Details on Palestine

The Sabra-Shatila Massacre - A Brief Overview

by Stanley Heller

Mid-September is the anniversary of a horrific massacre. In 1982 many hundreds of Palestinian civilians were slaughtered in Beirut Lebanon in two refugee camps during Israel invasion of that year. Even today there's no agreement on many of the basic facts.

Wikipedia says that claims about the number killed range between "780 and 3,500". It's not even clear how long it lasted. In the camps themselves the killing went from September 16-18, but many hundreds were taken out of the camp and disappeared.

In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and surrounded Beirut. It's goal was to drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon, to force out Syrian troops out and to put a Phalange leader as head of Lebanon. The Phalange was a political party/militia formed in the '30's by Pierre Gemayel after he participated in the Olympics in Germany in 1936. He was impressed by the Nazis.

By midsummer Israeli troops had occupied a large part of Lebanon and had surrounded Beirut. Phalange leader Bashir Gemayel was indeed elected Lebanese President in 1982 under their watchful eyes. In August there was a ceasefire. Ronald Regan's diplomat Philip Habib then made a bargain with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. Supposedly to prevent further destruction of Lebanon armed Palestinians would leave Beirut and the United States would guarantee the safety of the Palestinian civilians. 9,000 fighters left Beirut. However the international forces that were supposed to protect Palestinians left Beirut on September 11.

Four days later Bashir Gemayel and 25 others were killed in a huge bomb blast. Then Israel's defense minister Ariel Sharon made up the absurd tale that 2,000 heavily armed fighters were still in the Palestinians camps. He arranged for the Phalange militia to enter to look for the supposed fighters. Evidently South Lebanon army forces, a puppet army directly controlled by Israel, were sent in also. The results were hideous. Few of the victims were shot. They were mostly killed by knives in all the ways madmen and sadists have done throughout the ages. Over 900 of the murdered have been identified by name. The war correspondent Robert Fisk of the UK, who was one of the first to enter the camps after the massacre, estimates 1,700 were killed. He also says that he saw hundreds of men in basement rooms being interrogated by Israelis who later were "the 1,100 who were disappeared" These men were "taken away, handed back to the Phalange and murdered."

The United Nations Security Council condemned the massacre. The U.N. General Assembly declared it an "act of genocide" (section D2).

The Begin/Sharon Israeli government in 1982 denied all responsibility saying they had no idea a massacre would occur.

After a huge rally of angry Israelis their government set up a commission to study what went on. The commission estimated 700 Palestinian and Lebanese had been killed, but decided no Israeli bore any criminal responsibility.

No Israeli spent a day in jail for any of the murders. Ariel Sharon lost his position as head of the Defense Ministry, but years later he became Prime Minister of Israel. The Israeli government didn't ask the Lebanese government to investigate or arrest any of the killers.

The man who directed Phalange militia attack on the camps was Elie Hobeika. In 2001 he agreed to testify to a Belgian court that was investigating the criminal responsibility of Ariel Sharon for the massacre. On January 24, 2002 Hobeika and three other people were killed by a car bomb explosion near Beirut.

Moral Principles from A Guerrilla Fighter

To all leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerrilla organizations; to all soldiers of Palestinian militant groups:

My name is Marek Edelman. I am a former Deputy Commander of the Jewish Military Organization in Poland and one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the memorable year of 1943 we fought for the survival of the Jewish community in Warsaw. We fought for mere life, not for territory, nor for a national identity. We fought with hopeless determination, but our weapons were never directed against the defenceless civilian population, we never killed women and children. In the world devoid of principles and values, despite a constant danger of death, we did remain faithful to these values and moral principles.

We were isolated in our fight, and yet the powerful opposing army was not able to destroy these barely armed boys and girls. Our fight in Warsaw lasted several weeks, and later we fought in the partisan groups and in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Yet nowhere in the world can urban guerrilla force bring a conclusive victory, but it cannot be defeated by well-armed armies either. And this war will not bring any resolution. Blood will be spilled in vain and lives will be lost on both sides.

We were never careless with life. We never sent our soldiers to certain death. Life is one for eternity. Nobody has the right to mindlessly take it away. It is high time for everybody to understand that.

