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| the horror of Sabra and Shatila |
Though 41 years have passed we can still smell the stench of death and hear the voices of the martyred men, women and children when we pass through the streets of the Shatila camp and the Sabra neighbourhoods in West Beirut.
The massacre, carried out by the Israeli army and their Lebanese militia allies, lasted for three continuous days during the Israeli occupation of the Lebanese capital in 1982. Some 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed. Their mothers and children are still waiting for international accountability and justice for the victims.
When a Palestinian refugee visits the Sabra and Shatila camp, the scenes of the massacre still come to mind. They have become engraved in the conscience of every Palestinian. The images of the victims being butchered while militiamen stopped ambulances entering the camp and refused to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide relief supplies for the refugees makes the Palestinians even more determined to return to their land.
The Israeli goal was to eliminate the Palestinian refugees who fled after the pogroms organised by Zionist extremists drove them from their lands in 1948. Their plan continues to this day but the features have changed as the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon no longer have the right to live in dignity. They are deprived of their rights to education and health services, work, or own property, ... especially with the decline in international financial support for the United Nations relief agency, UNRWA.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre is not the only massacre committed by Zionist and Israeli gangs against the Palestinian people. We have not forgotten the Qana massacre or the massacres in Deir Yassin, Haifa, Balad al-Sheikh, Jerusalem, Abbasiya and Jaffa... and with the absence of justice and accountability of the Israeli occupation government, these pogroms continue every day against the Palestinian people.
These massacres show that the Israel wants to eliminate the Palestinian people in order to prove to the world the false narrative of the Zionist movement that Palestine is ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, which is refuted by all historical and scientific evidence.
What Israel is doing is a real holocaust to annihilate the Palestinian people wherever they are, whether inside or outside Palestine. But when the Palestinians want to hold the Zionists accountable, they are accused of “anti-Semitism” even though the Palestinian people are Semites themselves
We saw how the Belgian government amended its laws, when charges were made against General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Defence Minister, over Sabra and Shatila, to prevent him from being tried for war-crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. We saw this repeated at the International Criminal Court when the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda when she announced the opening of an investigation into Israeli war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip in 2014. When Attorney-General Karim Khan took over, the investigation was frozen in 2020 and it remains like that today..
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969-1974) said when she was asked about peace in Palestine that the old die and the young forget, but how can the young forget their martyred fathers, their wounded brothers, and their prisoners’ mothers? How can they forget how the Israeli occupiers demolished their homes and displaced them from their homes?
They are still refugees to this day. They do not have the right to self-determination and establish their independent state. We are talking about peace while justice is absent, the land is still usurped, and thousands of settlers live in homes of Palestinians, stealing Palestinian land and falsely ascribing Palestinian food, heritage culture to themselves!
Despite all these crimes and massacres committed by the Zionist and Israeli gangs against the Palestinian people, the major powers are still trying to force the Palestinian people to give up their legitimate rights that are recognised by international law.
Some Arab regimes have now normalised relations with Israel as if nothing had happened while the Israelis impose a siege on Gaza Strip, depriving Palestinians of benefiting from the natural resources the Israelis have stolen.
But when the Palestinian people resist the occupation some countries accuse them of violence and terrorism. They ignore the Palestinians’ non-violent struggles, such as the boycott of Israeli goods movement, which they criminalise. They ignore the prisoners’ hunger strikes. There are 5,000 Palestinians jailed in Israel without charge or fair trial, including women, children and the elderly. They are living martyrs sentenced to life imprisonment, because they struggle against injustice and the occupation.
The countries that support Israel refuse to hold Israel accountable. Rather, they support it with weapons and money to kill the Palestinian people and commit more massacres and crimes against them. Not only did the countries that financially and militarily support Israel fight the Palestinians, but they also take control of the media to spread the false Israeli narrative over the true Palestinian narrative, and restrict content supporting the Palestinian question on social media.
Our hope lies with the freedom fighters and the free people of the world who reject injustice wherever it exists. As Che Guevara said “wherever there is injustice, this is my homeland,” and we call on them to put pressure on their governments with the aim of boycotting Israel, imposing sanctions on it, withdrawing investments from it, and stopping its support financially, militarily, and politically... and holding it accountable for its crimes committed against the Palestinians, and supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, establishing their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital, and the return of refugees to their homes.
The author is a member of the international criminal court bar association and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP)
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