What happened is by now all too familiar to all too many people around the world: On the eve of the 15th anniversary of the 1967 June War, the Zionist entity in Palestine sent its army, air force and navy in an assault on Lebanon whose goal was the “destruction” of the PLO. The massacres they committed while there nauseated the international community. The one massacre, however, that stood out in particular for its calculated savagery was the one committed at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.

The number of bodies found there, and the growing list of “missing” Palestinians and Lebanese civilians to whom the camp had been home, suggested that well over a thousand people were butchered there between Sept. 16 and 18, quite probably as many as two thousand. Among the victims were women, children and the elderly, many of whom were tortured, disfigured and raped before they were mowed down with machine-gun fire.

Who was the mastermind behind this war crime? Can and should this war criminal, two decades after the fact, be brought to justice before an international war crimes tribunal?

That is the theme of “The Accused”, a length documentary broadcast on June 17 by the BBC, in which a number of prominent figures, including Morris Draper, US envoy to the Middle East at the time, say that the man responsible for the massacre, Ariel Sharon — who was actually invited to the White House to meet with President Bush last Monday — should or could be convicted for war crimes.

The day after the documentary was aired, a group of 28 Palestinian survivors of the massacre filed a brief with a Belgian court to indict Sharon, based on a law allowing trials in Belgium for war crimes regardless of where they occurred. Among them was Suad Srour Merreh, 14 at the time, who was raped, shot in the spine and left for dead among the bodies of her slain family members, and who remains paralyzed today. She told the court: “I have been waiting for this moment so long. What happened was most horrible, and which I will never forget.”

These survivors clearly will get closure only when Sharon is indicted, arrested and tried, in the same manner that the survivors of Nazi war crimes got closure when Nazi war criminals were brought to justice at Nuremberg; or when the families of the “disappeared” were consoled by the arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London two years ago on an international police warrant issued by a Spanish court.

This is what Raanan Ghissen, a spokesman for Sharon had to say about the BBC documentary: “There’s anti-Semitism, there’s deception, there’s malice all put in one show with a sinister intent.”

Oh, yes, that Jack-of-all-labels that Israeli officials level at anyone whom they want to shame into silence — anti-Semitism. But that label, which they had used effectively in the past against commentators in the media who had dared criticize Israel, does not wash anymore.

The BBC, an august media institution recognized and respected around the world for its professionalism and its independent coverage of the news, of course dismissed any taint of anti-Semitism. It insisted that Sharon’s election as prime minister in March, as well as the new international focus on war crimes prosecutions, justified a fresh look at the Sabra-Shatilla killings.

“The investigation of human rights abuses and the notion of accountability by all civilized states is a fundamental moral and legal obligation,” Fergal Keane, the producer of the documentary, wrote on the BBC Web site. “With questions now being asked in France over the behavior of its generals in Algeria, a former US presidential candidate forced to explain his actions in the Vietnam War, not to mention the case of General Pinochet in Chile ... the debate over war crimes has never been more relevant.”

The current international focus on war crimes prosecutions is indeed an interesting new phenomenon.

In a 40,000-word, two-part series in the February and March issues of Harper’s magazine, written by the veteran investigative reporter Christopher Hitchens, a call was made for the arrest and trial of Henry Kisssinger on charges relating to his role in prosecuting the Vietnam War and its support for the Chilean military at the time of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the duly elected president of Chile.

About a month ago a subpoena was indeed issued by a French magistrate for Kissinger in the course of a French investigation into the disappearances and deaths of French nationals at the time of the Pinochet coup in Chile; and the Chilean government has also asked Kissinger to give evidence concerning the death of Charles Horman, an American journalist and filmmaker believed executed by government forces after the Pinochet coup.

We will see whether or not, once he sets foot in France, Kissinger is arrested. But we in the Arab world should not rest in pursuing every legal avenue available to us to have Sharon brought to justice. And we should, above all, never forgive or forget what this war criminal was responsible for what he has done. How could we forgive or forget? For those who believe that that is possible, let them refresh their memory by taking a look back at the carnage, through an eyewitness account, given by Robert Fisk, the London Times correspondent in Beirut at the time, taken from his book, Pity the Nation.

“They were everywhere,” he wrote, “in the road, in lane ways, in backyards, and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of the garbage pits ..... In some cases, the blood was still wet on the ground. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting, Down every alleyway, there were corpses — women, young men, babies and grandparents lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at a Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Perhaps a thousand people were butchered ... these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing that was also an atrocity. It went even beyond what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a ‘terrorist’ atrocity. It was a war crime.”

The perpetrator of such savagery should be brought to justice before a war crimes tribunal and made to answer for his deeds.