(Courier Mail, 26/11/2023)
Sam Shahin still gets goosebumps thinking about it.
Thinking about the long, terrifying hours he spent holed up in underground bomb shelters as deadly shells rained down outside.
Thinking about the pitch black, the sound of explosions, the stench, the screaming children and the constant fear one of those bombs would hit the building above, leaving him and his family buried alive.
And thinking about the unimaginable worry his parents felt as they tried to protect their family from the deadly chaos that defined Lebanon in 1982.
Sam was a bright 14-year-old raised in and around the refugee camps of southern Lebanon and Beirut.
Dodging sniping bullets on the way to school had been par for the course, but when Israeli forces surrounded Beirut in ’82 as part of the First Lebanon War, the turmoil escalated to a whole new level.
“It’s a terrifying, terrifying existence,” Dr Shahin, now 55 and managing director of The Bend Motorsport Park and executive director of Peregrine Corporation, recalls.
We are sitting in his office in the Peregrine headquarters on The Parade in the inner-eastern suburb of Kensington, where the orderly peak-hour traffic outside and quiet buzz of a modern office are a universe away from the terror of a bomb shelter in Beirut.
We have met to discuss the new wave of death and destruction that has engulfed Israel and Gaza since Hamas militants attacked Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7, killing about 1200 and taking 240 hostages.
The attacks sparked an Israeli retaliation that the Gaza Health Ministry claims has killed more than 13,000 Palestinians.
The footage, pictures and news articles emanating from the Middle East in the past six weeks have rekindled the nightmares from those long nights cowering in bomb shelters for Dr Shahin, his siblings and their 84-year-old mother Salwa.
“She is incredibly distressed,” Dr Shahin replies when I ask how his mother is coping.
“As an 84-year-old she is having to relive the horrors of the Nakba 1948 dispossession and having to leave her birthplace. The horrors of living in tent cities. The horrors of living through a civil war.
“The horrors of living through that 1982 blockade inside Beirut and being pummelled. The horrors of the massacres in the two Palestinian refugee camps (Sabra and Shatila) in 1982.
“We were just a few hundred metres from those two refugee camps where thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered. It was horrendous. It was just terrifying. Frightening. Those nightmares never go away.”
Like the rest of her family, Salwa Shahin has been glued to news reports from Gaza that have left her ruminating on the horrors of the past.
The Shahins still have family members living in nearby Lebanon and Jerusalem and distant relatives in Gaza.
Dr Shahin says the Israeli strikes and invasion of Gaza threaten to leave a generation of Palestinians without hope – an attribute he describes as a recipe for radicalisation – and has urged Australian politicians at all levels to call out atrocities of war.
“The Australia that I love is a just nation that calls out atrocities when atrocities are perpetuated, by whomever they are perpetuated,” he says.
“But we call them out. We are not afraid of calling a spade a spade.
“I feel compelled to refresh the memories of decision-makers at every level in our great state at the council level, the state level and the federal level.
“They all have a responsibility. They represent everything we stand for.”
Dr Shahin says the attacks of October 7, when Hamas tortured and killed innocent civilians including babies and young children, were inhumane and criminal.
While condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas, Dr Shahin says Palestinian civilians are bearing the deaths and pain of Israel’s inevitable response.
He claims the response has been disproportionate and Israel has committed war crimes – allegations Israel has refuted.
Israel has accused Hamas of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, including basing its command centre in tunnels underneath Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital – home to at least 5000 patients and thousands more refugees.
While Israel gave warning to Gazan civilians, urging them to flee, many had no choice but to remain and run the gauntlet of bombardment.
Dr Shahin’s father Fathi “Fred” Shahin was born in the small Palestinian village of Qabba’a in 1938.
His mother Salwa was born in the ancient port city of Haifa a couple of years later.
Both Qabba’a and Haifa became part of Israel after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war.
The unrest prompted a wave of Palestinians to flee to neighbouring countries, most carrying the keys to their homes because they believed their exile would be only temporary. It was not.
Fathi, Salwa and their families lived in tents and moved between refugee camps before they met at night school, where he was studying to become an accountant and she a teacher.
They worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency helping Palestinian refugees in Lebanon for nearly 30 years but the 1982 Lebanon War was the final straw, and they started looking for a new and safer home for their growing family.
They did not speak English but landed in Sydney in 1984 and drove to Adelaide where they found a newspaper article, now framed in the reception area of the Peregrine HQ in Kensington, advertising a service station for sale on David Terrace, Kilkenny.
That service station became the genesis for 170 OTR service stations across Australia and a family business, Peregrine Corporation, that generates more than $2bn annual revenue and employs more than 3500 people.
Sam Shahin graduated as dux of Woodville High in 1985, earned a medical degree at Adelaide University and worked as a general practitioner for 10 years. He later attained an MBA and an accounting degree.
His applications to volunteer in former Palestine territories were rejected by Israel so he instead helped out in a refugee camp near Beirut where he was disheartened by the lack of change in the decade or so since he had left.
“Nothing had changed, in fact the state of the refugee camps was worse,” Dr Shahin says. “The state of health provision to refugees was worse. The next generation of refugees was living with the same desperation as the previous one.
“The thing that impressed me most was just how hopeless people felt in those refugee camps.
“I think you can take a lot of things from somebody, as long as you don’t take hope away from them.
“And that’s something that is at the heart of this current war in Gaza.”
About 2.5 million people live in Gaza, in an area of just 365 square kilometres – less than half the size of metropolitan Adelaide.
“It’s a small area that has been carpet-bombed – 6000 bombs a week,” Dr Shahin says. “Those that survive this war can only hope, at best, for a life of misery in another refugee camp somewhere in the Sinai Desert.
“This is the urgency that I feel we as human beings need to treat this tragedy. That unless we are proactive, we will have to deal with the consequences.
“We have to understand that if people do not have hope … put yourself in their shoes. What would you do?
“Hopelessness breeds extremism. It’s the breeding ground for radicalisation.”
Dr Shahin says unless political leaders consider the impact on future generations, they would be complicit in breeding a cohort of radicalists determined to continue the cycle of violence and warfare that has plagued the region for decades.
He wanted Australia to do more than abstain from voting in an October 27 UN resolution calling for an immediate truce in Gaza.
The non-binding motion, drafted by Jordan, was supported by 120 countries. Fourteen countries, including the US and Israel, voted no and Australia was one of 45 nations who did not vote.
Dr Shahin says he had no problem with the state government shining the colours of the Israeli flag on Adelaide buildings after October 7 but the lives of Gaza residents were no less important, and hence it was appropriate to also light up the same buildings with Palestinian colours.
He has joined multiple rallies in Adelaide supporting the people of Palestine and is buoyed by the turnout of people marching for the same cause in cities across Australia.
And he says reports of Palestinian parents tattooing names and birth dates on their children’s arms so they would be identifiable if pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings have left him close to tears.
“Can you imagine taking your child to have their details tattooed just in case they are unrecognisable if pulled from under the rubble?” he says.
“Where is our humanity? What humanity gets us to a point where we see that and it doesn’t drive you into action to help.
“The Australia I love is a fair country. The Australia I love values all human life equally. We all have a duty to do more to advocate for a just peace – for everyone’s sake.”