by Noam Chomsky
Israel could easily have avoided conflict with Syria, Schiff continues, concentrating its attack on the PLO in the western sector, a project that he seems to regard as legitimate. The Syrians would have “curbed the terrorists” in the areas they controlled as they had done before. “Before the war they warned the terrorists to refrain from actions that would bring Israel into conflict with them [Syria],” and they would have persisted in this policy. The war was not limited in this way because of Sharon’s intention “to drive the Syrians from Lebanon” in accord with the “large plan,” the establishment of the “new order.” Despite its efforts to avoid conflict, Syria was “forced to respond” to Israel’s attacks, just as “any other army would have done in their circumstances,” as Israel moved “to surround the Syrian army in the Bekaa valley.” In fact, the Syrian high command did not comprehend that Israel was bent on attacking Syrian forces. “They only understood too late that the war was not for south Lebanon but rather for all of Lebanon,” not “limiting itself to terrorist targets.” Syria did not even undertake a mobilization of reserves until June 9 and orders were given not to fire or even to respond to Israeli shelling, Schiff asserts. Israeli forces advancing on Syrian positions barely met with artillery fire at first. “The Syrians remained in defensive positions from the first moment, and if we had wished we could have avoided any large-scale ground fighting against them.” There is no truth to Begin’s assertion in the Knesset on that Syria rejected Israel’s cease-fire request, necessitating an Israeli response.*
*Returning soldiers told much the same story in the Israeli press. See, for Syria even refrained from employing its missiles against Israeli aircraft. Until they were attacked directly on June 9, “not one missile was fired against our aircraft,” which were operating freely “in great numbers” in Lebanon. The Israeli attack against the Syrian missiles was unprovoked; it was motivated by the “large plan,” since Israeli troops attacking Syrian forces would require air cover. “In all of this there may be military logic, but it is the logic of Sharon’s larger strategic plan, aimed at removing the Syrians from Lebanon along with the PLO and placing Bashir Gemayel in power.” This plan “in its very essence” necessitated “an intentional military attack” against the Syrians—who, it may be recalled, were in Lebanon under an Arab League mandate that was to expire in July 1982, having initially been at least tacitly welcomed by the U.S. and Israel because they were fighting against the PLO-Muslim coalition).12
With this background, Israel’s actions on the northern and eastern fronts in late August and early September take on a certain significance, in fact, a rather broad significance, to which we will return in the next chapter.
With regard to Schiff’s analysis, two points should be noted. In the first place, he is generally considered to be Israel’s most knowledgeable military correspondent and is a military historian of distinction, who has followed the affairs of the IDF at close range from its origins. In general,
example, Yediot Ahronot, July 5, 1982 (Israeli Mirror), where Moshe Savir, who “had been among the conquerors of Beaufort castle” in south Lebanon, reports on the lies told by the Begin-Sharon-Eitan triumvirate, among them their radio appeal to the Syrians to refrain from opening fire, an appeal made after “we had already been given orders to draw the Syrians into the war and to settle accounts with them, irrespective of what they themselves did.” See also chapter 5, section 5.1.
