Counter Punch - September 15, 2017
35 Years after the Sabra-Shatila Massacre where’s “The Resistance”?
By Franklin Lamb
This week commemorates the 35th anniversary of the Wednesday, Sept. 15 to Saturday, Sept. 18, Sabra-Shatila Massacre in the Fakhani neighborhood of Beirut. For many of the families and loved ones of the victims, as is certainly the case with this observer, it seems as though the Sabra-Shatila Massacre was committed at most four or five years ago. So vivid still in our memories are the horror images of that orgy of slaughter.
A massive crime against humanity which has yet to be adjudicated. Due to poisonous destructive sectarian political pressures, not only unique to Lebanon which has 18 competing sects with ever shifting alliances, there has never been any investigation by Lebanon’s government of the militiamen who actually conducted the slaughter. Subsequentlyi the Lebanese killers have thus been granted amnesty. A February 1983 Israeli Commission of Inquiry white-washed Israel’s facilitation of the crime with very limited and weak ‘findings of limited indirect responsiblity’.
As no Palestinian or person of goodwill who has learned about the Massacre will ever likely forget, shortly after dusk on the night of Sept. 15, 1982, the Israeli military, which had occupied much of Lebanon the preceding June, allowed drug and hate fueled right-wing Lebanese militia and others to enter Beirut’s Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and the adjacent neighborhoods of Sabra and Bir Hasan.
One dear friend, who was like a sister to the late American Journalist Janet Lee Stevens who wrote some of the most incisive reports documenting the Massacre, visited with me at the Shatila Palestinian Camp Youth Center (CYC) a few months ago. By the grace of God the lady escaped death by playing dead as two members of Elie Hobeika’s “Christian” militia kicked her body and poked her chest with a rifle muzzle but did not fire, apparently thinking she was already dead. She told me that she can still sometimes smell the stench of the blackened rotting bodies in the alleyways of Shatila camp from those hot September days in 1982. And that until today she sometimes has nightmares about the Israeli 81-milimeter flares that lite up the night sky as bright as a sports stadium during a night football game to aid the butchers conduct their carnage.
Who were the killers?
The militiamen came from both south Lebanon – the area of Major Haddad’s stronghold – and the Christian militia areas of East Beirut. According to residents of Shuweifat, a largely Druze area located just south of Beirut airport, there was a steady stream of trucks and armored vehicles carrying militiamen to the airport parking area during the afternoon of 9/16/1982.
Interviews conducted by Janet Stevens and other journalists with Lebanese soldiers who were on duty in the traffic circle adjacent to the Kuwaiti Embassy above Shatila camp unanimously confirmed reports that they saw Haddad militiamen dressed in uniforms that stood out from those of the Phalangist militiamen. They also said the Haddad men were noticeable because they lacked the Phalangist insignia on their uniforms reading ‘‘Lebanese Forces” and spoke with south Lebanon accents. Scores of survivors of the Massacre confirmed that many of the militiamen spoke with southern Lebanese accents and referred to one another by names as Ali, Hussein, Hassan and Abbas. All being Shiite Muslim names. Roughly half of Major Haddad’s 6,000-member militia members were Shiites from South Lebanon and more than a few had grievances with the PLO from the days when it occupied South Lebanon and Israeli artillery fire rained on homes and villages. When Israel invaded Lebanon on June 5, 1982 many Shia Muslim residents showered the Zionist forces with rice and flowers urging them to crush the PLO. Today it’s Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims who may well offer rice and flowers when the oft-predicted war ignites, urging the Israeli forces to destroy Hezbollah.
On Sunday September 18, 1982, Janet Stevens and other reporters found scattered on the ground in the south area of Shatila camp boxes that had contained M-16 bullets and hundreds of shell casings. The boxes were printed in Hebrew. Elsewhere there were wrappings from Israeli chocolate wafers on the ground, as well as remnants of United States Army C-rations which the US military had supplied to the Israelis. All findings being evidence that at least some of the militia were supplied with weapons and food by the Israeli military.
As no Palestinian or person of goodwill who has learned about the Massacre can ever forget, shortly after dusk on the night of Sept. 15, 1982, the Israeli military, which had occupied much of Lebanon the preceding June, allowed drug and hate fueled right-wing Lebanese militia and others to enter Beirut’s Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and the adjacent neighborhoods including Sabra, Fakhani and Bir Hasan.
For the next nearly 72 hours, the Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces-Phalange Party’s militia and its Saad Haddad allies among others, raped, killed and dismembered as many as 3000-3500 civilians. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.
Thirty-five years later, the massacre has not dimmed for the families of the victims or supporters of Palestine and those seeking justice. It is painfully remembered as a notorious chapter in modern Middle Eastern history for which accountability has to date failed.
