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

---

above, the Palestinian group had developed substantial bureaucratic, military, and diplomatic weight during the 1970s, projecting a "state in waiting" image that threatened Israel's plans for long-term control over the West Bank. A few statistics demonstrate the depth of the PLO's presence. According to Yezid Sayigh, for example, Fatah, the main PLO faction, had 10,000 salaried bureaucrats, 16,200 fighters, and 25,000 parttime militia in 1980–81. Smaller PLO factions employed several more thousands, while another 7,000 men and women worked outside Lebanon.^[81] In 1980, the PLO's welfare services supported 20,000 Palestinian families, ran three large orphanages, eleven day care centers, and a society for the blind. A PLO industrial agency employed 5,000 fulltime workers in forty-six workshops throughout Lebanon, offering vocational training to 30,000 in 1982, with reported earnings of $40 million.^[82] According to Rex Brynen, the PLO's budget was in the "hundreds of millions of dollars," with much of that going to social and administrative programs.^[83] Although these activities were headquartered in PLO buildings in West Beirut, they were rooted in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and other coastal towns. Without its refugee base, the PLO's quasi-state image would wither away.

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

---

over there, but do not let them come back." On August 26, Meridor told a press conference that Israel hoped to "relocate" Palestinian refugees to "other regions."^[88] Further suggestion of an expulsion campaign came from Ariel Sharon during the siege of Beirut, when he allegedly referred to Palestinian neighborhoods in the city as "terrorist camps" that needed to be "cleaned out, utterly destroyed," and "razed to the ground," despite their being home to some 85,000 persons. Their civilian residents, Sharon said, should "move on elsewhere." According to Israeli correspondents Schiff and Ya'ari, Sharon proposed bombing the camps for a week and then sending in Israel's local militia allies.^[89]

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.