Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  3.3 The Population under the PLO and the Phalange As Israeli forces conquered southern Lebanon in 1982, many stories began to circulate about the violence and terrorism of PLO rule (in contrast, little was said about the treatment of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israeli-backed Christian forces, but then, there is little to say, since those who were not killed outright were simply expelled; the treatment of Muslims by these forces has also received little notice, and again, the same comment holds). A number of journalists attempted to verify these reports. A respected Israeli Arab journalist, Attallah Mansour (himself a Maronite), travelled through the territories that had been under PLO and Lebanese Muslim control. He observes that of all the forces in Lebanon, only the Maronite Phalange and the extremist Christian “Guards of the Cedars,” also allied with Israel, practiced policies based on communal exclusivism, simply removing or destroying their local enemies. “In the left-Muslim-Palestinian camp there were communal militias, but most of these organizations profess a universalist Arab, Lebanese, or socialist ideology,” and their practice reflected the fact: Christian communities are found throughout the area under their control, in contrast to the Phalangists, “who drove out of the areas they controlled in Beirut, Junieh, and other areas almost all the non-Christian population.” The well-known Muslim atrocities (Damour, Aishiye) “apparently were revenge for similar actions carried out by ‘Christians’ in Karantina, Tel al-Zaatar, and in the Beirut area and Khiyam (near [Israeli] Metullah).” In contrast, throughout the areas held by the Muslim-Palestinian forces there are “lively Christian communities” of various sects, as Mansour found in a tour through the area, including Christian cities and towns and isolated villages deprived of any Phalange protection. He heard stories of oppression and occasional atrocities— “the Christians were not fortunate at all, but it is doubtful that many people were fortunate in Lebanon from 1975 apart from murderers and robbers.” A relative he met in a Christian town near Sidon (under Muslim-Palestinian control) told him that he had “read too many newspapers and believed the politicians.” Mansour’s general conclusion was that life for the Christians in these areas was no bed of roses, but that it went on in relative peace, in sharp contrast to what happened in the areas dominated by the murderous Israeli-backed Christian forces.9 Note the unusual, perhaps unique credibility of Mansour’s account, given his reputation, background, and access to sources.

  Two Jerusalem Post reporters also toured south Lebanon to investigate the stories of PLO terror and atrocities. Despite considerable effort, they “could find little or no substantive proof for many of the atrocity stories making the rounds,” and eventually concluded that they were “exaggerated.” A close reading of their discoveries suggests that this may be an understatement, particularly when we correct for the extreme bias that they barely attempt to hide. Thus they say that in Tel al-Zaatar “many Palestinians were reportedly killed by the Christian forces”—my emphasis—and they open their article by saying that life in southern Lebanon was “so unpleasant that a large part of its population fled north to escape the PLO,” later giving evidence that the population fled massive Israeli attacks; and so on, throughout.

  In the town of Hasbaya, they found that “the PLO appears to have behaved more or less correctly with the people”; they were also told that 49 people were killed there by Israeli shelling though the PLO “never came closer than two kilometers” except for “brief shopping forays,” and “fear of the IDF was, the notables imply, far greater among Hasbayans than their fear of the PLO,” an observation from which they draw no conclusions with regard to terrorism. In other towns and villages they found that officials and others knew “nothing” about allegations of PLO atrocities or misbehavior. They visited Nabatiye, allegedly one of the areas of the worst PLO atrocities. The police chief there told them of “about 10 cases of disappearance,” though he was unable to provide any details. As for the 50,000 people who fled from this town of 60,000, they fled “mostly because of fear of the [Israeli] shelling,” the police chief told them (200 were killed by Israeli attacks, including a “reprisal,” which destroyed much of the Palestine refugee camp after the terrorist raid in Ma’alot). He also denied that there had been any cases of rape or extortion, though the PLO took goods from shops whose owners had fled. Others confirmed this impression, insisting that they knew of no cases of murder or rape, including residents of Ansar, to which they were specifically directed by an IDF colonel who heard that they were “investigating PLO rule and atrocities.” Here, the only story they elicited was of the killing of five local inhabitants who had “opposed the PLO, fought against them, with arms, during or after a firefight, according to residents. They visited the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Tyre, Georges Haddad, to ask him about life under the PLO, but he “prefers to expatiate on the problem of the thousands detained by the IDF in southern Lebanon,” and when asked about “PLO anarchy or rule in Tyre” he responded by speaking of “IDF destruction of buildings in his city.” Finally, under repeated prodding, he said (“exasperated”) that there were some atrocities by “extremist” elements, specifically, by the Syrian-backed Sa’iqa in revenge for the Phalangist massacre in Tel al-Zaatar, where thousands were murdered. Also, “The PLO was inclined to persecute and strike out against persons who disagreed with or resisted them, or were identified as agents of Major Sa’ad Haddad or Israel.” The general impression these two Israeli reporters received was that the PLO were often oppressive, but that atrocities were rare. In southern Lebanon, fear was “never far below the surface— fear of the PLO’s arbitrary law of the gun and, in several cases, the even greater fear of Israeli air strikes and artillery barrages.”10

