August/September 1992, Page 21, 22

Special Report

Israel in Lebanon: Turning Neighbors into Enemies

By Rachelle Marshall

With the Cold War scarcely over, Israeli propagandists are hard at work brewing a new one. This time it's Islamic fundamentalism that threatens the free world. During Israel's recent election campaign bot Israel's new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir referred to the threat posed by "anti-suggesting that the U.S. and Israel had a common interest in combatting this threat.

"No fundamentalist power can impose itself on the Middle East without defeating Israel," he said in an interview last June. "Whatever happens in this area Israel will always be on the same front as the U.S." And last April Israeli Ambassador Zalman Shoval asked an audience of pro-Israel activists, "Isn't the combination of Muslim fundamentalism and tyrannical, military-oriented nationalism in parts of the Muslim world, both being pathologically anti-Western, at least as troubling as the former Communist threat was?"

Serving a Double Purpose

Portraying Muslims as fanatic opponents of Western values serves a double purpose for supporters of the Israeli government. It provides a rationale for the claim that Israel is a "strategic ally" of the U.S. and therefore deserving of huge outpourings of aid. It also is a convenient justification for Israel's ongoing war against southern Lebanon-a war that, unlike the fighting in former Yugoslavia, goes virtually unnoticed in the West.

As Israel Shahak reported in the June issue of the Washington Report, Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon are military operations in southern Lebanon are "so ferocious as to be comparable to the massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982." A year ago The New York Times reported that Israeli air and artillery attacks had killed at least 352 people in the previous three years. In the 12 months since then the attacks have escalated, leaving scores more dead and thousands homeless. When British hostage Terry Waite was released by his captors in Lebanon last November, he pleaded publicly with Israel to end what he described as the "constant shelling" he and the other captives had had to endure.

Israel claims its occupation of southern Lebanon is necessary to defend its northern border from Shi'i Muslim militias bent on destroying Israel. "Were we to leave," former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens declared, "within 24 hours rockets would be raining down on Galilee."

In fact, although Shi'i militias have killed some 35 Israeli soldiers in the past four years, they have seldom launched shells at civilian settlements across the border and these rare attacks have taken no Israeli lives. The root of the current violence is not that intransigent Muslims are out to destroy Israel but the fact that Israel's iron fist tactics in southern Lebanon since 1982 have made life so unendurable for the inhabitants and so offended their national pride that it has become their overriding goal to rid their country of Israeli forces. As their resistance continues, Israel's efforts to suppress it become more ruthless, and so the devastation of southern Lebanon goes on, a disaster that could have been avoided and that will end only when Israel withdraws to its own borders.

Israel and its supporters have tried to convince the world that resistance forces in Lebanon are "terrorists." It would be more accurate, however, to say that the true terrorists in Lebanon have been the Israelis themselves. For more than 20 years Lebanon has been under almost constant assault by the Israeli military.

Since 1969, thousands of civilians have died in Israeli bombing raids, launched in reprisal for sporadic cross-border attacks by Palestinians who had been driven from their homes in Israel. The original aim of the bombing was to force Palestinians away from the Israeli border by targeting civilian villages for destruction. An AP report of May 14, 1975, for instance, described the total obliteration of Kfar Shouba, a town of 7,000 people, and said that in the previous nine months 30 other villages in the area had received the same treatment.

During Lebanon's civil war, beginning in the mid-1970s, Israel provided arms and other aid to the right-wing Phalange forces fighting Palestinians and Muslims. Walid Khalidi writes in his book Conflict and Violence in Lebanon that after Menachem Begin became prime minister in 1977 Israel conducted "continuous warfare by proxy on Lebanese soil. When the proxy faltered, Israeli fire power and reinforcements were ready at hand." On several occasions, according to press reports at the time, Israel initiated attacks by its Christian allies in a deliberate attempt to undermine cease-fires and tentative peace agreements between Lebanese and Palestinians.

In March 1978, Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon, leaving what one Washington Post correspondent described as "a broad path of death and destruction unprecedented in the region." He reported that "the Israelis have used the same tactic that the Americans used in Vietnam: concentrated and heavy firepower and air strikes to blow away all before them-be they enemies or civilians. Most of the population [of the Lebanese town of Bint Jbail] has now joined the estimated 200,000 refugees that fled northward before the advancing Israelis. Almost all the rest are dead."

Although Israel later withdrew its ground forces, during the next three years the airforce continued to bomb southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut, causing thousands of civilian casualties. Nevertheless, because most of the victims were Palestinians, and Lebanese Shi'i Muslims tended to see the PLO rather than Israel as the chief cause of their problems, they offered little opposition to Israel's massive invasion of June 1982. Many, in fact, greeted the Israelis with the traditional welcome of rose water and rice. Their welcome faded quickly, however. Israel's attempt to set up a pro-Israel government in Beirut under the leadership of Christian Phalangist Bashir Gemayel antagonized many Muslims. The ruthlessness of the occupation that followed turned them into bitter enemies.

