“Where are the Arabs?” distressed Palestinian women asked the cameras while leaving the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp after witnessing one of worst crimes of the second half of the past century. 

In cooperation with the Israeli forces, Christian extremist militants murdered more than 3,500 Palestinians over two days in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut in 1982. 

This week marks the 33rd anniversary of the massacre, but the rhetorical question is still valid: Where are the Arabs?

Also this week, the occupation forces clashed with Palestinians, injuring dozens as settlers tried to enter al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. 

Arab leaders still ignore the plight of Palestinians and, more dangerously, that plight is fading from the consciousness of the Arab masses.

The massacre of Sabra and Shatila is not a matter of memories; it is still an open wound. For two and a half days, monsters of Lebanon’s Phalangist militia, Israel’s allies, destroyed life mercilessly in the camp. They executed and humiliated Palestinians for 36 hours. Israeli soldiers, who surrounded the camp, watched sadistically.

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli army commander, then-minister of defense, who secured the camp for the militants and guarded them as they raped and murdered Palestinians en mass, was never brought to justice. On the contrary, he went on to become Israel’s prime minister and became a celebrated figure in the “free world.” 

Sharon, who died in 2014 after eight years in a coma, belonged in prison. Instead, he was a guest in George W. Bush’s White House. President Obama sent his “deepest condolences” to Israel on behalf of the American people when the criminal prime minister died. CNN described him as “a warrior who sought peace.”

But it was not only Americans who were fond of Sharon. Former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak also treated the late Israeli premier like an honorable guest when the latter visited Cairo. 

“Sabra calls… Who would it call?” asks Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, echoing the Palestinian women who asked, “Where are the Arabs?”

Palestinians suffering in the diaspora is an extension of their pain at home.

The apartheid regime in the West Bank is thriving. Palestinians continue to suffer at Israeli checkpoints, enduring violent attacks from settlers under the protection of the occupation forces. Their resources are disproportionately consumed by neighboring Jewish colonies. They are brutally suppressed by the Israeli military and treated as subhuman in their own land, with no access to the highways, transportation systems and mobility offered to settlers.

However, suffering has become the norm across the Arab World. Millions of Syrians are risking death and rejection to escape war. 

And the Arab leaders remain absent and divided, indifferent about the agony of the masses.