Over thirty years have passed since the events described in this book, and more than a quarter of a century since it was first published in 1986. While a great deal has changed since then, much remains unchanged. At the same time, many of the crucial components and lessons of the Lebanese conflict—including the Israeli-Palestinian war, which for nearly fifteen years was fought primarily on Lebanese soil—seem to have been completely forgotten.
As I write these words in mid-2013, Lebanon is mercifully no longer subjected to a brutal, many-sided sectarian and proxy war. It is also no longer suffering from foreign military occupation, as it had been in 1982 and for many years thereafter. Unfortunately, the country’s fragile stability and its complex inter-sectarian balance are today being sorely tested by neighboring Syria’s descent into a hellish civil war—one that in some ways mirrors Lebanon’s own previous experiences.
Lebanon’s years of conflict, lasting from 1975 to 1990, offer many unlearned insights about the evils of sectarianism that Syrian and international actors should have taken into account in Syria over these past two years, but did not. Similar lessons were also ignored from 2003 onwards in Iraq by the American occupiers and many Iraqis. As the American occupation authorities and their Iraqi protégés re-engineered Iraq’s political system to their advantage, they willingly adopted many of the worst aspects of Lebanon’s political sectarianism. What was thus established in Iraq was a deeply flawed confessional model that is essentially based on the “divide and rule” practices of the worst era of French colonialism, a system which contributed significantly to igniting three terrible sectarian civil wars in Lebanon between 1860 and 1975. This model has deepened and exacerbated existing societal fissures between different Iraqi religious sects and ethnicities: Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, Arabs, Kurds, Turcomans, and others. Of course, this imposed model did not birth a new, unified, federal, and democratic Iraq from the rubble of decades of Ba’thist tyranny, sanguinary warfare with Iran, and devastating American wars and sanctions. It instead helped generate massacres along religious lines, ethnic cleansing, the flight of millions of people from their homes, and the de facto partition of the country. Syria is currently prey to similar agonies.
Failure to avoid the pitfalls of sectarian, religious, and ethnic conflict—combined with external intervention—caused Lebanon to implode, followed by Iraq and now Syria. Significant elements of these three societies have been systematically pulverized in an analogous fashion. In all these cases, the destruction has overwhelmed and annihilated much of the painstakingly constructed modern infrastructure of government (some of it dating back to the Tanzimât reforms of the late Ottoman era); multiple layers of civil society as well as intellectual and cultural life; and vast areas of the economy, all while impoverishing and displacing large sectors of the population. The devastation of these three societies was the cumulative consequence of generations of poor governance and failed national leadership, the breakdown of unifying national narratives, and persistent and aggressive interference by foreign powers. All of these factors have produced savage civil wars in each country. Only many years after its own fifteen-year ordeal ended in 1990 was Lebanon able to regain a degree of internal equilibrium, however precarious.
In 2000, Israel ended its occupation of large parts of southern Lebanon. This occupation, which had begun on a smaller scale with the military incursion in 1978, reached its apogee and widest extent during the 1982 Israeli invasion, which is the backdrop to this book. The events of May 2000 marked the first and only time that Israel has ever withdrawn its military forces from occupied territory without any Arab or international quid pro quo. This tally includes Israel’s 2005 military redeployment from the Gaza Strip, since it did not fully end its occupation of, or cede its control over, that small region.
1 What many in the Arab world learned from Lebanon’s harrowing experience is that only unremitting armed resistance can force Israel to withdraw from territory it occupies. That lesson was embraced in particular by many Palestinians who watched the successful military exploits of several militant groups, most notably the Lebanese Shi’ite Hizballah movement, against Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon. The creation and rise of Hizballah was a direct consequence of Israel’s invasion and the expansion of its occupation which followed the 1982 war.
2 Influenced by the war’s outcome and even more so by Hizballah’s victory in driving Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, many of these Palestinian observers subsequently gravitated to armed radical groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which had not even been established in the mid-1980s when this book was written. These groups have now become a powerful, even dominating, force in Palestinian politics. Unlike Hizballah in southern Lebanon, however, they have not yet proven themselves capable of parlaying armed resistance into completely ending Israeli occupation and control over any part of the territories occupied since 1967. Whether their military capabilities have even succeeded in deterring Israeli military action, or indeed whether they provoke its intensification, is a matter of a sharp and continuing Palestinian internal debate.
