On this day, 30 years ago, the soil of Lebanon was quenched with
the blood of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese. It is said
that chrysanthemums burst out of the earth at the place where
martyrs’ blood flows. In the year 2012, however, no
chrysanthemums are blooming in Sabra and Shatila. This bloody
crime on the hands of the Israeli state, its US funder, its
Lebanese proxy forces and the complicit Arab regimes that
created the conditions for the massacre of 1982, is carefully
skirted, quietly spun and wrapped in a cloak of silence. We are
asked to forget our people or confuse the events surrounding
their sudden disappearance; we are invited to debate these
matters as a subject for narratives, disputes and counter
narratives. Palestinians were in Sabra and Shatila 30 years ago
– and are in Shatila, in refugee camps throughout the Arab
world, and around the world in exile and diaspora today – after
being made refugees and forced from their homeland, Palestine,
in 1948 in the Nakba which established the Zion