Fascist Killed in Lebanon

Not the headline you are going to see in the MSM. And before folks go blaming Syria, one must remember that the Gemayel family has many enemies in Lebanon. As the Guardian points out;

Pierre Gemayel, the anti-Syrian politician shot dead in Beirut today, came from one of Lebanon's most prominent political dynasties.

His grandfather - also called Pierre - founded the Phalange party, a Christian Maronite paramilitary youth organisation modelled on the fascist organisations he observed while in Berlin as an Olympic athlete in 1936.

During the 1975 Lebanese civil war, the Phalange party was the most formidable force within the Christian camp.

Its militia shouldered the brunt of the fighting against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and, as part of the Lebanese Front - the mostly Christian, rightist coalition - the power of the Gemayel family increased considerably.

The Phalange were also the name of Franco's Fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

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Lebanon

Fascism


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Thousands of Lebanese mourn slain Christian political official

Byblos (Lebanon) (AFP) – Thousands of Lebanese on Friday mourned a slain Christian political official authorities said was killed by a Syrian gang, with supporters pointing the finger at Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah group.

Issued on: 12/04/2024 - 

Mourners and supporters of the Lebanese Forces wave their party's flag at Sleiman's funeral © Ibrahim CHALHOUB / AFP


Pascal Sleiman was a coordinator in the Byblos (Jbeil) area north of Beirut for the Lebanese Forces (LF) Christian party, which opposes the government in neighbouring Syria and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

On Monday, the army said that Sleiman, who had gone missing the day before, was killed in a carjacking by Syrian gang members who then took his body across the border.

His party said it would consider Sleiman's death a "political assassination until proven otherwise".

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has denied that his party was involved.

Speaking after Sleiman's funeral, LF leader Samir Geagea called for the "failed, corrupt" authorities in Lebanon to be changed.

Geagea blamed their failure, among other things, on "illegal weapons" -- a barely veiled reference to Hezbollah.

The Iran-backed group is the only party in Lebanon that has kept its weapons arsenal after the end of the 1975-1990 civil war, and it wields great influence on the country's political life.

Since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7, Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces in actions opposed by the LF and other parties.

"We don't want to wake up one day, as we did now, and find ourselves involved in a never-ending war," Geagea said Friday.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai, spiritual leader of Lebanon's largest Christian sect, held back tears as he presided over Sleiman's funeral in Byblos.

Outside the St Georges church, LF supporters waved the party's white flag with its cedar tree -- the symbol of Lebanon -- circled in red.

Mourners told AFP they were unconvinced by the army's version that car thieves killed Sleiman.

"This story never convinced me. It is not coherent at all," said Jean Habshi, 50, who came to pay his respects.

"Enough with Hezbollah, enough with the illegal weapons," Roba Hajal, 24, told AFP outside the church.

"If they (Hezbollah) did not kill him, at the very least they allowed the Syrians in. We are all at risk of meeting Pascal's fate," she said.

Lebanon has a long history of political assassinations that have taken place with impunity.

Years of economic meltdown have further strained a weak judiciary that has been widely accused of succumbing to political interference.

Ziad Hawat, an LF lawmaker from Byblos, on Friday called for a "serious, transparent" probe into Sleiman's murder, adding that the party had concerns "based on past experiences".

"We do not want the killer to be known to all," he added, while "remaining unknown to the judiciary".

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi vowed to get tough on Syrians after several were arrested on suspicion of involvement in Sleiman's killing.

© 2024 AFP

Fairobserver.comwww.fairobserver.com/world-news/europe-news/the-lebanese-phalanges-in-the-interwar-era/

The Lebanese Phalanges in the Interwar Era - Fair Observer

Feb 13, 2024 ... The Phalanges, a Lebanese Christian paramilitary movement, took inspiration from Europe's fascist movements between World War I and World ...

Cia.govwww.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP06T00412R000200240001-2.pdf

LEBANON S PHALANGE PARTY - CIA

The Lebanese Phalange Organization (Munazzamat al-. Kataeb al-Lubnaniyya in Arabic) is largely the creation of one influential Lebanese family, the Jumayyils.

Wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalangist_Party

Phalangist Party - Wikipedia

Kataeb Party, a Christian right-wing political party in Lebanon. Disambiguation icon. This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title ...

Encyclopedia.comwww.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/phalangists

Phalangists | Encyclopedia.com

The Phalanges Party established the most powerful militia in Lebanon as early as the 1950s, and the party attracted followers in the 1960s and 1970s by ...

Aljazeera.comwww.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/16/sabra-and-shatila-massacre-40-years-on-explainer

Sabra and Shatila massacre: What happened in Lebanon in 1982?

Sep 16, 2022 ... Israeli-backed Phalange militia killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in two days. ... It was one of the most ...

Enigma: The anatomy of Israel’s intelligence failure almost 45 years ago

THE YOM KIPPUR WAR OF 1973 AND THE GOLAN HEIGHTS WAR 1982

A TALE OF HUBRIS AND RACISM, SAVING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT 

THIS IS AN EXCERPT

LONG READ FEATURE ARTICLE FROM 2017
YOU MIGHT WANT TO 'PRINT' IT AND SAVE IT
AS A PDF TO READ LATER, IT IS 33 PAGES LONG

Bruce Riedel

Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Center for Middle East Policy

Director - The Intelligence Project

The critical meeting on the 3rd took place at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. The Head of Research, Aryeh Shalev, represented the DMI position, as General Zeira was ill. The Mossad director was not invited. Shalev explained the Egyptian build-up as an exercise, reminded the prime minister that the DMI had been right in May, and again judged the risk of war as “low.” The Syrians were admittedly more threatening, but there had been an air clash over the Mediterranean on September 13 in which 13 Syrian Mig-21’s were shot down for only one IAF loss; the DMI presumed Syria’s build up was more related to fears of an Israeli attack after the clash than anything else. IAF imagery of the Golan presented a frightening picture, especially compared to the May war scare. Now 850 tanks were forward deployed (compared to only 250 six months before) and 31 SAM batteries were deployed (compared to 2 in May). But Shalev argued there was no cause for alarm, it was just Syrian posturing. As usual, Syria was not given as much attention as Egypt. At the end of the meeting, the prime minister shook Shalev’s hand and thanked him for calming her down. No full cabinet meeting was scheduled until after Yom Kippur on Sunday, the 7th of October.[29]

Meanwhile, in Damascus the Egyptian War Minister met secretly with his counterparts and then with President Assad. According to the account of Nasser’s journalist-confidant after the war, Muhammad Heikal, they finalized October 6 as D-Day and agreed that H-Hour would be 1400. This was a compromise between the two allies; Syria wanted an earlier attack and Egypt one closer to dusk. Egyptian war plans had always preferred an attack at 1800 so that night would cover much of the crossing of equipment to reinforce the bridgehead.[30] October 6 was also Assad’s 43rd birthday.[31]

