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Title: “Limited War” in Lebanon
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: September 1993
Language: en
Topics: Lebanon, US foreign interventions, Middle East
Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199309__/
Notes: Published in Z Magazine.

Noam Chomsky

“Limited War” in Lebanon

On July 25, Israel launched what the press described as its “biggest

military assault on Lebanon” since the 1982 invasion. The assault was

provoked by guerrilla attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon,

killing seven Israeli soldiers. By the time a US-arranged cease fire

took hold on July 31, about 125 Lebanese were reported killed, along

with three Syrians and three Israelis, one a soldier in southern

Lebanon, while about 500,000 people were driven from their homes

according to reports from Lebanon.

Journalists in Lebanon reported that 90 percent of the 80,000

inhabitants of Tyre joined the flood of refugees northwards. Villages

were deserted, with many casualties and destruction of civilian

dwellings by intensive bombardment. Nabatiye, with a population of

60,000, was described as “a ghost town” by a Lebanese reporter a day

after the attack was launched. Inhabitants described the bombings as

even more intense and destructive than during the Israeli invasions of

1978 and 1982. Those who had not fled were running out of food and water

but were trapped in their villages, Mark Nicolson reported from Nabatiye

in the Financial Times, because “any visible movement inside or outside

their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery

spotters, who…were pounding shells repeatedly and devastatingly into

selected houses.” Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate

of more than 10 rounds a minute at times, he reported, while Israeli

jets roared overhead, and in nearby Sidon, “the main Hammoud hospital

was admitting new casualties every 15 minutes by late afternoon” of July

27. An Israeli Army spokesperson said that “70 percent of the village of

Jibshit is totally destroyed, its inhabitants will not recognize it.”

The goal is “to wipe the villages from the face of the earth,” a senior

officer added. In Tripoli, 40 miles north of Beirut, a Palestinian

refugee camp was attacked by Israeli planes firing missiles. Israeli

naval forces bombarded coastal areas near Beirut and intercepted vessels

approaching Lebanese ports, though whether they also resumed their

long-term practice of kidnapping and killing passengers on the high seas

is not reported.

Israel and the UN observer force (UNIFIL) estimate that there were

300–400 active guerrillas in south Lebanon, from the Iranian-backed

Hizbollah (Party of God). Eight were reported killed by Lebanese

sources. The reasons for the attack were stated at once by Israel’s

chief of staff, General Ehud Barak. As reported by Boston Globe

correspondent Ethan Bronner, “Barak said a pattern had emerged that

Israel considered intolerable: Every time Hizbollah attacked an Israeli

or pro-Israeli position inside the security zone, Israel would fire back

at the attackers north of the zone. Then, the attackers would lob

rockets at civilians in northern Israel rather than at military targets

inside the zone as in the past.”

The “security zone” is a region of southern Lebanon that Israel has

occupied in one or another form since its 1978 invasion. In recent

years, it has been held by a terrorist mercenary army (the South Lebanon

Army of General Lahd) backed by Israeli military forces. Any indigenous

resistance to the rule of israel and its proxies is considered

“terrorism,” which Israel has a right to counter by attacking Lebanon as

it chooses (retaliation, preemption, or whatever) — what General Barak

chooses to call “firing back at the attackers.” But the resistance has

no right to retaliate by shelling northern Israel. These are the rules;

one goal of Israel’s July attack was to enforce them.

The US government agrees that these are to be the operative rules, while

occasionally expressing qualms about the tactics used to enforce them —

meanwhile providing a huge flow of arms and any required diplomatic

support. Given Washington’s stand, it follows that the rules are

unchallengeable background assumptions, merely presupposed in reporting

and commentary. It is unnecessary to ask what the reaction would be if

any state not enjoying Washington’s favor were to carry out comparable

atrocities, in gross violation of international law and the UN Charter,

were such trivialities considered relevant.

On July 30, Hizbollah announced that rocket attacks on northern Israel

could only end “with the complete and permanent halt of aggression

against villages and civilians and the stopping of Israeli attacks from

air, land and sea on all Lebanese territory.” The statement “received a

testy response in Jerusalem,” the New York Times reported. Reviewing the

Lebanese operation, the Cabinet did not even consider the Hizbollah

proposal, the spokesperson for the Rabin government said. That is

understandable. The rules are that Israel is allowed to strike “villages

and civilians” at will, anywhere, if its occupying forces are attacked

in southern Lebanon. Since these rules are also accepted by Washington,

the Hizbollah statement was dismissed here as well.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher was highly praised by Prime

Minister Yitzhak Rabin for arranging the cease-fire, which, according to

Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, satisfied all of Israel’s

demands, imposing its rules, thus granting the expected rewards for

“benign aggression,” the category that is acceptable to the world ruler.

