Remembering the Sabra-Shatila massacre.

“Sabra and Shatila Massacre” (1982-83), by pioneering Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi

Over three bloody days from September 16 through  to 18, 1982, up to 3,500 Palestinian defenceless refugees in Shatila camp and Sabra neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon were slaughtered at the hands of Phalangist militiamen, encircled, trained and supported by Israeli occupation forces who had besieged West Beirut for 88 days before launching a full-scale occupation-day period, members of the Lebanese Christian militias, with the support of Israeli troops, killed mostly women, children and the elderly living in the camp complex. Exactly how many were actually killed  remains unknown as the real number is hard to determine because bodies were buried quickly in mass graves or never found and many men were marched out of the camp and “disappeared.” Israel actually supplied the bulldozers to bury the dead and later  tanks entered the camps and ran over the whole area, destroying houses and clearing any signs of crime.
Shortly before the massacres, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was evacuated from Lebanon as a result of an agreement reached after the Israeli invasion of the country. That meant the residents of Sabra and Shatila no longer had protection, despite promises made to them by Philip Habib, an envoy for then US President Ronald Reagan, that their security would be guaranteed.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Germavel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party. It was wrongly assumed that Palestinians militants had carried out the assassination. The incident would cause outrage and condemnation across the world.Sadly the Sabra and Shatila crimes were not the first crimes against the Palestinian people and would not be the last.
Over three decades later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as one of the most notorious chapters in modern Middle Eastern history. Today, not a single person (Israeli or Lebanese) has been charged with  involvement in the crime. The amnesty law that came into affect after Lebanon’s Civil Wars ended in 1991 let many of those involved in the massacre off the hook, including those who now form one of Lebanon’s ruling political parties, the Kata’eb. The forces who led the massacre were under the direct leadership of Elie Hobeika, intelligence chief of the Lebanese Forces. .

The Kahan Commission, later set up in 1983 in response to widespread international pressure, concluded that that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent the massacre Ariel Sharon, bore personally responsible, among others, for the massacre. Elie Hobeika later became a long-serving Member of the Lebanese Parliament as well as serving in many minsterial roles. Despite the findings of the Kahan Commission, Ariel Sharon held many influential ministerial roles in the Israeli government, serving in fact as Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006. Thus were the engineers of one of the bloodiest and most appalling massacres in contemporary history rewarded.
It is quite simply one of the greatest human tragedies that we should never simply forget.

Israel continues to abuse Palestinian rights without consequence. Settler attacks on Palestinian property, lands, and persons have terrorised thousands and killed almost entire families.Palestinian complaints filed against settlers go unindicted by Israel. In fact, the Israeli military serves the settlers by allowing the attackers to simply walk away". When they do take action, Israeli soldiers are more likely to support the settlers, often allowing them to continue attacking Palestinians rather than shielding innocent civilians.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel continues and the Israeli military itself continues to commit war crimes with impunity, as evidenced by Israel's repeated attacks on the tiny besieged Gaza Strip over the past decade, which have killed thousands of innocent Palestinians with disproportionate and indiscriminate force. Today there are more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, most barred from owning property and earing decent wages. They make up part of the nearly 5 million Palestinians refugees living in the West Bank, Gaza and throughout the Middle East, descendants of the 750,000 displaced after the establishment of the Israeli State.
Israel's years of dispossession and half-century of military rule still ongoing and is supported by unconditional American military aid and diplomatic backing. International bodies like the UN Security Council have repeatedly made note of Israel's human rights violations. Injustices continue to this day  through land confiscations, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, collective displacement, racist discrimination, assassination and killing.
The conscience of the world was terribly wounded on this  day and we cannot, should not and will not ever forget or forgive.With sorrow and with struggle, we  must remember Sabra and Shatila and pledge to continue to work for justice.The international community is obliged to remedy its moral responsibility to the victims of the  massacre by working to end Israel's occupation and other abuses of Palestinian rights.For the Palestinians, the tragedy of Sabra and Shatila remains a powerful reminder  of their endless cycle of displacement.
I conclude this post with the following powerful, moving poem from the pen of the late great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/mahmoud-darwish-poet-of-resistance.html


Sabra and Shatila  by Mahmoud Darwish

Sabra — a sleeping girl
The men left
War slept for two short nights,
Beirut obeyed and became the capital…
A long night
Observing the dreams in Sabra,
Sabra is sleeping.
Sabra — the remains of a dead body
She bid farewell to her horsemen and time
And surrendered to sleep out of tiredness.. and the Arabs who threw her behind them.
Sabra — and what the soldiers Departing from Galilee forgot
She doesn’t buy and sell anything but her silence
To buy flowers to put on her braided hair.
Sabra — sings her lost half, between the sea and the last war:
Why do you go?
And leave your wives in the middle of a hard night?
Why do you go?
And hang your night
Over the camp and the national anthem?
Sabra — covering her naked breasts with a farewell song
Counts her palms and gets it wrong
While she can’t find the arm:
How many times will you travel?
And for how long?
And for what dream?
If you return one day
for which exile shall you return,
which exile brought you back?
Sabra — tearing open her chest:
How many times
does the flower bloom?
How many times
will the revolution travel?
Sabra — afraid of the night. Puts it on her knees
covers it with her eyes’ mascara. Cries to distract it:
They left without saying
anything about their return
Withered and tended
from the rose’s flame!
Returned without returning
to the beginning of their journey
Age is like children
running away from a kiss.
No, I do not have an exile
To say: I have a home
God, oh time ..!
Sabra — sleeps. And the fascist’s knife wakes up
Sabra calls who she calls
All of this night is for me, and night is salt
the fascist cuts her breasts — the night reduced — 
he then dances around his knife and licks it. Singing an ode to a victory of the cedars,
And erases
Quietly .. Her flesh from her bones
and spreads her organs over the table
and the fascist continues dancing and laughs for the tilted eyes
and goes crazy for joy, Sabra is no longer a body:
He rides her as his instincts suggest, and his will manifests.
And steals a ring from her flesh and blood and goes back to his mirror
And be — Sea
And be — Land
And be — Clouds
And be — Blood
And be — Night
And be — Killing
And be — Saturday
and she be — Sabra.
Sabra — the intersection of two streets on a body
Sabra, the descent of a Spirit down a Stone
And Sabra — is no one
Sabra — is the identity of our time, forever.

(translation by Saad El Kurdi)

Here is a link to a post from a few years ago:
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/remembering-sabra-and-shatila-massacre.html