ISRAEL'S LEBANON FRONTIER
During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Lebanon was home to guerrillas whose presence triggered intense Israeli violence. Unlike the West Bank and Gaza, however, Lebanon was never encapsulated within Israel, serving instead as a frontier of sorts vis-à-vis the Jewish state. Subsequently, Lebanon was subjected to more destructive tactics than the ghetto. There was a silver lining in this cloud, however, as Israeli forces never exercised the same type of encompassing infrastructural regime in Lebanon that they wielded in Palestine. Israel's Lebanese tactics were destructive and spectacular, but sporadic and uneven.
Israel's Lebanon Repertoire
A recent example of Israeli violence, Lebanon-style, took place in mid-April 1996, when Israeli shells slammed into a UN compound near Qana village, killing 102 Lebanese civilians. The incident took place during Israel's Grapes of Wrath campaign, a fifteen-day operation involving 600 air sorties, 25,000 artillery shells, 154 slain civilians, and 400,000 displaced persons.[26] Grapes of Wrath was billed by Israel as a retaliation for attacks by the Islamist group Hezbollah, whose rockets had caused property damage in northern Israel and sent thousands fleeing southward.[27] Israel blamed the Qana deaths on the victims themselves, saying they had ignored warnings to flee the area; those who remained in the region did so "at their own risk, because we assume they're connected with Hezbollah." A radio broadcast by the Southern Lebanese Army (SLA), an Israeli militia ally, had listed forty-five villages by name, warning that "any presence in these villages will be considered a terrorist one, that is, the terrorists and all those with them will be hit."[28] Grapes of Wrath was a repeat of Israel's 1993 Operation Accountability, another punitive campaign that killed 120 civilians, displaced 300,000, and damaged over 17,000 homes.[29] In the 1990s, these dramatic displays of Israeli anger were accompanied by dozens of smaller attacks; in 1995 alone, according to UN estimates, Israel fired 37,000 artillery shells into Lebanon.[30]
As noted in the preface, Israel's Lebanon policies present an intriguing puzzle. In recent decades, Israel treated Lebanon to more intense doses of violence than Palestine, even though Hezbollah and other Lebanonbased guerrillas posed far less of a threat to Israel or Zionism than did West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. This is especially true in the early and mid-1990s, when Palestinian Intifada tactics shifted from unarmed demonstrations to more deadly bomb attacks.[31] In 1996, moreover, Palestine's Islamist Hamas group launched a series of successful suicide bombs against Jewish towns, proving itself more of an immediate military threat than Hezbollah. Still, Israeli forces did not use the same devastating methods against the West Bank and Gaza that they did in Lebanon[32]
This puzzle is comprehensible when we factor in Lebanon's and Palestine's different institutional contexts. The sovereignty norm, coupled with Israel's disinterest in annexing Lebanon, constituted it as a counterinsurgency frontier vis-à-vis Israel, an arena that Israel sought to influence but not incorporate. The lack of a clearly enforced sovereign boundary between Israel and Palestine, on the other hand, helped transform Palestine into an internal ghetto.
The Origins of Israel's Lebanon
Counterinsurgency Frontier, 1968–78
Lebanon began serving as Israel's counterinsurgency frontier in June 1968, when Palestinian organizations launched their first guerrillas against Israel from Lebanese territory, and Israel responded with a ground attack on a small Fatah base.[33] In 1969, Palestinian guerrillas and the Lebanese government signed an agreement permitting Palestinian fighters to attack Israel from a limited area of south Lebanon.[34] The Lebanese government had originally opposed Palestinian actions from its territory, but later bowed to local and pan-Arab sentiment. After Jordan's crackdown on Palestinians in 1970–71, the guerrillas made Lebanon their new center, carving out state-like structures in Beirut-area refugee camps.[35] The PLO's administrative headquarters were in Beirut, but it deployed hundreds of fighters to the south, where they enjoyed some support from local Palestinian refugees as well as pro-Palestinian Lebanese factions.[36]