Just look around you. Look at Ireland. After 50 years of bloody war, peace has arrived. The former deadly enemies sat down at a common table. Look at Poland, at Walesa and Kuron. Without a single shot being fired the criminal communist system was defeated. Both you and the State of Israel have to radically change your attitude. You have to want peace in order to save the lives of hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, and to create a better future for your loved ones, for your children. I know from my own experience that the current unfolding of events depends on you, the Military Leaders. The influence of political and civilian actors is much smaller. Some of you studied at the university in my city, some of you know me. You are wise and intelligent enough to understand that without peace there is no future for Palestine, and that peace can be attained only at the cost of both sides agreeing to some concessions.

I also ask President Bill Clinton, Minister Bernard Kouchner and MP Daniel Cohn-Bendit to endorse my appeal. I want to remind you our joint position on the Yugoslavia war. Maybe this war, in which there will be no winners, can also be stopped and replaced by negotiations leading to peace. Maybe the best mediator would not be a politician but a person of a high moral authority, who values each man’s life in dignity and peace higher than political goals.

Marek Edelman, August 2002

In Search of a Just Solution

By Michael A. Jefferson

In 1977 the TV miniseries Roots made its debut. It was based on Alex Haley's novel of the same name. It tells the story of an African American family beginning with the birth of Kunta Kinte (played by Levar Burton) in The Gambia, West Africa. At fifteen years of age he and several peers undergo a tribal rite of passage. Shortly thereafter he is captured by slave catchers. He's taken aboard a slave ship and after a hellish three-month journey at sea, lands in Annapolis, Maryland. He is then sold to a plantation owner from Virginia.

Roots provides a powerful and gripping account of the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery in general. For me it served as a brutal introduction to man's inhumanity to his fellow human being. I was thirteen years old.

The following year another miniseries aired. The Holocaust tells the story of the trials and tribulations of a fictional Jewish family who are forced to navigate life under the unmitigated barbarism of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich. It was the first time I heard the names - Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, Theresienstadt and Babi Yar. These names would come to embody the very essence of evil.

The two miniseries shattered my innocence. I breached the rye and stumbled over the cliff. In the ensuing years I succumbed to an insatiable appetite for political history. My academic quests led to further discoveries of human savagery. Four instantly come to mind. The Native American genocide. Read David Stannard’s American Holocaust; the Herero and Nama genocide waged by the German Empire from 1904-1908 in South West Africa (now Namibia); the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during World War I; and the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Read Michael Vickery’s Cambodia 1975-1982. Bosnia and Rwanda would later earn their way on the nefarious list of genocidal states in the 1990s.

I further read with great interest the role of the United States government, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in toppling democratically elected leaders around the world. Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran (1953); Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (1961); Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic (1963); and Salvador Allende in Chile (1973) to name just a few. Read Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow.

These elected leaders were supplanted by brutal dictators. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the Shah) in Iran. Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Read The Murder of Chileby Samuel Chavkin. There were other butchers and monsters supported by Uncle Sam. Including but not limited to: Anastacio Somoza in Nicaragua. Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay. Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Suharto in Indonesia. Read the Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

In 1984 as a college campus leader I, like so many of my contemporaries, became immersed in the anti-apartheid struggle raging across the U.S. and throughout the world. It is instructive to note, the U.S. government was a strong supporter of the white, racist government of South Africa. In fact, in 1988 the African National Congress (ANC) and its imprisoned future leader – Nelson Mandela were placed on the U.S. government's terrorist watch list. His name remained on the list until 2008 – fourteen years after he became the country's first Black president. He was ninety years old. It should be noted, Mandela, the former “terrorist” was a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause. In discussing terrorism, Noam Chomsky, the well-known Jewish-American dissident, once wrote – “it’s a great error to describe terrorism as the weapon of the weak. It’s a weapon of the strong, and always has been.”

Through my involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle I became very much aware of the horrific plight of the Palestinian people. I read the brilliant work of the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. Chomsky also became a favorite commentator of mine on the subject. And later the Israeli historian, IIan Pappe’, who wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The book discusses events surrounding the 1948 Palestinian “exodus” known as the Nakba – (meaning "catastrophe" in Arabic), in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly and in many cases violently removed from their lands and homes. They were later barred by Israeli law from ever returning.

