Memories of a Previous Israeli/American Genocide Against the Palestinians
Excerpt From: Rashid Khalidi’s. “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”.
Memories of a Previous Israeli/American Genocide Against the Palestinians
Excerpt From: Rashid Khalidi’s. “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”.
On July 8 (1982), the PLO presented its Eleven-Point Plan for withdrawal of its forces from Beirut. This plan called for establishing a buffer zone between Israeli forces and West Beirut, coupled with a limited withdrawal of the Israeli army, the lasting deployment of international forces, and international safeguards for the Palestinian (and Lebanese) populations, which would be left behind virtually without defenses once the PLO’s fighters had departed. On the strength of this plan, the Lebanese Muslim leaders were convinced that the PLO was sincere in its willingness to depart as a move to save the city. Also, they were deeply disconcerted by mounting evidence of Israel’s overt backing for the mainly Maronite LF, since it underlined the vulnerability of their communities in a post-PLO Lebanon dominated by Israel and its militant allies.
These concerns had been reinforced by the arrival of the LF militias in the Shouf in late June, and the widespread massacres, abductions, and murders that they carried out there and in the areas of the south under Israeli control. At this stage, after seven years of civil war, such sectarian slaughter was commonplace, and the PLO’s forces had served as a primary defender of the country’s Muslims and leftists. The Sunni, Shi‘a, and Druze leaders therefore redoubled their backing for the PLO’s demands in its Eleven-Point Plan.
There is a vital thread of US responsibility that must be followed to understand what happened next. The consequences were not just the result of decisions by Sharon, Begin, and other Israeli leaders, or of the actions of Lebanese militias who were Israel’s allies. They were also the direct responsibility of the Reagan administration, which, under pressure from Israel, stubbornly refused to accept the need for any formal safeguards for civilians, rejected the provision of international guarantees, and blocked the long-term deployment of international forces that might have protected noncombatants. Instead, to secure the PLO’s evacuation, Philip Habib, operating via Lebanese intermediaries, provided the Palestinians with solemn, categorical written pledges to shield the civilians in the refugee camps and neighborhoods of West Beirut. Typed on plain paper without letterhead, signatures, or identification, these memos were transmitted to the PLO by Lebanese Prime Minister Shafiq al-Wazzan and later enshrined in the records of the Lebanese government. The first of these memos, dated August 4, cited “US assurances about the safety of … the camps.” The second, two days later, said: “We also reaffirm the assurances of the United States as regards safety and security … for the camps in Beirut.” An American note of August 18 to the Lebanese foreign minister enshrining these pledges stated that
Law-abiding Palestinian non-combatants remaining in Beirut, including the families of those who have departed, will be authorized to live in peace and security. The Lebanese and US governments will provide appropriate security guarantees … on the basis of assurances received from the government of Israel and from the leaders of certain Lebanese groups with which it has been in contact.
These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut.
On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage. Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old-baby with its arms blown off.”
This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.
The departure from Beirut of thousands of the PLO’s militants and fighting forces between August 21 and September 1 was accompanied by a broad outpouring of emotion in West Beirut. Weeping, singing, ululating crowds lined the routes as convoys of trucks carried the Palestinian militants to the port. They watched as the PLO was forced to evacuate the Lebanese capital, with its leaders, cadres, and fighters going to an unknown destiny. They ended up scattered by land and sea over a half dozen Arab countries.
The men and women bound for an uncertain exile, some for the second or third time in their lives, were seen as heroes by many Beirutis for having stood up for ten weeks—with no external support to speak of—to the most powerful army in the Middle East. As their convoys rolled through Beirut, no one was aware that a sudden and unilateral American decision, taken under Israeli pressure, meant that the international forces supervising the evacuation—American, French, and Italian troops—would be withdrawn as soon as the last ship left. Israeli obduracy and US acquiescence had left the civilian population unprotected.
In the Zarif neighborhood where we lived, only a few buildings had been severely damaged, so we managed to survive the siege of Beirut physically unscathed (although I worried about the lasting effect the war might have on our two young daughters). Once PLO forces were gone and the siege was lifted, life slowly began to return to normal, even though Israeli troops still ringed West Beirut and tension remained very high. This seeming normalcy ended soon enough, and we would learn that those assurances delivered to the PLO were not worth the plain white paper they were written on.
On September 14, President-elect Bashir Gemayel, commander of the LF and leader of the Phalangists, was assassinated in a huge bomb blast that destroyed a Phalangist headquarters. This was the trigger for Israel’s forces immediately to enter and occupy the western part of the city—despite promises to the United States that it would not do so—where the PLO had previously been headquartered and where its LNM allies were still located. The following day, as Israeli troops swept into West Beirut quickly overpowering scattered and fitful resistance from fighters of the LNM, my family and I feared for our safety, as did other Palestinians with connections to the PLO—that is, nearly all Palestinians in Lebanon. They included not only refugees registered and born in Lebanon, but also people with foreign citizenship, work permits, and legal residence like ourselves.
