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CE by gunmen allied with the Israelis, with substantial Israeli military, financial, and political
assistance. The Lebanese gunmen possibly even carried out the massacre of many hundreds of
defenseless refugees under direct orders from the Israeli army. Srour, then 14 years old, was
gang-raped by the murderers of her family, who forced her dying father to watch the rape, and
then she was also shot and left for dead. The killers returned a little later, found that she was
still alive and shot her again.
Somehow, she survived the ordeal. A bullet is still lodged in her spine and she only
walks with the aid of crutches. Srour represented twenty-three survivors of the massacre in
filing charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and personal compensation in Belgium
in 2001 against Ariel Sharon for complicity in and responsibility for the massacre of her
family and many hundreds, maybe thousands, of other Palestinian refugees during those three
days in Lebanon. In doing so, she (as far as I know) unwittingly – but unforgettably – related
her own wisdom to that of her spiritual ancestor of 4,350 years ago as well as to that of
Mandela. She reflects Mandela’s idea back to its positive and even more optimistic origin. On
the occasion of filing the charges, nineteen years after the crimes were committed, she said:
First justice and then peace.
Money always disappears
But justice will last. 770
770 Quoted in Nguyen June 18, 2001. See also footnote 232, above, on the Sabra and Shatila massacre. For a
critical view of the escapist potentials of the faith that crime never (or only seldom) pays, however, see footnote
599, above.