by Noam Chomsky
Israeli bombardment was regarded as so ordinary and unremarkable that it was sometimes merely noted in passing, as when Pranay Gupte mentioned in a New York Times article on Lebanon that Israeli warships “lobbed shells into the port city of Tyre, a Palestinian center”26— incidentally, a Lebanese city; the “Palestinian center” was in Rashidiyeh, south of Tyre. All of this designed to achieve Eban’s “rational prospect.” One suspects that regular Palestinian bombardment of Israeli cities and towns might have been treated somewhat less casually, and might even have been regularly reported, perhaps even eliciting editorial comment, perhaps even criticism. One may recall, at this point, the common complaint by some Israeli commentators and many supporters of Israel here, several already quoted, that Israel’s “imperfections” are scrutinized under a magnifying glass by the Western media, while PLO atrocities are ignored.
4. From July 1981 4.1 The July Bombardments and the Habib Cease-Fire
I
n July 1981, Israeli planes once again initiated hostilities after a period of peace, striking Palestinian targets in southern Lebanon. Palestinian retaliation elicited extensive Israeli bombing, ultimately
the terror attacks of July 17-8 on Beirut and other civilian targets leaving hundreds dead. After Philip Habib’s negotiations on behalf of the U.S. government, a cease-fire was put into effect, but it was clear that “sooner or later, Israel will probably find a pretext for another invasion of Lebanon in an effort to administer the coup de grace to the PLO and to disperse the refugees once again.”27 The subsequent history is illuminating.
4.2 The Occupied Territories A series of important events took place from summer 1981 to the Israeli invasion a year later. Menachem Begin was re-elected and appointed as his Defense Minister General Ariel Sharon, who at once began to plan for the invasion, as he later explained. In November, a new and far harsher regime was instituted in the West Bank and Gaza, under the direction of Sharon and Menachem Milson, the new Civilian Administrator. The shift to “civilian administration” was widely understood as a move towards a form of annexation. In December and January, the Golan Heights were in effect annexed to Israel.
4.3 The Sinai Withdrawal In April 1982, Israel completed the withdrawal from the Sinai as arranged at Camp David, evacuating the town of Yamit in northeastern Sinai with a “national trauma” that appears to have been largely staged for a domestic and American audience.28 Amnon Kapeliouk described the Yamit evacuation as “one of the largest brain-washing operations conducted by the government in order to convince the Israeli people that they have suffered a ‘national trauma the effect of which will be felt for generations”’ and which will create “a national consensus opposed to similar withdrawals in the remaining occupied territories.” He quotes General Chaim Erez, commander of the Yamit evacuation, who says that “Everything was planned and agreed from the beginning” with the settlers who were to offer a show of resistance. Thus, Kapeliouk writes, “While the hospitals of the West Bank were full of scores of Palestinian victims of ‘trigger happy’ Israeli soldiers, a miracle occurred in Yamit: no demonstrators required even first-aid attention.”29
Meanwhile, the other intended audience here was treated to heartrending accounts of Jewish settlers, many of them recent immigrants from the U.S. and USSR, forced to leave their homes. As discussed in the preceding chapter (see chapter 4, section 4.1), the former Arab settlers had been displaced by force and violence not long before with little notice here, driven into the desert, their houses, mosques, schools, cemeteries, crops, orchards destroyed. Most then performed menial labor for the new settlers on their former lands. The New York Times reported that “local Arab labor is cheap,” not troubling to explain why. Some lived only a few hundred yards away, but they were not even provided with water from the pumping stations built for the modern town of Yamit, one of the proud achievements of the Labor Party.30 This was only one phase in the expulsion of the Bedouin from their lands in Israel and across the borders, beginning in 1950, when some 3500 were expelled from the demilitarized zones with air and ground attacks.31
The Bedouin had anticipated that after the completion of the Sinai evacuation, they would be able to move into the town of Yamit that had been constructed on the lands from which they had been driven. This was not to be, however. Yamit and the other Jewish settlements in the area were destroyed by the departing Israeli forces, leaving what Uri Avneri called a “monument commemorating the Israeli vandal.”32 David Shaham describes how Israel expelled the 6000 Bedouin of the area, destroying everything they had built and cultivated, and then introduced 2000 Jewish settlers with billions of dollars of investment (paid for by the usual generous donor). He then adds:
Now again we have uprooted trees, demolished the buildings, pulled out the water pipes, torn down electricity lines and introduced the desert. In the long run we will have only been an episode. Now the Bedouins will come back, they will dig water holes, build shacks and live in them, plant trees, grow vegetables—the area will truly return to what it was before we came in. But where shall we take our shame?33
This is in fact standard Israeli practice. Recall the destruction of Kuneitra a few years earlier when the Israeli army withdrew from parts of the Golan Heights. Or 1956, when Israel was compelled to withdraw from the Sinai after its attack on Egypt in collusion with France and Britain and Israeli forces “systematically destroyed all surfaced roads, railway tracks and telephone lines” and destroyed “all buildings in the tiny villages of Abu Ageila and El Quseima,” prompting UN Commander General Burns to comment: “God had scorched the Sinai earth, and His chosen people removed whatever stood above it.”34
The Sinai was evacuated in April, as scheduled. Egypt and Israel now enjoyed more or less normal arrangements, and, crucially, Egyptian military forces were excluded from the Arab-Israeli conflict, so that Israel could concentrate its attention (and its military forces) on the occupied territories and the northern border.
