Beware of Small States

The Catastrophe is what, quite simply, the Palestinians have ever afterwards called their dispossession and dispersal before and during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Hailing the new-born Jewish state which arose in their place, Weizmann called it a ‘miraculous clearing of the land; a miraculous simplification of Israel’s task’.¹ In fact, it could hardly have been more premeditated, being nothing less, for Ilan Pappe, than ‘the final act in a plot written in 1880’.² And in his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Pule.rtine,³ this most unflinching of Israel’s ‘new historians’ strips away the last, tattered remnants of all the myths which Israelis have sedulously cultivated about their ‘War of Independence’, from the earliest and most implausible of them - that the Palestinians fled the country on the orders of their leaders - to the latest and least implausible - which was actually endorsed by the first of the ‘new historians’ himself⁴ — that their flight was the unplanned consequence of war. In fact, Pappe says, it was the other way round; the original objective was the removal of the Palestinians, and ‘the war was the consequence, the means, to carry it out’.⁵

It was during the Great Rebellion that Zionist officials had begun work on converting the theoretical schemes of their predecessors into concrete plans of action. ‘The only way’, said the most important of these, Joseph Weitz, in charge of colonization and settlement, ‘is to cut and eradicate [the Arabs] from the roots; not a single village or a single tribe must be left.’⁶ Under Weitz’s auspices, and with ‘ant-like’ thoroughness, staff of the Jewish Agency went about their meticulous preparations for the ethnic cleansing of urban and rural Palestine.⁷ They secretly compiled data on just about everything - and more - that anyone could possibly want to know about every town and village in the country. In addition to maps, photographs, names and ages of everyone between sixteen and fifty, sociopolitical composition, best means of attack, they drew up an ‘index of hostility’ towards Zionism, and, in this connection, lists of ‘suspects’ or ‘wanted’ persons. Masquerading in front of the villagers as mere casual visitors, they had accomplished much of this research by exploiting the traditional codes of Arab hospitality.

With Weitz’s mission all but complete, his chief, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv, was able to say that all he needed was ‘the opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war’.⁸ That came in the shape of the Second World War and the all-surpassing atrocity, the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate an entire people, that accompanied it. Some six million Jews died in local, Nazi or Nazi-instigated massacres, or in the concentration camps and gas chambers to which they were transported from every European country - from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic to the Volga - that had fallen under Nazi conquest or control. Ben-Gurion could not possibly have imagined the price his people were to pay for this opportunity, this emergence of a combination of local and international conditions, political, diplomatic and military, that now strongly favoured his cause. For one thing, in response to the Hitlerian genocide, climax of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Europe was now ‘prepared to compensate the Jewish people for the Holocaust... with a state in Palestine’.⁹ For another, the Zionists were imbued with a whole new, overwhelming sense of the righteousness of their enterprise and determination that it would triumph. Holocaust survivors enlisted in the Jewish militias which were soon to ensure that it did.

The only real obstacle now left in their path was the imperial Britain to which they owed so much. The British Labour Party had always been pro-Zionist, even to the point of formally supporting ‘transfer’ for the Palestinians.¹⁰ But, with the responsibilities of office, the post-war Labour government, notably its foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, made an Archimedean discovery: the Balfour Declaration and Zionist interpretations of it were, and always had been, utterly incompatible with the Palestinian-dominated realities on the ground. On the strength of that discovery, Bevin was struggling to achieve as impartial, as democratic a solution as this whole, wretched, British-created mess would allow, to meet the wishes and the interests of the people actually living in Palestine, not just of those whom the Zionist leaders desired to bring there, and to bequeath an independent state that was neither Jewish nor Arab, but a marriage, in conditions of mutual respect and equality, of both. It was a solution to which, once more, the Zionists, with their very different plans, took the most furious exception. So the terror and the violence which they were preparing to use against the Palestinians they first directed against the British, with bombs, bullets and sabotage. Eighty-eight people, Jews and Arabs as well as British, died in the blowing up of their military and civilian headquarters in Palestine. Unable and unwilling, in the wake of the Holocaust, to tackle the Jewish rebellion with anything like the harshness they had the Arab one in the 1930s, war-weary and at their diplomatic wits’ end, the British duly announced that they had had enough. In November 1947, the United Nations, in whose lap they had dumped their problem, called, in a non-binding General Assembly recommendation, for the creation, within a partitioned Palestine, of a Jewish state alongside an Arab one.

Ethnic cleansing operations, conducted under cover of the collapse of law and order which, despite the continued British presence, the UN recommendation had provoked, began immediately. Then, in March 1948, Ben-Gurion activated the master plan, Plan Dalet, for the Palestinians’ ‘systematic and total expulsion’ from their homeland.¹¹ Every Hagana commander received a list of villages and neighbourhoods in his zone and precise operational instructions about how and when to attack, occupy and destroy them, and evict their inhabitants.¹² Much of the plan had already been carried out by 15 May, when the British pulled out, and the Arab armies began to move in, in their futile, fore-doomed bid to check it.