Southern Lebanese were soon trapped between PLO guerrillas on the one hand and Israeli counterinsurgency forces on the other.[37] British journalist Robert Fisk writes that Israel's attitude was straightforward: "If the Lebanese villagers allowed armed Palestinians to take shelter among their homes, then they would be made to pay for it in blood. The only way to avoid Israeli attack was to eject the Palestinians from their villages," something some Lebanese were either unwilling or unable to do, although by the late 1970s, Lebanese Shi'ite militias fought pitched battles with Palestinian factions.[38] In the early 1970s, Israeli forces regularly shelled the south and launched frequent search-and-destroy patrols by ground forces; these actions, Fisk writes, were "usually against civilian targets and always with results quite out of proportion to the original Palestinian attack," initiating a "pattern that would be expanded, developed and perfected with ferocity over the coming fifteen years."[39] Villages that did not expel Palestinians experienced particularly intense bombardment. Lebanese officials reported an average of 1.4 daily Israeli attacks in 1968–74, and an average of seven daily raids in 1975.[40] Israel's warplanes were particularly deadly, especially when attacking refugee camps. One June 1974 camp attack, for example, killed 27 and wounded 105, while a May 1975 raid killed 60 and wounded 140.[41] Israeli shelling drove many southern Lebanese northward, with one source estimating "tens of thousands" of displaced persons in the early 1970s and another speaking of 30,000 displaced households, or 150,000–300,000 persons.[42]
Israeli officials said the raids were retaliations for PLO violence, but in keeping with Israel's deterrence doctrine, its blows were more painful than those of the guerrillas. PLO forces killed 282 Israeli civilians and 250 soldiers from 1967 to July 1982, while Israel slew 3,500–5,000 civilians from 1973 to July 1982 alone. Israeli forces killed an additional 12,000–15,000 during its summer 1982 invasion, losing only 360 soldiers in return.[43] When Lebanese Shi'ites launched their own guerrilla war against Israel in the mid-1980s, Israeli leaders were surprised at the depth of popular southern Lebanese resentment against them.[44] At the same time, some southern Lebanese came to bitterly resent the Palestinian guerrillas, many of whom behaved arrogantly and attracted deadly Israeli reprisals.[45]
Lebanon collapsed into civil war in 1975, following rising tensions between Muslims, Palestinians, Druze, and Christians.[46] The Israeli-Palestinian fighting and PLO involvement in local Lebanese conflicts played a powerfully destabilizing role. Lebanese Christian factions were furious with PLO mobilization, which threatened to upset the country's confessional balance, undermine Christian power, and trigger Israeli reprisals.[47] In particular, the Christian militias were concerned because Palestinians had joined forces with leftist Muslim militias of the Lebanese National Movement. (Later on, the PLO's alliance with its Lebanese allies was disrupted, fueling the civil war even further.)[48] The civil war destroyed the Lebanese state, divided the country into warring fiefdoms, and caused tens of thousands of deaths.
Operation Litani and Its Aftermath
On March 14, 1978, following a brutal Palestinian attack on Jewish civilians in northern Israel, thousands of Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in an assault dubbed "Operation Litani."[49] The effort killed between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians, including seventy-five in a single air strike on an Abassiya mosque. Thousands were wounded, while 200,000–285,000 persons fled northward.[50]Washington Post journalist Jonathan Randal wrote that Israeli "destruction was on a scale known well in Vietnam," while Israeli scholar Yair Evron noted that Operation Litani caused "a mass civilian migration" in which "tens of thousands fled their homes" and "much property was destroyed," and involving "many casualties."[51] Randal estimates Israeli gunfire damaged or destroyed 6,000 homes and that "half a dozen villages were all but leveled in a frenzy of violence."[52] The destruction stemmed in part from Israel's reluctance to send troops into Palestinian-held neighborhoods without first using heavy artillery.
Operation Litani ended in withdrawal, but Israeli raids continued in an effort to keep the PLO from moving southward. Israeli warplanes killed 235 civilians in a May 1979 air raid, drove 50,000 northward on June 9, killed 309 and wounded 1,011 in July, and pushed another 170,000 northward on August 21. Overall, Israeli forces hit Lebanon 1,020 times between January and July 1979.[53] The attacks continued over the next two years and on July 17, 1981, Israel unleashed its most powerful barrage to date, destroying ten apartment buildings in West Beirut, killing 90–175 persons, and injuring 400–600.[54] Soon after, the PLO and Israel reached a cease-fire agreement that endured until June 1982.
