The Sabra and Shatila
massacre is personal
By Sam Bahour
These last few days, as they do every year, weigh heavy on every
Palestinian’s heart. For me, and my family, the heaviness is also personal.
Every Palestinian carries around two hearts. One is similar
to that which all others carry; it keeps us alive, active, working, loving,
moving, singing, playing, and hopeful that tomorrow will bring a better day.
The second is very difficult to explain; it is the one that carries within it
dark and heavy memories of our existence. Every Palestinian carries this dark
heart, albeit the number of chambers in each varies; for far too many, new chambers
are added daily, yet others are calcified but fully preserved.
These days bring to the forefront one of those chambers
present in all of our black hearts. This week, 33 years ago, in full
coordination with the Israeli military which had invaded South Lebanon a few months
prior, a group of “Christian” Phalangist fundamentalists, entered two
Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, and slaughtered over 3000 Palestinian
civilians. Most were murdered assassination style, using hatchets, striking mostly
to the head. Several victims were beheaded. Children, women, men, young and old,
no one was safe. September 16 and 17 were the days when the bulk of the cold-blooded
rampage took place. On September 18th journalists finally made their way into the
camp and the horrific scenes became known to all. Later, in 1983, the Israeli government
appointed the Kahan Commission to investigate the incident. The Commission
deemed Israel indirectly responsible, and Ariel Sharon, then Israel's Defense
Minister, personally responsible, forcing him to resign, deeming him unfit to
serve as Defense Minister. Sharon later went on to become a popular Israeli
Prime Minister.
During the massacre, I was in Youngstown, Ohio. Like
Palestinian communities worldwide, we were glued to the TV screens in total
shock. It was too painful to just sit and endlessly watch the unfolding event
any longer. The news footage of the humanitarian organization workers, wearing
masks to protect themselves from the overwhelming stench of death, picked the
bodies, one by one, off the piles on which they lie dead. As the bodies were
lowered into the hastily dug mass graves, it felt that we too were being
lowered in this resting place, with every descending body, over and over.
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|
The mock funeral procession
departing from the
Arab-American Community Center of Youngstown, Ohio.
|
Watching all this
from the Arab-American Community Center in Youngstown, we decided to act. We
started to plan an emergency mock funeral that would place empty symbolic coffins
on car rooftops and drive through the city in procession, ending symbolically
at one of the local cemeteries. We were determined that our city must be aware
of the war crime that had just took place against the Palestinian people thousands
of miles away. The Palestinian Americans in our community felt an obligation to
not only denounce the killings but to explain that the dead are Palestinian
refugees, kicked out of their homes in what today is Israel, and refused their
right to return home by Israel, the US’s strategic ally. Several in our
community were born and raised in Lebanon’s refugee camps; some of the murdered
were personally known to them. This made the event even more traumatic, because
if they were not in Youngstown they could have been a victim of this crime.
The mock funeral procession was a huge success. My grandmother
wanted to attend, but my father asked her to stay home because she was not
feeling well. The entire community participated. Dozens of Americans joined in
solidarity. The clergy of the city spoke out. We felt we did our part. The mock
funeral was over. We all went home.
 |
| My father, Sami Bahour, with his mother Badia in Al-Bireh, Palestine before he immigrated to the United States in 1957. |
As I reached our
house on Roosevelt Drive, my sister and I were frantically called to immediately
go to my grandmother Badia’s house, three houses away, on Northview Blvd. We
had no idea why the rush. We ran to her house. She was laying on the carpet,
immobile, quiet, but awake. She had third degree burns on her entire body. An
ambulance was called. My dad was called to come and arrived before the
ambulance. He went into shock and has never been the same person since that
day. Grandma was rushed to St. Elizabeth Hospital less than two miles away, which
is the best medical center in the region. She was then to be air lifted to the
nationally renowned Akron Hospital Burn Unit, a specialized facility. Bad
weather did not permit the ambulance helicopter to be used, so in an Intensive
Care Ambulance, she was transported to Akron, 45 minutes away. She fought for
her life for a little more than a week before succumbing to her wounds on
September 29, 1982. We buried her two days later, it was her 60th
birthday.
