Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Dan Connell, a journalist with wartime experience and Lebanon project officer for Oxfam, describes Israel’s strategy as follows: The Israeli strategy was obvious. They were hitting a broad belt, and they kept moving the belt up toward the populated area and pushing the people in front of it. The Israelis forced an increasing concentration of people into a smaller space, so that the casualties increased geometrically with every single shell or bomb that landed.

  The attackers used highly sophisticated U.S. weapons, including “shells and bombs designed to penetrate through the buildings before they explode,” collapsing buildings inwards, and phosphorus bombs to set fires and cause untreatable burns. Hospitals were closed down or destroyed. Much of the Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon was “flat as a parking lot” when Connell saw it, though 7-8000 Palestinians had drifted back—mostly women and children, since the men were “either fighting or arrested or dead.” The Israelis bulldozed the mosque at the edge of the camp searching for arms, but “found 90 or 100 bodies under it instead, completely rotted away.” Writing before the Beirut massacres but after the PLO had departed, he notes that “there could be a bloodbath in west Beirut” if no protection is given to the remnants of the population.98

  The Israeli press also reported the strategy of the invading army. One journalist observing the bombardment of Beirut in the early days describes it as follows:

  With deadly accuracy, the big guns laid waste whole rows of houses and apartment blocks believed to be PLO positions. The fields were pitted with craters … Israeli strategy at that point was obvious—to clean away a no-man’s land through which Israeli tanks could advance and prevent any PLO breakout.99

  The military tactics, as widely reported by the Israeli and foreign press, were simple. Since Israel had total command of the air and overwhelming superiority in firepower from land, sea and air, the IDF simply blasted away everything before it, then sent soldiers in to “clean out” what was left. We return to some descriptions of these tactics by Israeli military analysts. The tactics are familiar from Vietnam and other wars where a modern high technology army faces a vastly outmatched enemy. The difference lies in the fact that in other such cases, one rarely hears tales of great heroism and “purity of arms,” though to be accurate, these stories were more prevalent among American “supporters” than Israeli soldiers, many of whom were appalled at what they were ordered to do.

  Economist Middle East correspondent G. H. Jansen describes Israel’s tactics in the first days of the war as follows: to surround cities and towns “so swiftly that civilian inhabitants were trapped inside, and then to pound them from land, sea and air. After a couple of days of this there would be a timid probing attack: if there were resistance the pounding would resume.”* “A second striking aspect of Israeli military

  * Israeli troops in fact often warned inhabitants to leave before the land, sea and air pounding, but many report, not surprisingly, that they were unaware of the warnings; see Michael Jansen, The Battle of Beirut. Furthermore, the leaflets sometimes were dropped well after the bombardment of civilian targets began, as in Sidon (see Israel in Lebanon, p. 72, citing “the detailed diary of a reputable representative of a relief organisation” among other evidence). It has repeatedly been claimed that Israel suffered casualties because of the policy of warning inhabitants to leave, but it remains unexplained how this came about in

  doctrine exemplified in the Lebanese campaign,” he notes, “is the military exploitation of a cease-fire. Israel has done this so often, in every one of its wars, that perhaps one must assume that for the Israeli military ‘cease-fire’ only means ‘no shooting’ and is totally unconnected with any freezing of positions on the ground along a ‘cease-fire’ line.” We have, in fact, noted several earlier examples of exploitation of ceasefire: the conquest of Eilat in 1949 and of the Golan Heights in 1967. “The Israelis, in this war, have refined their cease-fire-exploitation doctrine by declaring cease-fires unilaterally, at times most advantageous to them. This has left them free to switch cease-fires on and off with a show either of peaceful intent or of outraged indignation. For the Israelis the cease-fire is not a step towards a truce or an armistice, it is simply a period of rest, reinforcement and peaceful penetration—an attempt to gain the spoils of war without fighting.”100 Such tactics are possible because of the huge military advantage that Israel enjoyed.

