[Volunteers at a Kibbutz in Dafna, northern Israel, 1980, top, and Eamon Delaney, above, with Israelis on military duty in 2012, “which included dressing as Arabs for ‘riot-training’]

Following the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, ‘kibbutznik’ Eamon Delaney recalls when helping Israel was a liberal cause.

I was living in a kibbutz in northern Israel in 1982 when Ariel Sharon as defence minister, ordered the ambitious and reckless invasion of Lebanon.

The kibbutz system, familiar to many Irish volunteers over the decades, was a left wing commune network, loosely associated with the establishment Labour party which had ruled Israel since its creation in 1948.

However, in 1977, the right wing Likud party came to power and in 1981, Likud was re-elected with Sharon as Defence Minister. The kibbutzniks were getting used to a Likud government but the prospect of Sharon as Defence Minister filled them with dread. They saw him as hot headed, glory hunting (he’d already had a controversial army career) and prone to needless confrontation with the surrounding Arabs.

The big question in 1982 was would Israel invade Lebanon so as to drive the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) away from Israel’s northern borders, where it was firing rockets, just like Hamas had been doing recently from Gaza. And as with Gaza, the Israel philosophy is to strike back disproportionately to deter further attacks.

But, with Sharon, it seemed to be even more than that, and the kibbutz members were convinced that he was looking for any pretext to invade Lebanon and rearrange its political landscape.And so it would be. We woke up one morning and saw a line of Israeli armour and vehicles streaming northwards, and the fisherman that I worked with in the fish ponds were gone – called up for military duty overnight.

Sharon promised he would only go 40km into Lebanon to drive the PLO north and carve out a safety zone in south Lebanon. But, giddy with apparent early success, he went all the way to Beirut, encircled the PLO and attacked the city with relentless airstrikes that appalled the world.  Most infamously, he allowed Israel’s Lebanese allies, the Christian Phalange, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla, knowing full well they were sworn enemies from the Lebanese civil war.

A massacre ensured over two days, while Israel army stood back, claiming ignorance. The Israelis didn’t perpetrate it, but they seem to connived at it and, to this day, Sharon has been personally blamed, including in European countries where indictments had been made against him. Worse still, the Israelis got bogged down in Lebanon and overstayed their ‘welcome,’ giving rise to a new and ruthless resistance movement against Israel– Hezbollah.Continue reading →