Sharonian Evil Lives

On January 13, Haaretz headlined “Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon laid to rest in state funeral.”

World dignitaries were there. Showing up honored a mass murderer. Attendees did it disgracefully. They have their own dark crosses to bear.

Nations represented partnered with Sharon’s crimes. They support Israel’s worst ones. They commit their own.

On Sunday, Sharon’s body lay in state. Netanyahu, Shimon Peres and Joe Biden delivered keynote addresses.

Other foreign dignitaries arrived. Countries represented included America, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Australia, Russia, the Philippines and Singapore.

No Arab states were represented. Nor China, Japan, India or Turkey. None from South or Central America. Egypt was the only African one. South Africa sent no one.

No foreign dignitaries attended Yitzhak Shamir’s 2012 funeral. He lay in state like Sharon. He did so in Israel’s Knesset.

When Menachem Begin died in 1992, tens of thousands marched to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. No foreign dignitaries joined them. Honoring Sharon shows how low they’ve sunk.

Some Israeli officials bristled because of too few foreign countries represented. Those coming shamed themselves.

Former Swedish Prime Minister/current Foreign Minister Carl Bildt didn’t attend. He’s an Israeli critic. It didn’t matter.

He tweeted a message of praise. He said Sharon “was a great leader of Israel. A brilliant military commander, but also a wise statesman seeing the necessity of peace.”

Opposition Swedish MPs were furious. Green Party MP Mehmet Kaplan is a former Muslim Council of Sweden spokesman.

He called Bildt’s comment “very, very tragic. This is very, very strange,” he said. “Simply woeful that he is acting this way.”

Left Party spokesman Hans Linde supports boycotting Israeli products. He called Bildt’s comments “deeply provocative.”

“He pays tribute to a person who is responsible for widespread massacres of Palestinians. A person who openly advocated the expulsion of the entire Palestinian people.”

No heads of state attended Sharon’s funeral. Obama didn’t come. George Bush and Bill Clinton stayed home. So did David Cameron, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel.

Sergei Lavrov represented Russia. Tony Blair was there for Britain. Vice President Joe Biden led Washington’s delegation.

Others with him included US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, Rep. Eliot Engel (D. NY), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D. FL), and former US Israeli ambassador Daniel Kurtzer.

Foreign war criminals honored Sharonian evil. They commit plenty of their own. Biden laid a wreath on Sharon’s grave. So did Netanyahu and Peres.

Biden called Sharon “a complex man who lived in complex times in a complex neighborhood.” Bidenisms are notorious.

They feature mumbo jumbo rubbish. They’re embarrassing. In August 2012, he said: “Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.”

Months earlier he said: “My mother and father believed if I wanted to be president…I could be vice president.”

In February 2009, he said: “If we do everything right…with absolute certainty, there’s a 30% chance we’re going to get it wrong.”

He said a “north star” guided Sharon. Deep-seated evil did. He was the butcher of Palestine. He hated Arabs. He deplored peace. He went to his grave an unrepentant mass murderer.

Imagine honoring what demands no-holds-barred condemnation. Imagine ignoring the worst of high crimes.

Imagine Israeli forces attacking Palestinians the day Sharon was buried. What better tribute to raw evil. What better way to express it.

Israeli warplanes bombed Gaza’s al-Bureij refugee camp. Civilian areas were called “terror sites.”

IDF soldiers terrorized Palestinian civilians. They conducted multiple pre-dawn neighborhood incursions.

Innocent victims were arrested. Children were traumatized. Peace is a four-letter word. So is nonviolence.

Extremist settlers reacted the same way. They destroyed dozens of Hebron area olive trees. They escalated other attacks. One settler child sprayed a Palestinian girl with chlorine.

Settlers terrorize Palestinians with impunity. They attack homes, vehicles, crops, mosques, holy sites, cemeteries, and schools. They commit violence. Once in a while they kill.

Palestinians are fair game any time. Even Sharon’s funeral day wasn’t off-limits.

They’re prisoners on their own land. They’re brutalized for not being Jews. They’re persecuted, beaten, arrested, imprisoned, tortured or murdered.

Israeli policy reflects Sharonian evil. Before his tragic September 2003 death, Edward Said reflected about news from Palestine. He commented about “frightful images of death and destruction.”

“It has been my experience,” he said, “to be utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon.”

After an Israeli warplane murdered nine children, he congratulat(ed) the pilot and boast(ed) of a great Israeli success.”

“I was able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in the same delusional and criminal way,” Said explained.

“Getting inside the official Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.”

He said Sharon reigned terror on Palestinians “deliberately” and “methodically.”

“It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon,” he stressed.

“Sharon want(ed) terrorism, not peace, and he (did) everything in his power to create the conditions for it.”

He represented the worst of pure evil. His policies were blindly destructive.

Palestinians endured his twisted logic. They did it for decades. He attacked what he called “terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories, terrorist suspects – the list is infinite,” said Said.

Notions of terrorism took on a life of their own. He “legitimized and relegitimized them.” He did so “without proof, logic, or rational argument.”

Israeli patriotism and “blind support…replaced skeptical reflection and moral seriousness.”