But for many other Palestinians, the 1982 war demonstrated the futility of the idea of armed resistance. Such individuals turned even more resolutely than before to a path of compromise and negotiations, producing a series of agreements with Israel that culminated with the so-called “Oslo Accords.” To the surprise of some, these accords, which were ostensibly meant to lead to peace and an end to the occupation, resulted in a re-invigorated and strengthened Israeli occupation regime. In the shadow of these agreements, and in some measure because of them, the Jewish settler population in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem has nearly tripled—from about 200,000 at the time of the Madrid peace conference in 1991 to almost 600,000 presently.
3The Oslo Accords and the intensified regime of Israeli occupation and settlement that has emerged from them are now seen by most Palestinians as highly inimical to their national interests and aspirations. Nevertheless, many others still cling to the Palestinian Authority that is the centerpiece of this post-Oslo regime, for reasons ranging from the opportunistic to the idealistic. But the perceived failure of the negotiating route adopted by the PLO since the 1980s (with its roots in crucial Palestinian decisions of the early and mid-1970s to favor a path of negotiations) has inevitably strengthened the alternatives. These alternatives range from popular mass nonviolent resistance to the Israeli military occupation; through protests and efforts to use boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel; to armed resistance to Israel’s unremitting control over Palestinian territories and populations. From this, we can see that Palestinians learned a plethora of different lessons from the 1982 war and its aftermath in Lebanon.
The Lebanon war also clearly had an impact on the Israeli public, as is attested by the massive public demonstrations subsequent to the Sabra and Shatila massacres as well as the political eclipse of the politicians responsible for the war, notably Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon (although the latter’s absence from politics proved to be temporary).
4 However, it is questionable whether the politicians ultimately responsible for Israel’s security really learned anything profound from the experience of Lebanon in 1982, or from those of the years that followed for that matter. A 2012 documentary film entitled
The Gatekeepers features interviews with all of the six men who, from 1981–2011, were directors of the Israeli General Security Service (the Shin Bet or Shabak), the intelligence agency that maintains Israel’s iron control of the millions of Palestinians under occupation. The film shows that these former domestic intelligence chiefs are fully aware that occupation inevitably and thoroughly corrupts the occupying society, and that the use of force against the Palestinians is ultimately futile.
5 But as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip entered its forty-seventh year in June 2013, most Israeli political leaders and much of Israeli society appear to act as if they were blithely unaware of any perils. This is the case despite warnings from two former Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, that continuing the status quo will lead inevitably to apartheid.
6 However, unlike the occupation of southern Lebanon, in Palestine the occupation shows no signs of being wound up at any time in the foreseeable future. In fact, quite the contrary: it is more entrenched today than ever.
Propositions that Palestinian nationalism can be suppressed by a combination of force, intimidation, and cooptation (all justified by an endlessly expansive definition of Israel’s “security” needs) and that the occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands can be indefinitely perpetuated, while often unspoken, are central to the thinking of nearly all elements of Israel’s political leadership, whether from the right or the “left.” It was a particularly aggressive version of these tenets, propounded by then-Defense Minister Sharon, which animated Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The ideological hold of these beliefs on the Israeli elite was perhaps slightly weakened for a time by the later unarmed Palestinian popular uprising—the first intifada—which started in 1987. The profound effect of the 1987–1991 uprising on Israeli and international public opinion unequivocally showed that the occupation in its then-current form was simply unsustainable.
The impact of the 1982 war and the first
intifada taken together undoubtedly undermined these certainties among many sectors of the Israeli public. However, as I showed in a recent book,
Brokers of Deceit: How the United States Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Israel’s leaders from the early 1990s and onwards clearly were not fully weaned from these propositions.
7 Instead, that book explains how and why in subsequent decades they, while strongly supported by the United States, chose to impose terms on the Palestinians that were based on the rigid ideas of Menachem Begin originally put forward in the late 1970s. These concepts were designed to create an indefinite occupation, one inextricably linked to flexible but permanent Israeli security control of the occupied territories and to untrammeled colonial settlement in them. The Palestinians meanwhile are permitted no more than a simulacrum of “autonomy” under these terms, particularly embodied in a “Palestinian Authority” (PA) that does not and cannot prevent continued colonization of Palestinian lands and the constant incursions of the Israeli security forces into supposedly “autonomous” areas. The final outcome envisaged by both the Israeli and U.S. governments, their insincere references to Palestinian statehood notwithstanding, would provide for ultimate Israeli security control while conceding only sham “sovereignty.”
