Lebanon — When veteran reporter Robert Fisk, first entered the Beirut Palestinian refugee camp 18th September 1982, these are some the words he wrote to describe what he saw:
‘It was the flies that told us. There were millions of them. Big as bluebottles, they covered us, unaware at first of the difference between the living and the dead. If the smell of the dead in Sidon was nauseating, the stench in Chatila made us retch. The dead were everywhere – in the road, in alleyways, in backyards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and laid on top of rubbish tips. The murderers – Christian militiamen whom Israel had let into the camps to flush out (manufactured ) terrorists – had only just left. The blood was still wet on the ground. When we had seen one hundred bodies we stopped counting. Down every alleyway there were corpses – women, adolescent young men, babies, children and grandparents – lying together where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death, in a lazy profusion.’ (Recorded in: Per non dimenticare… Sabra e Chatila, Stefano Chiarini)
The spurious reason stated by Israel for entering Lebanon and carrying out these massacres was to eliminate the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, (PLO). However, prior to the massacre, and under the direction of the US and United Nations, all PLO leaders and fighters had left Lebanon. This included all Palestinian men considered to be of fighting age. Although a promise had been made by the UN to protect the Palestinians the UN forces had withdrawn by September which left the families vulnerable to the attack. The only people left in the camp were women, children, babies and the aged.
Forty four years have passed, and the survivors and families of the 1982 Sabra Shatila massacre seem further away from obtaining justice than ever before. The commemoration, ‘Never to Forget’, an Italian programme initiated by the late Stefano Chiarini, in coordination with Kassem Aina, is held during September every year in Beirut.
During these past few years the cries for justice have not lost their intensity and have merely become broader in recognition of Israel’s more recent atrocities. The distant screams and explosions from bombs dropped on Gaza, South Lebanon and the Bekaa, while not audibly heard in Beirut, echoed throughout the ceremonial hall as a grim reminder that Israel, far from being held to account for its crimes, has continued to expand its brutality with impunity.
The 1982 massacre in Beirut was not the first of Israel’s orchestrated mass killing and sadly unlikely to be the last. One could go back to Israel’s birth pangs 1947/8 when Jewish militant gangs, during what’s known as the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), massacred an estimated 15,000 Palestinian civilians and caused a further 750,000 to flee. Having cleared the villages they incorporated them into Israel. Many of those fled to Lebanon taking their house keys with them in hopes of one-day returning. While Palestinians remain refugees with the hope of international ‘right of return’, Israel’s claim on the land of greater Israel, remains tenuous.
For those who fled the Nakba escaping to Lebanon wasn’t far enough. Geographically situated next to Israel, Lebanon has suffered a series of attacks and occupation, from the massacre of Tel Zataar Refugee Camp in 1976 to the bombing of Lebanon in 2006 and to the further attacks we have seen more recently.
Fisk’s description of the massacre that occurred in Sabra Shatila could be applied to the ongoing genocide the world is currently witnessing in Gaza. His words also describe the current invasion of South Lebanon where whole villages are being reduced to rubble, killing a documented 775 women and children. (https://Habbat.org)
The consequences of the pager attacks of two years ago are still felt. The injuries remain, and the crater where Israeli jets dropped 80 tons of explosives that killed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, along with fellow Lebanese Hezbollah resistance compatriots, and neighbouring Lebanese civilians, gapes like an open wound for the world to see. The cries of Palestinian Gazans mingle with the cries for justice with Palestinian and Lebanese victims of Israeli atrocities.
The current genocide in Gaza, the continued ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and attacks on South Lebanon, are not solely a result of action by the Palestinian resistance groups on 7th October. All context has been conveniently airbrushed away along with information as to how many Israelis were actually killed that October by Israel’s own weapons.
Israel’s wars are not about defence. Israelis are not the victims of unprovoked aggression. They are the perpetrators. The wars are about land acquisition (the Oded Yinon Plan), and promoting battle tested military hardware on behalf of weapons manufacturers like the Israeli Elbit Systems in UK.
For the Messianic Evangelical Christians, these wars are about an eschatological ‘End Times’ scenario where the world is destroyed to allow their prophesied messiah to return. What ‘He’ would return to, defies description. However for the uninitiated into this cult belief doctrine it is impossible to believe that an intelligent ‘All knowing Divine Being’, encompassing the Christian message of wisdom and love, would condone the genocide of innocents. None of these crimes will be forgotten or forgiven without justice or some kind of authentic reconciliation like the Nuremberg trials.
These massacres are allowed to continue because none of our Western Governments, media and establishments have been prepared to hold Israel to account. Israeli and Western leaders should take note, the voices around the world are growing louder and more focused in a collective determination to see justice. In this call for justice, it is not only the perpetrators of these crimes that need to stand trial, but also those who, through fear or financial incentives, are complicit in enabling them.