- Days of
Darkness, Days of Awe: Yom
 Kippur in Palestine
By Jennifer Loewenstein
 The Day of Atonement [Yom
Kippur] is the climax of the ten-day period of
repentance that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the
Day of Judgment. These ten days of reflection and
inspiration bring us the eternal message that it
is possible for human beings to improve their
characters. They speak to us about our ethical
conscience and moral responsibility, about
self-examination and spiritual regeneration.
The atonement prayers, articulating the ideals of
human brotherhood and mutual forgiveness, make
the worshiper intensely aware of human frailty,
reminding him that there is no man who is
absolutely free from sin and error. The
confessions are recited repeatedly on Yom Kippur
in the first person plural to emphasize the
collective responsibility of the whole
community.. We are repeatedly reminded that Yom
Kippur brings pardon for sins between man and
God, and it cannot bring forgiveness as long as
no attempt has been made to repair the injury
inflicted upon one's fellow man. God does not
clear the guilty in matters touching human beings
unless reparation precedes all else. The
wrongdoer must first win pardon from the person
wronged.
(PC) - Yom Kippur in Palestine and the
Palestinian people are again atoning for Israel's
sin of occupation. The lockdown in Gaza and the
West Bank is complete: for three days no
Palestinian will travel past a checkpoint; no
swimmers will be allowed on the beaches, more
heavily patrolled by gunboats than ever.
The electric fence around the perimeter of the
Gaza Strip and the wall already built in Khan
Yunis are manned with armed soldiers as are the
borders all around the West Bank. You won't be
going to school or work if it means crossing a
checkpoint. Forget about visiting family and
friends in other towns and villages. Most of all,
don't get seriously ill or wounded because you'll
die before the ambulance is allowed on to the
hospital.
1. The twenty-four hour curfews throughout the
Occupied Territories continue;
2 .The extra judicial killings remain standard
policy;
3 .The shooting of civilians who dare to show
their faces before a tank, a watchtower, or a
soldier demand no punishment;
4. The use of men, women, and children as human
shields meets with rationalization and
apolgetics;
5. The daily sadistic humiliation of fathers
before their sons and daughters is explained
away; the systematic abuse of the right to
education, the freedom of movement, the right to
work, 6. The right to human dignity, are denied
on the grounds of "security";
7. The theft of oranges and olives, of water and
land is justified for the needs of the
"neighborhoods" illegal settlements
that keep expanding and expanding in defiance of
all international law;
8. The bulldozing of family homes and orchards
barely make news any longer;
9. The fact that murder, theft, and marauding on
another people's land is accepted and defended by
the most religious and the most secular alike as
Israeli "self defense" is unquestioned.
The atonement prayers, articulating the ideals of
human brotherhood and mutual forgiveness, make
the worshiper intensely aware of human frailty,
reminding him that there is no man who is
absolutely free from sin and error. The
confessions are recited repeatedly on Yom Kippur
in the first person plural to emphasize the
collective responsibility of the whole
community.. We are repeatedly reminded that Yom
Kippur brings pardon for sins between man and
God, and it cannot bring forgiveness as long as
no attempt has been made to repair the injury
inflicted upon one's fellow man. God does not
clear the guilty in matters touching human beings
unless reparation precedes all else. The
wrongdoer must first win pardon from
the person wronged
. 
More than four hundred children and 1400 adults
murdered in two years. More than 5000 people
imprisoned and tortured. More than 17,000
dispossessed of their homes and land. Apartment
complexes bombed in the dead of night. Whole
factories and businesses destroyed in a single
raid. Social infrastructures and economies
wrecked beyond repair. The poverty increasing;
the unemployment skyrocketing; Refugee camps
invaded and terrorized daily. Jenin obliterated
beyond recognition. Jenin --we're not even
allowed to remember you. And yet I see the bodies
lying out in the dirt. I smell the dead buried
under their dynamited houses. I watch the lost
eyes of the children wandering the ruins and
remember the faces of the children of Rafah and
Khan Yunis more than 50% of whom suffer from Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder because they listen to
bombing and shooting every night never knowing
when it will come to get them.