The ‘large chunk of Palestine’ to which - in Ben-Gurion’s words - the plan was to apply was, in fact, precisely that 78 per cent of the country, instead of the mere 56 per cent allotted to it by the UN, on which the Israeli state eventually arose.¹³ That included most of the Galilee region, adjoining Lebanon, which the UN had assigned to the Arab state. Here, the Palestinians - and some Lebanese too — learned, more systematically than anywhere else, to what new, brutal and far-reaching purposes those ‘punitive missions’, first taught by Orde Wingate, would be put in the hands of the Zionist militia shortly to become the army of the new-born state. For up here, thanks in part to the (pathetically inadequate) arms they managed to acquire from Lebanon and the (pathetically ineffectual) presence of the volunteer, non-state Arab Liberation Army, Palestinian resistance was generally stronger, if ultimately unavailing, than anywhere else. Stronger, in consequence, were the characteristic modes of Zionist attack: exemplary terror, preliminary siege and ‘softening up’ by aerial and artillery bombardment, psychological warfare, expulsions at gunpoint, collective executions of ‘wanted’ men in village after village - and outright massacres. Of these, that of Deir Yassin, on the edge of Jerusalem, was to become the most infamous of the whole, six-month ethnic cleansing campaign. It was carried out by the underground Irgun organization; but it was the very official Hagana, supposedly committed to ‘purity of arms’, which carried out the bulk of more than thirty other, Deir Yassin-type mass killings. A goodly portion of them took place in Galilee — and even in Lebanon too. For there, in Operation Hiram, their last great, cleansing sweep, the Zionists, spilling across the frontier, had captured thirteen villages. In one of them, Houle, they assembled residents in two houses, then blew these up over their heads, killing eighty; in another, Saliha, ninety-four people, packed into a single abode, perished similarly.¹⁴

But, in retrospect, it can be said that the principal aggression, or at least the most enduring and fateful in its consequences, which the Zionists - now of course Israelis - carried out against Lebanon was to push the refugees they had created across its border. Lebanon was in any case the place to which, being closest, the Galilean villagers had been bound to turn for ultimate, if deeply reluctant, refuge after the kind of ordeal, repeated a hundred-fold, which Muhammad Hassan Furhan and Abdul Raman Furhan, from the village of Majd el Kurum, recounted to a researcher twenty-five years later:

We knew they [the Arab Liberation Army] were not coming back ... A few villagers and I went to see Officer Turki, commander of the ALA in the village, to find out the real reason for their retreat. Speaking to the villagers outside the mukhtar’s house, he told us that he had been informed by the ALA High Command that the Jews had occupied most of the Upper Galilee and he was ordered to retreat to Lebanon before the Jews blocked all the roads ... He concluded, saying that those were the orders of our Arab leaders and not his ... As he departed, he advised all our young men and women to leave the village, while the elderly people stayed and carried white flags to avoid a Jewish attack... We knew we would be killed if caught with our arms ... We did not want to take any risks and decided to leave to Lebanon while we still had the chance. About 100 to 120 families left that night... The roads were filled with people fleeing to Lebanon. The villagers we left behind on our way were worried. They said: ‘you have a head start, but our turn is next... we will catch up with you later.’

Umm Abd al-Qiblawi was among the villagers who resolved to stay behind:

During the morning of October 30, a few villagers decided to carry white flags and then meet the Jews west of the village. They were to tell the Jewish soldiers that the villagers had gotten rid of the ALA and that the village was safe and prepared to surrender. We were surprised when suddenly another Jewish force approached the village from the east. The Jews joined up at the village and soon after ordered us to assemble ... in the centre of the village. Jewish soldiers picked twelve of our men at random, blindfolded them, and shot them in front of us. I kept praying that my husband would not return to the village. One night, I joined about 60 families who had decided to leave to Lebanon where I met my husband ... The Jews did not stop us from leaving ...¹⁵

Indeed, from the armistice on, Israel’s relationship with Lebanon, so fertile in pre-state days, was to turn into the most static, the most uneventful, of its relationships with any of its neighbours in its first two decades of statehood. It was not that Ben-Gurion had suddenly lost interest in it. On the contrary, he clearly believed that the war, and Israel’s prowess in it, opened up new and grander opportunities there. The havoc he wished upon its Arab co-‘aggressors’, he did not wish on it, or at least not its Christian citizens. ‘We will break Transjordan,’ he had told his cabinet in the exultation of early military triumphs, ‘bomb Amman and destroy its army; then Syria falls; and if Egypt continues to fight, we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they [the Egyptians, the Arabs and Assyrians] did to our forefathers during Biblical times.’¹⁷ As for Lebanon, however, ‘We will establish a Christian state, whose southern border will be the Litani river.’ And in three places in his wartime diaries he recorded his conviction that such a state - and a stronger one the better - would be a logical outcome of the conflict. In years to come he repeatedly raised the idea of a ‘minority alliance’ — yet never, in the end, did he seriously try to make it operational.¹⁸

Nor was there a lack of interest from the Maronites, or at least the ‘pro-Zionists’ among them. These were pleased with the emergence of the Jewish state. Its borders were now sealed, all dealings with it strictly forbidden by pan-Arab fiat. But the ‘pro-Zionists’ kept up their contacts of the pre-war era, apparently believing, like Ben-Gurion, that, with Jewish statehood, grander opportunities now awaited them too. In their meetings with Israeli foreign ministry officials, Emile Eddé and a representative of Pierre Gemayel’s right-wing Phalange party, now emerging as a pole of opposition to the ‘Arabist’ regime of Bishara al-Khouri, spoke of staging a Christian ‘rebellion’ in Beirut; Israel should help it, among other things by linking up with the rebels through an invasion of the south. However, the Israeli foreign ministry, where non-interventionist thinking was dominant, felt that, even if the Maronites were psychologically ready for such a drastic action, in practical terms they definitely were not. And, apparently without much dissent from the interventionist camp, which nonetheless did give consideration to the idea, it was the foreign ministry’s view that prevailed.¹⁹

What saved Lebanon from the Israelis’ attentions was that, in the early years of statehood, they turned them elsewhere, to their other, larger neighbours, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It was to these that, in their ‘Arab policy’, they first applied the new means that statehood brought with it. A reason why, in pre-state days, they had devoted so much attention to the small, sectarian state of Lebanon was not merely because, by its very nature, it was so promising an arena for external intervention, but because it was the only country where they could have achieved anything at all by the means then available to them - essentially the non-violent, political and diplomatic. But now, with statehood, they had force, and vastly superior force, at their disposal too. The leap which that represented, though huge, had always been foreseen. Zionism, it had always been understood, would be advanced by this means above all others. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, had first expounded that; his disciples, Jabotinsky on the right, Ben-Gurion on the left, had enlarged upon it. Now, with the ‘War of Independence’, and that ancient dream, statehood itself, fulfilled, force had just furnished the most spectacular demonstration of its efficacy. Never Again - the slogan that, in the wake of the Holocaust, embodied what the new-born state perhaps above all reckoned to stand for — played its part as well: never again, that is to say, would Jews go like lambs to the slaughter.

