by Noam Chomsky
There were, indeed, many who had reason to fear what the future held, and these fears were soon borne out: the Palestinians and Muslims in Beirut, who were left defenseless, with power now in the hands of their Phalange enemies; the population of the south, subject to the whims of Major Haddad and whomever else Israel might choose to arm; the Druze of the Chouf region, which had escaped the civil war, who “were worried and scared last weekend as the Phalangist militias moved in behind the advancing Israelis”; and perhaps also those who
reported (with TV clips) on NBC TV news, Aug. 2. James Compton reported that “There were Palestinian positions here. They have long been abandoned... Most fortified Palestinian positions have been abandoned under Israel’s relentless barrage.”
remembered the West Bank while they pondered such scenes as the entry to Lebanon of the followers of the New York Lubavitcher Rabbi, equipped with a press to print copies of the Tanya, expounding their doctrine, photographed carrying out their work near the Presidential Palace in the hills above Beirut.186
The attitudes of Lebanese in Beirut did not go unnoticed in the American press. Time Bureau Chief William Stewart reported that by mid-August there
had been a remarkable transformation of opinion in this beleaguered city. Instead of desperately wanting the P.L.O. to leave in order to avoid further bloodshed, Lebanese civilians we talked to all over West Beirut now want to see Israel defeated. The Israeli attacks were directed not just against Palestinian military positions but at hospitals, schools, apartment houses, government offices and shipping centers. Everything became a target, and so did the people of West Beirut in what has become known as “the great siege.”187
The consummation—temporarily—of Operation “Peace for Galilee,” the “liberation of Lebanon.” Although the commentary on the matter that is standard here is hardly very persuasive, nevertheless it is reasonable to suppose that many Lebanese were pleased to see the PLO depart, for quite sound reasons. The first was that Abba Eban’s “rational prospect” (see chapter 5, section 1) had been amply fulfilled for many years, leading to vast suffering, and had again been fulfilled in Beirut, as Stewart observes. Furthermore, Lebanese across the political spectrum want to see the Palestinians in Palestine, not in their own country. While these feelings were complicated by Palestinian support for the Muslim majority in the civil war, nevertheless the sentiment is no doubt widely held, understandably enough. Just as even the most sympathetic Pakistanis want to see the Afghan refugees return to Afghanistan—particularly when, as in Lebanon, their presence and military actions call forth “retaliatory” strikes—so the Lebanese favor the return of Palestinians to their land. In this regard, they share views held throughout the Arab world. Propagandists here made much of the reluctance of the Arab states to take in the PLO fighters, crowing about this alleged demonstration that even the Arab states despise and reject the PLO. While it is true enough that the elites that rule the Arab states dislike the PLO—and, quite generally, nationalist currents in the Arab world that might threaten their power—one can hardly demonstrate the fact on these grounds, at least if we add one factor commonly ignored: that they regularly stated that they did not want to contribute to a new dispersal of the Palestinians, whom they prefer to see in a state of their own in Palestine in accordance with the international consensus. In the same context, we may take note of the common charge that the Arab states have contributed to the plight of the refugees by refusing to take them in,* a claim that ignores, as usual, the wishes of the Palestinians themselves, who have insisted on maintaining their national and cultural identity and their hope to return to their native land. Finally, while the charges that have circulated in the U.S. concerning the behavior of the PLO in Lebanon appear to be vastly exaggerated, at least to judge by investigations carried out by Israeli journalists, Jewish and Christian Arab, and while there seems little doubt that the behavior of the Israeli
* The charge is so common as to make reference almost superfluous. It was, for example, repeated in an unusually accurate ABC Closeup report on the Beirut massacres, Jan. 7, 1983, in apportioning the blame for the massacres.
backed Phalange was more brutal than anything attributable to the PLO, it nevertheless remains true that the PLO behaved in a disgraceful and stupid fashion in southern Lebanon, alienating much of the population.
