In the aftermath of Israel’s brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon, forty two years ago this October colleagues Randall O’Brien and Johnny Wink accompanied me to the late Senator Dale Bumpers’ Little Rock office to solicit help in facilitating the transporting of surviving Palestinian children to the US for prosthetic rehab and plastic surgeries. On our way out of Bumpers’ office, Randall intoned the following in his genteel southern drawl, a preacherly and professorial blend: “Senator, there is a broken bone in history. We are calling on you to help mend it.”

The broken bone is the 1948 war during which Israel ethnically cleansed over 750,000 thousand Palestinians from their ancestral lands and the complete vaporization of some 550 villages – permanently wiping them off the face of the earth – much as Israel is currently doing in Gaza and Lebanon.

After trouncing William J. Fullbright in the 1974 primary election and winning the Arkansas US Senate seat held by the internationally renowned American statesman, Chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, and one of the US Senate’s most powerful and most eloquent speakers, Dale Bumpers became an overnight celebrity.

Of a more humble background than his predecessor and a country lawyer by trade, Bumpers was inclined to be more folksy in his small group and one-on-one conversations. And even though his grandiloquence on the senate floor and his public speeches engaged the respective audiences intellectually, Bumpers never lost the oratorical magical touch of speaking to, instead of at, his colleagues and fellow citizens. A case in point was his stellar speech to his former colleagues in the Bill Clinton impeachment trial during the final arguments on the senate floor. Bumpers’ impassioned speech of January 21, 1999, given only days after he retired, might very well have been a factor in saving Clinton’s marriage and presidency.

I spent the summer of 1982 in St. Paul, MN, serving as a consultant for the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center. And I watched from afar, with much trepidation, Israel’s launching its June 6, 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a typically brutal application of Israeli force that resulted in the killing of over 18,000 thousand mostly civilians, and the wounding and maiming of thousands more Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Much like today, another half million were forced to become refugees, many for the second and third times. And much like today, Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, once dubbed the Paris of the Near East, was reduced to rubble.

 As the war began to draw to an end in mid September of 1982, the denouement to this sordid drama set the stage for the catastrophic and heinous genocide at the Beirut-based Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps.

What follows has been likened to Babi Yar and Treblinka. Orchestrated by the Israeli godfathers and executed by their Lebanese underlings, Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon (aka the Butcher of Beirut) oversaw his minions’ murderous rampage. Between 1,500 and 3,500 penned-up Palestinian women, children and the aged were slaughtered during a 36-hour orgy of killing, raping, pillaging, and dismemberment. To cover up this genocide, and much like the current Gaza genocide, no one was allowed in while the bloody carnage was unfolding. Because on the third day the stench from the decomposing bodies was putrefying, no one thought of recording the names, ages and body count of the butchered. Even the animals were not spared. Add carnage to genocide, the corpses of the victims, much like animal carcasses, were sprinkled with lime  and hauled off, en masse, in the buckets of frontend loaders and disposed of in mass graves. And to this day these miserable human beings, reduced to creatures whom the Israelis call Human Animals, have had no kadish, no decent burial, no grave or memorial markers, no annual commemorative services. Their memory, their pain, their destitute human plight, their abject misery, and their cry for justice were buried with them. For more information see online clinical psychologist Jewish American Ellen Seigel’s  live interviews shortly after she visited to the crime scene.  Further, in a 9/14/2017 Nation article Rashid Khalidi states that “The United States was responsible for the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut. … Washington had explicitly guaranteed [the safety of Palestinians] and recently classified documents reveal that US diplomats were told by the  Israelis what they and their allies might be up to.”   And Seth Anziska’s 9/17/2018 report in the New York Review of Books under the title Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations is also worth reading.

In a rare moment of exercising moral principles Israel’s Kahan Commission concluded that Sharon “bore personal responsibility” for the mass murder; he subsequently resigned as Defense Minister. And unlike I am a Zionist to the core Genocide Joe who’s shameful complicity in the current carnage is aided and abetted by AIPAC, mega campaign contributions and a glossing over by the media, an irate President Reagan’s call to Israeli Prime Minister Begin forced Israel to back off its brutal onslaught.

Incensed at both the cold-blooded murder and the apathetic manner in which the US, the European Community (the so-called civilized Christian Western World), the UN, and the so-called Arab brethren (most of whom are thuggish theocratic tyrants) responded to this massacre, I decided to channel my frustration and anguish into constructive action. I decided to help in the efforts of adoption agencies that were attempting to cut through the maze of red tape to speed up the adoption of orphaned children and in facilitating efforts to bring maimed and disfigured children to the US for plastic surgery and prosthetic therapy.

