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CounterPunch
September
18, 2002
20 Years
After
Sabra
and Shatila:
the Forgotten Massacres
by
Peggy Thomson
Every time I open my closet door I see them. The
black Talbots sandals I wore when I revisited the wretched Palestinian
refugee camps known as Sabra and Shatila. Although I've cleaned
them, for some reason the sandals seem to be coated with a film
of dust and dirt which simply will not go away.
Over the years dirt from Sabra and Shatila
has clung just as tenaciously to Israeli prime minister Ariel
Sharon. As some -- but probably not many -- Americans may remember,
twenty years ago this month the twin camps in southern Beirut
were the scene of an infamous massacre carried out by Lebanese
militiamen operating under Israel's direct control. The massacre
was an exceptionally tragic denouement to Israel's 1982 invasion
of its neighbor to the north, which Israel carried out with American
approval partly in the hope of establishing a Lebanese government
friendly to its interests.
During Lebanon's earlier civil war, Israel
had begun viewing the right-wing Christian Phalange militia as
a natural ally. (In a strange way the relationship reminds me
of Israel's present relationship with the Christian right in
this country in that both parties are trying to use the other
for their own ends in an alliance which may in fact be extremely
short-lived.) In the late 1970s, both Israel and the Phalangists
saw the Palestinians as an enemy -- Israel because of the obvious
PLO threat and the Christians because the Palestinian refugees
had the potential for upsetting the country's delicate Christian-Muslim
communal balance. At the end of Israel's Lebanon campaign it
looked for a very short while like the Phalangist leader Bashir
Gemeyal, Israel's hand-picked candidate, would indeed become
the new Lebanese president. This plan was thwarted, however,
after Gemeyal was assassinated in a powerful bomb blast shortly
before assuming office.
Israel immediately reinvaded West Beirut
and secretly began making preparations to allow Lebanese militiamen
to enter the refugee camps in search of "terrorists."
In a two-day orgy of bloodshed which subsequently shocked and
sickened the world, Israel's allies murdered between 1,000 and
",000 unarmed Palestinian refugees and impoverished Lebanese
while torturing, raping and terrorizing countless others. The
death toll may in fact be as high or higher than that of the
September 11 attacks on America. No one will ever be able to
say for sure because figures for the number killed in the massacre
vary wildly.
An Israeli investigative commission eventually
found Sharon, who was Israel's defense minister at the time,
"personally responsible" for the slaughter. As a result,
many people, including many Israelis, predicted that Sharon would
never become Israel's prime minister. Today, however, the phrase
that comes to mind is "never say never."
Although Sharon has been officially rehabilitated,
like every politician he must of necessity be concerned to some
degree about his image. In light of the ironfisted tactics he
has been using in the occupied territories since assuming the
Israeli premiership, the last thing the always controversial
Sharon has needed of late was a new wave of publicity relating
to his involvement in the massacre.
Interest in the twenty-year-old atrocities
was rekindled nonetheless, at least in Europe, after a court
case was brought last year against Sharon in Belgium charging
him with war crimes. The case received additional attention in
January after Elie Hobeika, a Lebanese warlord involved in the
massacre, was assassinated in Beirut. Shortly before his death
Hobeika had announced that he would go to Belgium to testify
against Sharon. Speculation is that Hobeika may have wanted to
clear his name by trying to pin a large portion of blame on another
Israeli proxy force long implicated in the massacre -- the South
Lebanon Army of Major Saad Haddad.
Also, it is worth nothing that Hobeika
isn't the only Lebanese Forces militia leader to have recently
met with an untimely end: Since the first of the year two of
Hobeika's comrades, who may have had connections to the case,
were assassinated or died under mysterious circumstances.
In a surprise move a Belgian appeals
court dismissed the case in June on grounds that Sharon could
not be prosecuted because he was not residing in Belgium. Lawyers
for the Palestinian survivors and relatives say they are appealing
the case to the Belgian Supreme Court while Belgian legislators
have been busily redrafting the existing law to specify, among
other things, that the accused, including sitting heads of government,
does not have to be in the country to be prosecuted.
When it comes to the massacres and to
Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion, people in this country sometimes
say, "Oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that.
