Explaining What Partial Responsiblity Means By Samer Oweida, Dana Omran & Julia Chocair
As you walk through the streets of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, you are engulfed by the desolation that permeates every aspect of life. The orphaned children playing soccer on the site of their parents’ deaths, the decrepit buildings, still not repaired 20 years later – these images serve as constant reminders of the atrocities that occurred at one of the most brutal stages of the Lebanese civil war.
According to the BBC, the Israeli siege of Beirut that began in June 1982 defied the United Nations Security Council resolutions that demanded an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. “Operation Peace for Galilee,” as the Israeli government called it, was facilitated by a strategic alliance with the Lebanese Phalangists, a right-wing Christian militia that felt threatened by the presence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon. Without a comprehensive understanding of the nature of this alliance, the slaughter that began on Sept. 16 in these Palestinian refugee camps is often subject to historical distortion.
The massacre followed the withdrawal of over 14,000-armed PLO forces (an overwhelming majority), which was orchestrated by a U.S.-brokered agreement and monitored by a U.N. peacekeeping force. Regardless, the architects of the 1982 invasion, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and then-IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, moved Israeli troops into West Beirut and permitted Christian Phalangist militias to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila with the purpose of routing out remaining PLO forces. What ensued is widely regarded as the worst atrocity of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war and perhaps of the entire Middle East conflict. The brutality of the events created mass public outcries within Israel regarding its government’s role in the massacres and the nature of its presence in Lebanon. As a result, an investigative commission was established, forcing the eventual resignation of both Eitan and Sharon.
Today, Israel’s role is still the subject of intense controversy. It cannot be denied that mercenary Lebanese Phalangists in fact committed the actual murders. However, the story does not end there. In the words of British correspondent Robert Fisk of The Guardian, who was in Lebanon at the time, “The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen . but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them . they had given them military assistance – the Israeli air force had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Shatila – and they had established military liaison with the murderers in the camps.” Although the Lebanese Phalangists physically carried out the murders, their actions would not have been possible without the presence and military support of the Israeli armed forces.
The Viewpoint by Dan Spector and Julia Segall [“Israel Shares Responsibility in Lebanese Massacre,” Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2002, The Hoya, p.3] mentions that the Israeli Kahan Commission found Israel “indirectly responsible” for the massacres. It fails, however, to clarify the significance and repercussions of indirect responsibility. The Kahan Commission’s report states, “it is the duty of the occupier, according to the rules of usual and customary international law, to do all it can to ensure the public’s well-being and security. Even if these legal norms are invalid regarding the situation in which the Israeli government and the forces operating at its instructions found themselves at the time of the events, still, as far as the obligations applying to every civilized nation and the ethical rules accepted by civilized peoples go, the problem of indirect responsibility cannot be disregarded.”
Furthermore, the Kahan Commission refers to nearly 1,800 “missing” persons who disappeared near the camps at the time of the massacre, stating that the nature of their deaths was “undetermined.” Therefore, Israel’s failure to intervene against the Phalangists during the slaughter should not be overlooked. Any attempt to liberate the Israeli government from blame for this tragedy is nothing more than moral cowardice and a callous rejection of the suffering of those innocent civilians.
Peace comes from compassion and understanding, not from deferral of responsibility. It is the mutual responsibility of all leaders to demonstrate an equal respect and compassion for human life in order to put an immediate stop to the cycle of violence. To defer responsibility onto one party, whether Arab or Israeli, is to shirk away from our responsibility as students and human beings. Only by recognizing the mistakes of the past can we truly appreciate the complex nature of today’s events in the Middle East and move forward with moral conviction and dignity.
Samer Oweida is a junior in the School of Foreign Service, Dana Omran is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service and Julia Choucair is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. All are members of the executive board of the Young Arab Leadership Alliance.