8Adding insult to injury, this enduring oppression and immiseration is disguised by an unending stream of disingenuous and deceitful talk by both Israel and American leaders about negotiations and a “peace process” that are supposedly meant to lead to a putative Palestinian state. That state constantly recedes into the distance as a larger and larger proportion of Israel’s total Jewish population—currently almost 600,000 people, or over 10 percent—lives in homes heavily subsidized by the Israeli government on stolen Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip has remained under stringent Israeli security control despite being evacuated by Israeli troops and settlers in 2005, and its population is subject to severe movement and trade restrictions, as well as to regular punitive military assaults from air, land, and sea. These measures are justified as a response to the occasional, largely futile, rocket attacks launched from Gaza against neighboring Israeli towns and cities.
Whether in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s politicians and military officials appear to have learned precious little from the 1982 war and onwards about how to deal with the Palestinian people. The only probable exception may have been superficial tactical lessons in urban warfare in heavily populated civilian areas, a type of conflict the Israeli military had not engaged in for decades before the fierce battles in Sidon and on the outskirts of Beirut. Rather than reflecting on the more profound import of the 1982 war, these leaders continue to rely primarily on the systematic and rote use of force and intimidation, leavened by measures of co-optation and token “concessions.” The powerful hammer of Israel’s massive security services and armed forces seems to be virtually the only tool considered for use by Israeli leaders, for whom everything appears to be a nail where the Palestinians are concerned.
Similarly, American policy makers seem to have either ignored or forgotten the many potential lessons of the 1982 episode. The disastrous American military intervention in Lebanon, launched together with French and Italian forces, started off in September of that year with one strictly limited objective: the evacuation of PLO forces and cadres from Lebanon. This had been linked to an explicit American commitment to ensure the protection of the Palestinian civilians left behind in Beirut’s refugee camps. Once the main American objective of the PLO’s removal from Beirut was achieved, U.S. troops immediately withdrew, which forced the allied French and Italian forces to follow suit, and the commitment to protect Palestinians was disregarded. This withdrawal was almost immediately followed by the horrific massacres of nearly 1,400 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the wake of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel’s assassination and the subsequent Israeli occupation of West Beirut.
9 This slaughter was the work of right-wing, Israeli-allied Lebanese militias that were introduced into these camps by the Israeli forces occupying and fully controlling the area. Palestinian leaders had repeatedly warned that such massacres were likely once PLO military forces withdrew, hence their explicit demand for American guarantees for the safety of the civilians in the camps.
10 Driven by a fully justified sense of shame and guilt over their failure to prevent this bloodbath, U.S. policy makers immediately returned American troops and the rest of the multinational forces to Beirut.
This second armed intervention ultimately led to an American attempt to impose a one-sided peace treaty with Israel on a pliable Lebanese government, followed by American military involvement on one side of the rekindled Lebanese civil war. The subsequent American effort was based on a thoroughly flawed reading of Lebanon’s sectarian political scene, a serious underestimation of the residual power of Syria, and a gross overestimation of the ability of the United States, Israel, and their Lebanese allies to affect outcomes. This entire discreditable episode was sealed by the deaths of hundreds of American marines, diplomats, academics, clergymen, and others killed and held hostage in a spate of ruthless suicide bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings in Beirut. The ignominious withdrawal of U.S. troops ensued soon after and the never-implemented Lebanese-Israeli treaty thereafter collapsed. This ill-considered American military and diplomatic intervention in Lebanon, in coordination with Israel’s own disastrous occupation of Lebanon, produced lasting conflicts between the U.S. and various Lebanese forces, notably Hizballah, that still have ongoing consequences.
Some senior policy makers in the Reagan administration were clearly sobered by the results of the 1982–1984 American interventions in Lebanon. However, what should have been the principal long-term lesson of this bitter experience—not to intervene militarily in complex internecine conflicts in Middle Eastern and neighboring countries whose internal dynamics were only dimly understood—clearly did not register on many of those who followed them in high office. This was amply shown by the even more disastrous U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan during the neoconservative era of unbridled American self-assertion presided over by George W. Bush. Indeed, precisely the wrong lessons—ones about the supposed merits of the Lebanese confessional system—were adopted by some American policy makers and gratuitously misapplied decades later to Iraq with ruinous consequences. The other lesson that the failed Lebanon adventure should have taught—that a just and lasting peace cannot be imposed by fiat by Israel, even if it is strongly supported by the U.S.—has also been studiously ignored by American policy makers in dealing with the Palestinians since 1991, with disastrous results for the Palestinians and for the prospects of lasting peace between them and the Israelis. This is one of the main conclusions of my most recent book, Brokers of Deceit.
