“Pregnant women will give birth to terrorists; the children when they grow up will be terrorists.” (Phalangist involved in the Sabra and Shantila massacre, when questioned by an Israeli tank crew, West Beirut. 17 September 1982. Robert Fisk; Pity the Nation, p359).

“We know, it’s not to our liking, and don’t interfere.” (Message from and Israeli army battalion commander to his men, on learning that Palestinians were being massacred. 17 September 1982. Robert Fisk; Pity the Nation, p3590.

It is hard to see any semblance of humanity in a war zone.

In the escalation of the crisis in the Middle East, the focus yesterday was on a spot on the map of Lebanon called Ain al-Hilweh. It is a refugee camp near the city of Sidon in Southern Lebanon, quite near the border with Israel. There are several refugee camps, although to call them camps makes them sound like places of transience, where people stop for a while and then move on, as refugees, the move on would hopefully be to a place of permanence. But Ain al-Hilweh has been a refugee camp since 1948 when Palestinians were expelled from Israel. The current population of Ain al Hiwel is over 70,000 Palestinian refugees but that number has grown with refugees from Syria.

Lebanon hosted many of the 750,000 Palestinians exiled during the period of the Nakbah, from 1948 as Israel consolidated its hold on the UN mandated shared Israel/Palestine.

Another such refugee camp was the Shatila refugee camp, south of Beirut which in 1982 was the site of a massacre, the slaughtering of over 4,000 men, women and children by a militia controlled by the Israeli Defence Force. The Shatila Refugee‘s current population is almost 10,000 registered Palestinian refugees and another 10,000 Syrian refugees escaping the horrors of their civil war and the devastation that ruined cities such as Aleppo, which still looks a bit like Gaza does today, essentially levelled and uninhabitable.

Since 1948, the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has denied them any entitlement to citizenship under Lebanese law, effectively rendering them as stateless and as such denied the opportunity to earn a living or access to health services.

“It is a tragedy of both our people. How can I explain in my poor English? I think Arabs have the same rights as the Jews and I think it is a tragedy of history that a people are refugees make new refugees. I have nothing against Arabs… They are the same as us. I don’t know that we Jews did this tragedy – but it happened.” (Shlomo Green, Jewish refugee from the Nazis, on learning that his home in Israel was taken from a Palestinian family in 1948. Robert Fisk; Pity the Nation, P. 12).

Shlomo Green was a refugee from Romania and settled in a house taken from David Damiani, an exiled Palestinian businessman. In Robert Fisk’s book, Pity the Nation, both men are cited in the second chapter, one was a refugee, a survivor of the Holocaust who had lost many relatives at Auschwitz, the other, forced from his home and the country of his birth.

Hamas and Hezbolla are ‘terrorist’ organisations, born out of the dispossession and dehumanisation of Palestinians who have been denied basic human rights since 1948.

The family whose home was taken for Shlomo Green’s family to occupy were among the 750,000 people shunted north to Lebanon, to live in a refugee camp, seemingly for ever with no rights, no recognition, just discarded people: Crammed into the confines of a restricted area such as Shantil or Ain al-Hawel. For over 75 years, those expelled and their off spring, now four generations have been left receiving handouts through Red Cross and UNHCR for survival. A breeding ground for discontent and even, dare it be expressed, anger at the treatment meted out for being who they are, stateless people, effectively nobodies.

Is it any wonder that the discontent can lead to the occasional bit of rebellion, the occasional outburst of anger, and when religion gets involved, that the dispossession is seen through the lens of discrimination which has been a hallmark of the region since the birth of religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam? People occupying the land because God said it was theirs.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying,

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan ind into the land of Canaan;

Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you, and destroy all their pictures,and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down their high places;

And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it…

ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.” (The Bible, Numbers 33: 50-55).

Is it any wonder why casualties are so disproportionately high on the Palestinian side of the conflict?

Israeli excuses for the high rate of civilian deaths and injury is because Hamas and Hezbollah use the people as human shields. I guess that must be true, since humans lived in the several multi-storied apartment blocks which was demolished to assassinate the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, apparently using a US supplied ‘bunker buster’ bomb, or in targeting Hamas militants in Gaza to bomb the areas which dropped leaflets had told the people to the safe areas on the maps provided, or to bomb hospitals and schools since that is the most obvious place the ‘terrorists’ will hide.

The long long history of violence, dispossession, religion continues unabated, the rivers of blood flow endlessly and it seems that the only non terrorist is… mmmm.

Robert Fisk was a respected journalist for The Independent and various other respected newspapers and journals. He lived in Beirut until his death in October 2020.

An Israeli journalist who lives in Ramallah in the West Bank, but from1993 to 1997 lived in Gaza is Amira Hass. For over 30 years she has written for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. In 1996 she wrote Drinking the sea at Gaza; Days and nights in a land under siege, and explains why she chose to live in ‘Yassir Arafat’s garbage strewn statelet’.

“In the end, my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me Gaza embodies the entire saga Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it represents the central contradiction the State of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve. I needed to know the people whose lives have been forever altered by my society and my history, whose parents and grandparents, refugees, were forced from their villages in 1948.” (Amira Hass. Drinking the sea at Gaza, P 7).

Amira Hass is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel in 1948.

Yes, Shlomo Green, both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live, and to live in peace.