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