Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1987, pages 4-6

Page 65

Remembering the Sabra-Shatila Massacres

By Richard Curtiss

"It looks like something out of someone's worst dream. Buildings broken, bodies lying in the street, people in alleyways crumpled in great big piles. Walls where eight or nine people have been lined up and shot...A family was shot near a courtyard. Obviously the man had come to answer the gate and was shot right there and the woman that was shot right next to him—she still had her dinner plates in her hand—crumpled on the ground; babies in diapers next to them with bullet holes in their heads. Bodies that have been booby trapped, grenades placed under them, so when people come in to pick them up, they're going to get killed too. It's just a horror"—Washington Post reporter Loren Jenkins speaking on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Sept. 20, 1982.

In the spring of 1982, Israelis described Defense Minister Ariel Sharon as "a war waiting to happen." His invasion force was assembled along Israel's border with Lebanon, and he had been to Washington and received a "green light," he later claimed, from US Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Haig had warned him, however, not to proceed without a "major, internationally-recognized provocation," and the Palestinians were scrupulously observing a US-brokered cease-fire. For 10 months, despite Israeli air raids on Palestinian camps in Lebanon, not a shell or a bullet was fired across the Lebanese border into Israel.

Finally, on June 4, when a "hit squad" sent to London by Abu Nidal, a PLO defector who had sworn to kill Yasir Arafat, gravely wounded the Israeli ambassador in London, Sharon had his casus belli. The British, however, informed the press that the would-be assassins were not from the PLO, and in fact carried the name of the PLO representative to the UK alongside that of the Israeli ambassador on their "hit list." Sharon ignored that and, on June 6, 1982, Israeli tanks crashed through Lebanese border posts, as Israeli planes swept ahead of them to pulverize anything in their path.

Sharon first told the world that he wanted only to root out Palestinian positions along Israel's borders and his tanks would stop 40 kilometers into Lebanon. When the three-pronged invasion raced past the 40-kilometer line, however, he admitted that the plan was to cut the Damascus-Beirut road, link up with Lebanese Phalangist militias, and surround leftist-Muslim-Palestinian-held West Beirut. By the time this was completed, perhaps 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians lay dead in the rubble of bombed-out buildings in undefended cities, towns, and villages all over south Lebanon. Sharon apparently expected the Phalangist militiamen, who had never won an even battle in the Lebanese civil war, to advance into West Beirut against Palestinians, who had never lost one.

When Maronite Christian leader Bashir Gemayel refused to send his militiamen forward, however, the Israelis themselves began a cruel war of attrition. Artillery shells rained down from the hills above West Beirut. Gunboats lobbed shells across the beaches into luxury apartments. Israeli aircraft rained death day after day on rich and poor neighborhoods alike. The aim was no longer to blast the Palestinians out of their fortified positions, but to provoke starving and terrified Lebanese into demanding that the Palestinians leave.

Instead, daily televised scenes of the Beirut carnage, plus revelations that Israel was illegally dropping deadly cluster bombs on heavily-populated Palestinian refugee camps, eventually provoked President Reagan into action. He fired Haig, and US Marines joined French and Italian forces to supervise the peaceful withdrawal of Syrian soldiers and PLO fighters from Beirut. Sharon promised US negotiator Philip Habib that Israeli forces would not seek to move into the defensive positions abandoned by the Palestinians, and Habib therefore guaranteed the safety of the Palestinian civilians the PLO fighters left behind.

The international forces were withdrawn immediately after the PLO evacuation was completed in late August, however, before Lebanese army units were ready to assume the defense of West Beirut. Then, at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday, September 14, Bashir Gemayel, by then Lebanon's president-elect, was assassinated by a 200-pound bomb smuggled into his East Beirut headquarters. Although his death was not announced by the Lebanese radio until six hours later, within an hour of the explosion Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Sharon had ordered a round-the-clock shuttle of Israeli planes and trucks bringing into Beirut military supplies, and Maronite militiamen from the Israeli-organized, paid, and directed Haddad militia in Israel's "security zone" along its border with Lebanon. The next day Sharon paid a condolence call on the Gemayel family and what he said or did not say at that time became the subject of his famous libel suit in New York. Time's Israeli correspondent reported that Sharon spoke to the Gemayels of the need for "revenge," but after the magazine printed this charge, it could not prove it, and was forced to retract.