The Israeli leaders informed the press “that the US-brokered deal

included an understanding that Israel and the southern Lebanese militia

it sponsors would continue to operate freely inside Israel’s so-called

security zone” in southern Lebanon, while rocketing of northern Israel

will cease (Bronner). There must be “quiet, I stress, on both sides of

the border,” Rabin emphasized, referring to the “security zone.” “The

status of the security zone has not changed,” Peres added, “and if they

try to plot against our forces there, or the South Lebanon Army forces

there, we will take measures against them.” The meaning is clear. The

new “understandings” permit Israel to carry out military operations at

will anywhere in Lebanon, as in the past, if it perceives “plots”

against its mercenary forces or its own military rule. The tacit

assumption, surely, is that in such an eventuality, Israel will receive

at worst a tap on the wrist accompanied with a new flow of weapons.

The occupation is in violation of UN Security Council resolution 425 of

March 1978, calling on Israel to withdraw immediately and

unconditionally from Lebanon. The government of Lebanon has reiterated

this demand, notably in February 1991 during the Gulf conflict; apart

from odd corners like this journal, the request was drowned out by the

self-congratulatory oratory about the wondrous new order of law and

justice. Israel is free to ignore such minor annoyances as the Security

Council and international law thanks to the stance of its superpower

patron, which is powerful enough to reduce the UN to an instrument of

its foreign policy and to shape international law as it chooses, as was

seen once again in the ludicrous legal arguments put forth to justify

Clinton’s bombing of Iraq in June.

For the same reason, Israel is free to reject the concept of “terrorism”

held by the international community, but rejected by the United States.

The concept is spelled out in the major UN General Assembly Resolution

on terrorism (42/159, December 7, 1987). which condemns international

terrorism and outlines measures to combat the crime, with one proviso:

“that nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the

right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from

the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that

right…, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and

foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor…the right

of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support

[in accordance with the Charter and other principles of international

law].” The Resolution passed 153–2, US and Israel opposed, Honduras

alone abstaining. Naturally, Washington denies any right to resist the

terror and oppression imposed by its clients.

US rejection of a General Assembly Resolution amounts to a veto, and

suffices to remove the issue from the realm of articulate opinion, which

reflexively adopts the US government position as axiomatic. Accordingly,

when the PLO endorsed all UN resolutions on terrorism, Yasser Arafat

was: denounced with derision across the spectrum for his evasiveness on

terror and his failure to repeat George Shultz’s “magic words” with

appropriate humility; as Shultz now reports in his much acclaimed

apologia, Turmoil and Triumph, he told Reagan in December 1988 that

Arafat was saying in one place ” ‘Unc, unc, unc,’ and in another he was

saying, ‘cle, cle, cle,’ but nowhere will he yet bring himself to say

‘Uncle’,” in the style expected of the lesser breeds.

Similarly, no one within the culture of respectability could dream of

questioning the doctrine that Iran’s support for resistance against

foreign occupation, in accord with the Charter and the near-unanimous

Resolution on terrorism, is still further evidence that it is a

terrorist state — though Washington’s support for the illegal military

occupation and its violence within and beyond does not suggest that the

US is a terrorist state.

The Logic of Terror At the outset of the operation, Prime Minister

Yitzhak Rabin informed the Israeli parliament “that he planned to flood

Beirut with refugees to press the Lebanese government to end the

attacks,” the Times reported: “He said Israel would continue to blast

villages as long as Katyusha rockets slammed into Israeli settlement

towns in Galilee” — in retaliation against Israeli attacks on civilian

targets in Lebanon to counter guerilla attacks in the “security zone.”

