As this is being written, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is moving toward its tragic conclusion in west Beirut. The invasion began with the stated goal of clearing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) troops out of a 25-mile strip of southern Lebanon. But it has now decimated much of the southern half of that country and left up to 14,000, mostly Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, dead.
In mid-June a representative of the evangelical Christian relief group World Vision visited Sidon, on the coast of Lebanon, after the Israeli attack. He reported widespread devastation throughout business and residential areas of the city. Of the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp Ein El Halweh, home to 60,000 Palestinians, he reported, "The entire township had been totally razed by saturation bombing...large sectors were levelled to just one or two meters height.... [At the] Kineye Government Secondary School the smell of death penetrated the neighborhood. Nearby residents reported 255 cadavers remained there.... In the basement I counted over 50 bodies but stopped when I discovered a mountain of bodies in one corner. Men, women, children, infants apparently all killed by massive aerial bombardment exploding in their basement refuge."
That scene has been repeated time and time again in the last two months as U.S.-made anti-personnel cluster bombs, incendiary phosphorus shells, and other high-tech machinery of "conventional" warfare have rained upon the people of Lebanon. And as these people have suffered, so have hopes for a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict.
The invasion began with a bombing raid on Beirut after an Israeli diplomat was shot in London. When the PLO responded to the bombing with rockets aimed at northern Israeli villages, the all-out invasion dubbed "Operation Peace for Galilee" began. As it turned out, the shooting in London had been done by an anti-PLO group based in Syria, and the invasion, which had been planned for months, had little to do with peace for anyone.
Since the PLO was driven out of Jordan in 1971, it has used southern Lebanon as its base for military operations against Israel. Most of those activities have involved cruel attacks on Israeli civilians. But for 10 months before the invasion, the PLO had been observing a U.S.-negotiated ceasefire, except for two occasions when PLO forces launched rocket fire into Israel in response to massive Israeli bombings in Lebanon. As long as Israel refrained from those bombing raids there was peace for Galilee.
Now as Israeli forces encircle west Beirut, their stated goal is the removal of PLO troops and their leadership from that city. But that is not the whole story. The real aim of the invasion is to shut off any possibility of a Palestinian state being established in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. And while Israel's immediate enemy is the PLO army, the fight is ultimately against Palestinian nationalism and a demand for justice that is not likely to go away, regardless of the outcome in Beirut.
Most of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are from families that were among the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who were driven out or who fled from their homes when the state of Israel was established in 1948. Most of them had their property confiscated by the new state and have for the last 35 years awaited their return to homes and villages that in most cases no longer exist.
The struggle of Jews for a national home in Palestine had begun at the turn of the century in response to an intense wave of persecution in Europe. It reached fruition when the United Nations established the state of Israel as a haven for Jews, mostly as a response to the devastation of the Nazi holocaust. The U.N. resolution that created the state of Israel called for a partition of Palestine. The areas with the heaviest concentration of Jewish settlements were to become Israel, and the rest was to become an independent Arab state. But Palestinian and other Arab leaders rejected the idea of partition. The remaining areas of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) came under the temporary rule of Jordan and Egypt, and the Arab nations vowed to eventually dismantle the Jewish state. Thus began the series of wars that have plagued the people of the Middle East ever since.
In 1967 Israel won a near-total victory over the combined armies of the Arab world. When that war was over, Israel had captured the Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West Bank and Gaza. At the time the widespread expectation was that Israel would use the conquered lands as bargaining chips to gain peace agreements with its neighbors. But 15 years later only the Sinai has been returned; the Golan Heights have been annexed outright, and the West Bank and Gaza have become the focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After the 1967 war, Yasser Arafat assumed leadership of the PLO, which had begun in 1964. Realizing that the Arab states were not going to win them their homeland and with nothing left to lose, the PLO began the campaign of international terrorism that brought its cause to mass attention and notoriety in the West. Those actions also had much to do with the forming of Israel's present reactionary posture.
