ISRAEL'S NEW PM
Nicknames: "The BullDozer", "The Butcher", "Mr. Apartheid"

He may be a brutish thug, he may fit the definition of war criminal, he may be a Jewish racist -- but now he is also the Prime Minister-elect of Israel, overwhelmingly swept into power in a way few imagined possible just a year ago. And whatever else he is, he may also be the single Israeli who has had more ongoing influence on the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship than any other in the past few decades.

What Sharon did militarily in 1973 and 1982 changed the course of history.

What he did in subsequent years championing the building of Israeli settlements and the "autonomy" concept for Palestinians then lead to the apartheid-like situation and the Oslo "Peace Process" approach. What he has done in Jerusalem, establishing his own apartment flying the Israeli flag from the building top, right in the heart of the Muslim section of the old city -- and recently "visiting" the "Temple Mount" escorted by hundreds of police and army -- makes it clear to all what Israel really has in mind for this crucial historical city that should be and eventually must be shared rather than conquered.

Meanwhile Shimon Peres is living up to his reputation of being duplicitous and slippery. Even before the votes were counted Peres was manuevering even in public to be Sharon's Foreign Minister in a "national unity" government; at the same time attempting an end run around Barak who himself is known to have been in touch with Sharon about becoming his Defense Minister.

This video clip from ABC "Nightline" last evening helps explain what Sharon is all about: http://www.MiddleEast.Org/sharon.htm

And this article and Sharon bio information helps put things in perspective, both past and present:

PERES SAYS LABOR PARTY SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING SHARON IF HE WINS
By Dan Perry

JERUSALEM (AP - 5 February) Sounding resigned to electoral failure, Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres said Monday that his Labor Party should consider joining forces with Ariel Sharon if the hawkish leader unseats Prime Minister Ehud Barak and proves open to compromise with the Palestinians.

"If there will be a chance for the continuation of the peace process, then I don't see any reason why not to have a national unity government," the former premier and Nobel laureate said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Peres added, however, that Sharon's previous positions and his reported plans to offer the Palestinians no land beyond what they now control - about 42 percent of the West Bank and most of the Gaza Strip - formed no basis for progress toward peace.

"I'm not sure he's prepared to offer the necessary compromises ... to reach peace," Peres said of Sharon, the Likud party leader who held a commanding lead over Labor's Barak in the polls ahead of Tuesday's election for prime minister. Peres predicted that if Sharon wins and then forms a narrow coalition that is based on right-wing and religious parties and does not include the peace camp, his government will be unstable.

"If there won't be a national unity government, I very much doubt that Sharon can survive any length of time," he said.

Barak has been plagued by a fractious parliament divided among small factions and split almost evenly between hawks and doves. Peres, a leading architect of the 1993 Oslo accords that began the peace process in earnest, criticized the Palestinian rejection of offers set out by Barak.

"I think it was a mistake on the part of the Palestinians, who were given a very generous offer," he said.

Barak offered the Palestinians an independent state in some 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including a share of Jerusalem and the dismantling of many Jewish settlements. But the sides could not agree on how to share Jerusalem, and the Palestinians insisted on the right of millions of refugees to return to Israel.

ARIEL SHARON

Ariel Sharon, whose original name is Sheinerman, was born in Kfar Malal on a moshav (agrarian community) in 1928.

Very active in the Haganah (Jewish self-defence organization) in his early youth, he was a platoon commander during the first Arab-Israeli war. In 1952-53, he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in History and Oriental studies. In 1953, he founded and led Unit 101, an élite unit dedicated to leading retaliatory strikes against the Palestinian fedayeen attacking Israel from Gaza and the West Bank.

During the 1956 war, he served as commander of a parachute brigade. His breach of discipline during this war angered the army command, and his advancement in the army ranks was suspended for years. In 1957-58, he studied at Camberley Staff College in the United Kingdom. During the years 1958-62, he i.a. served as commander of an infantry brigade and studied law at Tel-Aviv University. In 1962, he became Commander of the IDF armoured brigades. He was then appointed Head of Northern Command Staff in 1964 and Head of Southern Command Staff in 1969. Considering his chances slim of being appointed Chief of Staff, Sharon resigned from the army in June 1972 but was recalled to military service in the 1973 war.

In December 1973, he was elected to the Knesset on the Likud lists although he had no strong party affiliations. In 1974, he resigned his seat and left Likud to become, from 1975 to 1977, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's special security adviser.

In 1976, he formed a new party, Shlomzion, which gained two seats in the 1977 elections. This party disappeared shortly afterwards when Sharon joined Likud again and entered Menahem Begin's government as Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Settlements until 1981. Although he has never been religious, he supported the Gush Emunim movement and was thus viewed as the patron of the messianic settlers movement. He used his position to encourage the establishment of a dense network of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and contested the possibility of return of these territories under Arab sovereignty.