I just can't remember what." But you can't blame the average
American for not knowing much about the Lebanon invasion and
its aftermath since the story only ever got "a minute-ten"
or so on the evening news two or three times a week throughout
that long, terrible summer.
Still, as some may remember, in the beginning
the stated aim of what Israel euphemistically called "Operation
Peace for Galilee" was to stop cross-border attacks by Palestinian
guerrillas in southern Lebanon on Israel's northern settlements.
At the time of the Israeli invasion, however, a truce had been
in effect for more than a year and not a single settler had been
killed.
After Israeli troops reached Beirut in
three days, the campaign quickly expanded beyond its original
stated aims. The new objective suddenly became the removal of
Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization from
the Lebanese capital, where the group had gone after being expelled
from Jordan in 1970.
By the end of the summer of 1982, nearly
18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians had been killed, most
of them in Israeli air strikes on civilian targets. The carnage
stopped only after Arafat and his men were shipped to Tunisia
and several other Arab countries in a move which seems eerily
similar to the deportations this spring of the Palestinian militants
who were holed up in the Church of the Nativity.
The fact that this year marks the twentieth
anniversary of the invasion may have had something to do with
my decision to return to Lebanon this summer. Perhaps in some
way I don't fully understand the events of September 11 also
played a role, even though I knew full well that I wasn't likely
to discover any answers to the terrorist attacks carried out
against America by nosing around Sabra and Shatila. No, what
I think I was doing was trying to pay my respects in some small
way to the present inhabitants of the camps and to see what,
if anything, had changed since that bright Saturday morning twenty
years ago when a voice over a cameraman's walkie-talkie told
me that something dreadful had happened in Sabra and Shatila.
At the time I was a naive young woman
fresh out of journalism school who had been dispatched to Syria
and Lebanon to help cover "the war." This time, however,
I was in Lebanon for a different reason: to observe a conference
which was being held by a group of North American Christians
whose aim is to support and encourage the indigenous Christians
of the Middle East, who represent an often overlooked and beleaguered
minority in the region. (Other than a single busload of Japanese
tourists, the sixty or so Americans attending the conference
seemed to be the only western -- and certainly the only American
-- visitors in Lebanon at the time.)
While I was there I experienced some
ominous signs of what has been described as "the bad old
Beirut," the Beirut everyone wants to forget. One morning,
in what is apparently a relatively common occurrence, Israeli
jets overflew the city, breaking the sound barrier. The next
day a car bomb went off on a quiet residential street, killing
Palestinian guerrilla leader Jihad Jibril. If that weren't enough,
the day after that the body of a kidnapped Christian leader was
discovered in the trunk of his car. I knew I could have gone
to Lebanon without revisiting Sabra and Shatila, but obviously
something was drawing me back there. I had planned to go alone
to the refugee camps, but Robert Fisk, a former colleague of
mine at Canadian Broadcasting and Britain's most respected Middle
East correspondent, offered to accompany me.
As a middle-aged suburban housewife,
I knew I cut a slightly ridiculous figure wandering through the
camps in my khaki capris and Talbots sandals. (As every middle-class
matron knows, Talbots attire is for parties around the pool or
leisurely luncheons at the country club and not for the mean
streets of Sabra and Shatila.) Leaving our car, we passed the
Syrian soldiers who guard the camp and the Syrian workers who
live on its fringes. I wanted to see again the spot where Mr.
Nouri and another elderly man had fallen as they ran from their
homes in their pajamas. They were the first victims I remember
seeing, and I remember even now having the odd feeling at the
time that I was on the set of a western and that these two old
men had been gunned down in the street following a duel perhaps
or a fight in a nearby saloon.
Later, standing near a small open field,
which is actually a mass grave where several hundred victims
of the massacre are buried, I contemplated a long, hand-lettered
banner which read "The Arabic people will not forget the
American support to the Nazi Sharon in his massacres in Sabra,
Shatila and Janin (sic)." Squeezing through the dank, miserable
alleyways, which were depressingly unchanged from the way they
looked twenty years ago, I stopped before a crude, black-and-white
poster of a gorilla -- not to be confused with a guerrilla --
cradling a baby gorilla in its arms. Ariel Sharon's face was
superimposed on the mother gorilla's body while the baby had
-- you guessed it -- the face of George W. Bush. (Finding such
a poster in the refugee camps may not seem surprising, but later
I was somewhat started to see the same poster prominently displayed
near the principal's office in an Anglican school in Amman.)
