This report was first published in the Nov. 30, 1990 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, and was re-released in May 2002 as part of a special dossier, Ariel Sharon: Profile of an Unrepentant War Criminal.

Make Ariel Sharon Answer
to Charges of Genocide!

I. The British conspirators behind Ariel Sharon

A. The Sharon war government

Whenever Gen. Ariel Sharon has a dominant position within the Israeli government, you can expect mass killings. It is no secret that "Arik" Sharon is the funder and protector of the various "Jewish underground" sects that have regularly been killing Palestinians, most recently triggering the Jerusalem bloodbath of Oct. 8 which left 21 dead. Sharon would like to see such atrocities provide the pretext for his pet project: invading Jordan, toppling King Hussein, declaring that Jordan is "Palestine," and expelling the Palestinians from Israel—thereby "solving" the Palestinian problem once and for all.

Sharon exemplifies the mentality of those whom the British are seeking to place into power today. The high-level British backing for Sharon came out into the open in October 1982. Shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was directed by Sharon from his post as defense minister, Britain's Lord Harlech (David Orsmby-Gore) put together an international combination of business and political interests to invest enormous sums in real estate on the West Bank, which had been made available by a 1979 Israeli court decision that permitted sale of West Bank land. Among the key figures that reportedly were involved in this venture were former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former NATO Secretary General Peter Lord Carrington, U.K. parliamentarian Julian Amery, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig.

This is the group that backs Sharon's prime ministerial ambitions. In 1989, it moved to put Sharon in power. In April 1989, Kissinger and Carrington's Hollinger Corp. of Canada, which also includes Seagram's liquor tycoon Edgar Bronfman on its board, bought the Jerusalem Post. In January of this year, 20 editors and reporters of the paper were fired, after protesting that the new Hollinger-imposed publisher was pushing the formerly Labor Party-linked newspaper in a right-wing direction, backing Sharon's policy.

Another Kissinger-Carrington associate, Robert Maxwell, had purchased the important daily Ma'ariv a few months earlier. Maxwell, a British media magnate, is another Sharon backer.

By June 1990, Sharon was installed as housing minister, a portfolio that gave him the power to implement the first phase of his "final solution" to the Palestinian problem, with the mass migration of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel, as arranged through Edgar Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress.

The stage was set for a renewed Mideast crisis.

B. South Africa: 'The third force'

While the City of London and Wall Street set the Middle East on the path toward war during the summer of 1990, they also began to intensify tribal warfare in southern Africa. Here again, we find the footprints of Sharon's British sponsors and the Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Lord Carrington, Lonrho's "Tiny" Rowland, and Soviet-Israeli spy Shabtai Kalmanowitch are the key figures to watch.

Over 700 people were killed in fighting in the vicinity of Johannesburg in the month of August alone. The purpose of the externally fostered violence, which some in South Africa have labeled as organized by a "third force," is the destruction of the industrial potential of the Republic of South Africa (R.S.A.), which is required to prevent the genocidal depopulation of Africa promoted by the Anglo-Americans.

On Sept. 10, a group of Anglican clergymen led by Bishop Desmond Tutu met with President Willem de Klerk and issued a statement which charged that a "sinister third force in the country is fomenting chaos, possibly with a view to creating a climate for a coup against Mr. de Klerk's government." After a shooting incident at a Johannesburg commuter train station that week, Walter Sisulu of the African National Congress (ANC) charged that "mysterious forces, not necessarily Inkatha" (the movement led by Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi), were fomenting the warfare between the two rival black movements.

A white Catholic priest, Father Kevin Bugler, who witnessed the burning down of a squatter town, Thokoza, in one of the latest incidents in the month-long violence, told the New York Times on Sept. 13 that "the whole thing is being orchestrated from somewhere. Who's doing it? I don't believe it's just Inkatha."

Typical of such violence is a massacre which took place on board a commuter train taking black workers from Johannesburg to the townships on Sept. 13. At the Jeppe station, a gang of black teenagers, armed with machetes and spears, boarded the train and began systematically massacring the passengers. When the train arrived at the next stop five minutes later, a second gang was waiting to continue the massacre of passengers attempting to flee. The assailants then escaped, leaving 26 people dead and over 100 wounded.

