Right now, some mercy for the Palestinians in Gaza is desperately needed before it is too late.

Shakespeare saw mercy as “an attribute to God himself” and above “the force of temporal power”[1], but it seems that for all the Christian rhetoric today, and particularly amongst our Western leaders, mercy towards other human beings has been well and truly forgotten. Perhaps the Palestinians do not qualify — most are Muslim and the rest who are Christian, are still Arabs. To some, that means they are not like us because we have been told as much. An Israeli prime minister referred to them as “beasts walking on two legs”, [2] and although the context has been disputed, the analogy with animals has been used often enough to give credence to the Zionist mindset. It is no wonder there are those who think that is good enough reason to herd them behind concrete walls, check and search them whenever they want to move about inside their prison, and drop bombs on them when they get out of line. Yet still not satisfied with these measures, Israel has resorted now to starving them.

On 19 September 2007, the Israeli government designated Gaza “a hostile entity” [3] and decided to impose “additional sanctions” which will reduce even more drastically the basic necessities of living for the entire population. This unrelenting aggression against every man, woman and child for having elected a government that Israel and the US do not want, is known as collective punishment and is prohibited by international law. But, rather than castigate Israel, the international community, as is its wont, may well decide to sever all ties with Gaza in case it is seen to be aiding this “hostile entity”. If this happens, the Palestinians will find themselves totally isolated and at Israel’s mercy and whim.

Gaza’s population has already been severely punished since Israel completely cut it off from the outside world and forced it into extreme poverty, making it humiliatingly dependent on international aid. Almost no one and nothing is allowed to enter or leave this godforsaken hellhole without approval from Israel. Further restrictions would be unsustainable. Without the basic necessities like electricity, fuel, water, food and medicines, the lives of ordinary people would be held to ransom. It does not take much imagination to know what happens to a population when there is no clean drinking water, inadequate sewage and waste disposal and no refrigeration for food and medicines.

Do we really want to see 1.5 million people scrabbling for food in the garbage dumps, people withering away as diseases begin to spread into an epidemic and the descent into chaos as absolute desperation forces the people to grab at anything for survival? Just in case anyone thinks that this is an exaggeration, the beginnings of that scenario are already in play. Israel is setting up a demonic experiment in human behaviour reduced to the extremes of existence. By demonising the Palestinians over the years and rendering them unfit for human compassion, these now “sub-human” people are to be kept in Dov Weisglass’ formaldehyde with the peace process. [4] Give it any name you want, this is genocide.

The situation in Gaza is so dire now that mercy is just about all they can hope for if they want to survive. Neither justice nor peace have been offered in any measure nor are likely to be if Israel has its way. The Palestinians know only too well the futility of the peace processes and the barriers to justice. The powers that be have already thrown their weight
behind Israel enough times for the Palestinians to be sure that their next generation will be suffering even worse humiliations than they have experienced themselves. But for many, the choice of being killed or living as slaves is not a choice at all. No wonder some of them are fighting back, even if their crude attempts at resistance are met with formidable and unmatchable retaliation. Only last November, the Israeli military attacked Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip with a vengeance that left 82 Palestinian civilians dead and 260 injured. [5] This was the culmination of five months of killing by Israeli soldiers which saw the number of dead soar to 382 Palestinians with 1,229 injured. In the same period, Palestinian rocket fire had killed one Israeli and injured 26 others. [6]

It is impossible to make sense of this brutality unless we understand that Israel, since its creation, has been willing the Palestinians to vanish — not only those living in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and even inside Israel itself; that what is happening in Gaza is just part of the long and unforgiving litany of crimes that is still continuing.