The funeral wake was difficult. The casket remained closed. As
tradition calls for, a Koran reading was playing in the background as friends
and family paid their last respects. Then, half way through the evening, in a
standing room only hall, my heartbroken father walked to the tape recorder. He
pressed stop and removed the Koran cassette and replaced it with one he had
brought with him; we had prepared it together the night before. When he pressed
play, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “My Mother”
(English lyrics here),
performed by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife, rang out in the utter silence.
Several of the elders in the room leaped up toward the tape recorder, thinking
my father had made a mistake. He asked them to sit back down. He wanted this song
played. The tears which fell at that moment washed my grandmother’s soul, yet
again, along with each and every soul of the victims of Sabra and Shatila.
How was she burned? Grandma Badia, we learned afterwards,
was in the initial stages, or so we thought, of Parkinson’s disease. It turns
out the disease was more advanced than doctors could diagnose. She needed
constant care. The massacre taking place in Sabra and Shatila was too much for
us all. In the heat of the moment everyone left to the mock funeral procession,
leaving grandma home alone in the hope that she would get some rest. The
accident was caused by an oven fire while she was cooking dinner for all of us
who were out demonstrating, at least this is what the fire department
investigation revealed. I’ll never accept that. My grandmother was one more
victim of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre in the Sabra
and Shatila refugee camps.
Two events in my younger years transfixed me on dedicating
my entire life to the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, this event and the
First Intifada. I want to mourn but I can’t anymore because all the other
chambers in my dark heart fiercely compete. Do I mourn my grandmother or the
nearly 3,500 murdered in Sabra and Shatila? Or do I mourn all 20,000 Palestinians
and Lebanese killed in that war? Or do I recall Qana, and if so, which massacre
there, the first or second? While Qana beats on the walls of its chamber, Deir
Yassin and Kufr Qassem can be heard screaming in the background. In between the
screaming there are the smaller “events,” the bombing of buildings, the assassinations,
the unreported natural deaths of refugees in exile and internally displaced
Palestinians in Israel, and political prisoners languishing in detention. Then,
more recent memory yells out -- Gaza 2000, Gaza 2002, Gaza 2006, Gaza 2008/9, Gaza
2012, and then Gaza 2014 deafens me. When my senses return, the one-and-a-half
year-old Palestinian infant, Ali Saad Dawabsheh, who was burned to death last
month in the West Bank village of Duma, near Nablus, by Israeli settlers who
firebombed his home while the family was asleep haunts me. Ali’s father died a
few days later from his burn wounds and his mother died a few weeks after her
husband from hers. Ali’s now orphan brother will survive, like so many before
him, damaged for life, but alive. The list is never-ending!
Yes, there are days when the heavy heart crams the other
heart into a corner of our chest, making it difficult to take a deep breath, at
times bringing painful thumps to the forefront. But I refuse to despair. I
refuse to be defined by this conflict. I do not want to mold my existence into
days of commemorations of exile, massacres, death and destruction. I refuse to
live in the past, but I also refuse to forget the past. I remember in order to
respect, to learn, to understand my present, and to define how I will chart my
future. For those looking in from the outside it will be hard to comprehend;
how a person can live a schizophrenic life but not be infected with the disorder
itself. How, in the same day, a conscious mind and beating heart can make the
case that a policy of slow ethnic cleansing is being undertaken against them,
while the same mind and heart, the normal one, can live a life of hope that is
totally convinced that tomorrow will witness better times.
This is our predicament as Palestinians, we have no
alternative but to struggle with our internal turmoil as we attempt to maintain
our sanity and raise the next generation to understand that both of their
hearts will compete for their chest space too, regrettably.
~ Sam Bahour is a Palestinian American living in his
ancestral home in Al-Bireh, Palestine, eating from the same fig, almond and
olive trees that his father and Grandmother Badia ate from before leaving
Palestine. He blogs at www.epalestine.com.
