The massacre of Palestinian refugees is remembered every year. Margaretta wa Gacheru
By Margaretta wa Gacheru
In Summary
It is curated by a big-hearted American Jewish historian who felt compelled to remember the Palestinian people.
The Forgotten People is a photographic exhibition currently up until mid-July at Alliance Francaise.
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It is curated by a big-hearted American Jewish historian who
felt
compelled to remember the Palestinian people, particularly those refugees who lived and died in Sabra and Shatila camps where hundreds of unarmed people (between 800 and 3,000) were massacred by Lebanese Phalangists in 1982.
compelled to remember the Palestinian people, particularly those refugees who lived and died in Sabra and Shatila camps where hundreds of unarmed people (between 800 and 3,000) were massacred by Lebanese Phalangists in 1982.
“I’m neither a Palestinian nor a Muslim, so this
exhibition is not about me,” said Dr Dana Siedenberg, the American
scholar who has known about the Palestinian struggle since the 60s when
she was a student activist at University of Wisconsin during the height
of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
Dr Siedenberg came up close and personal with the
‘forgotten’ Palestinians several years later after she had completed her
doctorate at Syracuse University and had gone to work in Washington, DC
as a liaison between Federally Employed Women and Capital Hill.
That was where she met Ellen Siegel, the
psychiatric nurse who had been based at the Gaza Hospital in Beirut,
Lebanon and who had been an eye-witness to the vicious brutality of the
ultra-right wing Phalangists towards the Palestinians who she had seen
slaughtered with impunity in the two nearby refugee camps called Sabra
and Shatila.
Ms Siegel escaped a similar fate, having been lined
up outside her hospital with several colleagues, expecting to be shot.
For some reason, it didn’t happen but the experience had a profound
impact on her.
She has spent most of her life since then inspiring
others to feel empathy for the Palestinians and also to understand the
injustices meted out on them since 1948 when the state of Israel was
established on what had been Palestinian land.
When Ms Siegel won the Arab-American
Anti-Discrimination Committee award and the Rachel Corrie Prize in 2011,
she invited Dr Siedenberg to accompany her back to Lebanon where she
received the awards.
The photographs in The Forgotten People were taken
during that trip by Dr Siedenberg and reflect the flagrant destruction
of the two refugee camps.
Especially moving are images of the ‘martyrs’, all
the men, women and children who died, not only in Sabra and Shatila but
in other parts of Lebanon, a country that, like Kenya, has an exploding
refugee population.
“The Palestinians are living as refugees in
countries all across the Mediterranean rim,” said Dr Siedenberg who was
deeply moved by the resilience of all the Palestinians she met during
her sojourn around the camps.
“I have immense respect for these people who refuse
to see themselves as victims. Instead, they are a preparing themselves
to build an alternative society in Palestine undergirded by their values
of community and camaraderie.”
The photographs offer graphic insights into the tragic situation of that these “forgotten people” have endured.
For instance, there is one image of an old man
looking out nostalgically over a high fence to see the land he and his
ancestors used to live on which is now covered in farms supposedly
“owned” by Israeli settlers who are unapologetic about what could be
called a ‘land grab.”
In his book entitled ‘‘The Battle for Justice in
Palestine,’’ the American-based Palestinian journalist and scholar Ali
Abunimah presents a thorough-going history of that troubled land
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