Palestinian martyrs’ cemetery: Ghassan Kanafani (seated, left), author and PFLP spokesman, talking right here at a press convention in Amman on 15 September 1970, is buried right here
Paul Popper · Popperfoto · Getty
The Cemetery of the Martyrs of the Revolution close to the street to Beirut Worldwide Airport is a tiny piece of Palestine in the course of Lebanon. You don’t must be Palestinian to be buried right here: it’s a multi-faith web site — the one qualification for admission is to have served the Palestinian trigger. It’s thus the top level of the tales of those that travelled right here from everywhere in the world. The women and men buried right here come principally from a forgotten period which started within the late Nineteen Sixties, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was arrange in Lebanon, and lasted till the Palestinian withdrawal from Beirut in summer time 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
In addition to searching for the liberation of Palestine, the PLO constructed social, charitable, army and inventive establishments in exile, mobilising all these within the refugee camps. The organisation’s beliefs have been nationalist and revolutionary and it subscribed to the Third-Worldism of the time: it solid hyperlinks with the Lebanese left, collaborating significantly with the native Communist Celebration (CPL). The Palestinian left and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah (the PLO’s important constituent organisation) attracted many Lebanese, different Arab and worldwide activists, some from as far-off as Bangladesh, Japan and Latin America.
Fatah’s worldwide affairs division engaged in dialogue a couple of single ‘democratic Palestine’, bringing collectively Jews, Christians and Muslims, and together with distinguished figures resembling the author Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) and the Italian Communist Celebration leaders Enrico Berlinguer (1922-84) and Luigi Longo (1900-80).
The PLO-affiliated Basis for the Care and Rehabilitation of the Households of the Martyrs was arrange in 1965. It leased a small plot of land from the Lebanese state close to the Shatila refugee camp to create a Palestinian nationwide cemetery. A part of the plot was destroyed and served as a retrenchment camp for the Palestinians throughout their 1985-87 battle towards the (…)
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