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.