he is considered the prototypical “moderate” who holds “the middle ground,” journalist Nahum Barnea observes, noting that when Peres and Begin appeared in a television debate on the eve of the 1977 elections, they chose Schiff to be the moderator. Second, Schiff regarded the war in Lebanon as a disaster for the State of Israel. Sharon, in his view, “is ruining Israel”: Sharon might be a proper commander “for the Tartars” who overran Asia and Eastern Europe under Genghis Khan, but not for Israel.13
2.3 The West Falls into Line Returning to the state of affairs as of late August, the situation in the United States was not as favorable as Israel’s leaders might have hoped—despite the “green light,” the projected aid increases in recognition of Israel’s achievements, and the range of apologetics across the broad spectrum already discussed. There had been some erosion of the automatic support for Israeli actions and neglect of its atrocities, a fact that aroused much outrage in circles accustomed to more complete obedience and committed to the doctrine that control over thought and expression must be total, so that even slight deviations, even mere reporting of some of the facts, is an intolerable affront, evidence of a “double standard” if not outright anti-Semitism. But despite the slight departure from the norm, the situation was, in fact, well under control. The basic assumptions of Israeli propaganda were quite widely accepted: Israel had the right to invade Lebanon in “self-defense”; to demolish Palestinian population centers; to destroy what must be destroyed and arrest whoever must be arrested, in the words of the Chief of Staff (see chapter 4, section 7.2); to scatter the remaining population; and to bomb Beirut to drive out the PLO hijackers, who were holding the civilian population hostage. The subsequent fate of the twolegged beasts aroused little interest or comment here. If Israel had been driven to harsh actions, it was the fault of the PLO, which had never veered from its single-minded commitment to the destruction of Israel and the fostering of international terrorism, always rejecting U.S.-Israeli offers of a fair political settlement. In the occupied territories, Israel was organizing “moderate” elements, now free from PLO intimidation, and the “radicals” were being silenced. Dissent in the United States was unprecedented, but the center—and a very broad one at that—was holding.
In fact, in the West quite generally Israel was being granted the dispensations ordinarily reserved for Western violence. For example, few eyebrows were raised when Henry Kissinger rambled on in his charmingly empty-headed fashion in the London Economist, explaining how thanks to the war some “reasonable Palestinians” might finally “come to a Sadat-like insight that they must co-exist with Israel in some form,” though surely not the PLO (which had come to that insight years before, though Kissinger could no more comprehend that fact than he could understand Sadat’s peace offer of 1971 or the stance of the Arab states at the time that he was successfully blocking State Department moves towards a political settlement; see chapter 3, section 2.4.1); while as for the PLO, the Reagan plan must not be turned into “a subterfuge for rehabilitating” it or for “introducing the PLO in its present form and with its present concepts on the West Bank” (where these “concepts,” as discussed in chapter 3, include a two-state settlement in accordance with the international consensus). One particular sin of the PLO is its persistent attempt “to upset the equilibrium on the West Bank,” that is, to oppose the Israeli occupation that Kissinger helped to implant, a clear demonstration of PLO “radicalism.” Of course, we should “return to the overwhelming majority of Arabs living on the West Bank and Gaza a controlling voice in facing their own future,” while blocking the “rehabilitation” of the PLO, which they regard as their political representative, even those officially designated as “reasonable,” e.g., Elias Freij. In short, self-determination along the lines of the traditional American conception: namely, in the form that we will determine, since we are plainly the authentic representatives of the Palestinians—as of the Filipinos, the Nicaraguans, the Greeks, the Vietnamese, the Chileans, the Salvadorans, and many others who have been privileged to enjoy our beneficent attentions.
Kissinger also warned that “opposition to Israel must not become a congenital feature of our foreign policy,” an imminent threat as all can see. We should not permit Arabs to gain the impression that “acrossthe-board opposition to Israel is built into us, so to speak,” as they might conclude, for example, by looking at the flow of aid. We might “harass” Israel “into emotional and psychic collapse” unless it “feels compassion on our side, maybe even affection, rather than unremitting pressure.” Furthermore, “some Arabs” now “
seem to imagine that they can achieve their maximum programme [i.e., destruction of Israel] in return for nothing more than simple recognition of Israel”—a pronouncement that appears to mean that some Arabs feel that they can achieve their goal of destroying Israel by nothing more than recognizing it, a most intriguing concept. And so on, all regarded with at least mock seriousness by his sophisticated international audience.14
Kissinger argues that we should oppose “the creation of another radical state with irredentist aims towards both Jordan and Israel,” a Palestinian state dominated by the PLO, as “irreconcilable with the stability of the Middle East,” A saner view, expressed by Assistant Secretary of State Veliotes, is that a Palestinian “ministate would look at Jordan and Israel as superpowers”15—though from this rather different perception he draws the same conclusion: we should oppose such a ministate as harmful to “stability,” now because of its weakness rather than its irredentism. We see here an example of the beauty of political orthodoxy, as of certain other religious doctrines: since the desired conclusions are necessary truths, they can be derived from whatever premise we choose to put forth.