  Since the western press was regularly accused in the United States of failing to recognize the amazing and historically unique Israeli efforts to spare civilians and of exaggerating the scale of the destruction and terror—we return to some specifics—it is useful to bear in mind that the

  areas that were sure to be next on the list, warning or not, and how casualties could be caused by the use of the tactics just described, which are repeatedly verified in the Israeli press (see above and below, for many examples). Danny Wolf, formerly a commander in the Paratroopers, asks: “If someone dropped leaflets over Herzliya [in Israel] tomorrow, telling the civilians in hiding to evacuate the town within two hours, wouldn’t that be a war crime?” (Amir Oren, Koteret Rashit, Jan. 19, 1983). It would be interesting to hear the answer from those who cite these alleged IDF warnings with much respect as proof of the noble commitment to “purity of arms.”

  actual tactics used were entirely familiar and that some of the most terrible accounts were given by Israeli soldiers and journalists. In Knesset debate, Menachem Begin responded to accusations about civilian casualties by recalling the words of Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur of the Labor Party after the 1978 invasion of Lebanon under the Begin government, cited in introduction to chapter 5. When asked “what happens when we meet a civilian population,” Gur’s answer was that “It is a civilian population known to have provided active aid to the terrorists... Why has that population of southern Lebanon suddenly become such a great and just one?” Asked further whether he was saying that the population of southern Lebanon “should be punished,” he responded: “And how! I am using Sabra language [colloquial Hebrew]: And how!” The “terrorists” had been “nourished by the population around them.” Gur went on to explain the orders he had given: “bring in tanks as quickly as possible and hit them from far off before the boys reached a face-to-face battle.” He continued: “For 30 years, from the war of independence to this day, we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and in towns…”With audacity bordering on obscenity, Begin was able to utter the words: “We did not even once deliberately harm the civilian population…all the fighting has been aimed against military targets...”

  Turning to the press, Tom Segev of Ha’aretz toured “Lebanon after the conquest” in mid-June. He saw “refugees wandering amidst swarms of flies, dressed in rags, their faces expressing terror and their eyes, bewilderment..., the women wailing and the children sobbing” (he noticed Henry Kamm of the New York Times nearby; one may usefully compare his account of the same scenes). Tyre was a “destroyed city”; in the market place there was not a store undamaged. Here and there people were walking, “as in a nightmare.” “A terrible smell filled the air”—of decomposing bodies, he learned. Archbishop Georges Haddad told him that many had been killed, though he did not know the numbers, since many were still buried beneath the ruins and he was occupied with caring for the many orphans wandering in the streets, some so young that they did not even know their names. In Sidon, the destruction was still worse: “the center of the town—destroyed.” “This is what the cities of Germany looked like at the end of the Second World War.” “Half the inhabitants remained without shelter, 100,000 people.” He saw “mounds of ruins,” tens of thousands of people at the shore where they remained for days, women driven away by soldiers when they attempted to flee to the beaches, children wandering “among the tanks and the ruins and the shots and the hysteria,” blindfolded young men, hands tied with plastic bonds, “terror and confusion.”

  Danny Rubinstein of Davar toured the conquered areas at the war’s end. Virtually no Pa
lestinians were to be found in Christian-controlled areas, the refugee camps having been destroyed long ago (see the description by Attallah Mansour, section 3.3). The Red Cross give the figure of 15,000 as a “realistic” estimate of the number of prisoners taken by the Israeli army. In the “ruins of Am el-Hilweh,” a toothless old man was the youngest man left in the camp, among thousands of man was the youngest man left in the camp, among thousands of 400,000 Palestinians had been “dispersed in all directions” (“mainly women, children and old men, since all the men have been detained”). The remnants are at the mercy of Phalangist patrols and Haddad forces, who burn houses and “beat the people.” There is no one to care for the tens of thousands of refugee children, “and of course all the civilian networks operated by the PLO have been annihilated, and tens of thousands of families, or parts of families, are dispersed like animals.” “The shocking scene of the destroyed camps proves that the destruction was systematic.” Even shelters in which people hid from the Israeli bombardments were destroyed, “and they are still digging out bodies”— this, in areas where the fighting had ended over 2 months earlier.101 An Oxfam appeal in March 1983 states that “No one will ever know how many dead are buried beneath the twisted steel of apartment buildings or the broken stone of the cities and villages of Lebanon.”

