Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Sabra and Shatila:
New Revelations on U.S. and Israeli Complicity in Lebanese Massacre
Seth
Anziska
September
17, 2018
The
New York Review of Books
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.
The startling
verbatim exchange between Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and US
diplomat Morris Draper clearly demonstrated how the slaughter of civilians
in the Palestinian refugee camps of south Beirut was prolonged by Draper’s
acquiescence in the face of Sharon’s deceptive claim of “terrorists” remaining
behind. This made the US unwittingly complicit in the notorious three-day
massacre carried out by militiamen linked to the Phalange, a right-wing
political party of Lebanese Maronite Christians that was allied with Israel.
Not long after
publishing these findings, I was approached by William Quandt, a leading
American expert on the Middle East who served on the National Security
Council with responsibility for Arab-Israeli affairs under President Jimmy
Carter. Quandt had been an expert consultant for the defense in the 1983–1984
lawsuit of Ariel Sharon v. Time Magazine, in which
Sharon sued Time for libel over its coverage of his role in
the massacre. In the course of preparing for the case, which was eventually
settled out of court, the New York-based law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore
obtained classified material from the secret appendix of the official
Israeli report into the massacre, known as the Kahan Commission. Large
sections of the Hebrew original were translated into English by the law firm,
and have been authenticated by several experts, including Israeli sources.
Quandt was given a copy of those documents and passed them along to me for my
own research.
We are publishing
here for the first time these English-language excerpts from the secret Kahan
Commission Appendix, in their original form and as an open source, so that
researchers in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and farther afield can consult these
primary sources directly. This appendix is another historical source that can
elicit shock: a chilling set of memoranda that paints a more complete picture
of Israeli and Phalange eagerness to foment violence against the Palestinians
as part of a wider war to remake the Middle East.
It includes
extensive minutes of meetings between Israeli and Lebanese officials around the
outbreak of the 1982 War, formative discussions between the Israeli Mossad,
Israeli military intelligence, and Lebanese Maronite Christian leaders over the
fate of Palestinians, commission testimonies from high-ranking Israeli
officials, and internal Israeli cabinet minutes about the consequences of the
violence. Collectively, the evidence provides new details of Israel’s extended
discussions with Lebanese allies in Beirut to “clean the city out of
terrorists” as part of a broader political agenda to remake Lebanon’s
demographics. In practice, this pattern of false and dehumanizing rhetoric
about “terrorists” served to countenance unrelenting violence, leading to the
deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in September 1982.
The
documents consist of large sections of the secret Kahan Commission
Appendix. This material is presented without annotation or comment, arranged in
page order. Handwritten page numbers and markings reflect the scanned copy
provided by William Quandt, who was given the documents while consulting
for Time in
Ariel Sharon’s 1984 lawsuit against the magazine. (Page references given in the
essay refer to these handwritten numbers, but that numbering restarts in a
second section after page 309; therefore references are notated as I: 1–309 and
II: 1–100.) The documents can be viewed here. Also see Kahan
Commission Appendix (English) by The New York Review of Books on
Scribd.
Earlier this
month, during a research trip in Lebanon, I visited Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, the
principal documentarian and historian of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Not
long after passing the suburban neighborhood of Monte-Verde, the road from
Beirut to the nearby mountain village of Ras el-Matn curves around a sharp
bend. Careening around that corner, my Uber driver and I stopped our
conversation mid-sentence, catching our breath as the beauty of the
pine-forested Lamartine Valley unfurled before us. The congestion of the
seaside capital, with its endless traffic and sticky summer heat, melted away.
So did the driver’s complaints about rental prices, the refugee crisis, and
political corruption. It is easy to see how this lush valley, still unspoiled
today, inspired the writing of the nineteenth-century French poet and
Orientalist Alphonse de Lamartine, after whom it is named.
After the ascent,
we reached Ras el-Matn and stopped in front of the Raed Pharmacy. Following the
instructions I’d been given, I walked 200 meters down the road to the foot of
some large stone steps. At the top of the stairs, an elegantly dressed woman in
her early eighties greeted me warmly and led me to the shade of her stately
olive tree. Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout is a formidable scholar of Palestine, born
in Jerusalem to a Lebanese family driven out during the 1948 War, known in Arabic
as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Now retired, al-Hout spends much of
her time researching and writing in this quiet mountain village, which became
the Nuwayhed family home at the turn of the twentieth century.
