by Noam Chomsky
Christian and Druze leaders as well as Prime Minister Shafik Wazzan accused Israel of arming both sides* in an effort to fuel hostilities and justify a continued Israeli presence.177 A number of Israeli journalists agreed, adding substantial detail. Aharon Bachar commented on the fact that in the early stages of the negotiations at Khalde (Lebanon) and Kiryat Shemona (Israel), when the Lebanese were refusing to accept Israeli demands, the relations between the IDF and Walid Jumblatt’s Druze supporters (who had formed part of the PLO-Muslim coalition) became highly “correct.” In fact, Druze artillery was able to shell near Khalde, where the negotiations were in process, though it was evident that the IDF could have immediately silenced it had they chosen to do so. Bachar takes this to have been a message from Sharon to the Lebanese government that unless it accepted Israel’s terms, Israel would back the Druze who “are able to turn Amin Gemayel from the President of Lebanon to the Mayor of East Beirut in a week,” with tacit IDF backing. He also notes that protest by Israeli Druze over Phalange actions in the Chouf had “suddenly stopped,” and that the Lebanese government, “caught in the trap that the Israelis had set for them in the Chouf mountains,” had no choice but “to take part in the peace comedy in Khalde and Kiryat Shemona,” referring to the negotiations between Israel and Lebanon.178
By the end of January 1983, Lebanese police reported that 115 people had been killed in the Phalange-Druze fighting in the Chouf. Twenty-five more Phalange fighters were reported killed a week later, when Druze militiamen seized the town of Aley. The Phalange again accused the Israeli army of helping the Druze, alleging that they were
* A Western diplomat confirmed that Israel is arming the Druze, basing himself on information from a Druze militia official “who told him the Israelis were selling the Druze a variety of weapons, including heavy artillery” (Rebecca Trounson, Boston Globe, Feb. 15, 1983).
operating from positions next to those manned by Israeli troops, who kept Christian militiamen in their barracks. The Lebanese representative at the Khalde negotiations criticized Israel for permitting the Chouf fighting to continue. Israel responded by stating that the IDF had imposed a cease-fire and would not permit anyone to bear arms in the Aley or Chouf mountain regions.179 The fighting continued, however.
7.3 Beirut after the Israeli Invasion In Beirut itself, conflicts continued between the Amin Gemayel government and its “undeclared opponents—the Israelis and the hardcore Christians,” including the Guardians of the Cedars and the Lebanese Forces militia that had been formed and led by Bashir Gemayel with Israeli assistance. Its pro-Israeli leader Fady Frem, identified as one of the leaders of the September massacres, spoke at a Phalangist rally in favor of “cultural and special ties” between the minorities in the Middle East, that is, between Israel and the Maronites, a call that “could only be seen as an ominous challenge to President Gemayel.”180
Immediately after Israel conquered West Beirut, the Muslim population was disarmed and the confiscated arms were either taken to Israel or handed over to the Phalangists, whom Israel had just accused of the Beirut massacres, or the Lebanese army, according to IDF spokesmen. “The Muslims of West Beirut now fear most a rampage through their part of the city by the well armed and equipped Falangists who have been their blood enemies since the 1975-76 civil war.”181 A few days later, the Lebanese army, now under Phalange influence, cordoned off large areas of West Beirut to search for weapons and “illegal residents,” some foreigners but primarily Palestinians and Muslims who had fled to Beirut during the past decade, driven from their homes by the Israeli bombings from the early 1970s, the Phalange policy of clearing Muslims out of areas under their control during the civil war, the 1978 invasion, the subsequent heavy bombings and finally the “Peace for Galilee” operation. A Shiite ghetto, populated by poor refugees from the south, was bulldozed, and the squatters who lived there were denied permission to reconstruct. Hundreds of people were rounded up, including Lebanese Muslims. Most of those rounded up were probably Palestinians, whose number may have reached several thousand within the following months. David Ottaway reported that “The government has already made clear that it wants the vast majority of the estimated 500,000 Palestinians in Lebanon to leave as soon as possible.” He reports that a French officer of the international peace-keeping force saw 60-100 Palestinian men taken from one part of the Sabra camp. The Economist reported that “fear and uncertainty in the camps today are even greater than they were when the Israelis briefly occupied west Beirut.”*
There was at first a pretense that after the Muslims of West Beirut were disarmed, the Lebanese army would turn to East Beirut and disarm the militia there. That never happened. The Lebanese army did take over East Beirut in February 1983, though the Phalange militia kept their arms and a pier in Beirut harbor that they used for imports without
* See also Robert Fisk, London Times, Feb. 9, 1983, reporting the vicious beating of a Druze woman by Phalangists in Beirut, who justify the act (meanwhile, explaining that “we are not violent people”), also explaining that “we need the Israelis and we dare not lose their help. We are too few here in Lebanon. We have just been driven out of Aley by the Druze. The Israelis let that happen to teach us that we cannot do without them... We are patriots and we are not brutal but we are all alone.”