6.3 Israelis It is, then, a shade less than obvious that Lebanese were uniformly celebrating their liberation through the summer of 1982. As for Israel’s reactions, the war had initially received overwhelming support there, including many critics of the drift towards religious-chauvinist fanaticism. For example, Amnon Rubinstein, a Knesset member from the Shinui (“Change”) Party and a civil libertarian of sorts,* wrote after a month of war that “only a small radical minority demands immediate withdrawal” from Lebanon, an accurate appraisal apart from the term
* As for many others (notoriously, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz), Rubinstein’s civil libertarian commitments quickly fade in connection with Israeli dissidents. See TNCW, p. 434, and p. 142 and note 107. The point illustrated by Dershowitz, et al., is familiar enough. Thus, many Stalinists really did struggle courageously for civil rights in the United States, while taking a rather different stance with regard to their Holy State. The same is true, to a lesser but nonetheless quite substantial degree, of supporters of the murderer of Kronstadt, the man who called for the militarization of labor in a “labor army,” who dismantled the Soviets and factory councils and destroyed the anarchist movements after they were no longer needed to defend Bolshevik rule while assisting in establishing the institutions of the Soviet dungeon. It is a curious feature of the contemporary intellectual scene in the U.S. that former Trotskyites are now commonly described as having fought the good fight against totalitarian oppression.
“radical,” familiar in a similar context from the days of U.S. aggression in South Vietnam. “Israel is rightly not ashamed of its alliance with the Christian minority in Lebanon,” Rubinstein added. “The negative attitude toward the Lebanese Christians almost universally expressed in the Western media...[is] a mixture of ignorance and insanity that characterizes some segments of the international scene.” Even France, which the Maronites regard as a “second homeland,” has “completely forsaken them” and in its “frenzied courtship of Palestinians,” overlooks the rights of the Lebanese Christians including the Haddadists, as does the West more generally, he argued.188
Turning to the facts, it was a convenient pose, hardly to be taken seriously, that Israel’s alliance with pro-Israeli segments of Christian society was undertaken to defend a persecuted minority (namely, the privileged group that dominated the Muslim majority). Israel’s concern for the rights of the oppressed—adequately illustrated by its behavior with regard to South Africa, Zaire, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Guatemala, etc., not to speak of the territory it controls directly and those it has driven from their homes*—is basically no different from that of any other
* Recall that many of the Palestinian refugees were expelled outright, while many others fled in terror after Israeli atrocities, and that since 1948 Israel has refused any settlement that might involve permitting their return apart from limited cases. Israel’s colossal gall in this regard—or more accurately, its perception of the integrity of its supporters and its colossal contempt for them— has repeatedly been demonstrated, for example, in a flyer distributed (with no identification) by the Israeli consulate with the heading “Who Cares About Refugees?” Its purpose is to compare Israel’s profound humanitarian concern for refugees, its “care about refugees” deriving from Jewish historical experience, with the callousness of the Arab states. The proof is that Israel has been enthusiastic in helping Cambodian refugees. By the same logic, Soviet Party
state with interests to pursue in the international arena. The reference to the “frenzied courtship of Palestinians” in the West gives an interesting indication of the state of mind and grasp of reality on the part of many liberal Isra
eli intellectuals.
What Rubinstein describes as a “mixture of ignorance and insanity” with regard to Israel’s Christian allies spread over Israel as well, as soldiers and journalists began to learn about them from evidence more direct than Israeli propaganda. Included were some of the most respected correspondents in Israel, for example, Ze’ev Schiff, whose description of Israel’s Maronite allies enjoying the fun was cited above, and Colonel Dov Yirmiah, who recounts stories of Phalange atrocities in June (see section 5.3). Or consider the report by this soldier, after the Beirut massacres:
A storm was aroused in the state concerning the Phalangists in connection with the Sabra and Shatila affair. It was only necessary to become acquainted with the Phalangists to know that they were capable of doing what they did. At least I, a simple soldier, understood this, when I was in Beirut before it all happened. I happened to make friends with one Phalangist. Until today, I cannot forget two pictures that he showed me with real pride. In one he stood in a heroic pose holding in his hands two full jars—ears of terrorists! He told me that he had cut them from the bodies of terrorists recently [that is, after the IDF had turned the
Liners, if they had the audacity, could demonstrate the deep commitment of the Soviet leadership to civil liberties by citing their outrage over miscarriages of justice in the United States, the case of the Wilmington 10, for example. Again, the Age of Orwell.