It was not her
dispossession in 1948 that I had come to talk to her about, but what had
happened thirty-four years later, in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and
brought fighting to her doorstep once more. On Friday September 17, 1982, four
Israeli soldiers in full battle dress knocked on the door of Bayan’s Beirut
apartment, where she lived with her late husband, Shafiq al-Hout, who was the
official representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in
Lebanon. Shafiq was not there but in hiding, a target of several assassination
attempts because of his leadership position in the Palestinian resistance in
Lebanon. The soldiers forced their way in and began questioning Bayan while
searching for documents. One officer found her husband’s old Palestinian
passport, from his childhood in Jaffa, where he was born and raised during the
British Mandate. The soldiers were amazed as they looked through its pages.
“Your reaction is
no surprise to me. I am sure you have never seen such a document,” Bayan told
them. “As you can see, the text is written in all three languages: Arabic,
English, and Hebrew. It comes from the time when Palestine had enough room for
everyone, regardless of his religion or sect.”
The soldiers
confiscated the cherished passport, despite Bayan’s attempts to get it back, as
she recounted tearfully to her husband when they were reunited some days later.
In his memoirs, Shafiq al-Hout recalled the incident with obvious
pain, conveying a message from the story, “that the Zionists’ perpetual
objective is the elimination of Palestinian national identity. Why else would
they insist on continuing to eradicate all physical, spiritual, and cultural
trace of our presence in Palestine?” As a refugee who had fled Israel’s
creation and ended up in exile, Shafiq regarded the 1982 war against the PLO in
Lebanon as another outright assault on the aspirations of his people.
Under the
leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel
Sharon, the Israeli government launched an invasion in June of that year partly
on the pretext of stopping Palestinian militant rocket fire on the Galilee
region of northern Israel. After the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israeli
leaders had also become increasingly anxious about the power of the PLO and the
growing links between Palestinians inside the occupied territories and across
the Arab diaspora. The main focus of their concern was on Lebanon, where the
PLO had relocated its center of operations from Jordan after an armed
confrontation with King Hussein’s army in 1970–1971. Israeli strategists
believed that targeting the PLO in Lebanon and forcing its withdrawal would
accomplish several objectives: the quashing of Palestinian national aspirations
for a homeland, the expulsion of Syria’s troops from Lebanon and the
elimination of Syrian influence there, and the establishment of a client
Maronite Christian state as a close ally.
Instead of
entrenching Israeli dominance over its northern neighbor, the Lebanon War
morphed into what some have called “Israel’s Vietnam.” In the midst of an
already brutal civil war, the Israeli intervention resulted in the deaths of
more than 600 Israeli soldiers and at least 5,000 Lebanese and Palestinian
civilians—over 19,000 by Lebanese estimates that counted combatants
as well. Closely coordinated with Maronite forces, Israel’s invasion soon
devolved from being a limited incursion to a summer-long siege against the
PLO’s stronghold in West Beirut. Unlike the wars in 1948, 1967, or 1973, Israel
was unequivocally engaged in what Begin called a “war of choice.” Combining
military force with psychological operations, Israeli forces inflicted heavy
casualties inside an Arab capital for the first time, bombarding Palestinian
positions from land, sea, and air, while occupying Lebanon’s international
airport.
President Ronald
Reagan, disturbed by the images of destruction, pushed his administration to
negotiate an end to the fighting and to facilitate a peaceful evacuation of PLO
fighters from the city to neighboring Arab states. The PLO leader, Yasser
Arafat, had signaled that he and his men were willing to withdraw provided that
the PLO had the requisite American guarantees of security for Palestinian
civilians and Lebanese supporters who remained behind. Sharing the draft of the
withdrawal agreement with Shafiq al-Hout, Arafat sounded a wistful
note about the departure:
"Beirut
has given Palestine what no other Arab capital has. It has given and given,
without asking for anything in return. And it never would ask. Nor should we
make it ask. We should pay it back of our own free will."