At that time the PLO's goal was replacement of the Jewish state with a secular democratic state in all of Palestine. In the last few years, however, the PLO leadership has moved toward the idea of accepting a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would co-exist peacefully with Israel. This shift has been evident in the PLO's endorsement of Middle East peace plans put forward by Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, both of which called for a West Bank-Gaza state at peace with Israel. However, the PLO has withheld explicit recognition of Israel's right to exist, saying that such recognition must be simultaneous with Israel's recognition of a Palestinian state's right to exist.
At the same time that the PLO has been moderating its position, so have the other Arab states. An international consensus has also been emerging among the Soviets, the governments of western Europe, and even a growing minority within Israel for negotiations between Israel and the PLO toward the goal of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
All this, combined with the limited success of peace talks between Egypt and Israel, would seem to indicate that peace is within reach. But as the headlines from Beirut remind us, it may be further away than ever: Menachem Begin and his defense minister Ariel Sharon consider the West Bank and Gaza a permanent and indivisible part of the biblical land of Israel and are moving as rapidly as possible to make Israeli sovereignty there an immovable fact.
Shortly after Israel acquired the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, it became clear that the Israelis intended to keep some parts of these territories permanently. In 1970 the moderate Labor Party government began establishing civilian agricultural settlements in the valley along the Jordan River. The idea was to establish a military buffer between Israel and Jordan while taking advantage of the valley's agricultural resources and cutting off the Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank from the large Palestinian population on the Jordanian side of the river.
At the same time, construction began on a ring of high-rise apartment buildings for Jewish Israelis on the outskirts of Arab East Jerusalem, which was also part of the West Bank territory conquered in 1967. According to Palestinian economist Ibrahim Matar, the Jerusalem settlements are designed "to create a...feeling among the Palestinians of living in a ghetto, in order to demoralize the Palestinians and encourage them to emigrate." The East Jerusalem ring of settlements also serves to cut off the natural expansion of the Arab section of the city. The settlements in the Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem, like all built since, were constructed on land confiscated from Palestinian owners without compensation.
The election of Begin's Likud government in 1977 marked a quantum leap for Israeli ambitions toward the occupied territories. Begin and his allies approached the territories not just as a security consideration, but with a religious belief that it was their right and duty to assert Jewish sovereignty over this land promised by God. That mindset was exemplified by the fact that Begin very early on expunged the title West Bank from official discourse in favor of the biblical names Judea and Samaria.
Under Begin the establishment of civilian settlements in the territories was stepped up. And instead of concentrating on the Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem, settlements were begun throughout the territories. There are now about 94 settlements, populated by about 27,000 Israelis, in the territories outside of Jerusalem and another 65,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem. Israel now controls at least a third of the land on the West Bank with some estimates as high as 40 per cent.
Most of the settlements are not agricultural; rather they are bedroom communities from which Israelis commute to work in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Yet for each settlement Arab land is confiscated not just for housing but for a surrounding "settlement bloc" that connects the ring around the Arab city. Highways are also being built connecting the settlement blocs to one another and to Israel.
The Israelis who populate the settlements tend to come disproportionately from ultra-orthodox right-wing groups like Gush Emunim ("Block of the Faithful") and the followers of the American-born rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane has recently written a book published in the U.S. called They Must Go! that openly advocates the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. The settlers are all armed by the government with machine guns and have been responsible for numerous violent attacks on their Arab neighbors, including the attempted assassination of two mayors of West Bank towns.
The strategy behind the settlements is to "create facts" that any future negotiations cannot remove. With the completion of each new settlement it becomes more difficult to imagine Israel relinquishing the occupied territories, particularly in view of the armed and dangerous nature of many of the settlers. The U.S. during the Carter years officially condemned the settlement policy as a violation of international law. But at the same time the U.S. has helped finance the expensive program through $850 million of no-strings economic aid to Israel each year.
The settlements are only one part of Israel's strategy to maintain control over the territories. Occupation authorities have also promulgated a series of military orders that regulate virtually every area of social existence. Palestinians must have a permit from the occupiers to erect, for instance, a new building or in any way improve their property, to dig a new well on their land, or to leave and re-enter the country. Such permits are rarely granted. In addition, publications of any nature are banned, as are any political gatherings. All these regulations are aimed at making life as difficult as possible in order to make emigration a more attractive option.