Over sixty years, Israel has razed Palestinian homes and villages; destroyed their historical records of existence; denied their culture and identity and even promoted elements of it as their own; terrorised the Palestinians into leaving through campaigns of massacres and military brutality; divided families and communities with a prison wall and razor wire; prevented family unification; bulldozed their cultivated lands which provided the farmers with sustainable living for centuries; obstructed education to a people long known for their academic achievements; intensified the closure on their society despite agreeing to ease the restrictions; taken their water leaving the Palestinians no choice but to buy it back at exorbitant prices; ruined their economy; demolished thousands of their homes; transferred thousands of others by force; refused them building permits while they allow Jewish citizens and settlers to build; created some 2000 occupier laws and regulations to prevent their natural growth even as they encourage the development of illegal Jewish settlements deep inside the occupied Palestinian territories; herded them into Bantustans while Israel maintains absolute control of all their movements; withheld their taxes so their civil servants could not be paid; put pressure on Western governments to impose sanctions; allowed US armaments in to stoke a civil war between the Palestinians; isolated Gaza from the West Bank and ostracised its leadership; and now, in a particularly venomous act is reducing Gaza to absolute penury while offering the interim Palestinian leadership in the West Bank “legitimacy” and another round of peace talks. And in the neighbouring Arab countries, some 6 million Palestinians are refused their right to return home – a situation going back to 1948 when Israel’s first prime minister Ben Gurion set up a “Transfer Committee” which prohibited the return of the then 750,000 refugees who had fled Israel’s campaign of terror. [7]

On the long and painful road towards resolving the injustices that are mounting with each Israeli act of aggression, mercy is very much needed. If Israel is loathe to give it, we must demand it of our governments to pressure Israel into stopping this collective punishment. Otherwise, we will be complicit in acts of calculated misery and ultimately the death of a whole people. However, mercy must extend beyond agreeing to feed the Palestinians properly, letting them have their electricity back and promising not to deprive them of water. This mercy must free the Palestinians from Israel’s occupation and allow them the justice that has long been their due. And that, according to Dr Ghada Karmi, is the dilemma
that Israel has with Palestine. [8] It would mean the end of the grand Zionist plan to establish a Jewish-only state in a land belonging to another people and the beginning of an arduous journey towards reconciliation with the long-suffering victims of its colonial project. In the process, both peoples have yet to find out that mercy “blesseth him that gives and him that takes” [9]: without it, peace will remain as elusive as ever.

Footnotes

[1] William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 4 scene 1

[2] The Palestinians are “… beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts,” New Statesman, 25 June 1982.(Zionists claim that Begin was just talking about Palestinian terrorists.)

[3] www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2172691,00.html

[4] Dov Weisglass: “The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with the Palestinians.” Ha’aretz, Oct. 6, 2004.

[5] As of 15 November. UNRWA Gaza Field Office data.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Benny Morris, “Remarques sur l’historiographie sioniste de l’idée d’un transfert de populations en Palestine dans les années 1937-1944″, in “Les nouveaux enjeux de l’historiographie israélienne,” ed. Florence Heymann, Information paper, Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem, no. 12, December 1995. On the contradictions of Mapam’s position, see the first chapter of 1948 and After.

[8] Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s dilemma in Palestine, Pluto Press, London, 2007.

[9] William Shakespeare, ibid.

It happened 25 years ago, on 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. 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.

Sabra and Shatila — two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon — were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children — more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses — doctors, nurses, journalists — who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]

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.

There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.

Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2] The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women. [3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7] Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat — young boys all shot at point-blank range. [8]

And most numbing of all are the recollections of the survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad Srour, 35 said:

“I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling “Mama! Mama!” then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead.” [9]

The statistics of those killed vary, but even according to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11] Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what are clear crimes against humanity.

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 Shatila.” [12]

25 years later it is no different.

The Political Developments

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. [13]

By 1 September, 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 US 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 Shatila. 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 Sharon 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.

Inquiries, Charges and Off Scot-Free

Although Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not find any Israeli directly responsible, 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. It, therefore, lamely recommended that the Israeli prime minister consider removing him from office. [14] Sharon resigned but remained as Minister without portfolio and joined two parliamentary commissions on defence and Lebanese affairs. There is no doubt, as Chomsky points out “that the inquiry was not intended for people who have a prejudice in favour of truth and honesty”, but it certainly gained support for Israel in the US Congress and among the public. [15] It took an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous operation as a “criminal massacre” and declaring it an act of genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.

It was not until 2001 that a law suit was filed in Belgium by the survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims against Sharon alleging his personal responsibility. However, the court did not allow for “universal jurisdiction” – a principle which was intended to remove safe havens for war criminals and allow their prosecution across states. The case was won on appeal and the trial allowed to proceed, but without Sharon who by then was prime minister of Israel and had immunity. US interference led to the Belgian Parliament gutting the universal jurisdiction law and by the time the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague the following year, the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre could no longer be tried because its terms of reference did not allow it to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide pre-dating 1 July 2002. Neither Sharon nor those who carried out the massacres have ever been punished for their horrendous crimes.

