On this week in 1982, three "Israel"-allied right-wing Lebanese militant factions, the South Lebanon Army, entered the Shatila refugee camp after the assassination of Bachir Gemayel. The massacre occurred outside of the context of battle, where fighters of the Palestinian resistance were not in Beirut, giving "Israel's" allies the opportunity to besiege the camp, murdering 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and 1,900 Lebanese. 

The cowardly crime, occurring in a disarmed context and targeting defenseless civilians rather than active combatants, proved the scale of the war crime as one that could not be justified in any political context. Mirroring the vast disproportionalities in power dynamics between Palestinians and the so-called “international community” that backs the occupation, the criminals carrying out the massacre were reinforced by the presence of American, French, Italian and other internationally-stationed forces that form some of the occupation’s allies rather than neutral arbitrators. 

Kikah Afifi, a Palestinian born and raised in Shatila, remembers the 1982 massacre as just a 12-year-old.

She recalled how the camp’s residents were rounded up, removed from their spots of refuge and hiding, and put in lines dividing women and children from men, losing her brothers to the massacre. “I decided I didn’t want to die the way my brothers died,” she recalled, a sight where “people were slaughtered as people were just watching.”

“We don’t have land to bury our dead in,” she said, mentioning it was this very inclination to eventually die in dignity in her own land that pushed her to join the Palestinian resistance at 17.

The war crime began after the PLO’s withdrawal from Beirut, occurring as the Israelis invaded Lebanon’s capital, agreed upon with the promises of the so-called international community to guarantee the safety of the Palestinian refugees in Beirut. In reality, it is apparent that these Western nations were only reinforcing "Israel's" occupation of the Lebanese capital and largest city, being no fewer witnesses to the massacre that was to unfold starting September 16, a little over two weeks after the PLO withdrawal from Beirut was completed. The multinational force did its official pull out on September 10, a full 20 days earlier than they were supposed to stay. 

However, the assassination of Gemmayel was a pretext, not a completely consequential cause for the massacre, mentioned Walid Charara, Al-Akhbar journalist involved in the Lebanese National Movement, the then-leftist coalition that fought alongside the Palestinians in Lebanon. He emphasized that “all of the Zionist entity’s massacres were pre-planned.”

Charara stressed that the wide misconception that Gemayel’s assassination was an entirely causal factor served to obfuscate the ongoing project of the occupation, using displacement as its vehicle and ethnic cleansing as its strategy. The main goal was not just to disarm the Palestinian resistance, but to use the Palestinian resistance as a pretext to completely cleanse the region of its indigenous Palestinian and Lebanese population to expand its borderless military base, instilling in Lebanon an ideology that was compatible and compliant with Zionism. 

Gemayel’s assassination didn’t occur until September 14, and while it was unexpected, it came days after the armed withdrawal of the international forces.

This ideological, as well as political, camaraderie was found in none other than the comprador army of the Kata’eb Phalangites, and their armed wing, the Lebanese Forces and the South Lebanon Army, factions that operated to give "Israel" its footing in Lebanon with the former assisting "Israel" in carrying out the Sabra and Shatila massacre.  

Accountability and fighting for rights

To this day, not one Israeli militant, nor any of their Lebanese accomplices, have been formally charged with a crime, and accountability continues to be evaded.

One major war criminal is even a leader of a major Lebanese political party, continuing to shore up a fascist current in Lebanon. The current leader of the Lebanese Forces political party, which was the armed wing of the Kataeb group at the time which helped collaborate with the Israelis in carrying out the massacre, Samir Geagea, never ceased in continuing his antics. The mastermind behind last year’s Tayouneh massacre, Geagea, walks free, aspiring to become Lebanese President with Saudi and Western blessing and support. 

To this day, Palestinians continue to fight for their rights, and are denied the most basic ones, most notably the right of return due to the occupation of their home country. Till today, Palestinians in Lebanon suffer in overcrowded refugee camps, barred from bringing in building materials and renovating their camps. Palestinians are barred from many professions in Lebanon, including the highest professions, a discriminatory mandate challenged only by former Labor Minister Mostafa Bayram, of the Hezbollah political party, who introduced the first measure last year to repeal discriminatory bans on Palestinians from certain jobs. The measure was quickly pushed back against and overturned by Lebanon’s pharmacist and physician syndicates, the latter whose president, Charaf Abou Charaf, issued strong denunciations against the decision.

Samira Saleh, Senior member of the GUPW (General Union of Palestinian Women) and Palestinian Women's committees, speaking at the AMED conference, noted that “the barricades that were placed in refugee camps were supposed to be temporary,” yet still remain, especially in camps in Saida and Tyre, adding that “Palestinians are not allowed to bring in construction material.”

She added that the conception that Palestinians need Lebanese citizenship to acquire their rights is a false one, also emphasizing that international actors, despite promising Palestinians about the removal of barriers, both physical and social, at various conferences, implementation is always “lacking.”

Lessons going forward

Ethnic cleansing, the strategy that underscored the Sabra and Shatila crime, showed itself to be as much of an ideological project as it was a political one. The main purveyors of the massacre were Christian fascists, who modeled their ideology off the right-wing, Nazi-adjacent ethnonationalism of the Spanish Phalange. In a material sense, their ideological embrace of Euro-centric and Europhilic ethnonationalism served the aim of furthering Western, through their Israeli auxiliaries, material, economically and politically, control and expansion over the region.

To remember Sabra and Shatila necessitates the active revival of the narratives of the victims and subjects of the crime, as Palestinians and their allies have not only been hostage to the ethnic cleansing project in history but have been made subject to be passive recipients and subjects of imperialist control to the extent that their narrative has been under attack. Palestinian narratives and historical memory have been attacked in media, academia, and in the political sphere in a world designed to uphold the hegemony of capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism. 

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, an academic, harps on the importance of documenting oral history as an act of resistance of Palestinians in their reaffirmation of historical memory as under siege as their land, “fighting education battlefields on what is included on curricula,” adding that as a people, Palestinians are silenced in more ways than one. 

“The problem faced by us in the knowledge production industry is that no one believes us when we document: white narratives are given more credibility,” adding that it is “extremely important” to “decolonize knowledge production.”

In her service to the cause, Abdulhadi, who also leads the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at SFSU pioneered the “Teaching Palestine” program to serve the aims of uplifting indigenous grassroots knowledge and history to the forefront of scholarship and popular recollections on Palestine. This year’s commemoration in Beirut of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, occurring months after the Israeli invasion of Beirut, had the added dimension of marking the 50th assassination anniversary of Ghassan Kanafani, the 20th anniversary of the Zionist entity’s massacre at Jenin, Palestine following the second Intifada, as well as 15 years post the 2007 siege of Gaza.