“terrorists” over to Phalange control]. In the second, I saw him standing holding in each hand a head that had been cut off, and between his legs a third! He explained to me with great self-importance that these were the heads of Palestinians he had decapitated.189
Another case is the story of the Druze Sheikh Sami Abu-Said in the Chouf, quiet during the civil war but enflamed by the entry of the Phalange in the trail of the IDF. He was captured in a Phalange ambush and killed with an axe. His body was mutilated and his limbs cut off, then placed in a box and sent to his village, setting off one of the many postwar incidents in the region.190 There are many other examples.
In fact, Rubinstein is being a bit disingenuous. There was ample evidence about the character and behavior of Israel’s allies and clients long before, from the days of Karantina, Tel al-Zaatar and Khiyam (see section 3), for example. The facts were simply suppressed in Israel when it was convenient to suppress them—and brought forth, to a degree, when it became useful to do so, in particular, by September 1982, when evidence began to mount that the Phalangists would not be the docile allies that Israel had expected, and after the Sabra-Shatila massacres, when it became necessary to appeal to the “Arab character” to explain away what had happened under the control of the IDF. Rubinstein himself would surely not have written about the Phalange in October the way he did in July, nor would he have condemned the “ignorance and insanity” of those in the West who were critical of the Phalange, not because the Phalange had changed, or because his knowledge about the Phalange had changed, but because Israel’s relations with them had changed. One may also recall the forbidden point that however terrible the behavior of Israel’s allies had been, it hardly compares with what Israel itself had done in its war of terror in southern Lebanon for many years; consider the full story of Khiyam, for example.
Rubinstein’s is a voice from the critical end of the spectrum of mainstream political and intellectual life in Israel. A month later, as the battering of Beirut reached new heights of savagery, Begin’s popularity correspondingly soared to record heights. A mid-August poll showed that Begin’s Likud would capture 66 seats in the 120-member Knesset if elections were held then (up from 48 in the 1981 elections), while Labor Party support dwindled to 35 seats (47 in 1981).* More than 80% supported the invasion of Lebanon (which was supported, publicly at least, by the Labor opposition), and 64% approved of the decision to go beyond the 25-mile zone announced in early propaganda, though it was already clear that the costs to Israel would not be small.191 A few weeks later, another poll showed that 60% of Israelis opposed negotiations with the PLO while 5% supported the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank (NB.: not including the Gaza Strip).192 Presumably, Israel’s population largely agreed with Begin’s assertion that Israel “never attacked the civilian population in Beirut,” and with the statement of Defense Minister Sharon that “I would not be exaggerating by saying that there is no other country in the world that can boast of such a capacity for confrontation and such successes with such supreme universal moral value as little Israel.” The Knesset voted
* Asked to state their preference for head of the government, 54% selected Begin in August, the next highest (14%) being Rabin and the next, then President Yitzhak Navon (4%). Begin’s popularity dropped to 45% by October (and Rabin’s to 11%) after the events to which we return, while Navon’s rose to 18%. By February 1983, Begin’s popularity was 45%, Navon’s 23%, and Rabin’s 5% (about 20% not responding throughout). Shimon Peres, head of the Labor Party, stood at about 3.5% throughout. Ma’ariv, Feb. 18, 1983.