The next day, October 4, a larger security meeting in the IDF was given the same appraisal. No mobilization of the IDF was ordered. Sadat and Assad, meanwhile, were informing the Soviet ambassadors in Cairo and Damascus that war was imminent, but did not provide the exact D-Day.[32] Assad was the more forthcoming and informative. On the 5th, Soviet transport aircraft—including giant AN-22s—began evacuating the dependents of Soviet diplomats and advisors from Egypt and Syria. Sadat would later bitterly complain that the Soviet evacuation betrayed a “total lack of confidence in us and our fighting ability.”[33]

The Russian evacuation should have been the final straw that convinced the DMI that war was imminent. There was no reason to evacuate from Egypt if Tahrir was really only an exercise. The Israelis even intercepted a phone call involving the Iraqi ambassador in Moscow, who was close to the Soviet leadership, in which he reported that the Soviets were evacuating because they expected an imminent Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel.[34] The evacuation did raise some concerns in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv but the Soviet move did not prompt a change in the DMI estimate. The rest of the 7th Armored Brigade was sent to the Golan, but a long, 43-paragraph appraisal by the DMI concluded it was really all an exercise and there was “low probability” for war. Later in the day General Zeira told Dayan “I don’t think we are going to war.”[35]

That morning, October 5, at 0230 in Tel Aviv, the Source called the Mossad station in London. Again, he used the code word for war. Alerted immediately, Mossad chief Zvi Zamir took a morning first flight to London. Zamir was later severely criticized by the post-war investigation for not immediately flying to London and for going back to sleep for a couple of hours.[36] Ashraf Marwan was in Paris when he alerted the Mossad station in London. He didn’t know exactly when the war was to start, but he made an educated guess. A friend had told him that Egyptair, the national airline, was moving all of its aircraft from Cairo to Libya on October 5. Marwan knew from the war plans that an attack would follow this within 24 hours. According to the war plan H-Hour would be at 6pm. He told Zamir this late on the evening of the 5th. The Mossad chief called home at 0340 in Israel, where it was now October 6—Yom Kippur—and alerted his staff. War was expected to start at 6pm that day. It was not five days advance warning.[37] 

Egyptian Armed Forces crossing the eastern bank of the Suez Canal during October war.

Dayan was briefed on the new Mossad information just before 6am. He told the IDF command not to order a general mobilization on the basis of the Source’s news but to call up some reservists and evacuate children from the Golan Heights settlements. At a cabinet meeting at 9am, the prime minister ordered a larger call-up and ruled out a preemptive air strike. She met with the American ambassador after the cabinet meeting and told him war was imminent, and asked that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tell the Russians immediately to call off the Arabs. Kissinger was awakened in his room at the Waldorf Astoria to the news war was imminent. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was informed minutes later. Schlesinger recalled later the outbreak of war came “almost wholly as a surprise. We really had all the clues we needed but all these indicators were dismissed as Arab hyperbole. The Israeli mind set was that the Arabs would not attack until they had air superiority. The U.S. mind set was the Israelis know best.”[38]

Egyptian vehicles crossing the Suez Canal on October 7, 1973,

 during the Yom Kippur War.

EXPLAINING THE MEHDAL

The war cost Israel 2,656 dead and 7,250 wounded. 300 of the 500 Israeli tanks on the Canal and Golan were destroyed in the first days of the war. The intelligence mistake was enormous and cost Zeira his job. The Agranat Commission that investigated the blunder concluded that a “doctrinaire adherence to the konzeptziya” was at the root of the problem. The generals who were involved in the disaster would spend the rest of their lives arguing over whose fault it was. Zeira came to blame the Mossad for running what he concluded was a double agent that gave Israel the wrong concept. Zamir sued Zeira for slander and for leaking the name of an intelligence asset.

Any professional intelligence officer will naturally be inclined to sympathize with the Israeli intelligence community in 1973. I have worked with the Israelis and know many of the individuals in this story. Making sense of incomplete data is hard; making clear estimates under enormous time pressure about life and death situations is very hard. Everything always looks clear after the fact, anyone can connect the dots after the game is over. The Israelis were determined not to be worst-case alarmists and cry wolf every time the skies darkened. But even with all the sympathy of one professional for another, the Israeli intelligence failure in 1973 is remarkable. They knew so much and yet came to the worst estimate.

The problem was indeed rooted in the concept and the intelligence community’s slavish commitment to its interpretation of all data collected about the enemy and his intentions. As Zamir put it: “[W]e simply did not feel them capable of war.”[39] Even with amazing intelligence collection successes and the warning from Hussein, the intelligence community refused to be budged from its line of analysis. It had been proven right in the past and was supremely confident it was right again. Even when some more junior officers questioned the logic, like the Jordan desk officer, they were ignored. As a future head of analysis in the DMI Ephraim Kam has argued, our “error began with a basic concept that the Arabs would not attack during the next two to three years, and every new development was adopted to this concept.”[40]

But it was more than the concept that was in error. The Israeli intelligence community and the Israeli policy community had created a small and intimate feedback loop in which their common assumptions about the enemy were never challenged. Dayan, a military hero of epic proportions, shared the fundamental assumption that the Arabs were incompetent with his intelligence advisers. Since the prime minister relied on her generals entirely on military issues, she shared it as well. Again, to quote Kam: “[I]n estimating the enemy’s behavior the intelligence community is not alone, it got plenty of feedback from outside. Once a national consensus about the opponent’s behavior becomes settled, it is very hard to dislodge.”[41]

The meetings held in the weeks from Hussein’s warning of war to the attack itself illustrate the problem. The intelligence community adhered to its concept and interpreted the data collected to fit inside the box. The policy consumer of the intelligence estimate did not challenge the analysis, but rather reinforced it. “The result is feedback: the decisionmakers contribute to the creation of a climate of opinion that influences the intelligence process, while intelligence provides information that supports the decisionmakers’ assessment. Decisionmakers influence the analytical process as well. Analysts may over-emphasize information that supports existing policy.”[42]

As a small country, the Israeli national security bureaucracy is relatively small and lean. This was certainly true in 1973. The feedback loop was a fairly small one, and it would have been very difficult for someone in the establishment to challenge the consensus successfully. With the national command authority absent for much of the critical phase of the crisis, the problem was exacerbated.