The Zionists-as-Israelis were resolved from the outset to make full use of their new asset. For it almost goes without saying that, in the conflict between the interventionist and non-interventionist schools of thought, the interventionists now secured the upper hand. With their ascendancy came that of the institutions where force would find its natural home: the army and the security and intelligence services. Force became the instinctive, automatic remedy for every problem, more effective than diplomacy, negotiation or the mediation of outsiders, and ‘security’ became the great shibboleth in whose name it was applied. It was a state of mind perhaps best summed up in Ben-Gurion’s celebrated dictum that the business of the foreign ministry was not to make foreign policy but to explain the policy of the defence ministry to the rest of the world.²⁰ Its leading lights were Ben-Gurion himself, famous generals such as Moshe Dayan, and - already a rising star — the most reckless, ruthless and ambitious interventionist of them all, Ariel Sharon. Their leading opponent was Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister; his never-ending conflict with them was symptomatic of the fundamental choice that faced the new-born state, the choice, as he himself once put it, between making itself ‘a state of law’ or ‘a state of piracy’.²¹ In his posthumously published diaries, he lamented the moral corruption that reliance on force engendered, and the subordination of ‘purity of arms’ to a policy of ’revenge’ elevated into a ‘sacred principle’ of state. Yet even he, while opposing these things, did not oppose them enough. For in the end - lamented Livia Rokach, the translator of his diaries - ‘his unflagging Zionist faith’ meant that ‘he was as fascinated as he was repelled by the strategy, as envious of its immediate success as he was worried over its longer range consequences ... for Zionism and Israel.’²² The chief of these consequences was that with brief interludes - the first of them being his own, much-contested two-year premiership - the interventionist school became the more or less permanently dominant one, that a nation born by the sword was forever going to live by it.

In those early years, however alluring the potentialities it might have offered the interventionists, Lebanon did not pose a serious, immediate challenge or threat. In their eyes, Egypt, Syria and Jordan did. The armistice agreements had helped set off a chain of violent upheaval in the Arab world. New revolutionary movements were sweeping the region and, in some places, seizing power. The Catastrophe fuelled them. For the revolutionaries attributed the Arab defeat to the rottenness of the old order — the monarchies, the regimes of the beys and the pashas, the great landowners and feudalists, selfish, frivolous, reactionary, subservient to the Western creators of Israel. The revolutionaries came in various guises, but above all they were pan-Arabist, secular nationalists, the offspring - two or three generations on - of the Arab Awakening to which Lebanese Christians had contributed much. By the end of the Second World War, most Arab countries had achieved at least a formal independence, but they still laboured under various forms of neo-colonial influence. The new revolutionary regimes were bent on throwing these off, adopting truly independent foreign policies, forging new relationships with whomsoever they pleased, the Soviet Union or other emergent Third World nations like themselves, striving to unify the Arab ‘nation’ that Sykes-Picot had sundered, and turning to radical, socialist or even communist agendas for the reform and modernization of their societies. And they were to make of Palestine the pan-Arab cause par excellence.

Among Israel’s neighbours, Syria and Egypt became members of this new order. Syria had always been the so-called ‘beating heart’ of pan-Arabism, but Egypt was now set to become its ‘great power’. In 1952 President Nasser and his Free Officers had overthrown King Farouk and the monarchy. At first the Israelis had entertained the hope that, under them, Egypt - which, with its sense of separate identity reaching back to Pharaonic antiquity, was less beguiled by pan-Arabism than other Arab states - would be the first to make peace with them. Just as, in an earlier generation, Weizmann had sought a deal with Amir Faisal as the most representative of Arabs, so now they had similar expectations of Nasser, not perhaps as the most representative of them, but the most powerful. And, to begin with, in his secret dealings with Israel, Nasser was indeed very reasonable and restrained.²³ These expectations were quickly dashed, however. Pan-Arabism was ‘a role wandering aimlessly about in search of an actor to play it’.²⁴ Thus had Nasser, the disgruntled officer who had fought and been wounded in Palestine, mused to himself in the wake of Egypt’s wretched performance and defeat. It was not very long before he himself became that actor, indeed - very much more than that - the great Arab champion, the idol of the masses from the Atlantic to the Gulf. And nothing had more helped him do it than - with all their bluster and belligerence - Ben-Gurion and the interventionists themselves.

The other neighbour, Jordan (formerly Transjordan), was not part of this revolutionary new order. Its problem lay in the fact that it was situated, geopolitically, in the very cockpit of the regional turbulence which the Arab-Israeli conflict, in its new dimensions, was now to engender. Its regime, indeed its very existence as a state, was threatened by both Arabs and Israelis. For the new revolutionaries, the Hashemite monarchy was precisely the kind of ‘imperialist lackey’ they abhorred, and all the more so because it had gone to war less to save Palestine for the Palestinians than to expand its own territory at their expense. Its British-trained and British-officered army was the best in the Arab world, and Ben-Gurion had been reluctant to take it on. So, instead, he had done a secret deal with King Abdullah, who was to annex the West Bank, some 22 per cent of Palestine, to his original Transjordanian domain as his reward for doing nothing to prevent Ben-Gurion from securing the other 78 per cent which he wanted for the Jewish state. But Israel still coveted that missing 22 per cent, and it could be pretty sure that one day, out of the turbulence, the opportunity would arise to get it.