50-40 to accept Sharon’s statement, rejecting by 52-38 a Labor Party statement that “the military advantage gained by the heavy bombing and shelling of Beirut ‘did not justify the damage caused Israel’,” obviously the only relevant consideration.193 None of this affected judgments here concerning Israel’s sublime moral standards. Recall the “pragmatic” critique of America’s aggression and atrocities in Indochina which was predominant by far among “the intellectual elite” even at the height of opposition to the Vietnam war.194
As explained by Gideon Hausner, Israel’s war against the PLO (“the centre of a cancerous growth which has metastasized all over the world,” a “gang of thugs”) proved “again” Israel’s “power and its respect for human values. Not for the first time in our history, an outstanding Jewish contribution is being first begrudged, then gradually acknowledged and ultimately acclaimed”—acclaimed as a “victory for humanity.”195 Hausner was the prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann and is the chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center.
Hausner’s choice of terms can hardly fail to call to mind other episodes of Jewish history, when Jews or Zionists were the centers of various cancerous growths.” Again it is interesting to see how some supporters of Israeli policies seem intent on fulfilling a curious self-image as spokesmen for states that we do not “dare to mention by name,” in Abba Eban’s phrase, with insistent mimicry of their phraseology: a “new order” imposed by Israeli arms; a Palestinian state as “a dagger poised at the heart of Israel”—not to speak of “two-legged beasts” inhabiting “nests” like vermin, etc. There is something indeed perverse in this pose. The significance of such phrases as “cancerous growth” and “gang of thugs” becomes clearer when we bear in mind the status of the PLO among Palestinians in the occupied territories and elsewhere, and the fact, clear enough to many Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon, that “every Palestinian is automatically a suspected terrorist, and by our definition of that term it is actually true…[since] we are confronting a comprehensive [PLO] organizational structure,” including youth clubs, health services and a functioning economy, and everyone connected with them (i.e., all Palestinians) “is now a terrorist by our definition.”196 Recall Ya’akov Meridor’s reference to the casualties in Sidon as “terrorists and their hostages”—a phrase that can only be interpreted as meaning “Palestinians and Lebanese,” in the perverse Israeli idiom.
This picture of Israel’s war in southern Lebanon, and of the nature of the cancer that was excised, was confirmed by many others, for example, Mordechai Bar-On, formerly the IDF’s chief education officer and a Jewish Agency official, whose remarks were partially quoted earlier (section 4.6.1).* “Of all the declared, implied and hidden
* This leading Peace Now activist describes the PLO as “a malicious and extremist movement” which has “to a great extent employed intimidation and terror amongst the Palestinians themselves” (a claim that is not too easily reconcilable with the results of Israeli polls in the West Bank and tha
t also overlooks too easily some elements of the history of Zionism); it is “a vicious and cruel organization” with “extremist positions” refusing any compromise with Israel, reflecting the “obstinacy, blindness and folly of the Palestinians.” It would require “a radical internal reform” for the PLO to “lead the Palestinians to realize their aspirations through compromise with Israel.” Again, we note how Bar-On, a respected dovish intellectual, erases from history the record of PLO moves to realize Palestinian aspirations through compromise since the mid-1970s, which happen to have been publicized repeatedly in the very journal in which he writes. Comparable remarks by a PLO leader concerning Israel would be eagerly seized upon by Israeli propagandists as proof that the PLO cannot be considered a possible partner for negotiations. Recall that Peace Now (which, in fact, has done important and courageous work) is commonly put forth as an ideal that has no counterpart among the Palestinians. See p. 288* and chapter 3, note
objectives of the war in Lebanon,” he writes, “there is no doubt that the central aim was to deal a crushing blow to the national aspirations of the Palestinians and to their very existence as a nation endeavouring to define itself and gain the right to self-determination.” The goal was achieved:
Anyone who visited Southern Lebanon during and even after the fighting would see that the war was fought not just against terrorist organizations and the PLO, and not even solely to destroy the PLO’s military infrastructure in the region. It was fought against the very existence of the Palestinians as a community with its own way of life, which had been evolving in Lebanon since 1948, and at an enhanced rate since 1975... [against the] health and educational services, political and social organizations, judicial and self-management systems, etc. Now that all these autonomous social systems have been utterly destroyed, the Palestinian refugees have once again become a faceless mass of people, uprooted, evacuated and torn away from any form of collective life.197