What do we know now that we did not know when this book was originally published in 1986? Relatively little has since emerged from Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and other Arab sources about the respective roles of the different Arab actors in the events of the 1982 war, albeit for different reasons in each case.
For the Palestinians, the reverses of 1982 were just the beginning of a series of traumatic events that diverted much attention from what had happened that year. Indeed, this episode seems to have receded from the memories of many Palestinians. Defeat is always an orphan, of course, and what happened to the PLO in Lebanon in 1982 was most certainly a decisive defeat, however much some of its leaders thereafter tried to uphold a narrative of “victory in defeat.”
11 Moreover, starting with the
intifada of 1987, the focus of Palestinian politics—and of much scholarship about Palestine—has shifted away from the Palestinian diaspora to the occupied homeland, especially after the bulk of the leadership and cadres of the PLO returned to Palestine with the creation of the PA in the mid-1990s. Since then, events in Beirut during the summer of 1982 and what has happened more generally in the diaspora, where the resurgence of Palestinian nationalism after 1948 had primarily taken place, has lost its salience for many Palestinians and most outside observers.
12 Finally, Palestinians are no nearer today to having a state than they were in 1982; this absence of a state, among many other things, has meant that there is no Palestinian national archive or repository of historical materials, which naturally makes research more difficult. Israel’s repeated assaults on Palestinian research centers and archives have also exacerbated this problem.
13For the Lebanese, the 1982 invasion was only one ugly episode in the fifteen-year trauma of the war that tore their country apart, and it is one many are perfectly happy to forget, for a variety of reasons. To this day, the entire war remains a largely unspoken topic in Lebanese public life, although it has been treated sensitively in cinema and the arts, and it has been addressed by scholars in Lebanon and elsewhere.
14 For Syrians, the role played by their army, although it fought creditably against heavy odds in the Biqa’ valley and in the Lebanese mountains, was best forgotten. This was because Syria accepted a ceasefire on June 26, 1982, after less than three weeks of fighting. Its forces were thus no longer involved in combat for the war’s remaining seven weeks, during which time the PLO and its Lebanese allies fought alone in defense of Beirut.
15 As for the rest of the Arab world, whose governments had stood idly by while an Arab capital city was subjected to a lengthy siege and repeated bombardments, there is every incentive to overlook the embarrassments of the 1982 war. It was rapidly forgotten as attention shifted to domestic concerns and to dramatic regional developments such as the series of wars in the Persian Gulf, starting with the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, and the Afghanistan conflict.
On the American side, while several participants have written memoirs, there was not a great deal of scholarly work done on the Lebanese adventure of the early 1980s in the years immediately afterwards. In view of its embarrassing end, this is not entirely surprising. Still, given the large number of casualties in the embassy and marine barracks bombings, as well as the heavy blow to American prestige that ensued after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, one might have expected more attention to it, notwithstanding the absence of declassified documents in the public domain until very recently. Even the published accounts by participants that do touch upon this episode are not always candid or enlightening. Alexander Haig’s memoir, referred to in the original edition of this book, is a prime example of this tendency. The account of his successor, George Shultz, is more forthcoming about some aspects of the war, as are those of President Reagan and his deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver.
16It will soon be possible to write a much fuller and more comprehensive history of Israel’s part in Lebanon war, and the American role in it. The recent declassification of documents in both the American and Israeli archives for that period is already yielding major revelations that significantly amplify our knowledge about crucial aspects of these nations’ actions during the war and especially in its immediate aftermath.
17 Among the most striking of these revelations were newly-released documents from the Israel State Archives discovered by a young researcher, three of which were published in full in connection with an op-ed article he published in the
New York Times.18 Verbatim records of meetings between Israeli and American officials that took place in Washington and Jerusalem at the height of the Sabra and Shatila massacres on September 16, 17, and 18, 1982, and which were posted online by the
Times, constitute a chilling addendum to the conclusions of this book.
19These transcripts reveal the willful, arrogant duplicity of Israeli government leaders in dealing with their American counterparts. This is most notably the case with Ariel Sharon who, in keeping with his reputation, was by turns bullying, insulting, and dismissive in his demeanor during meetings with U.S. diplomats. Other Israeli officials were nearly as brazen. The first of these documents is a transcript of the meeting which took place after U.S. Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called in Israeli Ambassador Moshe Arens on September 16, 1982, at the instruction of the president and the secretary of state.
20 Eagleburger harshly berated Arens for Israel’s invasion of West Beirut, which he described as “directly counter to a series of assurances made in the course of the summer” by Begin and Sharon, creating the appearance “of a deliberate deception by Israel” of its American ally. He stated that “the occupation by Israel of an Arab capital is a grave political mistake with far-reaching symbolic and concrete implications of the most dangerous sort,” and, in keeping with his instructions, demanded an immediate Israeli military withdrawal from West Beirut.
