I saw Israel’s ‘final solution to the Palestinian problem’ in Lebanon 41 years ago, and I see it again today
Bodies in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, 1982
Don Wagner writes in Mondoweiss:
Forty-one years ago, I was in Lebanon leading a group of ten U.S. relief and development directors hoping to introduce them to the extensive needs of impoverished Lebanese and Palestinian refugees. On June 4, 1982, around 3:00 p.m., we were on our way to the crowded Fakhani district of Beirut when a fleet of Israeli warplanes (U.S.-made F-16s) roared in from the Mediterranean Sea, dropping bombs on the area we were about to visit. We took cover in a hotel basement. After the bombing subsided, I phoned our hosts, who proposed we meet them another day as they were busy searching for survivors from the bombing.
We visited a Red Crescent hospital near the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps the next morning. We were taken to a hospital wing that had been struck by the Israeli bombing the previous day. Suddenly air-raid sirens went off and we were rushed to the basement with the patients and hospital staff. Again, Israeli F-16s were bombing various targets in the area. About twenty minutes later a series of ambulances arrived at the hospital’s emergency entrance and unloaded stretchers carrying teenage girls — some having lost limbs and others enduring severe burns. Hospital workers had just unloaded 19 body bags with girls who had died. As the families of the teenagers began to arrive, learning that their loved ones had been lost, the cries and wailing of the mothers and sisters pierced our hearts. Everyone in our group wept with them. Later, we learned that the UN staff had provided the Israeli military with the route of the Palestinian girls’ field trip, but the military commanders chose to ignore the information, and the three clearly marked UN school buses were targeted on the coastal road.
Sickened by this savagery, I felt we had to tell this story to a U.S. media outlet. We found the addresses and phone numbers of the CBS, ABC, and CNN Bureaus but only NBC answered. Mike Mallory, the NBC Bureau Chief, agreed to interview us. He warned us that all of their recent dispatches were cut by Israeli censors in the New York studios. He conducted a twenty-minute interview with our group, based on what we had witnessed. We learned later our interview was also rejected.
Our Lebanese and Palestinian hosts urged us to return quickly to the U.S. to tell what we had witnessed. We left Beirut on Tuesday, June 8th, and when I landed in Paris, I called my staff, asking them to arrange media interviews the next day. One memorable interview was scheduled for Wednesday, June 9, with WMAQ, NBC-TV in Chicago. Tim Weigel, normally a sportscaster, was assigned to the interview and called to confirm the time of the interview. I was shocked when he said I would be interviewed in Grant Park while an Israeli General would be opposite me in the studio. When I questioned the arrangement which privileged the Israeli General, I was told that one of the NBC staff had confirmed this arrangement with the Israeli Consulate. It could not be changed.
Israeli General Shromi had been touring the US to offer Israel’s perspective on the Invasion of Lebanon or what the Israelis called “Peace for the Galilee.” He began the interview by stating that Israel was conducting a defensive war with “surgically precise bombings to root out PLO terrorist nests.’” I challenged his narrative, claiming Israel started the unprovoked war on June 4. I noted that, according to the Red Cross, most of the casualties were civilians. I gave several examples of the casualties, including the hospital wing hit by Israel on June 4 and the tragic case of the school girls with 19 dead and several wounded on the morning of June 5. The General was clearly upset by my remarks and then he said something that astounded me. “This is our final solution to the Palestinian problem.”
Having pursued extensive studies of the Nazi Holocaust, I communicated my shock, remarking, “I can’t believe what you just said, General. Isn’t this “final solution” language what the Nazis used concerning your people, the Jews? You, sir, have just endorsed genocide, wiping out an entire people, innocent men, women, and children. If this is Israel’s plan it is a war crime.”