government control, then turning it over to the government after a reported agreement that they would receive funds collected at the port. Muslims who had welcomed Amin Gemayel’s election, recalling his reputation for conciliation and diplomacy as contrasted with the militant fanaticism of his Israeli-backed brother Bashir, now fear that “instead of Amin using the state and the army to curb the Maronite militants, the latter appear to have hijacked the state and the army for their own purposes,” in the words of one “disillusioned Moslem professor” interviewed by Helena Cobban.182 Exactly what is happening within the Phalange government, with its apparent split between Israeli-oriented and more independent elements, it is difficult to ascertain.
The torture of Palestinians under Phalange rule continued. A team of Italian medical volunteers had attempted to reconstruct the services for Palestinians and poor Lebanese in the Acre hospital, where, according to Professor Walter Cavallari of a Rome hospital who headed the orthopedic unit of the team, “medical personnel had been kidnapped, killed, tortured, raped.” Following the practice of the IDF during the “Peace for Galilee” operation, the Phalange government expelled the Italian team, leaving severely injured patients unattended and closing down virtually the last medical center for Palestinians and Lebanese poor. Dr. Cavallari reports that kidnappings and illegal arrests continue, and that in the camps, fear of “disappearance,” Latin America style, is “very terrible.” The people live in the ruins of the bombardment, while the government refuses to permit them to reconstruct their homes or the productive enterprises that had provided employment. The Italian doctors say that ill and wounded patients had begun to come to the hospital from other areas of Lebanon as well to receive medical assistance from the Italian team. They are now abandoned, some in the course of surgery, without help and without hope. The Palestinian Red Crescent, which had provided free medical services to the poor, Palestinians and Lebanese, is denied legal status and unable to function (there is no other free medical service in Lebanon). The Italian government made no protest.183 The U.S. government had no protest to make, since there were no medical volunteers or equipment from the country that had backed and financed the operation that had created this situation.
The one PLO institution in West Beirut that had survived the Israeli invasion and its aftermath was the PLO Research Center. As noted earlier, its 25,000 volume library and microfilm collection was looted and carted away by Israeli soldiers, but it was being restored by its Director, Sabri Jiryis. On February 5, the Research Center was destroyed by a bomb that killed at least 20 people, including Jiryis’s wife. Reporting this incident from Beirut, Trudy Rubin notes also that in November the Lebanese army had confiscated a qu
arter-million dollars worth of medicine donated by foreign charitable agencies and that it was creating visa difficulties for foreign medical volunteers who made up the bulk of the staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent hospitals after the expulsion of the PLO, killing or arresting their staffs. She cites reports of 1-3000 Palestinians imprisoned by the Lebanese government, and reports plans by Lebanese government officials to expel many Palestinians, perhaps all but 50,000 of the approximately 500,000 who remain.184
A glimpse of what the invasion has created was given by AP reporter Paola Crociani, arrested and expelled, charged with “contacts with undesirable elements” (Palestinians). In prison, she was shown a room with hundreds of men piled on top of one another, “a huge heap of human bodies with exhausted desperate faces,” without food or water, unable to move; “the stench was unbearable.” She saw torture victims and heard “terrible screams—screams of pain of men subjected to torture during interrogation.” More recruits into the ranks of the disappeared.185
By early 1983, the multinational peacekeeping force in Beirut was coming under attack. Apart from continuing conflicts between Israeli forces and the U.S. marine contingent, which elicited harsh comment from marine commandant Gen. Robert Barrow,186 there were also attacks on Italian, Dutch and French forces by unknown assailants, all in Shiite neighborhoods. Lebanon’s army commander, Gen. Ibrahim Tannous, accused unnamed “non-Lebanese parties” of “masterminding and staging” the attacks in a campaign to drive the international peace force out of Lebanon. Some have speculated that the attackers might be from a dissident wing of Amal (the Shiite militia) with Iranian contacts. “Shiite religious and political leaders, however, have charged the Israeli secret service engineered the attacks to show that the Lebanese army and the international force was incapable of maintaining security in Lebanon.”187 Meanwhile Israeli forces continued to come under guerrilla attack.
