Sharon spells war for those Palestinians who still bear the scars

A standard, bedrock Palestinian view is that there is no real difference between so-called Israeli moderates and extremists, …

A standard, bedrock Palestinian view is that there is no real difference between so-called Israeli moderates and extremists, Labour and Likud, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. It is as firmly held in Beirut's Sabra and Chatila refugee camps as anywhere else that the massacre that took place there 18 years ago is generally regarded as the most damaging such episode in Israel's history. The killings are also indelibly associated with Sharon, defence minister during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Abu Mujahid, who runs a youth centre in Chatila, was there. On the night of September 15th, 1982, he couldn't get home past the Israel army that had laid hermetic siege to the camps. "It was like daylight at night," he said of the flares it continuously threw up. For the next 48 hours, aided by the siege and the flares, right-wing Phalangist militiamen, Israel's Lebanese allies, went through the camps, slaughtering anything up to 3,000 men, women and children left defenceless by the enforced departure, a few days before, of Yasser Arafat and his guerillas. When Abu Mujahid finally made it he saw "corpses so bloated and blackened in the sun that fathers couldn't recognise their own sons, bodies torn apart, and strewn about, along with dead animals, like garbage".

"Sharon may have ordered this," he said, "but, for me, they are still basically the same. The only difference is that when Labour kills, it pretends to regret it, while Likud does it with a smile."

But for Suheil Natur, a researcher, Sharon will be much worse than Barak, less because of who he is than because of the conditions in which he has come to power. "Of course," he said, "the very name Sharon carries a message - prepare yourselves for war." But there have been extremist prime ministers before. Older camp residents recall the shock they felt when Menahim Begin, leader of the pre-independence Irgun terrorist underground, came to power in 1976, to be followed by the more extreme Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the Stern Gang. "The difference this time," Natur said, "is the whole climate of extremism in Israel; the fact that the peace process is virtually dead and the logic of violence has taken over.

READ MORE

"After Oslo we had thought that coexistence would become possible; that the Israel peace camp would push for a reasonable Palestinian state. But instead, it accepted all these interim arrangements that tore the heart out of one in advance. "Now, with the Intifada, it hardly raised a squeak of protest at the brutalities of the army, and then it swallowed the line that Arafat only repaid generosity with violence."

"The Intifada has given us new hope," said Nihad Hamad, a social worker. "At least there is now talk of the right of return. With Sharon there may be war, but with war there is hope of victory - and anyway, anything is better than rotting here for another 53 years."

No, they say, it is not they, but Arafat and his Palestine Authority (PA), who are in a panic. In the run-up to the elections the PA had urged Israel-Arabs to rally behind Barak. "Just what business is it of Arafat's?" asked Abu Mujahid, "trying to market Barak, the bad, for Sharon, the even worse - and with the blood of our latest martyrs?"

Arafat is seen to have invested his all in a fraudulent peace process that is now on the point of blowing up in his face. Arab governments are seen to be scared too. "Of course," said Suheil Natur, "they are again singing the old song - that we must give any new man his chance, whoever he is. After all, they say, didn't Begin, the first of the Likudniks, become the first to make peace? But peace with Egypt was the easiest; Israel had to yield none of its historic claims; Egypt got all her territory back." Jordan is perhaps the most fundamentally exposed.

"Remember," he said, "the Sabra and Chatila massacre was all about driving us out of Lebanon, dumping us in Jordan and turning the Hashemite kingdom into the Palestine state. It didn't work last time, but already he's talking about trying something like it again."

For those with only the squalor, confinement and indolent futility of camp life to lose, there seems to be a sort of grim exhilaration in the feeling that a long struggle may now be moving towards a climax, costly though it will be. The kind of peace that most of them speak about remains what it always was - a "return" not to an Arafat state but to what is now Israel.