Israel’s plan, Army spokesperson Michael Vromen stated, was to “create

pressure on the Lebanese government [to rein in the Hizbollah

guerrillas] by having as many refugees as possible gathered around

Beirut.” The “limited war” is “a noisy, frightening ‘message’ in the

words of officials [in Tel Aviv] that the south will be uninhabitable

unless Hizbollah is stopped” (Ethan Bronner). “We believe that the

Lebanese government of Rafik Hariri, which has been promising order and

stability in Lebanon, will not allow this kind of chaos to continue for

very long,” a senior Israeli official explained: “Between the population

of the south, the Lebanese government and the Syrians, we are hoping

Hizbollah will be stopped.” As the cease-fire was announced, Rabin

stated that one of the goals of the operation, now achieved, had been

“the use of firepower to create conditions to allow understandings with

the power brokers who influence the terrorist organizations in Lebanon.”

A broader goal was outlined by Uri Lubrani, Israel’s coordinator of

Lebanese policy. The purpose of the attack, he said, is to induce the

Lebanese government to demand Syrian permission to negotiate directly

with Israel. “This is an attempt to drive home a point,” Lubrani said.

“Lebanese government, you claim you want to exercise authority over all

of Lebanese territory. You want us to take you seriously in your

negotiations. Go to your masters [in Damascus] and tell them: ‘Let me

decide on my own fate’.” According to this conception, Israel is

advancing the “peace process” by attacking Lebanon. That is entirely

reasonable, if we understand the “peace process” to be a program for

imposing US-Israeli dominance over the region by a mixture of violence

and diplomacy with a gun visibly cocked — as we should.

Doubtless Lebanon should be free from the Syrian domination that was

backed by George Bush as part of the payoff for Syria’s participation in

his Gulf war. But by US-Israeli logic, Syria should have the right to

make much of Israel uninhabitable by intensive bombardment, driving

hundreds of thousands of refugees to Tel Aviv, to impose its demands,

including the demand that Israel observe UN Security Council

resolutions, among them, the Council’s order that Israel withdraw from

Lebanon and rescind its effective annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

That has yet to be advocated here.

Lubrani’s analysis was confirmed by Shimon Peres, describing the

“achievement” of the Israeli operations as they ended. Previously, he

said, Lebanon had not accepted Israel’s “suggestion” that it negotiate

separately with Israel; now the “suggestion” is taken more seriously.

Predictably, both he and Rabin argued that Israel’s violence had

promoted the peace process, not only by driving a wedge between Lebanon

and Syria but also by opening channels for further negotiations Israeli

officials elaborated. It follows that Israel should next bomb Amman,

thus contributing to peace by separating Jordan from the other Arab

parties and opening new channels of communication as the US moves to

terminate the assault by imposing Israel’s demands.

Naturally, Israel has always preferred separate arrangements with much

weaker neighbors who will succumb to its threats, leaving the

Palestinians in the lurch, along with Arab states whose territory Israel

occupies (in this case, Syria).

Lubrani was Israel’s de facto Ambassador to Iran under the Shah, then a

leading figure in the sale of US arms to Iran via Israel that began

immediately after the Shah was overthrown. The purpose of this project,

he explained publicly in 1982, was to establish contact with elements of

the Iranian military who were “determined, ruthless, cruel, …emotionally

geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill ten thousand people.”

Such a force could take over Teheran, he said, and restore the

Israeli-Iranian alliance. A long-time Labor Party functionary, Lubrani

has lost none of the qualities that have endeared the Party to

left-liberal opinion for many years.

Israeli military officials confirmed yet another motive: to adjoin to

the “security zone” a broad strip of land to its north that will be a

no-man’s land where Israel can strike freely. In this way, Israel can

extend “the area of Lebanon it controls without having to commit ground

troops, a move that would be unpopular with the Israeli public,” Julian

Ozanne reports, noting that the pattern of bombardment also reveals

these objectives. Arab officials and press commentary suggest further

motives, Lamis Andoni reports: to pressure Syria to accept Israel’s

plans for the Golan Heights, and to focus regional and international

attention against Iran, a major current policy objective, as is not

obscure (see Z magazine, June). She also reports that “Contrary to the

Western view that Hizbollah and its Iranian backers provoked the

violence to sabotage the peace process, Arabs argue that Israel has used

the incident as a cover to achieve its goals in Lebanon and to pressure

Syria to accept its terms for peace.”

The “Western view” — more accurately, Washington’s — is adopted

reflexively in US reporting and commentary, with the rarest of

exceptions, the usual pattern. Thus it is simply a Fact, requiring no

discussion or argument, that Hizbollah “started the latest round of

fighting in an effort to sabotage the peace negotiations and provoke a

wider conflict” (New York Times Middle East specialist Elaine Sciolino).