The first
contingent of PLO fighters left the city on August 21, with Arafat and leading
PLO officials departing on a Greek shipping vessel to Tunisia on August 30. In
all, some 10,000 fighters left Lebanon by sea and land routes, pushing the PLO
into still deeper exile. Even after the heaviest fighting ended, a protracted
Israeli occupation of the south of the country lasted until 2000, reshaping the
politics of the region. Syrian influence over the country continued, but
increasingly it was supplanted by Iranian power with the rise of Hezbollah. Far
from cementing Israel’s regional hegemony, the 1982 War ultimately undercut
Israeli and American influence in the Middle East, while transforming
perceptions of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism around the globe.
At the heart of
this transformation was the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which began on
September 16 and was still taking place on the day that Israeli soldiers raided
Bayan’s apartment, September 17. After the evacuation of PLO fighters,
Shafiq al-Hout had stayed behind to organize the protection of Palestinian
civilians remaining in the country. Israeli troops had also remained in Beirut,
with Ariel Sharon determined to forge an advantageous peace treaty with a
pliant Lebanese government.
The September 14 assassination of
President-elect Bashir Gemayel, a close Maronite ally of Israel, upended
Sharon’s plans, and he responded by ordering his troops forward into West
Beirut. Despite American pressure to withdraw, the Israelis claimed that the
Palestinian refugee camps still harbored “terrorists” whom they hoped to “mop
up” with the help of their Christian allies. At this point, the US had pulled
back its Marine forces to their ships, making any American guarantee of
external protection meaningless. In that absence, the Lebanese militia linked
to the Maronite Christian Phalange party, which was reeling from the
assassination of their leader, was free to terrorize Palestinian civilians.
The militia
fighters congregated at the Beirut airport, a major Israeli staging point; from
there, they were ushered through Israeli lines into the camps, which were
surrounded by Israeli forces. Under the command of Phalange leader Elie
Hobeika, these men raped, killed, and dismembered hundreds of women, children,
and elderly men while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow, dark
alleyways. Sharon, meanwhile, briefed his cabinet colleagues on September 16
about the Phalange movements, stressing, according to cabinet minutes, that
“the results will speak for themselves… let us have the number of days
necessary for destroying the terrorists” (I: 287). This insistence on the
presence of “terrorists” belied the actuality of who had remained after the
PLO’s evacuation, yet it fit with Israel’s rhetorical strategy of deliberately
blurring distinctions between Palestinian civilians and armed fighters.
As news of the
massacre trickled out, Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout began what would become a
painstaking, years-long quest to document the details of each victim and
corroborate accounts of what had occurred in the camps. By recording interviews
with survivors and witnesses, and doggedly collecting documentary evidence
(including suppressed lists of casualties, some from Lebanese humanitarian
sources), she eventually published the definitive account of the
massacre, Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 (2004), which also
appeared in an Arabic edition. Bayan provides the verified names of at least
1,390 victims, with estimates far exceeding that number of those who were
detained and disappeared during the violence.
“I wanted to prove
there was a community,” Bayan recounted to me in her Ras el-Matn garden. “A
community was killed, families were killed.” Another impetus for her work was
the anger she felt at reading the official Israeli account of the massacre,
which was issued in February 1983 as the Kahan Commission Report (and
translated into Arabic in Lebanon). Facing domestic and international outrage
over the atrocity, Prime Minister Begin had appointed the Chief Justice of
Israel’s Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan, to lead an independent inquiry into the
September 1982 events.
The commission
focused narrowly on the Israeli role in the affair, and the report exonerated
the Israeli government of immediate responsibility—though it did find certain
military and intelligence leaders “indirectly responsible” for allowing the
Phalangists into the camps. Ariel Sharon, in particular, was singled out for
“ignoring the danger of bloodshed” and “not taking appropriate measures to
prevent” the violence. As a result of the report, the Director of Military
Intelligence Yehoshua Saguyand the Division Commander in charge of
Beirut, Amos Yaron, were forced out of their posts and briefly removed
from operational roles. The published findings avoided, however, any discussion
either of the victims or of the political background of the massacre.
Bayan al-Hout
described the mechanics of the massacre as having three sides. “I have only one
part of the triangle,” she said, “the victim side.” The other two comprise the
Phalange side—“those who committed the massacre by their hands”—and the side of
those “who were leading the show.” The appendix material from the Kahan
Commission Report reveals the third side of the triangle, and forces a new
reckoning with the mechanics of slaughter and the moral implications of the
events in 1982.
