Syed Ibrahim Moiz reflects on the Sabra and Chatila massacres 40 years on (September 2022)

Vilification and incrimination against foreigners, particularly in days of desperation, are not new phenomena. Yet even by these standards, the Lebanese war saw a moral nadir forty years ago this month, when far-right Maronite militants reacted to the assassination of their leader Bashir Pierre Gemayel, by springing on and systemically butchering several thousand Palestinian civilians. Not only did this shocking brutality mark the climax of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as it was carried out under an occupying Israeli army, but it was also the culmination of years of systemic propaganda against Palestinians, who were blamed not only for the actions of their political and military leaders but also scapegoated for the breakdown of a dysfunctional factional Lebanese political system that had been created under French colonialism.

Yet the fashionable notion that the Palestinians were to blame for stymying the Lebanese war is ludicrous when looking at Lebanese history. Confessionalist blocs in Lebanese politics, where the elites of the country’s various communities split quotas between themselves, had existed since at least the French occupation of Lebanon.  So too had resultant tensions, not only between sectarian blocs but between different classes of the same sect, as younger populists increasingly began to upstage the aristocrats who had represented their sectarian community. Thus, for instance, Maronite aristocrat Suleiman Frangieh and tycoon Camille Chamoun, both of whom had held the presidency at various points, were increasingly challenged by the far-right Phalanges led by Pierre Gemayel, whose son Bashir ran a brutish militia for the party; they, in turn, maintained their own private militias. Similar dynamics occurred in the Shia community, where the old feudal elite would be upstaged by first Amal and later the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group. Only the Druze community led by Kamal Joumblatt could be said to have its eggs in one basket, but Joumblatt fiercely attacked the status quo from a leftist angle.

The Palestinians were seen, in particular by rightwing Maronites, as a potential boost for the growing Sunni Muslim camp. Historically and religiously bound to neighbouring countries and transnational trends in the mostly Sunni countries of the region, Lebanese Sunnis had been viewed with some suspicion by the Lebanese right; in the 1950s, for instance, they had largely backed pan-Arab trends repugnant to Lebanese nationalists. For Lebanese nationalists, particularly of a rightwing vein, the arrival of thousands of Muslim Palestinians including both civilians and militias, was alarming because the Palestinians might support the Muslim blocs and particularly the younger “radicals” among them, influenced as they were with a nationalist revolutionary trend. Thus they were kept under close supervision; when Palestinians protested on this count as early as 1960, Lebanese ruler Fouad Chehab gave an answer worth quoting at length:

“Let’s speak frankly. Lebanon is a country of sects and we treat everyone according to this reality. If we treat you as a sect, you will dominate the others because of your large numbers, your concentration in the same places and your passion for politics…The Palestinian problem is bigger than Lebanon. For Lebanon will either repress the Palestinians or be repressed by them – and no third solution exists.”

By the same token, underrepresented communities in Lebanon saw the Palestinians as either an aspiration or an ally; these included leftists – whether communists, Baathists, or politically nimble adventurers like the Joumblatts – and Muslims at large. In order to circumvent this, the Lebanese army stealthily lent support to rightwing Maronite militias, most of whom inveighed against the Palestinians. In turn, the Palestinian Liberation Organization – in spite of official neutrality and regular contacts across the Lebanese political and religious arena – drew closer to the camp led by Joumblatt, a loose coalition of Muslims and leftists upset with the status quo.

Israel also exacerbated the situation, mounting regular raids across the border to preempt Palestinian activity; these weighed heavily on the predominantly Shia south and contributed to local alienation, epitomized by Amal founder Moussa Sadr’s eventual drift away from the Palestinian camp. The Liberation Organization agreed to control its armed factions, but as in Jordan, whence it had been recently bloodily expelled, struggled to do so, particularly when confronted with regular provocations by rightwing militias. In one case, Palestinian militants caught Bashir Gemayel, the Phalange leader, after he had ambushed them, but let him go in order to placate the rightwing. The Palestinian leaders were not themselves sinless – several earned reputations for corruption that conflicted with the high-minded ideals behind their resistance – but this was hardly unique to them and moreover taken as a convenient scapegoat for the preexisting strains in Lebanese politics, with the rightwing vilifying the Palestinians and increasingly the Muslims en masse.

Two separate political crises, in the spring of 1973 and 1975 respectively, focused on the Palestinian question and the growing force of Israeli raids across the border. Further urgency was lent to the issue by the ongoing negotiations after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, after which different governments and groups used violence specifically as a bargaining tool. For Israel, repeated punishing raids across the border were a way to intimidate the Lebanese regime into ousting the Palestinians. By this point, what seemed a local conflict was starting to go regional. The United States, hoping to coerce Arab states into its diplomacy with Tel Aviv and Israel covertly lent support to the rightwing militias, in turn emboldening them against any amicable resolution. While Syria, in particular, sought to preserve its primacy in the Lebanese political system. By the end of 1975, when Bashir Gemayel’s militia triggered a bout of sectarian slaughter against Muslims, matters had reached a point of no return. The Palestinians reached a breaking point and dropped their non-interference in Lebanese politics. In early 1976, they backed a number of Muslim mutinies in the army in opposition to the Lebanese command’s tacit approval of Gemayel’s atrocities.

