Murray Rothbard on the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982

All other news, all other concerns, fade into insignificance beside the enormous horror of the massacre in Beirut.  All humanity is outraged at the wanton slaughter of hundreds of men (mainly elderly), women, and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.  The days of the massacre— September 16 to 18—shall truly live in infamy.

There is one ray of hope in this bloodbath: the world-wide outrage demonstrates that mankind’s sensibilities have , as some have feared, been blunted by the butcheries of the twentieth century or by watching repeated carnage on television.  Mankind is still capable of reacting to evident atrocities that are wreaked upon other human beings: be they thousands of miles away or members of a different or even alien religion, culture, or ethnic group.  When hundreds of manifest innocents are brutally and systematically slaughtered, all of us who are still fully human cry out in profound protest. 

The outrage and protest must be compounded of several elements.  First, of course, we must mourn for the poor downtrodden people of Lebanon, especially the Palestinians, who were driven out in 1948 to a reluctant exile from their homes and land.  We must mourn for the slaughtered and their remaining families.  And for the hundreds of thousands in Lebanon and in Beirut who have been killed, wounded, bombed out, and rendered homeless wanderers by the aggression of the State of Israel. 

But mourning and compassion are not enough.  As in any mass murder, the responsibility and the guilt for the crime must be pinpointed.  For the sake of justice and to try to make sure that such a holocaust—for holocaust it has been—may never happen again. 

Who, then, is guilty?  On the most immediate and direct level, of course, the uniformed thugs and murderers who committed the slaughter.  They consist of two groups of Christian Lebanese, working their will on innocent Muslims: the Christian Lebanese Forces of Major Saad Haddad, and the Christian Phalange, headed by the Gemayel family, now installed in the presidency of Lebanon. 

But equally responsible, equally guilty, are the aiders and abettors, the string-pullers, the masters of West Beirut where the slaughter took place: the State of Israel.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Massacre," The Libertarian Forum, October 1982

Time magazine on the Sabra and Satila massacre of June 1982

After the Phalangists had left the camps, Red Cross personnel, many journalists and other persons entered, and it then became apparent that in the camps, and particularly in Shatila, civilians, including women and children, had been massacred.  It was clear from the spectacle that presented itself that a considerable number of the killed had not been cut down in combat but had been murdered, and that no few acts of barbarism had also been perpetrated. 

In this kind of careful, deliberate prose, Israel's official commission of inquiry described the dreadful events of the three days last September when Israelis allowed Lebanese Phalangist soldiers to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, where the Christian militiamen proceeded to murder between 700 and 800 Arabs.  After four months of testimony and deliberation, the Israeli commission last week delivered its report on the Beirut massacre, and it proved to be a stinging indictment of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and several military officials, concluding that they shared an "indirect" responsibility for what happened in the Beirut camps.  The report assigned only a "certain degree" of blame to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but it recommended that Sharon either resign or be dismissed.  It was also highly critical of three top commanders and a military intelligence official who were involved in the Israeli occupation of West Beirut. 

The report, described by the Jerusalem Post as a "political earthquake," set off shock waves throughout Israel and indeed throughout the world.  It was hailed in the U.S. and Western Europe as a remarkable example of self-criticism by a democratic society.  Said the New York Times: "How rare the nation that seeks salvation by revealing such shame."  In France, Interior Minister Gaston Defferre remarked, "This report is the honor of Israel.  It gives the world a new lesson in democracy."  The Italian Communist paper L'Unita called the report "a turning point for Israel," while Italian Journalist Arrigo Levi wrote in La Stampa of Turin: "It would be difficult to find any other nation at war that would let itself be subject to such an open and hard self-criticism." 

The U.S. cautiously avoided any public comment on the report. Said President Reagan: "I just don't think we should be commenting or injecting ourselves into that internal problem."  Nonetheless, some Administration officials privately expressed hopes that the commission's findings could, by reducing Sharon's influence, lead to a lessening of the increasingly pernicious tension that has recently permeated U.S.-Israeli relations.

~ William E. Smith, "The Verdict Is Guilty: An Israeli commission and the Beirut massacre," Time, February 21, 1983