The Bigger Picture

The length of time since these acts were carried out should be no impediment to exposing the truth. More than 60 years after the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe, the world still mourns and remembers and erects monuments and museums to that violent holocaust. How they are done, to whom they are done and to how many does not make the crimes any more or less heinous. They can never be justified even on the strength of one state’s rationale that another people ought to be punished, or worse still, are simply inferior or worthless beings. It should lead all of us to question on whose judgment are such decisions made and how can we possibly justify such crimes at all?

The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who
survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967 and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing is still going on today. Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded – a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.

This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, 25 years on.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Dr Ang Swee Chai, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Grafton Books, London, 1989.

[2] James MacManus, Guardian, 20 September 1982.

[3] Loren Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 September 1982.

[4] Elaine Carey, Daily Mail, 20 September 1982.

[5] Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, London: Oxford University Press, 1990.

[6] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[7] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[8] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[9] Lebanese Daily Star, 16 September 1998.

[10] Amnon Kapeliouk, “Sabra & Chatila – Inquiry into a Massacre”, November 1982.

[11] Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984.

[12] Robert Fisk, Fifteen Years After the Bloodbath, The World turns its Back, shaml.org, 1997.

[13] Noam Chomsky, The Fatal Triangle, South End Press, Cambridge MA, p.221.

[14] The Complete Kahan Commission Report, Princeton, Karz Cohl, 1983, p. 125 (Hereafter, the Kahan Commission Report).

[15] Chomsky, ibid. p.406.

[16] The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon, Sean MacBride, 1983 (referred to as the International Commission of Inquiry or MacBride report).

[17] United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 16 December 1982.

[18] MacBride report, ibid. p.179.

The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed on the ground for the Palestinians. Israel is rolling into the occupied Palestinian territories with its tanks and armoured vehicles and using its war planes to fire rockets on an already severely beleaguered people in Gaza. Only in this past week, there were at least twenty-nine such military incursions that ended up with four Palestinian resistance fighters being executed by Israeli soldiers while a fifth Palestinian ended up dying from tank shell wounds. Palestinian civilians always bear the brunt of such incursions and eleven people were seriously wounded including five children and an elderly woman. The daily arrest of civilians has been routine for decades, but certainly the seventy-two civilians arrested this week make a mockery of the 250 prisoners just released as Israel’s goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

These are specific attacks on people that will be recorded as statistics. However, we do not hear about the personal agony of families as they see their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters die. Neither do we hear about the suffering these families must endure if any of them survive crippled physically and emotionally for life. These human details disappear into the homogeneous whole of the conflict, with so far, no promise that tomorrow or next week, there will not be new victims. Such is the terror endured for forty years of Israel’s unrelenting occupation. And that is not counting the horrendous ethnic cleansing that Israel engaged in over a twenty-year period before that.

As for the recently promised easing of restrictions on movement in the West Bank, Palestinians have only seen more checkpoints erected with ever greater severity in who can go where and if they will be allowed to go at all. Similarly in Gaza, Israel refuses to lift the siege on this tiny strip of land with its burgeoning population and is refusing to allow European observers to open the Rafah International Crossing Point. This has left some 6,000 Palestinians stuck for weeks now on the Egyptian side of the border unable to return home. Already sixteen Palestinians have died when their health deteriorated fatally in the searing conditions. The commercial crossings are being opened only long enough to allow in the bare essential food aid that will just keep the Palestinians from starving to death.

Perhaps the most tendentious of Olmert’s promises is the “land for peace” deal with promises made and nothing delivered. Just more of the same. Sharon was a master at such dissembling tactics — going along with the Quartet’s Road Map for peace while he furiously and illegally engaged in new and expanding Jewish settlement building in the West Bank. The settlers he pulled out of Gaza in his much-lauded unilateral disengagement project are even now being re-settled illegally in the West Bank. Olmert’s own propensity for such deceit on the settlement project was exposed last month in a Jerusalem Post news report with a senior Israeli diplomat saying “We are being sent abroad, quite simply to lie” and Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer said that Olmert’s government “had built more settlements than any previous government.”

