Sabra and Chatila

Lt. General Ariel Sharon in 1953

Let us not forget the horrors of the Sabra and Chatila slaughter of 3,500 innocents by Israel and its Lebanese proxies, the Phalangists, 30 years ago today. The IDF which invaded Lebanon was under the control of Arik Sharon, a Jewish terrorist with some form who had led the Qibya massacre of innocents in Jordan in 1953 and who lied to his Prime Minister and Parliament about the Lebanon invasion.

Villagers return to Qibya in 1953.
The act was condemned by the U.S. State Department,
the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide. The State Department described the raid as "shocking", and used the occasion to
confirm publicly that economic aid to Israel had been suspended previously,
for other non-compliance regarding the 1949 Armistice Agreements.

The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy.  It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen.  But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Let us not forget the detail of what happened from the accounts of the Red Cross, the United Nations and the brave journalists including Robert Fisk who witnessed the aftermath of the racist slaughter by the Israeli equipped and trained Phalangist militia for which the Israeli Army (IDF) had sealed off the camps preventing people leaving and fired flares at night to illuminate them to facilitate the slaughter.

• People Tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the power  shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their hearts gave out – the  electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs.
• People with gouged out eye sockets.  Faces unrecognisable with the gaping  holes that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully  ended.
• Women raped.  Not once – but two, three, four times – horribly violated,  their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the cover of clothing to  preserve their dignity at the moment of death.
• Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from their tiny torsos,  so hard to know to whom they belonged – just mounds of bloodied limbs  amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.
• Families executed.  Blood, blood and more blood sprayed on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.

What happened must be set against the background of a Lebanon that had been invaded by the Israeli army only months earlier, supposedly in ‘retaliation’ for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London on 4 June 1982.  Israel attributed the attempt to Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) then resident in Beirut. In reality, it was a rival militant group headed by Abu Nidal.   Israel wanted to oust the PLO from Lebanon altogether and on 6 June 1982, Israel began its devastating assault on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population in the southern part of Lebanon.  Lebanese government casualty figures numbered the dead at around 19,000 with some 30,000 wounded, but these numbers are hardly accurate because of the mass graves and other bodies lost in the rubble.

No doubt right wing Republicans in the United States learnt the lesson of invading a foreign country on a totally false pretext and telling the “Big Lie” over and over again through a compliant media – witness the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2001 on the totally false pretext that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11. Iraq of course had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 which was carried out by mainly Saudi terrorists financed by a Saudi Billionaire who had been a CIA “asset” – Osama Bin Laden.

By 1 September 1982, a cease-fire had been mediated by United States envoy Philip Habib, and Arafat and his men surrendered their weapons and were evacuated from Beirut with guarantees by the United States that the civilians left behind in the camps would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force.  That guarantee was not kept and the vacuum then created, paved the way for the atrocities that followed.

As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some “2,000 terrorists” he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila.  

Beirut being bombed by Israel in 1982

After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September leaving the “mopping-up” of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia, known as the Phalangists.  The next day, the Phalangists – armed and trained by the Israeli army – entered the camps and proceeded to massacre the unarmed civilians while Israel’s General Yaron and his men watched the entire operations.  More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.

Brigadier-General Amos Yaron, the divisional commander whose troops sealed the camps to prevent victims from escaping and helped direct the operation along with Sharon and Eitan was found to have “committed a breach of duty”. He was immediately promoted Major-General and made head of Manpower in the army, served as Director-General of the Israeli Defense Ministry and Military Attaches at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He is currently working for various Israeli lobby groups as a scholar in ‘think thanks’ and no doubt setting the United States agenda in the Middle East.

Israel’s own limited Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not find any Israeli directly responsible, but it did find that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for “not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre” before sending the Phalangists into the camps. Sharon resigned as Minister of Defense but retained his Cabinet position in Begin’s Government and over the next 16 years held four more ministerial posts, including that of Foreign Minister, before becoming Prime Minister in February, 2001. Following the Jenin rampage US President Bush anointed him “a man of peace.”

Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel escalated the racist brutality between Israel and the Palestinians. This determined attempt to destroy Palestinian Identity and Culture has continued unabated to the present day supported by American weapons and connivance, over $1.8 Bn. a year in US military support for Israel and the Israeli lobby hijacking the US political agenda to blackmail US Presidents and legislators into blind support for the racist and aggressive policies of Israel, a Middle East rogue state which has attacked each and every one of its neighbours, flouts International Law and has introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

Robert Fisk

Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said:

“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning?  Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Chatila.”

Thirty years later it is no different.