A Photograph that changed my life

Never forget Sabra and Shatila (Beirut, 1982).

Victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 1982. Photo: Bill Foley (Associated Press).

I became a journalist because of a photograph by Bill Foley (AP) that ran on the front page of an Indian newspaper in 1982 (I believe it was The Statesman). The picture was taken in Sabra and Shatila (Beirut, Lebanon) a few days after the mass slaughter of Palestinians engineered by the Israeli army and a Lebanese Christian militia. The photograph showed two grieving women bent over dead bodies. That image captivated me; what exasperated me was the lack of explanation of their grief. One of the women had her hand over her mouth. Was it the smell that bothered her or was it that she was holding back her emotions as she searched for her loved ones.

Years later, when I was living in Beirut, I asked Robert Fisk (1946-2020) about that photograph. He had been at Sabra and Shatila, this Palestinian neighbourhood in the city, not long after the massacre had taken place. In September 1982, Fisk had come to report on the massacre with Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post and Odd Karsten Tveit of NRK, as well as with Bill Foley (Associated Press), who took that photograph. They were guided in by Nora Boustany, one of the most important Lebanese journalists of her generation (her part in this story often ignored since she is treated as the ‘stringer’). Of what they saw, Fisk later wrote, ‘There were babies - blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment, and empty bottles of whiskey’.

Fisk’s notes make me shake in anger:

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

Boustany thought back at walking through the neighbourhood hours after the massacre:

The Sabra and Shatila massacre is etched in my memory as an unforgettable lesson about man’s inhumanity to man. It did not matter that I was born a Christian or a Lebanese; what mattered was the sickening, ghoulish way in which women and children were slaughtered.

Two books to recommend: Tveit’s book, Goodbye Lebanon: Israel’s First Defeat (Rimal Books, 2013) and Fisk’s book, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford, 2001).

The title of Fisk’s book comes from a poem in Khalil Gibran’s The Garden of the Prophet (1933).

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose stateman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Gibran, born in Bsharri (1883), was a great advocate of Greater Syria (Bilād ash-Shām), bringing the people of the Levant together despite their differences of culture and place. He felt that unity was more important than division. It was division that caused the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. That massacre (or ‘incident’ as these are often called in Lebanon) sat heavy on the head of Fisk, and that is why he used the poem for his monumental book.

One morning, Fisk asked me if I was busy that day, and when I said no, we got into a taxi and drove to the Islamic Martyrs cemetery and entered the neighbourhood of Shatila. We searched for those two women and others who could tell the story of the violence. It was a day that I will never forget. We never found anyone who remembered the two women, nor did we find their names. But I was shaken by this place that had dragged me into journalism.

I want to share with you Fisk’s assessment of how this massacre was reported and how we should think about it.

When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel's enemies?

That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.

But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure - but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance - the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had established military liaison with the murderers in the camps

Not one journalist in the capitalist press today can write with this kind of clarity. They write either with evasion or they would ask the Israeli Defence minister in charge - Ariel Sharon - to tell them what to write. It is shameful.

I became a journalist, in a way, to make sure that fifteen-year-olds in places such as Calcutta (India) would find out both about the world’s suffering and about the world’s struggles for decency and dignity.

That is the reason why Globetrotter exists. It is a syndication service that tries our best to get honest reports about what is happening in the world. My latest piece is called ‘Israeli inflict revenge on Palestinians for its own intelligence failure’ (You can read it here: https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/03/12/israel-inflicts-revenge-on-palestinians-for-its-own-intelligence-failure/).

Thanks for reading.

So it goes.