Najdeh's director pointed out that that while approximately three dozen NGOs are offering some modest help to Palestinian refugees, including food vouchers, a few dollars, and used clothing, nothing at all has been forthcoming from the Lebanese government, which has now all but blocked virtually every Palestinian fleeing death in Syria from entering Lebanon.
The latest regulations at the Masnaa border crossing (from Syria to Lebanon) are appalling. This observer was advised on 9/10/13 by immigration officials at Masnaa that a new regulation has been put into effect requiring that all Palestinian refugees either, a) show, by means of a lease, that she/he has rented housing and paid in advance, or, b) possesses a paid-in-full airline ticket to depart Lebanon for somewhere/anywhere within 48 hours. It is an absurd, Kafkaesque condition that fundamentally violates the 1952 Refugee Convention--binding on Lebanon via international customary law as well as the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Not to be outdone by Lebanon, Zionist ally Jordan, as well as "Camp David" Egypt, have also issued bans upon Palestinian refugees from war-torn Syria. In fact, much of the help Palestinians from Syria receive comes from their own kin. We see Palestinians helping Palestinians in a heartening exhibition of sisterhood and brotherhood.
Other commemoration events included parties at the Palestinian embassy, a visit with massacre survivors in their homes, and a community lunch. Also each year a march takes place--from Ghobeiry Municipality Cultural Center, located across from Shatila camp, to the cemetery off Rue Sabra. It is here where nearly 1100 Sabra-Shatila massacre martyrs were hastily buried on Sunday, September 20, 1982. As witnessed and reported by the late American journalist Janet Lee Stevens, the corpses, of mainly women and children, were in a state of rapid decomposition due to the hot weather and piled into a mass grave. The site later became a garbage dump, and then a football field, until the Hezbollah-led Ghobeiry Municipality insisted on its sanctity, cleaning up the area and planting some shrubs, while Europeans donated a rose garden.
Despite delayed justice for the victims, the quest, as I say, continues and is accelerating. Another subject much discussed this year is why, after 31 years, Israel and its officials who oversaw the massacre have in the main avoided legal consequences and accountability. But the culture and era of international sanctions to dismantle the apartheid Zionist regime is rapidly spreading and gaining momentum. Two examples are the BDS movement and the EU sanctions. The new European Union guidelines, it emerged today, will prevent Israeli ministries, public bodies, and businesses that operate in occupied Palestinian territory from receiving loans worth hundreds of millions of Euros each year from the European Investment Bank. The EU will also stop awarding grant funding for activities that take place in occupied Palestinian territory, even if they are headquartered inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. As the Palestinian BDS National Committee counseled on 7/18/13, no one seeking the liberation of Palestine and the full right of return must sit by in despair. It remains for all of us to put as much pressure on apartheid Israel and its accomplices, whose numbers seem to be dwindling every month.
There are also a number of other non-governmental initiatives to secure justice for the victims of Israeli crimes, including the 1982 massacre. These include the work of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) (http://ccrjustice.org/) and citizen tribunals such as the just-adjourned Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, which worked on the case of IDF commander Amos Yaron, and the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTOP). The latter is an international initiative created in the 1960s to expose human-rights abuses and to stir people to action in opposition to Israel's clear but unpunished violations of international law. The RTOP's current efforts include achieving justice for the victims of Sabra-Shatila.
As for the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, its indictment of Yaron read in part:
Defendant Amos Yaron is accused of perpetrating War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Genocide in his capacity as the Commanding Israeli General in military control of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in September of 1982 when he knowingly facilitated and permitted the large-scale Massacre of the Residents of those two camps in violation of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907; the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949; the 1948 Genocide Convention; the Nuremberg Charter (1945), the Nuremberg Judgment (1946) and the Nuremberg Principles (1950); customary international law, jus cogens, the Laws of War, and International Humanitarian Law.
This was not the first time the Amos Yaron case has been presented before the international public and may not be the last, as human-rights advocates pursue justice for the victims of Sabra-Shatila.
True American patriots working at or with the CCR have prepared cases and a valuable Legal Handbook for Palestinian Activists (see CCR website). These efforts have included work by Maria LaHood, Jamil Dakwar, cooperating human-rights attorney, and Abdeen Jabara, civil-rights lawyer and activist. The CCR has done historic work on the subject of Universal Jurisdiction and use American courts on behalf of Palestinian claimants to seek justice for alleged rights violations committed by Israeli officials, both in Palestine and internationally.
In a US federal court in 2008, CCR brought a class-action suit against retired Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon, charging him with war crimes and extra-judicial killing for his role in the 1996 IDF attack on a United Nations compound in Qana that killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians who had taken shelter there, injuring many more. While presenting a very strong and factual case, the court upheld a dismissal of Belhas v. Ya'alon on procedural grounds, citing sovereign immunity.
Even so, CCR believes that as we are all citizens of an increasingly interconnected world, it is critical that all nations, the United States especially, recognize and incorporate the norms of international law into their systems of justice. And it was CCR, by the way, which also pioneered the use of the Alien Tort Statute to prosecute human-rights abuses committed abroad in U.S. courts--an effort that has led to the creation of a body of law that helps to hold foreign officials and corporations accountable to the public--plus the organization has also brought cases against U.S. officials in foreign courts under the principle of Universal Jurisdiction, all of this based in the belief that some crimes are so heinous they defy national boundaries. Such initiatives cannot be understated in their importance in educating both the public and legal community, as well as in developing remedies for those previously shut out of the American legal system.
As various aspects of the carnage at Sabra-Shatila continue to surface, they reveal the abject depravity and criminality of Israeli officials as well as the weak response to these crimes by US government officials, including President Reagan. Also discussed this week was the work of Seth Anziska, a doctoral candidate in international history at Columbia University, who has gained some limited access to the reportedly massive secret files guarded by the Zionist regime not only from public examination but also from the governments of its supposed allies.
Visiting the Israel State Archives, Mr. Anziska saw a few declassified documents chronicling key conversations between American and Israeli officials, discussions that took place both before and during the two and one-half days of slaughter. Anziska concluded:
"The verbatim transcripts reveal that the Israelis misled American diplomats about events in Beirut and bullied them into accepting the spurious claim that thousands of 'terrorists' were in the camps, when both countries knew the camps' residents were defenseless--since their PLO protectors evacuated Beirut the month before once Yassir Arafat received written assurances from Ronald Reagan that the US government guaranteed the safety of Shatila's residents. When the United States was in a position to exert strong diplomatic pressure on Israel that could have ended the atrocities, it did essentially nothing. As a result, Phalange militiamen were able to murder Palestinian civilians at their own pace. And they did."
A few summaries from the Israeli archives examined by Mr. Anziska:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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