Benny Morris on Sharon: I will reply in red between brackets:
"IT is too early to assess Ariel Sharon's legacy. [Too early? Why? His trail of blood is quite long, and documented. And the survivors of Sabra and Shatila massacres, for examples, can tell the story, and underline his legacy. I have met survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, have you? Have you heard their stories? One (then a little child), who is now a graduate student, was found days after the massacre hiding under a bed. She told me that was able to see what Lebanese Forces militias (Israeli-trained and armed and present-day allies of mini-Hariri) did to her mother before killing her.] To be sure, he will be remembered as one of Israel's great field commanders, the wily, bulldozing general who cracked the Egyptian bastion at Um Katef-Abu Awgeila in 1967 and led the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, turning the tables in the Yom Kippur War. With greater ambiguity, he will go down as the defense minister who orchestrated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that, paradoxically, set Yasir Arafat on the road to Oslo and (however insincerely) peace with Israel. [This is the most important part. Notice that his military "accomplishments" are listed technically and in general terms so as to not have to mention his victims. In fact, he really rose quite early as a "field commander." In fact, his significance in Zionist military-political history was not only due to his brutality and his ability to lead his troops in the massacre of Arabs, civilians and prisoners if the need be. He believed in the political value of massacring civilians, which explains why massacring civilians was never an aberration in his long career. Look at the way he refers to his first famous massacre--the massacre that made him famous and valuable in Zionist ranks--the massacre of Qibya. In his autobiography, he says about the massacre of defenseless civilians in the village of Qibya: "But while the civilian deaths were a tragedy, the Kibbiya raid was also a turning point...Israeli forces were capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines. A few days after Kibbiya I was invited to Jerusalem to see Ben-Gurion in his office. It was an exciting moment for me..." (Warrior, p. 90). He must have been very exciting. This political value of massacre is similar to the reference to Dayr Yasin in Menachem Begin's account in The Revolt. Ben Gurion was impressed with his "abilities" and he has been rising in Zionism ever since. Hell, he grasped what Zionism is all about, very early one, and put it into practice. Notice how Morris refers to the Israeli invasion of 1982 as a diplomatic success, the death of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians mostly civilians does not deserve even a footnote in Zionist annals. And notice that Morris does not mention where Sharon stood on the very same "diplomatic accomplishments" that he is attributing to him.]. Mr. Sharon will also be known as the chief architect of the Likud Party's settlement drive in the occupied territories. [Here, in fairness to Zionist consensus, the settlement plans for the occupied territories of '67, not to be confused with the occupied territories of '48, were of the making of Labor AND what became Likud--the mainstream and the revisionist Zionists.] His defeat, as prime minister, of the second Palestinian intifada [Morris, whose embrace of ethnic cleansing is now expressed in polite company and media interviews, here refers to the murder of 3,386 Palestinians as a clinical defeat of the intifada. No toll and no destruction mentioned. Zionism, always kills cleanly and efficiently. The inferior Arab enemy does not even bleed. This explains why the New York Times only shows Israeli funerals and not Palestinian funerals. "They" don't mourn their dead; "they" don't value human lives the way "we" do, etc"] will doubtless be carefully studied [Hopefully it will be studied some day in human rights programs and at sessions of the International Criminal Court, but that will not take place in the era of US Empire], once the hysteria [what a sexist word this is, but Zionism is always entitled to all forms of prejudice, discrimination, bigotry, and persecution because it has a sense of moral superiority about its very violent mission] and hype [hype? Ya, what is the big deal about the murder of 3,386 Palestinians? Why should one care, especially if one is a proud advocate of ethnic cleaning as Morris is] die down, as a model of a relatively clean [this should be classic; do you notice that Zionist killing is always clean? What does that mean? Clean? Does that mean that the enemy is murdered in cold blood? Or does it mean that the enemy belongs to an inferior race? Or is this a reference to the genetic makeup of Palestinians which prevent them from bleeding when shot and killed by Israelis? Is that what makes it clean?], successful [here the delusions of early and later Zionism. At every juncture, at every turn of the Arab Israeli conflict, after every "military" "victory", Zionism adds another delusion. Zionists always feel that with this campaign of killing of the enemy, that with this fresh massacre of Palestinians, the enemy will be subjugated, only to discover that the "success" that Morris is talking about is very very short-lived. It is always short-lived, and will never rescue Zionism from the inevitability of its historical political failure. That success never lasts, and will not last. The enemy will not be crushed, a century of delusions (and of massacres) should suffice to refute this Zionist triumphalism.] counterinsurgency....The rest of the article is filled with too many cliches, and too many old elements of Zionist propaganda that the reader can easily spot. Oh, and I really don't have time to continue.