UK aware of Israel’s ‘terror’ for over 20 years

Declassified UK | Mark Curtis

The parallels are remarkable. 

There were “numerous reports that the Israeli authorities have prevented medical and other humanitarian assistance from reaching those in need”.

The Red Cross was saying “that their staff have been threatened at gunpoint, warning shots have been fired at their vehicles and two ICRC [Red Cross] vehicles have been damaged by tanks”.

There were “media reports of people dying for lack of treatment” and on the “humanitarian impact of curfews affecting over 1 million people”.

There were Israeli soldiers indulging in “theft and looting from homes and shops and the vandalism of people’s homes”. 

And “many reports of the killing of unarmed Palestinians”.

Sound familiar? 

But this is not Gaza in 2025. It was the occupied West Bank in 2002, described in an internal Foreign Office report revealed in the British archives. 

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Robert Fisk: The ‘flowers’ of the Arab Spring are so distracting that Ariel Sharon’s death has barely raised a whimper

Independent Voices

Has ever the Arab awakening – the Arab “Spring” if we were to believe the nonsense spouted at the time – looked more desperate, more bloody, more hopeless, more despairing than it does today? I am not referring to the anguish so distracting the Arab world that it scarcely raised a whimper this weekend when the man most of them regarded as a war criminal – Ariel Sharon – was mourned by the West and its frightened journos as “iconic”, “legendary”, “audacious”, a “bulldozer” and “a proudly Zionist general”.

Incredibly, the presenter of Al Jazeera English even offered her “sincere condolences” to an Israeli friend of this dreadful man. When the Israeli Kahan Commission report was quoted by reporters, they inaccurately said it held Sharon only “indirectly” responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians murdered by Israel’s proxy Lebanese militia. In fact, the official text also states that Sharon was “personally” responsible.

But why should Arabs care about the final demise of a man who, like much of the Arab world, spent the last years of his existence in a coma? For the awful truth – and it has to be stated at last – is that the Arab revolutions have brought about unspeakable slaughter, an unprecedented flood of refugees and economic disaster. As a newspaper seller put it simply to me in Cairo a few weeks ago, “the revolution was great, what followed was terrible”. Indeed, across the Middle East, millions of Arabs, I suspect, now believe that the overthrow of their dictators was a tragedy, that if dictatorship meant political and physical imprisonment, then freedom brought only bloodshed, lawlessness, insecurity and a craving for the old autocrats.

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Israelis pay tribute to a "brave soldier and daring leader", while Hamas says Mr Sharon's hands "were smeared with blood".

Comment: Anyone capable of a careful analysis of history will see Ariel Sharon in the thick of massacres and general psychopathic lunacy for Zionism. "Smeared with blood" is a very fair appraisal indeed.

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The Guardian

Death of Sharon, aged 85, comes as less of a shock to Israel than stroke that felled him at height of his premiership in 2006 

Link to video: Ariel Sharon dies aged 85

 
Ariel Sharon, the controversial self-styled "warrior" who dominated Israel's military and political landscape for decades, has died eight years after a massive stroke left him in a vegetative state.

The former army general and prime minister suffered multiple organ failure over the new year. His sons were at his bedside at the Sheba Medical Centre, a long-term care facility near Tel Aviv, where Sharon has lain since May 2006.

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