It wasn't like everything from southern Lebanon was peaceful and then Israel launched a bolt out of the blue attack.
That's exactly how it was. See bold text:
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Shadows of the Past
To appreciate more fully what is happening, some historical background is useful. Israel's 1978 invasion killed several thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, drove hundreds of thousands to the north, and left a region of the south under the control of a murderous proxy force, Major Haddad's militia. Haddad's forces were responsible for many atrocities, reported in Israel but not here, one of the most notorious being the massacre of all remaining inhabitants of the Lebanese town of Khiam during Israel's 1978 invasion; the population had been reduced from 30,000 to 32 by Israeli bombing in earlier years. During its 1982 invasion, Israel selected Khiam as the site of its notorious Ansar I prison camp, used since to punish people suspected of anti-Israel activity in Lebanon, or their relatives, thus to undermine any resistance to the South Lebanon Army. There is ample evidence of hideous conditions and savage torture, reported by the press in Israel and England, but not authenticated by the Red Cross or any humanitarian organization because Israel refuses to allow any access to the horror chamber run by its proxies under its supervision.
The 1978 invasion was presented as retaliation for a Palestinian terrorist attack, which originated far north of the zone Israel invaded. In earlier years there had been a pattern of cross-border attacks by the PLO from Lebanon into Israel (called "terrorism") and by Israel into Lebanon (called "retaliation"). The scale was radically different, reflecting the force available to the attackers and their susceptibility to international reaction. Diplomats and UN officials in Beirut estimated about 3500 killed in Israeli raids in the early 1970s, along with unknown numbers of Palestinian civilians, with hundreds of thousands fleeing what was, in effect, a scorched earth policy carried out with US support and equipment. PLO actions, some of them atrocious acts of terror, took a vastly lesser toll.
Often Israel's terrorist operations lacked any pretense of retaliation. Thus in February 1973, Israeli airborne and amphibious forces attacked Tripoli in northern Lebanon, killing 31 people (mainly civilians) and destroying classrooms, clinics, and other buildings in a raid justified as preemptive. In December 1975, Israeli warplanes bombed and strafed Palestinian refugee camps and nearby villages, killing over 50 people, while "Israeli officials stressed that the purpose of the action had been preventive, not punitive," the New York Times reported. That particular attack, arguably, was indeed retaliation: against the United Nations, which, two days earlier, had arranged for the PLO to participate in a session to consider a proposal for a two-state settlement advanced by the
PLO and the Arab states, supported by the world generally, angrily denounced by Israel, and vetoed by the US -- hence out of history, like other unacceptable facts. One of the targets was Nabatiye, again emptied today. Nabatiye was a frequent target, including an attack in early November 1977, when the town was heavily shelled, with no provocation, by Israeli batteries on both sides of the border and Israeli-supported Lebanese Maronite forces; in the ensuing exchange, over 70 people were killed, almost all Lebanese. Egyptian President Sadat cited this Israeli-initiated exchange, which threatened to lead to a major war, as a reason for his offer to visit Jerusalem a few days later. By the time Israel invaded in 1978, Nabatiye's population of 60,000 had been reduced to 5,000, the remainder having fled "mostly from fear of the [Israeli] shelling," the Jerusalem Post reported. Others fared
similarly.
As PLO cross-border terror declined in the mid- 1970s, Israel intensified its own terror in Lebanon, with US compliance and media silence, for the most part. Hundreds more civilians were killed in Israeli attacks after the 1978 invasion, almost 1,000 by August 1979, the Lebanese government reported. ln July 1981, Israel once again violated a cease-fire, attacking civilian targets in Lebanon. Palestinian retaliation elicited heavy Israeli bombing. Some 450 Arabs -- nearly all Lebanese civilians -- were reported killed, along with six Jews. From these events, all that remains in historical memory in the US is the scene of Jewish civilians huddling in bomb shelters under attack from PLO terrorists and their Katyushas.
The US mediated a cease-fire, "and after mid-1981 the Lebanese-Israeli border was quiet," William Quandt -- a well-known Middle East expert and NSC staffer during the Nixon and Carter administrations -- writes in his history of the "peace process." Quandt's version is the standard one. The "border was quiet" in the sense that the PLO adhered to the cease-fire rigorously while Israel continued its violations: bombing and killing civilians, sinking fishing boats, violating Lebanese air space thousands of times, and carrying out other provocations designed to elicit some PLO reaction that could be used as a pretext for the planned invasion. The border was "quiet" because the crossborder terror was all Israeli, and only Arabs were being killed.
The occasional reports here reflected the common understanding. Thus in April 1982, Israel bombed alleged PLO centers south of Beirut, killing two dozen people, in retaliation for what it called 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 sagely 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." Typically, it is Israel's anguish that we must respect when still more Arabs are murdered by Israeli terror, and are thus to be seen as victims of mutual hostility, no agent indicated.
The same attitudes prevail today. H.D.S. Greenway of the Boston Globe, who reported the 1978 invasion 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 Hizbollah, 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 thousand of refugees, and devastation of the south is a dubious proposition. Can one imagine an article recommending a murderous and destructive attack on Israel, if only it could secure Lebanon's border and promote peace?
Having failed to elicit the desired PLO reaction, Israel simply manufactured a pretext for its long-planned invasion of June 1982, claiming that it was in retaliation for an attempt to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to London; the attempt, 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.
The official line in the US has been that "Operation Peace for Galilee -- the Israeli invasion of Lebanon -- was originally 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" (Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January-February 1985). This is plainly nonsense, given the history, which is not challenged. Since it is now recognized that the rockets still rain down, the story has been 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" (Elaine Sciolino, July 27, 1993). Security had been at risk only 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. 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 ir 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 towar 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 Gen. Yehoshaphat Harkabi. US backing for Israel's aggression, including veto of Security Council efforts to stop the slaughter, was presumably based on the same reasoning. |