One theory is that the massacre took
place, not because the Christian Phalangists wished to avenge
their leader, but rather because the Israelis' wished to frighten
the Palestinians into fleeing, possibly to Jordan. The theory
behind such an idea was that the Palestinians from Lebanon would
then be joined, voluntarily or otherwise, by those living in
the West Bank, thus effecting a wholesale Jordanian "transfer,"
an option for solving the Palestinian "problem" still
favored today by many Israeli right-wingers. The International
Commission of Inquiry -- not to be confused with Israel's Kahan
Commission, although both were established to investigate the
massacre -- noted in its report "the extent to which Israeli
participation in prior massacres against the Palestinian people
creates a most disturbing pattern of a political struggle carried
on by means of mass terror directed at civilians, including women,
children and the aged." This statement is an obvious reference
to the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, which has long been cited
as an example of the use of terror tactics by Israel to effect
the exodus of Palestinian civilians.
The only western correspondent still
based in Beirut, Robert Fisk has somehow managed to survive twenty-six
years of warfare and unrest, including the especially terrifying
years during the 1980s when scores of western men -- including
several friends and acquaintances of ours -- were being whisked
off the streets by shadowy Islamic kidnappers. But in the year
since the September 11 tragedies, Fisk has been faced with another
threat: a steadily accelerating stream of hate mail for what
many regard as his anti-Israel views, even though the veteran
reporter has long been an ardent critic not only of Yasser Arafat
and the PLO but also of the Arab world's various other despotic
regimes.
There were, of course other journalists,
including a number of Americans, who covered the massacre at
Sabra and Shatila. But you don't hear much from them these days.
As we trudged through the camps, I couldn't help thinking that
perhaps Fisk's dogged pursuit of the massacre story might be
yet another reason behind the threats now being made against
him.
In an even more disturbing development,
the actor John Malkovich has publicly stated that he would like
to shoot the fifty-six year-old journalist, a statement Fisk
admits worries him, "since a crazy might actually listen
to someone like Malkovich and take him seriously." I must
admit experiencing a fleeting moment when I wondered whether
it was safe to be in the company of my former colleague. Almost
as soon as I had the thought I pushed it away because that's
what Lebanon does to you. It can make what might in other circumstances
seem risky somehow seem perfectly normal.
Fisk says he keeps returning to Sabra
and Shatila from time to time because whenever he does he learns
something new. As disturbing and depressing as the camps are,
they do seem to retain a terrible fascination for journalists.
And if you stop to think about it, it's easy to understand why.
Like detectives, journalists are attracted to unsolved crimes,
and despite the effort mounted in the Belgian court, so far no
one has stood trial for the atrocities that took place in Sabra
and Shatila. And for the moment at least it seems unlikely that
anyone ever will.
The camps also beckon because they represent
in the most graphic way imaginable the Palestinian "problem,"
a problem soon to be obscured, it would seem, if only temporarily,
by a U.S. war in Iraq. Still, journalists are always looking
for "the story," and when you visit Sabra and Shatila
-- or any other Palestinian refugee camp for that matter -- you
know you are getting at the heart of the story euphemistically
known as "the Middle East conflict." All of a sudden
you see for yourself why the early Zionists' slogan about what
was then Palestine -- "a land without a people for a people
without a land" -- was at best wishful thinking and at worst
a dangerous and costly delusion.
Peggy Thomson
can be reached at: thomson@counterpunch.org
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September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
September
14 / 15, 2002
Ben Tripp
Notes for
Future Historians:
The Bush Administration Explained
Tom Crumpacker
Democracy & US Policy on Cuba
David Vest
Neither-Handed
Behzad Yaghmaian
A Letter
from Istanbul
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fire Next Time:
Nuclear Plants & Terrorism
Anis Shivani
The Warped
World of
Bernard Lewis
Uri Avnery
A Witness from the Past
Robert Fisk
Bush Across
the Rubicon
Josh Frank
Lacking Tenacity
Christini, Alam, & Krieger
Poems
September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
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