Or if one prefers, it is a Fact that Syria, “seeking to remind everyone

that Damascus is the source of all peace and war in the region,

encouraged its Party of God proxies to fire scores of rockets into

northern Israel.” (Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman,

omitting a few relevant stages). It could not be that the guerrillas who

were mobilized by Israeli aggression and terror, as all concede, had

some other interest: say, to drive the occupying army out of their

country and disperse its terrorist mercenaries.

Shadows of the Past

To appreciate more fully what is happening, some historical background

is useful. Israel’s 1978 invasion killed several thousand Lebanese and

Palestinians, drove hundreds of thousands to the north, and left a

region of the south under the control of a murderous proxy force, Major

Haddad’s militia. Haddad’s forces were responsible for many atrocities,

reported in Israel but not here, one of the most notorious being the

massacre of all remaining inhabitants of the Lebanese town of Khiam

during Israel’s 1978 invasion; the population had been reduced from

30,000 to 32 by Israeli bombing in earlier years. During its 1982

invasion, Israel selected Khiam as the site of its notorious Ansar I

prison camp, used since to punish people suspected of anti-Israel

activity in Lebanon, or their relatives, thus to undermine any

resistance to the South Lebanon Army. There is ample evidence of hideous

conditions and savage torture, reported by the press in Israel and

England, but not authenticated by the Red Cross or any humanitarian

organization because Israel refuses to allow any access to the horror

chamber run by its proxies under its supervision.

The 1978 invasion was presented as retaliation for a Palestinian

terrorist attack, which originated far north of the zone Israel invaded.

In earlier years there had been a pattern of cross-border attacks by the

PLO from Lebanon into Israel (called “terrorism”) and by Israel into

Lebanon (called “retaliation”). The scale was radically different,

reflecting the force available to the attackers and their susceptibility

to international reaction. Diplomats and UN officials in Beirut

estimated about 3,500 killed in Israeli raids in the early 1970s, along

with unknown numbers of Palestinian civilians, with hundreds of

thousands fleeing what was, in effect, a scorched earth policy carried

out with US support and equipment. PLO actions, some of them atrocious

acts of terror, took a vastly lesser toll.

Often Israel’s terrorist operations lacked any pretense of retaliation.

Thus in February 1973, Israeli airborne and amphibious forces attacked

Tripoli in northern Lebanon, killing 31 people (mainly civilians) and

destroying classrooms, clinics, and other buildings in a raid justified

as preemptive. In December 1975, Israeli warplanes bombed and strafed

Palestinian refugee camps and nearby villages, killing over 50 people,

while “Israeli officials stressed that the purpose of the action had

been preventive, not punitive,” the New York Times reported. That

particular attack, arguably, was indeed retaliation: against the United

Nations, which, two days earlier, had arranged for the PLO to

participate in a session to consider a proposal for a two-state

settlement advanced by the PLO and the Arab states, supported by the

world generally, angrily denounced by Israel, and vetoed by the US —

hence out of history, like other unacceptable facts. One of the targets

was Nabatiye, again emptied today. Nabatiye was a frequent target,

including an attack in early November 1977, when the town was heavily

shelled, with no provocation, by Israeli batteries on both sides of the

border and Israeli-supported Lebanese Maronite forces; in the ensuing

exchange, over 70 people were killed, almost all Lebanese. Egyptian

President Sadat cited this Israeli-initiated exchange, which threatened

to lead to a major war, as a reason for his offer to visit Jerusalem a

few days later. By the time Israel invaded in 1978, Nabatiye’s

population of 60,000 had been reduced to 5,000, the remainder having

fled “mostly from fear of the [Israeli] shelling,” the Jerusalem Post

reported. Others fared similarly.

As PLO cross-border terror declined in the mid- 1970s, Israel

intensified its own terror in Lebanon, with US compliance and media

silence, for the most part. Hundreds more civilians were killed in

Israeli attacks after the 1978 invasion, almost 1,000 by August 1979,

the Lebanese government reported. ln July 1981, Israel once again

violated a cease-fire, attacking civilian targets in Lebanon.

Palestinian retaliation elicited heavy Israeli bombing. Some 450 Arabs —

nearly all Lebanese civilians — were reported killed, along with six

Jews. From these events, all that remains in historical memory in the US

is the scene of Jewish civilians huddling in bomb shelters under attack

from PLO terrorists and their Katyushas.