While various of these South African figures claim to have difficulty identifying this "third force," its origin is not so difficult to determine—it is Britain, and the British puppet-state Israel.

The identity between those British establishment figures who currently control Israel and those who rule South Africa is important to understand. Britain's Lord Carrington, for example, is a patron of Sharon, and a key controller of the Mossad. He has long been associated with Barclays Bank and the Rio Tinto Zinc mining interests which dominate southern Africa. Tiny Rowland is a British intelligence official who has specialized in African operations through his firm, Lonrho, one of the most powerful firms in Africa. Rowland is a business partner of the Emir of Kuwait and a collaborator of the Mossad, particularly the group tied to Sharon.

This link between British operations in the Middle East and British operations in Africa goes back to at least the mid-19th century, when the patrons of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist who carved up Africa, saw Zionism as a means of furthering British control of the Middle East. The first draft of Rhodes's will in 1877 called for the "establishment of a secret society" the "true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world." Rhodes conceived of the "occupation of the Holy Land" as being essential to the "consolidation of the whole Empire."

The Rhodes fortune, primarily obtained from looting Africa, was later used to establish this "secret society," termed the "Rhodes Trust" or "Round Tables" organization. In 1917, Round Tables officer Arthur Lord Balfour proclaimed the British intent of establishing a Zionist state. One of the Round Tables' agents, Chaim Weizmann, was installed as Israel's first President in 1948. The organization had been guided by Viscount Alfred Milner, the former High Commissioner for South Africa and former chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc.

The British effort to meld Africa, the Middle East, and other regions into a single empire ultimately failed, however. The British were forced to formally decolonize Africa in 1960-64. But Britain never intended to make its colonies truly independent, just as it never intended to give any Arab state control over its destiny. Rowland's Lonrho was one of the major institutions that the British used to continue to control Africa, just as the creation of Israel was designed to be an instrument of post-World War II British control of the Middle East.

An examination of the holdings of Lonrho in combination with Rio Tinto Zinc and the Anglo-American Corp., all run by the same interests, reveals that the three British firms control most of the world's vital strategic minerals outside of Russia, and control the African economy. Yet official economic statistics tell little of the real story, which is better shown by Lonrho control of most of the region's revolutionary or separatist movements of both the left, right, and ethnic or tribal variety. British imperial policy has always been based on manipulating all ethnic and political factions, and states, against each other.

For such reasons, Lonrho—and the Mossad—have simultaneously supported most African self-styled "liberation movements," right, left, or tribal, as well as whoever might be in power. So, for example, Lonrho has simultaneously supported the Angolan government and the UNITA guerrilla insurgency opposing it, the South African government and the African National Congress, and has recently mediated between the Mozambique government and the insurgent RENAMO guerrillas.

Israeli intelligence has also worked closely with the CIA in destabilizing the African continent through such methods, a relationship which dates back to at least former CIA counterintelligence director James Jesus Angleton's postwar patronage of the Mossad. This relationship was upgraded in 1975, when then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reportedly asked the Israelis to aid South African operations in Angola. At the same time, former Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann—Chaim Weizmann's son—began setting up operations in Zaire, including an Israeli nuclear missile testing facility.

C. The Kalmanowitch case

Some sense of the current complex relationship among the City of London, Washington, and also Moscow, in running Israeli intelligence operations designed to destabilize Africa, emerged in a spy case involving one Shabtai Kalmanowitch in 1987. At the time of his exposure, the Soviet emigré to Israel was a key figure in the Mossad's African operations, while continuing to work, purportedly without Israeli knowledge, for the KGB. Kalmanowitch was particularly close to the networks of Ariel Sharon.