The Americans proved to be no help either. They too were mesmerized by the concept. Richard Helms had served as director of Central Intelligence since before the 1967 war to just before the 1973 war. In 1967 he had rightly predicted Israel’s stunning victory. He told President Richard Nixon in 1973 that the IDF “will be able to beat each and every one of its enemies and all together for the next five years. Damn it, the Israelis are really so much better off with what they have than their pitiful and stupid neighbors, who cannot do a thing without the Russians.”[43] Rather than a second set of eyes on the problem and a check on Israeli assumptions, the American intelligence community became an amen chorus for Israeli errors.

President Richard Nixon, Vice President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig in Oval Office. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Dayan was probably the most surprised of all and he almost immediately went into a deep depression from the shock of the disaster. By late on October 7 he was “close to a mental breakdown” and was speaking of the fall of the Third Temple. He ordered the commander of the IAF to put all of its resources into fighting Syria and said: “[T]he Third Temple is in danger. If the air force does not transfer all its power to block the Syrians, Syrian tanks will enter Israel soon.”[44] He ordered an alert of the Israeli nuclear deterrent. Israel’s medium-range Jericho missiles, developed with French assistance in the 1960s, were ordered on alert and deployed where American satellites could see them at their base at Beit Zecharia near Jerusalem. Normally the Jericho’s were hidden from American intelligence eyes. William Quandt, who served in the White House, recalled later: “[W]e did not know what kind of warheads the Jericho’s had but it did not make much sense to me that they would be equipped with conventional ordinance.” The tide of war soon shifted to Israel’s advantage, thankfully and Dayan ordered the missiles back into their concrete dugouts.[45] By the end of the war, Dayan was increasingly ignored by the prime minister—she did not fire him, but she had lost confidence in him.

The Agranat Commission recommended some organizational changes to prevent another disaster. This is always the default position of bureaucracies when intelligence fails: Change the organizational flow chart, not the menu itself. In particular, the commission recommended that the Mossad establish an analytical capability itself to challenge the military intelligence assessments, and that the Foreign Ministry significantly build up its research and analysis wing to add a third voice to the debate. The theory was that having three organizations each independently study the data and make estimates would diminish the chance of the concept going unchallenged.

LEBANON 1982, FAILURE REDUX

It did not work out that way. Less than a decade later, Israel suffered another major intelligence debacle when it invaded Lebanon. Once again, a consensus was formed between the intelligence and policy communities that a short war in Lebanon against the Palestinian resistance movement led by Yasser Arafat could change the strategic balance in the region in Israel’s favor. The hero of the 1973 war and now Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was the chief proponent of the new concept, but many others supported him. Sharon had been one of the most firm believers in the 1973 concept, believing Egypt would face “total destruction” and “a horrible, horrible cost” if it went to war then.[46] Now, he was the architect of a new concept, remaking the Middle East via a war in Lebanon. Using a provocation—an Iraqi terror attack in London on the Israeli ambassador—Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982.[47] 

 

Israeli troops in south Lebanon (1982). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A critical ingredient in the new concept was the assumption that the majority of the population in Lebanon would welcome Israel as it defeated the Palestinians and their Syrian allies. The Maronite Christian minority in Lebanon would actively assist the Israelis against the Palestinians and the Syrians. The Sunni Muslim community was allegedly tired of Palestinian and Syrian hegemony and would be neutral. The largest demographic group in the country, the Shiite Muslims, was ignored. They were not politically active and not on the new Israeli concept’s list of key actors. This was a grave error. Why did it occur? Why was Israeli intelligence, just nine years after the Yom Kippur war, again to fail to understand the dynamics of another war?

In Lebanon in 1982, the Israeli intelligence community relied heavily on its Christian ally, the Lebanese Forces, for intelligence about the complexities of Lebanese politics. For decades, Israel’s concern in Lebanon had been the Palestinian terrorist organizations and the Syrian occupation army, while Lebanese politics and society were not a priority. For understanding this arena, the Israelis turned to the Lebanese Forces.

Bashir Jumayyil was the leader of the Lebanese Forces in the early 1980s. The son of the founder of the oldest Christian party, the Phalange, Bashir was an activist who despised the Palestinians, Syrians, and virtually all Muslims. He conspired with Sharon to get himself elected president of Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in June 1982 and promised Israel he would sign a peace treaty, drive out the Palestinians, and Syrians and create a reliable northern ally for Israel.

Responsibility for dealing with the Phalangists, as they were popularly known in Israel, rested with the Mossad as a covert operation. The links between the Mossad and the Christians went back many years, but had only really blossomed after the Lebanese civil war began in 1975. Mossad officers frequently visited the Phalange headquarters in East Beirut, and Phalangists were frequent visitors to Israel. Arms and training flowed into the Lebanese Forces militia from Israel.

Since the Mossad dealt directly with the Phalangists, it became the expert on both the Christians in particular and Lebanon in general. But the Mossad found it difficult to maintain its analytic objectivity while also being the operational interlocutor with the Christians. It became their advocate as well as handler. As the Kahan Commission reported, after the war had culminated in a Phalangist massacre of innocent Palestinian women and children in September 1982:

“the Mossad was the organization that actually handled the relations between the Phalangists and Israel, and its representatives maintained close contacts with the Phalangist leadership. The Mossad, to a not inconsiderable extent under the influence of constant and close relations with the Phalangist elite, felt positively about strengthening relations with that organization.”[48]

The then-head of the Mossad, Nahum Admoni, put it succinctly: “[T]he Mossad tried to the best of its ability to present and approach the subject (of intelligence on Lebanon) as objectively as possible; but since it was in charge of the contacts, I accept as an assumption that subjective and not only objective relations also emerged.”[49] The key intelligence collector and analyst on Lebanon, the Mossad, became too often the advocate of Phalangist assessments. Since Sharon wanted to hear that his concept for change in Lebanon would work, the policy and intelligence feedback loop became again a self-fulfilling, closed world.

Military intelligence of course also collected and analyzed intelligence on Lebanon as well, but its leadership was reluctant to challenge the Mossad’s primacy. When Jumayyil was assassinated on September 14, 1982, the IDF entered into Muslim West Beirut. Phalangist fighters were then sent into two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatilla, where they proceeded to massacre the inhabitants. The Kahan Commission, which investigated the incident, concluded that the director of military intelligence at the time, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, “stepped aside” from his responsibility to assess the likelihood of a Phalangist massacre because he did not want to clash with Sharon and the Mossad on the Christians propensity for extreme violence. Consequently, the commission recommended he be removed from his command. Ironically, because Admoni had only taken command of the Mossad two days before the assassination, the Kahan Commission absolved him of responsibility and he remained Director until 1989.[50] It did fault the Mossad as an institution for adhering to the “conception” and for the “view prevalent in the Mossad that the Phalangists were a trustworthy element” despite their long track record of extremist violence against Palestinian civilians.