Arens was nonplussed by this scathing denunciation. He immediately went on the offensive, baldly asserting: “I’m not sure you guys know what you’re doing. Yesterday when I talked to the Secretary, you raised this business of Israeli deception. I don’t know where it is coming from, but some people are trying to build this up.” The Begin government had engaged in persistent, systematic deception aplenty—before, during, and after the Lebanon war—of the U.S. government, as is amply demonstrated in the best Israeli account of the war, written by the respected and extraordinarily well-connected journalists Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari.
21 The three documents posted online by the
New York Times provide further examples of such deception. But Ambassador Arens (a Likud Party grandee who became Israel’s minister of defense a few months later, a post he would hold three times) was having none of these well-founded accusations. He went on to dispute them vigorously, countering one sally dismissively with the words, “We should avoid this openly confrontational mode. If you think this will scare us, you’re wrong.” Arens was not only forceful in his rejection of charges that his government had deceived the United States during this acrimonious meeting. He was also inflexible in his rejection of the plan President Reagan had put forward earlier in September for dealing with the Palestine issue, or as Arens termed it, “the future of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.”
22 Irrespective of whether Israel had deceived the U.S. government about the entry of its army into West Beirut, however, no one in Washington on September 16 was yet aware of the slaughter that was just beginning to take place in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.
The second document reveals the complete failure of the United States to do what it might have done while there was still time to prevent these horrific massacres from happening, thereby honoring its pledge to the PLO that no harm would come to the Palestinian civilian population left behind in Beirut. Specifically, the United States failed to restrain the Israeli military from employing Lebanese surrogates to do just what the PLO leadership had feared, which was to “clean the area” of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut’s southern suburbs. This was the chilling phrase repeatedly employed by Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir in their meeting with the special U.S. envoy, Morris Draper, on September 17, 1982, the second day of the massacre.
23The use of the sinister term “clean” (together with others such as “neutralize”) must be taken in conjunction with the persistent refrain of Sharon and other Israeli officials present during this meeting that there were two thousand “terrorists” still hiding in Beirut, whom the Israeli defense minister repeatedly stated had to be captured or killed. The Israeli officials constantly reiterated this untruth, which had been enshrined in an Israeli cabinet resolution the day before that referred to “about 2,000 terrorists equipped with modern weapons” who had supposedly remained in West Beirut. The Israeli officials used the term “terrorist” 42 times, 39 coming from Sharon alone. This patent falsehood was repeated in spite of the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut of more than 15,000 of its combatants and other personnel just weeks before. Incidentally, the spuriousness of this pretext, which was utilized to justify Israel’s entry into West Beirut and the sending of the Phalangist militia into the Palestinian camps, was among many crucial issues that were never examined by the Kahan Commission, the official commission of inquiry appointed by the Israeli government to look into the massacres.
24Under the impact of what can only be described as constant browbeating by the formidable Sharon, the U.S. envoy did not protest this outrageous mischaracterization of the Palestinian civilian population in Beirut and its refugee camps as “terrorists” for most of the meeting. Indeed, eventually Draper came to use the term five times himself. Sharon insisted at one point that there would be no impact if Israeli delayed its withdrawal from West Beirut, stating, “Nothing will happen. Maybe some more terrorists will be killed. That will be to the benefit of all of us, for the benefit of all of us…. For every peace loving man in the world, just to reduce a little bit this threat of these international syndicated terrorists.” In fact, as the Americans knew (as undoubtedly also did most of the Israeli officials present at the meeting), after the evacuation of over 15,000 PLO personnel, including all the full-time regular combatants, from Beirut at the end of August only largely defenseless Palestinian civilians were left in the refugee camps. This was the case, although members of armed Lebanese left-wing militias who were present elsewhere in West Beirut were also sometimes mentioned during this meeting. As I note in this book’s conclusion, the PLO’s regular combatants had held a large part of the Israeli army at bay at the gates of Beirut for several weeks. Needless to say, had even a couple of hundred of those battle-hardened fighters been present (let alone 2,000 of them), they would have easily dealt with the Phalangist gunmen deployed by their Israeli allies to “clean” the camps. Sharon and most of his colleagues at this meeting must have known this perfectly well.