When the United States government first learned about the massacre, which was hours after it began, the Reagan Administration contemplated exerting diplomatic pressure on Israel that could have quickly ended the atrocities. But it decided not to do so even amid reports that militiamen were continuing their slaughter of Palestinian families in and near Shatila camp. The White House had only weeks earlier signed an agreement that it would use all means to protect civilians in Palestinian camps as a condition precedent of the August, 1982 voluntary evacuation of 11,000 PLO fighters.`
Researcher Seth Anziska reported a few years ago on some recently declassified documents from the Israel State Archives that chronicle the conversations between American and Israeli officials before and during the massacre. The verbatim transcripts reveal that the Israelis misled American diplomats about events in Beirut and bullied them into accepting the spurious claim that 2000 to 3000 “terrorists” were in Shatila.
Much as we see with claims today in Syria, Sharon’s “terrorists” were, in fact, more than 90% innocent civilians.
“The main order of the day is to keep the peace,” Israeli Prime Minister Begin told the American envoy to the Middle East, Morris Draper, on Sept. 15. “Otherwise, there could be pogroms.”
Two days later Mr. Draper and the American ambassador, Samuel W. Lewis, held a meeting with Israeli officials. Contrary to Begins earlier assurances, Defense Minister Sharon insisted that the occupation of West Beirut was also completely justified because he had information that they were yet another “2,000 to 3,000 terrorists who remained in West Beirut.”
A verbatim transcript of the Sept. 17 meeting reveals that the Americans appeared intimidated by Mr. Sharon’s false insistence that “terrorists” needed “mopping up.” It also makes plain how Israel’s refusal to relinquish areas under its control to the Lebanese army as well as its delays in coordinating with the Lebanese government which the Americans wanted to step in, prolonged the slaughter. Secretary of State George P. Shultz later admitted that “we are partially responsible” because “we took the Israelis and the Lebanese at their word.”
Thirty-five years later, for the victims’ families of the 1982 Massacre, including 29 Shia, this tragedy is magnified by their impression that the Hezbollah-led “Resistance” has been averting its eyes for more than three decades from their oft-repeated support for the Palestinian cause. And by the “Resistance” failure today, for solely political reasons to give desperately needed aid to slow the deterioration of Lebanon’s Palestinian camps.
One urgent question still being put by survivors of the massacre and supporters of Palestine to the Hezbollah led “Resistance” is whether at long last it will put its oft-touted “Moral and Religious Duty” to support the Palestinians goal of Full Return to Palestine” above Lebanon’s intensifying Shia-Sunni sectarian politics. If so, Lebanon’s Palestinians will finally be granted the elementary civil rights which will expedite their return to Palestine, help grow Lebanon’s economy, and give some much needed credence to shop-worn “Resistance” speeches.
Palestinians from Syrian camps also victims of Lebanon’s Satilla Massacre
Palestinian refugees from Syria, including the approximately 40,000 who fled to Lebanon from that country’s nearly seven-year civil war, also share the continuing trauma of the 1982 Massacre at Shatila. One reason is because many Palestinians living in Syria’s ten camps lost relatives who were in the Shatila and the adjacent Sabra neighborhood on those fateful days of September 16-18 1982. The Palestinians in both countries are also closely connected by family, with many having been neighbors from among the 531 Palestinian villages Zionist forces ethnically cleansed during the three year Nakba (1948).
Historically, since the 1970’s when the PLO held broad powers in Lebanon, Syria based Palestinians refugees passed relatively easily across their border crossings for visitations. The largely unimpeded Syria-Lebanon border passages continued as Syria occupied Lebanon essentially unimpeded with as many as 40,000 troops from the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war in June of 1976 until UN Security Council Resolution 1551 was enacted in September of 2004. Just five months later the February 14, 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others affected this arrangement as it ignited the so-called “Cedar Revolution” and forced Syria’s occupation forces and many of its intelligence operatives back into their own country. Syria retaliated by tightening border crossings.
Today, Palestinian refugees in Syria who back in 2011 represented approximately 3 % of Syria’s population continue fleeing their war-torn host country and are one of the refugee groups most urgently seeking to find new homes in Europe. Palestinians are proportionally the most over-represented minority of all those escaping the carnage across Syria. UNRWA estimates that as of this month more than 20% of Syria’s pre-war estimated 450,000 Palestinians have fled the country. Some estimates suggest that as many as 100,000 have taken the death boats to Europe with hundreds dying en route. The Syrian war has also driven all but approximately 7000 Palestinians out of the Yarmouk neighborhood south of central Damascus. Yarmouk was Syria’s largest ‘camp’ with a pre-war population of nearly 150,000. The fact that they, among others, are risking their lives on various dangerous sea and land routes towards Europe reflects a realization among many Palestinians that, 95% being non-Shia, there is no future for them in a “Resistance” Iranian-Shia dominated Middle East.
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
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