Some critics have
always suspected, and hoped to uncover evidence, that Israeli officials
explicitly ordered the massacre or directly colluded in its execution. These
new documents don’t supply that smoking gun. What they do show is a pattern of
extensive cooperation and planning between Israeli and Maronite leaders in the
aims and conduct of the war that provides a more comprehensive framework for
judging moral accountability. These sources suggest a line of thinking about
the political and military defeat of Palestinian nationalism that built on the
legacy of the Nakba itself, reaching tragic ends through the
destruction wrought in Beirut.
Israeli and
Maronite war plans were not limited to targeting PLO fighters, and this is also
evident from statements by officials on both sides concerning Palestinian
refugees. The refugees were first discussed on July 31, 1982, as the Israeli
siege of Beirut was still going on, at the end of a secret meeting between the
Christian leader Bashir Gemayel, chief of Lebanese Military Intelligence Johnny
Abdu, and leading Israeli and Lebanese officials at Ariel Sharon’s ranch in the
Negev in southern Israel. Sharon explained that he would be insisting on an
Israeli peace agreement with the Lebanese government and this had to address
the question of the Palestinian refugees left behind in Beirut. Bashir told the
Israelis, “We’ll take care of everything and we’ll let you know soon.” Yehoshua
Saguy, the Israeli intelligence chief, responded, “The time has come for
Bashir’s men to prepare a plan to deal with the Palestinians. I understand you
are getting ready to deal with it and you need to prepare a plan.” Sharon added
a final note, anticipating squeamishness in Israel and among diaspora
supporters over such blunt action: “The Jews are weird but you must agree about
the issue—we don’t wish to stay there and take care of the issue”
(I: 234–43).
By discussing the
fate of Palestinians in that way, Sharon and the other Israeli officials
invited Gemayel and the Phalange to do Israel’s bidding in the refugee camps of
Beirut—and received an enthusiastic response. But amid the vague and
euphemistic language of July 31, what was that bidding exactly? The
understanding between the Israelis and Maronites can be traced back to a
meeting earlier that month between Sharon and Bashir Gemayel at the Lebanese
Forces headquarters in Beirut. According to records contained in the secret
appendix, Gemayel asked the Israelis “whether we would object to him moving
bulldozers into the refugee camps in the south, to remove them, so that the
refugees won’t stay in the south,” referring to camps in southern Lebanon.
According to the record, “the DM [Sharon] responded by saying that it was none
of our business. We do not wish to handle Lebanon’s internal affairs” (I:
294–95). Sharon’s disavowal here seems unambiguous, yet such open talk of
driving out Palestinians through violence and expulsion recurred in further
discussions he held just before the massacre. In a crucial meeting with Gemayel
on September 12, two days before the Lebanese leader’s assassination, Gemayel
told Sharon that “conditions should be created which would lead the
Palestinians to leave Lebanon” (I: 83; 100–102). Not all the details of what
transpired at that meeting are known; no complete minutes exist in the appendix
(and none may have been taken).
The excerpts from
the Kahan Appendix do, however, underscore the fact that members of the Israeli
military and intelligence organizations knew in advance what the Phalange was
intending to do to the Palestinians—at a minimum, forced expulsion through
threatened or actual deadly violence, and the subsequent razing of the refugee
camps. According to the testimony of Colonel Elkana Harnof, a senior Israeli
military intelligence officer, the Phalange revealed that “Sabra would become a
zoo and Shatilah Beirut’s parking place.” Harnof added details about acts of
brutality and massacres that had already taken place, inflicted by Maronite
forces with “specific references to acts of elimination of locals ‘most likely
Palestinians.’” This was relayed to Defense Minister Sharon as early as June
23, little more than two weeks after the start of the Israeli invasion (II:
78). On that day, a report was passed to Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and
Defense Minister Sharon that described the Christian militia’s “terminating”
500 people in the evacuation of West Beirut. The Mossad Director Nahum Admoni
and others met with Bashir Gemayel and the description of the meeting contains
harrowing evidence of what was planned for the Palestinians throughout Lebanon.