4.4 Israeli Provocations and the U.S. Response Through early 1982 Israel carried out a series of provocative actions in southern Lebanon, including the sinking of Lebanese fishing boats in Lebanese territorial waters,* “training exercises” in southern Lebanon with extensive gunfire by the Haddad forces (in effect, part of the Israeli army), military maneuvers in southern Lebanon that were described by the UN as “intensive, excessive, and provocative,” repeated deployment of military forces at potential invasion routes, and-from August 1981 to May 1982—2125 violations of Lebanese airspace and 652 violations of Lebanese territorial waters.35 None of these actions succeeded in eliciting a PLO “provocation” that could serve as a pretext for the planned invasion. In February, Time reported, an Israeli “assault was narrowly averted…though perhaps not for long.” In January, Defense Minister Sharon had met with the commander of the Christian Phalange forces, Bashir Gemayel, in an Israeli gunboat off the Lebanese coast, to plan an invasion “that would bring Israeli forces as far north as the edge
* AJME News (Beirut, April 1982) cites a report of the rightist “Voice of Lebanon” radio on March 9 that a Lebanese freighter was dynamited by Israeli frogmen at Tyre (there is a picture of the damaged ship).
of Beirut International Airport,”36 a precise description of the operation launched in early June. The Israeli and international media carried many other reports of the impending invasion,* but the PLO was uncooperative and supplied no suitable pretext.
On April 21 Israel broke the nine-month truce with a still more provocative action, bombing alleged PLO centers in coastal areas south of Beirut. This time there had been a PLO “terrorist act”: an Israeli soldier had been killed when his military jeep struck a land mine—in southern Lebanon! There was still no PLO response. Israel’s position that its bombing was retaliatory was accepted in the U.S. by the “proPLO” and “anti-Israel” press. The Washington Post, for example, responded to these events as follows:
So this is not the moment for sermons to Israel. It is a moment for respect for
Israel’s anguish—and for mourning the latest victims of Israeli-Palestinian hostility.37
Typically, it is Israel’s anguish that we must respect when still more Palestinians are killed in an unprovoked Israeli terrorist attack—again, one imagines that the reaction might have been somewhat different if the PLO had bombed coastal towns north of Tel Aviv, killing many people, in retaliation for the death of a Palestinian guerrilla in northern
* Ze’ev Schiff cites an NBC television report by John Chancellor, “known for his contacts in Washington,” on April 8, 1982, which was so accurate that it “amounted to a virtual exposure of the Israeli war plans,” including the plans for attacking Beirut and confronting the Syrian forces in the Bekaa valley, one of a series of indications that Washington was “duly informed” about Sharon’s plans “that went beyond southern Lebanon,” contrary to subsequent pretense. “Green Light, Lebanon,” Foreign Policy, Spring 1983.
Israel, an Israeli “provocation.” The reference in the Post to “Israel’s anguish” has to do with the difficulty of “suppressing” Palestinian nationalism in the occupied territories, and the “great pain” caused by the evacuation of the Yamit settlers in what the Israeli press called “Operation National Trauma ’82” (see note 28). Note that “the latest victims” were not victims of Israeli air raids, but of the more abstract “Israeli-Palestinian hostility.”
Emboldened by such signals as this, Israel prepared for the next “provocation.” On May 9 Israel again bombed Lebanon in retaliation for the discovery of land mines in Israel and the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem.38 This time, there was a light PLO rocket and artillery response, directed away from settled areas, with no reported casualties.
Three days later, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, Ze’ev Schiff, wrote: With regard to the war in the North, Israel is now at one minute before midnight... It is not true that—as we tell the Americans—we do not want to invade Lebanon. There are influential forces, led by the Defense Minister, which, with intelligence and cunning, are taking well-considered steps to reach a situation that will leave Israel with no choice but to invade Lebanon even if it were to involve a war with Syria.
The war would aim to “root out” the PLO and to make Israel the “policeman of Lebanon,” able “to decide even how the members of the Lebanese parliament vote when it comes to the election of the next Lebanese president”39—an election scheduled for the coming August. It is inconceivable that the U.S. government was unaware of all of this.