READ ON 

Face to Face with Hezbollah

The Many Faces of the Lebanese Shiite Organization

by Dan Lieberman / December 7th, 2023

As part of a fact-finding mission to the Middle East in late 2007, one year after Hezbollah concluded a war with Israel, we spent a few days with Hezbollah. I knew that Hezbollah carried heavy baggage, could be threatening, and operated as a state within a state, but it never seemed, as bludgeoning reports insisted, an international terrorist organization. All of the few horrific actions involving Hezbollah have been tit-for-tat revenge attacks for Israeli murder of its cadres, such as the February 16, 1992, Israeli Apache AH64 helicopter missile attack on an automobile that killed Sheikh Abbas Musawi, the then secretary-general of Hezbollah, his wife, and five-year-old son.

Face-to-face in November 2007 revealed an organized and thoughtful Hezbollah without traces of being fanatical.

---

They speak English, carry I-pods, and listen to Santana and Guns and Roses. They don’t approach with anger and don’t behave overbearing. They are well-educated, mostly from Beirut’s American University, relaxed and alert to world happenings. They impress as being more secular than pious. They are spokespersons for Hezbollah – the Party of God.

Maybe they are a selected group of well-trained talkers for foreigners; a subtle means to convince the unwary that Hezbollah’s followers are just everyday guys and gals. Maybe, but observations and events were inconsistent with the media’s drastic descriptions of the militant Lebanese Shiite movement.

The Party of God has insufficient support for exercising political control of Lebanon and knows it doesn’t have the numbers or the strength to turn the Levant into an Islamic Republic. Hezbollah’s clerics don’t indicate they intend to force Shari’a upon their constituencies. More an amalgam of differing viewpoints – religious, social, political, and militant – Hezbollah is solidified by a common struggle for the dispossessed and a battle against corruption. Meetings with Hezbollah and Lebanese officials together with a trip to southern Lebanon, as a member of a Council for National Interest peace delegation, revealed much about the nature of the Party of God.

The voyage started in Beirut, at a tenement building that is indistinguishable from the adjoining buildings in the Shiite district. Hezbollah followers crowd the sidewalk to greet and lead to a simple apartment on an upper floor. Sayyid Nawaf Al-Musawi, the head of Hezbollah’s International Relations, is dressed in conventional clothes.

The only indication of religious fervor is the beads he rotates in his right hand. He sits relaxed but talks seriously and with conviction. The female translator’s minor errors and dubious translations of colloquial expressions are politely excused. The head of Hezbollah’s International Relations has a lot to say – about everything.

Region

In Iraq there is a severe humane problem – same as in Palestine. The West Bank is now a prison. The US gives no importance to the Iraqi people. US policy is based on Israeli safety and Middle East oil. America is creating chaos and the region is under its hegemony. The regime is increasing the problems rather than resolving them. Now they are talking about a new war in Iran. Iraq was weak, but Iran is strong and it will be a much harder war. A barrel of oil and a barrel of gunfire will create a catastrophe that is beyond comprehension. A disaster is happening and Americans are giving a story that is false. They were lying about WMDs in Iraq and now they are lying about nuclear issues in Iran. They told the people that the Iraqis would welcome them as liberators. This is an example of a delusion to the citizens of the US. American citizens deserve to know the truth. Colin Powell gave false information to the UN but he thought it was the truth. When someone tries to find the truth he is called a terrorist. America operates on misleading evidence.

Governing Lebanon

The one who rules must be accepted by all the others. Now the minority is ruling, but this is supported by the U.S. Why does the U.S. want this? For the benefit of the Israelis. We are a movement only against Israeli attack and Israeli occupation. We support unity. We encourage consensus. The Vatican, the Arabs want unity in Lebanon, but the American influences in Lebanon do not want this. We want a multi-ethnic nation and not as in Israel, which calls itself a Jewish country even though ¼ of its citizens are Christians and Muslims. We cannot have an election with 50% plus one because the text of the constitution is clear – there has to be a 2/3 majority. A person elected by 50% plus one is not the President and only an impostor.

Israel

Hezbollah will never recognize Israel. Israel (Palestine?) should be a democratic nation where all religions exist together and have equal freedom. In the 1919 Paris meeting, the Zionists presented a document which coveted South Lebanon and delineated four river basins they wanted to own.

Sayyid Nawaf Al-Musawi ended his conversation with prophetic expressions.

We don’t judge you on the basis of your stand on Israel. Do not judge us on that issue. There are natural ties between Shia Lebanon and Iran. They have the same source. The fifteenth century Iranian studies came from Lebanon. The geography of Lebanon enabled the Shia to stay. It is tough to conquer Southern Lebanon because of its geography.

Leaving Beirut for the South of Lebanon is similar to leaving any metropolis – traffic jams, new expressways, and roadways that cut through residential areas. The Paris of the Middle East has lost much of its charm. It is heavy until the view of the blue-green Mediterranean waters calm the atmosphere. Banana groves, similar to those that camouflaged the Hezbollah rocket carriers during the 2006 summer war, are prominent. Also prominent are posters of Rafiq Hariri, the assassinated and previous Prime Minister. After the Sunni city of Sidon, the peaceful countryside of groves and orchards is marked with newly repaired bridges that cross ready-to-be-paved roads. The war-damaged roads lead to Tyre.

The Shiite city has freshly sanded beaches and a picturesque seaside promenade. The posters have changed – they now feature Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s political leader, Tyre is the home of Sheik Nabil Kaook, Hezbollah commander of South Lebanon, who narrowly escaped death when Israeli warplanes bombed his home in the 2006 war.

In his presence, women are not greeted with handshakes, but with hands respectfully placed over the heart. The women sit veiled and separate from the men. The cleric is well-groomed and well-tailored – his white turban shows his status and his brown cloak matches the brown chair on which he sits.

Harsh and accusatory, interspersed with feelings for the dispossessed, the Hezbollah Sheik has one succinct message: “The United States took the decision to go to war and to continue the war. It treats Lebanon as just another occupation.”

Tyre is also identified with the Al-Sadr Foundation, which manages an orphanage under the control of Rabab al-Sadr, sister of disappeared Shiite cleric Sayyid Musa al-Sadr. Shi’a clerics who have the title of Sayyid claim descent from Muhammad. Sayyid Musa al-Sadr is more famous than his designation. His life, a story of dedication, success, and an eventual mystery reveal strong links between Shiites from Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Born in Qom, Iran in 1928 to a Lebanese family of theologians, Musa al-Sadr studied theology in Najaf, Iraq. Being related to the father of Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraq was another home for him. In 1960 Musa al-Sadr moved to Tyre, his father’s birthplace. He soon became recognized as a strong advocate for the economically and politically disadvantaged Shi’ite population. His role in establishing schools and medical clinics throughout southern Lebanon led to the 1974 founding of the Movement of the Disinherited, whose armed wing became Amal, the other Shiite party in Lebanon.

