Contents All good things must come to an end...
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Lebanese blood oils Israeli elections
3
Salah Jaber
Palestine: Three Jerusalems?
5
Walid Salem
Greek printer, International Viewpoint is still
Turkey's military accord with Israel
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Erdal Tan
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11 Not peace, but an imperialist offensive
John McAnulty
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Dominique Mezzi
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Christian Picquet
28 Dewstasiament approves gay mariages
29 Poland: The reactionary dispair of the cheated
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Lebanese blood oils Israeli elections
The real terrorists in southern Lebanon are the Israeli occupation force and their local mercenaries.
Three invasions and eighteen years of occupation of the border zone have only fortified the Lebanese resistance.
Salah Jaber
THE PALESTINIANS ARE NOT THE only victims of the Zionist enterprise. So are the Lebanese. Over the last few years, their degree of suffering has become comparable to that of those Palestinians in
Jordanian and Lebanese exile, who have suffered the most attrocities, adding to their uprooting. Lebanese suffering is often forgotten: many messages of solidarity during the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982 failed to mention the host population among the victims..
The creation by force of the Zionist colonial state in 1948 involved only marginal incursions into South Lebanese territory. But the country immediately faced the influx of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, uprooted, expelled and penniless.
These refugees formed a very specific element in the rural exodus which generated, in the 1950s and 1960s, massive slums round the country's major towns. Particularly the capital, Beirut, which became the home of half the population.
Lebanon stayed out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. But the country paid a higher price for the Arab defeat than any other country. This was because Lebanon, with
Jordan hosted most of the bases and positions of the various Palestinian armed forces.
These forces increased rapidly after the 1967 defeat. They came to represent a state within the state. In Jordan, King Hussein soon repressed the Palestinian resistance in the terrible 1970 "Black September" blood bath. Israel put sharp pressure on the Lebanese government to do the same. In December 1968, Israel destroyed a number of aeroplanes at Beirut airport as a warning, thus begining a long series of military interventions.
The problem was not a lack of desire from the part of the Lebanese government. And certainly not an exhibition of steadfastness. The reality was that Beirut was quite unable to impose its control on the Palestinian resistance on Lebanese territory. It tried, on several occasions, particularly in southern Lebanon, where the Palestinian commandos organised their missions into Israel, and from where they fired shells across the border.
The weakness of the Lebanese army, compared to the forces controlled by King Hussein of Jordan, was one factor in the government's impotence. Another was its own lack of cohesion, faced with a population which, in its majority, felt deep solidarity with the Palestinians. This feeling was shared
Lebanon * by most Muslim Lebanese, and the left-wing component of the Christian population.
The 1969 agreement between the Lebanese army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) imposed restrictions on Palestinian activities in most of the country, but accepted their relative autonomy in the south of the country, which came to be nicknamed "Fatahland," after Yasser Arafat's organisation, the dominant faction in the PLO. Collective punishment
South Lebanon became the regular target of Israeli artillery and airborne destruction. The aim was to destroy the Palestinian bases, but also, simultaneously, to try to turn the local population against the Palestinians. This formed part of Israel's well-established policy of imposing collective punishment, in the occupied territories as well as Lebanon, since 1967. Each intervention across the border into northern Israel, and each rocket attack provoked a deluge of iron and explosives. Directed not just against the presumed point of origin of the Palestinian
International Viewpoint #277 3
resistance, but any neighbouring Lebanese villages. This violence was invariably accompanied by the air-distribution of thousands of leaflets exhorting the villagers to expel the fighters operating in their zone.
Without results. The civilian population, mainly Shi'ite Muslims tending to support the left in Lebanese politics, remained in solidarity with the Palestinians. Israel was unable to undo the virtual LebanesePalestinian osmosis in organisational and military affairs. Israe's ti trael escalat
Israel escalated the conflict, invading southern Lebanon for the first time, then withdrawing, leaving behind it a stain of death and destruction. The Israeli threat to the Lebanese government increased. It became clear that, if Beirut did not take the Jordanian road in managing its "Palestinian problem," Israel would occupy southern Lebanon, adding yet another Arab territory to the trophy list assembled in 1967.
