by Noam Chomsky
Doubtless Lebanon should be free from the Syrian domination that was backed by George Bush as part of the payoff for Syria’s participation in his Gulf war. But by U.S.-Israeli logic, Syria should have the right to make much of Israel uninhabitable by intensive bombardment, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees to Tel Aviv, to impose its demands, including the demand that Israel observe UN Security Council resolutions, among them the Council’s order that Israel withdraw from Lebanon and rescind its effective annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. That has yet to be advocated here.
Lubrani’s analysis was confirmed by Shimon Peres, describing the “achievement” of the Israeli operations as they ended. Previously, he said, Lebanon had not accepted Israel’s “suggestion” that it negotiate separately with Israel; now the “suggestion” is taken more seriously. Predictably, both he and Rabin argued that Israel’s violence had promoted the peace process, not only by driving a wedge between Lebanon and Syria but also by opening channels for further negotiations, Israeli officials elaborated. It follows that Israel should next bomb Amman, thus contributing to peace by separating Jordan from the other Arab parties and opening new channels of communication as the U.S. moves to terminate the assault by imposing Israel’s demands.13
Naturally, Israel has always preferred separate arrangements with much weaker neighbors who will succumb to its threats, leaving the Palestinians in the lurch, along with Arab states whose territory Israel occupies (in this case, Syria).
Lubrani was Israel’s de facto Ambassador to Iran under the Shah, then a leading figure in the sale of U.S. arms to Iran via Israel that began immediately after the Shah was overthrown. The purpose of this project, he explained publicly in 1982, was to establish contact with elements of the Iranian military who were “determined, ruthless, cruel,...[and] emotionally geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill ten thousand people.” Such a force could take over Teheran, he said, and restore the Israeli-Iranian alliance. A long-time Labor Party functionary, Lubrani has lost none of the qualities that have endeared the party to left-liberal opinion for many years.14
Israeli military officials confirmed yet another motive: to adjoin to the “security zone” a broad strip of land to its north that will be a no-man’s land where Israel can strike freely. In this way, Israel can extend “the area of Lebanon it controls without having to commit ground troops, a move that would be unpopular with the Israeli public,” Julian Ozanne reports, noting that the pattern of bombardment also reveals these objectives. Arab officials and press commentary suggest further motives, Lamis Andoni reports: to pressure Syria to accept Israel’s plans for the Golan Heights, and to focus regional and international attention against Iran, a major current policy objective, as is not obscure. Andoni also reports that ‘Contrary to the Western view that Hizbullah and its Iranian backers provoked the violence to sabotage the peace process, Arabs argue that Israel has used the incident as a cover to achieve its goals in Lebanon and to pressure Syria to accept its terms for peace.
The “Western view”—more accurately Washington’s—is adopted reflexively in U.S. reporting and commentary with the rarest of exceptions. Thus it is simply a Fact, requiring no discussion or argument, that Hizbollah “started the latest round of fighting in an effort to sabotage the peace negotiations and provoke a wider conflict” (New York Times Middle East specialist Elaine Sciolino). Or, if one prefers, it is a Fact that Syria, “seeking to remind everyone that Damascus is the source of all peace and war in the region, encouraged its Party of God proxies to fire scores of rockets into northern Israel” (Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, omitting a few relevant stages). It could not be that the guerrillas who were mobilized by Israeli aggression and terror, as all concede, had some other interest: say, to drive the occupying army out of their country and disperse its terrorist mercenaries.15
To appreciate more fully what is happening, some historical background is useful.
Since the onset of Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon—often “preemptive,” as officially declared—the occasional reports in the U.S. have largely reflected the understanding that, as a useful and generally obedient client state, Israel inherits Washington’s right to carry out terror at will.16 Thus in April 1982, as part of its attempt to elicit some PLO reaction that would justify its planned invasion of Lebanon, Israel bombed alleged PLO centers south of Beirut, killing two dozen people. The official justification was that this was retaliation for a PLO “terrorist act”: an Israeli soldier had been killed when his jeep struck a land-mine in illegally occupied southern Lebanon. The Washington Post thoughtfully observed that “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” Reflexively we understand that it is Israel’s anguish that we must respect when still more Arabs are murdered by Israeli terror, becoming victims of mutual hostility, no agent indicated.