While successfully improving economic and social conditions for a disenfranchised Shiite population, Sayyid Musa al-Sadr made enemies of landlords, corrupt officials, political establishment, and members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. His eventual disassociation with, what was then, a corrupt Amal, created other groups, some of whom later coalesced into Hezbollah. On February 16, 1985, an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World,” alerted the world to Hezbollah’s formal existence. Musa al-Sadr was not present. In 1978, when attending a conference in Libya, Musa al-Sadr mysteriously vanished. No clue to his disappearance has surfaced.

Elegant chalets grace the barren hills of southern Lebanon. Many of them are homes of expatriate Lebanese, who have always been principal contributors to Lebanon’s economy. Expatriates from Sierra Leone, the Gulf States, Dearborn, Michigan, and other U.S. cities send funds to their Lebanese relatives who purchase properties throughout Lebanon. Southern Lebanon has many retired Dearborns who have returned to their families and to a land they always cherished. But that’s not all, informed persons claim Southern Lebanon has diamond and drug smuggling that help finance Hezbollah and local communities.

The elegant chalets emphasize the destruction of villages during the 2006 summer war. Bint Jbiel, “the daughter of the mountain,” rested in the path of the invading Israeli army. Israel’s military dropped leaflets that ordered the population to leave the village. The inhabitants obeyed the order and now the old city, not the new part, is 70% destroyed; a mound of rubble that includes the 600-year-old mosque.

Homes along a nearby dirt road are pocked with shell and bullet holes, evidence of tanks having discharged random fire at empty houses for no apparent reason except they were close to the path of the tank. A total of eighteen Israeli tanks broke down, crashed, or were destroyed by Hezbollah ambushes during the Israeli invasion.

From a hill close to the mined border with Israel, the deputy mayor of Marjayoun pointed to the verdant fields of Northern Israel. He claimed that in 1948 Israel seized one kilometer of Lebanese territory and that the houses in the distance are mainly empty.

Damage-weary Lebanon is not confined to the border area. Timur Goksel, former senior advisor to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), who has been in Lebanon for twenty years, noted he had never witnessed so much wanton destruction. He said that Iran funds an Iranian Hezbollah that has no connections with Lebanese Hezbollah. Five hundred million dollars of these funds are being used to repair war-damaged southern Lebanon. In contrast, the U.S. is contributing 34 million dollars to repair a large bridge.

Timor Goksel refutes the March 14 majority party charge that Hezbollah is obstructionist: “The Shiites (not all Hezbollah) are 30% of the country and cannot rule on their own. They want to have a role in the government and they want to be a mainstream party.” Principal leaders in the Lebanese government support Goksel’s evaluation. Former general Michel Aoun, Christian head of the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc, wants what Hezbollah wants; a new parliament where the new majority will be accepted. Aoun’s bloc has a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Hezbollah. He insisted the MOU is not an alliance but a strategy for integrating Hezbollah into a mutual defense of Lebanon. Former General and then Maronite President of Lebanon, Emil Lahoud, agreed with Hezbollah’s determination to follow constitutional law and only elect a president with a 2/3 quorum.

The Lebanese president describes Hezbollah as “one hundred percent Lebanese. Hezbollah takes material assistance from Iran and would take it from the devil if necessary to protect their country. They are not terrorists.” Fawsi Salloukh, Lebanon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs talked from a prepared

document that severely criticized Israel and the United States. He also wants a new election and not a litigious issue. He doesn’t believe Iran wants to dominate Hezbollah and stressed its natural for Shiites in Lebanon and Iran to establish good relations.

Forgotten amidst the rhetoric, but mentioned by Michel Aoun and Emil Lahoud are simple facts: Hezbollah has had electoral alliances with Saad Hariri’s Future Movement, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, and Noah Berri’s Amal. In 1999, Hezbollah members of Lebanon’s engineering syndicate formed a coalition with the Phalange Party, a rightist Christian group, and the National Liberal Party, both allies of Israel during the civil war.

The Halifee restaurant in the Dahieh neighborhood is considered a popular dining place for Hezbollah followers; only two blocks from the Haret Hreil Hussineyeh mosque, whose senior cleric is Hezbollah religious leader Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Israeli bombers, during the July 2006 war, leveled the cleric’s home, as well as part of the surrounding area. The restaurant crowds with people enjoying the food, enjoying the elegant surroundings, enjoying the evening. There is no indication of a particular type of person; no sign of a distinctive Hezbollah character.

La Terrase is a restaurant located on Hadi Nasrallah, a street, named after leader Hasan Nassrallah’s deceased son. Huge craters from Israeli bombing remain in the adjacent neighborhood. Enter la Terrase and first have a choice of a coffee bar. Go deeper and there is a cafeteria. Further in is a small restaurant. Climb the stairs and enter a huge restaurant surrounded by couches on which linger multitudes of young couples; drinking coffee, engaged in conversations and quiet embraces – not the ordinary media images of Hezbollah life.

Innocent Americans were killed on September 11, 2001, by Al-Qaeda terrorists who considered the World Trade Center to be imperialist land – the center of the U.S. establishment. Innocent Lebanese were killed on July 15, 2006, one day of many bombardments that contributed to the vast destruction of the Dahieh district by Israeli military who considered Dahieh to be Hezbollah land – the center of the Hezbollah establishment.

The U.S. and Hezbollah establishments still exist. Many innocents died in both places. The U.S. remembers the day 9/11 as a bitter memory. Lebanon had a mid-summer nightmare of smaller 9/11’s; angry memories the residents of Dahieh will forever retain. The Western world rightfully memorializes America’s tragedy but neglects Lebanon’s equal tragedies.

It is that neglect which created Hezbollah, sustained Hezbollah, and made Hezbollah popular throughout the Arab world. Years of punishing emergencies in Lebanon — refugees from the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah’s attachment to the Syrian strife, the 4 August 2020 explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut that caused at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, $15 billion in property damage, and left an estimated 300,000 people homeless, followed by economic collapse have polarized the Lebanese and may have affected contemporary Hezbollah’s operations and its acceptance by the Lebanese population.