The authorities have given special attention to thwarting any development of indigenous institutions among the Palestinians of the occupied territories. They rightly see that such institutions are the seeds of a future Palestinian state. The three Palestinian universities, in particular Bir Zeit University, have been closed repeatedly. The closings have usually been as punishment for student demonstrations. The schools also suffer censorship of books for classroom or library use. The occupation authorities maintain a list of about 1,100 banned titles. Newspapers are not allowed to publish in the West Bank or Gaza. The only Palestinian newspapers come from East Jerusalem, which since its annexation is technically under Israeli law. And those newspapers are heavily censored, often banned from distribution in the territories, and sometimes simply confiscated from the marketplaces.
A major part of the drive to derail Palestinian institutions has been the removal of their leadership. Since the occupation began, more than 1,000 Palestinian professionals, academics, artists, and other social and political leaders have been deported, among them, the president of Bir Zeit University and the elected mayors of Halhoum and Hebron. The mayors were simply seized in the middle of the night, blindfolded, put in a helicopter, and dropped across the border in Lebanon.
While the institutions of Palestinian society have been uprooted, the path has also been cleared for permanent Israeli rule through the integration of the economies of the West Bank and Gaza with that of Israel. Palestinian towns have been forced to hook up to the Israeli electrical grid and water services. The West Bank and Gaza market has been flooded with Israeli goods while West Bank and Gaza businesspeople are severely regulated in their export of goods to Israel. With economic development in the territories stunted, many residents are forced to make the long commute to Israel to find menial service or construction jobs, a situation made more difficult by a law forbidding Arab workers from the territories to be inside Israel overnight.
Laid on top of all these social and economic restrictions is the burden of harassment and brutality by occupying soldiers. In the 15 years of occupation, 200,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.3 million have passed through the military prisons. Prisoners can be held without charges and without seeing a lawyer for months on end. All trials are held in military courts, and reports from Israeli human rights advocates indicate that torture and beatings are not unusual in the prisons.
In addition to the harassment of individuals, collective punishment, banned by international law, has become commonplace. In the wake of demonstrations against the occupiers, whole towns have been placed under curfew, sometimes for 23 hours a day. This spring two neighboring villages between Bethlehem and Hebron with a population totaling 30,000 were under an all-day curfew for more than two weeks. Families can have their homes demolished as punishment if a member is suspected of acting against the occupation. Homes numbering 1,350 have been destroyed in this fashion since the occupation began. And hundreds of Palestinians have been placed under house arrest or restricted to their town without any formal charges.
The occupation and the importing of settlers have served only to create a more fervently nationalist spirit among the people of the occupied territories. In 1976 the Labor government allowed free elections for municipal governments in the West Bank in the hopes that "moderate" Palestinian leadership would emerge. But in almost every city PLO supporters were elected by large margins.
The most intense resistance yet was sparked early this year by the imposition of civil administration, which put the territories under civilian rather than military rule. In practice there was no significant change in occupation policies; often it simply meant military administrators taking off their uniforms. But the Palestinians saw clearly that it represented a step toward annexation of the occupied territories. It meant a "normalization" of the occupation.
The Palestinian mayors and town councils refused to have any dealings with the civil administrators, which led to four of the mayors being dismissed from office. When the mayors were fired, municipal workers and shopkeepers went on strike in towns throughout the territories, and youths armed with stones took to the streets. The army dealt with the situation by firing into the crowds and looking the other way when armed Israeli settlers did the same. At least 25 Palestinians were killed in the course of the uprising.
To replace the elected governments of the West Bank and Gaza the Israelis have created (and armed) bodies called the Village Leagues with the hope that they will become recognized as the Palestinian participants in the Camp David autonomy talks. But the Village League members are regarded as thugs and traitors by most Palestinians. At this point their only authority comes from their Israeli machine guns.
While all this has been going on, Israel has been stalling on beginning the autonomy talks. Begin's policies until now indicate that he has no intention of entering those talks in good faith. Rather, he is moving as quickly as possible to create a situation in which Israeli control of the territories becomes inevitable. Ariel Sharon has said, "There is already a Palestinian homeland.. It is called Jordan." Comments like these have fueled the suspicion that Israel plans to force enough Palestinians across the river, by whatever means, to make the West Bank and Gaza safe to annex. As Begin and Sharon see things, the only obstacle to their plans for the West Bank and Gaza is the allegiance of the residents to the PLO as their political leadership. That is why they are simultaneously completing the removal of PLO-oriented leadership in the territories, trying to create a puppet leadership, and undertaking the invasion of Lebanon with the goal of destroying the PLO as a factor in Middle East politics.