The same attitudes prevail today. H.D.S. Greenway of the Boston Globe, who reported Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon graphically, now writes that “If shelling Lebanese villages, even at the cost of lives, and driving civilian refugees north would secure Israel’s border, weaken Hezbollah, and promote peace, I would say go to it, as would many Arabs and Israelis. But history has not been kind to Israeli adventures in Lebanon. They have solved very little and have almost always caused more problems,” so the murder of civilians, expulsion of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and devastation of the south is a dubious proposition.17 Can one imagine an article recommending a murderous and destructive attack on Israel, if only it could secure Lebanon’s border and promote peace?
The assumptions are so deeply implanted as to be unnoticeable. Thus few react when the cover of the New Yorker magazine, in July 1993, depicts children happily building castles in the sand—including a replica of the World Trade Center—as a crazed child wearing Arab headdress leaps down to destroy them with an ugly leer; the children are Black, Latino, and White, a deft touch, designed to absolve the authors of any charge of racism, while at the same time highlighting the depravity of the ethnic group that is to be despised by right-thinking people.
Having failed to elicit the desired PLO reaction, Israel simply manufactured a pretext for its long-planned invasion of Lebanon: the attempt to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to London, which, as Israel was aware, was carried out by the terrorist Abu Nidal organization that had been at war with the PLO for years and did not so much as have an office in Lebanon.18
The preferred version in the U.S. was that “Operation Peace for Galilee”—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—was undertaken to protect the civilian population from Palestinian gunners, and that “the rocket and shelling attacks on Israel’s northern border” were ended by the operation, though “If rockets again rain down on Israel’s northern border after all that has been expended on Lebanon, the Israeli public will be outraged.19 This cannot be correct, given the history which is not challenged (even if unreported, for the most part). When it came to be recognized that the rockets still “rain down,” the story was modified: “Israel’s two military forays into Lebanon [1978, 1982] were military disasters that failed to provide long-term security for Israel’s northern border.”20 Security had indeed been at risk, as a result of Israel’s unprovoked attacks from 1981, and to a large extent before. The phrase “military disaster” does not refer to the killing of some 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in 1982, overwhelmingly civilians, the destruction of much of southern Lebanon and the capital city of Beirut, or the terrible atrocities carried out by Israeli troops through the mid-1980s; rather, to Israel’s failure to impose the “new order” it had proclaimed for Lebanon and its inability to maintain its occupation in full because of the casualties caused by unanticipated resistance (“terror”), forcing it back to its “security zone.”
The actual reasons for the 1982 invasion have never been concealed in Israel, though they are rated
“X” here.21 A few weeks after the invasion began, Israel’s leading academic specialist on the Palestinians, Yehoshua Porath, pointed out that the decision to invade “flowed from the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed” by the PLO, a “veritable catastrophe” for the Israeli government because it endangered the policy of evading a political settlement. The PLO was gaining respectability thanks to its preference for negotiations over terror. The Israeli government’s hope, therefore, was to compel “the stricken PLO” to “return to its earlier terrorism,” thus “undercutting the danger” of negotiations. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir later stated, Israel went to war because there was “a terrible danger... Not so much a military one as a political one.” The invasion was intended to “undermine the position of the moderates within [the PLO] ranks” and thus to block “the PLO ‘peace offensive”’ and “to halt [the PLO’s] rise to political respectability” (strategic analyst Avner Yaniv); it should be called “the war to safeguard the occupation of the West Bank,” having been motivated by Begin’s “fear of the momentum of the peace process,” according to Israeli Arabist and former head of military intelligence General Yehoshaphat Harkabi. U.S. backing for Israel’s aggression, including the vetoing of Security Council efforts to stop the slaughter, was presumably based on the same reasoning.