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

Fake Peace, Real War, and the Road To “Plausible Genocide”

by Michael K. Smith / March 8th, 2024

We will destroy everything not Jewish. 
— Theodore Herzl [1]

We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads . . . . You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.
— Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan [2]

The common denominator amongst all the American peace efforts is their abysmal failure.
— Cheryl A. Rubenberg [3]

USrael’s disgraceful conduct in Gaza goes on, and on and on. Leveling hospitals, shooting children in the head; gunning down a surgeon at the operating table, using an emergency call from a little girl trapped in a car with the corpses of family members to lure two rescue workers to her, then killing all three; systematically killing Palestinian journalists reporting on the slaughter; promising to save three premature babies at a hospital under forced evacuation, then leaving them to slowly die and be devoured by dogs; singing in chorus of the joy of exterminating Arabs; cheering the blocking of food aid to starving Gazans; killing entire families, inducing a Palestinian boy to lay down in the road hoping someone would run over him and end his misery; this is but a small sampling of the consequences of trapping over a million Gazans in the southern half of a 125-square-mile concentration camp without food, shelter, or sanitation, then methodically shooting and bombing them while thousands of their relatives decompose under expanding mountains of rubble.

Depravity on this scale will not magically disappear by establishing a cease fire and holding peace talks, as urgently necessary as both those preliminaries are. Only relentless popular pressure on the U.S. government to force it to deny Israel the means to subjugate and murder Palestinians can even hope to lead to de-nazification of the Jewish state, without which real peace can never be achieved. Keep in mind that in the midst of the current wholesale slaughter a large majority of Israelis think Netanyahu isn’t using enough violence.

Cease fires we have had before, and peace agreements, too, but they didn’t solve the underlying conflict because addressing the absence of Palestinian national rights – the heart of the Palestine conflict – is taboo.

Because of this taboo, massacres of Palestinians are a feature, not a bug, of Zionist ideology, and have stained Israel’s history from before the state was even formed.

Only the scale of the current Gaza slaughter sets it apart.

In June of 1982, for example, Israel invaded Lebanon on a surge of Pentagon arms shipments, seeking to disperse the Palestine Liberation Organization (the Hamas of its day) and poison its relations with the local population while destroying its political and military structures. Tens of thousands of civilians died as the IDF carved up the country in alliance with Christian fascist militias.

While claiming to stand tall for human rights, Washington kept arms and money flowing in support of Israel’s occupation of not just Palestine, but Syria and Lebanon as well.

Lebanon was savagely pounded, leaving people roaming the wreckage of Beirut in clouds of flies, terror in their eyes, their clothes reduced to rags. Mothers howled, orphans sobbed, and the stench of rotting corpses filled the air.

Cluster bombs leveled whole blocks. White phosphorous burned people alive. Palestinian refugee camps were blasted to rubble, left pockmarked with blackened craters that filled with dead bodies and other debris. An officer in the U.N. peace-keeping force swept aside by the Israeli attack on Rashidiyeh said, “It was like shooting sparrows with a cannon.” Asked why houses containing women and children were being bombarded and bulldozed, an Israeli army officer explained that, “they are all terrorists.”

Surrounded by tanks, gunshots, and hysteria, one hundred thousand people were left without shelter or food, roaming through piles of wreckage. Blindfolded men, handcuffed with plastic bonds, were marched away to concentration camps where they were tortured, humiliated, and murdered. Their families were turned over to Phalangist patrols and Haddad forces (Israeli allies), who torched homes and beat people indiscriminately.

At the United Nations, the United States gave its customary blessing to Israeli savagery, vetoing a Security Council resolution condemning Israel.

Much impressed by Israel’s “purity of arms, The New York Times saluted the “liberation” of Lebanon.

But it was a macabre “liberation.” After three months of relentless attack, the southern half of the country lay in ruins. Even President Reagan, as ardent a fan of Israel as any of his predecessors in the Oval Office, couldn’t stomach more killing, and called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to stop the “holocaust.” Offended at the president’s use of this word, Begin nevertheless halted the bombardment immediately.

An agreement between Israel, the U.S. and the PLO was signed with security guarantees for the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat and his PLO fighters left for Tunis. On September 16, in defiance of the cease fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints and allowed truckloads of their Phalange and Haddad allies into the Palestinian camps. The Phalangists came with old scores to settle and a long list of atrocities against Palestinians already to their credit. The Haddad forces acted as part of the Israeli Army and operated under its command.

Perched on rooftops, Israeli soldiers watched through binoculars during the day and lit up the sky with flares at night, guiding the soldiers as they moved from shelter to shelter in the camps slaughtering the defenseless refugees. In mid-massacre, Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan congratulated the Phalangist command for having “carried out good work,” offered a bulldozer for scooping up corpses, and authorized the killers to remain in the camp twelve more hours. [4]

On September 18 war correspondent Robert Fisk entered the camps and described what he found there:

Down every alleyway there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been killed or machine-gunned to death. . .  In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed . . . these were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whiskey.

. . . Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range  . . . One had been castrated . . .  The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.”  [5]

Such were the results of Israel exercising its “right to self-defense,” just as the wholesale slaughter and starvation of Gazans forty-two years later is rationalized on the same grounds.

The moral of the story is that no matter how blindingly obvious its crimes are Israel is never guilty of anything because . . . the Holocaust.

Forty-seven years ago the London Sunday Times reported that Israel routinely tortures Palestinians, a devastating revelation at the time. The scope of the torture, said the Times, was so broad that it implicated “all of Israel’s security forces,” and was so “systematic that it [could not] be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders.”

Among the prisoner experiences detailed by the Times’ Insight team were being beaten and kicked, being set upon by dogs, having one’s testicles squeezed, having a ball-point pen refill shoved into one’s penis, or being raped with a stick and left bleeding from the mouth and face and anus.

Israel categorically denied the charges, but refused to rebut, diverting to side issues and attacking Israeli lawyers who stooped so low as to defend Arabs. Seth Kaplan in the staunchly liberal The New Republic rose in defense of Israeli torture, arguing that how a government treats its people “is not susceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture. One may have to use extreme measures – call them ‘torture’ – to deal with a terrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life.”  [6] Of course, every state in the world practicing administrative torture routinely claimed it was fighting “terrorists,” an infinitely elastic designation in the hands of national security officials.

So what supposedly made Palestinians “terrorists”? Mainly, that they resisted Israel’s steady tactic of robbing, swindling, torturing, and murdering all those who had been living in Palestine long before Zionism even appeared on the scene. But Israel simply couldn’t publicly admit that Palestine was not what it told the world it was – a land without a people for a people without a land. It had to keep torturing and killing Palestinians to induce them to vacate the land, but it could never admit this. At the end of 1996, when the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the justices called it “moderate physical pressure,” which sounds more like massage than torture. [7]

Two major Middle East peace agreements have been negotiated entirely under the prejudiced assumption that Palestinians are terrorists to be neutralized, not an oppressed people entitled to its rights. In neither Camp David nor Oslo was there any indication that Palestinian grievances were to be seriously considered, much less honestly dealt with. Had the obvious issues been faced with courage then, Gazans wouldn’t be getting slaughtered now. But they weren’t, an outcome that could have been foreseen just by looking at the people who produced the agreements.