4.5 The Pretext for the Invasion of Lebanon On June 3, a terrorist group that had been engaged in a running battle with the PLO for a decade and whose head (Abu Nidal) had been condemned to death by the PLO attempted to assassinate Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London. The facts were reported at once by the British police and government, with the further information that PLO leaders were on the “hit list” of the attackers, but the insistence of the PLO that it had nothing to do with this act was rejected by the Israeli government, with much of the U.S. press in line as usual.* The Washington Post commented that the assassination attempt was an “embarrassment” for the PLO, which “claims to represent all Palestinians, but…tends to be selective about accepting responsibility for acts of Palestinian violence.”40 By the same logic, it would be legitimate to bomb Israel when any Jew carries out a violent act against Palestinians, for example, the Jewish Defense League in New York, or an American immigrant who went berserk at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, or the “Jewish Armed Resistance” in Rome (see below). Recall that the Israeli courts have determined that Israel is the State of
* The three attackers were caught and given 30-35-year sentences. The leader, who was deputy commander of Abu Nidal’s special operations section, was identified as a Colonel in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The assassination may have been ordered by the Iraqi government in the expectation that Israel would attack Lebanon in “reprisal,” offering Iraq the opportunity to end the war with Iran in the name of unity against Israel, as it proposed to do on June 10. Iran refused, giving exactly this analysis of what had happened. Ian Black, Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 13, 1983. Black suggests further that Britain and the U.S. downplayed the incident because of their interest in improving trade and diplomatic relations with Iraq. See p. 367*. Also p. 159*.
the Jewish people, which includes the Jews of the diaspora (see chapter 3, section 2.2.1, and chapter 4, section 8.2, for the meaning of the fact). If the Post were to make a similar comment about Israel and Jews, it would rightly be condemned for outrageous anti-Semitism and advocacy of terrorism.
In “retaliation” for the attempt to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador, Israel carried out heavy bombardment of Palestinian and Lebanese targets in Lebanon (where the Abu Nidal group does not even have an office). Again the official Israeli version was accepted by the press; the bombings were unfortunate, perhaps excessive, but “retaliation” or “reprisal.”41 The Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila (later to become famous as the site of the September massacres) were bombed for four hours. The local (Gaza) hospital was hit. Over 200 people were killed, according to the eyewitness account of an American observer.42 Recall that the total number of Israelis killed in the course of PLO terrorist cross-border actions in 15 years was 106.
This time, there was a Palestinian response, shelling of northern settlements, and Israel launched its long-planned full-scale invasion, Operation “Peace for Galilee,” to “protect the northern border.” For 11 months, there had been no Palestinian action on the northern border apart from the May and June retaliatory shellings, and in July 1981 it had been Israel’s initiative that shattered the peace along the border, not for the first time, as we have seen.
A number of Israelis expressed shock over the “retaliation” after the attempt to assassinate Ambassador Argov. One asked that “we imagine that the British would have bombed Tel Aviv or Netanya in retaliation for the murder of Lord Moyne [by a group directed by the current Foreign Minister of Israel] or the hanging of the [British] Sergeants” by Begin’s terrorist army, asking: “Wouldn’t we have called it barbarism?”43 And what would we have called it if Lord Moyne had been killed by an anti- Zionist terrorist group, instead of by Zionist terrorists, to correct the analogy? The same might be asked about the assassination of two Palestinians in Rome in June 1982 by a group called the “Jewish Armed Resistance,” which appears to have been in contact with the Jewish Defense League,44 whose leader calls for the expulsion of Arabs from the Land of Israel when he is not beating and shooting at them as part of his regular army service on the West Bank—but in this case, the question was not raised in the United States, in accordance with the normal double standard. The PLO allegation that Israel was involved in the Rome assassinations was denounced by Israeli officials in Rome as tantamount to “an appeal to the assassination of members of the embassy of Israel.” In contrast, the Israeli claim that the PLO was responsible for the Argov attack was not tantamount to an appeal for assassination; rather, it was the prelude to the Israeli assassination of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese in the “retaliatory strikes” and the subsequent full-scale invasion. Again, the obvious questions were not raised here.
4.6 The Reasons for the Invasion of Lebanon 4.6.1 The Imperatives of Rejectionism
The Israeli claim to be acting in legitimate self-defense was accepted by
the U.S. government and large segments of the press and intelligentsia, though in this case, an unprecedented negative reaction developed in the U.S. One obvious purpose of the Israeli attack, as predicted long before, was to disperse the refugees once again and to destroy the organization that represents Palestinian nationalism, to ensure, as one senior Israeli diplomat said, that “They [the PLO] are dead people politically.”45 Recall the U.S. veto of the June 26 Security Council Resolution calling for an end to hostilities on the grounds that it was “a transparent attempt to preserve the P.L.O. as a viable political force.”46 With the Palestinian counterpart to the Zionist
Organization eliminated, it was hoped that Israel could proceed with its plans to suppress any meaningful form of Palestinian self-determination within the occupied territories without any concern for Palestinian opposition in the international arena or for what Palestinians might regard as “retaliation” from southern Lebanon for further oppression and brutality in the territories (“unprovoked terrorism,” in western lingo). At the same time, destruction of the PLO might serve to demoralize the Palestinians in the territories and elsewhere, in accordance with the assumption of General Sharon that “quiet on the West Bank” requires “the destruction of the PLO in Lebanon”47 and the advice of New Republic editor Martin Peretz, on the eve of the invasion, that Israel should administer to the PLO a “lasting military defeat” that “will clarify to the Palestinians in the West Bank that their struggle for an independent state has suffered a setback of many years.”48 Then, Peretz explains, “the Palestinians will be turned into just another crushed nation, like the Kurds or the Afghans,” and the Palestinian problem—which “is beginning to be boring”—will be resolved.*