Six months after the invasion, The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli restrictions on travel and other activities had crippled the economy of southern Lebanon, with agricultural production falling by 70 percent. The mayor of Sidon told reporters, "Israel has so much to admire and we could have become admirers if they had treated us with dignity. But the Israelis have turned us into enemies."

Growing Resistance

Resistance to the Israeli occupation was passive at first. As Israelis rounded up men for interrogation and raided villages for recruits to Israeli-backed militias, however, opponents became more militant. In early 1984, after Israeli police shot to death two members of the Shi'i Muslim Amal faction near Tyre, two Israeli soldiers were killed in a roadside ambush.

Israel responded with vastly disproportionate violence that only further inflamed resentment. By March 1985 Israeli forces searching for resistance fighters were using what Chicago Tribune correspondent Jonathan Broder called "reconnaissance by fire," which meant that soldiers in military vehicles raced through villages spraying fire in all directions. Broder wrote that southern Lebanon "has been turned into a free-fire zone trapped in an escalating cycle of violence and destruction." Israel claimed it was fighting terrorism, but Shi'i leader Ali Jaber told Broder, "They are the ones who are entering our villages, destroying our homes, killing our people and breaking our economy. So who are the terrorists?"

If Israel had set out to manufacture enemies at the start of the occupation, it could have devised no better method than its mass arrests of Lebanese and Palestinians and their imprisonment in the notorious Ansar detention camp in southern Lebanon. At one point in late 1982 there were 10,000 prisoners at Ansar, with another 5,000 being held in Israel. The indiscriminate arrests included U.N. workers, medical personnel, and municipal employees, whose services were desperately needed in areas devastated by Israeli bombing.

According to Amnesty International and other observers, Ansar was virtually a huge torture chamber, where prisoners routinely endured beatings and other abuse and were often forced to sit bound and blindfolded for several days without food or water. In January 1984, after 500 Lebanese were arrested in retaliation for attacks on Israeli troops, UPI reported that many of them had been packed into windowless concrete boxes three paces square, with six men to each box. Former prisoners said it was impossible to sit or lie in these cells. As a result of prisoner exchanges, today there are fewer prisoners but conditions are not much better for those who remain. Amnesty's most recent report in May accused authorities at Khiam prison, run by Israel's South Lebanon Army, of torturing inmates and said that the latter should be considered hostages, who are being held only for trading purposes.

Predictable Results

The results of Israel's determination to remain in Lebanon were predictable from the beginning. In February 1984, David Shipler of The New York Times observed that "the longer the army stays on Lebanese soil, manning checkpoints, conducting searches, making arrests, the more resentment it stirs among a local Lebanese population with whom Israel has no quarrel." In the same month, an editorial in the Oakland Tribune criticized Israel for conditions at Ansar and for the intrusions by Israeli troops into Muslim holy places and concluded that "Israel's own interest demands withdrawal." Otherwise, "Israel risks turning its North Bank into another West Bank, where military exigencies fuel a cruel cycle of resistance and repression."

Even Israeli military intelligence chief Ehud Barak warned that continued occupation would only arouse the enmity of the previously neutral Lebanese Shi'i. In February 1985, Gen. Moshe Levi said on Israeli television, "Among other things, Shi'i terrorism is a result of our presence in Lebanon. It is my assessment that through our continued presence we give the Shi'i more reasons to go on attacking us."

Because the civilian leadership ignored these warnings, Israel is now embroiled in a guerrilla war that, although its chief victims are Lebanese civilians, takes a regular toll of Israeli soldiers and is another drain on Israel's economy. This war will end only when Israel withdraws its troops from the so-called "security zone" in southern Lebanon, disbands its surrogate militias, and frees several hundred hostages, including Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, who was kidnapped in 1989. These measures would entail little if any risk to Israel. Although Shi'i are determined to rid their country of an invader, they show no signs of wanting to become invaders themselves. Indeed, their backers in Syria and Iran, as well as the Lebanese government, would be certain to squelch such an attempt, fearing reprisal by Israel and U.S. antagonism. In any case, in the absence of Israeli provocation, it is likely that all but the most die-hard militants would turn to rebuilding their own land rather than attacking Israel. Those few who remain could be dealt with by the Lebanese government, which has a stake in preserving internal stability.

Today there is no longer any pressure from within the Israeli government for an end to the occupation, so it will have to come from the outside. In an op-ed column in The New York Times last February, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy urged Washington and Moscow, as co-sponsors of the Middle East peace talks, to jointly call for Israel's withdrawal within 12 months.

Last year the State Department did ask Israel to leave southern Lebanon and let Lebanese army troops take over, but nothing came of the request. Through U.N. Resolutions 425, 509, and 684 the Security Council has repeatedly declared Israel's occupation to be illegal.

Although Murphy did not suggest it, there is no reason why the U.S. shouldn't ask the U.N. to impose sanctions against Israel as long as it is in violation of these resolutions. Such a move would entail high political costs for Washington, but the alternative is to stand by as Lebanon and its people bleed to death in a senseless and avoidable cycle of violence.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. She is a member of New Jewish Agenda and writes frequently on the Middle East.

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