Uppermost in all our minds was the Phalangist massacre in the Tal al-Za‘tar refugee camp in 1976 where two thousand Palestinian civilians had been slaughtered. In light of the Israeli-LF alliance, the PLO had specifically cited Tal al-Za‘tar in its Eleven-Point Plan and during the negotiations over its evacuation. Our fears were of course compounded by the murders that had been carried out by the LF forces in areas recently occupied by Israel, and by Israel’s depiction of the PLO as terrorists, with no distinction made between militants and civilians.
The morning after Gemayel’s assassination, amid the sound of heavy gunfire, we heard, through the open windows of our apartment, the approaching roar of diesel engines and the clanking of tank treads. The din was produced by the Israeli armored columns advancing into West Beirut. We knew that we had to get to safety quickly. I was fortunate to reach Malcolm Kerr, the president of the AUB and a good friend, who immediately let us take refuge in a vacant faculty apartment. Mona, my mother, my brother, and I loaded our girls and a few hastily packed things into two cars and sped to the university just before Israeli troops arrived at its gates.
The next day, September 16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter the campus to search for terrorists. Kerr rushed off to the university entrance, where, he later told us, he rejected the officers’ demands. “There are no terrorists on the AUB campus,” he said. “If you’re looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who’ve destroyed Beirut.”
Thanks to Malcolm Kerr’s courage, we were temporarily safe in a faculty apartment at the AUB, but we soon heard that others were at that moment in mortal peril.
On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.
The following evening, two shaken American journalists, Loren Jenkins and Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, among the first Westerners to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, came to tell us what they had seen. They had been with Ryan Crocker, who was the first American diplomat to file a report on what the three of them witnessed: the hideous evidence of a massacre. Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.
The flares that had so puzzled my brother and me are described from a very different perspective in Waltz with Bashir, a film and book co-authored by Ari Folman. An Israeli soldier during the siege of Beirut, Folman was stationed on a rooftop at the time of the massacre with a unit that launched the flares. In Waltz with Bashir, Folman refers to concentric circles of responsibility for the mass murder that was facilitated by this act, suggesting that those in the outer circles were also implicated. In his mind, “the murderers and the circles around them were one and the same.
The statement is as true of the war as a whole as it is of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. A commission of inquiry set up after the events, chaired by Israeli Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, established the direct and indirect responsibility of Begin, Sharon, and senior Israeli military commanders for the massacres. Most of those named lost their posts as a result of both the inquiry and the general revulsion in Israel over the massacres. However, documents released by the Israel State Archives in 2012 and the unpublished secret appendices to the Kahan Commission reveal even more damning evidence of these individuals’ culpability, which was far greater than the original 1983 report lays out. The documents expose long-deliberated decisions by Sharon and others to send the practiced Phalangist killers into the Palestinian refugee camps, with the aim of massacring and driving away their populations. They also show how American diplomats were repeatedly browbeaten by their Israeli interlocutors and failed to stop the slaughter that the US government had promised to prevent.
According to these documents, after the entire PLO military contingent had left Beirut at the end of August 1982, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and other Israeli officials falsely asserted that some two thousand Palestinian fighters and heavy weaponry remained in the city, in violation of the evacuation accords. Shamir made the claim in a meeting with an American diplomat on September 17, even though the United States government knew for certain that this was not the case—Sharon himself told the Israeli cabinet a day earlier that “15,000 armed terrorists had been withdrawn from Beirut.” Moreover, Israeli military intelligence undoubtedly knew that this number included every single regular PLO military unit in Beirut.
Sadly, American diplomats did not challenge Israeli leaders on their spurious figures. Indeed, the documents show that US officials had difficulty standing up to the Israelis over anything to do with their occupation of West Beirut. When Moshe Arens, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, was obliged to listen to a series of harsh talking points read to him that were drafted by Secretary of State George Shultz (who by then had taken over from Haig)—accusing Israel of “deception” and demanding the immediate withdrawal of its troops from West Beirut—Arens responded with scorn. “I am not sure you guys know what you are doing,” he told Lawrence Eagleburger, the deputy secretary of state, and called the American points “a fabrication” and “completely false.” Eagleburger suggested that the State Department might issue a statement calling Israel’s occupation of West Beirut “contrary to assurances,” at which point Arens’s deputy, the thirty-three-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu, weighed in: “I would suggest you delete this,” he said. “Otherwise you give us no choice but to defend our credibility by setting the record straight. We’ll end up in a shooting war with each other.” After listening to an aside from Netanyahu in Hebrew, Arens added, “I think that is right.” Rarely in history has a junior diplomat of a small country spoken thus to a senior representative of a superpower and been supported in doing so.
I remember this disaster only too well. Many thanks for sharing Kahilidi's report. Israel has never had any intention of ushering in a two-state 'solution' or any other such concept of a Palestinian state. Their objective from the beginning and today's genocide deeply underscores this; has been to literally wipe Palestine off the face of the earth and murder as many Palestinians- regardless of age- as possible. And, yet again, not only does the US stand by and watch...it supplies the tools for the massacres and runs interference on the world stage.
Khalidi closes with a chilling memory, a quote from none other than Benyamin Netanyahu (a third level deputy at the time):
“I would suggest you delete this,” [Eagleburger's statement] he said. “Otherwise you give us no choice but to defend our credibility by setting the record straight. We’ll end up in a shooting war with each other.”
I have sometimes wondered of that possibility.