7.4 Under Syrian Control The remainder of Lebanon remains under Syrian control. Bitter communal fighting broke out in the fall of 1982 in Tripoli, with many killed, and factional conflicts of varied sorts continue, involving proSyrian groups, Palestinians, and a variety of others. What is happening in this region is obscure; the one extended description that I have seen remains unpublished.188
8. Israel’s Moral Lapse
A
s of April 1983, the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations continued in limbo. Israel had little reason to bring them to a conclusion unless its basic terms could be imposed. Asher Maniv points out that “They drag their feet on Lebanese negotiations not because
they want to stay there, but because they want to stay in the West Bank.” Since Washington had linked the West Bank and Lebanon negotiations, Israel had an incentive to delay the latter so that it could continue with the intensive programs leading to extension of Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territories, derailing any “territorial compromise.”189 Maniv underestimates the Israeli interest in remaining in Lebanon, either directly, under some temporary form of de facto partition with Syria (until the next round), or indirectly, after some form of conditional withdrawal, through the system of collaborators and dependent institutional structures that it is imposing. Either way, Israel will have its “North Bank” and can proceed, as circumstances permit, with further integration.
As for the Reagan administration, at least at the rhetorical level it continued to press for a quick settlement and withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon, which, it is hoped, can then become an American client state, part of the American-sponsored “strategic consensus” in the region.* Reagan even discovered that “there’s a certain moral point that
* Like his predecessors, Reagan is having some difficulty in convincing the Arab states that Russia is the enemy they must fear. They have been much more concerned with threats closer to home: Israel and Iran. Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the well-known Egyptian journalist Mohammed Heikal wrote that “Any Arab leader who tried to stir his people’s religious conscience by
we think the Israelis are neglecting or not observing. And that is the new Government of Lebanon, after all these years of revolution and upheaval, has asked all the foreign forces to leave. For them not to leave now puts them technically in the position of an occupying force, that they are there by force in this country that has said to them, ‘We now want you to depart’.”190
Again, the press was disciplined enough to refrain from the obvious comment, though it may be that the process of self-indoctrination had reached such a point that it did not even come to mind. Throughout the summer of 1982, from June 5, the government of Lebanon had been demanding in the clearest and most vigorous terms that the invading army withdraw forthwith, citing the Security Council Resolutions calling for Israel’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal. That did not place Israel “technically in the position of an occupying force,” for quite a simple reason: since at that time the U.S. was backing the aggression, Israel was then not an “occupying force” but was rather engaged in selfdefense, just like Americans in South Vietnam, Russians in Afghanistan, Germans in Belgium, and all aggressors, by their own lights.
In October, immediately after his election as president, Amin Gemayel spoke at the United Nations, where he again referred to the Security Council Resolutions of early June calling for the unconditional
invoking the sanctity of Kabul to condemn an occupation that is 13 weeks old would only remind them of the occupation to which their holy city of Jerusalem had been subjected for 13 years” (Op-Ed. New York Times, April 2, 1980). Rejecting U.S. warnings about the Soviet threat, the Kuwaiti journal Al-watan observed: “At a time when the Israeli dagger is thrust deep in the Arab heart and U.S. planes are bombing thousands of Palestinians, we will not accept the argument that the threat comes from the Black sea” (June 18, 1982; The Middle East, July 1982).
