To Ariel Sharon's attorney Milton Gould, the issue before the jury was the destruction of the reputation of a hero and patriot. "It falls to you, six Americans," he said, "to do your duty and eradicate this infamy." To Thomas Barr, chief counsel for Time Inc., what was at stake was the ability of the press to seek and print the truth. "This involves a news story of how a horrible, brutal, insensible massacre of women and children took place," he said. "That is what the press's job is: to dig at things like this, to pick at things that may not be pleasant or comfortable for the people involved, to try to get as much of the story as possible into the hands of the public so that the public can make decisions about how we want to run our lives."
After eight weeks and 14 witnesses, the case of Sharon vs. Time Inc. culminated last week with vigorous summations by each side. It was now up to the jury to decide if, as the former Israeli Defense Minister contends, TIME magazine libeled him in a paragraph in its Feb. 21, 1983, cover story about an official Israeli report on the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut.
Both sides had rested their cases three weeks ago, but the attorneys' final arguments were delayed while Federal Court Judge Abraham Sofaer worked out a highly unusual arrangement with the Israeli government to allow limited access to secret documents involved in the case. After its representatives had seen . some, but not all, of the relevant documents, TIME issued a correction regarding one sentence (see box). But TIME asserted that the substance of the paragraph was true and protested that it had been denied access to key testimony given to Israeli investigators that could confirm the story.
The cover story dealt with the published findings of a commission headed by Israel's Supreme Court president, Yitzhak Kahan. The killings, which began two days after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, were carried out by Christian Phalangist militiamen. The Kahan commission concluded that Sharon had ordered the militiamen into the camps and bore "indirect responsibility" for what had happened. "It is impossible to justify the Minister of Defense's disregard of the danger of a massacre," said the commission report. Sharon resigned his post two days after the findings were released.
Sharon's lawsuit is aimed at the 22nd paragraph in TIME's eight-page story, which reads as follows:
"One section of the report, known as Appendix B, was not published at all, mainly for security reasons. That section contains the names of several intelligence agents referred to elsewhere in the report. TIME has learned that it also contains further details about Sharon's visit to the Gemayel family on the day after Bashir Gemayel's assassination. Sharon reportedly told the Gemayels that the Israeli army would be moving into West Beirut and that he expected the Christian forces to go into the Palestinian refugee camps. Sharon also reportedly discussed with the Gemayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge for the assassination of Bashir, but the details of the conversation are not known."