There were two principal, and intimately related, purposes to which, in the interventionists’ hands, force would be put. The first was the territorial expansion of the new-born state. So far, said Ben-Gurion, this had been set up in only ‘a portion of the Land of Israel’; and ‘to maintain the status quo will not do’.²⁵ After all, it had long been his conviction that if Zion were to rise again, it would have to do so in stages; so first ‘we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state’, and then ‘we will abolish the partition of the country and ... expand to the whole Land of Israel’. And this would be achieved not by ‘moralizing and “preaching sermons on the mount” but by machine-guns, which we will need’.²⁶ For the Palestinians, of course, expansion meant more of the same: expulsion for some, or most, and expropriation, colonization, oppression and racial discrimination for others who managed to stay behind.

The precise limits of the expansion were not defined. For the right-wing Revisionists and others yet more extreme, they should have incorporated the whole of Jordan and substantial tracts of Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. For the mainstream, ruling Labour, the least they should comprise were those parts of historic Palestine which had eluded Israeli control in 1948. But wherever expansion, direct physical possession, ended, the establishing of regional hegemony began. For this was the second purpose to which force would be put. That is to say its use, not for the further ‘up-building’ of the Jewish state itself, but for its defence through attacking, fighting, intimidating, dominating and deterring all those Arabs beyond the borders who might threaten or destroy it from without. At the core of Ben-Gurion’s philosophy lay the conviction that the Arabs were quite simply incapable of accepting peaceful co-existence with the intruder in their midst; and he was ready for decades of their hostility until Israel’s superior strength, and vigorous and repeated demonstrations of it, finally persuaded them that they had no choice but to do so. Forever spurned by its neighbours, Israel was to be a beleaguered state, but, for that very reason, it had to be an invincible one too. It was the doctrine of the Iron Wall, first applied to the Palestinians, now extended to the entire Arab world.²⁷

By contrast, to achieve virtue, all the Israelis had to do was to stand still, to hold what they had. They called their army the Israel Defence Forces and all its actions were ostensibly defensive in nature. The West in general exhibited very little scepticism about this new Israeli narrative, least of all the United States. There, heavily influenced - where they were not frankly suborned - by the increasingly powerful Jewish lobby, press and politicians strongly supported - where they did not openly idolize - an Israel which, as well as supposedly battling valiantly for its young life, very quickly acquired another inestimable merit in their eyes. The state that would never even have been born without the systematic, pre-state sabotage of democracy and self-determination for the people it supplanted - almost overnight this self-same state earned the title it so profitably boasts till this day: ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’.²⁹

The official Israeli narrative was not merely a deformation of reality, it was, as the ‘new historians’ discovered, so very far removed from it that one of them, Avi Shlaim, professed himself ‘astonished’ at the disparity:

I believed in Israel’s purity of arms ... that Israel was the victim ... I knew that in every country there’s a gap between rhetoric and practice, but I don’t know of any country where the gap is as great as in Israel... Golda Meir used to say that she was willing to travel anywhere in the world to make peace. But these were not truthful words. In the archive ... I found that all the Arab leaders were practical people, people who wanted peace.³⁰

The files of the Israeli foreign ministry burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948.³¹

By far the boldest of these feelers came - it seems amazing now - from Syria. This most Arab of Arab countries has always appeared to be the most patriotically intransigent on Palestine’s behalf. Yet at the time, in the person of General Husni Zaim, it had a very conciliatory ruler indeed. His motives might not have been the purest, but there is no doubt about the facts: nearly thirty years, and three Arab-Israeli wars, before President Sadat made his historic pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then concluded the first, seminal peace agreement between Israel and an Arab country, Zaim was offering to meet Ben-Gurion face to face, and, as part of a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement, permanently to settle 300,000 refugees in the fertile Jazira plain - enough, that is, to absorb not merely the 100,000 who, in their flight from Palestine, had fetched up in Syria itself, but all of Lebanon‘s, and a further 100,000 from anywhere else as well. But Ben-Gurion spurned this extraordinary offer, and the overtures of other Arab countries too, in accordance with the celebrated and quintessentially hard-line Zionist grounds of ein brera — of ‘no choice’. No choice, that is to say, because there was allegedly ‘no one to talk to’, no Arab leader willing even to consider a peaceful settlement. This was obduracy that quite ‘dumbfounded’ the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson.³²

It was not that Ben-Gurion did not want peace. That was ever the ultimate goal. It was just that, for the foreseeable future, he considered that there was more to be gained without it. Peace now would have shackled Zionism, arrested its growth, both territorially and in other ways, long before it had acquired the stature and the strength it would need to hold its own, come what may, in a world made hostile ... by no one more than Ben-Gurion himself. Peace with Syria would inter alia have left Israel without control over most of its water resources; with Jordan, it would forever have saddled it with ‘ridiculous borders’ that deprived it of the rest of Palestine and - a strategist’s nightmare - militarily imperilled it;³³ with Egypt, it would have thwarted the expansionist designs it had on that front too. And, in addition, Ben-Gurion wanted to establish Israel’s incontestable strategic and military dominance over all three countries. Another war, the ‘second round’ which was the incessant - but infinitely more serious - talk of Israelis too, was the way to get it.