During the 1970s, Israel came to view Lebanon as an arena where it was appropriate to use intense violence to punish civilians and guerrillas, and to convince Lebanese villagers to reject a Palestinian presence. At the same time, however, such methods were not considered appropriate in the West Bank and Gaza. Lebanon was external to Israel's formal zone of responsibility, separated by a sovereign border from the norms and laws of Israeli state and society. As Israeli rights group B'Tselem noted, the Israeli public debate "almost completely ignored the suffering and injustice inflicted on Lebanese civilians," suggesting that unlike West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, Lebanese civilians were not "part of the collective Israeli consciousness."[55] And, whereas there was public discussion of Palestinian human rights during the 1980s and 1990s, Israeli society had little to say about Lebanese civilians. Paradoxically, Israel's de facto annexation of Palestine implied a greater sense of Israeli responsibility for its inhabitants. By contrast, Israel was able to influence southern Lebanon through punitive operations, and it never sought comprehensive control. The frontier status of Lebanon, coupled with Israel's disinterest in annexing Lebanese territory, promoted sporadic acts of intense violence rather than infrastructural methods of surveillance and policing. Parts of Lebanon, in other words, took on some of the frontier characteristics that Bosnia assumed vis-à-vis Serbia in the early 1990s. Southern Lebanon was a peripheral zone of indeterminate status vis-à-vis Israel, whose armed forces used punitive sorties to drive out their civilian and militia enemies. The Israeli state made no effort to settle southern Lebanon with Jewish settlers, however, or to incorporate Lebanese land into its legal or bureaucratic fabric. Unlike the Palestinian ghetto, there was no Lebanese enclave trapped within the broader Israeli state.
Hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese were "cleansed" northward by Israeli forces, but unlike Serbian actions in Bosnia, this was not part of a broader Israeli agenda of state expansion and demographic change. Israel had no intention of incorporating southern Lebanon into Greater Israel. Southern Lebanon was emptied of much of its civilian population due to Israeli counterinsurgency efforts, unlike Serbia's clandestine effort to re-engineer Bosnia's ethno-national composition.
The 1982 War
An assassination attempt in 1982 against Israel's London ambassador triggered an Israeli invasion dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee by its
Israeli warplanes began the war with a June 4 series of air raids, killing 45 and wounding 150.[59] Two days later, Israeli armored columns began advancing through southern Lebanon, including 90,000 troops, 2,600 armored vehicles, and hundreds of warplanes and artillery.[60] As was true during Operation Litani, Israeli commanders planned to limit their own casualties by first shelling suspect urban areas. As Israeli scholar Avner Yaniv noted, officers decided to use "masses of artillery" and intense air support, "even at the cost of heavy civilian casualties among the Palestinians and the Lebanese."[61] This tolerance of non-Jewish casualties, coupled with the Palestinian habit of basing guerrilla forces in urban areas, led to widespread loss of civilian life.[62] According to one Israeli trooper, orders instructing infantrymen to respect civilian life seemed meaningless when refugee camps were first "mercilessly shelled and bombed."[63] As Israeli academic Yehoshua Porat wrote, "The heavy bombardments, the enormous destruction and the high number of casualties" established a "most horrifying moral principle: Jewish blood is worth more than any other blood."[64] As another Israeli journalist opined, one of the war's central themes was "massive harm to Lebanon's innocent civilian population."[65]
Casualty rates attest to the invasion's intensity. Lebanese officials put the summer 1982 death toll at 18,000, of whom 2,000 were combatants, estimating an additional 30,000 injured; other sources argued for 12,000–15,000 civilian deaths and 40,000 wounded.[66] Israel's casualty toll for the same period was 368 dead and 2,383 wounded, all combatants.[67]
Witnesses seemed awed by the ferocity of Israel's actions. Reporter Avraham Rabinovich wrote that the effects of shelling on Tyre and Sidon were "numbing," while Robert Fisk reported that air attacks on Sidon "must have been among the most ferocious ever delivered on a Lebanese city … it looks as if a tornado has torn through the residential buildings."[69] Some of the worst damage occurred in Ein Hilwe refugee camp, where Israeli correspondents wrote that a "thick, black cloud of dust and smoke hung" as Israeli "artillery and planes pounded away … on and on … for days."[70] In his diary, Israeli officer Dov Yermiya wrote that "the quantity of bombs and shells" that Israeli forces poured into Ein Hilwe reminded him of World War II, while another Israeli reporter wrote that the camp had been transformed by shelling into "two square kilometers of twisted broken rubble, putrid rubbish and torn and shattered personal belongings." According to Lebanese authorities, the bombing killed some 600 persons.[71] Israeli forces used similar tactics against other camps, saying they contained underground guerrilla facilities. Cluster, fragmentation, and phosphorous munitions were reportedly used in populated areas, with painful results.[72] Media reports suggested some Israeli officers had opposed the indiscriminate bombardments, but that their opposition gave way due to their fear of Israeli infantry casualties.[73]
This violence was taking place in Lebanon not Palestine, highlighting the importance of institutional context. Had such methods been used in the ghetto, Israel would have been tearing at the very fabric of its own state. When aimed at Palestinians or Lebanese living beyond a sovereign border, however, no such trauma was involved. Israel's Lebanon offensives targeted external enemies situated beyond Israel's zone of empirical and juridical sovereignty, and thus did not disrupt established patterns of internal state governance. That Ein Hilwe was externalized while the West Bank camps were situated in the ghetto, however, was historical accident.
