The other holocaust

Issue 

See no evil: the Sabra and Shatila massacres
SBS TV's Timewatch series
Monday, August 9, 7.30 p.m. (Adelaide 7.00)
Reviewed by Sean Malloy

"Tell the world. Film it, film it, film it", pleads a Palestinian woman who survived the horrors that took place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in the suburbs of Beirut in September 1982. Protected and encouraged by Israeli forces, right-wing Lebanese militias killed 2750 unarmed Palestinians.

Evidence of the massacre was filmed. See no evil includes footage of the events not shown publicly before.

This documentary is a serious and sensitive examination of the massacre. Sensitive in the sense that the sickening bloodshed is not presented in a voyeuristic manner. Serious because it exposes the Israeli government's responsibility for the massacre.

Interviews with witnesses from different sides of the massacre weave together the nightmare created by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israeli Defence Forces veterans who were prepared to speak to the BBC documentary team are akin in their disposition to veterans of other wars who know that something was fundamentally wrong with their actions. Although none of the dissenting Israeli veterans interviewed were directly involved in the killing, their failure to stop the massacre and their government's role in organising it will haunt them for life.

The survivors describe the terror and the organised manner of the slaying. Most seem to be the only ones left from whole families who lived in the camps.

One gripping piece of footage from the time of the massacre records two Palestinian women trying to explain to Israeli soldiers what was happening in Sabra and Shatila. The elder of the two women asks one soldier if it is a sin to kill children; the soldier replies "yes it is a sin". She asks why he

cannot do anything about it. "I can't leave my post", he answers. "Go home", he adds, but she can't go home: her home, Palestine, is occupied and run by a regime that won't let her return.

Israeli novelist Itzhak Orpaz wrote, "My mother and father, whom I lost in the holocaust, were murdered again in Sabra and Shatila".

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