by Noam Chomsky
As the Lebanon war proceeded, West Bank organizations and associations, including religious circles, insistently repeated their support for the PLO, in sermons given in mosques and in public statements. The Supreme Islamic Council of Jerusalem, normally apolitical, sent a letter to the United Nations rejecting the Camp David “peace process” and recognizing the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and stated publicly its “support for the PLO in its heroic attempt to reach a noble solution for the Palestinian problem,” calling upon the Palestinian people to donate one day’s salary “to our sons and brothers in Lebanon.” West Bank and Gaza municipalities issued a communiqué denouncing the war in Lebanon and declaring that the PLO remains the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people (June 20). A supporting statement, announcing once again “our full support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in the homeland and the diaspora,” was issued by a broad group of West Bank unions. Amnon Kapeliouk, who covers the occupied territories for the Israeli journal Al Hamishmar, wrote that there is near unanimity in opposition to the invasion (apart from the Village Leagues “fostered by the civilian administration”) and in reiterating the previous stand that “for any political negotiation it is necessary to address the PLO in Beirut.” Correspondingly, it was next to impossible to find quisling elements to replace deposed officials. In Dir Dabouan, the eighth town to have its elected administration removed since March, not one inhabitant was willing to serve in the new Israeli-imposed administration. Kapeliouk reports that apart from three people in the city of Jenin, no collaborators were found during the intensive summer repression undertaken “to exploit the opportunity” (in the government’s phrase) to “break the current local leadership.”60
In the New York Times, David Shipler quoted the spokesman for the Israeli administrative authority in the West Bank who states: “We’re conducting a political war against the P.L.O. The army is conducting a military war.” “Taking advantage of the P.L.O.’s weakened position in Beirut,” Shipler adds, “Defense Minister Ariel Sharon has stepped up political and economic assaults on the organization’s adherents and admirers in areas occupied by Israel since 1967,” giving a number of details.61
Protests continued throughout the summer, despite the harsh military repression. On September 3, one person was reported killed and three injured in Nablus when Israeli soldiers fired into a demonstration, and another Palestinian was killed near Tulkarm during a “combing process” carried out by the Israeli army searching for a person who had fired at Israeli soldiers. Another was killed by a settler during “violent student demonstrations” on October 26, and two were wounded in clashes with Israeli settlers, among other incidents.62 Recall that even the “moderates” (Freij, Shawa, etc.) continued to express their support for the PLO throughout the Lebanon invasion, and some in fact felt that support for the PLO had increased during the invasion (see chapter 3, section 2.3.1). A number of Israeli observers, among others, also observed the significant impact of the heroic PLO resistance against overwhelming odds. See section 8.3.1.
None of this fits too well with the preferred picture of the West Bank Palestinians, intimidated by the PLO for many years, who presumably should have been celebrating their liberation through the summer of 1982. Americans who might have been dismayed by the events in the real world could be comforted by turning to the pages of the New Republic, where they would be reassured to learn that what was taking place in the West Bank did not happen. As the journal’s specialist on the Palestinians, David Pryce-Jones, explained, “the PLO has had little success in inciting public disturbance on the West Bank and in Gaza” (this has been the case since 1967, he assures us). “As in earlier cases, Palestinians declined the PLO’s appeals to action,” the reason being that the Palestinians “have been under much more immediate and sustained threat from the PLO itself’ than from “Israel, Jordan, and the Lebanese Christians,” who they merely “resent,” while they are terrified of the PLO.63 In short, Israel’s repression in the occupied territories and its destruction of Palestinian camps in Lebanon, the Black September killings in Jordan, the Tel al-Zaatar and Sabra-Shatila massacres, etc., cannot compare to the terrorism launched against the suffering Palestinians by the PLO. This no doubt explains the total quiescence in the West Bank apart from the outpouring of joyous acclaim for Israel, Jordan, and the Lebanese Christians by the population of the West Bank and Gaza now that they had at last been rescued from their PLO tormenters by Israel’s army of liberation.
