The New York Times
Monday, September 27, 1982
Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section A;
Page 6, Column 1;
Foreign Desk ISRAELI ISSUE: SHARON

News Analysis
DAVID K. SHIPLER, Special to the New York Times

DATELINE: JERUSALEM, Sept. 26

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon has emerged as a major issue in Israelis' concern over questions of their army's responsibility in the Beirut massacre.

Concerns about Mr. Sharon, often expressed in the past by those now being voiced across a broader spectrum of Israeli politics. Some members of Prime Minister Menachem Begin's Herut Party are saying privately that they believe Mr. Sharon's performance before, during and after the massacre warrants his dismissal.

At the request of the opposition Labor Party, a special session of the Israeli Parliament has been called for next Thursday to discuss charges against Mr. Sharon arising from his statements after the massacre.

The first such statement, in a speech in Parliament on Wednesday, implied that Israeli Army officers had been involved somehow in a massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians at Beirut's Tell Zaatar refugee camp in 1976, when Shimon Peres, head of the Labor Party, was Defense Minister. Mr. Peres, other Labor members and senior army officers were enraged, and Mr. Sharon backtracked in a television interview Friday.

The Anger in the Army

But the damage to Mr. Sharon may have already been done. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the secretary of the Tami Party, which contributes three legislators to Mr. Begin's fragile coalition, is a retired brigadier general and was the army's liaison officer with the Phalangists at the time. He said he was clandestinely in Beirut with the Phalangists before the incident, but only to observe and report on the battle for Tell Zaatar, which was besieged for two months at the height of Lebanon's civil war, and that he left two weeks before the massacre, in which estimates of the death toll ran as high as 1,600.

Anger in the army is so intense, Israeli newspapers reported today, that during an extraordinary meeting Friday with the Chief of Staff, Lieut. Gen. Rafael Eytan, most generals demanded Mr. Sharon's dismissal. The Chief of Staff was said to have responded in a tough fashion. Today he announced that he had rejected the request of Brig. Gen. Amram Mitzna to be relieved of his duties as commander of the Staff College because of the massacre, telling him to continue in his post or leave the army entirely.

Mr. Sharon's second controversial statement, in an interview Friday on Israeli television, came as he was explaining the reasons for going into West Beirut after the assassination of Presidentelect Bashir Gemayel. The Government said at the time that the army ''took positions in West Beirut in order to prevent the danger of violence, bloodshed and anarchy.''

Government Stand Is Disputed

Mr. Sharon called that statement ''a camouflage for something else.'' ''Our entry into West Beirut was in order to make war against the infrastructure left by the terrorists,'' Mr. Sharon declared, ''to gain control of the great quantities of arms that, in violation of the agreement, were not transferred to the Lebanese Army. Would you expect the Government to say in its statement that the Israeli Army is going into West Beirut in order to go from house to house, from cellar to cellar, in order to find the new command posts of the terrorists?'' His admission is regarded as having embarrassed the Government.

He also stirred a storm when he said, in condemning internal dissent in Israel, that he and General Eytan ''came to a conclusion that we could not mobilize a particular brigade, because there was a very serious mood current.'' Presumably he meant that many members of the brigade opposed the war. The remark has led to charges from some opposition legislators that Mr. Sharon should be prosecuted for disclosing a state secret.

Amos Elon, the writer and political commentator, said he thought the Defense Minister should be brought up on much graver charges.

'This Man's a War Criminal'

''The man, by his own confession in the Knesset last Wednesday, is an accessory to a crime and should be prosecuted,'' Mr. Elon said. He dismissed Mr. Sharon's contention that he never expected the Lebanese Christian forces to commit a massacre.

Mr. Elon said: ''A man who puts a snake into a child's bed and says: 'I'm sorry. I told the snake not to bite. I didn't know snakes were so dangerous.' It's impossible to understand. This man's a war criminal.''

''He's dangerous,'' said Yehuda Litany, a political correspondent for the daily Haaretz, ''because he means seriously what he plans. He planned the Lebanon operation one year ahead. Many people didn't take him seriously.''

Despite the shock of the nation, many who have watched Mr. Sharon closely through the years see a background of insensitivity to human life; in his brilliant career as a military man, for example, Mr. Sharon was often accused of being unconcerned about Israeli, as well as civilian, casualties. When he was taking the post of Defense Minister, a general who worked closely with him said, ''He has no moral brakes.''

Ron Ben-Yishai, military correspondent for Israel Television, said that on the night of Sept. 17, after being told by army officers of the continuing massacre, he called Mr. Sharon at home, waking him just before 11:30 P.M.

'The Most Bizarre Thing'

''He didn't say it's terrible. He didn't say it's beautiful. He didn't react at all. He didn't react at all - that is the most bizarre thing about it.''

''To me this is not surprising,'' Mr. Elon said. ''I think from the very start this was Fascism with a Jewish face. There is a famous line in Sharett's private diaries,'' the writer said, then went off to get the work of the late Moshe Sharett, who was Foreign Minister when the then-Colonel Sharon led a reprisal raid against the Jordanian border town of Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 villagers, about half of them women and children, the night of Oct. 14-15, 1953. It was in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by terrorists who slipped across from Jordan.

Mr. Elon read aloud what Foreign Minister Sharett wrote about the colonel the morning of Oct. 15, ''Which of the two souls that battle between the pages of the Bible will gain the upper hand here, the dark and barbaric or the noble?'' It is a question many Israelis were asking at sundown today as they began Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.