Minister of Defence in the second Begin government in 1981, he masterminded Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. Under the findings of an official Commission of Inquiry (the Kahan Commission), he was held responsible for the massacres perpetrated in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. He resigned from his post in 1983 but remained Minister without portofolio until 1984.

In the national unity government of 1984, Shimon Peres appointed him Minister of Trade and Industry. He served in this capacity until May 1990. He then became Minister of Construction and Housing until Likud's electoral defeat of 1992. In the Knesset, he was member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence committee from 1990 to 1992 and Chairman of the committee overseeing Jewish immigration from USSR.

In 1996, he was appointed Minister of National Infrastructure in Benjamin Netanyahu's government - a post especially created for him - and on October 9th 1998, Minister for Foreign Affairs. His appointment placated right-wingers crucial to Netanyahu's coalition (see Israel, Elections and Parliament). Sharon - known to be one of the more hawkish in his party - has always proposed radical schemes for "solving the Palestinian problem" like the annexation of most of the West Bank.

Sharon is seen, like Rabin and Ehud Barak, as a military hero. Over all his career, he has nurtured a large right-wing populist support base. He is considered as a man who has no limits and uses power ruthlessly. He occupies a property in Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter and is Israel's wealthiest cattle farmer.

Following the resignation of Bibi Netanyahu as leader of the Likud after his failure in the elections of 17 May 1999, Ariel Sharon was installed as its interim chairman. He was elected as chairmain on 2 September 1999 for a term of two years.

ARIEL SHARON: A MAN WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE
By Steven Katsineris

Ariel Sharon was born in Palestine in 1928, grandson of a Russian migrant family and the son of farmers. When he was 13, his father gave him a knife. Sharon remembers, "The knife was symbolic, to protect ourselves from our enemies. It was a lesson I have never forgotten."

His first military experience began when he fought in the underground Haganah, the largest of the Zionist groups that fought to seize Palestine in 1948, creating the state of Israel and dispossessing the native Palestinians.

At the age of 22, he led commando units that specialised in behind-the-lines raids and forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.

By the 1950s, he had become a major and formed an elite "anti-terrorist" group called Unit 101. Operating without uniforms, the group, nicknamed "the avengers", met Palestinian resistance attacks with institutional terror. The group carried out outrage after outrage, in terror raids across the Israeli borders, into refugee camps and villages.

In one notorious attack on Jordan in 1953, Unit 101, under Sharon's command, slaughtered 69 civilians, over half of them women and children, when they blew up their homes in Qibia village.

Two years later he was reprimanded for giving logistical support to four young Israelis who took random blood revenge on Bedouins for Arab attacks on Israeli settlements. By this time Sharon was a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army.

The independence of Unit 101, its murderous methods and the free hand given to it by the political establishment led to strong resentment among other sections of the military leadership.

In the 1956 Suez war, Sharon disobeyed orders and sent his paratroopers into the Mitla Pass in the Sinai desert. In doing so, he deceived his superiors, sacrificed his men for no apparent military purpose and gained the displeasure of the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Dayan. Four of his junior officers accused him of sending men to their deaths for his own glory.

Sharon's military career went into eclipse. But in 1964, the then chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, resurrected him. Sharon served Israel well again in the 1967 war and afterward was given the job of pacifying the Palestinian resistance in the occupied Gaza Strip. With a brutal policy of repression, of blowing up houses, bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, imposing severe collective punishments and imprisoning hundreds of young Palestinians suspected of being fighters, he managed to decrease resistance activity dramatically.

In the 1973 war, as a reserve general, he was recalled to command a division. He led a strike across the Suez Canal, behind Egyptian lines, and this made him a national hero.

Like so many Israeli military men, he then went into politics and was elected a member of the Likud bloc in the Israeli parliament. In the first Begin Likud government, he was minister of agriculture and settlements. In politics he applied the same fanaticism and many of the same techniques he used to control the Gaza Strip. Sharon became the champion and architect of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, causing a settlement boom.

Sharon's settlement campaign was one of the keys to Likud's re-election in 1981, as he was credited with making swift and permanent progress in establishing a perpetual Israeli presence on the West Bank. After the election, Begin appointed Sharon defence minister.

It was said in Israel that Sharon was "a war looking for a place to happen". The war in Lebanon was planned and executed by Sharon.

In early 1982, he made a visit to the Phalange Party (Lebanese militia organisation) to coordinate long-held plans for the coming conflict. Israel was to support and supply the Phalangists, an authentic fascist party, formed in 1936 after the founder had returned from a visit to Hitler's Germany.