  By late June, the Lebanese police gave estimates of about 10,000 killed. These early figures appear to have been roughly accurate. A later accounting reported by the independent Lebanese daily An-nahar gave a figure of 17,825 known to have been killed and over 30,000 wounded, including 5500 killed in Beirut and over 1200 civilians killed in the Sidon area. A government investigation estimated that 90% of the casualties were civilians. By late December, the Lebanese police estimated the numbers killed through August at 19,085, with 6775 killed in Beirut, 84% of them civilians. Israel reported 340 IDF soldiers killed in early September, 446 by late November (if these numbers are accurate, then the number of Israeli soldiers killed in the ten weeks following the departure of the PLO from Lebanon is exactly the same as the number of Israelis killed in all terrorist actions across the northern border from 1967). According to Chief of Staff Eitan, the number of Israeli soldiers killed “in the entire western sector of Lebanon”—that is, apart from the Syrian front—was 117. Eight Israeli soldiers died “in Beirut proper,” he claimed, three in accidents. If correct (which is unlikely), Eitan’s figures mean that five Israeli soldiers were killed in the process of massacring some 6000 civilians in Beirut, a glorious victory indeed. Israel also offered various figures for casualties within Lebanon. Its final accounting was that 930 people were killed in Beirut including 340 civilians, and that 40 buildings were destroyed in the Beirut bombings,* 350 in all of Lebanon.102 The number of PLO killed was

  *Since one of these was Beirut’s only synagogue, we may conclude that 39 buildings of terrorists were destroyed. Despite considerable effort,

  given as 4000.103 The estimates given by Israel were generally ridiculed by reporters and relief workers, though solemnly repeated by supporters here. Within Israel itself, the Lebanese figures were regularly cited; for example, by Yizhar Smilanski, one of Israel’s best-known novelists, in a bitter denunciation of Begin (the “man of blood” who was willing to sacrifice “some 50,000 human beings” for his political ends) and of the society that is able to tolerate him.104 In general, Israeli credibility suffered seriously during the war, as it had in the course of the 1973 war. Military correspondent Hirsh Goodman reported that “the army spokesman [was] less credible than ever before.” Because of repeated government lies (e.g., the claim, finally admitted to be false, that the IDF returns fire only to the point from which it originates), “thousands of Israeli troops who bear eye-witness to events no longer believe the army spokesman” and “have taken to listening to Radio Lebanon in English and Arabic to get what they believe is a credible picture of the war.” The “overwhelming majority of men—including senior officers”—accused Israeli military correspondents of “allowing this war to grow out of all proportion to the original goals, by mindlessly repeating official explanations we all knew were false.” The officers and men “of four top fighting units…accused [military correspondents] of covering up the truth, of lying to the public, of not reporting on the real mood at the front and of being lackeys of the defence minister.” Soldiers “repeated the latest jokes doing the rounds, like the one about the idiot in the ordnance corps who must have put all Israeli cannon in back to front. ‘Each time we open fire the army spokesman announces we’re being

  representatives of the World Zionist Organization were unable to convince the Jews of West Beirut to immigrate to Israel. “‘Why should we leave,’ they asked? Here are our houses and our friends.”152 Or what is left of them.

  fired at...’” Goodman is concerned not only over the deterioration in morale caused by this flagrant lying but also by Israel’s “current world image.”105 About that, he need not have feared too much. At least in the U.S., Israeli government claims continued to be taken quite seriously, even the figures offered with regard to casualties and war damages.

