(4 of 5)
Barr then reviewed the Kahan report in detail, citing passages that buttressed TIME's contention that Sharon had discussed revenge with the Phalangists. The Kahan report disputed key points of Sharon's testimony before the commission, Barr said. Sharon, for example, contended that Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan ordered the Phalangists into the camps; the report concluded that Sharon also made the decision. Contrary to the impression Sharon tried to create during the trial, the former Defense Minister had been warned of the consequences of his decision even as the Phalangists were preparing to enter the camps. In one instance, cited by the Kahan commission, Eitan told his superior that the Phalangists "are seething with the feeling of revenge and there might be rivers of blood."
"If you had decided to send this bunch of bloodthirsty cutthroats into those camps," said Barr to the jurors, "alarm bells would be going off in your heads. You would be saying, 'God, keep those people out of there. We can't let those people go into those camps.' Yet he (Sharon) sat on the witness stand and told you, 'I didn't know it was going to happen. I had no idea, never in my wildest dreams.' "
Barr reminded the jurors that Sharon's lawyers must prove "actual malice," that is, that TIME published the paragraph knowing it to be false, or with reckless disregard for whether it was false. He insisted that staff members had worked on the story in good faith. Halevy had several sources for his account of Sharon's talks with the Phalangists, the lawyer argued. After reading the Kahan report, "he believed those sources were correct." As for the other TIME journalists who relied on Halevy's reporting, Barr said, they had read the Kahan report and trusted Halevy completely.
"The plaintiff's case is too much," Barr concluded. "It reaches out beyond sense and reason." Sharon brought this lawsuit, Barr charged, because "he had to fight somebody. He couldn't sue the commission. It already had gone out of business. He picked out this one paragraph and said, 'This is the way to attack the Kahan commission . . . and that's the way I'm going to wash my hands clean of this terrible, terrible mess.' "
During his six-hour summation, Gould charged that TIME was engaged in a "feverish pursuit of scoops" in order to "sell magazines." He called TIME journalists "smooth-faced Boy Scouts" and said that witnesses from the magazine indulged in "self-adulation" when they praised David Halevy's reporting career. As for Halevy himself, an Israeli citizen, Gould derided his war record and called him a "Humphrey Bogart playing Ernie Pyle." He contended that Halevy fabricated the story and that his colleagues at TIME printed it against their better judgment.
Gould depicted Sharon as a "great and good man . . . an asset too precious to be defiled by lies and half-truths." He told the jury: "Your verdict will do much to determine whether he'll go down in history as a great man, a great soldier, a savior of his country or as a kind of monster, another Herod." Sharon's approval of the decision to send the Phalangists into the camps, he said, was made while "bullets were flying and guys were dying." Said Gould: "He's not making the kind of decisions you make as an editor up there in Rockefeller Center, with all the fancy furniture."