The trouble with ‘preventing Palestine’

Seth Anziska’s book on the Arab-Israeli “peace process” is a useful primer on the conflict, but it does not fully examine the paradox of the Carter administration’s solution that we are still living with, argues AS’AD ABUKHALIL*

Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, left, and U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski play chess at Camp David, September 9, 1978 | CIA

A new book by Seth Anziska, titled “Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo” created quite a buzz before its official release in late 2018. The writer had mentioned it in press articles and noted that he had unearthed important documents. The book, however, is not as firm in its Palestinian advocacy as has been assumed by supporters of the cause who have praised it on social media and in reviews.

The forgotten massacre

Thirty years after 1,700 Palestinians were killed at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, Robert Fisk revisits the killing fields 

Bodies at the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1982 | REUTERS

The memories remain, of course. The man who lost his family in an earlier massacre, only to watch the young men of Chatila lined up after the new killings and marched off to death. But – like the muck piled on the garbage tip amid the concrete hovels – the stench of injustice still pervades the camps where 1,700 Palestinians were butchered 30 years ago next week. No-one was tried and sentenced for a slaughter, which even an Israeli writer at the time compared to the killing of Yugoslavs by Nazi sympathisers in the Second World War. Sabra and Chatila are a memorial to criminals who evaded responsibility, who got away with it.

Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations

Surviving Palestinian civilians returning to the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila after the massacre carried out by Phalange-linked militiamen, Beirut, Lebanon, September 21, 1982. | Alain MINGAM/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

By Seth Anziska

Historians try not to audibly gasp in the reading rooms of official archives, but there are times when the written record retains a capacity to shock. In 2012, while working at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, I came across highly classified material from Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon that had just been opened to researchers. This access was in line with the thirty-year rule of declassification governing the release of documents in Israel. Sifting through Foreign Ministry files, I stumbled upon the minutes of a September 17 meeting between Israeli and American officials that took place in the midst of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Sabra & Shatila, 1982 – never again

The world watched in horror as the story of the inhuman massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon first emerged in September, 1982 | An entire generation of the Palestinian people has grown up in their shadow | The general at the centre of this butchery is today the prime minister of Israel – Ariel Sharon | The scale of the infamy has changed, but not the methods, the perpetrators or their allies | The past is always present

Sabra and Chatila – two undefended refugee camps in Beirut where hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugees, including babies, were massacred 16-18 September 1982. (Click to enlarge)

From the Dossier on Palestine (2002)

By PIERRE PÉAN*

TWENTY years have passed, but reread the accounts or speak to survivors in what remains of the Sabra and Shatila camps, and the words still drip red. Time has not washed away the blood. All through my investigation I was horrified as I listened to story after story about children with their throats slit, or pregnant women with their bellies slashed open, or heads and limbs hacked off. I felt physically sick.

The United States was responsible for the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut

Washington had explicitly guaranteed their safety – and recently declassified documents reveal that US diplomats were told by the Israelis what they and their allies might be up to | RASHID KHALIDI*

In this September 27, 1982, file photo, a Palestinian woman attending a Beirut memorial service holds the helmets worn by those who committed the Sabra and Shatila massacre | AP Photo / Bill Foley, File

On the night of September 16, 1982, my younger brother and I were baffled as we watched dozens of Israeli flares floating down in complete silence over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. We knew that the Israeli army had rapidly occupied the western part of the city two days earlier. But flares are used by armies to illuminate a battlefield, and with all the PLO fighters who had resisted the Israeli army during the months-long siege of the city already evacuated from Beirut, we went to bed perplexed, wondering what enemy was left for the occupying army to hunt.

This day. Remembering Sabra and Shatila (1982)

Thirty-two years ago on 16 September 1982, the Lebanese Christian Phalange Party militia entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut during the 1982 nvasion f Lebanon by Israel. Israeli forces commanded by Gen. Ariel Sharon occupied the surrounding city and facilitated the militia’s entry into the camp, accompanied by an Israeli death squad. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon eariler that year had been given the “green light” by the Reagan administration. Over the following three days (15-18 September), as many as 3,000 civilians were massacred as Israeli-manned checkpoints turned back fleeing Palestinians and Israeli troops fired flares to illuminate the camp at night. This conscience-searing event marks a defining moment in the Palestinians’ struggle to be rid of the decades-long illegal military occupation of their lands and lives by the so-called State of Israel. It continues to be commemorated wherever Palestinians and their friends gather.