According to the
notes of the meeting, “Bashir [Gemayel] adds it is possible that in this
context they will need several ‘Dir Yassins,’” referring to a notorious
massacre of Palestinians in an attack on a village by Jewish Irgun fighters
during the 1948 War. But, the memorandum of the meeting records, “N.[ahum]
Admoni stresses that as long as the IDF is around, the Christians will have to
refrain from this type of action. Bashir explains once again that he will act
at a later stage since a Christian state would not be able to survive if the
demographic aspect will not be dealt with” (II: 79). As Admoni explained to the
Kahan Commission, “Bashir had a very spontaneous speaking style. He was
preoccupied with Lebanon’s demographic balance, and discussed it a lot. When he
(Bashir) talked in terms of demographic change—it was always in terms of
killing and elimination” (II: 80).
The invocation of
Deir Yassin was an ominous indication of the measures those who disliked the
Palestinian presence in Lebanon and wanted to see them disappear were willing
to envisage. It is unclear where the Palestinian refugees were expected to go,
if they survived such an onslaught. Jordan was one possible destination—and
Sharon had voiced hopes of seeing the Hashemite Kingdom collapse and turn into
a Palestinian state as a result of an influx of Palestinians from Lebanon,
since this would, he thought, relieve pressure on Israel to withdraw from the
West Bank. The father of one Phalange militia member involved in the
massacre testified to a staff member of the Kahan Commission that
before entering the camps, the fighters were briefed by Elie Hobeika, from
which “the men understood that their mission was to liquidate young
Palestinians as a way of instigating a mass flight from the camps—in accordance
with Bashir’s vision of the final act of the war in West Beirut.”
Israeli officials
were evidently aware of Gemayel’s dire intentions but did not want to pay a
moral price for their strategic alliance with the Maronites. When pressed by
Chief Justice Kahan about Phalange intentions with regard to Palestinian
civilians, the Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi explained the Israeli reply to
Gemayel: “We told him we thank him very much, but that we have no intention
that the solving of the Lebanese Palestinian problem would be made at the
expense of the State of Israel” (II: 81–83). In the aftermath of Sabra and
Shatila, Sharon’s primary defense was to blame the Phalange militiamen and
exonerate the Israeli army which remained outside the camps during the
massacre.
The new documents
paint a more incriminating picture of wider Israeli official eagerness to
invite the Phalange militia into Beirut, to help fulfill a broader diplomatic
and military objective of vanquishing Palestinian demands for nationhood and
the right of return. For the Lebanese, the revelations contained in the Kahan
Appendix will elicit an uncomfortable reckoning with a past many would rather
forget. The Maronite collusion with the Israelis before and during the invasion
was known, but the additional new details provide a fuller picture of
right-wing Christian agency in the Israeli intervention that wrought
destruction across the country. The evidence of Maronite leaders’ planning of
violence will undermine prolonged efforts to rehabilitate the wartime
leaders of several political parties.
In Israel, the
rehabilitation campaign reached its apogee in the case of Ariel Sharon. Initial
public condemnation of Sharon’s part in the 1982 War eventually gave way to his
resurrection with his election as prime minister in the early 2000s. But a
focus on Sharon alone absolves others of their involvement in the violence
against Palestinian refugees. Eliding Palestinian political demands did not
work in the 1980s, and will not go unchallenged today. As Bayan al-Hout’s
confrontation with the soldiers who took away her husband’s passport showed,
Palestinians still exist even if evidence of their history is stolen.
With a taxi
waiting to take me back to Beirut, Bayan walked me to the door, stopping by
another large tree in her garden. She had me extend my hand into the
trunk—hollowed out completely by a bomb dropped during the war. On the winding
drive back down to the valley, I thought about something Bayan told me during
my visit. I had asked about her methods as a historian, and my own struggle to
assemble the missing pieces of the triangle that would illuminate the political
origins of the violence.
“The historiography
of massacres could never be done as a plan, because the massacre itself, it
leads you,” Bayan explained. “It makes its own historiography. You are led by
the massacre.”
This essay is
adapted from Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David
to Oslo, published by Princeton University Press.
Seth
Anziska is
the Mohamed S. Farsi-Polonsky Lecturer in Jewish-Muslim Relations at University
College London. He has been a visiting fellow at the American University of
Beirut and the London School of Economics. In 2016 he was awarded the Oxford
University Press Dissertation Prize in International History (2016).
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
