More Memories of a Previous Israeli/American Genocide Against the Palestinians
Excerpt From: Rashid Khalidi’s. “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”
More Memories of a Previous Israeli/American Genocide Against the Palestinians
Excerpt From: Rashid Khalidi’s. “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”
On September 17, as the massacres Loren Jenkins and Jon Randal described to us continued, Philip Habib’s assistant, Ambassador Morris Draper, was instructed by Washington to press Shamir and Sharon for a commitment to leave West Beirut. Sharon, characteristically, escalated things. “There are thousands of terrorists in Beirut,” he told Draper. “Is it your interest that they will stay there?” Draper did not demur at this false assertion, but when the exasperated US envoy said to the assembled Israeli officials, “We didn’t think you should have come in [to West Beirut]. You should have stayed out,” Sharon bluntly told the ambassador: “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.”
After Draper mildly challenged Sharon on another claim involving “terrorists,” Israel’s defense minister flatly said, “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].”
Sharon could not have been more chillingly explicit. Unbeknown to Draper or the US government, at that very moment the LF militias that Sharon’s forces had sent into the refugee camps were carrying out the killing of which he spoke—but of unarmed old people, women, and children, not supposed terrorists. If Sharon’s forces did not carry out the actual slaughter, they had nonetheless armed the LF to the tune of $118.5 million, trained them, sent them to do the job, and illuminated and facilitated their bloody task with flares.
That Sharon’s intention to use the LF in this way was premeditated stands out in scores of pages of the secret appendices to the commission’s report. Sharon; the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan; the chief of military intelligence, Major General Yehoshua Saguy; the head of the Mossad, Yitzhak Yofi; and Yofi’s deputy and successor, Nahum Admoni—all knew full well of the atrocities perpetrated by the LF earlier in the Lebanese war. They also knew of the lethal intentions of Bashir Gemayel and his followers toward the Palestinians. While those named vigorously denied such knowledge to the Kahan Commission, the evidence that it collected and kept secret is damning, and it informed the commission’s decisions. Nonetheless, the killings in Sabra and Shatila were not just the result of the LF militias’ thirst for revenge or even of these Israeli commanders’ premeditation. As with the war itself, these deaths were also the direct responsibility of the US government.
In planning for the invasion of Lebanon, Israel’s leaders had been wary of repeating the fiasco of 1956, when their country had attacked Egypt without US approval and been forced to back down. Having learned from this bitter experience, Israel only went to war in 1967 after receiving the backing of its American ally. Now, in 1982, launching this “war of choice,” as many Israeli commentators called it, was entirely dependent on the green light given by Alexander Haig, a point confirmed by well-informed Israeli journalists soon after the war. The new and fuller details revealed in previously unavailable documents make the case clearly: Sharon told Haig exactly what he was about to do in great detail, and Haig gave his endorsement, amounting to another US declaration of war on the Palestinians. Even after a public outcry over the deaths of so many Lebanese and Palestinians civilians, after the televised images of the bombardment of Beirut, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, American support continued undiminished.
In terms of what Ari Folman called the outer circles of responsibility, American culpability for Israel’s invasion extends even further than Haig’s green light: the United States supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes mandated by American law. Sharon explicitly forewarned US officials that this would happen. According to Draper’s later recollections, after he and Habib met with Sharon in December 1981, he reported to Washington that in Israel’s planned attack “we were going to see American-made munitions being dropped from American-made aircraft over Lebanon, and civilians were going to be killed.” Moreover, the Israeli high command and intelligence services were not the only ones who were aware of the murderous propensities of the LF toward Palestinian civilians. Their American counterparts were just as knowledgeable about the LF’s bloody track record.
Because of this knowledge, because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians. The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.