While support for Israel at all three levels—diplomatic, material and ideological—remained high, nevertheless the purposes of the invasion were well-understood, at least in some circles. In Foreign Affairs, the Israeli-American military historian and strategic analyst Amos Perlmutter wrote that
Begin and Sharon share the same dream: Sharon is the dream’s hatchet man. That dream is to annihilate the PLO, douse any vestiges of Palestinian nationalism, crush PLO allies and collaborators in the West Bank and eventually force the Palestinians there into Jordan and cripple, if not end, the Palestinian nationalist movement. That, for Sharon and Begin, was the ultimate purpose of the Lebanese war.
He does not add that the dream entails crushing the overwhelming majority of the population of the West Bank (the allies and collaborators of the PLO), but perhaps that is implicit; or that the same “dream” is shared in essentials, and was being implemented, by the Labor Party, a fact commonly ignored.
In the same issue, Harold Saunders, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs under Carter and previously a member of the National Security Council staff with responsibility for Middle East matters, writes that
With a fragmented and dispersed PLO, Israeli leaders foresaw the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza—deprived of outside moral support—coming to accept permanent Israeli control there, in a situation in which much of that Palestinian population could be induced (or gradually coerced) to migrate across the Jordan River into Jordan... Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian War [in Lebanon] was fought mainly over whether an organized Palestinian movement would survive in order to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians as two people with equal rights. It was not fought only to determine how many Palestinian fighters should be where in Lebanon... The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, to repeat, was designed to destroy once and for all any hope among the people of the West Bank and Gaza that the process of shaping the Palestinian people into a nation could succeed. It was designed to break any final resistance to total Israeli control and to pave the way for making life so difficult for those who valued their freedom and political self-expression that they would eventually leave for Jordan.
By the late 1970s, he adds, “there is little question that [support for a West-Bank Gaza state “in land from which Israel had withdrawn under Security Council Resolution 242] remains the mainstream view of the Palestinian people as endorsed by the Palestinian National Congress” of the PLO, a position “reinforced” by the Lebanon war.16
Perlmutter envisages a virtual partition of Lebanon, with an Israelibacked alliance dominated by the Phalange and Haddad holding 2/3 of Lebanon and Syria holding the rest, and a “prolonged Israeli military presence” since ‘‘the Christians cannot survive as a political force without the protection and presence of Israel.” This might provide “an opportunity for a Syrian-Israeli rapprochement.” Syria is a “status quo power,” as revealed by its passive acquiescence in the Israeli conquest; in fact, Rabin’s Labor government had “somewhat reluctantly” encouraged Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon and “encouraged Syria to come close to Israel’s northern border” so as to “pacify the Israeli-Lebanese border in the same way that the Israeli-Syrian border had been pacified after 1973.” As for Sharon, he ousted the Israeli settlers from the Sinai “because, pragmatically, a quiescent Egypt was needed for any future course of action in Lebanon”; and by the time he took over the Defense Ministry, “Israeli generals were already busy planning a large-scale invasion of Lebanon,” planning to reach Beirut from the first moment of the war. As for “the scope of Sharon’s New Order in Lebanon and for the Middle East,” Perlmutter believes that it virtually excludes a stable Lebanese central government (an unlikely prospect at best because of Lebanon’s internal strife), and “the so-called New Order, when looked at imaginatively and correctly, provides some leverage for the United States” to turn Syria towards the Western camp and to “reassert…some U.S. control over events in the Middle East.” The U.S. should not, however, act “as the PLO’s Salvation Army in West Beirut,” he wrote in the summer of 1982. Saunders looked forward to U.S. efforts to bring about “an Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” but with little hope, it seems.