In 1982 I put much stock in Betty Bumpers’ reputation as an activist and advocate for children. Further, that same year she launched Peace Links, an organization whose intent was “to effect a mind shift in the way people think about peace and war.” My wife’s exchanges with Mrs. Bumpers and her organization prompted me to conjecture that there were evening discussions at the Bumpers’ dinner table about the welfare of children and Mrs.  Bumpers’ peace initiatives. I was, therefore, certain that the Senator would be receptive to a meeting to discuss my concerns. Thus it was that forty-two years ago this October, the meeting was held in Senator Dale Bumpers’ Little Rock office. His bread, buttered on both sides by AIPAC (Israel’s political action committee), David Pryor, Arkansas’ other senator, declined to meet with us.

I entreated two colleagues with whom I am philosophically aligned to accompany me to Dale Bumpers’ office. Johnny Wink and Randall O’Brien, professors of English and theology, are dear friends and colleagues who share the following: they are both Mississippi natives who experienced first-hand the tectonic changes that came about as a result of the tremulous struggle for civil rights and the reverberating aftershocks in the American South. These struggles, and the brewing anti-Vietnam War zeitgeist, helped shape their characters and set the needles of their moral compasses due north. Both have had stellar careers as university professors. For the past 51 years Johnny’s been hammering grammar, linguistics, literature, and Latin into the minds of his young scholars, and Randal, after a stellar career in higher education, retired from serving as president of Carson Newman University.

Only two things linger from the one-hour meeting with former Senator Dale Bumpers: his concern for lost Lebanese and Palestinian lives did not resonate and, when told about the dire conditions in the tiny Gaza Strip and the plight of its then-950,000 thousand citizens concentrated in the world’s “geographically highest density population and the largest open air prison on the face of the earth,” Bumpers, like most politicians, and working from scripted information, expressed doubt about the large concentration of Palestinian refugees in such a tiny strip of land. With campaign donations on his mind, “That can’t be,” Bumpers opined, and thus ended the conversation.

In retrospect, I wish I had taken a map of Gaza with me, along with supporting data. Here are some facts for the reader, facts about Gaza the media has never reported: Pulaski County is 808 sq. miles; its current population is 400,631. Gaza is 141 sq. miles; its current population is 2.3 million. With a population of 10,063, Camden, Arkansas, is 16.5 miles. Recently Israel ordered 2 million Palestinians to move to a safe haven – where they were bombed, yet again. The so-called safe haven is 10 sq. miles, or 2/3 the size of Camden. Can one imagine 2 million starving, wounded, disease-stricken and maimed human beings boxed into an area smaller than Camden? Can one imagine Camden’s starving dogs feasting on corpses?

Not only is Gaza a hermetically sealed (land, sea, air) enclave, but it also has  had to bear the brunt of Israeli apartheid and horror. The Israelis have always bragged about putting Gazans “on a diet,” meaning restricting food to less than the required 2300 calories per person, per day. See the 10/17/2012 Times of Israel, “Israel Counted Calorie Requirements for Gazans.” Over 90% of cancer patients were never allowed to travel to the occupied West Bank for treatments. And COVID immunizations were held up for well over a year.  In short, Gazans were and have been condemned to perpetual dehumanization. And only because Israel has and continues to consider them “human animals,” rats, and serpents.

Since 2007 Israel has waged four major wars on Gaza. While Israeli citizens promenaded on Tel Aviv’s beaches cheering their air force and Israeli children were signing bombs with magic markers, the Israeli media, the army, and politicians called these sinister wars a necessary periodic “mowing the grass” events. In 2007 and 2008 schools, hospitals, and homes were bombed, leaving thousands of mostly women and children dead and wounded. In 2014, 2,251 were killed and thousands wounded. The 2018 and 2021 assaults on Gaza normalized death,  and todays’ erasure of whole communities in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank occurred under Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

Fed up with Nazi brutalities, in 1943 the Jews of Warsaw, Poland rose up in arms in the largest urban revolt against their Fascist occupiers and tormentors. The Nazi response was predictably heinous, vindictive, and brutal.

“Senator, there is a broken bone in history. We are calling on you to help mend it,” said the wise, prescient Baptist minister, college professor, former dean and retired university president. Is it not time to help set and mend, once and for all, the broken bone of Palestine, a bone whose shattered and gangrenous fragments have splintered the entire region?

On October 9, 2023 a dear friend sent me Langston Hughes’ poem under the title A Raisin in the Sun. The poet asks: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore-and then run?/ Does it stink like rotten meat? / Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet? / Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load, / Or does it explode?”

After 54 years of apartheid, repression, dispossession, dehumanizing brutalities, erasure, and death, and after years of pleading for justice, on October 7, 2023, Gazans’ dreams exploded, and the prisoners of the largest open air prison in modern history, hellbent on retribution, broke through the wall of apartheid in a violent rampage. And Israel’s response has also been predictably vindictive, heinous, and brutal.

And the world WILL never been the same.

A version of this column appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s Perspectives on 10/20/2024. 

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