This could have come, depending on opportunity, against any one - or more - of the three. And, by 1953, it had been more or less determined which that one would be. ‘How wonderful it would be if the Egyptians started an offensive which we could defeat and follow with an invasion of that [Sinai] desert.’ Thus, in October of that year, did the first Israeli president, Ben Zvi, give succinct utterance to the yearnings of the interventionists - and the method by which they would fulfil them.³⁴ This was to profit from the endless cycle of violence, the so-called ‘border wars’, already under way. Since 1948, Palestinian refugees, rotting and resentful in squalid camps that had sprung up all around the new-born state, had been sneaking across its frontiers; at first it had been simply, and typically, to retrieve some possessions from their homes or fields; but later, though even then on a very small scale, they came with hostile intent - to attack and sometimes kill the settlers who had usurped them. The cross-border raids the Israelis mounted in response - if, that is, they could be said to have had any credible justification at all, which they often did not - were monstrously disproportionate. They were expressly designed by Ariel Sharon, commander of the special forces - Unit 101 — that carried them out, ‘to kill as many civilians as possible’. So wilfully murderous were they, in fact, that on one occasion even his own, highly indoctrinated and anything but squeamish men were moved to protest the slaughter of women in a Gaza refugee camp; what business was it of theirs, he retorted, to concern themselves with these ‘whores of the Arab infiltrators?’³⁵ The reprisals were primarily about ‘revenge, punishment and deterrence’.³⁶ But in their other, their war-provoking strategic purpose, they were, as General Dayan, their most influential advocate, put it, the very ‘elixir of life for us’.³⁷

To begin with at least, most of the Palestinian ‘infiltrations’ came from Jordanian territory, because, for geographical and other reasons, they were the more tempting, and the more easily carried out, from there than from anywhere else. But against whichever of Israel’s neighbours Ben-Gurion and his interventionists unleashed the battle-hungry Sharon, it was always Egypt, and the goading of it down the road to war, that they had primarily in mind.³⁸ Their critical breakthrough came in February 1955, when, in a surprise attack on an Egyptian position in Gaza, they slaughtered thirty-nine soldiers ‘in their beds’.³⁹ Nasser, who had hitherto restrained Palestinian ‘infiltrations’ from Gaza, now allowed them free rein. At the same time, responding to his commanders’ clamour for weapons, he negotiated the famous Czech arms deal, a landmark in the Soviet Union’s drive to undermine Western influence in the Middle East. It was just what Ben-Gurion wanted; the ‘hosts of Amalek’ were re-arming in Egypt, he said, and the ‘grave and dangerous’ arms deal had been concluded for ‘one reason and one reason only — to destroy the state and people of Israel’; in the name of pan-Arabism, Nasser was bent on establishing an Arab empire, eliminating all Western influence from it, and turning Egypt into a forward base for Soviet power.⁴⁰ Ben-Gurion resolved to topple him. It was, he proclaimed, ‘a mitzvah [sacred duty] to do so... Who [was] he anyway, this Shmasser-Nasser?’⁴¹ Just as he had considered Egypt, as the ‘great power’ of the Arab world, to be the only neighbour really worth making peace with when once it had seemed so potentially friendly, so he resolved to make war on it now that he had caused it to become so unfriendly.

Thereafter, said an Israeli military history of the period, it was only a short step from the ‘hidden war’ of border skirmishing to the ‘open war’ of October 1956.⁴² But, in the event, the full-scale Israeli invasion of Egypt, known to history as the ‘Suez War’, did not come about in response to any Egyptian ‘offensive’ of the Israeli president’s wishing, let alone any evidence - for there was none - that Egypt was bent on an all-out war to destroy the Jewish state.⁴³ It came about, unprovoked, when Britain and France, angered by Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, another blow to their fraying, neo-colonial position in the Middle East, decided that they too must attack Egypt and overthrow its obstreperous, upstart ruler. Israel was secretly invited to start a war on Egypt that would give them the pretext to intervene themselves. Israel duly obliged, and, in a week-long Blitzkrieg, seized the whole of the Sinai Peninsula.

The objectives of Ben-Gurion and his interventionists were both expansionist and hegemonic. They wanted to keep Gaza, Sinai and its newly discovered oilfields,⁴⁴ or, failing that, Sharm al-Sheikh and the Straits of Tiran linked by a land corridor to Israel. As for the hegemony, the grand design which Ben-Gurion had in mind was indeed quite as ‘fantastic’ as he himself conceded it to be - nothing less than a thorough-going re-arrangement of the whole Middle East, Sykes-Picot fashion, with Israel in the role of regional overlord on the West’s behalf.⁴⁵ On the expansionist front, he did secure the opening of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and, on the hegemonic one, he did establish Israel as the pre-eminent military power of the region; and that, for a nation forever doomed to put its trust in force, was very important. But of his grand design - nothing.

It was above all President Eisenhower who frustrated him. Then, as now, Israel could command the automatic support, sympathy or extravagant applause of the ‘friends of Israel’ in the United States. On this occasion Senator Jacob Javits rushed to Israel to declare that ‘the American people fully understand the self-defense motives’ that lay behind the invasion of Sinai, while Rabbi Louis Newman of New York said that ‘America must aid, not hurt, the three democracies of Britain, France and Israel.’⁴⁶ But Israel held no special charm for Eisenhower, who had previously warned its ambassador to Washington that his administration would do everything in its power to ‘prevent the settlement of international issues by force’, and that if he thought that Jewish sympathy’ for Israel ‘would have any influence on [him]’, he ‘should disabuse his mind about it’. In those days, the American commitment to the well-being and survival of Israel was offset by the conviction that too close an identification with it, and with its treatment of Palestinians and Arabs, would undermine all America’s efforts to keep the strategically vital Middle East on the Western side in the struggle against Soviet communism. Far from regarding it as a strategic asset, his secretary of state, Foster Dulles, once confided that it was a ‘millstone round our necks’.⁴⁷ Eisenhower enforced Israel’s humiliating, all but unconditional withdrawal. But it was the last time any American president was to take so resolute, so moral a stand, or anything approaching it, against Israel and ‘the Lobby’. That was a deficiency from which, in the fullness of time, Lebanon was to suffer more painfully than any other Arab state. Meanwhile, however, it was spared.