Undisputed is the fact that Israeli commanders had already met with Maronite militia leaders at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 15, to discuss an Phalangist assault on the refugee camps. At 4:30 a.m. the Israelis began an artillery bombardment of West Beirut, followed by a tank assault. At 9:30 a.m. in Jerusalem, Begin informed US envoy Morris Draper that "since 5 a.m. this morning our forces have advanced and taken positions inside West Beirut...to maintain order inside the city." Fighting with rag-tag Lebanese Muslim and leftist militias in West Beirut was still underway when an ominous movement began behind Israeli lines. Haddad troops, arriving by truck in new, Israeli-supplied uniforms, and militiamen from the Gemayel's Phalange, were assembled and briefed for several hours by Arabic-speaking Israelis with maps of the camps. During that period, Israeli units were sporadically firing artillery rounds into the Sabra and Shatila camps, although no fire was being returned because the last PLO defenders had been evacuated two weeks earlier, and any arms larger than handguns had been collected at that time.

At noon Thursday, Sept. 16, a delegation of five old men bearing white flags tried to negotiate an end to the shelling of the two camps by the Israeli forces, which had now surrounded the camps and sealed the exits. Four of the Palestinian negotiators were killed. At 5 p.m. the first 150 Phalangist militiamen entered the camps and at 5:30 Israeli forces began firing flares over them to illuminate the narrow, twisting alleys, where massacres had already begun in one area only 100 yards from the nearest Israeli observation post. At this point mobs of Palestinian women began rushing to nearby camp exits, seeking to escape. Israeli tanks, stationed at 100- or 200-yard intervals and blocking all exits, turned back everyone. Israeli officers have testified that it was about this time that they first heard the order to kill the women and children, as well as the men, relayed over a walkie-talkie by militia commander Elie Hobeika, from the command post he shared with the Israelis. Israeli units continued firing illumination flares over the camps, a pattern they maintained throughout Thursday and Friday nights.

Starting Thursday evening, horribly wounded victims began pouring into two hospitals in the camps, and the airwaves were full of commands revealing what was going on inside, and queries from Israeli officers and enlisted men, who could not believe that their commanders realized that whole families were being slaughtered in front of their eyes. When two Israeli officers stationed in adjacent tanks began discussing with each other the executions of children they were watching, the voice of General Amos Yaron, commander of Israeli forces in Beirut, came on the air to warn them against such talk on the military radio.

By midnight Thursday, between 1,000 and 2,000 Palestinians had taken refuge in the Gaza hospital, inside the camps, while Israeli soldiers blocked access to the Akka hospital. At the same time, in Jerusalem, a midnight meeting of the Israeli cabinet was hearing General Rafael Eitan's report on the entire West Beirut operation. According to minutes of the meeting, Eitan predicted that in the camps there would be "acts of revenge...an outburst the likes of which have not been seen." There was no dissent, however, from the plan to continue sending Phalangists into the camps.

By Friday morning Israeli army bulldozers had arrived. While the Phalangist militiamen rested, corpses were bulldozed into a mass grave and Israeli soldiers sent food and water across the barricades to the militiamen. Word of what was going on spread rapidly throughout Beirut. Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, began telephoning Israeli officials, including Minister of Communications Mordechai Zippori. Zippori telephoned then Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Nevertheless, at 11 a.m. General Yaron agreed with Hobeika that two more battalions of militiamen could enter the camps, along with supplies. In the hours that followed, a militia unit invaded the Akka hospital, killing patients and Palestinian medical personnel and raping two Palestinian nurses repeatedly before they were killed and their bodies mutilated. Some of the residents of the camps were removed alive in trucks, and Israeli television reporter Ron Ben-Yishai interviewed some fresh Lebanese militiamen, dressed in Israeli uniforms but wearing an inscription reading "Lebanese forces," who were preparing to go into the camps. They told Ben-Yishai they would kill the men and rape "their mothers and sisters."

By 4 p.m. three American journalists had reached the US Embassy in Beirut to report that Phalangists were in the camps. Embassy officers informed Draper and telephoned Amin Gemayel, elder brother of the slain Bashir and the future president of Lebanon, to ask if the reports were true. Gemayel telephoned back almost immediately to say the reports were true, but that the militiamen were being withdrawn.

