It occurs to me I may have inadvertently perplexed some people by
mentioning Unit 101. In short, a terrible crime was committed in
1953 in which an entire family was slaughtered in Palestine. Rather
than treat the matter as a police matter and hunt down and punish the
perpetrators, Ariel Sharon organized the infamous Unit 101, which
went into a small Jordanian town called Kivry and destroyed every
home there, along with the occupants. That this was done has never
been denied, and it is described as "retaliation" because some
unknown assailant or assailants committed a crime of which the
residents of Kivry were innocent.
The question is not whether a response was required to such a vicious
crime as the slaughter of a family. Any reasonable person would
agree that this sort of thing cannot be tolerated. The question is
whether it is justified to wipe out a village as a response to the
commission of a crime. Put another way, if someone burglarized a
house in your town, would the police be justified in going to another
town and burning down the entire place? Or if the moral issue is set
aside, can this sort of response be reasonably expected to do what
policing is supposed to do, namely diminish the incidence of future
crimes and protect the public?
The Kivry massacre took place in October 1953 and would be just a sad
footnote in history were it not for the fact that it was followed by
numerous other massacres since, the most publicized being the
massacres in Lebanon in 1982 and the more recent massacre in Jenin,
which was covered up by the Commandant of Unit 101.
Anyone who wants to read more and make up his or her mind can find
beaucoups of sites, pro and con, by entering "Unit 101" (in qotation
marks) followed by the word Sharon into google.com Some of these
sites characterize the Commandant as a great hero, others as a mad
dog killer. Unfortunately none of them discuss what seems to me to
be the central issue: Bad policy leads to bad results, and multiple
suicide bombings every day is a very bad result indeed. It did not
have to be this way. Ler us hope that sanity prevails and this whole
sorry business is brought to a conclusion, so that people on both
sides of the Green Line can live without fear and under the rule of
law.