But Lebanon was never out of Ben-Gurion and the interventionists’ thoughts. Indeed, in principle at least, they had greater ambitions for Lebanon than they did for anywhere else. But, in the event, whatever form these ambitions took, they were to remain in the realm of theory, of ‘ideas to be played around’ with.⁴⁸ A number of times they looked like going into effect, but in the end they did not. That was partly because Ben-Gurion, the supreme pragmatist, believed that, in the resort to force, opportunity was all, or at least highly desirable. And in his judgement what often promised to become a configuration of sufficiently favourable circumstances never quite did so. It was also because Lebanon was one place where Sharett and the non-interventionists did manage to stay the interventionists’ hand. That was usually because of the sheer scale, audacity and illegality of what they had in mind; they were made to see that they just couldn’t get away with it. There was a paradox here as well. It was the Maronites who so tempted them to act - yet simultaneously deterred them. It was the ‘pro-Zionist’ Maronites out of whom they might have fashioned their instrument for turning multi-sectarian Lebanon into that ‘Christian state’, and Israel’s ‘natural ally’, of their dreams. But it was the ‘Arabist’ Maronites who would never let them do it. And the ‘Arabists’ now held power. And what they did with power, in the spirit of the National Pact, was to strike all the right pan-Arab attitudes that they possibly could, yet never quite aggressively or provocatively enough to give Israel the pretext to do to Lebanon - through ‘border wars’ and the ‘open wars’ to which they led - what it was doing to Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

From the outset, the Lebanese authorities opposed all ‘infiltration’ across their southern frontier, and set up an apparatus for the surveillance of it. Wherever they could without antagonizing the Muslim half of the population, they transferred refugees who had fetched up near the border northwards to camps in Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. By 1952 infiltration was almost non-existent. It did revive a little in 1953 when the Mufti sponsored a bout of trans-frontier terrorism from Lebanon at the same time as he was doing so, on a larger scale, from Jordan; a guerilla band calling itself the Servants of the Merciful suddenly came into being, killed two Israeli settlers in what was once the village of Saffuriya, from which all the band’s members had been driven in 1948 — and just as suddenly disappeared. In 1955, in response to Israel’s bloody Gaza ambush, it was President Nasser’s turn to lay on some fedayeen incursions from Lebanon as well as from Gaza. Whereupon, the Lebanese army stepped up its border controls, declaring a ten-kilometre-deep ‘security zone’ and granting ‘freedom of fire’ to troops encountering infiltrators inside it. As a result, throughout this period, and to the annoyance of the interventionists, the Lebanese frontier was the only one that witnessed no large-scale Israeli retaliatory attacks.⁴⁹

It was hardly an accident, therefore, that when their opportunity arose to intervene by force in Syria, the interventionists automatically thought of doing the same - and more - in Lebanon too. In early 1954, as the pro-Egyptian regime of Colonel Adib Shishakli tottered on the point of collapse, the region was agog with expectations that Iraq would send its army across the Syrian frontier in a bid to install a pro-Iraqi regime in its place. This was enough, for a while at least, for Ben-Gurion and his faithful lieutenant, Moshe Dayan, then plotting war on Egypt, to ‘concentrate on action against Syria’ instead.⁵⁰ The moment Iraq went in, urged Dayan, Israel should ‘advance [into Syria] and realize a series of faits accomplis’. Another ardent interventionist, Pinhas Lavon, told a deeply sceptical Sharett, then prime minister, that now was ‘the time to move forward and occupy Syrian border positions beyond the demilitarized zones ... Syria is disintegrating. A state with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. This is a historic opportunity; we shouldn’t miss it.‘⁵¹ All this was being urged against a neighbour which, for all its nationalist pretensions, had actually given Israel hardly more trouble, across its frontiers, than had diminutive, inoffensive Lebanon; in fact, if there had been trouble it had almost always been of Israel’s making. When Shishakli finally fell, he did so without any interference from Iraq; yet Lavon asserted that it added up to ‘a typical Iraqi action’ anyway, and that Israel should proceed regardless.⁵² An ‘electrified’ Ben-Gurion agreed with him - then turned to his favourite, Lebanese obsession. The manner in which he did so was striking in its disregard for international law or morality. If, when making their case for action against Syria, he and his interventionists would don at least a fig leaf of ‘security’ or ‘defence’ justifications, where Lebanon was concerned, he didn’t bother even with that.⁵³ Sharett recorded in his diary:

This is the time, [Ben-Gurion] said, to push Lebanon, that is, the Maronites in that country, to proclaim a Christian state. I said that this was nonsense. The Maronites are divided. The partisans of Christian separatism are weak and will dare do nothing. A Christian Lebanon would mean their giving up Tyre, Tripoli, the Beqa’a. There is no force that could bring Lebanon back to its pre-World War I dimensions ... Ben-Gurion reacted furiously. He began to enumerate the historical justifications for a restricted Christian [i.e. Christian only] Lebanon. If such a development were to take place, the Christian Powers would not dare oppose it. I claimed that there was no factor ready to create such a situation, and that if we were to push and encourage it on our own we would get ourselves into an adventure that [would] place shame on us. Here came a wave of insults regarding my lack of daring and my narrow-mindedness ... I got tired of struggling against a whirlwind.⁵⁴

The next day Sharett received a letter from Ben-Gurion in his Negev retreat:

It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab League ... [The Christians] are a majority in historical Lebanon and this majority has a tradition and a culture different from those other components of the Arab League ... The creation of a Christian state is therefore a natural act; it has historical roots and will find support in wide circles in the Christian world, both Catholic and Protestant. In normal times this would be impossible. First and foremost because of the lack of initiative and courage of the Christians. But at times of confusion, or revolution or civil war, things take on another aspect, and even the weak declares himself to be a hero. It seems to me that this is the central duty ... of our foreign policy. We must act in all possible ways to bring about a radical change in Lebanon ... this is an historic opportunity. Missing it will be unpardonable.⁵⁵