Israeli forces drove farther north, reaching Beirut on June 12, besieging 20,000 guerrillas and 300,000 civilians until August 21, when the
Israel's Expulsion Plans for Lebanon's Palestinian Refugees
As we saw in the previous chapters, the notion of ethnic cleansing or "Arab transfer" was increasingly discussed within Jewish nationalist circles in the 1980s. The number of Israelis interested in pursuing this option vis-à-vis Palestinians in the West Bank and, possibly, the Gaza Strip mounted throughout this period, even garnering support from some governing elites. Yet while at least some preconditions for an ethnic cleansing option for Palestinians did exist within Israel, movement in that direction was stymied by Palestine's ghetto-like institutional environment.
The Lebanese counterinsurgency frontier, however, presented a different set of constraints and possibilities, and according to some Israeli sources, there were wartime plans to forcibly deport many, if not all, of the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon.[80] If Israeli leaders did have a scheme to deport Lebanon's 350,000-strong Palestinian refugee community, it would have been a logical outgrowth of Israel's broader effort to eliminate the PLO as an organizational and ideological force. As noted
Israeli governments were eager to ensure continued Jewish control over the West Bank and Gaza, but the PLO's international profile, coupled with its bureaucratic weight, presented a credible political alternative. A key Israeli goal for the 1982 war, therefore, was to destroy the PLO's Lebanon institutions in the hope that this would deal a fatal blow to the broader Palestinian nationalist cause.[84] Israel's military chief said as much in July 1982, noting that Israel's Lebanon war was "part of the struggle over the Land of Israel,"[85] and as Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon elaborated, "the more we damage the PLO infrastructure, the more the Arabs in Judea and Samaria and Gaza will be ready to negotiate with us."[86] Israel, in other words, launched its 1982 attack on Lebanon to resolve a policy issue in Palestine. In a pattern that repeated itself throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Israel used more intense methods in Lebanon, even though its real target was Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hints of a possible Israeli plan to expel Palestinian civilians from Lebanon came first from prime minister Menachem Begin on June 10, 1982, four days after the war began, when he reportedly used the term "transfer" in describing Israeli war aims.[87] On June 18, according to reserve officer Dov Yermiyah's published war diary, cabinet minister Yaakov Meridor told a group of Israeli troops in Lebanon that Palestinian refugees "must be pushed away eastward, toward Syria; let them go
The existence of a tacit Israeli plan to expel at least some of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees was also indicated by its policy of post-conflict refugee camp reconstruction. In the country's south, Israeli forces initially blocked camp reconstruction efforts, and on June 13, 1982, the officer in charge of civilian affairs in southern Lebanon explained that the destruction of Palestinian camps "should be regarded as an inadvertent but welcome achievement."[90] Indeed, Israeli forces reportedly helped complete camp destruction by bulldozing surviving structures. According to international human rights campaigners, Israel's policy indicated it hoped "to push the Palestinian people out of the occupied zones and even out of Lebanon."[91] A final suggestion of possible Israeli intentions comes from the Sabra and Shatila killings, discussed below, which may have been linked to a broader deportation plan devised, at least in part, by Israel's militia allies.
Israel did not always act brutally in Lebanon, of course, and Israeli society was not uniformly in favor of despotic violence. Indeed, Jewish protests against the September 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres and the Lebanon war demonstrated clearly that many Israelis opposed their government's policy. Israel, like Serbia, was a complex, multifaceted society, containing both radical and more moderate tendencies. Zionist ideology, like all nationalist frameworks, included both radicals and pragmatists. Neither Israel nor Zionism was essentially prone to intense violence.