Syria was the first foreign state to directly intervene and in an unexpected direction. Hafez Assad had originally backed the Palestinians, but seeing Arafat as too amenable to his rival Anwar Sadat, judged that the best way to prevent Israeli clients like Gemayel from taking over the rightwing camp was to support the Maronite old guard. Thus when he ordered his army into Lebanon, it was against the Palestinians. The Syrian army thus helped right-wing militias besiege Palestinian camps such as Tal Zaatar, whose conquest in 1976 was achieved with promises of amnesty that instead turned into widespread slaughter against Palestinians. The same Maronite leaders who had thundered about Lebanese independence when it came to opposing Palestinians found themselves in favour of the invasion An American diplomat reported that their enthusiasm sounded “like Assad is the latest incarnation of the crusaders”. The Syrian army would stay in Lebanon for nearly thirty years, its overriding role to produce a balance of clientele favourable to its supremacy.

Israel, meanwhile, was busy bolstering its own clientele, most notably a southern Christian militia led by Saad Haddad and Antoine Lahed that proclaimed a “Free South” in 1979, a year after a brief Israeli invasion that reached up to the Litani River. By the end of the 1970s, the Lebanese state had functionally ceased to exist, supplanted instead by a number of militias across the spectrum. It is important to note that while the Palestinian issue was often cited as the trigger behind these militias, it was the tacit support given by the Lebanese establishment, particularly the army, to rightwing militias that hastened the breakdown of the state. The Lebanese state had practically committed suicide.

By 1981, the Palestinian camp – and in particular Fatah, who were trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the 1970s – had resumed operations from southern Lebanon against both Israel and its client southern Maronite militia. Fatah continued to face significant opposition from other Palestinian actors, such as the freewheeling mercenary Sabri Banna, whose assassination of an Israeli diplomat in 1982 triggered a massive Israeli invasion long in the works. Though they faced unexpected resistance, the Israeli army surged north and laid a summer-long siege on Beirut. Arafat was eventually forced to quit the Lebanese capital at the summer’s end, after which his military commander Saad Sayel was assassinated behind Syrian lines.

Though pockets of Palestinian fighters remained in the south, the Palestinian “shadow state” had been uprooted and Bashir Gemayel had been installed as Israel’s man in Beirut. The thuggish new ruler’s presidency was short, however; within a month he was assassinated, probably with the connivance of Syria. Though the culprits were Lebanese, it was the Palestinian scapegoat that paid the price. Under the watchful eye of the Israeli army, Gemayel’s spymaster Elie Hobeika led his militia into the Sabra and Chatila camps, now populated almost exclusively by civilians and proceeded to torture, rape and butcher Palestinians in the thousands.

It was a horrific epitaph to the Palestinian “government-in-exile” that had vacated Lebanon leading to the systemic slaughter of now defenceless civilians. But it was also a climax of a decade of systemic propaganda against the Palestinians in Lebanon, who were blamed for every aspect of the state’s dysfunction and collapse. This climate had been fuelled and whipped up in turn by neighbouring regimes, including both Syria and Israel – whose respective invasions in 1976 and 1982 both featured the Lebanese rightwing slaughtering Palestinian camps – as well as the crumbling Lebanese establishment whose appeals to nationalism could not mask their eagerness to ally with these foreign interventions.

As it happened, the culling of the Palestinians did not end foreign intervention in Lebanon, whose plight as a plaything of foreign powers has only intensified. Israel and Syria would only fully vacate the country in 2000 and 2005 respectively, by which point Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries had also stepped in to install their clients, with corrupt patronage networks abounding around a fragile state. There was no real accountability for war crimes. Bashir Gemayel’s brother Amine replaced him, while Elie Hobeika went from a client of Israel to a client of Syria. To date, few of Lebanese’s war-born oligarchs have faced any inquiry as to their role in the massacres.

Nor were the Palestinians finished. By 1983, separate networks of Palestinians had returned to various parts of the country, often with Lebanese Muslim support, though their role has since been firmly secondary to that of Lebanese militias. For Palestinians in Lebanon, little has improved, most still live in squalid refugee camps. Just like the influx of Syrian refugees post 2011, they have been seen as a security risk and a potentially dangerous boost for Lebanese Sunnis, the only confessional group whose militias have regularly been targeted by the Lebanese government. The Palestinian experience in Lebanon, with its nadir in September 1982, epitomizes the worst risks of scapegoating and dehumanising a persecuted and dispossessed minority behind a nationalist, patriotic and confessional façade.