Returning to the real world, it comes as little surprise that Israel followed its invasion of Lebanon by heightening the repression in the occupied territories, targeting even pro-Jordanian elements (e.g., Mayor Shawa, who, as noted earlier, also recognizes the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people). Recall that under the Labor government, even pro-Jordanian notables who intended to form an anti-PLO grouping were denied the right to organize while Palestinian moderates, such as Bir Zeit President Hanna Nasser, were expelled or repressed, a fact long noted by Israeli journalists in the occupied territories; for example, Danny Rubinstein, who observed that some of the earliest choices for expulsion were pro-Jordanian figures, and more recently, elected officials regarded as moderates. Arab leadership “in fact cannot exist” under Israeli rule, he wrote well before the Sharon-Milson regime was established, even “moderate traditionalists.”64
The Begin government has simply been extending the policies initiated by the Labor government, with increasing harshness, and continued to do so during and after the Lebanon war. On October 29, 1982, the civil administration in the West Bank (which is subordinate to the military) issued a directive instructing administrators “to keep up pressure on ‘extremist mayors’ while trying to neutralize pro-Jordanian Palestinians” in an effort “to curtail Jordanian influence in the area and to increase the area’s dependence on the Israeli administration there.” In the words of the directive: “The pressure must not be let up on them [the “extremist mayors”] after dismissing them from their positions,” and with regard to pro-Jordanian elements, policy “must be a maximum continuation of neutralizing them and bringing them to great dependence on the administration.” Support should be provided for “pragmatic, moderate people,” Village League heads who “we have begun to cultivate,” although “It should be stressed that the aim of cultivation is not for its own sake but rather for the purpose of achieving a political end.”65
It is, in fact, difficult to distinguish pro-PLO from pro-Jordanian elements, as the case of ex-Mayor Shawa indicates. Thus when security forces detained three Hebron political figures in mid-June for “trying to organize support for the Palestinians in Lebanon,” it turned out that one was a former director of the local agricultural department who ran social services during the Jordanian administration and another was director of education during the same period.66
Some argue that the spirit of Palestinian nationalism in the occupied territories and support for the PLO there cannot be destroyed by demolishing the organized Palestinian community in Lebanon and employing the strong-arm methods carried out by Sharon, Milson and others and advocated by Martin Peretz and the like (see p. 360*) in the occupied territories. This seems to me questionable. The strength and courage of the Samidin have been truly impressive, but people have their limits, and conquerors in the past have succeeded in breaking their will.
After the repression of June and early July described above, one supporter of the Israeli invasion, Robert Tucker, wrote that “The Israeli action was, quite clearly, an anticipatory measure, taken to forestall the prospect of serious injury” to Israel, hence legitimate; by this moral code, preemptive strikes are now justified, and there can be no rational objection, say, to the Russian invasion of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, given the dangers posed to the USSR by NATO, or perhaps even to Hitler’s moves to blunt the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany67.* But
, Tucker adds, “if, despite the destruction of the P.L.O. as a military force, and perhaps as a political force as well, the Israeli Government uses its victory to harden further its policy in the occupied territories, the case made today by critics of the war will be made more persuasive.”68 One wonders what would count as “hardening of policy,” since evidently the actions undertaken from the first days of the invasion, or those of the preceding months, do not—perhaps mass expulsion of Palestinians, though no doubt an appropriate moral code could be devised to justify this as well, and perhaps yet will be.
The destruction of the PLO in Lebanon will require new prodigies of apologetics from “supporters of Israel,” who have been stoutly maintaining that Israel has long sought political accommodation but has been blocked in this effort by the PLO, and that only PLO terrorism has
* Recall that Hitler’s 1937 plan for an operation against Czechoslovakia was justified in internal documents “in order to parry the imminent attack of a superior enemy coalition” and in public by the Czech threat and “terror” against Germans.67 Recall also that Hitler’s conceptions have struck a responsive chord in current Zionist commentary; see p. 150*.
prevented West Bank “moderates” from seeking conciliation with Israel—which will, of course, grant them the right of true national selfdetermination when they are liberated from PLO tyranny. Early efforts appeared by mid-summer 1982, taking the interesting position that of course the Palestinians have national rights and even the right to a state of their own in the occupied territories, but that the PLO cannot play any part in this process. We must “eliminate the PLO, and enfranchise the Palestinians.”69 In short, we are naturally in favor of self-determination for the Palestinians, but we will determine who represents them, meanwhile giving full support to Israel, where both major political groupings have long rejected any meaningful form of self-determination or even negotiation with any Palestinians on any political issue, while looking forward to their “departure” in some manner.
In Israel, it is recognized that “American Jews have their work cut out for them.” Elmer Winter outlines their task in the Jerusalem Post: “They need to place Israel’s incursion into Lebanon, and the resulting new opportunities, into proper perspective, and not be deterred by editorial writers who criticize Israel for overkill, expansionism, arrogance, etc.” He then proceeds to suggest an appropriate “course of action,” the prime element being to stress that “Israel’s decision to push the PLO back from the Israeli-Lebanon border came after 11 months of escalating terrorist attacks against its northern towns and villages” which the UN forces were unable to prevent.70 In fact, the number of these attacks was zero, apart from retaliatory strikes in May and June, and what the UN was unable to prevent was the Israeli invasion through their lines, a fact little discussed here, but not overlooked in the European countries that had provided those troops. Winter proceeds with his instructions in the same vein, and, predictably, many have risen to the occasion, and will continue to work to overcome the actual history, as in the past, continuing to imitate their Stalinist models. See chapter 2, section 2.1.
4.6.2 Achieving National Unity While the occupied territories were the prime target of the Israeli invasion, it had other motives as well. There were, in the first place, domestic political factors. A Hebrew University historian writes that
The decision to launch and expand the Lebanese war can probably best be seen at this moment as a military quasicoup in Israel carried through by peaceful means against the previously existing political order. As Bismark demonstrated so brilliantly in the 1860’s, there is no better way to pulverize political opposition and to silence recalcitrant colleagues than to initiate short, victorious wars against weak neighboring armies.
