Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Some further attention should be given to Howe’s demand for acknowledgement of the “legitimacy of Israel” as a precondition to negotiation. The wording is so common here as to pass unnoticed, but a little thought will show that it constitutes still another device of American and Israeli rejectionists to block any possibility of a peaceful political settlement. There is no relevant concept of “legitimacy” or “right to exist” in diplomatic interactions or international law. States are recognized because they exist and function, not because they are “legitimate” or have a “right to exist.” The U.S. would certainly not declare that the USSR is “legitimate” or has a “right to exist” in its present form, or that the governments of its satellites are “legitimate.” In fact, the U.S. officially rejects the forcible incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR, to this day. Nevertheless, the U.S. recognizes the USSR and its satellites. There are others who regard no state as legitimate, but they do not thereby oppose the mutual recognition of existing states with whatever rights are accorded them within the existing international system, though no abstract “right to exist.” Note that the demand that Palestinians recognize the “legitimacy” of Israel goes well beyond the demand that Israel recognize the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians,” as Palestinians have insisted with remarkable near-unanimity and as Israel has of course always refused to do. One can recognize that some group regards a particular institutional structure (state or organization) as its legitimate representative without thereby according it “legitimacy” as an institution. There is no more reason to expect Palestinians to accept the “legitimacy” of Israel-that is the “legitimacy” of their dispossession from their homes-than there is for Israel to accept the “legitimacy” of Syria under Alawite tyranny, or for Mexico to accept the “legitimacy” of the United States, which stole much of its land; etc. To impose this unprecedented demand is simply to place still another barrier in the path of eventual negotiations and political settlement. Israelis may regard their state as presently constituted as “legitimate,” and Palestinians may regard the PLO as their “sole legitimate representative,” but these commitments need not be adopted by others who, nevertheless, recognize the fact of these commitments and accept the right to self-determination, whatever their attitude towards the institutional structures that result from the fulfilment (partial and distorted as always) of this right.123

  What of the idea, expressed by Hentoff and Peres, that prior to Begin and Sharon Israeli soldiers had to be careful about injuring civilians, or that David Ben-Gurion insisted on righteousness not merely strength and—as is implied by Peres’s remarks—would have been appalled at the efforts of Begin and Sharon to evade responsibility for what happened in Beirut? Do these statements give a fair assessment of the period since 1948 when “we struck the civilian population consciously, because they deserved it,” in Ze’ev Schiffs paraphrase of the remarks of the Chief of Staff, a relative dove? Or of Ben-Gurion’s doctrine that it is necessary to strike defenseless innocents “mercilessly, women and children included,” in reprisal actions?124 American Zionists may plead ignorance of the facts. Peres, however, knows them very well.

  Peres knows, for example, that this is not the first time that an Israeli government has been forced to resort to such deceit to cover up the terrorist violence of Ariel Sharon. The first well-known occasion was in October 1953, when Unit 101 commanded by Sharon attacked the Jordanian village of Qibya in alleged “reprisal” for the killing of a mother and two children in an Israeli village. Jordan had condemned the murders and offered its cooperation to track down the criminals; the murderers had no known or suspected connection with Qibya. UN military observers who reached the scene two hours after Sharon’s commandos had finished their work described what they found: “Bulletriddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them… Witnesses were uniform in describing their experience as a night of horror, during which Israeli soldiers moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades.”125

  The Qibya attack evoked harsh condemnation, with even the American Jewish and strongly pro-Israel press comparing it to the Nazi massacre at Lidice; in contrast, the massacre is lauded as a major achievement in the official Israeli history of the paratroopers, which states that “it washed away the stain” of earlier defeats that the IDF had sustained in “reprisal operations.” The public stance was different. Concerned over the international reaction, Ben-Gurion, speaking in the name of the Government of Israel, rejected “the ridiculous and fantastic” claim that Israeli military units were involved in the raid; it was, he claimed, a spontaneous retaliation by “border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps,” who attacked the village of Qibya “that was one of the main centers of the murderers’ gangs,” the kind of reprisal that Israel had “feared.” Foreign Minister Sharett was opposed to the deception, feeling that “no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars.” He felt that “the stain would stick to us and will not be washed away for many years to come.” “Seventy corpses were found in the rubble,” according to Ben-Gurion’s biographer Bar-Zohar, “including dozens of women and children.” BenGurion later “confess[ed] to one of his confidants that he had lied,” BarZohar continues, but justified this act with a literary reference (Victor Hugo) to a nun who had lied to protect a hunted -prisoner. Bar-Zohar also repeats the standard Israeli claim that “it never even entered the paratroopers’ minds that they were unwillingly perpetrating a massacre” as they blew up house after house in the undefended village—just as the political and military leadership never dreamed that the Phalangists they sent into Sabra and Shatila might not behave as perfect gentlemen. Recall what was found by the UN military observers.126

  Purity of arms? Care about injuring civilians? Conciliation and peace? Righteousness, not just strength, and “pain” at the evasion of responsibility?