Learning about the Nakba left an enduring impact. I remain haunted by the massacre which unfolded at Deir Yassin and hundreds of other Palestinian villages. There presently exists a law in Israel that penalizes those institutions and groups that commemorate this significant event in Palestinian history. It is known as the Nakba Law. Authors Pappe and Chomsky later teamed up to write Gaza in Crisisand On Palestine. Thomas Suarez’s book Palestine Hijacked is truly worth reading as well.

Over the last seventy plus years of the Israeli occupation the fate of the Palestinian people has primarily been determined by the Western democracies or more aptly stated the failure of the United States and its European allies to advance a just solution to the brutal and unjust Israeli occupation. The U.S. support for Israel in particular, has often been criticized as one-sided and racist in the main. A charge, which for all practical purposes cannot be refuted.

Not unlike its support for the former apartheid government of South Africa, the veto power wielded by the U.S. in the United Nations has helped shield Israel from international condemnation. This is the challenge faced by opponents of the Israeli occupation. The legitimacy and support (i.e. financial and otherwise) provided by the U.S. for Israeli policies (i.e. settlement expansion, human rights violations, and acts of aggression) continues to embolden the apartheid regime. As long as the State of Israel enjoys this legitimacy the pathway to a just and viable solution will remain elusive.

Another challenge for supporters of the Palestinian cause is the constant diet of misinformation disseminated by the mainstream press regarding the brutal occupation. Many observers find the coverage wholly biased in favor of Israel. This writer agrees. Rarely is Israel held to account for basic violations of human rights. The demolition of homes, desecration of holy sites, unjust imprisonment of thousands without charge, wanton acts of violence committed by members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Jewish settlers, against a defenseless population, are usually downplayed, normalized or dismissed as justifiable by the mainstream press.

Critics of Israel's policies have also been unfairly labeled anti-Semitic. This tactic has long been used to chill speech in the hope of silencing such critics. Unfortunately, in many instances, the ploy remains effective. However, there is growing pushback against this disparaging type of marking. It must continue. The display of naked violence against Palestinians viewed by millions on social media will undoubtedly help to undermine efforts to muzzle Israel's critics.

Israel's most formidable ally in the U.S. is without question its powerful lobby. Read The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The Israel lobby led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has enormous influence in both houses of Congress as well as the White House. The fact that Israel receives billions of dollars in foreign military aid (and billions more in loan guarantees) with very little strings attached, can be directly attributed to the power of this lobby. The lobby's Achilles heel is an informed American public willing to make demands of its political representatives that can drastically alter American policy in the Middle East.

If Israel is to become a just society the U.S. can no longer turn a blind eye or deaf ear to the draconian policies, acts of aggression and unjust laws used to subjugate the Palestinian people. For their part, supporters of Israel should be reminded of the heroic armed struggle waged by a group of Jewish men and women eighty years ago, during World War II.

After the defeat of Poland in the fall of 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews, primarily from Poland were stripped of their rights, possessions and forcibly evicted from their homes by their Nazi occupiers. They were corralled and “resettled” in a small section of Poland’s capital –in what became known as the "Warsaw Ghetto." The area was sealed off by a ten-foot-high wall with barbed wire at the top. It was in effect an open-air prison.

In late 1942 and early 1943 as the ghetto was being emptied of its occupants, an organized effort was made to smuggle arms into the ghetto. On April 19, 1943 hundreds of ghetto residents participated in an armed insurrection to halt the transport of Jews from the ghetto to various concentration camps, primarily Treblinka, where certain death awaited them. Thousands died in the uprising, which lasted several weeks. In the end the Germans razed the ghetto.

Astonishingly, the Nazi occupiers characterized these brave and desperate souls as “terrorists.” At the conclusion of the war the true terrorists were exposed and arrested. The Nuremberg trials settled the matter once and for all.

The chief counsel for the prosecution at the trials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson provided this ominous warning: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. And we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

We are all on notice. Never forget!

The Sabra-Shatila Massacre 1982

The Sabra-Shatila Massacre - A Brief Overview

Moral Principles from A Guerrilla Fighter

In Search of a Just Solution