ISRAELI CARNAGE IN LEBANON REPEATS PATTERN FROM 1982

By James Bovard

Since March, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have displaced more than a million civilians and killed or wounded more than 17,000 people. Al Jazeera reported last month that “Israeli artillery shelling is still causing uncontrollable fires. Lebanese civil defense and firefighters are not being allowed by the Israelis to reach these areas and put out the flames. More than 60 towns in southern Lebanon are still occupied by the Israeli army, where the Israelis are carrying out a systematic campaign of demolitions.”

The war in Iran and the continued carnage in Gaza have squeezed out American media coverage of Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon and Beirut.  But Israel is repeating the same strategy and the storyline that it has used to justify attacking Lebanon since the dawn of the Reagan era.

In June 1982, a terrorist organization headed by Abu Nidal (the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s) attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. Nidal’s forces had previously killed many Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in bomb and shooting attacks, since they considered Yasser Arafat a traitor for his willingness to negotiate with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin exploited the shooting in London to send the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) into Lebanon to crush the PLO. Yet, as Thomas Friedman noted in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, “the number of Israeli casualties the PLO guerrillas in Lebanon actually inflicted were minuscule (one death in the 12 months before the invasion).” The Israeli invasion was originally scheduled for the previous summer but was postponed after U.S. envoy Philip Habib negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Israeli cabinet that his “Operation Peace for Galilee” would extend only 40 kilometers into Lebanon. However, Sharon sent his tanks to Beirut, determined to destroy the PLO once and for all. Foreign Ministry Director General David Kimche announced: “We have no aspirations for a single inch of Lebanese territory. Our sole aim is to free ourselves from the threat of terrorism.” As David Martin and John Walcott noted in their superb 1988 book, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism, the U.S. embassy in Beirut “sent cable after cable to Washington, warning that an Israeli invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Arab world, but not a word came back.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent estimated that fourteen thousand people, mostly civilians, were killed and wounded in the first month of the Israeli attack. When Palestinians fought back tenaciously, the IDF responded with indiscriminate bombing of Beirut. The IDF bombed the buildings housing the local bureaus of the Los Angeles Times, United Press International, and Newsweek. The Israelis cut off Beirut’s water and electricity supply and imposed a blockade.

The UN brokered a peace deal in which the United States and other multinational troops entered Beirut to buffer a ceasefire, allowing the PLO to board ships and transport to Tunisia, which had agreed to provide a safe haven. The U.S. government signed an agreement with Arafat, pledging that U.S. forces would safeguard civilians who stayed behind. Once the PLO withdrew from Beirut, the U.S. troops were pulled out and put back on Navy ships.

But the Israeli military partnered with bloodthirsty Christian Phalangist militiamen, aiding them as they carried out massacres in Palestinian refugee camps that left 700 men, women, and children dead.

President Reagan sent U.S. troops back into Beirut to stabilize the situation. Shortly afterward, the U.S. military effectively entered the Lebanese Civil War by bombing Muslim forces.  A suicidal Muslim truck driver responded by demolishing the barracks holding U.S. troops, killing 243 Marines. Reagan then withdrew most of the U.S. troops from Lebanon. His actions enraged neoconservatives who seemed to believe that America was obliged to pay any price to assure the success of Operation Peace for Galilee.

I had the ideal bomb-by-bomb commentator for that invasion.  Shortly after I moved to the Washington area, I landed in a boarding house in Pentagon City, Virginia.  One of the other residents was a retired CIA agent named Virgil who had become a falling-down-the-stairs drunk. But his mind was often sharp as a tack and he was a gifted storyteller. For most of his career, he was based in Beirut and Egypt, where he said he taught future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to speak English. Sadat was assassinated shortly after I moved into that house. Virgil also knew Hosni Mubarak and accurately described Sadat’s successor as utterly ruthless yet cool-headed. Virgil was tight with the most prominent anti-Zionist rabbi in the U.S., Elmer Berger. Back issues of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a newsletter Berger advised, adorned the living room. Virgil’s comments on Israel’s carnage in Lebanon were the perfect antidote to much of the “conventional wisdom” on that war.

Israel’s would-be whirlwind invasion of Lebanon turned into an 18-year quagmire that cost the lives of more than 1,500 Israeli soldiers. Israel maintained control over a swath of land in South Lebanon to purportedly protect itself from terrorist attacks by Hezbollah and others.

Israel also trained, equipped, and paid the South Lebanon Army (SLA). From 1993 to 1999, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and its SLA proxies killed at least 355 Lebanese civilians while Muslim guerrillas in Lebanon killed 9 Israeli civilians, according to B’Tselem, Israel’s premier human rights organization. In 1993 and 1996, Israel launched massive shelling campaigns on Lebanese villages to stampede hundreds of thousands of people north toward Beirut.

