So too had resultant tensions, not only between sectarian blocs but between different classes of the same sect, as younger populists increasingly began to upstage the aristocrats who had represented their sectarian community. Confessionalist blocs in Lebanese politics, where the elites of the country’s various communities split quotas between themselves, had existed since at least the French occupation of Lebanon. Yet the fashionable notion that the Palestinians were to blame for stymying the Lebanese war is ludicrous when looking at Lebanese history. Not only did this shocking brutality mark the climax of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as it was carried out under an occupying Israeli army, but it was also the culmination of years of systemic propaganda against Palestinians, who were blamed not only for the actions of their political and military leaders but also scapegoated for the breakdown of a dysfunctional factional Lebanese political system that had been created under French colonialism. Yet even by these standards, the Lebanese war saw a moral nadir forty years ago this month, when far-right Maronite militants reacted to the assassination of their leader Bashir Pierre Gemayel, by springing on and systemically butchering several thousand Palestinian civilians. Vilification and incrimination against foreigners, particularly in days of desperation, are not new phenomena. Syed Ibrahim Moiz reflects on the Sabra and Chatila massacres 40 years on (September 2022)
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