Nobody is perfect. Israel is surely far from perfect and while the IDF has done all that is possible to prevent civilian casualties and is rarely directly responsible for those situations, the Sabra and Shatila massacre is surely something Israel has taken responsibility for.
Pro-Palestine activists, online and in weekly protests around the globe, use the event as a classic example of the “genocide” Israel has committed, in reality not one Israeli bullet was shot during that bloody Lebanese night. For that exact reason, it is important to revisit the chain of events leading to the killing of thousands of refugees in the outskirts of Beirut.
After the 1948 Israeli war of independence, as mentioned in previous articles in The Judean, roughly 700 thousand Arab refugees were left with no home to return to. Refugee camps were built all over the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Two of the camps developed in the rural area around Beirut, Lebanon, were Called Sabra and Shatila. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with it first meeting in Cairo, later conducting a meeting of similar nature in Jordanian East Jerusalem. The PLO, in its early days at least, was, by all definitions, a terrorist organization. They determined that their road to victory in Palestine was one of violence and militarized aggression.
This criminal is the one who killed the Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, not Israel... The Palestinians must know the truth... pic.twitter.com/VSPfIuZjWC
— ميكافيلي (@SadiiS4) October 1, 2022
What many don’t realize about the PLO is their involvement in not one, but two Arabic civil wars. During the Jordanian civil war of 1970-71, the main combatant forces were the Hashemite Kingdom and the PLO. The Hashemite Kingdom eventually expelled the PLO from its lands, leading to a new base for PLO terrorism, Lebanon. Lebanon was perfect for a chaos-creating organization, with large ethnic minorities and ongoing political turmoil, a civil war was imminent. The PLO, led by Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, turned Southern Lebanon into a base for terrorist activities just across the border in Israel. Old-school Israelis, including the great peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin, saw the PLO and Arafat as unnegotiable terrorists. The name given to Southern Lebanon by Israelis in the early 1970s was “Fatahland”, named after a militant part of the PLO, Fatah.
In 1975, due to a mixture of PLO aggression against Christian minorities and Syrian-controlled factions' heavy influence, the Lebanese civil war began. The exhausting conflict was tainted with a sense of ethnic cleansing. Countless cases, such as the Damour Massacre, depict the gruesome murder of Christians by the PLO and its allies.
No I think you are ignorant. Israeli- born Jews are called Sabras, like the Sabra fruit. Sweet inside and prickly on the outside. The massacre in Sabra and Shatila were perpetrated by Lebanese Christian militias, not by Israel. https://t.co/H415NQKisr pic.twitter.com/ypWTBg6vR5
— Imshin (@imshin) September 19, 2022
As the years went by, the Lebanese war did not seem to be nearing any kind of resolution. In 1982 Israel made the decision to firmly invade the parts of Lebanon under PLO influence. The ongoing terrorist activities reached a boiling point when an Israeli ambassador was assassinated in London by a Palestinian terrorist. As Israel began the military invasion, they found a friend in the Christian militias and Druze combatants who were, like Israel, determined to eliminate the Palestinian influence in Lebanon.
On the 16th of September, 1982, roughly 2 weeks after PLO officials fled Lebanon, the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Western Beirut were surrounded by Israeli forces. It should be noted that international law prohibited the IDF from surrounding the camps, Israel did so regardless due to intelligence indicating numerous threats within the areas. The Israeli forces began targeted shelling of the camps, aiming for complexes known to store weapons and armed militants. When IDF forces were done a bizarre order trickled down from the chief of staff down to officers in the area, “Let the Falangists [Christian militias] clean up the camps.”
It is truly unknown who was behind the order, as many in Israel's leadership excused themselves from responsibility. Christian militias held a deep hatred for Palestinians as they blamed them for the entire war, and many experienced PLO terrorism first-hand over the years. The two days of Falangists in Sabra and Shatila resulted in thousands of innocents dead. Journalists who snuck into the camps later saw disturbing images of mutilated bodies, along with the awful stench that all who have experienced war recognize.
We Judaized hummus according to this historian giving his two cents about the false claim that “Sabra” (both the Marvel character and the hummus brand) are named after Sabra and Shatila massacre. pic.twitter.com/FjrxruCWvn
— ~Jachnun Supremacist~ נפתלי בן מתתיהו (@JachnunEmpire) September 19, 2022
The Israeli mistake was not that they facilitated the killing of innocent people in Sabra and Shatila, because Israelis were not even present, but in allowing the Christian militias to enter the camps and interpret “cleaning-up” in a way that exacted vengeance for the years of slaughter and terror the PLO had placed on their communities. Israel's mistake was withdrawing to allow vigilante justice instead of supporting an operation to bring the actual PLO leadership to justice. The mistake cost the lives of innocent women, children, and elderly who quite possibly supported the PLO, but were not the PLO and had nothing to do with the atrocities carried out against the indigenous people of Lebanon.
The news of the atrocities in the Lebanese camps shocked most Israelis, leading to a massive political outcry and federal probes into all who were involved. Ariel Sharon who was the Minister of Defense at the time eventually resigned from his position. All who were remotely involved in the ongoing war were in some way responsible for the massacre, according to Israeli protesters.
The story of Sabra and Shatila is not one Israel takes pride in, it remains an open-wound in Israeli society. However, the lesson that historical fact teaches is not of how Zionist forces brutally killed thousands of innocent refugees, but of how Israel as a nation made a huge miscalculation and later faced the consequences that come when wrong is done.