Sharon believed that the demoralisation of the Palestinians would be complete if he inflicted a crushing military defeat on the PLO in Lebanon.

As for Lebanon, Israeli's aim was to establish a Phalangist government which would then make a treaty with Israel. Phalange Party leader Bashir Gemayel said that his party wanted every Palestinian civilian out of Lebanon, and Israel wanted them scattered among the other Arab countries.

In order to rationalise the invasion and the bombing of civilians, Begin and Sharon went to great lengths to dehumanise the Palestinians. Begin declared emotively, "If Hitler was sitting in a house with 20 other people, would it be correct to blow up the house?". In a speech tot the Knesset, Begin described Palestinians as "beasts walking on two legs". Sharon described Palestinians as "bugs" while their refugee camps were"tourist camps".

On June 5, 1982, tens of thousands of Israeli troops poured across the border and fought their way up the Lebanese coast. Heavy Israeli sea, air and land bombardment had a devastating impact, laying waste to a substantial portion of southern Lebanon.

The cities of Sidon and Tyre were a scene of desolation, with much of the cities levelled by Israeli tank and artillery shells. Palestinian refugee camps around Tyre and Sidon bore the brunt of the colossal destruction.

Ain Hilweh (Sweet Spring), the largest Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon with 25,000 residents, was razed. Nearly half a million people were made homeless by the invasion.

One week later, Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut, shelling, bombing and trying to break stiff Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. By the end of July, the Lebanese government (as well as church and aid groups) stated that at least 14,000 people had been killed and twice that number seriously wounded. Over 90% of those killed were unarmed civilians.

After three months of war, an agreement was reached under the sponsorship of US envoy Philip Habib. The PLO pledged to withdraw its fighters from Beirut, after receiving US and Lebanese government promises that multinational forces would secure the safety of the Palestinian and Lebanese civilian population. And Israel would not enter Beirut.

The last contingent of defenders left the city on September 1, 1982. Two days later, the Israeli army occupied a new position at the southern entrance of the city and thus dominated the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila. The USA did nothing. On September 7, the Israeli army advanced again, and again the USA did not react. On September 15, the Israeli army entered Beirut, just after the departure of the US marines, who had stayed only 16 days.

Ariel Sharon declared that Israel had entered Beirut in order to dislodge 2000 Palestinian fighters who had remained in the city. The task of purging the camps Sharon had given to the Phalange.

The same day that Israel occupied Beirut, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, Raphael Eytan, quoted in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, stated that only a handful of fedayeen fighters remained with their families, as well as a small staff of the PLO bureau. General Drori telephoned Ariel Sharon and told him, "Our friends are going to the camps. We have coordinated their entry." Sharon replied, "Congratulations, our friends' operation has been approved".

So the massacre of defenceless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians began. Whole families were murdered, many raped and tortured before being killed. Because many bodies were heaped into lorries and taken away, or buried in mass graves, the exact toll will never be known. It was estimated that at least 2000 people were killed.

After an international outcry, Israel established an inquiry headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Kahan. Despite its shortcomings, the commission's report was a damning indictment of Sharon and a number of his colleagues. The commission said that Sharon had received intelligence warnings that the Phalangists might go on the rampage if allowed into the camps. "In our view, even without such a warning, it is impossible to justify the minister of defence's [Sharon's] disregard of the danger of the massacre."

"... responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of defence, for having disregarded the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps and having failed to take this danger into account when deciding to have the Phalangists enter the camps.

"In addition responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of defence for not ordering appropriate measures for the prevention of the massacre." (Kahan Report)

The commission's conclusions constituted the minimum that could be deduced from the evidence. The facts warranted a finding of more than just indirect responsibility:

The Phalangists militia was "ordered" into the camps by Israeli chief of staff, Lieutenant General Raphael Eytan.

Phalangist commanders met with General Amir Drori, commander of Israeli troops in Lebanon, and General Amas Yaron, commander for West Beirut, to "coordinate the militia's entry into the camps and arrange communications".

The Phalange were given logistical support by the Israeli army during the massacre.

The Phalange took orders, salaries and training directly from Israel.

Sharon and the Israelis knew that the Phalange leaders planned to expel most of the Palestinians from Lebanon by committing some atrocity.

The Phalangists were at all times under Israeli army orders. "Only one element of Israeli Defence Forces will command all forces in the area", revealed the Kahan report. The Israeli head of intelligence quoted commented, "This means that all forces in the area, including the Phalangists, will be under IDF command and will act according to its instructions". [Green Left Weekly]