The US mediated a cease-fire, “and after mid-1981 the Lebanese-Israeli

border was quiet,” William Quandt — a well-known Middle East expert and

NSC staffer during the Nixon and Carter administrations — writes in his

history of the “peace process.” Quandt’s version is the standard one.

The “border was quiet” in the sense that the PLO adhered to the

cease-fire rigorously while Israel continued its violations: bombing and

killing civilians, sinking fishing boats, violating Lebanese air space

thousands of times, and carrying out other provocations designed to

elicit some PLO reaction that could be used as a pretext for the planned

invasion. The border was “quiet” because the crossborder terror was all

Israeli, and only Arabs were being killed.

The occasional reports here reflected the common understanding. Thus in

April 1982, Israel bombed alleged PLO centers south of Beirut, killing

two dozen people, in retaliation for what it called a PLO “terrorist

act”: an Israeli soldier had been killed when his jeep struck a

land-mine in illegally-occupied southern Lebanon. The Washington Post

sagely observed that “this is not the moment for sermons to Israel. It

is a moment for respect for Israel’s anguish — and for mourning the

latest victims of Israeli-Palestinian hostility.” Typically, it is

Israel’s anguish that we must respect when still more Arabs are murdered

by Israeli terror, and are thus to be seen as victims of mutual

hostility, no agent indicated.

The same attitudes prevail today. H.D.S. Greenway of the Boston Globe,

who reported the 1978 invasion graphically, now writes that “If shelling

Lebanese villages, even at the cost of lives, and driving civilian

refugees north would secure Israel’s border, weaken Hizbollah, and

promote peace, I would say go to it, as would many Arabs and Israelis.

But history has not been kind to Israeli adventures in Lebanon. They

have solved very little and have almost always caused more problems,” so

the murder of civilians, expulsion of hundreds of thousand of refugees,

and devastation of the south is a dubious proposition. Can one imagine

an article recommending a murderous and destructive attack on Israel, if

only it could secure Lebanon’s border and promote peace?

Having failed to elicit the desired PLO reaction, Israel simply

manufactured a pretext for its long-planned invasion of June 1982,

claiming that it was in retaliation for an attempt to assassinate the

Israeli Ambassador to London; the attempt, as Israel was aware, was

carried out by the terrorist Abu Nidal organization that had been at war

with the PLO for years and did not so much as have an office in Lebanon.

The official line in the US has been that “Operation Peace for Galilee —

the Israeli invasion of Lebanon — was originally undertaken” to protect

the civilian population from Palestinian gunners, and that “the rocket

and shelling attacks on Israel’s northern border” were ended by the

operation, though “If rockets again rain down on Israel’s northern

border after all that has been expended on Lebanon, the Israeli public

will be outraged” (Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January-February

1985). This is plainly nonsense, given the history, which is not

challenged. Since it is now recognized that the rockets still rain down,

the story has been modified: “Israel’s two military forays into Lebanon

[1978, 1982] were military disasters that failed to provide long-term

security for Israel’s northern border” (Elaine Sciolino, July 27, 1993).

Security had been at risk only as a result of Israel’s unprovoked

attacks from 1981, and to a large extent before. The phrase “military

disaster” does not refer to the killing of some 20,000 Lebanese and

Palestinians in 1982, overwhelmingly civilians, the destruction of much

of southern Lebanon and the capital city of Beirut, or the terrible

atrocities carried out by Israeli troops through the mid-1980s; rather,

to Israel’s failure to impose the “new order” it had proclaimed for

Lebanon, and its inability to maintain its occupation in full because of

the casualties caused by unanticipated resistance (“terror”), forcing it

back to its “security zone.”

The actual reasons for the 1982 invasion have never been concealed in

Israel, though they are rated “X” here. A few weeks after the invasion

began, Israel’s leading academic specialist on the Palestinians,

Yehoshua Porath, pointed out that the decision to invade “flowed from

the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed” by the PLO, a

“veritable catastrophe” for the Israeli government because ir endangered

the policy of evading a political settlement. The PLO was gaining

respectability thanks to its preference for negotiations over terror.

