The Israeli premier is on his way to Washington to be feted by the Americans as part of their campaign against terrorism. There is a big irony here. Sharon himself is a terrorist. In 1983, an Israeli investigation found that when he was Israel’s minister of defense, he was indirectly but "personally" responsible for the massacres of 1,500 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla camps in Beirut the year before. Sharon was forced to resign.
Now, nearly 20 years later, the Palestinians are attempting to call the man who is now Israel’s prime minister to account, in a Belgian court of law. There can be no doubt that Sharon should answer for his deeds, but is Belgium the right arena for this prosecution? What Israel has done to the Palestinians should be of concern to the entire international community. It is before an international court that Israel’s criminals ought to be arraigned. Ideally, the Palestinians should be pressing a case in the international courts and using the United Nations as the conduit to mount the prosecution.
Observers fear that if the Belgian action is continued, it could lead to an inconclusive end. The Israelis are already maneuvering to frustrate the case. They are challenging the right of Belgium to hold such a trial and saying that as a serving prime minister, Sharon enjoys immunity. The outcome of the Belgian case could be an inconclusive mess, similar to attempts to extradite Gen. Pinochet to Chile using loopholes in Spanish law and then British law, because there is not yet an established international process to bring political criminals to book. Just as Britain, and probably Spain, did not really want to allow the process to continue for political reasons, it would seem more than likely that the Belgians will find every reason to avoid the case. This may be why the Belgian court has now delayed a decision on whether it will hear the case.
Were the case to go ahead, the damning evidence against Sharon, including that adduced by the Israeli authorities themselves, will become lost in a confusion of charges and countercharges and disputes about the legitimacy of the court. Thus the Palestinians are almost certainly making the right move but in entirely the wrong place. Unfortunately, the right place, which is an international court, does not exist. What this case demonstrates is the absolute need for such an institution.
It might be better if the Palestinians focused all their efforts on mounting a prosecution before the bar of international justice. Sharon and the Israeli hawks will find it a lot harder, if not impossible, to ignore the immense moral weight of the international community. The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is showing the way. It is slowly and carefully creating the precedent for justice that extends across any border. It sticks doggedly to facts and avoids any suggestion that this is merely the retributive justice of the victors, as was the case in the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis.
Such an overwhelmingly dispassionate forum is exactly the place where Ariel Sharon, along with the militiamen who pulled the triggers in the camps at Sabra and Shatilla and the Israeli officers who stood by for three days while the butchery went on, should be called to answer for their crimes.
