Nineteen years ago Lebanese Christian militias entered
Moslem refugee camps in Lebanon named Sabra and Shatilla and
spent several days avenging earlier murders of Christians by
Moslems in the way that most of those who live in the Middle
East do: they murdered innocents who shared the religion of
the earlier criminals. None of the murderers has ever even
been charged, but now in Belgium they want to pin the blame
on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. As the prime minister at the
time, Menachem Begin, said: "A goy murders another
goy, and they hang the Jew!"
It was just after Israel invaded Lebanon to silence the PLO
(Moslem) terror that had plagued its northern communities in
its Operation Peace for the Galilee. Menachem Begin was the
prime minister and Ariel Sharon was Minister of Defense. The
Likud was in power for the first time in the 30 years since
the founding of the State. Lebanon, an Arab state with
significant Christian and Moslem communities, had been riven
for many years by a long civil war along religious lines,
marked by atrocities on both sides. Taking advantage of the
Lebanese chaos, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were firmly
entrenched in southern Lebanon, and were making life
dangerous and miserable for Jewish communities in the north
of Israel.
Israel launched a major offensive into Lebanon, driving deep
into the country. They drove Arafat out; he fled to Tunis in
Tunisia where he remained in "exile" until Israel called him
back to sign the Oslo agreements and to set up the
Palestinian Authority about eleven years later. Israel later
pulled back, maintaining a buffer zone of a narrow strip of
Lebanese territory, but for a short while they controlled
much of Lebanon.
The Christian Arabs were and are the natural allies of
Israel (the South Lebanon Army is Christian), and Israel's
success gave some of the Christian militias an opportunity
to settle some scores. Israel allowed them to go into the
Sabra and Shatilla Moslem refugee camps and they murdered
Moslem men, women and children to avenge the previous murder
of Christian men, women and children by Moslem fighters.
The question is only if Sharon, as Minister of Defense,
should have realized what would happen if they were let in.
At worst, his responsibility is very indirect. No one
suggests that Israel or Minister of Defense Sharon sent them
to murder. Israel specifically told them not to kill
anyone.
In any case it was no more than one massacre among many in a
long series that characterized the Christian-Moslem conflict
in Lebanon. What made it special was that the Israeli Left,
led by Shimon Peres and the Labor party, uncomfortably out
of power for the first time, made it into a cause of huge
demonstrations and petitions that brought about the
appointment of an official commission of inquiry and
eventually forced Sharon from office. It was clear that the
hope was to topple the Likud, but that took another ten
years.
Appalled by the actions of Peres and the Left, and
explaining that such behavior wrongly presupposes that
Israel is "just another nation," Maran HaRav Shach
shlita wrote (Michtavim Umaamarim I,10): "The
turning off the way of Torah brings . . . to such
deterioration that one can come to public halshana .
. . that is, incitement to all the nations and adding to
hatred of Am Yisroel, that all the nations began to condemn
Israel relying upon what the Jews themselves said, that Jews
are the main cause of those events. Woe to that shame, that
we have never before heard of an entire Jewish community
that was malshin on Jews. . . How far the
deterioration can go when they leave the path of Torah and
shemiras mitzvos; where is their ahavas
Yisroel?"
Unfortunately, these words seem fully applicable today, as
Prime Minister Sharon stands accused of "war crimes" in a
Belgian court by Lebanese Moslems, and the Israeli Foreign
Ministry, led by the same Shimon Peres, has to try to
neutralize those deeds of almost 20 years ago.