The Israeli government’s hope, therefore, was to compel “the stricken

PLO” to “return to its earlier terrorism,” thus “undercutting the

danger” of negotiations. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir later stated,

Israel went to war because there was “a terrible danger…. Not so much a

military one as a political one.” The invasion was intended to

“undermine the position of the moderates within [the PLO] ranks” and

thus to block” the PLO ‘peace offensive’” and “to halt [the PLO’s] rise

to political respectability” (strategic analyst Avner Yaniv); it should

be called “the war to safeguard the occupation of the West Bank,” having

been motivated by Begin’s “fear of the momentum of the peace process,”

according to Israeli Arabist and former head of military intelligence

Gen. Yehoshaphat Harkabi. US backing for Israel’s aggression, including

veto of Security Council efforts to stop the slaughter, was presumably

based on the same reasoning.

The thinking behind Israel’s terrorist operations in Lebanon is also no

secret. It was outlined, for example, by the respected former Foreign

Minister Abba Eban, considered a leading dove. He was responding to a

review by Menahem Begin of atrocities against civilians carried out by

the Labor governments in which Eban served, a picture, according to

Eban, “of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death

and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes

which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.” Eban does

not contest the facts, but criticizes Begin for revealing them. He also

explains the reasons for Israel’s wanton attacks: “there was a rational

prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert

pressure for the cessation of hostilities.”

In short, the civilian populations were to be held hostage under the

threat and exercise of extreme violence, until they compel their

governments to accept Israeli plans for the region. As we have seen, the

current assault is quite frankly predicated on the same “rational

prospect.”

As for the civilian toll, the basic thinking goes back to the founding

fathers. In a January 1, 1948 diary entry, David Ben-Gurion wrote: “What

is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time,

place and casualties. If we know the family — [we must] strike

mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is

inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish

between guilty and innocent. Where there was no attack — we should not

strike.” The qualifications were quickly dropped, by Ben-Gurion in

particular, and by now have long been forgotten. Talk of “purity of

arms” or the “benign occupation” is disgraceful apologetics, as widely

recognized by now within Israel.

Safeguarding the Occupation

Harkabi’s description of the 1982 invasion a “the war to safeguard the

occupation of the West Bank” might be applied to Israel’s July 1993

attack as well, though the intentions of the Labor government and its US

sponsor are not quite those of the Likud government of 1982. The latter

called for extension of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied

territories, though not annexation, the distinction being left vague.

The Labor government, in contrast, calls for “territorial compromise,”

its traditional position from the “Allon plan” of 1968.

The descendants of this plan vary somewhat in manner of implementation,

though the principles remain stable. Israel is to maintain control over

the resources and usable land of the territories, including a wide and

growing region called “Jerusalem.” Much of the indigenous population,

which lacks national rights, will eventually find its way to existing

Arab states (“transfer”), as the leading figures of the Zionist movement

always hoped and intended, while those who remain will either be

administered by Jordan, or allowed to run their own local affairs.

Israel will proceed with its plans for settling and exploiting the

territories, maintaining effective overall control. Questions remain

about just how to deal with the Golan Heights, and over the disposition

of Gaza, which has become such a hellhole under Israeli occupation that

there are now thoughts of abandoning it — which means virtual

destruction under current conditions. The Arab states are to accept

Israeli arrangements and enter into a full peace treaty. The general

project is entitled “land for peace” or “territorial compromise.”

Pursuing the project, Israel proceeds with its programs of expansion and

integration of the territories, now helped by US loan guarantees in

addition to the traditional huge subsidies, which have no remote

analogue in international affairs; the $10 billion loan guarantees,

demanded with much passion for Russian immigrants who were being forced

to Israel by pressures on Germany, the US, and others not to allow them

a free choice, are now being used for infrastructure and business

investment, it is frankly conceded — of course freeing funds for

settlement in the territories. And while Jewish settlement flourishes

and expands, the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories

sink into misery and despair, the decline sharply accelerated by Rabin’s

closure of the territories, which threatens even survival in a region

that has been denied any possibility of independent development under

the cruel military occupation. The “closure,” of course, observes the

usual racist criteria: Jewish settlers in the territories are exempt.

The July 1993 operations are intended to advance all of these prospects,

making it clear to the Arab states and Palestinians that they have no

choice but to yield to the force exercised by Israel under US

protection. All other possibilities have been eliminated in the New

World Order, in which there is no deterrent to US force, no space for

independent initiatives (“neutralism,” “nonalignment”), no annoying

impediments from international institutions, and no thought of a

European role in what is recognized to be US turf.