A similar point is made by military historian (Col., Ret.) Meir Pail, former Director of the IDF Military Academy for officer training. He writes that some military adventure was needed by the Begin government “to strengthen their position in the Israeli public and to unite the people under their leadership.” Why pick Lebanon? “There was to be found the weakest enemy, it would seem, guaranteeing a clear-cut military victory,” and furthermore, “American support would be forthcoming” in this case, as indeed it was.71
Even short of “victorious wars against weak neighboring states,” the same devices can be used to shore up a tottering national consensus, as the Reagan administration has illustrated with its absurd posturing about Libyan hit-men, Libyan aggression and threats, etc. In February 1983, for example, the administration was beginning to be concerned about the defection of its “conservative” (meaning, statist militarist) constituency who were charging it with insufficient militancy. The administration responded by boldly confronting an alleged Libyan threat to the Sudan, sending an aircraft carrier into disputed waters off the Libyan coast, providing AWACS to Egypt, etc. Shortly after, Secretary of State George Shultz was able to announce that “Col. Muammar elQaddafi, the Libyan leader, ‘is back in his box where he belongs’ because President Reagan acted ‘quickly and decisively”’ against this threat to world order.72 The racist character of the phrase was no more perceived (by the mainstream media, that is; others commented on it) than the shallowness of the evidence of the “threat” (null, so far as has been made public), or the relation to the immediate background circumstances. In fact, the entire episode was quietly dropped as soon as the needs of the state had been served.
To cover up the weakness of Israel’s enemy, it was necessary to concoct stories about the immense military power of the PLO. Impressive tales were circulated about the huge arsenals of captured weapons, repeated with much awe in the U.S. and ridiculed by military commentators in Israel. The military correspondent of Ha’aretz, Ze’ev Schiff, reported that “the imagination is given full reign as in the stories of A Thousand and One Nights.” The captured arms were perhaps sufficient to equip one division with “light weapons,” mostly rifles. Some tanks were captured, a few perhaps belonging to the PLO, the rest Syrian. In the Jerusalem Post, military correspondent Hirsh Goodman concluded that to regard the PLO as a potential military threat “would be pushing the matter to absurdity.” Meir Pail estimated that weapons in the hands of the PLO were approximately equal to the quantities in the hands of the Haddadists and Phalangists (largely provided by Israel), and were intended to maintain the balance of terror within Lebanon. Labor Knesset member Yossi Sarid “wanted to know who had authorized senior IDF officers to tell Jewish fund-raisers from abroad that enough PLO arms had been seized to equip a million terrorists,” an obvious absurdity.73 Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Chief of Staff during the June 1967 war) dismissed the idea that the PLO was a threat to Israel, adding that the captured weapons were primarily light arms, intended for “terrorists,” not for an army.74
4.6.3 A New Order in Lebanon There were other reasons for the invasion as well. IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had stated not long before: “Since I have constructed a military machine costing billions of dollars, I am obliged to use it... Tomorrow I may be in Beirut.”75
A motive of broader scope and greater historical depth was to place Israel in a position to dictate the terms of any political settlement in Lebanon, exactly as Ze’ev Schiff had pointed out prior to the invasion (see above, sections 4.4, 4.6.1). The timing of the invasion may well have been influenced by the fact that the mandate of the Syrian Arab Peacekeeping force was to expire in late July, while elections were scheduled for August-September.76 The political situation was therefore fluid, and some observers believed that there was a chance for a political agreement among Lebanese.77 Israel preferred rule over Lebanon by the Phalange, or as an alternative, some form of partition with Maronite domination of at least the central regions and the southern portions associated in some form with Israel, perhaps under the rule of its client, Major Haddad. Right-wing Israelis have been quite explicit about the matter. The well-known physicist Yuval Ne’eman, former president of Tel Aviv University and a Knesset member from the Tehiya
Party, urged that Israel “establish a new order in Lebanon.”* The Israeli army “must be prepared for a long stay in Lebanon,” during which “Israel will have an opportunity of reaching a stage of socioeconomic or technological development in the nearby region which, geographically and historically, is an integral part of Eretz Yisrael.” Possibly there could be “an agreement on border rectification,” in which “Israel could integrate the strip south of the Litani, with its friendly citizens, into Israel’s development plans”78—thus taking a long step towards realizing the traditional “vision” of Ben-Gurion and others, which remained quite alive at least through the mid-1950s, and has a strong motivation in terms of economic and resource factors, as we have seen.
A few weeks later, Ne’eman was appointed to the cabinet to head the new Ministry of Science and Technology. “The primary mission of the Ministry of Science headed by Professor Yuval Ne’eman is the development of the Jewish region in the territories beyond the Green Line” (the pre-1967 borders). In an interview, Ne’eman stated that “only this mission impelled Tehiya to join the governing coalition.”79 He may well have his eye on the “North Bank” as well. His new Ministry is also “authorized to concentrate on creating an infrastructure for factories, especially sophisticated scientific industries, in the new Israeli settlements of the West Bank.” The government’s goal, Ne’eman stated, is “to settle so many Jews that the West Bank and Gaza can’t be given back to the Arabs.”80 We return to some of the activities of the new Ministry in the next chapter.