But the world lacks courage from government leaders, acquiescent mainstream media, non-governmental organizations dependent on government support, academics looking for tenure, and populations too long fed on a diet of Zionist myths.  People are terrified of being labelled anti-Semitic, a mendacious charge against anyone criticizing Israel.  Palestinians too, afraid of being further shunned and disadvantaged in countries that give them refuge, so often remain silent. Not only do people fear repercussions, but speaking the truth or even just hearing  it has a way of taking people out of their comfort zones. They fear their troubled consciences may require them to act and so they bury their heads deeper into the sand where they hope even the sounds of silence might be extinguished.

This, then, is the challenge for advocates the world over. How does one talk Palestine to power if one cannot even talk Palestine to the people who are in fear of the powerful?

In the face of media saturation with Zionist viewpoints and the new “Brand Israel” campaigns, many wanting to advocate for Palestine might feel defeated, but time and again we see that the power of one can be enormously effective.

The great scholar and public intellectual, Edward Said, showed more than anyone else that individuals can make a difference in the public defence  of Palestine. He particularly saw the intellectual’s voice as having ”resonance.”

But one does not need to be an intellectual. Said’s words can just as aptly apply to any one of us. He said avoidance was “reprehensible” and  in his 1994 book, Representations of the Intellectual, described it as “that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled  position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming too controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is … to remain within the responsible mainstream … .”

In 1993 when almost everyone else thought the handshakes at the White House steps would seal the negotiated Oslo accords and at long last give the Palestinians their freedom and bring peace to the region, Edward Said, saw that these accords would merely provide the cover for Israel to pursue its colonial expansionism and consolidate its occupation of Palestine. However, he knew to criticize Oslo meant, in effect, taking a position against “hope” and “peace.” His decision to do so flew in the face of the Palestinian revolutionary leadership that had bartered for statehood.

Although Said was denounced for his views, he was not prepared to buy into the deception that he knew would leave the Palestinians with neither hope nor peace. And just as he predicted, each fruitless year of peacemaking finally exposed the horrible reality of Oslo as Palestinians found themselves the victims of Israel’s matrix of control, a term first used to describe the situation by Israeli professor, Jeff Halper, in 1999. And this domination of one people over another without any intention of addressing the injustices against the Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homeland, has undeniably reduced Israel to an apartheid state.

The Palestinians have nothing left worth calling a state and they are facing an existential threat on all fronts. Yet, some intellectuals are still talking about a two-state solution in lock step with politicians, a mantra that is repeated uncritically, even mendaciously, in the mainstream media.

This pandering to an idea for decades has been undermined by the furious sounds of drills and hammers reverberating in illegal settlements throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the catastrophic societal ruptures engineered in Gaza. Now those sounds are muffled by the rhetoric of “economic peace,” “institution-building,” “democracy,” ”internal security” and “statehood.” They are words that must be challenged at every opportunity, for they are not mere words, but dangerous concepts when isolated from truth on the ground.

It is no use talking about “economic peace” when industrial estates built for Palestinian workers are intended to provide Israel with slave labour and cheap goods. It is useless to support “institution building” when Israel continues to undermine and obstruct those programs already struggling to service Palestinian society. It is a lie to speak of  ”democracy” when fair elections in 2006 had Israel and the ”international community” denying Hamas the right to govern. It is a charade to accept “internal security” when arming and training  Palestinians to police their own people covers for Israel’s and America’s divide-and-conquer scheme. It is hollow to speak of  ”statehood” when Israel keeps stealing land and building illegal settlements that deprive the Palestinians of their homes and livelihoods while herding them into isolated and walled-in ghettoes.

Edward Said was proven right. Now it is our turn to speak the truth and act fearlessly, regardless of the censure we are likely to encounter. The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, is believed to have said that truth passes through three stages: “first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”  Today, we are at the third stage: the 11 million Palestinians living under occupation, apartheid, and as stateless refugees are the living truth. That is Israel’s Achilles’ heel.

The Palestinians are no longer the humble shepherds and farmers that Zionist forces terrorized into fleeing to make way for the Jewish State of Israel. A new generation wants justice, and it is demanding it eloquently, nonviolently, and strategically. Their message: no normal relations with Israel while it oppresses Palestinians, denies their rights and violates international law. And boycott, divestment and sanctions have to be legitimate tools for challenging a state that claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme and criminal its actions.

The temptation, of course, is always to opt for the path of least resistance. Therefore, we must appeal to the individual, not even to sacrifice for others, but to recognize that no matter where we live in this global village, we are all vulnerable if we do not stand up for universal human rights and uphold the principles and application of international law.

Despite his own Zionist affiliations and loyalty to Israel, Justice Richard Goldstone saw the danger of tailoring his UN-backed report on war crimes in Gaza to exonerate Israel. He had the decency and courage to put the rule of law and humanity ahead of the savage condemnation he knew would come from talking truth to power.

The same can be said of Richard Falk, the Jewish professor emeritus from Princeton University and UN special rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories, who was denied entry into Israel because he described Israel’s siege on Gaza as a “Holocaust in the making” (“Israel deports American academic,” Guardian, 15 December 2008).  Israel’s treatment was insulting enough, but now shamefully, the Palestinian Authority has asked the Human Rights Council to “postpone”  his report on Gaza and, as Nadia Hijab reported, is asking him to resign  (“PA’s  betrayal of human rights defenders the unkindest cut ” by Nadia Hijab,  14 March 2010).