Kalmanowitch had arrived in Israel from his native Lithuania in 1971, where he quickly joined the Mossad, becoming Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's information officer. By 1976, Kalmanowitch had become rich through trading in African diamonds. By 1977, he was the campaign manager and bankroller for the Knesset (parliament) campaign of Sharon ally Samuel Flatto-Sharon. During the same election, Sharon's campaign manager was Rafi Eytan.

Once in office, Flatto-Sharon gained international notoriety for calling for the deployment of "killer teams" directed against Pope John Paul II and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, in speeches on the Knesset floor. Flatto-Sharon is a funder of the fanatical settlements movement Gush Emunim, the Jewish Defense League (led by the late terrorist Meir Kahane), and related organizations which serve under Sharon and Eytan.

As Flatto-Sharon's parliamentary aide, Kalmanowitch rapidly expanded his African operations, particularly after beginning close work with the New York-based Rabbi Ronald Greenwald, a purported agent of the CIA and Mossad, in 1978. Greenwald, and his B International, have been the commercial representatives of the South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana. The bantustan, which is controlled by South Africa in partnership with Israel, was created to aid diamond and arms smuggling from and to the region, as well as to be a center of casino operations. In 1982, Kalmanowitch became the bantustan's representative in Israel.

At the time of his Israeli arrest, Kalmanowitch oversaw an African-based Mossad proprietary, LIAT, which employed David Tamari, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, who had been the Mossad case-officer for the Sierra Leone coup of 1985; Yoram Avidor, the former Israeli finance minister who, together with Ariel Sharon, has been a key liaison between Israel and South Africa in their planned joint development of a new combat jet, the Lavi; and scores more of "former" Mossad agents who had been trained by the former chief of Mossad African operations, David Kimche. Kimche is today an employee of Tiny Rowland.

II. Sharon's war crimes

A. Israeli 'Lebensraum'

Ariel Sharon has been a promoter of the policy of expelling the 1.6 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, since the Jewish state seized the two regions from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 war. Immediately following the war, Sharon, then a general in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), deployed armed Jewish "settlers" into the West Bank under the pretext of creating a "defense perimeter." This was the beginning of the policy of making the occupied territories "Arab free," by a combination of terrorism, land annexations, and settlements. By 1985, an estimated 52% of the West Bank and 40% of Gaza had been confiscated by Israelis.

Statistics compiled by the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center of Jerusalem give some indication of the mass murder that the Sharon-dominated government is now systematically carrying out.

During the period from Dec. 9, 1987, when the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, began, through Aug. 31, 1990, Israeli soldiers, police, and "settlers" have killed 856 Palestinians, and wounded 99,000 more. Of those killed, 217 were under 16 years of age. Of the fatalities, 704 were from gunshot wounds, 63 were from beatings, and 89 were tear gas-related. At least 52 of these deaths were brought about by settlers' militias, through both random and selective shootings and bombings. Twenty of the victims were shot or beaten to death in prison.

The extermination of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza is not solely implemented through police riots or selective assassinations. An estimated 10,400 Palestinians are currently suffering "administrative detention," as part of a policy of breaking the Palestinians' will. This imprisonment does not require any legal due process, but is imposed by Israeli military or security services for reasons of "state security." There are no time periods of detention specified and no appeal possible. According to some estimates, more than 40,000 Palestinians have passed in and out of detention since the Intifada began in December 1987—a rate of 1 in every 10 men between the ages of 15 and 60. Virtually every family has a relative who has been arrested.

At the same time, Israel has systematically attempted to destroy the livelihood of Palestinians in order to force them to leave. Since the Intifada began, over 1,347 homes have been demolished by the state, for "security reasons," as punishment, or under other pretexts. Families which have their homes demolished, are prohibited by law from constructing new ones, and so are forced to live in tents—or move out. On Oct. 21, Sharon told the French daily Le Monde that any Palestinian found carrying a knife in Jerusalem should have his home demolished.

