By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
Feb 23, 2005
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has abandoned his election platform and is implementing the long held positions of the leftist Labor Party, a Labor minister told Israel’s Channel One News Monday.
Minister-without-portfolio Haim Ramon said he was “proud to be Sharon’s servant while he gets us out of Gaza” in accordance with Labor’s platform of surrendering the Jews’ biblical homeland to their Arab enemies.
A legendary IDF fighter, meanwhile, has joined the chorus of voices calling on Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to forcibly expel Jews from their homes.
Two-faced Sharon
During the election campaign leading up to the 2004 national election, Sharon vowed he would never uproot Jews from any part of their biblical patrimony.
He ferociously attacked the platform of unilateral retreat being advocated by his challenger, Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna.
Even after winning the election, Sharon declared, “Netzarim is the same as Tel Aviv,” suggesting that abandoning the isolated Gaza settlement would be the same as surrendering Israel’s seaside metropolis.
But now that very platform of retreat and uprooting Jewish settlers “is being implemented in the government by someone who was elected on a completely different platform,” Ramon said on Israel’s Mabat News program.
Ramon and his Labor Party colleagues were brought into Sharon’s cabinet after he failed to garner support for his ideological shift from among his right-wing allies.
Former-prime minister Ehud Barak chastised Labor for turning itself into Sharon’s rubberstamp and becoming subservient to a Likud-led government.
“I am proud to be Sharon's servant while he gets us out of Gaza,” Ramon responded.
The general has gone nuts
A man who knows Sharon better than most says he is convinced the prime minister has “gone nuts.”
“The great fighter has run away; he is simply a dangerous man,” legendary IDF fighter Meir Har-Tzion told Ma’ariv .
Once dubbed his generation’s greatest Jewish warrior by Moshe Dayan, Meir explained that “if a Palestinian State arises here, that will be the beginning of the end for the State of Israel.”
He labeled Sharon’s plan to uproot Gaza’s Jews a “holocaust.”
Har-Tzion and Sharon together established the renowned Unit 101 counter-terrorism unit in the 1950s.
Legendary warrior urges insubordination
Har-Tzion told the paper that IDF soldiers must refuse orders to expel Jews from their homes, joining a growing chorus of voices for insubordination.
He said the soldiers must be willing to go to jail for refusing immoral orders.