  After what is officially termed their “liberation” from PLO terror, the inhabitants of Hasbaya—where the PLO had behaved correctly and 49 people were killed by IDF shelling—apparently began to raise some problems for their liberators. In November 1982, the IDF banned all political activity in Hasbaya and other villages of the region “after arms caches were discovered in the offices of these parties in the town of Hasbaya.” The parties banned were “the pro-Syrian party, the pro-Iraqi party, the Communist Party, and the party of Walid Jumblatt” (the Druze leader whose father, assassinated in 1977, had headed the now disbanded Muslim-Palestinian Lebanese National Front), a party affiliated with the strongly pro-Israel Socialist International. The Israeli commander also ordered that pictures of party leaders be removed from the walls of houses. The day after these reports appeared, the IDF denied them, alleging that the ban was instituted by Major Haddad, the Israeli client who was given jurisdiction over this area after the Israeli conquest; a distinction without a difference.11

  3.4 Israeli Military Operations in Lebanon in the 1970s Israel’s attacks in Lebanon over the years were generally described in the U.S. as retaliation against PLO terrorism. As usual, the categories of “terrorism” and “reprisal” are more ideological than descriptive. One might, for example, raise the question of what the Palestinians were doing in Lebanon in the first place; they did not move there because they liked the scenery. The comparable question would not be regarded as irrelevant in the case of some official enemy conducting “retaliatory” or “preemptive” strikes against “terrorism,” say, attacks by the Russiansponsored Afghan army against Afghan refugees in Pakistan (see note 4). Other questions also arise. For example, two days before the PLO terrorist attack in Ma’alot in May 1974, where 20 teenage Israeli hostages from a paramilitary youth group (Gadna) were killed during an attempt to rescue the hostages after Israel had rejected negotiation efforts (the terrorist unit, from Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front, had previously killed five other Israelis, including 2 Arabs), an Israeli air attack on the village of EI-Kfeir in Lebanon killed four civilians. The PLO raid is (properly) described here as terrorism, but not the Israeli air attack—which, in fact, is known (though barely known) here only because it happened to be the native village of the parents of U.S. Senator James Abourezk. According to Edward Said, the
Ma’alot attack was “preceded by weeks of sustained Israeli napalm bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon” with over 200 killed.12 It might also be noted that the taking of hostages in order to exchange them for prisoners, as at Ma’alot, is not without precedent. Recall the Israeli hijacking of a civilian airliner, 20 years earlier, with the same intent (see chapter 3, section 3).

  In the mid-1970s, as the PLO began to turn away from cross-border terrorist raids and the Labor government intensified its attacks, Israel shifted the grounds from “retaliation” to “prevention.” Thus, on December 2, 1975, 30 Israeli warplanes bombed and strafed Palestinian refugee camps and nearby villages, killing 57 people (Lebanese military communiqué; Palestinian press service). “Israeli officials stressed that the purpose of the action had been preventive, not punitive.” Two days earlier, over Israel’s angry objections, the UN Security Council had “paved the way for participation by the Palestine Liberation Organization in talks on the over-all Middle East situation…”—namely, in the session devoted to the Arab initiative for a full-scale peaceful two-state settlement “prepared” by the PLO (according to Israel’s UN representative) and vetoed by the U.S.13 One might conjecture that the “preventive” strikes in fact constituted Israel’s retaliation against the UN Security Council. Israel’s right to undertake such “preventive” massacres was rarely questioned here.