Uprooting trees is also a favorite form of punishment, since most Palestinian peasants' livelihoods are based on olive, date, almond, and citrus fruit orchards. The Israeli government has uprooted over 91,000 orchard trees since 1987. The curfew imposed since the Haram al-Sharif massacre of Oct. 8 at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque is also economically motivated, since this is the harvest time for olives, the West Bank's most important crop. There have been 7,755 curfew-days imposed in total, on various towns and villages, since the Intifada began. In 1988, ninety percent of the grape harvest, another important crop, rotted in the fields due to curfews.

B. Sharon's terror career

Sharon and company began applying their twin policy of terror and construction of Jewish settlements immediately after seizing the Arab lands in the 1967 war. But a 1972 Israeli government decision to partially lift a previous ban on the private purchase of West Bank land by Israelis, made their plans that much easier. The ban was lifted through the lobbying efforts of Yehezkel Sahar, a former minister of police and Sharon associate. Their first project was the construction of a residential area outside of Jerusalem for retired IDF officers. One partner of Sahar in the scheme was Gen. Rehavam Zeevi. Zeevi, a longtime associate of Sharon, has also been associated with the butchery of Palestinians, especially during the period he was counterterrorism adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the mid-1970s.

In the years 1972-76 there was a steady increase in West Bank land purchases, especially by firms linked to Mossad officer Rafi Eytan, Sharon's aide. One project was a partnership of Eytan, Sharon adviser Eli Landau, and Avraham Mintz, a leader of the Gush Emunim, in founding the Eilot Morah settlement.

In 1973, Sharon left the military to enter politics, in part to mobilize the Israeli population on behalf of his expansionist policy. Sharon was convinced to do so by Meshulam Riklis, the New York-based owner of Rapid American Corp. who was, and is, Sharon's primary foreign-based controller. Riklis had been a Hebrew school teacher in Minneapolis until he was picked up by Anti-Defamation League leader Burton Joseph in the 1950s. Under Joseph's patronage, Riklis amassed a fortune, briefly controlling Investors Overseas Services in 1970, the notorious former Mossad-CIA financial front. The ADL, whose top officers are largely former CIA and FBI agents and assets, has long been linked to Mossad operations in the United States. For such reasons, the ADL has long been one of the major U.S.-based supporters of Sharon's prime ministerial ambitions.

In December 1973, Sharon was elected to the Knesset, largely through the aid and funding of such U.S.-based patrons. In June 1974, Sharon led a group of Jewish settlers in setting up an illegal settlement near Nablus.

After Menachem Begin's Likud bloc came into power in 1977, the policy of "Judaizing" the territories dramatically accelerated. The plan that the new regime sought to implement was the one proposed by Matitayahu Drobles, the Likud-affiliated head of the World Zionist Organization's settlement division. The plan called for settling 1.3 million Jews in the occupied territories by 2010. The native-born Jewish population of Israel will not be more than 4.3 million by that year. The Drobles plan, consequently, was based implicitly on shipping a large number of expected Soviet Jewish immigrants to live in the territories. The project to ship such Jews in was then being negotiated by World Jewish Congress head Edgar Bronfman, a partner of Riklis in various real estate schemes, who has also been a backer of Sharon.

Begin's appointment of Sharon as minister of agriculture in September 1977 was crucial to this expansionist policy.

The ministry is in charge of "agricultural settlements," including settlements by Jewish fundamentalists on the West Bank. It has also been one of the major covers for Israel's foreign and domestic intelligence operations.

Sharon pushed these settlements by hook and by crook. At the end of his first month in this post, he made it public that he had been secretly authorizing settlements on the West Bank. In October 1977, he announced the foundation of 12 more settlements. During his tenure as agriculture minister from 1977-81, these settlements grew rapidly. By 1981, some 25,000 Jews had settled in the West Bank under Ministry of Agriculture patronage. Most were members of the terrorist Gush Emunim, a group whose leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, was recently released from Israeli prison, where he had been briefly incarcerated for shooting an Arab.

