Sabra-Shatila vs. Damour: The Immoral of the Story

If you ask anyone in the world today what they remember from the Lebanese civil war, they'll tell you the "Sabra-Shatila camp massacres", something that offends millions of Lebanese who see their 35 years of suffering and destruction of their country reduced to one of hundreds of similar atrocities that were committed during the Lebanese War. On blogs by young people and in reports by journalists who live thousands of miles away from Lebanon and who weren´t even born then, you'll hear the standard spin about the poor Palestinians and the bad Israelis who allowed the barbaric Lebanese Christian militiamen to enter the camps and carry out the massacre in September of 1982. Even today in Lebanon itself, the Daily Star newspaper – whose Lebanese identity is suspect in the least – features an article remembering Sabra-Shatila [Nicholas Kimbrell, Daily Star, Tuesday, September 16, 2008], while deliberately choosing on any other day of the year to ignore other massacres that took place in Lebanon during that period of the war. I have in mind one particular massacre that ought to be remembered because the Christian militiamen who committed the atrocities in Sabra-Shatila themselves cited it as the act for which they were seeking revenge. The Damour massacre took place six years before Sabra-Shatila, it equaled it in horror, and in fact was the ultimate reason for the Christian militiamen to carry out Sabra-Shatila.

The offensive and insulting aspect of all this is that, in all those remembrances of Sabra-Shatila, the Lebanese are reduced to mere abstract agents of horrible behavior between the real actors - those who are worthy of our feelings of hatred and sympathy – namely, the Israelis of course, and the Palestinians. But the Lebanese, those who actually did the killing, are never really discussed. They are reduced, even as they were the killers, to no more than a burden on the Israeli conscience which is, still according to the common narrative, the real moral dilemma in this one of many massacres on Lebanese soil.

Indeed, the Lebanese are deprived in this narrative of any human dimension that may explain their horrible conduct. The subtext is that the Lebanese Christian militiamen are incapable of moral conflict, they are (in the subconscious of Westerners) incapable of questioning and doubting the moral value of their actions, and so we, Westerners, don't even bother to ask those questions on their behalf. We simply take it for granted that the Lebanese Christian militiamen are not driven by any human motive; they simply are sub-humans and we do not ask the moral question when it comes to them. Just as we would not ask of a tiger who mauls someone at a zoo or a dog that suddenly attacks a baby, and so on. It just is expected behavior.

On the other hand, the Palestinian refugees are presented as the ultimate victims – which they very much are – of this horrible crime, but here again – because the Palestinians, like the Christian militiamen, are Arabs – we don't even attribute to them any agency as to their fate. They are unwilling victims, and they have no say in their fate as victims, no responsibility, no moral issues behind their status of victims.

The only moral issue in this essentially Western construct (to which Edward Said would have shuddered) is: How could the Israelis allow such a thing as this massacre to happen and unfold under their watch? Here, the subtext is: Only the Jewish Israelis (for a multitude of reasons having to do with Western history and the relationship between the West and the Jewish people over centuries) are capable of moral judgment, and so they ought to be responsible for allowing the massacres to occur. The Arabs are incapable of morality, so neither the killer Lebanese nor the victim Palestinians are of interest. They are, respectively, the technicians and the guinea pigs in this ethical experiment which only the Jewish Israelis are capable of struggling through and comprehending. In a laboratory, you don't ask the guinea pig for its reflections on being the sacrificial animal, nor do you ask the lab technician for the grand consequences of the experiment. Only the scientist who supervises both the whole enterprise is capable of such human reflection.

I started writing this with the goal of discussing why the Lebanese people reject the permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees in their country, or to tell those who forget that the Palestinians caused tremendous pain and harm to their host country for more than two decades. In fact, not one of all those who discuss the Sabra-Shatila massacres will ever mention the Damour Massacre that took place in January 1976, six years before the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacre, and – if you ask those who carried out the latter – was an act of revenge for the Damour Massacre. The organic link between the two massacres is deliberately ignored. Out of ignorance perhaps, but also out of a willful intent of describing the Lebanese War for it was not, a "civil" war, rather than for it really was, a war between the Lebanese owners of the land on one hand, and their foreign Palestinian guests backed by their Arab "brothers" (Syrian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Libyan, etc.) on the other hand, all of which was to the pleasure of the Israelis who wanted – and still want today – to see Lebanon become a substitute homeland for the Palestinians and a grave to the Right of Return.

