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One night’s massacre would have been enough to produce the outcry that
resulted once the first news reports, photos and TV pictures were sent around
the world. That the bloodletting was allowed to continue after we knew what
was going on, beyond the cost in innocent lives, made the fallout even worse. In
Israel, the response was unlike anything in the past. There had been some
opposition to the war: from parts of Labor, from political groups further to the
left and particularly the pressure group Peace Now, formed in 1978 to protest
the Begin government’s obvious desire to use the peace with Egypt as a means
to limit, rather than actively explore, prospects for a wider agreement with the
Palestinians.
After Sabra and Shatila, Peace Now was the driving force behind demands
for an inquiry into the Israeli role into what had happened. But the trauma went
deeper. Israelis of all political stripes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the
Kings of Israeli Square in the heart of Tel Aviv a week after the massacre.
There were soldiers, too: 20somethings back from the fighting and reservists a
decade or more older. Some estimates put the size of the crowd at as many as
400,000, almost ten percent of the population of Israel at the time. The protest
was nominally aimed at forcing the government to empower a commission of
inquiry, which it did a couple of days later. But the mood in the square was
more like an outpouring of shock and shame. While the catalyst was the
massacre in the camps, it tapped into a rumble of growing questions, and
doubts, about the war itself, which had been building ever since the prolonged
siege of west Beirut: what the invasion was for, how it had been planned and
prosecuted, and what it said about our country, our government and our armed
forces.
I was at home with Nava, watching the coverage of the demonstration on
television. I shared the protesters’ view that an inquiry was needed. In the days
since my phone call to Tsila Drori, ’'d remained troubled not just by our failure
to stop the killings once we knew what was going on, but by the response from
Begin, Arik and some other ministers to the massacre. Determined to shift the
blame and responsibility elsewhere, they kept driving home the point that it was
Phalangists, not Israelis, who had carried out the killings. That was true. But it
could not erase the failures of judgment and control on our part. We were the
ones who had allowed them into the camps. Our forces were deployed around
the perimeter. And the killers were our “Lebanese Christian allies”.
The formal picking-apart of Israel’s share of responsibility would be the job
of the inquiry commission. I did take some heart from the very fact such large
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