Draper had great difficulty holding his own under Sharon’s incessant bullying. At one point he interjected plaintively, “It is going to be very hard to carry on a conversation if you think that when I say ‘cooperative’ it is a pejorative word. It is a positive word. It is a very positive word. If I can get more than three sentences in.” It is therefore not surprising that it was not until about three-quarters of the way through the stormy September 17 meeting that Draper finally disputed the deceitful way that Sharon and his colleagues were depicting the situation in Beirut. The American envoy insisted that “the fact is that the [PLO] evacuees out of Beirut were greater in number than we thought when we started,” and noted that thousands more Palestinian fighters were evacuated than his original estimate and that of Ambassador Philip Habib, the principal U.S. special envoy who negotiated the evacuation. He went on to describe what Sharon and his colleagues were doing as playing “with the numbers game of 2,000 and so forth and so on.”
Growing exasperated at the refusal of the Israeli officials to accede to the American demand for a withdrawal of their forces from West Beirut (although he was unaware of the slaughter then taking place in Sabra and Shatila under the noses of Israeli troops surrounding the camps), Draper finally could not restrain himself, beginning the following exchange with Sharon:
Draper: The hostile people will say, sure the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is going to stay in West Beirut and they will let the Lebanese go and kill the Palestinians in the camps.
Sharon: So we’ll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism [sic].
Draper: We are not interested in saving any of these people.
Sharon: If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.
Draper: Let me reflect my government’s position on this exactly.
Apparently shaken by where Sharon’s deceptive aggressiveness had taken the exchange, Draper finally expressed himself with undiplomatic bluntness about Israel’s invasion of West Beirut:
If you have to stay out here for 600 years while the Lebanese neutralize this, we want you to stay out. Let the Lebanese do it. That’s our position. We spent three months trying to get as many of the terrorists out as possible—safely. That was the political arrangement. So it wouldn’t be necessary for you to come in. I have to reflect the views of Washington on this…. It still goes back to the fundamental position which I was using lightly: we didn’t think you should come in. You should have stayed out.
Sharon’s response to this frankness was insultingly blunt: “You did not think or you did think. When it comes to our security, we have never asked. We will never ask. When it comes to existence and security, it is our own responsibility and we will never give it to anybody to decide for us.” The transcript indicates that this outburst was followed by “(Consultations in Hebrew),” details of which are not recorded in this Israeli government record. The meeting ended soon afterwards when Sharon reiterated that Draper should tell Washington that the response to American demands for an Israeli withdrawal from West Beirut was the Begin government’s uncompromising cabinet resolution of the previous day, and that arrangements would be worked out. Draper’s acerbic reply “You suggest it is easier to convince Washington than it is to convince you?” was met by the disingenuous words “You managed to convince us,” from Sharon, to which Draper reposted, “Who convinced whom? (laughter).” While the participants in the meeting laughed in false bonhomie, hundreds of people were dying in Sabra and Shatila at the hands of the Phalangists, just meters away from Israeli troops surrounding the camps.
It is important to understand that, by this point, Sharon and many of the Israelis present during this riveting exchange had a good sense of what was happening in the Palestinian refugee camps. Yitzhak Shamir had reportedly been informed that very morning that a “slaughter” was taking place in the camps.
25 David Kimche was the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, an agency which had extensive sources in Lebanon, had worked for years with the Phalangists, and could be presumed to be knowledgeable about their intentions regarding the Palestinians and what they were doing in Sabra and Shatila. We can only guess precisely how much Sharon knew about the actions of the Phalangist militiamen he had ordered into the camps. He had long pressed the Phalangists to send their forces into the Palestinian camps in Beirut to complete the job of “cleaning” them. Given the behavior of these militias at Palestinian camps they had previously overrun, like Tal al-Za’tar in 1976, this could mean only a massacre. According to an authoritative Israeli account of the war, Sharon indeed had come to an agreement on just such a “cleaning operation” with Phalangist military commander and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel only two days before the latter’s assassination.
26 So it is not hard to surmise that Sharon knew what was happening, and indeed what he intended to happen, when he sent his Phalangist protégés into the camps. Whether or not this was his aim, Sharon’s obstinate stonewalling of the American envoy during the September 17 meeting prolonged the ongoing slaughter that these militias had begun the preceding evening.
Draper’s unease likely originated from his own sense that things were going horribly wrong—both during this painfully difficult meeting and on the ground in West Beirut. On the preceding day, September 16, Draper had apparently been shocked when told by Yehoshua Saguy, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, that Phalangist gunmen would be sent in to the camps.