After its failure to impose the intended “New Order” in Lebanon in 1982, Israel attempted to hold on to as much of Lebanon as possible, though it was forced to withdraw to its “security zone” as resistance caused too many Israeli casualties. Meanwhile Israel conducted violent terror operations, notably the “iron fist” operations of 1985 under the direction of Prime Minister Shimon Peres. These went on through the 1980s.22
To continue with a brief sample in later years, a few months after Sheikh Obeid had been kidnapped in late 1989 (see section 1), Israeli forces kidnapped Jawad Kaspi, a leader of the Shiite organization Amal, near Beirut, bringing him to Israel. In November 1991, AP reported that “the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army [SLA] shelled Shiite Muslim villages,” wounding an elderly woman and damaging 10 houses, a day after “Israeli forces and their allied militia shelled villages in the region..., killing four children.” The SLA also killed an Irish UNIFIL peacekeeper in an “unprovoked” attack, the UN reported. In December, Israel kidnapped three Lebanese, two of them journalists, near Jibshit north of the “security zone,” bringing them to Israel and releasing them a few days later. Three children, two of them sons of one of the kidnapped journalists, were killed by a car bomb left by Israeli forces; “it’s too bad that children were killed,” an Israeli military official said, but “the terrorists must realize” that vehicles can explode “on both sides of the security border.” Through 1991, the Israeli air force carried out 23 raids on Palestinian and Shiite Muslim bases in Lebanon, killing 31 people and wounding 108.23
Nineteen ninety-two opened with a January 10 attack by Israeli jets on an alleged guerrilla base near Beirut, killing 12 people (nine civilians) and wounding 14, most of them seriously hurt, so hospital officials expected the death toll to rise. Witnesses reported that the Israeli missiles targeted “a tent camp of Bedouin shepherds and squatters living in a cluster of buildings already shattered by the Lebanese civil war, destroying several buildings and setting Bedouin tents on fire.” On February 16, Arab guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers in an army camp near the border. In retaliation the next day Israeli forces killed Sheikh Mussawi and his wife and child; they also “retaliated with air strikes on two Palestinian refugee camps at Ain Hilwe and Rashidiye in southern Lebanon [also well outside the “security zone”] that killed four people, including two children, and wounded nearly a dozen others.” Three days later, Israel bombed 30 villages in southern Lebanon, killing four and wounding 50 according to early reports, causing some 75,000 to 100,000 Lebanese to flee villages north of the “security zone.” Israeli tanks and troops also attacked villages north of the zone—in response to Shiite shelling, as the New York Times put it. Two Lebanese civilians were killed, and eight UN peacekeeping soldiers wounded. The London Guardian reported that Israeli forces prevented the medical evacuation of the wounded UN peacekeepers, according to the UN, after smashing their way through a UN barricade with bulldozers and hitting a UN post with artillery “If the incident had been committed by let us say Iraq or Libya, international denunciation would have been thundered within the hour,” the Guardian noted; in this case, it was ignored. After the Israeli attackers withdrew, Shiite guerrillas fired rockets into Israel, killing a five-year-old girl.24
So events continued. In May Israeli rockets killed Hizbollah official Yasir Nasser, his wife, two daughters aged two and four, and his fatherin-law, in Jibshit. Prime Minister Shamir stated that “The Israeli army will continue to clear out nests of terrorists until they understand the message” and halt their attacks within Israeli-occupied Lebanon. Lebanese police reported 37 killed and 72 wounded in Israeli air raids in the first half of 1992. In June, Israeli shelling killed four Lebanese farmers tending their fields north of the “security zone,” in retaliation for a bomb in the zone that caused “minor wounds” to Israeli soldiers. In response to a bomb ambush that killed five Israeli soldiers in October, “Israeli artillery, aircraft and gunboats pounded targets across Lebanon,” the Times reported, sending hundreds of people fleeing from villages; “A shell is landing every second” in Nabatiye, Reuters reported.25
In February 1993, four Lebanese, two of them guerrillas, were killed when Israeli forces and the SLA militia “pounded 20 Lebanese villages in retaliation for” Hizbollah attacks “on the northern edge” of Israel’s “security zone.” After three Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon, Israeli helicopters retaliated by firing “at least 15 missiles into three houses, a bakery and a valley outside the zone, as tanks and artillery slammed 200 shells around a string of villages in the region.” A few days later, Israeli helicopters attacked the motorcade of Lebanese guerrilla leader Samir Swidan, seriously wounding him and killing his wife and young daughter. On July 20, the UN Secretary-General reported to the Security Council on the “increased level of hostilities over the past six months,” noting that “The practice of [Israeli] firing into populated areas continued, with resulting civilian casualties.”26
This is only a bare sample. As the occasional summaries indicated, much is not reported in the U.S.