  I said that Qibya was the first “well-known” example of Sharon’s terrorist career. It was not the first example. We find out more from Hebrew sources, for example, the history of the paratroopers, where we learn that Sharon was involved in the abduction of two Syrian officers in the early 1950s, and that the “first attack” of his Unit 101 was in August 1953. The target was the El-Bureig refugee camp south of Gaza, with 50 refugees reported killed according to the Israeli history; other sources give lower numbers, 15 or 20. UN commander Major General Vagn Bennike, reporting to the UN Security Council, described how “bombs were thrown through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons.” Again, the justification was “reprisal.”127 See also p. 207*.

  Qibya is the incident that at once comes to mind—as it surely came to Shimon Peres’s mind—when tales about purity of arms, conciliation and peace, righteousness and honor are told to contrast Begin with his Labor Party predecessors. El-Bureig and Qibya launched Sharon’s career. Conceivably, the Beirut massacres may end it. His career includes many ugly episodes in between, for example, the repression in Gaza and the brutal treatment of the inhabitants of northeastern Sinai under the Labor government. The responsibility of the Israeli army was far clearer and more stark in the earlier case of Qibya than in the Beirut massacres, as was the deception. The same is true of the massacres in Gaza after the 1956 war, and much else, crucially including the huge slaughter of civilians in Sabra and Shatila, and elsewhere in Lebanon, in June-August 1982.128

  When Sharett feared that “the stain would stick to us and will not be washed away for many years,” he was wrong. In fact, the record has been erased from memory, as the quotes just given indicate, or successfully prettified. Thus, the well-known Israeli-American military hi
storian Amos Perlmutter, writing in the New York Times Magazine, describes the activities of Sharon’s Unit 101 in the following terms:

  Every time terrorists were captured in Israel, they would be interrogated to determine where they had come from. Then an Israeli force would return to the terrorists’ villages and retaliate against them, an eye for an eye—or, more often, two eyes for an eye.129

  Hardly a proper account of the Qibya operation, or many others.* Today, Israel’s leading journal, Ha’aretz, writes that “the stain of

  Sabra and Shatila has stuck to us, and we shall not be able to erase it.”

  This reference to the Sabra-Shatila massacres repeats virtually the very

  words used by Moshe Sharett after the Qibya massacre 30 years earlier.

  Citing this statement, Newsweek adds that the Beirut tragedy caused “a

  wound to Israel’s soul [that] went deeper than lamentation over a mas

  * The implications of Perlmutter’s account are in some ways even more appalling than the reality—which is that Israel’s “retaliations” were undertaken largely without concern for the source of the terrorism, as in Qibya. Terrorists are not known to tell their interrogators where they had come from, except under torture. Note furthermore that even in his version, the victims of the “retaliation” are innocents. There is also the usual question of the chicken and the egg.

  sacre,” a “feeling among many Israelis that over the years their country had strayed somehow from the ideals of Zionism,” a feeling that its military successes “had sapped its moral authority, transforming the nation from an underdog into a bully.”130 The same issue of Newsweek has a picture of Ben-Gurion, who endorsed the Qibya massacre (among others) and sought to conceal it with lies. He is depicted as a man of peace, “Casting a light unto the nations.” Recall the highly selective and politically irrelevant reference to Ben-Gurion’s views in Dissent (see p. 647). It has been no service to Israel to wash away these many stains, and to have established the conditions under which new and greater ones will appear. It is no service now to pretend that Begin and Sharon have introduced something radically new into Israeli social or political culture or military practice in West Beirut, or before. There are differences between the Likud and its predecessors, important ones, but they are nothing like those presented in contemporary debate. By laboring to cover up the real history of Israel, and the U.S. contribution to it, its supporters have encouraged precisely the tendencies whose fruition they now deplore as the facts become too well-publicized to suppress.

  The crucial point, already copiously illustrated, is that over the years Israeli political elites have learned that they will be protected from exposure in the United States, and that, as the New York Times editors recommended once again while much of West Beirut was being smashed to rubble, the U.S. will pay for their exploits, as long as U.S. interests are protected. Given this historical experience, Begin and Sharon had every reason to believe that the same tactics would work once again when they sent the forces they mobilized into the refugee camps. Their judgment may in fact prove correct, as memories fade and the inevitable reconstruction of recent events proceeds, a process that was well underway within a few months of the massacre, as we shall see directly when we turn to the Report of the Kahan Commission of Inquiry and its reception.