The months and years pile up like bones. The
bodies turn into ghosts. Twenty years ago this
Yom Kippur, September 16th 1982, Ariel Sharon
sent his phalangist thugs into the Palestinian
refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila to murder
everyone they found. Two thousand women,
children, and men lay slaughtered and mangled in
the dust and squalor of the south Beirut camp by
the time the killing spree ended. At least 700 of
them now lie in an unmarked mass grave at the
edge of Chatila, unremembered; unnamed;
unglorified. Ariel Sharon, the butcher who left
17,500 civilians dead in Beirut during Israel's
1982 invasion of Lebanon now commands the Israeli
state; Sharon, found personally responsible for
the massacre at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's own
Kahane Commission, is now in charge of the
systematic suffocation of the Palestinian people
for daring to live on their own land. 
Yom Kippur in Palestine and the Palestinian
people are still paying for Israel's sin of
occupying their land. How much longer do we
pretend it's not happening?
Yom Kippur.cannot bring forgiveness as long as no
attempt has been made to repair the injury
inflicted upon one's fellow man. God does not
clear the guilty in matters touching human beings
unless reparation precedes all else.
Quotes from: Birnbaum, Philip. Encyclopedia of
Jewish Concepts. Hebrew Publishing Company, New
York; 1979. P.259 Palestine Chronicle
Monday, September 16 2002 @ 02:35 AM GMT
www.kesser.org/gallery/kleinman/
kleinman2.html
the paintings.
A TRIBUTE By Dr. Omar I.
Al Taher* 
THIS IS a tribute to forgotten victims.
Forgotten, because they do not have friends and
allies in high places; forgotten, because their
supporters are not the movers and shakers of
world events; forgotten, because they do not
muster military power and a huge propaganda
machine; forgotten, because no one ever recited
their names and lit candles for them; forgotten,
because they never received a proper burial and
gun salutes. They are forgotten because twenty
years on their bodies still lie in two unmarked
mass graves; one is being used as a garbage dump
and the other has been paved over for a golf
course.
The massacre
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Sabra
and Shatilla massacres in which 3,500
Palestinians were brutally slaughtered in the two
refugee camps in West Beirut at the hands of the
“Lebanese Christian Phalangists —
Lebanese Forces”, a proxy militia, trained,
armed and financed by Israel. This massacre was
the culmination of Israel's bloody invasion of
Lebanon in the summer of 1982, in which over
20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, mainly
civilians, were killed.
The orgy of killing at the camps commenced in the
afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 16, and lasted until
the morning of Saturday, Sept. 18, 1982. While
the atrocities were committed by Lebanese,
Israel's role and prints were everywhere to be
seen. Apart from co-planning the operation,
providing aerial photographs of the camps, and
introducing the killers into the area — a
fact attested to by then Israeli Chief-of-Staff
Lt. Gen. Rafael Eitan — Israeli troops,
whose forward command post was situated a mere
200 metres southwest of the Shatilla camp, looked
on most of the time and prevented refugees from
fleeing the camps all of the time. Controlling
the perimeters, Israeli troops prevented the
Palestinians' escape through light shelling and
sniping, as well as by blocking the main exits;
they also used flares to light up the narrow
alleys at night to provide the killers with a
clear vision. And to top it all up, bulldozers,
with clear Hebrew markings, were later brought in
to “clean up”; they demolished houses
over their inhabitants and dug mass graves,
something reminiscent of what Israel did last
April in the Jenin refugee camp. Furthermore,
according to General Amir Drori, commander of the
Israeli forces in Lebanon, Eitan, met the head of
the Phalangist forces Friday afternoon and
congratulated him on the “smooth military
operation inside the camps”. Hence, the
evidence against Israel as an accomplice is more
than mere circumstantial; it is cogent and
compelling.
