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Savior or Villain
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16908 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
3,967 Words |
| Author
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Max Singer
Max Singer, a public policy expert who lived in Israel from
1973-1977, is the author of Passage to a Human World. |
WARRIOR: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ARIEL SHARON
Ariel Sharon, with David Chanoff
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989
548 pp., $24.95
On Sunday, June 6, 1982, Israeli tank columns moved into Lebanon, beginning the most divisive war in Israel's history. The next day PLO fighters entrenched in civilian neighborhoods delayed the advance of the Israeli army along the coastal plain, illegally using local inhabitants as hostages and cover - even putting civilians in the windows and open doorways of buildings from which they were fighting. Israeli units, reluctant to endanger civilians by using their full firepower, suffered increased casualties and fell behind their strategic timetables.
That night this problem was considered at a meeting at Northern Command Headquarters. The obvious solution was to avoid house-to-house fighting by using the air force to destroy whatever buildings were in the way of the advance. This would open the road and save the Israel Defense Force (IDF) considerable casualties, but it would also cause a heavy death toll among the civilian population that the PLO was holding in the buildings.
In Warrior, Ariel ("Arik") Sharon, Israel's Minister of Defense at the time, describes the meeting at Command Headquarters that began at 1A.M. with all the divisional commanders and many staff officers present.
“As the night wore on the small room we were meeting in became shrouded in cigarette smoke. Despite the discomfort of the place, the discussion was intense and quiet, at times almost whispered. I had known most of these people for years; there was hardly one I hadn't been in battle with. I knew them as professional officers, men who had war in their blood. They knew precisely the price we would pay the next day if we decided not to blast the road open from the air - their soldier's lives, their offices' lives, perhaps their own lives. As we talked, messages came into the room from the front announcing new developments, adding to the tension…. When we finally finished early in the morning, every single one of the officers present had expressed himself. To a man they recommended that we not use the air force…And after listening to the soul-searching that had gone on for hours, that was the decision I took. I don't know if any other army in the world would have spent a night in the middle of a war…discussing such an issue, let alone making such a
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