An observer of the Palestinian scene in Lebanon notes that the revival of bloody memories has become hotter in recent years. About a month ago, the memory of the events of the Tel al-Zaatar camp was commemorated, and these days the commemoration of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The momentum of factional and popular participation, especially on social media, is on the rise, raising many questions: Why now, why are massacres being revived and others ignored, and if remembering the victims is part of their right, then where are the rights of the living, which sometimes contradicts the presence of the dense memory?
There is no question about the right of the victims, their families, and all their sympathizers to keep the memory fresh and active, but the push to confine the Palestinian people to an emotional state that can only do so by crying, an intentional tension towards the past, a deliberate distraction from the future, and an indirect acknowledgment of the absence of a confident project that answers the question. The many Palestinian questions.
It is like a social hypnosis, close to misinformation, through a deliberate political distortion of problems in the direction of painful events. Evoking the blood-soaked memory, sometimes intended to cover up the Palestinian crisis in Lebanon, is an admission of the inability to address it.
So the pictures of the remains of children coming from the Sabra and Shatila massacre become a substitute for the picture of the child from the same camp, three-year-old Samir Maher Abu Steita, who was drowned off the coast of Greece, fleeing with his family from a socially distressed camp, forgotten by factions, and threatened with extinction in terms of his Palestinian identity, which was once dominant , which vanishes due to the permanent flight of Palestinians from the camp to distant exiles.
We do not know how many of those who visited the mass grave of the massacre victims were helped by their feet to walk dozens of meters further, to overlook the thousands of forgotten poor people in the Shatila camp. And how many of those who remembered the rights of the victims also remembered the rights of the living? The first scene does not need more than a camera, and perhaps a wreath if necessary, the other place needs a project and an act. The legitimate question: What did all these people do for the families of the victims so that their lives would be better than the lives of those who were killed? Even the final figure for the number of victims did not bother to know it away from media use, so that the number remains an estimate.
The cemetery itself, was deliberately neglected for about 15 years after the massacre, and turned into a garbage dump that no one dared to clean. When the meeting of the ten factions was established in 1993, Shafiq al-Hout told them, “There is a garbage complex in Shatila camp under which hundreds of massacre martyrs lie. I give you a year to clean that spot and turn it into a decent shrine. If you do, consider me a soldier in your ranks.” they did not.
The matter is far from what Hitler had said to Hajj Amin al-Husseini in their three meetings, “You are an emotional people.” The year 1987 witnessed the announcement of the official defeat of the Palestinians by the cancellation of the Cairo Agreement by the Lebanese Parliament. The Taif Agreement came to perpetuate that defeat. Yasser Arafat’s complaint to Lakhdar al-Ibrahimi was, “This agreement did not recognize me. This agreement raised the issue of the Syrian, Iranian and Israeli presence and ignored the Palestinian presence.” Even the PLO’s apology in 2008 was considered the apology of the defeated, although it is one of the few who have tried and even executed elements since the beginning of the civil war for sectarian and other transgressions.
Until the time of the PLO’s departure from Beirut in August 1982, the Palestinians were reviving memories associated with what they considered glory and an optimistic outlook towards the future. Their biggest celebration is on 1/1, the anniversary of the start of their modern revolution, during which major celebrations are held. This is followed by the anniversary of Earth Day 30/3. Even the anniversary of the Nakba on May 15 was not fraught with so much oppression. The years after the Israeli invasion in 1982, the memory of Tel al-Zaatar is dominant, Sabra and Shatila, the Nakba, and every massacre and tragic event are recalled. She brought up those memories with a noticeable dip in joy, and all his gadgets. Even the anecdotes they tell are from an earlier time.
The Palestinian memory in Lebanon is highly selective, some of which may be by necessity, but some of it is governed and motivated by the political situation more than by emotion or the victims’ right to be present. Some massacres or violations completely fell from memory, or were buried for a while. Some massacres and displacement are masses of thyme, remembering the victims and half of the killer’s face, and blinding the other half of the face. Reality may necessitate ignoring the role of Officer Raad in the attack, but also ignoring the primary role of one of the actors in the rescue of hundreds of his family under the pretext of political contradiction, this is a great moral fallacy.
In Sabra and Shatila, there are those who repeat the words of Bashir Gemayel that the Sabra camp will become our national park for animals, but he deliberately ignored for years the name of the one who tried to carry out the mission, remembered the petty killers, and distinguished between them according to their final political choices. The politicization of memory to this extent calls into question the moral motives of those calling for retribution for murderers. There is no denying the right of memory to have its holes to rest from the troubles of thinking, but memory should not carry all this political malice.
Yes, the Palestinian memory in Lebanon cannot be fully active, and in this sense it is an impossible memory. Many of the perpetrators of crimes against the Palestinians occupy positions in a state in which the militias that fought the civil war have become an essential part of its structure, and the fate of the combatants was not similar to the fate of their counterparts in other countries. Others are Kyogoslavia, South Africa, or Rwanda, so that it is easy to examine the memory completely freely, far from a language of revenge. Lebanon’s recovery from its past, the liberation of its memory, and part of that releasing the massacre, is a prerequisite for a healthy Palestinian memory.
In sum, the right of the victims to attend does not negate the right of the living to be rescued from an ongoing massacre, but without blood, through the unprecedented deprivation of the Palestinians, which takes on several dimensions. Turning the occasions of massacres into weeps increases misery, without achieving much in the way of the struggle to achieve justice for the victims, and one of the biggest blows that can be directed at the victims and their families is the investment of that blood in the cheap political market.