US responsibility
One could also venture to say confidently that
the US is jointly responsible for the massacre.
The Israeli occupation of west Beirut, which
precipitated the massacre, was primarily made
possible through the use of American weapons and
an American green light. Moreover, the massacre
followed written US assurances that Palestinians
remaining in Beirut following the evacuation of
PLO forces would be safe, an agreement brokered
by US mediator Philip Habib. In fact, this
responsibility was tacitly admitted by Morris
Draper, the US special envoy to the Middle East,
who stated in the course of a BBC documentary on
the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, which was aired
in the UK on June 17, 2001, that “US
officials were horrified” when told Sharon
had allowed Phalange militias into west Beirut
and the camps “because it would be a
massacre”.
Well, a massacre did indeed take place, and it
was the first televised one, so to speak. Since
then, we have grown accustomed to seeing
slaughtered and mutilated bodies of civilians,
from Rwanda to Bosnia and from Afghanistan to
Jenin. Now, 20 years and scores of massacres
later, one still vividly recalls the horrific
images of piles of swollen bodies or of the
pigtailed 7-year-old girl with 5 gunshot wounds
in her back lying in a pool of blood. But by far
the most indelibly printed image is that of the
frail old man in his white and blue striped
pyjamas lying next to his walking cane with his
jaw smashed.
One also remembers the eerie tone of masked
foreign reporters and correspondents reporting on
the massacre hours after the Israelis lifted
their siege of the camps. The horror and
disbelief at the magnitude of the massacre
overwhelmed a number of reporters and their
footage was disrupted. The massacre drew the
media from all over the world, evoking reportage
that won prizes for meticulous investigation.
 The following
excerpts would perhaps help give the reader an
idea about the extent of butchery that took
place. Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post
described the ghastly sight in the camps in the
aftermath of the massacre in the following
telling terms: “The scene at the Shatilla
camp was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the
deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under
the hot sun, and the streets were littered with
thousands of spent cartridges. Houses had been
dynamited and bulldozed, many with the
inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay
before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to
have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys
and streets, apparently shot as they tried to
escape. Each little dirt alley through the
deserted buildings, where Palestinians have lived
since fleeing Palestine when Israel was created
in 1948, told its own horror story”.
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, two American
journalists, described the scene as they entered
the camps. “When we entered Sabra and
Shatilla on Saturday, Sept. 18, 1982, the final
day of the killing, we saw bodies everywhere. We
photographed victims that had been mutilated with
axes and knives. Only a few of the people had
been machinegunned. Others had their heads
smashed, their eyes removed, their throats cut,
skin was stripped from their bodies, limbs were
severed, and some people were eviscerated.”
Researcher Rosemary Sayigh, described the scene
as the massacre unfolded: “The targeted area
was crammed with people recently returned from
the places they had taken refuge during the war,
now supposedly over. Schools would soon open,
everyone needed to repair their homes, clear the
streets and get ready for the winter. People felt
some security from the fact that they were
unarmed, and that all who remained were legal
residents. Many of the massacre victims were
found clutching their identity cards, as if
trying to prove their legitimacy.”
Hollow appeals
In spite of calls from the UN to investigate the
massacre, nothing of the sort has ever
materialised. Both the Security Council and the
General Assembly have expressed “their
horror” at the “appalling
massacre” and called for an
“investigation into the circumstances and
extent of the massacre” and to make public
“the report on the findings as soon as
possible”. In December 1982, the General
Assembly affirmed that “genocide is a crime
under international law which the civilised world
condemns, and for the commission of which
principals and accomplices — whether private
individuals, public officials or statesmen, and
whether the crime is committed on religious,
racial, political or any other grounds — are
punishable”. In its penultimate statement,
the General Assembly classified the massacre at
Sabra and Shatilla as an “act of
genocide”.