These are honourable men, but we too can stand on principle in smaller ways, whether that is refusing to buy Israeli goods at our local store, boycotting an Israeli-government sponsored event or exposing and protesting the collusion between governments and corporations with Israel. That is what it means to become part of a worldwide civil movement that will do what our leaders will not: pressure Israel to dismantle the matrix of control on Palestine and make reparations for the decades of injustices it has perpetrated against its people. It is, indeed, possible for all of us to “squeeze out of reality some of  its potentialities,” the reality that University of Melbourne Professor, Ghassan Hage, has said is found in those utopic moments that come from challenging our own thoughts, fears and biases. In that space lies the untapped power we seek, to speak the truth without fear or favour. In that space lies the potential for political change. In that space, there will always be hope for Palestine.

Alas, in the flurry of words, the music has not changed. America seems as much bedazzled by Israel as a parent who is blind to the antics of an over-indulged, demanding child. No amount of insults seems to shatter their illusion that the precious being is, in fact, a monster.

In their attempts to convince the rest of us not so enamoured, they fail to see that they have allowed their symbiotic relationships to become abusive. Just as the parent can no longer control a child’s obnoxious behaviour, so too America finds itself hamstrung by Israel’s illegal settlement expansion into Palestinian territory and its determination to take and Judaise all of Jerusalem. And while this time there have been some firm admonishments, there have been no follow-up consequences, America lapsing into the same old routine of placating Israel with promises to keep the faith.

The AIPAC conference in Washington DC provided the meeting place for the usual Israel love-in. There, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu plumbed the depths. He lied when he said that Jews had built Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. He lied when he said it was theirs to build again. He lied when he said “it is our capital”.

No one pulled him up over those lies. Instead Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waffled on about how Israel’s behaviour exposes the daylight between them that others in the region hope to exploit – the same daylight that US Vice-president Biden vowed did not exist between the two countries – and how it endangers the proximity talks and America’s essential role in bringing those to fruition. But not before she had told the audience that America’s commitment to Israel was “rock solid, enduring, unwavering and forever”.

Her prime concern was not that Israel’s behaviour denies millions of Palestinians the right to live in their own homeland and cruelly oppresses those who still do, but rather that America’s credibility as an honest broker in a long-defunct peace process might be at risk.

Nothing was said about Jerusalem being a corpus separatum under UN trusteeship since the Partition of Palestine in 1947 or that Israel does not have sovereignty over Jerusalem, despite its military conquests. Not a mention was made that East Jerusalem is occupied territory and that Israel is in breach of international law.

Netanyahu’s claims over Jerusalem presuppose an “eternal connection” between Jews and the land. But the historical record on that is clear. Not only are there non-Jewish groups who ruled Jerusalem for centuries rather than the brief 170 years of likely Jewish rule, but also the city existed long before Judaism took form.

On any reading, Jerusalem is no more Jewish than it is Christian or Islamic. Yet, if anyone can lay claim to it by an “eternal connection”, it is the Palestinians whose history goes back millennia to the Canaanites who worshipped pagan deities and then to those who converted to emerging Judaism, Christianity and centuries later to ascendant Islam. Thus, the three monotheistic religions believe they too have a claim. For this reason, the 1947 UN Partition resolution sought to give Jerusalem international status as a separate body.

To this day, the international community has refused to officially recognise Israeli sovereignty of Jerusalem. Notwithstanding this, Israel has pursued an aggressive policy of “unification” and “reunification” of Jewish Jerusalem by pushing out the boundaries of Palestinian East Jerusalem to some 73 sq km, well into the military-occupied West Bank where Israel has illegally settled some 300,000 Jews.

Secretary Clinton’s “no to settlements” and “no to natural growth” at the end of last year were empty words. Within days, she had eagerly announced that Netanyahu’s guarantees of no new settlement building and no new land grabs were “unprecedented” concessions. Nothing was said about the building going on in East Jerusalem, let alone the forced evictions of Palestinians, the demolition of their homes and Israeli building policies, which are deliberately skewed towards Jewish population growth.

One has to wonder what meaning words have at all when carefully considered ones are ignored. A United Nations report of May 2009 put as many as 60,000 Palestinians at risk of eviction from their homes and called for a freeze on demolitions in East Jerusalem. Yet, the most that Secretary Clinton could say then – 10 months ago – was that Israel’s actions were “unhelpful” in advancing the peace process.

As has happened innumerable times in the past, the chiding words of US emissaries and government officials, are always quickly followed up with other words to reassure Israel of “the unbreakable bond” between the two countries, and more significantly, actions that belie the reprimands. In the midst of all the recent hoo-ha about chilling relations, a $210 million arms deal with Israel and paid for by US military aid nevertheless went ahead with an estimated massive $3 billion F-35 warplane deal still in the offing.

In other words, regardless of the song-sheet, America never misses a beat to give Israel what it wants. It will be interesting to see if the US does withdraw support for Israel in the United Nations on any resolutions before the Security Council critical of Israel’s settlement policies in occupied East Jerusalem. The rumours are fulminating amongst denials from both sides. While to many this signifies a change of heart in America’s love affair with Israel, it may be no more than the stuff of gossip columns to re-make America’s image as honest broker in the Middle East.

The disconnect between words and actions might please those who want peace more than they want justice for the Palestinians, but for many, the words have been done to death. By the time proximity talks morph into full negotiations, there will be no Jerusalem left to negotiate and no Palestinians left in Jerusalem. All words will then be meaningless.

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.