So matters stood in late August. In summary, the government of Israel had good reason, in its own terms, to feel satisfied with its achievements, at home, in Lebanon, and also in the United States despite some residual problems. The euphoria was not to last very long, however, and the events of the subsequent weeks were to impose at least a change of timetable, if not of longer-term plans for the “New Order for Lebanon and for the Middle East.” We turn to these longerterm questions in the next chapter.
3. The Taste of Victory Turns Sour
T
he events that followed in September 1982 were traumatic and complex. The construction that seemed so pretty in late August began to crumble, temporarily at least. Reagan’s peace initiative, announced on September 1, seemed to steal the fruits of victory
from the Israeli government. It called for a freeze on new settlements, some vague form of autonomy short of self-determination for the inhabitants of the occupied territories, and a Jordanian solution. These proposals were sharply in conflict with one primary war aim of the government of Israel: to lay the basis for the extension of Israeli sovereignty over the territories. Meanwhile, conflicts were developing between Israel and Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated shortly after. Israel at once invaded West Beirut, violating the terms of the agreement negotiated by Philip Habib under which the PLO had left. This aroused only mild criticism in the United States, where the U.S. pledge to Lebanon and the PLO that Israel would not enter Beirut was quickly forgotten, but the massacres that followed were harshly condemned. The crumbling Labor opposition in Israel hoped to receive a new lease on life, and its image as upholding peace and justice and conciliation was hastily resurrected by American supporters of Israel. If only Begin and Sharon, who had destroyed the “beautiful Israel,” could be removed, then all would be well. Let us now turn to a closer analysis of these crucial events and their significance.
3.1 Reagan’s Peace Plan Reagan’s peace plan called for a settlement freeze and stated that the U.S. would not support new settlements during the transition period. The transition was to lead to a form of “autonomy” in which “domestic authority” would be transferred “from Israel to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.” At best, the call for a settlement freeze would have been of limited significance, as was quickly noted in Israel, because of the character of the settlement programs that had been instituted, in part under Reagan’s initiative.17
Reagan’s program was explicitly rejectionist: it excluded the PLO, that is, denied the right of the inhabitants of the territories to select their political representative, thus undermining its own rhetoric concerning “s
elf-government.” It also opposed “the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” thus rejecting the international consensus and the near-unanimous sentiments of the inhabitants of the occupied territories, including even Israel’s chosen quislings. It also stated that the U.S. “will not support annexation or permanent control by Israel”—exactly what the U.S. had been supporting and continued to support after September 1 with the newly increased military and economic aid. The “self-government” to be achieved would be “in association with Jordan.” The question of boundaries was left vague.18 As discussed earlier, Reagan’s proposal was somewhat analogous to a hypothetical proposal of 1947 offering “autonomy” to the Jewish community of Palestine, but without a state or the participation of the Zionist Organization, and under the rule of some European country in which their experience had been less than happy. Nevertheless, this rejectionist program was considerably more favorable to the Palestinians than the alternatives that had previously been advanced by those with real power in the region: primarily, the U.S. and Israel. Given the objective constraints established by U.S. power, a case can perhaps be made that the wisest course for the Palestinians would have been to accept the Reagan proposals, thus committing national suicide but at least raising some obstacles to the U.S. backed Israeli takeover of what remains outside Israel’s complete control in the occupied territories.
Reagan’s proposals were rejected angrily by the Begin government, which announced that it would have absolutely nothing to do with them. The Reagan plan was therefore stone dead from the first moment, unless the U.S. would have chosen to put some pressure on Israel, or more accurately, to withdraw its material support for Israel’s settlement programs in the occupied territories. The U.S. at once made clear that it would not limit this support, and in fact extended it shortly after, increasing aid to new heights while maintaining the unique arrangements that permit U.S. aid to be used without supervision, hence for settlements in the occupied territories (in violation of the aid legislation). In short, the U.S. and Israel immediately killed the Reagan plan.