27 This meant that the worst fears of the Palestinians were likely to be realized. It also constituted a violation of the assurances the Americans understood they had received from the Israeli government, as Under Secretary Eagleburger had bluntly told a not particularly forthcoming Ambassador Arens that very day.
28 As far as we know, neither Eagleburger on September 16 nor Draper on the following day had yet learned from American diplomats on the spot or from any other intelligence sources what was actually happening in the camps. Indeed, it was only on September 18—the day after Draper’s meeting with Sharon, Shamir, and other Israeli officials—that American journalists took a U.S. diplomat into the camps and he was able to inform his superiors of the horrors that had transpired there.
29It is worth noting that even the harsh remonstrance that Eagleburger addressed to Arens on September 16 mainly focused on how Israel’s decision to enter West Beirut violated assurances the U.S. believed it had received from the Israeli government. The Under Secretary of State was instructed to read talking points to the ambassador which noted that Israel’s seizure of West Beirut was “directly contrary to a series of assurances made in the course of the summer by the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister that Israel had no intention of occupying West Beirut.” Similarly, Draper’s feeble and unheeded protests to Sharon and Shamir on the following day were largely about the Israeli entry into West Beirut and the necessity for a speedy withdrawal (which Sharon and Shamir refused to entertain), rather than specifically addressing the possibility of massacres of Palestinian civilians in violation of U.S. assurances to the PLO.
It was only after news of the massacre had finally been relayed to Washington by the sole American diplomat remaining at the embassy in West Beirut on September 18, 1982,
30 that Secretary of State Shultz met with Ambassador Arens, producing an exchange that is reproduced in the third of these newly declassified documents.
31 This time, it was the American who did most of the talking to a clearly chastened Arens, who responded with an expression of sorrow but also with a thoroughly deceptive description of Israel’s actions over the previous days that he said he had just received from Sharon.
32 Alluding to the “horrible picture” of the massacre that had just been perpetrated, Shultz told Arens bluntly and forcefully that “the President has asked me to demand of you that you get your forces out of West Beirut.” He reiterated the American view that they had all along being assured by Israel that it never intended to occupy that part of the city. Shultz then went beyond a simple demand for withdrawal, going as far as any American official would to accuse the Israelis of complicity in the massacre. He stated: “When you take military control of a city you are responsible for what happens. I don’t say you wanted this but what happens rests in your hands. We find it very hard to accept that this would take place if you had really asserted yourself in those camps.” He concluded by saying that “the President is deeply upset” and was “deeply depressed by these events.” Shultz thereby firmly slammed the barn door shut long after the horse was gone. The United States finally acted assertively towards Israel, but it was far too late for those lying dead in Sabra and Shatila.
What can one make of these and other exchanges contained in these three declassified documents? One is that the PLO was grievously mistaken in relying on American assurances to protect the Palestinian civilian population of the camps after the withdrawal of their forces, as these assurances involved restraining an Israeli government over which the United States exercised, or chose to exercise, only very limited influence. This was the second of three significant American pledges over nearly fifty years regarding Palestine or the Palestinians, none of which were honored by the United States. The first of these had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promise to the Saudi ruler, ‘Abd al-’Aziz Ibn Sa’ud, to take no action regarding Palestine that would harm the Arabs, or without consulting with the Arab states. This pledge was conveyed in a letter to the Saudi king on April 8, 1945, after the two men had met in Egypt while Roosevelt was on his way back to the U.S. from Yalta.
33 These commitments were completely ignored by Harry Truman and the rest of Roosevelt’s successors in the White House.
The third commitment was embodied in the U.S. letter of assurances offered to the Palestinians on October 18, 1991, before the Madrid Peace Conference later that month. This letter affirmed that the U.S. intended to oppose actions that would prejudice or preempt outcomes yet to be negotiated, notably “unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be resolved through negotiations” such as “settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967.”
34 Over twenty-two years later and three presidential administrations on, the United States has yet to make good on this much-proclaimed intention. One might think that such an unbroken record of broken promises would convince Palestinian leaders of the foolishness of relying on such assurances from a superpower. Unfortunately, some of them apparently have not been convinced of this.
Another striking feature of these exchanges is the tone of casual arrogance used by Israeli ministers and envoys towards American officials, a characteristic which has surely become familiar to these officials’ successors in office. One of those present on the Israeli side during the first of these meetings was the young diplomat Benjamin Netanyahu, who seconded the bluff tone of his superior, Moshe Arens.