  In fact, Israeli attacks in Lebanon were covered only sporadically in the press, and then often in side comment, in part, perhaps, because of the difficulties faced by journalists attempting to travel in southern Lebanon, in part from indifference. The story of these operations has yet to be told. They did receive occasional notice.14 Newsweek reported in 1970 that “By conservative estimate, the escalating border war has already forced out one-fifth of the 150,000 Lebanese Moslems in the area, and the rest live gripped in a steady terror.” In the words of one Christian villager, the population is “caught in the middle” between the Palestinians, who “want back their land,” and the Israelis, who “don’t want to give it up.” “Both are determined to fight,” an accurate statement as of 1970.15

  After a visit to Lebanon in 1974, correspondent Philip Bowring wrote: Although foreigners feel safe enough from the raids of the Israelis in central Beirut, if they take the trouble to leave the tourist haunts they will see why the locals live with fear. The Lebanese view is that the raids are less an effort to satisfy Israeli domestic blood lusts than an attempt to blow Lebanon’s fragile political unity apart, setting Christians and Muslims against each other and the Palestinians against everyone. It could happen.16

  It did happen, in accord with the “rational prospect” explained by Abba Eban, but Americans, who were funding the operation, rarely “took the trouble” to see.

  That Israel has (again rationally) been intent on fostering internal strife in Lebanon has also been argued, for example, by Walid Khalidi, who suggests that Israeli initiatives leading to the intensive Israeli bombardment of November 1977 and the 1978 invasion may have been in part motivated by the desire to disrupt a recent agreement between the Lebanese government, Syria and the PLO (the Shtaura accord), which imposed a freeze on Palestinian cross-border operations and offered some possibility for a settlement of the civil conflict. Shortly after the surrender of heavy armaments by the PLO in the first phase of the accord, the Israeli-controlled Haddad militia launched an offensive with Israeli military support, disrupting the government’s plans to deploy the Lebanese army in the south. Edward Mortimer suggests that similar concerns may have influenced the timing of the 1982 invasion, about which, more below. Discussing Israel’s policies after the 1982 invasion, David Hirst concludes:

  Israel’s policy, in so far as it has a coherent one, appears to be to divide and rule, to seize, opportunistically, on all available means of reinforcing military control with political manipulation, to bring rival communities into collision with each other and into dependence on itself.17

  A close look at the facts tends to lend credibility to these conclusions, as we shall see in the next chapter. One of the rare articles on the bombing of Lebanon in the early 1970s was written by Judith Coburn, after an investigation of several months. One Christian Arab village was “a near ghost town” after five straight days of bombing in May 1974 (the same month as the Ma’alot terrorist action, which in contrast to this one, is very well-known). She found scores of villages like it, bombed since 1968 and attacked “almost daily in recent months…by airplane, artillery, tanks and gunboats,” and invaded by Israeli commandos who blow up houses, kill villagers, and take prisoners. “The Israelis are using the full range of sophisticated savagery known to our own military in Indochina: shells, bombs, phosphorous, incendiary bombs, CBUs and napalm,” much of it supplied by the U.S. The Lebanese government says that 301 Lebanese civilians have been killed; diplomats in Beirut and UN officials estimate 3500 killed in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan in Israeli raids. There are no figures for Palestinian civilians, “but observers estimate they must be at least twice as high as for the Lebanese.” Palestinian towns and camps have been almost levelled. “Most Lebanese and some diplomats in Beirut believe that the Israelis are pursuing a ‘scorched earth’ policy in southern Lebanon designed to drive all population from the area and establish a DMZ,” reporting burning of crops, destruction of olive groves, and so on. “The bombing has become so routine that it goes largely unreported in the American press”18—though Palestinian terror attacks were always front-page news and (again, properly) elicited outraged condemnation.* If the figures cited are correct, then by 1975 Israel had killed about 10 times as many Palestinians and Lebanese in attacks on

  * American correspondents in Beirut report privately that the New York office of a major television network suppressed a 1975 documentary on Israeli military actions in southern Lebanon.