On this occasion Sharett prevailed: there was no attack on Lebanon, and none, at least for a while, on Syria. But the idea of one would not go away. In May of the following year, 1955, Ben-Gurion once again demanded that something be done about Lebanon. And once again it was trouble inside Syria and the possibility of an Iraqi invasion that was to furnish the pretext. Dayan leapt to his support and, going beyond a mere general advocacy of intervention as such, outlined a plan by which it should actually be carried out:

According to him, the only thing that’s necessary is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff [Dayan] we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad, but under the circumstances the government of Iraq will do our will and will occupy Syria.⁵⁶

Once again the opportunity never arose. But then, after repeatedly looking northward, to Iraq and Syria, for at least a semblance of the casus belli Israel required to intervene in Lebanon, only to be repeatedly frustrated, Ben-Gurion finally found it elsewhere - in the maturing of his plans to wage war on Egypt, and, above all, in the undreamt-of bonus of waging it in partnership with Western Europe’s two leading military powers. For even via an offensive on Israel’s southern front, Lebanon, on its northern one, was still to be a key component, the linchpin even, of his scheme for the geopolitical restructuring of the whole region. It could hardly have been otherwise, given his Lebanese obsession, as well as the fact that the interventionists had actually been putting it about - to the Lebanese themselves and, through them, to the Americans, British and French - that ‘an attack on Lebanon’, rather than on Syria, Jordan or Egypt, ‘[offered] chances of the greatest results’.⁵⁷

It had been only a week before his Sinai Blitzkrieg that he laid his grand design before the conference which, in the words of ‘new historian’ Avi Shlaim, ‘hatched not just the most famous but also the best-documented war plot in modern history’.⁵⁸ That took place in a private villa in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, where, in the deepest secrecy, Ben-Gurion, Dayan and other members of his delegation had closeted themselves for two days with their co-conspirators, led by French prime minister Guy Mollet and British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd. His ‘general plan’, he said, was to ‘oust Nasser’ and ‘partition’ Jordan, this being a country which, he considered, had ‘no right to exist’. Its eastern part (Transjordan) would go to Iraq ‘so that it [would] make peace with Israel’, thereby enabling the refugees to settle there with the aid of American money. Its territories west of the Jordan river would be ‘annexed to Israel as an autonomous region’. As for Lebanon, its borders would be ‘reduced’ and it would ‘become a Christian state’; its predominantly Muslim territories would go ‘part to Syria and part — as far as the Litani - to us’.⁵⁹ To his somewhat astonished or embarrassed listeners, he conceded that his plan might indeed, at first hearing, seem ‘fantastic’; but, to his diary, he confided that he was in deadly earnest. With the destruction of the Nasser regime, he believed, the nationalist movement whose leadership it had seized would suffer body blows from one end of the Arab world to the other, and in the power struggle between it and all those rival forces in the region - be they secular-modernist, traditionalist, pro-Western, ethnic or sectarian - the nationalists’ enemies would regain the upper hand. In these conditions his plan, or something like it, would automatically fulfil itself.

In the loyalist camp, Christians, mainly Maronites, and a few dissident Muslims and Druzes, rallied to the defence of ‘their’ Lebanon against the pan-Arab suzerainty, or even outright take-over, which they believed Nasser had in store for it. Chamoun’s Maronite rivals, the right-wing Phalangists, fielded a militia of their own.⁶² Iraq and Jordan responded to Chamoun’s request for troops, who made their way to Lebanon across Israeli territory. The foreign minister, Charles Malik, a former ‘Arabist’ too, openly asserted that his government needed 7,000 men to seal off its porous border (with Syria), and that it had ‘no objection to anybody in any way sealing that border’ on its behalf.⁶³ Israel hastened to become that ‘anybody’, intercepting a group of infiltrators and supplying arms and artillery support to loyalist forces confronting rebels in the south. It was no less anxious than the United States to keep Lebanon in ‘the free world’. Chastened by Suez, Israel’s interventionists were still in cautious mode; but they made it known that if, in extremis, the US let ‘Christian Lebanon’ down, they themselves would not.

By the summer of 1958, after fighting that had cost some 2,500 lives, government authority was basically reduced to the old ‘Mount Lebanon’ of Ottoman times plus the eastern, Christian side of Beirut. The rest of the country was essentially under rebel control. It looked as though the Greater Lebanon the French had created in 1920 might break asunder, the ‘Mountain’ and East Beirut re-constituting themselves as a Christian mini-state and the former Syrian provinces returning whence they had come. The US, suspicious of Chamoun’s personal ambitions and unconstitutional practices, at first spurned his appeals for intervention under the aegis of the Eisenhower Doctrine. In the end, it was great events elsewhere - revolution in Iraq and the fall of its pro-Western monarchy — that spurred the Americans into action. Within hours, as British paratroopers descended on Amman, US Marines were coming ashore off Beirut, in the first such direct American military intervention in the Arab world since early in the nineteenth century, when, with the Barbary Pirates sowing terror on the high seas, the fledgling republic had built a fleet to combat them. An American trouble-shooter, Robert Murphy, shouldered the mediatory role to which a local, Lebanese ‘third force’ had proved unequal. He swiftly devised a compromise, to which the army, ultimate bulwark of national unity, was the key. Its commander, General Fuad Chehab, was of course a Maronite, but as a Maronite of the ‘Arabist’ persuasion he had made it his business, throughout the crisis, to keep the army above, and out of, the fray. He had not thereby endeared himself to many in his own community, but, as the only figure who commanded a broad acceptance on both sides, he had become the only possible candidate for the presidency. Under him, the equilibrium of the sectarian state was restored, and ‘no victor no vanquished’ became the hallowed maxim that should henceforth guide it. On the one hand, Lebanon remained a plausibly independent, essentially pro-Western, Maronite-dominated state, determined to keep itself out of any kind of conflict with Israel. On the other hand - to please the Muslims - it observed all the rites and pieties of pan-Arabism; in practice, that meant deferring so far as possible to Nasser - or to his ambassador in Beirut, of whom it used to be said that he was really his ‘high commissioner’, interfering as he did in the very minutiae of domestic politics.⁶⁴