The Camp David Treaty was negotiated by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Sadat was a former Nazi collaborator whose idol was the Shah of Iran, a U.S. client then moving at break-neck speed to Westernize the country, in the process laying down a human rights record so appalling that Amnesty International characterized it as “beyond belief.” He was shortly overthrown by the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The year before Camp David Sadat had made his “sacred mission” to Jerusalem to speak to the Knesset, opening the way for peace. But he complied with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan’s instructions to delete references to the PLO, and he never got off his knees after that. At Camp David he threw himself on the goodwill of the United States, striving for an agreement so good for Israel that Begin would invite condemnation should he dare to reject it.  Dismissed as a traitor and a fool throughout the Arab world, he was assassinated three years later.

Former head of the underground terrorist group Irgun, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was proud of his role in blowing up 95 British and Arabs in the King David Hotel in 1946, as well as the slaughter of over two-hundred Arab women, children and old men at Deir Yassin in 1948. In WWII, the Irgun had offered to support the Nazis against the British. One of Begin’s first acts when he became Israeli Prime Minister was to issue a postage stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group made the proposal. [8]

The last thing one could reasonably expect out of Prime Minister Begin’s cabinet was peace. His military junta included five generals who maintained cozy relations with apartheid South Africa and the blood-soaked dictators Augusto Pinochet and Anastasio Somoza.

As for Begin’s territorial ambitions, they were expansive, to say the least. The former Irgun commander had been elected on a platform calling for the annexation of the West Bank and the East Bank of the Jordan River, a goal that the Likud Party has never renounced. He regarded the West Bank and Gaza not as occupied but as liberated – from the indigenous Arabs to whom he felt they didn’t rightfully belong, and he called the land “Judea and Samaria,” Biblical names for God’s gift to the Jews. He openly regarded the Palestinians as Israel’s coolies, corralling them into Bantustans even as he promised them full autonomy, which he defined mystically as self-rule for people, but not for the land on which they lived. [9]

The key figure at Camp David, of course, was U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentalist Baptist and supposedly a neutral mediator between Begin and Sadat. He confessed to having an “affinity for Israel” based on its custodianship of the Holy Land, and regarded it as “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.” Ordained by God!  He had “no strong feelings about the Arab countries,” but condemned the “terrorist PLO.” Begin he described implausibly as a man of integrity and honor.

Carter instructed Sadat that unless his proposals were patently fair to Israel, which regarded Arabs as subhuman, Begin would justifiably reject them. When Egypt’s opening proposals requested compensation for Israeli use of land and oil wells in the occupied Sinai, free immigration to the West Bank, Israeli withdrawal from the illegally occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), and a Palestinian state, Carter was despondent at the “extremely harsh” recommendations. [10] Any treatment of Palestinians other than as anonymous refugees to be absorbed and pacified in colonial structures was apparently unimaginable extremism.

At the time, the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and its inclusion in negotiations was the only possible basis for establishing Palestinian national rights and reaching real peace. Nevertheless, Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up the U.S. stance at Camp David as “bye-bye PLO.” The Palestinians’ nationalist aspirations were summarily dismissed, and a solution for the Occupied Territories was postponed until future “autonomy talks,” to which the PLO would not be invited. This doomed any prospect of peace.

Unsurprisingly, Camp David’s imagined Palestinian “autonomy” was a substitute for national liberation in the Accords, and was fundamentally colonial. Israel was allowed to retain economic and political power over the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israeli Defense Forces were permitted to indefinitely remain. The Palestinians were essentially granted municipal authority (to pick up the garbage?) provided it didn’t threaten Israeli “security.” Prime Minister Begin openly declared that he would never allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

It’s hard to improve upon the summation of Camp David provided by Fayez Sayegh, founder of the Palestine Research Center:

A fraction of the Palestinian people (under one-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the national right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); and this promise is to be fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement. Beyond that, the vast majority of Palestinians is condemned to permanent loss of its Palestinian national identity, to permanent exile and statelessness, to permanent separation from one another and from Palestine – to a life without national hope or meaning.  [11]

Nevertheless, the United States applauded what it somehow construed as the birth of peace in the Middle East, while Israel proceeded to “annex” Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, tattoo the Occupied Territories with Jewish settlements, carve up southern Lebanon, attack Iraq, and bomb Palestinian refugee camps. [12]

None of this was a surprise. According to Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv, the effect of Camp David’s removing of Egypt from the Arab military alliance was that “Israel would be free to sustain military operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activity on the West Bank.”  [13]

Five years after Israel had reduced southern Lebanon to rubble Gaza rose in rebellion (the first intifada), and six years after that came the Oslo Accords, with the White House announcing triumphantly for the second time that lasting Middle East peace was at hand. But once again there was no peace. In accordance with long-standing U.S.-Israeli rejectionism the Oslo Accords called for the incorporation of Palestinian lands in a permanent colonial structure administered by Israel.

In other words, after more than seventy years of sacrifice and popular struggle for their national rights, the Palestinians were triumphantly handed a micro-state with no power. A toothless “Palestinian Authority” was set up in the West Bank.

Once again, Israel remained in possession of everything that counted: East Jerusalem, the settlements, the economy, the land, water, sovereignty, and “security.” The Oslo settlement was based on UN Resolution 242, which only recognized Palestinians as stateless refugees, not as a people possessed of national rights.

Israel made no commitment to giving up its violence or compensating the Palestinians for 45 years of conquest and dispossession. Yasir Arafat renounced all nationalist aspirations and discarded Palestinian rights, including the right to resist oppression. He accepted responsibility for guaranteeing Israeli security, turning his people into police for their occupiers.

The Palestinians were granted nothing more than “limited autonomy,” with no guarantee of Palestinian security, no Palestinian sovereignty, and no autonomous economy. Israeli companies were to set up sweatshops in the Occupied Territories and Palestinians were to continue supplying the $6-a-day labor. After years of granting concessions to Israel, they were asked to wait three to five more years until “final status” talks could determine what Israel’s vague references to “improvements” actually meant.

For the majority of Palestinians living in the Diaspora, this represented the final act of robbery, nullifying years of promises from the UN, Arab governments, and the PLO itself.

