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When Israeli soldiers re-enter Lebanon, the people share a common dread, but, as is the global norm, there is a hierarchy: the privileged rich will probably be saved while the poorest risk exposure to the greatest horrors.

Former Israeli Defence Minister, the war criminal known as the Butcher of Beirut who later became an Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was “personally responsible” for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 16-18 September 1982. Under his command, the Israeli army oversaw the slaughter of elderly, women, youth and children, and babies, from posts surrounding Sabra and the adjoining Palestinian refugee camp. The inhabitants were known to be defenceless, since Israel had previously arranged for the evacuation of all resistance fighters from Beirut. Eyewitness statements put Israeli soldiers inside Sabra and Shatila during the massacre.

Undeniably Israel’s allies, the fascist Christian militia calling themselves the ‘Lebanese Forces,’ had carte blanche. Despite their penchant for murder, torture and rape, they would have received arms, permission, and assistance from Israel - just as Israel’s latest war crimes in Lebanon required arms, the go-ahead, and assistance from the US.

The prominent journalist Robert Fisk recalls this tactical cooperation between a “supposedly disciplined army” and a band of murdering militiamen in his articles and other written accounts. Among the first into Sabra and Shatila after the massacre, he noted the flare canisters dropped by Israeli aircraft to facilitate the murderers’ grisly work.

The piles of corpses, some hurriedly pushed into heaps and partially hidden under dirt, included pregnant women eviscerated and young males castrated. A short walk from Sabra and Shatila, the modern sports complex marks the site of the old Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium, and, quite plausibly, a mass grave.

This is where several hundred men, rounded up by Israeli-led patrols, were disappeared even after the initial massacre - even as the images of dead families flickered on TV sets and the stench of the dead in Sabra and Shatila mixed with the hot summer air.

The attempted indictment of Sharon, under Belgium’s law of universal jurisdiction, was blocked by US pressure. Julie Flint’s 2001 exposé for the Guardian uncovered the secret documents that were never introduced to a court.

Flint wrote: “What ensues is a cynical damage-limitation conference in which senior officers of the Israeli Defence Forces [sic] utter not one word of reproach for a massacre in which militiamen trained, armed and sent into the camps by them killed at least 900 defenceless civilians.”

Flint later quotes from an account of a meeting between leader of the Lebanese Forces, Bashir Gemayel, and a senior Mossad agent: “In one account of this meeting, Bashir ‘adds that it is possible that in this context they will need several Dir Yassins.’” This reference is to another massacre.

Before it was a massacre, Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village. In April 1948, the pre-national Jewish militia, Irgun, attacked its inhabitants.

For decades, Israel’s damage limitation exercises sought to promote the myth the Palestinian people didn’t exist - “a land without people for people without a land” - rendering the case against ethnic cleansing somewhat difficult to argue. The village that became a massacre stands to testify to a reign of terror, which forced the first wave of Palestinians from their homeland: the 1948 refugees.

The creation of the ‘Jewish state’ in a naturally mixed-religion Arab land undeniably caused extreme hardship. But the suffering and injustice grows worse. It is a horrid wound picked and pulled and torn, without even minimal accountability for the gravest of crimes. The Palestinian diaspora, now living a marginal existence in depressing refugee camps, should rightly be able to claim Israeli citizenship. The keys to their homes, now occupied by Jews, are big and old like crutches. Others have deeds proving ownership of land in Israel proper. Some of the 1948 refugees, terrorised and scattered, landed in Shatila.

By the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, was an Israeli Prime Minister. He was also a Noble Peace Prize laureate. The Butcher of Beirut was President George W. Bush’s “man of peace.” Israel’s latest head of state, Ehud Olmert, is similarly peace seeking.

The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s fresh killing binge in Lebanon is still in evidence. Mainly children fall prey to the unexploded devices left behind by the “completely immoral” use of cluster bombs, which Israeli aircraft hurriedly rained down on the south of Lebanon in the run-up to the ceasefire. So, the war has not ended in Lebanon. And the infrastructure of life is gone. And whole villages were razed.

The two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah were quietly and largely forgotten when they failed to provide an adequate premise for the extent of destruction and loss of life inflicted by Israel. There was nothing surgical about Israel’s operations. As one canny friend ‘living’ as a refugee in Lebanon reported, “you are safe as long as you are not innocent.”

Instead, Israel said it was ‘responding’ to rockets fired into northern Israel by Hezbollah, a preposterous piece of propaganda anyone with a memory longer than a few weeks should be able to decry. True to its military doctrine and history, Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel only after Israel attacked, mercilessly and with “pinpoint accuracy,” Lebanon.

An Amnesty International report finally confirmed what we already knew. Israel’s strikes against civilians and the infrastructure of life in Lebanon went beyond ‘collateral damage,’ being in fact deliberate: they were war crimes.

On Saturday 15 July 2006, the Israeli army first ordered civilians out of Marwaheen and second fired upon vehicles as families tried to leave. A strike against two vehicles left at least twenty civilians dead, mostly children. More Israeli atrocities came to pass, but this was among the first.

Qana - many say the true location of Jesus’ first miracle of turning water into wine - will not be forgotten, since it was the scene of an Israeli atrocity before. In 1996, 106 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians died horrible deaths as Israel shelled the UN compound they had sought refuge in. Many more were seriously injured. The Israeli forces knew where and what they were attacking, since the UN informed them. The drone or “spotter” Israel initially denied existed turned up in UN footage, proving irrefutably the Israeli forces had pictures of the area and people both before and during the slaughter.

Despite everything that continues to happen, Tony Blair is publicly supportive of Israel. Most recently he shamefully declined to call for a ceasefire even as the death toll tipped 1000 civilians in Lebanon.

Equally shamefully, Blair declines to criticise the daily crimes against Palestinians. It is commonly understood that the reductive policy of ostracising the democratically elected Hamas-led government only serves to worsen the already appalling conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Last week saw a report drawn up by influential MPs, spanning all three of the major political parties, alleging pretty much any criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism rather than anti-Zionism. This is truly dangerous.

It is dangerous and to the detriment of democratic principles to wed religion to the state. Thus in Israel proper, non-Jews do not enjoy the same privileges as Jews. Thus in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, malnourished mothers add starch to baby formula to make it stretch further, while illegal Jewish-only settlements have enough wealth and water for lawns and swimming pools. Thus opposition to and outrage at Israel’s crimes are countered with accusations of anti-Semitism - a reoccurring allegation only made more ridiculous if we care to remember Israel’s victims are a Semitic people too, be they Lebanese or the largely forgotten Palestinian victims.

Perhaps it is the enforced impoverishment of almost an entire people that conjures the prevailing political disregard for the Palestinian inhabitants of the Palestinian Occupied Territories and Palestinian refugee camps. For they have been banished to the ghettos they must inhabit, an action seemingly defended on the basis of imputed ‘racial’ characteristics: by default they are the undeserving possible ‘terrorists.’ In contrast, Israel, its religious hierarchy and brutally maintained religious segregation (dubbed the “demographic problem”), enjoys positive acceptance.

In 2000, Hezbollah liberated most of Lebanon: the casualties Israel sustained in conflict with Hezbollah on Lebanese soil were too much for the Israeli public to bear. Israel, however, held onto Lebanese political prisoners, and continued to occupy a part of Lebanon and habitually violate Lebanese airspace - quiet reminders of Israel’s absolute powers.

This is why human dignity and equality in a land for all people is so hard to imagine.

Sarah Skilton