35 During these exchanges with their American counterparts, Defense Minister Sharon, Ambassador Arens, Foreign Minister (and later Prime Minister) Shamir, and even more junior officials (like David Kimche and Netanyahu) are brusque to, and sometimes well beyond, the point of rudeness. They clearly do not feel in the least awed by dealing with the top officials of a superpower. Nothing has changed in this regard in more than twenty years. Indeed, if Netanyahu’s lecturing of President Barack Obama before the cameras at the White House in 2011 is any indication, at least one of the personae on the Israeli side in 1982 appears to have learned well from his Likud mentors.
36 Netanyahu is now at the pinnacle of the Israeli political system as Israel’s only prime minister besides David Ben Gurion to have been elected to a third term.
The last enduring element to emerge from these three meetings is the utter feebleness of American diplomacy when it comes to dealing with an obstreperous and uncooperative Israeli ally on the Palestine issue. Some of the reasons for this are commonly known, from the strength of the Israel lobby in Washington to the absence of wide support for the Palestinian narrative in the U.S. public, dynamics which are only beginning, albeit very slowly, to change. Other reasons, as I set out in Brokers of Deceit, include the fact that the interests of the Arab Gulf autocracies are not in contradiction with, and indeed in many respects can be seen to be aligned with, those of Israel. Thus it is not surprising that the formidable “lobby” which staunchly supports these petro-monarchies and is primarily constituted by some of the most powerful titans of the oil, defense, and aerospace industries is rarely engaged on the issue of Palestine.
But this weakness of American officials extends well beyond the point that would be dictated by what is politically expedient in terms of not being seen to alienate Israel. It seems to stretch to the point of accepting (and even fully adopting) highly questionable baseline Israeli assumptions. President Obama used virtually every well-worn trope of Zionist rhapsody known to American politics in his speech to Israeli students in Jerusalem on March 21, 201 3.
37 This wholehearted acceptance of the entire approach of one party to this conflict resonates in the language of American officials over a number of administrations. During the Sharon-Draper exchange, the Palestinians were utterly dehumanized by their Israeli opponents in the encompassing description of them as “terrorists.” What is important here is the fact that this well-worn Israeli approach has come to be adopted by their American interlocutors. We can see that Sharon and his Israeli colleagues’ jackhammer repetition of these words to describe the situation in West Beirut—they used them on average once every 3.5 minutes during a meeting that lasted one and a half hours—finally had its impact on Draper. Draper had been tasked by his superiors with telling the two senior Israeli ministers that the United States wanted Israeli troops to withdraw immediately from West Beirut; these instructions are apparent judging from Under Secretary Eagleburger’s uncompromising tone to Arens the day before. Nevertheless, we have seen that Draper was finally worn down and diverted, in large part by an unrelenting linguistic barrage from the intimidating Israeli defense minister. Virtually the sole time Palestinians are described in different terms by American officials in the forty-nine pages of transcripts from the Israel State Archives made available by the
New York Times was in the wake of the massacre, when Secretary of State Shultz described the message he was conveying to Arens as “heavy with grief for these Palestinian people …”
38The American acceptance of an Israeli-derived narrative to frame events in Beirut in the summer of 1982 goes a long way in explaining why the United States did not then restrain Israel as it had promised to do. The use of that same narrative to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general (as has been done by most recent American presidents, including President Obama in all of his speeches on the topic, up to and including his much-remarked ones in Cairo in 2009 and in Israel in March 2013) is a major part of the larger problem in the Middle East.
39 U.S. policy makers and diplomats have shared for too long many of the same skewed assumptions, as well as the perverse and dishonest language that expresses these beliefs, with Israeli leaders. This is why the American officials portrayed in these declassified documents simply could not see that what Ariel Sharon was really talking about on September 17, 1982, amounted precisely to the massacre of innocents, and not the “cleansing” or “neutralizing” of pockets of “terrorists.”
Ultimately, this still-ongoing abuse of language to conceal and mis-portray reality is why this new edition is still relevant twenty-seven years after Under Siege was first published. So long as the unequal conflict wherein Israel op presses the Palestinians and denies them their inalienable rights is framed for Americans by their leaders and their media in terms derived from the lexicon of these oppressors, there is no hope of the United States contributing to the resolution of this conflict. In these circumstances, American efforts can only exacerbate the conflict, as they have been doing for many years. Worse, if and when further atrocities against the Palestinian people take place, there is the terrible danger that what could be done to prevent them will not happen, as had occurred in Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
Finally, it is worth noting that to this day, over thirty years after the event, no one has been punished for the deaths of the nearly 1,400 innocent people who lost their lives in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, or for those of the many thousands of other Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who perished during the 1982 war.
Notes