Unfortunately the Israeli government is confusing the cause and the effect of their Palestinian problem. The PLO is not some external force imposed on the Palestinians. Rather, it arose as a result of the basic injustice done to the Palestinian people. Until that wrong has been righted and an approximation of justice established, Israel's Palestinian problem will not go away any more than the U.S. destruction of Vietnam made our "Viet Cong problem" go away. Despite the often terrible actions it has taken against Israel, the PLO is the acknowledged political leadership of the Palestinian people. If the present PLO is destroyed, then another expression of Palestinian aspirations will certainly take its place. And history suggests that the longer justice is denied the more fearsome become the consequences.
The United States bears a heavy responsibility for the present state of affairs in the Middle East. It undertook the Camp David peace process, flawed from the beginning by the absence of Palestinian representatives, at a time when it derailed prospects for a more productive multilateral Geneva conference. Even while denouncing Israel's settlement policy and human rights violations, the U.S. has failed to take any concrete action against Israeli practices. And perhaps most importantly, the U.S. supplied the weapons that have wreaked such destruction on Lebanon.
The Begin government now seems to consider itself beyond U.S. influence. And it may well be in the short term. Over its years of U.S. sponsorship, Israel has amassed one of the world's greatest military machines. It has its own weapons industry that accounts for a large percentage of Israel's export trade. Israel has become a major supplier of weapons to regimes like those in Guatemala and formerly to Somoza's Nicaragua. And Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, the extent of which is unknown. Begin has shown his willingness to flout U.S. opinion by his breaking of numerous ceasefires in Beirut. And he has recently affirmed his inflexibility by declaring that even if the PLO unequivocally recognized the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state he still would never negotiate with it.
But despite his bluster, Begin must know that in the long run his continuing military might and any prospects for reviving his failing economy will depend on the friendliness of the U.S. government. Aside from the increasingly restive Israeli electorate, the U.S. is the only force that can sway Begin from a path that can lead only to disaster, perhaps even global disaster. But the will for peace seems to be lacking in Washington. While in recent weeks the Reagan administration has made some attempts at dissuading the Israelis in Lebanon, these efforts have been too little too late to make up for its initial mild disapproval of the invasion and blanket endorsement of Israeli aims.
Hope for peace seems to rest with the grassroots peace movements, our own and the one in Israel. If the peace movement in this country is serious about reducing the danger of nuclear war it must realize that unconditional U.S. support of Israel's military actions is increasing that danger at least as much as the construction of the Trident missile system. If we are serious about peace we must help create the will for the U.S. to play a more positive role in the Middle East.
A necessary first step for the U.S. to contribute to peace is for it to stop acting as the arms merchant to the region. We are supplying an arms race on both sides that has made the Middle East the most heavily armed area per capita in the world. The U.S. must stop arming all the parties to the Middle East conflict, Israel as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.
We must do all we can to encourage a peace process that brings the PLO and Israel into negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Eventually those negotiations will also have to settle the question of compensation or repatriation for the Palestinian refugees from pre-1967 Israel. Only such a basis of justice can conceivably lead to peace, because the peace must be between equals. The Palestinians must have their national identity affirmed by a state of their own, and the Israelis must have their national existence affirmed by that new state of Palestine's willingness to live at peace with them.
Finally, if peace is to be more than a word it must mean more than a ceasefire or even a satisfactory political formula. It must also mean a spirit of reconciliation, a desire for justice, and a compassion that allows each party to see the world through its enemy's eyes. But at present even a lasting ceasefire would require nothing short of a miracle, and a true peace that takes root in the heart is in the realm of dreams. But fortunately the Middle East is a part of the world where miracles have been known to happen. It is also the place where the vision was born of the day when swords are turned to plowshares and people will sit each under their own vine and fig tree, and none will make them afraid.
Danny Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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