Cohesion thus restored, Lebanon managed - just - to preserve itself unscathed by the developments that led to the next, and third, Arab-Israeli war. These were Israel’s diversion of a major part of the River Jordan for its own exclusive use, and the collective, but unsuccessful, Arab attempts to prevent that by a counter-diversion of the Jordan’s tributaries, which lay in Syrian and Jordanian territory, and its headwaters, which lay in Lebanon’s. Then it emerged intact from the war itself. Some in the Israeli leadership had actually wanted to attack Lebanon too, and then annex those southern regions, Litani river included, which the interventionists had so long coveted.⁶⁵ But once again their ambitions were thwarted: after all, what possible pretext could Israel invoke against this weakest and - thanks mainly to the Maronites it so hankered to befriend - most peaceable of its neighbours? Instead, in those six astonishing days of June 1967, Israel contented itself with destroying the armies of its three other neighbours and acquiring territories - the West Bank and Gaza which had eluded it in 1948, the whole of Sinai from which it had been forced to withdraw in 1956, and the Golan Heights - several times its own size. It was the apogee of force - and, perhaps most disconcertingly, of the world’s tolerance, indeed approval, of it. For this time, under President Lyndon Johnson, the US deemed that Israel had sufficient casus belli in Nasser’s ostensible closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping; in any case, even before the war broke out, Johnson had already rejected his predecessors’ attempts to come to terms with Arab nationalist regimes, and anti-Arab - especially anti-Nasser - sentiment pervaded Washington. As for Western, particularly American, public opinion, it was by and large literally entranced by Israel’s smashing victory, and by the Jewish people’s deliverance from a second Holocaust which it was widely perceived to have wrought.⁶⁶

Second only to Israel’s military prowess, it had been the folly and incompetence of the Arab regimes and, above all, a boastful and bellicose rhetoric unaccompanied by the intention, let alone the capacity, to live up to it, which yielded this result.⁶⁷ Coming in the wake of other reverses - chief among them the break-up of the Syrian-Egyptian union - which Nasser and the nationalist cause had suffered since they reached their high-water mark in the Lebanese settlement of nine years before, this was indeed their lowest ebb. Nasser himself called it al-Naksa, ‘the Setback’, but in reality it was another Nakba, another Catastrophe, and, in a sense, a worse one than before. For if, as the Arab nationalists contended, the struggle for Palestine was eventually to have furnished the ultimate proof of nationalism’s success, it had now become the opposite: the damning measure of its failure.

There was outright rejoicing in Kesrouan, doughtiest of Maronite provinces, not simply because Lebanon had been spared again, but because, after such a defeat, Nasser and his nationalists would surely never pose a threat to it again.⁶⁸ But the rejoicing was singularly out of place. It could not have been known at the time, of course, or even truly apprehended for years to come, but the fact was that if any one event would one day come to qualify, in retrospect, as Lebanon’s nemesis, it was surely the Six-Day War. At any rate, the adversities it was to suffer in its wake were to prove greater, and certainly more enduring, than those of any other Arab state. To be sure, Lebanon - or its true believers - managed for a while yet to sustain its faith, despite growing reasons for not doing so, in its own, felicitous exceptionality, its difference from the region of which it was nonetheless inescapably a part. And it was to be spared any involvement in yet another Middle Eastern war, the fourth, which, in October 1973, Egypt and Syria unleashed on Israel in retaliation for their defeat in the third. Yet whatever Lebanon uniquely was or reckoned itself to be - Switzerland of the Orient, meeting place of East and West, oasis of freedom and democracy, high place of culture, commerce and the good life - one thing was becoming steadily clearer: in its geopolitical self, it was definitely coming into its own as Mikhail Bakunin’s ‘small state’ of the Middle East, the battleground for other people’s wars. And it has remained so ever since. So much so, in fact, that from 1973 till this day it has (apart from Palestine itself) furnished the only militarily active front in the Arab-Israeli struggle; in other words, well over half the time - thirty-five years out of more than sixty- that struggle has so far endured since 1948. And that is not to mention what, Lebanon being the quintessential sectarian state it also is, all but inevitably came with that proxy role: its own, internal, civil war, compared with which, in duration and intensity, the brief affray of 1958 had been a mere prologue. In the fullness of time, of course, Islam - militant, political, fundamentalist Islam - was to become the region’s great new universal credo, which filled the yawning void left by the decline and disrepute of secular-modernist nationalism. And, with the coming of Hizbullah, Lebanon would, in its peculiarly Lebanese way, feel the full impact of that. But before Hizbullah came the Palestinians.

THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE PALESTINIANS

MASSACRES IN GALILEE, FLIGHT TO LEBANON

ISRAEL LEAVES LEBANON IN PEACE

ISRAEL’S BORDER WARS WITH ITS OTHER ARAB NEIGHBOURS

TERRITORIAL EXPANSION AND REGIONAL HEGEMONY THE OBJECTIVE

MAKING WAR TO MAKE PEACE

THE ROAD TO SUEZ

BEN-GURION PUSHES FOR A ‘CHRISTIAN LEBANON’

SEARCHING FOR THE CASUS BELLI THAT NEVER QUITE COMES

SUEZ TO THE RESCUE: BEN-GURION’S ‘FANTASTIC’ PLAN FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

DEBACLE AT SUEZ: ANY PLAN WOULD NOW BE NASSER’S, NOT BEN-GURION’S

MINI CIVIL WAR, 1958

LEBANON STAYS OUT OF TWO MORE ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

NASSER’S DEFEAT, MARONITES’ DELIGHT