This week Victory to the Intifada (VTI) remembered the victims of the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla. Two demonstrations were held in London: the regular Thursday evening picket outside M&S at Marble Arch and a picket of Camden M&S on Saturday. These events were lively, vocal and effective, enabled by the lack of a significant police presence and the absence of the fascist opposition demo - apparently celebrating Jewish New Year. Thursday’s picket coincided with the date that Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia were given the go ahead by Israel to wreak revenge on an innocent Palestinian refugee population residing in an area under Israeli Defence Force (IDF) control. The assault lasted 62 hours and up to 4000 people were killed - the exact numbers are unobtainable as victims were buried under rubble and in mass graves, bodies were removed and men ‘disappeared’. The victims included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disembowelled before or after they were killed. In 1983 Israel’s own state inquiry found Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, personally responsible for these murders during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Sabra and Shatilla were refugee camps – the Palestinians living there had been forced from their homes and lands by Israel. Then Israel oversaw their massacre – there was an IDF forward command post on the roof of a multi-story building located some 200 metres southwest of the Shatilla camp from which soldiers were recorded as having seen the brutal rampage and informed their superiors who did nothing to stop it. A document issued by former Defence Minister Sharon’s office containing his ‘Summary of 15 September 1982’ states: ‘For the operation in the camps the Phalangists should be sent in’ and ‘the I.D.F. shall command the forces in the area.’ The mass murderer Ariel Sharon far from being indicted in Israel now stands at the head of the Israeli state as Prime Minister.

In 2002 attempts were made to charge Sharon with war crimes before a court in Belgium. After the trial was announced three key witnesses, Lebanese right-wing Christians involved in the massacre, were killed:
· Elie Hobeika was blown up outside his house in Beirut together with three bodyguards just a few days after he’d agreed to give evidence in Belgium.
· Michael Nasser was shot dead in Brazil by a man firing a pistol equipped with a silencer; his young wife was shot down beside him.
· Jean Ghanem drove his car into a tree on New Year’s Day.

Once again Israel and its terrorist leaders were able to mock justice and conceal their acts of genocide against the Palestinian population. Ariel Sharon has a long history of perpetrating massacres, as do most of Israel’s leaders past and present. They are motivated by racism, inherent in the Israeli state’s need for a Jewish majority in order to exist and the difficulty of achieving this alongside the Zionist desire to expand the borders of Israel, in many cases to take in all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. (Betar, the far-right Zionist group who aim to destroy the pickets of M&S and silence Palestinian solidarity, subscribe to this Zionist vision of Greater Israel.) All Zionists therefore support ethnic cleansing. Even the so-called ‘Prince of Peace’ Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister 1992-1995) boasted of ethnic cleansing in 1956 when he was commander of forces in northern Israel: ‘I solved one problem in the north by exploiting the fighting against the Egyptians… and we transferred 2000 Arabs… across the Jordan River into Syria.’

Victory to the Intifada urges everyone to isolate the Zionist state in the fight against racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide and injustice. The accusations that British fascists would be willing to join us is preposterous and clearly a Zionist invention to discredit our campaign and silence Palestinian solidarity. It is the Zionists themselves that exhibit anti-Semitism – against both Arabs and Jews – as they have shown in Britain with threats and abuse against an anti-Zionist Jew in Manchester, following in the footsteps of their leaders who committed terrorist acts against the indigenous Jews of Palestine when they marched in the 1920s in opposition to the Zionist project of the settler state of Israel. It is the Zionists themselves who found that their ideology shared aspects of Hitler’s vision in the 1930s, which Hitler himself recognised allowing the Zionists to continue to function after every other Jewish organisation in Germany at the time had been brutally suppressed. Fascists find commonality with other fascists because they share racist views and the founder of Betar supported Mussolini and wrote an article titled ‘In defence of Fascism’. For further reading on this or other aspects of Zionist history contact the address below.

In the meantime… get active, get organised and join the only weekly demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian people on the streets of Britain:
Every Thursday 6-8pm, Marble Arch Marks and Spencer, Oxford Street

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
Free Palestine!
Boycott M&S!