Declassified Mossad Docs Reveal Israel’s Complicity in 1982 Massacre by Lebanese Fascist Militia
23:45 GMT 09.09.2022 (Updated: 17:27 GMT 15.01.2023)
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In documents recently declassified and published by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the direct connection between Israel’s Mossad spy agency and the Lebanese fascist group responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees was revealed.
The document is an account of the 1981-1982 period, including the planning and execution of Israel’s June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which aimed to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the country and install a pliant, pro-Israeli Christian leader in Beirut. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin promised the move would bring Israel “forty years of peace.”
It was submitted to the Israeli High Court of Justice by the Prime Minister’s Office in response to a court petition seeking information about the connection between the Mossad, Israel’s espionage agency, and the Christian militias in Lebanon responsible for massacring Palestinian refugees.
When the Mossad was asked for the documents in 2020, it claimed it couldn’t find them.
The brutal killings of between 460 and 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites in Beirut’s Sabra neighborhood and the nearby Shatila refugee camp on September 16-18, 1982, were carried out by militias of the Lebanese Forces, the military wing of the far-right Kataeb Party, also called the Phalangists, which came from Lebanon’s Maronite Christian community.
‘We Will Help the Christians Help Themselves’
Israeli cooperation with the LF was already well-known: when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched the 1982 invasion, they advanced to the outskirts of Beirut, but held back in support of the LF while it advanced into the city and seized power.
Kataeb leader Bachir Gemayel, a key Israeli partner, became Lebanon’s prime minister. Israel supported Gemayel against the PLO, which had rebased itself in Libya after being driven out of Jordan at the outset of that country’s civil war, but retained a powerful presence in southern Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees had fled after being driven out of Israel and denied the right to return to their homes.
According to the document, the IDF retained almost complete control over the LF, dictating its actions during the conflict and its policies after it took power.
“We have the Lebanese to do what we want them to do,” the document states, according to Haaretz. “That is the asset we have, now tell us what to do with it. Because the state isn’t all that organized in its decision-making, the ones who told us what to do with the asset wasn’t Begin, and the government, but rather the military.”
The file reveals that the IDF and LF had been preparing the war for more than a year.
“It was Israel’s most planned war,” the document says. “The preparations had already begun in mid-1981, and they gained momentum towards the end of that year. In January of 1982, [IDF General and Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon met the Christian [LF] leadership – and said to Pierre Gemayel: ‘We are embarking on a full-scale war and that as a result of it, there ought to be change in Lebanon-Israel relations.’’
According to the Mossad document, the IDF’s links inside Lebanese politics go back to the 1950s and the administration of Lebanese Prime Minister Camille Chamoun, a Maronite, who had appealed to imperial Iran and the United States for help staying in power in 1958. Those links deepened after Lebanon descended into civil war in 1975, and Chamoun’s National Liberal Party allied with Kataeb to form the Lebanese Forces. Chamoun appealed to Tel Aviv for help, which began selling the LF weapons.
“There were no far-reaching diplomatic talks with the Christians, there was no profound discussion,” the document says, adding that the IDF’s thinking was simply that “We will help the Christians help themselves.”
It lays out in great detail how the arms were smuggled secretly into Lebanon, noting they were “loaded onto rafts of a sort that carried quantities of arms. We would arrive on a given night with two shipments, and in the third stage we refined it even more.”
According to the Mossad, they transferred 6,000 M-16 rifles and 60,000 rounds of ammunition for them; 40 120-millimeter mortars with 12,000 shells for them; and 100 81-millimeter mortars with 2,000 shells for them.
‘Goyim Killing Goyim’
It was Gemayel’s assassination on September 14, 1982, just months after taking power, that set in motion the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. A bomb had exploded at the Kataeb headquarters, killing him and 26 other Phalangists. The American FBI concluded that the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) had been responsible for the blast, but Kataeb decided to take revenge upon the PLO instead.
The ruins of the Sabra neighborhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut seen in 2003, 21 years after the massacre of Palestinians by the Lebanese Forces
© Flickr / IsmailKupeli
Gemayel’s death prompted the IDF to enter parts of western Beirut, which it had previously hesitated to do and which was in violation of the ceasefire agreement, on claims of “restoring order.” According to an Israeli investigation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre known as the Kahan Commission, Defense Minister Sharon and IDF Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan decided that the Lebanese Forces should be used to enter the Palestinian refugee camps located there. The two, along with several other senior Israeli defense officials, met in a building 200 meters from the Shatila camp the day before the attack and gave the order for the LF to enter the camps.
Over the following two days, the LF murdered its way through the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila camp, which the IDF had surrounded and claimed was packed with Palestinian “terrorists.” While there were some firefights as Palestinians defended themselves, there were also lined-up executions of Palestinians by the LF.
Afterward, the area was closed off, and only a few journalists were able to get in and describe what they found. One described how many of the bodies of the dead had been severely mutilated: young men had been castrated, some people had been scalped, and some had the Christian cross carved onto their bodies.
At the time, when Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin was asked about the massacre, he dismissed it as “goyim killing goyim,” the Hebrew word for non-Jews. In fact, they did so on Israeli orders using Israeli weapons.