On April 18, 1996, the IDF artillery shelled a United Nations compound near Qana that was overflowing with 800 Lebanese civilians “who had fled from their villages on IDF orders.” The barrage killed 102 refugees and wounded hundreds of others. Hezbollah guerrillas had fired Katyusha rockets a few hundred yards from the compound. A spokesman for U.N. forces in Lebanon quickly denounced the attack as a “massacre.” Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli offensive, insisted that the shelling of the camp could not possibly have been deliberate because “that thing cannot happen in a democratic country like Israel.”

The IDF insisted that it was unaware that the camp was chock full of refugees. A UN report retorted: “Contrary to repeated denials, two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle [drone] were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling.” America’s U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright didn’t give a damn about the killings, but she was outraged by the U.N. report criticizing the IDF. Albright’s spokesman declared that she was “disturbed” that the report “chose to draw unjustified conclusions about this incident that can only divide and polarize the environment rather than drawing practical lessons that can prevent such a tragedy from occurring again.” An Amnesty International report concluded that the IDF “intentionally attacked the UN compound” at Qana. A few weeks after the attack, two of the Israeli gunners involved in the shelling were interviewed by a Jerusalem news weekly. One of the gunners commented: “In a war, these things happen… It’s just a bunch of Arabs.” A second gunner said that, after bombarding the refugee camp, a commander told the gunners that “we were shooting well and to continue this way and that Arabs, you know, there are millions of them.” Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, who had fought at Qana 18 years earlier while serving in the IDF, explained the carnage: “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own. Believing we really have the right to instruct 400,000 people to leave their homes within eight hours. And that we have the right, when those eight hours have passed, to treat their homes as military targets. And that we have the right to drop 16,000 shells on their villages and small towns. And that we have the right to kill without being guilty.”

Shavit added: “An Israeli massacre can be distinguished in most respects from an Arab massacre in that it is not malicious, not carried out on orders from High Above and does not serve any strategic purpose… An Israeli massacre usually occurs after we sanction an unjustifiable degree of violence so that at some point we lose the ability to control that violence. Thus, in most cases, an Israeli massacre is a kind of work accident.”

Though the Israeli army initially justified the 1996 incursion as seeking to “rout out terrorist nests” in southern Lebanon, the subsequent occupation by the IDF would spur terrorist attacks on Israeli forces far beyond what Israel suffered before the invasion. The clearest legacy of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon is Hezbollah.

In mid-July 2006, Israel launched another bombing campaign and invasion of southern Lebanon.  But Hezbollah stunned the world by fighting the IDF to a draw despite endless Israeli cheerleaders in Washington. The House of Representatives voted 410-8 for a resolution endorsing Israeli military action. In late July, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon announced on Israeli Army Radio that the IDF was entitled to kill anyone who remained in southern Lebanon. “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,” Ramon declared.

A month after the war started, Seymour Hersh’s revealed in a superb article in The New Yorker that Israel’s war on Lebanon was a warm-up for a U.S. war on Iran. The Bush administration was “closely involved” in planning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.  A former senior intelligence official informed Hersh that, beginning the previous Spring, “planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.”

Hersh noted: “The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing… is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

The Bush team was chomping at the bit to use the “lessons” from Israel’s war for its own war on Iran.  A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’” The Bush team apparently believed that they were entitled to create a few more catastrophes before Bush’s time ran out.

In March 2007, Former US United Nations Ambassador John Bolton told the BBC today that he was “damned proud” of how the U.S. intentionally blocked efforts to achieve a ceasefire when Israel was bombing Beirut and many other locales in Lebanon.  Bolton said it was “perfectly legitimate and good politics” for Israel to seek to crush Hezbollah.   The fact that the Israelis used U.S. bombs to wreak death and destruction throughout Lebanon was morally irrelevant.   More than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed by the Israeli government, with the Bush team cheering on each detonation. AIPAC, the most powerful lobby in DC, bragged of its role in blocking any ceasefire.

Bolton captured the arrogance and total hypocrisy of the Bush war on terrorism.  In a meeting in August 2006, Bolton “implied that because Lebanon harbored Hezbollah, Lebanese lives were forfeit,” according to a UN official who heard Bolton commenting in meetings at the time.

Neither AIPAC nor the Bush team suffered any backlash from Christian fundamentalists as a result of Israeli bombing of Christian villages.  Most Lebanese Christians despised and opposed Hezbollah – but they were Lebanese so they apparently deserved to die.

Twenty years later, many if not most, American Christians are again shunning the plight of Lebanese Christians or blaming them for getting killed  – as if this is all part of God’s plan for Greater Israel. Not since the Reagan administration have Washington policymakers sought to vigorously rein in the Israeli military that is bankrolled and armed by the U.S. government.

UPDATED;

At the National Conservativism Conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the Israeli government to commandeer much of southern Lebanon.  “I demand that the State of Israel permanently apply its sovereignty over the territories it currently holds, both in Gaza and in Lebanon,” he said. Too bad for all those churches in the requisitioned territory.

Why did so many American Christians ever presume that the Israeli Likud Party is the voice of God?