During this same period, Rafi Eytan was installed as Prime Minister Begin's "Adviser on the Warfare against Terror," a post that Sharon himself had held briefly a few years earlier. Eytan, who had been Sharon's 1977 campaign manager, was placed in that key post in the Begin government by Sharon. As the name of the post suggests, Eytan was detailed to oversee terrorist operations against Palestinians. The Gush Emunim, the Kach party of the recently assassinated Meir Kahane, and various other settlers groups are secretly coordinated, armed, and funded by that office.

The policy of using supposed private "settlers" such as the Gush Emunim to butcher Arabs is nothing new. In some ways, one could date the policy back to 1953, when Gen. Moshe Dayan ordered the formation of an elite, secret, volunteer unit of the Israeli Army to conduct massacres of Palestinians. The unit, "Unit 101," was led by Sharon. The massacres were always blamed on civilians.

In October 1953, in their first action, Sharon, leading 600 soldiers, infiltrated Jordan, and killed 66 men, women, and children in the 2,000-person village of Qibya (now in the occupied West Bank). The massacre was supposedly conducted in "reprisal" for the shooting of two Israeli Jews a few days before. U.N. military observers, investigating the scene of the incident two hours later, described it this way: "Bullet-ridden bodies near doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished homes indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them."

Other raids soon followed. On Feb. 28, 1955, the unit raided the Egyptian town of Gaza (now in the occupied Gaza Strip). Twenty-two soldiers were blown up in a truck by the supposed Israeli civilians. On Aug. 31, six months later, 39 Egyptians were killed in a raid on the nearby Egyptian village of Khan Yunis. On Oct. 10, 1956, two months before the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, 83 Arabs were killed in a raid on Qalqilya, now in the occupied West Bank. In an interview with the New York Times, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser later said that the massacre in Gaza forced him to open relations with the Soviet Union regarding the purchase of arms, and that the attack on Khan Yunis forced him to accept the Soviet offer.

Sharon's terrorist unit was later incorporated into the IDF paratroop corps, after a decade of massacres.

This same policy of butchery, including the use of supposedly non-government assassins, characterized the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that then-Defense Minister Sharon ordered on June 4, 1982. In 1978-79 alone, Israeli raids had driven some 200,000 Palestinians out of southern Lebanon. The invasion, which had been ordered by the U.S. State Department as part of its policy of destroying Lebanon, had the included purpose of implementing a "final solution" to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then based there.

During the height of the invasion—June 4 through Aug. 31—19,025 people were killed and 30,032 were wounded, most of them civilians.

On Aug. 21, the PLO began evacuating Beirut, after a siege of 10 weeks and daily aerial bombings, because, PLO officials said, "the destruction of Beirut over the heads of a half a million Muslims is not a mere possibility but has become a reality." On that date, the first of 15,600 Palestinians left Beirut, and an American-sponsored ceasefire was accepted by the Israelis, since one of their main aims had been achieved.

On Sept. 15, the Israelis broke the ceasefire, invaded West Beirut, and ordered the encirclement of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj el Barajneh. On Sept. 16, Sharon's IDF sent units of the Israeli-aligned Lebanese Phalange militia into the camps, with the orders to "purify them." The militia remained in the camps until Sept. 18, with the armed backup of the IDF. During that time, the militia killed an estimated 1,500 men, women, and children.

The pretext for the invasion and slaughter was the attempted assassination of Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov in London by the nephew of Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal (born Sabri al-Banna) a few days before. Abu Nidal and his organization are controlled by Israeli intelligence and used, as in this case, to provide timely pretexts for Israeli actions. Abu Nidal's father, Haj Khalil al-Banna, was an intimate with Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Shapiro, the founder of the Ha-Shomer "self-defense" movement. His brother, Mohammed, is one of the biggest fruit wholesalers on the West Bank, with extensive dealings with various Jewish kibbutzim.

According to one scenario thrown around in Washington today, another Abu Nidal-ordered assassination, blamed on Iraq, will be the pretext for an Anglo-American-Israeli assault on Iraq.

C. Sharon's backers make a killing

In 1979, the Israeli high court ruled for the first time that individual Israelis could buy West Bank lands. Up to that time, land purchases could only be made by the Israeli government or through special exemptions. The shift in policy immediately benefited Sharon's New York and City of London controllers, who could always find an Israeli front-man for their land speculation.