Israel may well consider that these opportunities are now enhanced. The

Clinton administration is regarded as even more extreme in rejection of

Palestinian rights than the government of Israel itself. Two weeks

before the latest Israeli attacks, the political correspondent of

Hadashot, Amnon Barzilai, observed that the US proposals presented to

Israel and the Palestinians break new ground in rejectionism: for the

first time, they stipulate that “all the options will be left open,”

including even “the demand for full annexation of the territories” under

“Israeli sovereignty.” In this respect, Clinton goes far beyond the

governing Labor Party, “which never demanded that all the options be

kept open,” insisting rather on “territorial compromise.” The US

initiative can only “strengthen the suspicion among the Palestinians

that there is reason to fear an Israeli conspiracy with American

support,” though in reality, neither the United States nor the Israeli

political blocs, Labor or Likud, would consider true annexation of the

territories with the enormous costs that would entail, such as extending

at least minimal social, economic, and political rights to their

inhabitants.

US policy has always been strictly rejectionist, similar to that of

Hizbollah, except that Washington denies national rights to

Palestinians, not Jews. Again, the modalities have varied over the

years, though basic assumptions have been stable, as has the doctrinal

framework: thus, Washington is invariably seeking peace and justice,

pursuing the “peace process,” a term of newspeak that refers to

Washington’s efforts to impose its own rejectionist goals, excluding all

diplomatic initiatives that conflict with them. In its recent version,

the “peace process” has been based on the Baker-Shamir-Peres consensus

of 1989, which barred any “additional Palestinian state in the Gaza

district and in the area between Israel and Jordan” (Jordan already

being a “Palestinian state”) or any negotiations with the PLO, and

declared that “There will be no change in the status of Judea, Samaria

and Gaza other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the

Government” of Israel, which reject Palestinian self-determination. With

these “basic principles” in place, there are to be “free elections”

under Israeli military occupation to yield “autonomy” — what Israeli

journalist Danny Rubinstein, who has been covering the occupied

territories with distinction for years, calls “the autonomy of a POW

camp.”

In the aftermath of the Gulf conflict, there were new opportunities for

advancing this project as well as new urgency in pursuing it. The

opportunities derived from the forceful assertion of unilateral US power

over the region, the demoralization of the Arab world (and the Third

World generally), the abdication of Europe. and the collapse of the

Soviet Union, leaving Russia as an even more loyal client than Britain,

perhaps. The urgency arose from the need to concoct some “triumph” to

conceal the disastrous consequences of the US-UK war in the Gulf, with

Saddam firmly in power cheerfully slaughtering Shiites and Kurds while

Stormin’ Norman and the heroic George Bush stood quietly aside, US

corporations were beginning to rake in huge contracts for reconstruction

of the ruins, and “an excess of more than 46,900 children died [in Iraq]

between January and August 1991” from the effects of the war and the

sanctions, according to a study conducted by leading US and foreign

medical specialists reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, far

more since.

Something had to be done. Accordingly, a new “peace initiative” was

declared with much fanfare amidst praise for the noble President who

“has made very clear that he wants to breathe light into that

hypothetical creature, the Middle East peace process” (Anthony Lewis).

The story since should surprise no one who looked beyond the impressive

chorus of self-praise to the not-very-obscure facts (see Z Magazine,

October, December, 1991).

The US still remains committed to the “peace process” it initiated, not

surprisingly, given its framework. We therefore have even more powerful

reasons for recognizing that “this is not the moment for sermons to

Israel,” rather for “respect for Israel’s anguish — and for mourning the

latest victims of Israel-Palestinian hostility.” Sermons — let alone any

other reaction — would only impede the “peace process.” Indeed the

“peace process,” apologists argue, has been advanced by Rabin’s

violence, not only for the powerful reasons given by Israeli authorities

but also because it enables Rabin to fend off criticism from the right

as he strides towards “territorial compromise.”

Rabin’s assault on Lebanon is thus much like Clinton’s bombing of Iraq a

month earlier in retaliation for an alleged threat to assassinate a

former US leader, a crime so heinous that our pure sensibility can

scarcely even imagine how it could be conceived by some distorted and

primitive mind. Clinton’s brave act, we were informed, relieved the

fears that the old draft dodger might be less prone to violence than his

predecessors, and refuted the dangerous belief that “American foreign

policy in the post-Cold War era was destined to be forever hogtied by

the constraints of multilateralism” (Washington Post) — that is, by

international law and the UN Charter.

Welcome to the New World Order.