It is the ordinary people who are suffering every human rights violation imaginable at the hands of Israel’s army, the fanatical Jewish settlers and Israel’s policymakers and spin doctors who have never seen the Palestinians as human beings. None of the world media is reporting Israel’s crimes although it is absolutely clear that Israel has breached and continuous to breach international law. For the Palestinians living this cold and brutal reality, Israel’s true intentions are very apparent. But, if Olmert has indeed had a change of heart, then a bona fide way of showing that would be to immediately commit to a timeline and begin easing the restrictions on movement as he promised Abbas and to stop all settlement building and expansion as he falsely claims has been done. There is little cause for hope though if the last fourteen years of peace games are anything to go by. They have yielded absolutely nothing for the Palestinians except the loss of even more of their land to Israel and more bloodshed and destitution at the hands of Israel’s minions. With nothing being said about Israel’s violations in this last week of July by those talking peace, that is reason enough to
worry that the welfare of all Palestinians is not what is uppermost in the minds of those negotiating this peace.

The Bank’s report is timely and welcome, but curiously it does not mention the effects of the sanctions that the West and Israel imposed on the Palestinians at the beginning of last year. At the time, the World Bank had stated that the Palestinian economy would shrink by 27% in 2006; a one year contraction that compares to the Great Depression in the US.” In other words, the Palestinian economy was in danger of collapse even then and the warnings were not acted upon. Instead, the world cavalierly continued with its sanctions because it did not approve of the newly elected Hamas government — democratically elected in fair and transparent elections
overseen by former US president Jimmy Carter. Now, the World Bank is ratcheting up its dire warnings about the prohibitive restrictions that have decimated the Palestinian economy: as long as the political situation remains unresolved and the economy continues to depend on foreign assistance simply for survival, there is very little prospect of a sustainable economic
recovery. Certainly not the sort of sustained growth rates that can provide decent living standards for an expanding population. Any reversal of the situation, says the report, would have to entail dismantling Israel’s grid of physical and administrative barriers.

These catastrophic conditions have been apparent for years, which makes one wonder about the real intentions of the world’s leaders, especially since so much energy has been wasted trying to negotiate a two-state solution according to the long-irrelevant Road Map. Not only does the report point to the physical barriers of checkpoints, roadblocks, walls, gates and no-go zones, but it reveals Israel’s complex permit system which seriously affects the freedom of Palestinians to move anywhere. The permits and IDs are mind-boggling, not just because they are needed to move, but because they are necessary at all inside the West Bank which was designated as part of the future Palestinian state by the Oslo Accords in 1993. Israel, however, is undeterred and continues its settlement expansion and Judaisation of such entrapment. The fact that the number of obstacles has risen — 44% higher than at the signing of the Agreement on Movement and Access in November 2005, according to UN OCHA data on which the report relied only confirms Israel’s deliberate intent to paralyse the Palestinian economy, further disintegrate Palestinian society and render any viable Palestinian state forever impossible.

Israel’s myth-making about an inferior, uncivilised, violent people does not square with Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz’s description of the Palestinians and their economy when he was Chief Economist at the World Bank in 1997. He said then: “The Palestinian economy is blessed with excellent people. Its general development indicators — including life expectancy, literacy and child mortality rates — are among the best in the Middle East and North Africa region.” If one considers the unrelenting punishing controls being exerted on the Palestinians, it is a wonder that they have survived the attacks on their society and economy at all. However, their resourcefulness which has sustained them thus far, will be no use once Israel’s impenetrable maze of dead-ends is completed. If the world allows that to happen, the problems besetting the Palestinians will take on a much more frightening dimension. Israel has yet to provide an answer for what it plans to do with almost 3 million people in the West Bank deprived of their land, water, homes, and liberty. There are not too many solutions left.

The most tragic thing in all this is that so many Palestinian lives have been lost and wasted — and continue to be — in the living hell Israel has been allowed to construct while the world falls over itself to defend Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend that existence. Not a word is said about the rights of Palestinians crying out to be recognised under Israel’s occupation. The World Bank’s report this time is absolutely clear, making our legal and moral culpability for the consequences even more onerous if we do not help the Palestinians. We ignore the report’s findings at our peril.