From Beirut to the Beltway

The Washington Post in September 1982 described it as “something out of someone’s worst dreams. Buildings broken, bodies lying in the street, people in alley ways crumpled in great big piles.”

On Saturday morning, September 18 1982, the world discovered a massacre in the areas of Sabra and Shatila south west of Beirut. Hundreds of bodies of Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children, mutilated, hacked, ridden with bullets, tied up and raped, and some burnt beyond recognition covered the narrow alleys of the Palestinian refugee camp in Shatila and the surrounding Lebanese neighborhoods.

The massacre capped a bloody Israeli invasion that, according to the Macbride international commission that investigated the invasion, killed 20,000 people, 80 per cent of whom were civilians. It also orphaned 6000 children and made 800,000 refugees.

The Macbride report concluded that Israel “committed acts of aggression contrary to international law, made use of weapons and warfare forbidden by international law, deliberately and indiscriminately bombarded civilian targets including hospitals and schools, systematically bombarded cities, towns, villages and refugee camps, and was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila and played a facilitative role in the actual killings.”

A recent book by Bayan al-Hout put the number of victims in the Sabra and Shatila massacre at 3500.

On September 16, the Israeli army led select members of the “Lebanese Forces,” the “Free Lebanon Army,” “the Tigers” and the “Guardians of the Cedars” - all Christian Maronite militias trained and armed by Israel- into Sabra and Shatila. The army lit the sky with flares and supervised the killings from a tall command post overlooking the scene.

This “noble” mission, as described by one of the killers in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, was to rid “Lebanon of its last remaining enemies. We were to search the camp and take all the able-bodied men prisoners.” Acting on orders from Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Army Chief of Staff to “find and destroy terrorists,” they stabbed and shot their way into the modest refugee homes and shelters, accompanied by “Israeli friends”, as the killer described them, who were there to make their work “easier."

The issue of the Palestinian refugees in Beirut had been on the table during the meetings that brought together Bashir Gemayel and then defence minister Ariel Sharon. Between June 15 and September 12, Sharon and his chief of staff Raphael Eitan pressured the Lebanese Forces to implement “Operation Spark”, which involved the entry of the Lebanese forces into West Beirut and the refugee camps.

During a meeting in the house of the Lebanese army intelligence officer Johnny Abdo on the 23rd of July (while West Beirut was under siege), Bashir appeared unwilling to take care of the Palesinian “problem” himself, and asked the Israelis to shoulder the responsibility. He told the head of Military Intelligence (General Saguy) that the “general problem” of Palestinian refugees was too early to be discussed. However, he asked the IDF to occupy southwest Beirut and destroy the camps as that action “won’t cause great sorrow among local Muslims residing in the northwestern part of the city and some would even cooperate.”

After Bashir’s assassination on September 14, Sharon met with the distraught Lebanese forces commanders and pressured them to enter Beirut. He told them to “take control of the Lebanese army” before “proposals are made.” If they entered West Beirut behind the Israeli army, he told them, they could create facts on the ground that can withstand future American pressure:

Employ every legal avenue, [but] if you don’t succeed we will support you.

According to Israeli authors Schiff and Ya’ari, Sharon at this point “ordered” the Lebanese Forces commanders to “to enter the camps and destroy whatever was left of the PLO's infrastructure in West Beirut. He is quoted as saying "I don't want a single one of them left!" When Elie Hobeika, the head of the LF military intelligence, pressed for details on “how to single them out”, Sharon replied: “I am off to Bekfaya now. We’ll discuss that at a more restricted session.”

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was essentially a military operation planned by the Israeli army. The degree of direct Israeli involvement is staggering. All evidence indicates that it was a military operation facilitated by the Israeli army in every way possible: through the maps, the presence of a liaison officer at the forward command post, the flares that lit up the skies for the killers, and the presence of Israeli soldiers with the killers.

The killer who was interviewed by Der Spiegel in February 1983 said that he belonged to the Tigers, the militia that Bashir had pretty much eliminated while consolidating his power in East Beirut. He also said that many of his comrades had lost a brother in battles with the Palestinians. He mentiones “a dozen Israelis in green uniforms without indication of rank” who came along. “They had maps with them and spoke Arabic well, except that like all Jews, they pronounced the hard 'h' as 'kh.' “Our officers had told us that "the Israeli friends who will accompany you are also volunteers, they haven’t said anything to their army about their involvement with us…they will make your work easier."

Although the Kahan commission set up after the massacre denied the existence of Israeli soldiers among the killers, many survivors and witnesses have indicated that they heard or spotted Israeli soldiers. The choice of the killers who went into the camps was made in accordance with their background and their level of hatred towards Palestinians.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre generated a lot of negative publicity for Israel. Even though Begin had given the impression that he did not care for world opinion, he started to fear the effects of this massacre on American support for Israel, especially in light of Regan’s peace plans.

Sharon and Begin thus did not hesitate to entirely blame their Christian allies for it. Following massive public outcry, the Likud led government set up an inquiry commission to investigate “all the facts and factors connected with the atrocity carried out by a unit of Lebanese forces against the civilian population in the Shatila and Sabra camps.”

The Kahan report’s main focus was to show Israel’s “moral fortitude and its functioning as a democratic state that scrupulously maintains principles of the civilized world.” It never set out to interview survivors and never visited the site of the massacre. In another word, it was not an investigation. It was considered good enough that Israel conducted such an inquiry “on a subject not related to Israel’s responsibility.”

Nevertheless, the Kahan commission recommended the dismissal of the Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan and Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy for not foreseeing the killings (and not for their role in it), in the context of “no guilt can be assigned to Israelis.”