  As relief officials and others regularly commented, accurate numbers cannot be obtained, since many—particularly Palestinians—are simply unaccounted for. Months after the fighting had ended in the Sidon area inhabitants of Ain el-Hilweh were still digging out corpses and had no idea how many had been killed, and an education officer of the Israeli army (a Lieutenant Colonel) reported that the army feared epidemics in Sidon itself “because of the many bodies under the wreckage…”106 Lebanese and foreign relief officials observed that “Many of the dead never reached hospital,” and that unknown numbers of bodies are believed lost in the rubble in Beirut; hospital figures, the primary basis for the Lebanese calculations cited above, “only hint at the scale of the tragedy.” “Many bodies could not be lodged in overflowing morgues and were not included in the statistics.”107

  The Lebanese government casualty figures are based on police records, which in turn are based on actual counts in hospitals, clinics and civil defense centers. These figures, according to police spokesmen, do “not include people buried in mass graves in areas where Lebanese authorities were not informed.”108 The figures, including the figure of 19,000 dead and over 30,000 wounded, must surely be underestimates, assuming that those celebrating their liberation (the story that Israel and its supporters here would like us to believe) were not purposely magnifying the scale of the horrors caused by their liberators. Particularly with regard to the Palestinians, one can only guess what the scale of casualties may have been.

  A UN report estimated 13,500 severely damaged houses in West Beirut alone, thousands elsewhere, not counting the Palestinian camps (which are—or were—in fact towns).109 As for the Palestinians, the head of the UN Agency that has been responsible for them, Olof Rydbeck of Sweden, said that its work of 32 years “has been wiped out”; Israeli bombardment had left “practically all the schools, clinics and installations of the agency in ruins.110 Israel made much of the fact that one UNRWA school had been converted to a PLO military training center, unknown to UNRWA. “The Israelis are entitled to be indignant,” the London Economist observed. “Their protest would carry more weight if they had not looted the college’s educational equipment, reduced its student roll to about 150 and reduced the nearby refugee camp, from which many of the students were drawn, to a mass of rubble.”111 Some older Israelis must have winced at the show of indignation, those who recalled UNRWA’s earlier incarnation as UNRRA, established to care for other refugees. The Chief of UNRRA Operations in Germany, 1945-6, writes in his memoirs that “Military training of Jewish D.P.’s was taking place in [UNRRA] camps, presumably in preparation for active participation in the war of liberation from the British Mandate on their arrival in Palestine. Instructors were found to be N.C.O.s from British and U.S. armies, in uniform, absent without, but I fancy sometimes with, leave from their units.”112 All illegal, a violation of UNRRA’s commitment, and one
of the proud moments in the history of the foundation of the State of Israel. It is, once again, uncanny to see how history is being replayed, with a change in the cast of characters that will become still more macabre before we conclude, with future chapters that one hesitates to imagine.

  John Kifner reported that “there was not much left standing” in the Palestinian camps after Israel’s bombardment, and that in the south, “the Israelis have bulldozed refugee camps to make them uninhabitable.113 Contrary to a standard propaganda claim, reporters found “no heavy artillery or well-fortified positions” in the Sabra, Shatilla and Bourj al-Barajneh camps in Beirut, which had “taken a terrible pounding” since June 6 (actually, June 4), causing the flight of half of their 125,000 population in the first few weeks of the war.114 The areas to which they escaped, particularly the Fakhani quarter in Beirut, were also mercilessly bombed. Since Palestinians are by definition all terrorists, or mothers of terrorists, or future terrorists—so different from Begin, Shamir and Sharon for example—whatever was done to them was regarded as legitimate.

  5.2 Beirut: Precision Bombardment Repeatedly, Israel blocked international relief efforts and prevented food and medical supplies from reaching victims.* Israeli military forces also appear to have gone out of their way to destroy medical facilities—at least, if one wants to believe Israeli government claims about “pinpoint accuracy” in bombardment.115 “International agencies agree that the civilian death toll would have been considerably higher had it not been for the medical facilities that the Palestine Liberation Organization provides for its own people”116—and, in fact, for many poor Lebanese— so it is not surprising that these were a particular target of attack.