Beirut was also under pressure from the United States, and their local protégés, the Lebanese Phalange Party, the hardest force on the reactionary Christian right. The Lebanese government intervened against the Palestinians again in 1973, but failed to achieve its goals. The Lebanese army was obliged to suspend its military operations against the Palestinian camps, out of fear that the conflict would spread to the Lebanese population. The pro-Palestinian faction of the population had been mobilised. Civil war was in this context that the Phalangists launched the Lebanese civil war. Twenty one years ago. The rest is history. Kissinger's Lebanese operation was a fiasco. The Lebanese army exploded. The local allies of Israel and the United States were almost defeated. Until their two patrons reluctantly allowed Syria to intervene in 1976.
The Palestinian military presence in southern Lebanon was by now greater than ever. The decomposing Lebanese state no longer had any control over the region. The PLO, its leftist Lebanese allies, and the Shi'ite Amal movement were in charge. Syria guaranteed a semblance of order in the rest of the country. But Israel refused to allow 4 International Viewpoint May 1996
Pit Somank Damascus to send troops any closer to Israel than a 'red line' marked by the Litani river.
The only solution left for the Zionist state was to try to solve the problem by itself. In 1978 Israel again invaded, driving everything before them, right up to the Litani line, 40 km into Lebanese territory. Israeli troops tried their hardest to "cleanse" the territory, before international pressure (UN Resolution 425) forced them to cede their place to a UN force, which took up a buffer position between Israel's self-awarded "security zone," and the rest of Lebanon, north of the Litani river.
Israel created a puppet Lebanese military force in South Lebanon, completely subordinate to the Israeli troops which remain in the zone (on the basis of regular incursions, rather than the maintenance of fixed bases). The resulting situation is a de facto annexation of a band of southern Lebanese territory by Israel, with a locally-hired mercenary army. In other words, a similar situation to the way Israel imagines the future of the "autonomous" Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza.
This virtually annexed "frontier strip" actually increases the insecurity in northern Israel, rather than reduce it. Israel now faces not only Palestinian guerrilla operations, but the resistance of Lebanese anti-occupation forces. Even worse for Israel, the creation of the "security zone" has counteracted what disaffection towards the Palestinians Israeli collective punishment and PLO bureaucratic behaviour had provoked among the Shiite villagers of southern Lebanon. Popular resentment against the Zionist state continued to rise. Peace for Galilee
In 1982, the Begin-Sharon government invaded Lebanon for the third time. Operation "Peace for Galilee" took Israeli tanks as far north as Beirut. The Israeli army almost neutralised the Palestinian forces in Lebanon, and weakened and disarmed most of the Lebanese left. The country paid a terrible price: 20,000 dead, and huge material damage. All of this could only increase hostility towards Israel.
The Zionist army was obliged to withdraw from Lebanon in 1985, in a move generally perceived as its first "defeat". But this withdrawl was not the result of Palestinian military activities, but the Lebanese resistance. 1985 also saw a "camp war" between the Palestinian camps and the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Amal, sponsored by Syria. But the traditional role of the left as the vector of social and patriotic radicalisation against Israel was taken up, in a deformed way, by a new, Islamic fundamentalist Shi' ite organisation, Hezbollah. With strong support from the Iran of the ayatollahs.
Hizbullah managed to impose itself, at the price of violent confrontations with both Amal and the left. Like most of the region's Islamic fundamentalist organisations, Hezbollah developed a significant popular base, thanks to its social policy and activities. Financial support from Iran was obviously a great help. Hizbullah also enjoyed at least the tolerance of the Syrian regime, which had no intention of abandoning the Iran friendship card this side of a global settlement with Israel and its American sponsors.
Fortified with a semi-mystical spirit of sacrifice, Hizbullah proved a more effective combatant than the PLO had been. Particularly since Hizbullah is completely at home in southern Lebanon.
The war of attrition in southern Lebanon is now ten years old. With periods of truce, like the aftermath of the 1993 Washingtonbrokered accord. But also with moments of Israeli escalation of the conflict. Of which the current attacks are the strongest example so far. Whatever agreement puts an end to the current hostilities, the security of northern Israel will not be secured as long as Israel refuses to withdraw from southern Lebanon. Only a total withdrawal will allow the defusing of the resentment which Hizbullah has channelled, and permit the Lebanese army to take responsibility for effective control of the zone, in the framework of the Pax Zionista-Americana which is being installed across the region.
Israeli Premier Shimon Peres knows all this. But he could not resist the temptation to ensure his re-election later this month, even at the cost of a holocaust consuming hundreds of Lebanese civilians, and driving hundreds of thousands into exodus. He did so with the understanding and sympathy of western imperialism. Except for the mediatised Qana massacre, which the west considered "regretable". As we saw in the Gulf War, "no blood on TV" is an important part of modern imperialst wars *