The thinking behind Israel’s terrorist operations in Lebanon is no secret. It was outlined, for example, by the respected former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, considered a leading dove, and long before, by David Ben-Gurion.27 Talk of “purity of arms” or the “benign occupation” is disgraceful apologetics, as widely recognized by now within Israel.
3. Safeguarding the Occupation
H
arkabi’s description of the 1982 invasion as “the war to safeguard the occupation of the West Bank” might be applied to Israel’s July 1993 attack as well, though the intentions of the Labor government and its U.S. sponsor are not quite those of
the Likud government of 1982. The latter called for extension of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied territories, though not annexation, the distinction being left vague. The Labor government, in contrast, calls for “territorial compromise,” its traditional position from the “Allon Plan” of 1968.
The descendants of this plan vary somewhat in manner of implementation, though the principles remain stable. Israel is to maintain control over the resources and usable land of the territories, including a wide and growing region called “Jerusalem.” Much of the indigenous population, which lacks national rights, will eventually find its way to existing Arab states (“transfer”), as the leading figures of the Zionist movement always hoped and intended, while those who remain will either be administered by Jordan, or allowed to run their own local affairs. Israel will proceed with its plans for settling and exploiting the territories, maintaining effective overall control. Questions remain about just how to deal with the Golan Heights, and over the disposi
tion of Gaza, which has become such a hellhole under Israeli occupation that there are now thoughts of abandoning it—which means virtual destruction under current conditions. The Arab states are to accept Israeli arrangements and enter into a full peace treaty. The general project is entitled “land for peace” or “territorial compromise.”
Pursuing the project, Israel proceeds with its programs of expansion and integration of the territories, now helped by U.S. loan guarantees in addition to the traditional huge subsidies, which have no remote analogue in international affairs; the $10 billion loan guarantees, demanded with much passion for Russian immigrants who were being forced to Israel by pressures on Germany, the U.S., and others not to allow them a free choice, are now being used for infrastructure and business investment, it is frankly conceded—of course freeing funds for settlement in the territories.28 And while Jewish settlement flourishes and expands, the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories sink into misery and despair, the decline sharply accelerated by Rabin’s closure of the territories, which threatens even survival in a region that has been denied any possibility of independent development under the cruel military occupation. The “closure,” of course, observes the usual criteria: Jewish settlers in the territories are exempt.
The July 1993 operations are intended to advance all of these prospects, making it clear to the Arab states and the Palestinians that they have no choice but to yield to the force exercised by Israel under U.S. protection. All other possibilities have been eliminated in the New World Order, in which there is no deterrent to U.S. force, no space for independent initiatives (“neutralism,” “nonalignment”), no annoying impediments from international institutions, and no thought of an independent European role in what is recognized to be U.S. turf.
Israel may well consider that these opportunities are now enhanced. The Clinton Administration is regarded as even more extreme in rejection of Palestinian rights than the government of Israel itself. Two weeks before the latest Israeli attacks, the political correspondent of Hadashot, Amnon Barzilai, observed that the U.S. proposals presented to Israel and the Palestinians break new ground in rejectionism: for the first time, they stipulate that “all the options will be left open,” including even “the demand for full annexation of the territories” under “Israeli sovereignty.” In this respect, Clinton goes far beyond the governing Labor Party, “which never demanded that all the options be kept open,” insisting rather on “territorial compromise.” The U.S. initiative can only “strengthen the suspicion among the Palestinians that there is reason to fear an Israeli conspiracy with American support,” though in reality, neither the United States nor the Israeli political blocs, Labor or Likud, would consider true annexation of the territories with the enormous costs that would entail, such as extending at least minimal social, economic, and political rights to their inhabitants.29