  Lebanon as the total number of Israelis killed in the course of crossborder Palestinian attacks through 1982. See chapter 3, section 2.4.2. London Guardian correspondent Irene Beeson reports that “150 or more towns and villages in South Lebanon…have been repeatedly savaged by the Israeli armed forces since 1968.” She describes the history of the village of Khiyam, bombed from 1968. By the time Israel invaded ten years later, only 32 of its 30,000 inhabitants remained. “They were massacred in cold blood” by the Haddad forces that Israel had established in the south.19 After the Beirut massacres in September 1982, the story of Khiyam was recalled in the Israeli press. Moshe Hazani wrote that “we knew about the Christian atrocities of 1978—and we were silent.” “The silence fell on other villages, where there were events similar [to those of Khiyam], and perhaps still more terrible…” “Our hands spilled this blood,” he writes, adding that the Beirut massacres could have been no surprise to the IDF, which knew the history well.20

  Those who are paying the bills have yet to show similar honesty. Note that a decade of bombardment that drove out much of the population still goes unmentioned.

  Before the Lebanese army disintegrated in 1976, it had given a figure of 1.4 Israeli violations of Lebanese territory per day from 1968-74, with 17 per day in 1975, when the tally ended. By October 1977 it was estimated that the total number of refugees from the south (mostly impoverished Shiite Lebanese Muslims) had reached 300,000.21 Many were brutally expelled from their slum dwellings in West Beirut after the conquering Israeli army (or as some prefer, “their liberators”) had handed control over to the Phalange; see chapter 6, section 7.3.

  In November 1977 an Israeli-initiated exchange of fire caused several casualties on each side, and finally Israeli bombing “in which some 70 people, nearly all Lebanese, were killed.”22 As noted earlier, the fear of a still greater war at this time may well have been one of the factors that impelled Sadat to offer to visit Jerusalem. In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for a terrorist attack by PLO guerrillas, who reached Israel by sea from near Beirut, leading to the death of 34 Israelis in an exchange of fire on a coastal road. The invasion
was violent and destructive, with many areas left in ruins, some 250,000 refugees, and 2000 dead.23 The raiders had come from a point well north of the area invaded by Israel; the border had been relatively quiet since the November 1977 interchange initiated by Israel.

  In 1979, heavy Israeli bombardment continued, generally ignored in the U.S., though some of the worst atrocities were reported. John Cooley reports: “Despairing over apparent Western indifference to the ongoing carnage in Lebanon, Lebanese Prime Minister Selim al-Hoss has compiled a list of Lebanese men, women, and children killed or wounded in Israeli attacks inside Lebanon since last April,” to be dispatched to Washington by the U.S. Embassy. The purpose was to “show the magnitude of purely Lebanese casualties—nearly 100 killed and wounded in one day’s air raids last April alone.”24 The Lebanese government list is reported to have detailed “the names, ages and occupations of 969 Lebanese civilians killed and 224 wounded by Israeli air strikes and shelling.”25 Cooley reports further that the Lebanese Prime Minister, “a mild-mannered man educated in the United States, reacted angrily to a U.S. State Department statement that the American administration did not know whether U.S.-made planes had bombed Lebanon recently,” asking: “Does the American spokesman expect to convince us that Israel’s military capability, being used to pound populated areas mercilessly and daily, is not provided by the United States, despite all the American economic and military aid Israel is receiving?” Eyewitnesses “report homes, farms, livestock, automobiles, and boats in the port of Tyre destroyed” in the latest fighting, which included firing by U.S.-supplied heavy artillery from inside Israel and from inside Major Haddad’s southern Lebanese enclave, Cooley continues.