Sharonianism reflected “nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder, and the stifling of everyday life.”

Palestine resembles a penal colony. Gazans are “surrounded by an electrified wire fence on three sides. They’re imprisoned like animals.”

They’re worse off under siege. They can’t work, move, attend school or do much else normally. They were targets for Sharon’s warplanes. Tanks, artillery and ground forces “gunned them down like turkeys.”

Gaza is a human nightmare. “Sharon and his sadistic minions prattle(d) on about eliminating terrorism.” Human suffering never “enter(ed) (his) closed mind.”

West Bank towns are “wasteland(s) of destroyed buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical systems.”

“Commerce is finished.” Children suffer malnutrition. Most Palestinians are impoverished.

Occupation before, during and after Sharon reflects security force terror, “torture and abjection.”

Israel is a nation without conscience. Its “soul (was) captured by a mania for punishing the weak. (It) mirrors the psychopathic mentality of…Sharon.”

His sole agenda was “kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians until ‘they break.’ ” He took pride in his monstrous abuse. He enjoyed a chorus of US supporters. They partnered in crime.

They targeted Palestinian civilians. They do it today and then some. Defenseless people have no warplanes, tanks, artillery, or other sophisticated weapons.

They have no nuclear, biological or chemical ones. They have nothing but a profound will to survive. They’re up against one of the world’s most malevolent forces.

They endure deplorable indignities. Most people can’t imagine their suffering. Brutality defines Israeli policy. It’s always been this way.

It was ruthless under Sharon. Netanyahu mirrors him. In many ways, he exceeds his worst policies. Knesset members are the most extremist in Israeli history.

Occupied Palestine resembles Arundahadi Roy’s description of India. It’s a “limbless, headless, soulless torso left bleeding under the butcher’s clever with a flag driven deep into her mutilated heart.”

Muslims are persecuted like Hitler treated Jews. Every day is Kristallnacht. Institutionalized terror haunts Palestinians. Collective punishment is policy.

Normal daily life is denied. Population centers are isolated. Borders are closed. Peaceful public demonstrations are assaulted. Free expression and movement are prohibited.

Institutionalized racism matches the worst of Nazi Germany. Palestinians suffocate in isolated ghettos. Economic strangulation is imposed.

Curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, separation walls, electric fences, and other barriers obstruct daily life. State terror is official policy.

Multiple neighborhood incursions, land, sea and air attacks, bulldozed homes, land theft, ethnic cleansing, slow-motion genocide, targeted killings, mass arrests, torture, and gulag imprisonment ravage Muslims.

They’re targeted for not being Jews. Children are used for target practice. Famers are attacked in their fields. Fundamental civil and human rights don’t matter. International law is a figure of speech. It’s systematically ignored.

Crimes of war and against humanity repeat without redress. Wanting to live free in sovereign Palestine is called terrorism.

Punitive taxes are imposed. Few services are provided. Vital ones are lacking or inadequate. Palestinian lawmakers are imprisoned for belonging to the wrong party.

Israeli security forces operate with impunity. They maraud, rampage, pillage, vandalize, destroy, commit violence, and murder in cold blood.

They do whatever they want. They do it unaccountably. Israel’s fascist government gives chutzpah new meaning. Triumphant wrong over right defines it. So does brute force against defenseless people.

Netanyahu is Israel’s most polarizing leader. He achieved the impossible. He exceeds the worst of his predecessors. Israel’s far right adores him.

Imagine transcending Sharonian evil. Imagine doing it daily. Imagine making democracy a dirty word. Imagine hollowing it out entirely.

Imagine waging war to prevent it. Imagine lawlessness writ large. Imagine targeting challengers for change. Imagine Judaizing Palestine one stolen dunum at a time.

Imagine driving a spike into the corpse of freedom. It’s Israel’s version of democracy. It’s none whatsoever. It’s pure illusion. It doesn’t exist.

Maybe one day Netanyahu will be eulogized like Sharon. Maybe he’ll be called a great leader. Maybe his “greater Israel” agenda will be remembered. It replicates Sharon’s and then some.

Maybe Gaza’s siege will define him. Maybe slow-motion genocide his way. Maybe surrounding Israel with walls. Maybe stealing Palestinian land to build them.

Maybe building more settlements than any of his predecessors. Maybe occupation harshness to a greater than ever level. Maybe talking peace while waging war.

Maybe ridiculing peace in our time. Maybe advancing his campaign to prevent it. Imagine all take and no give. Maybe calling himself an indomitable Israeli protector.

Imagine treating peaceful Palestinians like existential threats. Imagine terrorizing them daily. Imagine mass arresting them.

Imagining barbaric Israeli gulag conditions. Imagine torturing Palestinian prisoners brutally.

Imagine murdering defense civilians in cold blood. Imagine blaming them for his crimes. Imagine ruthlessness writ large. Imagine world leaders turning a blind eye.

Sharonian evil defined his military and political career. It applies to Netanyahu and then some. It applies to Israel’s far right.

It gives pause to whether Palestinian liberation is more illusion than reality. It bears witness to their longstanding suffering. No end in sight looms.