In 1980, Sharon began an international propaganda campaign to promote such private land purchases. To this end, he began tours of the United States, urging American Jews to purchase West Bank land. A cluster of companies, all tied to Sharon, was formed to channel these international investments, including: Jumbo, whose attorney was Begin's son-in-law Roni Milo, today Minister of Police Affairs; Samaria and Judea, a combine tied to the Tehiya party of Yuval Ne'eman; and Meteor, owned by Jacob Avkin, a member of Sharon's Shlomotzion party.

In 1981, the Israeli high court further ruled that the Israeli government could declare all rocky, vacant, or uncultivated acreage as state property. Arbitrary government definitions of what constituted "vacant" or "uncultivated" land accelerated the displacement of Palestinians. By 1982, when Sharon was installed as defense minister, the stage had been set for making a killing in the real estate market, by killing Arabs.

In October 1982, as mentioned above, Lord Harlech and Kissinger put together their international combine to buy up the West Bank. According to Harlech's plan, third-party buyers, often Arabs, would purchase blocs of real estate on behalf of the group. These areas, which would eventually become "Arab-free," would be used to settle the large numbers of Soviet Jews expected to emigrate to Israel.

This transfer, however, required violence against the Palestinians. This was where their boy Sharon came in.

To prepare for this transfer, Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, had already held a meeting at his farm in the spring of 1982 with a number of his cronies. Attendees included Rafi Eytan, still the prime minister's Adviser on the Warfare against Terror; Gen. Rehavam Zeevi, whom Eytan had replaced in that post; and Meshulam Riklis.

Shortly after the Harlech-Kissinger discussions, and the Sharon gathering, the Jewish fundamentalist crazies run by Sharon, Eytan, and Zeevi accelerated their provocations against Palestinians. These included not only beatings and killings of Palestinians, but also attempted bombings of the site of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Jewish fundamentalists insist that the Al Aqsa mosque on the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) is where Solomon's Temple had been, and that demolition of the mosque is necessary to rebuild the temple. Religious desecrations of Muslim sites, it was thought, would rapidly create a spiraling pattern of violence, thereby giving the Israeli army the pretext to drive the Palestinian population of the West Bank into Jordan en masse.

EIR coverage of this "land scam" and "Temple Mount" plot in 1983 provoked an international uproar, particularly among the oligarchical circles of Europe. U.S. documents made available to EIR through the Freedom of Information Act show that Henry Kissinger was particularly incensed by those 1983 articles.

One of the specific reasons for the international outcry was that EIR had traced back Harlech and Kissinger's game to the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, housed in London. The Masons claim their descent from the builders of Solomon's Temple. The plot to blow up the mosque was, as we showed, ideologically motivated as well.

The sponsorship of the Harlech-Kissinger group by the Masonic order was quite overt. As a Quatuor Coronati Lodge spokesman put it at the time, "The Middle East could be hit by a new wave of fundamentalism.... The one thing that would unite the whole Arab world would be an attempt to rebuild Solomon's Temple; this would lead to no end of trouble.... It would be nice to see the Temple of Solomon there, but you would have to do something with the mosque first, like blow it up."

The U.S. side of this operation was run by the Temple Mount Foundation, founded by Terry Risenhoover, whose vast North Slope oil concessions had been sponsored by Kissinger Associates board member Robert O. Anderson. Risenhoover's group, composed primarily of Protestant fundamentalists, aided their British allies by generously funding the Jewish Defense League and the Gush Emunim, even in opposition to a few anti-Sharon Israeli groups which feared the plot's consequences.

This is precisely the same group that sponsored the Oct. 8 attempt to lay a foundation stone for the new temple at the Al Aqsa mosque, providing Israeli authorities the pretext to shoot into the Palestinian crowd that had gathered at the site to protest the action. The resulting deaths, which totaled 21, it was hoped, would create the conditions suitable for an Israeli strike into Jordan, triggering a Gulf war.