At the celebration of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, Arafat, the conquered, thanked everyone for the agreement suspending most of his people’s rights, and delivered an emotionally sterile speech as though he were reading out of a phone book. He barely mentioned the Palestinians.

Yitzak Rabin, the conqueror, gave a long speech detailing Israeli anguish, loss, and suffering involved in the conquest. He promised that Israel would concede nothing on sovereignty and would keep the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the roads, and the settlements.  He did not concede that Israel was, or ever had been, an occupying power. He made no commitment to dismantling the maze of racist laws and repressive fixtures of the Occupation. He said nothing about the thousands of Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails. He expressed not a twinge of remorse for four-and-a-half decades of ethnic cleansing and lies.  [14]

So the occupation of Palestine continued for years more, severely restricting Palestinian movement, increasing Jewish colonization of Arab land, and intensifying bureaucratic harassment. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon and a thousand Israeli soldiers touched off the second intifada by invading the Al Aqsa mosque site in Arab Jerusalem. The next day Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered riot police to storm the compound where 20,000 Palestinians were praying. Rocks were thrown and the police opened fire, killing seven and wounding 220. Within days President Clinton dispatched the largest shipment of attack helicopters to Israel in a decade.

Though portrayed by Israel apologists as extraordinarily generous towards the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ehud Barak never dismantled a settlement or freed a Palestinian prisoner during his entire 18 months in office. Like his predecessors, he refused to compromise on settlements, borders, refugee rights, and Jerusalem. According to Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration, it is a myth that Israel had offered to meet “most if not all of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations,” and equally a myth that the “Palestinians made no concession of their own.” In fact, Palestinians expressed willingness to accommodate Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a limit on repatriation of Palestinian exiles, though all of them were entitled to return. Malley stated that “no other Arab party that has negotiated with Israel . . . ever came close to even considering such compromises.”

Meanwhile, Israel offered nothing and demanded surrender, just as it always had.

According to Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff, the Palestinians were left with three options:  (1) agree to the expanding Occupation, (2) set up Bantustans, or (3) launch an uprising.

Palestinians chose to fight, and Israel pounded the nearly defenseless civilian population with helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks, missiles, and machine guns. While systematically assassinating Palestinian leaders, Israel cried “immoral” when its victims turned their bodies into weapons in horrific suicide bombings at supermarkets, restaurants, pool halls, and discotheques. Israeli propaganda blamed “hate teaching” by the PLO, but the real hate teacher was the racist ideology that defined Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs” and “cockroaches in a bottle,” among other terms of endearment popular with Israeli leaders. [15] This swelled the ranks of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade with volunteers who had lost close relatives to the Israeli military.

Amidst the firestorm of moral indignation occasioned by the suicide attacks, Israel never considered negotiating in good faith to resolve the longstanding conflict, and the United States applied no pressure to make them do so. Following in the footsteps of a long line of predecessors, President George W. Bush heaped arms and aid on Israel, vetoed UN resolutions calling for observers in the Occupied Territories, and continued funding the ever-expanding Jewish settlements. With the entire world recoiling in shocked outrage at Israel’s pulverizing of the West Bank, he declared Ariel Sharon “a man of peace.” [16]

Post-Oslo the stealing of land and dynamiting of Palestinian homes continued with the same justification as before: Jewish land was redeemed, Arab land was unredeemed. By the end of the twentieth-century, over 80% of Palestine no longer belonged to Palestinian Arabs. Under Clinton-Barak settlement construction had accelerated dramatically and Jews received nearly seven times as much water as Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, three hundred miles of Jews-only highways and bypass roads integrated the settlements into Israel proper while dividing Palestinian areas into enclaves of misery completely cut-off from the wider world.

Increasing numbers of Israeli Arabs joined with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to protest Jewish supremacy rooted in nationality rights granting Jews exclusive use of land, better access to jobs, special treatment in getting loans, and preferences for college admission, among other unearned advantages. Military service brought even more benefits, from which Palestinians were excluded.  [17]

Founded as a haven for Jews, Israel had become the most dangerous place in the world for them to live. The constant war on Palestinians that made this so was still described as self-defense, and the crushing of their national culture was still the goal of “peace.” Orwell would have felt like an amateur.

Whatever differences President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu may be having regarding tactics and media sound bites, the commitment they share is to preserving the festering boil of apartheid Israel, rooted in the conviction that Jews are a master race of chosen people destined to scrub the Holy Land of unsightly Arabs and rule over Greater Israel forever.

The stench of death is its constant gift to the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism, (Pluto, 2007) p. 224

[2] Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, (Haymarket, 2010), p. 160

[3] “American Efforts For Peace In The Middle East, 1919-1986“, quoted in Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, Tekiner, Abed-Rabbo, Mezvinsky, eds. (Amana Books, 1988) p. 19509

[4] Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End, 1983) pps. 155, 359-71, Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies, (Zed, 1994) pps. 117-121

[5] Robert Fisk is quoted from his book Pity The Nation in Susan Abulhawa, Mornings In Jenin, (Bloomsbury, 2010) pps. 224-6. Abulhawa is a novelist, but quotes verbatim passages from Pity The Nation.

[6] Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, (Pantheon, 1973-1982) p. 454n., Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 178-84.

[7] Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down – A Primer For The Looking Glass World, (Henry Holt, 1998), p. 88.

[8] Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 153.

[9] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979) pps. 14-15, 44, 57, 138, 195, 204, 206-7; Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 144, 191, 279, 351, 398, 683. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End, 1983), p. 95n.; Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 334, 347)

[10]  Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 274-5, 338-40; Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 651.

[11] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979), p. 212

[12] Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, (Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 244; Larry Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980) pps. 120-3)

[13] Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994) p. 213.

[14] Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword, (Common Courage, 1994) p. 110; Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. xxxiv, xxxv-xxxvii; Christopher Hitchens in Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents, (Random House, 1993) p. 3.

[15] John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 89)

[16] Stephen Shalom, “The Israel-Palestine Crisis,” Z Magazine, May 2002; Edward Said, “The Desertion of Arafat,” New Left Review, September-October 2001; Rezeq Faraj, “Israel and Hamas,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 2001; Rania Masri, “The Al Aqsa Intifada – The consequence of Israel’s 34-year occupation”; Noam Chomsky, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001.

[17] Max Elbaum, interview with Phyllis Bennis, “For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel,” ColorLines, December 15, 2000; Edward Herman, “Israel’s Approved Ethnic Cleansing,” Z Magazine, April 2001; Rene Backmann, A Wall In Palestine, (Picador, 2010), p. 170.

Michael Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire." He co-blogs with Frank Scott at www.legalienate.blogspot.com   Read other articles by Michael.