For those who don´t know – because they were never told; because there were never any investigations or inquiries; it just wasn´t cool enough – in the Damour Massacre, thousands of Yasser Arafat's and Hafez Assad's Palestinian fighters converged on the defenseless Christian town of Damour, 20 miles south of Beirut along the Mediterranean coast, and in an overnight orgy of throat-slitting, raping, cutting open babies before their parents´ eyes, and such other Palestinian humanity visited upon the Lebanese, 1,000 people were butchered, and 5,000 were sent fleeing north by boats on a stormy sea in the cold winter of January 1976.

Israel was not involved in the Damour Massacre, so there was no coverage. Israel's "conscience" was not involved, so there was no moral dilemma. Arab killing Arab is expected and is of no interest because Arabs are incapable of moral thinking. But as soon as Jewish Israelis are involved, even as observers – not as killers or victims – and volumes and dissertations are written about it in the most prestigious of academies and in the top newspapers of the world for decades after the event. Inquiry commissions are formed and several decisions are issued. And remembrances – like that of the Daily Star – are written about it decades later.

But Damour remained a ghost town between 1976 and 1990, its old stone houses razed to the ground, its cemeteries desecrated, its orange groves devastated. By the mid 1990s when the people of Damour began returning, the landscape had changed so much that the town is today unrecognizable. Today, it looks like one of those brand new Jewish settlements built atop a West Bank hill (where the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon ought, in fact, to go back). In my childhood, as my father would drive us to his birthplace and the house he was born, I remember Damour as this blast of colors decking its stone houses along its Main Street: Colors of all the fruits produced by the Damour River delta valley – the "Sehel" as the locals called it – down below the coastal road and the exuberantly colored terra cotta industry on display that reminds me of Indian village markets in the Andean countries.

How come the Jewish Israelis' moral conscience is not called upon to take the Palestinian refugees back? Not to Haifa and Jaffa, or even to the villages of the Galilee; just to the West Bank where they could be only miles away from the Palestine they left. How come the demographic argument – not to disturb the Jewish identity of Israel – is so much more important than the moral dilemma of evicting one people from their land, taking their land, and asking other countries to give them land? How come the demographic argument is never invoked to protect Lebanon´s own demographic complexity that dwarfs Israel´s simplistic Jewish-Arab demography?

That the West, and particularly the media, refuses to this day to acknowledge the harm done to Lebanon by the temporary guests that the Palestinians are, remains evidence that Lebanon continues to be forced into a position of such instability and torment so that one day it will, completely on its knees, accept the permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees. The urgency with which the European Union, the UN and the US met in Vienna this past winter to pump millions of dollars into rebuilding the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian Camp (destroyed in fighting with the Lebanese army in 2007) against the wishes of the Lebanese people, but with the acquiescence of the corrupt Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora, tells the real story. The Palestinian refugees can be very easily re-settled in those countries that have taken millions of refugees from around the world in recent decades. Yet, they must stay in Lebanon at any cost. The British Ambassador to Lebanon, Ms. Frances Guy, did not mince her words when she said in an interview on July 12 with a Lebanese television channel:

"It is clear that a solution to the Palestinian problem should include the issue of the Palestinian refugees and reaching an agreement over a solution for them wherever they may be. Therefore, the question of those refugees´ right to return to their lands should be discussed, and perhaps the Palestinians who are in Lebanon have become Lebanese. They emigrated from Palestine in 1948, and therefore such negotiations should take place in the framework of the peace process. There won´t be compensations through the settlement of the Palestinians in Lebanon, but we have to be realistic in order to see the number of Palestinians who are able to return, and the number of those who really want to return. The Palestinians might indeed be given the right to return, but they may not want that. Therefore, we must discuss this matter."

"We never talked about the possibility of giving the Lebanese citizenship to the Palestinians, but perhaps they could have the Palestinian citizenship and stay in Lebanon, like any foreigner living in this country. The bigger problem in Lebanon is in the fact that the Palestinian refugees are unable to exercise the same rights that any foreigner living on its soil enjoys, including the right to obtain work and other rights. There is discrimination between one foreigner and another, and this is the matter that must be discussed today, and not giving the Lebanese citizenship to the Palestinian refugee."[End of quote].

Lebanon will never forget what the Palestinians did to Damour, nor will the Lebanese people ever accept that the moral responsibility for the Palestinian refugees belongs anywhere else but in Israel-Palestine. The international community can count on it. Solving the Jewish question of Europe by the creation of the State of Israel degenerated into the insoluble Palestinian problem. But that was 20th century barbarism. Today, in this "enlightened" world of ours, how can solving the Palestinian question at Lebanon´s expense be even contemplated? It certainly is guaranteed to create the next Middle East problem for the next one hundred years.