withdrawal of Israel’s invading army: These resolutions did not lead naturally to the liberation of Lebanon, and they did not put an end to the continuing and recurrent invasion. However, they condemned the act of aggression, firmly established the legitimacy of our rights, supported the sanctity of our soil, and contributed to the preservation of the unity and the sovereignty of our country within its internationally-recognized boundaries… Contending with the Israeli invasion of March, 1978, the United Nations peacekeeping forces in South Lebanon were shocked, as we all know, because they were prevented from performing their mission fully, either through the provocation of one party or through the obstructions set up by another… [In June 1982] Israel violated the [1949 Armistice] agreement by invading Lebanon once more in circumstances known to all. The withdrawal of Israeli forces constitutes today the fundamental objective called for by your resolutions, and this objective must be achieved. Lebanon similarly awaits the simultaneous withdrawal of all non-Lebanese forces present on its territory.191
Still, the IDF had not yet become an “occupying force,” even “technically.” They were not missing any subtle “moral points” during the events of the summer, or afterwards, though by early February 1983 a certain moral lapse could be detected, as they began to refuse American orders. The moral lapse becomes clearer when in a negotiating session, Israeli Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir declares: “Nobody is going to influence us on matters of our defense. We will do what we please.”192 Israel is entitled to “do what we please,” by the approved moral code, only when that is also what pleases its paymaster and sponsor. By early 1983, that was not completely the case, though it is difficult to imagine that in the short term at least, the United States will put any significant barriers in the way of Israel’s objectives—at least, so long as no political force appears in the United States committed to an end to U.S. rejectionism and dismissal of Palestinian rights.
In May 1983, Secretary of State Shultz’s “shuttle diplomacy” led to a Lebanese-Israeli agreement that Israel accepted over Labor Party opposition, signed on May 17.193 As for the Lebanese government (in effect, the government of Beirut, as David Shipler o
bserves; a government that was “unable to negotiate forcefully,” “with most of their country under occupation,” the Times continues), it appears to have agreed to the terms under duress, feeling that “the draft agreement contained so many concessions to the Israelis that Lebanon could not afford to agree to it," 194,194 though it did, having little choice. In fact, the agreement was presumably a welcome one, considering the alternatives. The terms of the 11-page agreement with its 11-page military annex, side letters, and “clarifications” were leaked by Israeli sources, who claim that the pact is “tantamount to a peace treaty,” portraying it as “a wide-ranging document constituting the second major agreement between Israel and an Arab country,” thus neutralizing Lebanon along with Egypt in tacit acquiescence to the Israeli takeover of the West Bank, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights. The Israeli sources report that a 30-mile strip of southern Lebanon is to be under the control of a “territorial brigade” composed of the Haddad militia and other local forces, with Haddad himself in a command position that is not specified precisely. The exact terms are to be kept secret, reportedly at the request of the Lebanese government. “Israeli officials stress that the real test of the agreement will come not in its language but in its application.” Given the actual distribution of power, there is every reason to expect that Israel will ensure that the “application” conforms to the intent outlined by the sources cited, which would effectively place the region under Israeli control. Furthermore, Israel is permitted to conduct joint patrols with the Lebanese army beyond this region, to the Awali river north of Sidon. The Israeli interpretation of the accords corresponds rather closely to their demands on Lebanon in September 1982; see section 3.3. It is also consistent with the published segments. Shipler adds that the “high-sounding pledges in the accord…appear to constitute a quasi-legal arrangement under which Israel could intervene again in Lebanon if the agreement’s terms were broken… Israel could interpret a subsequent violation [or from another point of view, subsequent resistance to its interpretation of the terms of the imposed agreement or to the integration of the occupied territories] as clearing the way for renewed Israeli military action in Lebanon.” United Nations troops are restricted to the right to “surveil and observe” the Palestinian camps;195 they cannot patrol these areas, which means that they cannot provide a barrier to further killings in the camps. This possible consequence is not noted in the Times news reports, which keep to the official Israeli line: that the UN had been unable to prevent “a PLO buildup,” which means, under recent and current conditions, a reconstruction of political, social and economic life under the organization that the Palestinians regard as their representative. Two designated entry points are established for Israeli goods, and negotiations on future mutual relations are to start six months after an actual withdrawal of Israeli forces begins.