At 4:30 p.m. General Eitan, who had returned from Jerusalem, informed Fadi Frem, head of Phalangist forces in East Beirut, that "the Americans" had asked him "to stop the operations in the camps." Frem asked for more time "to clean them out" and Eitan granted him permission to remain in the camps until 5 a.m. Saturday. Fresh troops went in and, as shadows deepened, Israeli illuminating fire resumed.

In the evening, Draper complained to Amin Gemayel that his promise to get the militiamen out of the camps had not been honored. At 7:30 p.m., Draper passed on to the Israeli foreign ministry representative in Beirut a complaint from Lebanon's Prime Minister that militiamen were murdering patients in the Akka hospital. Correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai reached Sharon by telephone at 11:30 p.m. and told him about the massacre. Sharon thanked him and, since it was the appropriate day on the Jewish calendar, wished Ben-Yishai a "happy new year." Throughout the night, 200 militiamen continued to roam the camps, killing anyone they could find still alive. Several entered the Gaza hospital between 6 and 7 a.m. and forced the staff outside. Arab medical personnel were shot and the foreign nurses and doctors herded away at gunpoint. At the same time, loudspeakers called Sabra inhabitants to assemble on the main street, where "you will be safe." Those who did were prodded at a trot along the main road, but small groups were separated, pushed against walls, and shot.

At 8 a.m. Ben-Yishai arrived in the camps with a film crew. When he tried to film the line of survivors being driven along a main street, a Phalangist militiaman threatened to shoot him. Only at this point did an Israeli officer intervene to stop the slaughter. At about the same time, the European and North American doctors and nurses from Gaza hospital were turned over to chagrined Israeli officers, who apparently had not realized there were non-Arabs in the camps.

Under the eyes of the Israeli journalists and foreign doctors and nurses, the Israeli Defense Forces had begun halting the massacre they had been watching and supporting for 36 hours when, at 10 a.m., Saturday, Sept. 18, Draper dictated by telephone to Israeli Foreign Minister Bruce Kashdan a US demand to "stop the acts of slaughter." Journalists now streaming into the camps saw the bulldozers still working, one with its scoop filled with bodies, another pushing earth over a mass grave. Between 1,000 and 2,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were dead.

After the massacres were revealed, to their credit, 400,000 Israelis—10 percent of the population—turned out to demand an investigation. Begin reluctantly appointed a commission headed by Israeli Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan. The report, a whitewash by any standards, charged Sharon only with "indirect responsibility," which did not put an end to his political career. He hopes to be the next prime minister of Israel. Nor has it put an end to the careers of the Israeli officers involved. Yaron, for example, was appointed Israeli military attache to the United States and Canada and, although Canada refused to accept his credentials, the Reagan administration raised no objection to his appointment. However, public protests against Yaron in the US, coupled with a lawsuit against him, bought by survivors of the Sabra-Shatila massacres, may have caused Yaron and the Israeli government to reconsider: There have been rumors that he will soon leave Israel's embassy in Washington for another assignment.

Although the perpetrators remain unpunished, the massacres did not accomplish their purpose. Both Sharon and the Phalangists wanted to trigger a mass flight of Palestinians from Lebanon. They believed the Syrians would force the fleeing Palestinians into Jordan, where they eventually would destabilize the regime of King Hussein and set up a Palestinian state in its place. Israel could then proclaim that the Palestinians at last had their own state—in Jordan—and push into it the Arabs of the West Bank, Gaza, and perhaps Israel itself. Instead, the Palestinians stayed firmly rooted in Lebanon, and the Israeli right-wing ruthlessness exhibited in Lebanon helped open an ever-widening chasm in Israeli society.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon cost the Jewish state the unquestioning support it had enjoyed among many educated Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. As a result, an increasingly reactionary Israel, sinking under the weight of what can only be called "Jewish fundamentalism," relies increasingly for political support in the United States upon Christian fundamentalists. The fondest hope of these American fundamentalists, however, is not that Israel will remain a place where Jews who choose to can "live a Jewish life." Instead, the Christian fundamentalists see the creation of Israel as the "in-gathering" of Jews in Jerusalem, prelude to prophesied events including Armageddon, conversion of the Jews, and the Second Coming of Christ.

Five years ago, this month, the Sabra-Shatila massacres were set in motion by men who believed the end they sought justified the means they chose. In doing so, however, these Israeli and Lebanese hardliners may have pushed both of their tormented and fractured countries closer to an end in keeping with their means.