In fact, an Israeli Commission of Inquiry, in
1983, found that then defence minister Ariel
Sharon, Israel's current prime minister —
described lately by the US president as “a
man of peace” — “bears personal
responsibility”; it further recommended that
he should be removed from office if he does not
resign. However, most crucially, the Kahane
Commission stopped short of accusing Sharon of
intentionally introducing the Lebanese Forces
into the camps to carry out the massacre. What
makes the Kahane Commission's investigation into
the massacre suspect and dubious is that twenty
years on, certain evidence submitted to it is
still classified as “secret”.
Universal jurisdiction
It is now widely accepted under international law
that certain crimes are of such an egregious
nature that states are able to prosecute
individuals charged with committing them
regardless of the nationality of the perpetrator
and regardless of the geographic location where,
or the time in which, the crime was committed.
Such principle is predicated on the conviction
that perpetrators of such hideous acts should not
enjoy the same rights customarily accorded by
society to common criminals.
In June 2001, three lawyers representing 28
survivors of the massacre filed a lawsuit in
Brussels against Sharon, holding him responsible
for genocide, crimes against humanity and war
crimes. However, due to a loophole in Belgium's
law, the attempt was unsuccessful. Belgian law,
under which the complaint was filed, is based on
the legal concept of universal  jurisdiction
and states explicitly that immunity attached to a
person's official status is no bar for him being
charged. It sets aside limitation of time,
citizenship and status. The loophole through
which Sharon slipped was that the accused ought
to be in Belgium for Belgian courts to exercise
jurisdiction. Attempts by Belgian legislators to
close this loop are already under way. Mrs Khasan
is one of these lawyers
Ironically, Israel was amongst the first to
invoke universal customary law. In 1960, it
kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Latin America to
stand trial for crimes against humanity committed
20 years earlier. He was found guilty by an
Israeli court and was executed in 1961.
Similarly, in 1985, Israel succeeded in having
John Demjanjuk extradited from the US to stand
trial for alleged crimes he had committed almost
half a century earlier. On appeal from his death
sentence, his conviction was quashed on grounds
that the evidence was insufficient to prove his
guilt.
Lest we should forget
What happened at Sabra and Shatilla was not an
“act of God” but an “act of
genocide”. This means that someone,
somewhere, is responsible for it and ought to be
answerable. Unfortunately, twenty years on, not a
single person has been convicted, let alone
charged.
Paradoxically, the perpetrators of one of the
most brutal and calculating massacres of the 20th
century are neither on the run nor in hideouts.
They continue to run the affairs of the Israeli
state and continue to shuttle freely between
world capitals, taking advantage of the blanket
immunity accorded them by the most powerful
nation in the world.
As has been shown, war crimes and crimes against
humanity are “perpetual crimes” in that
they are triable any time. Cognisant of the fact
that the hierarchy within the new international
order is not conducive to the convening of war
crimes tribunal as in Nuremberg, and until this
moral and ethical aberration ameliorates, the
task is to strive to keep the memory of the
massacre alive in the hearts and minds of all
honourable peace-loving people in the world. This
is the least we owe to the mothers and fathers,
sons and daughters, spouses and siblings of those
who lost their lives.
Dr.Omar I al Taher
* The writer, a holder of a PhD degree in
international affairs and an LLB degree from the
UK, is currently a legal trainee at a law firm in
Amman - September 17, 2002
JUDEOPHOBIA
that was more or less quiescent at the beginning
of the last century, emerged again in 1919 - the
year of the Versaille Peace Treaty. This
established Israel, in what had been the German
Middle East Protectorates, under British Mandate.
A writer Jacob Wasserman depicts the scapegoating
of Jews for every conceivable frustration that
occurred thereafter. At that time Jews emigrating
to live in Israel always bought the land they
wanted from the Arabs, however during the British
Mandate the British themselves occupied land
under a British Land Law still used in Pakistan
and South Africa, one that was used freely here
in Ireland. They took a large area of land for
the establishment of Water engineering plant in
the first instance. It was rumoured recently that
the Israeli government still uses the provisions
of that Law to account for their own occupied
territories.
(jbraddell,editor)
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