  6.4 On “Moral Idiocy” The typical reaction in the U.S. to the Beirut massacres was as just illustrated: criticism of Begin-Sharon, resurrection of fantasies concerning the “beautiful Israel” that was, of course, what its supporters had been backing all along; euphoria as Israel showed its profound moral convictions by lamenting the massacre; and to celebrate the triumph of humanitarianism, an aid increase for the further militarization of Israeli society and for new settlements in the occupied territories. There were, however, other reactions. Norman Podhoretz bewailed the “great slide down the slippery slope to moral idiocy” on the part of those who “began denouncing the Jews” when “Christians murdered Moslems for having murdered Christians”—essentially Begin’s reaction, at the same time. The “moral idiots” were effacing the responsibility of Yasser Arafat, who was “directly responsible for the deaths of the Lebanese babies behind whom he hid his forces in Beirut,” just as his followers “had murdered Israeli babies at Maalot” (on the Ma’alot killings, see chapter 5, section 3.4, above; recall also how the Jewish Defense forces—Haganah—“hid behind Jewish babies” during the Jerusalem siege and before; see chapter 5, section 8.2.3). The moral idiots failed to see that it was, once again, the PLO, far more than Israel, who bore a major responsibility for the Sabra-Shatila massacres.131

  There was also a reaction from Elie Wiesel, who is much revered internationally and in the United States for his writings on the Holocaust and on moral standards and has been proposed many times for the Nobel Peace Prize for these writings, again for 1983, by half the members of Congress according to the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.* Wiesel’s position was that: “I don’t think we should even comment on [the massacre in the refugee camps] since the [Israeli judicial] investigation is still on.” “We should not pass judgement until the investigation takes place.” Nevertheless, he did feel “sadness,” for the first time, he explains; nothing that had happened before in the

  * In 1983, Wiesel was awarded the 1983 International Literary Prize for Peace in Liege, Belgium, perhaps in recognition of his observations through 1982 on Israel’s policies in the occupied territories and in Lebanon. Boston Globe, April 24, 1983. He was selected as chairman of the Holocaust memorial, as the “only one person of sufficient stature.” In his speech at the April 1983 gathering of Holocaust survivors, he emphasized support for Israel in the face of military and “political” threats. Washington Post, April 12, 13, 1983. Wolf Blitzer comments from Washington in the Jerusalem Post (April 15, 1983) that the organizers “were always careful, in their public statements, to characterize it as a nonpolitical event. But from the start, those involved in the operation fully recognized the automatic political spinoff for Israel…Israeli officials and sympathetic American Jewish political activists agreed that raising public awareness of the Holocaust...was bound to generate heightened sympathy and support for Israel. Only the most fanatically pro-Arab and anti-Israel advocates could fail to appreciate the relationship.” The organizers chose a low-keyed approach; they “did not have to use a sledgehammer to press their point for strong U.S. backing for Israel…Thus, without much advertisement or fanfare, Israel’s cause automatically received a major boost. Israeli diplomats were very well aware of the fact.” He goes on to explain how U.S. government officials “hesitated” to criticize Israel and “its West Bank settlement policy” because of the Holocaust gathering, joining Wiesel in their silence. Recall Nahum Goldmann’s remarks on exploitation of the Holocaust for political ends, an act of “sacrilege.” See chapter 4, section 2.

  occupied territories or in Lebanon had evoked any sadness on his part, and now the sadness was “with Israel, and not against Israel”—surely not “with the Palestinians who had been massacred or with the remnants who escaped. Furthermore, Wiesel continues, “After all, the Israeli soldiers did not kill”—this time at least; they had often killed at Sabra and Shatila in the preceding weeks, arousing no “sadness” on Wiesel’s part, even “sadness with Israel.” Therefore, Israel is basically exempt from criticism, as were the Czar and his officials, military forces and police at the time of the Kishinev massacre, by his exalted standards.

  Recall Wiesel’s unwillingness to criticize Israel beyond its borders, or to comment on what happens in the occupied territories, because “You must be in a position of power to possess all the information.” Generalizing the principle beyond the single state to which it applies for this saintly figure, as we should if it is valid, we reach some interesting conclusions: it follows, for example, that critics of the Holocaust while it was in progress were engaged in an illegitimate act, since not being in positions of power in Nazi Germany, they “did
not possess all the information.”

  At a rather different moral level, the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua responded to the massacre by saying that “the German soldiers also did not know what was happening”:

  What happened in the refugee camps in Beirut is the logical consequence of all that took place in the past months. A logical consequence, and almost an unavoidable one. What can one say? Even if I could believe that IDF soldiers who stood at a distance of 100 meters from the camps did not know what happened, then this would be the same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and Treblinka and did not know what was happening! We too did not want to know.

  Others too were unwilling to accept facile evasions of the Elie Wiesel type, for example, Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University, editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, who wrote:

  The massacre was done by us. The Phalangists are our mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organized them as soldiers to do the work for him. Even so have we organized the assassins in Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians.132