Will There Be Yet Another War in Lebanon?
Extracts from The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Will There Be Yet Another War in Lebanon?
Extracts from The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi.
In light of the very real threat of yet another war in Lebanon (haven’t the Lebanese suffered enough already?) I thought it a good idea to re-publish extracts from the excellent “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017” by Rashid Khalidi.
“By 1982, Beirutis had lived through many years of war. They were used to the sound of explosions and had learned from experience to distinguish among them. On June 4 that year, a Friday, I was in a meeting of the admissions committee at the American University of Beirut, where I had been teaching for the past six years. It seemed like a routine end of the week. Suddenly, we heard the thunderous sound of what must have been multiple two-thousand-pound bombs exploding in the distance. We quickly recognized the gravity of what was happening, and the meeting broke up immediately. This aerial bombardment was the opening salvo in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon directed against the PLO. Everyone in the country had long been expecting it, and most had been dreading it.”
“Our two daughters, Lamya, who was five and a half, and Dima, then almost three, were at kindergarten and nursery school in different places. With the screeching roar of supersonic warplanes diving to attack in the background (one of the most terrifying sounds on earth), I rushed to my car to pick the girls up from their schools. Everyone on the road that day drove with the heedless abandon they always displayed when the fighting started up again in Beirut—that is, they drove only slightly more recklessly than usual.”
“My wife, Mona, then in her fourth month of pregnancy, was at work at WAFA, the PLO’s Palestine News Agency, where she was chief editor of its English-language bulletin. As best as I could tell, the colossal explosions rocking the Lebanese capital seemed to be coming from the teeming Fakhani district of West Beirut a couple of miles away. Adjacent to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the WAFA office was located there, as were most of the PLO’s information and political offices. The site of the explosions was soon confirmed by radio reports.”
“The Beirut telephone system, never very reliable and even less so after seven years of war, was so overloaded that I could not get through to Mona. I had no way to reach her and no idea of what was happening. I hoped she had taken shelter in the basement of the rundown WAFA building. Luckily, the AUB was close to the girls’ schools. Mona and I were always anxious about being able to reach them quickly whenever the on-again, off-again fighting began. During the first few years of the intermittent war in Lebanon, we had never been afraid for ourselves, but there was constant worry once the girls started going to school.”
“Our daughters, and later our son, were born in Beirut in the midst of the war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government and some others, as were Mona and I. To my distress, those most likely to label us in this way were now preparing to invade the city. Although it could almost have been a normal Beirut Friday school pickup, even with the shuddering explosions in the distances, I knew that our lives would not be normal for quite a while. I soon had the girls safely at home, and my mother and I calmed them as well as we could against the relentless thunderous noise outside.
When Mona finally got home, I learned that in spite of the heavy aerial bombardment, she had decided not to heed advice to go down to a basement shelter. From her experience over many years of war, she knew that a prolonged assault (as that one was) would mean she could be stuck there and separated from the girls for many hours. So instead she slipped out of the office and started off for home. With everyone in the street running away from the bombing and no cars or taxis in sight, she ran, too. A breathless mile or so away, near the UNESCO offices, she found a cab willing to stop and take her the rest of the way safely. This experience had no apparent effect on the baby she was carrying, our son Ismail, who was born a few months later, although for a very long time after, he remained extremely sensitive to loud sounds.”
“On that Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed and flattened dozens of buildings, including a sports stadium near the Fakhani neighborhood, on the pretext that they housed PLO offices and facilities. The intense bombardment of targets in Beirut and the south of Lebanon that continued into the next day were the prelude to a massive ground assault starting on June 6, which ultimately led to Israel’s occupation of much of Lebanon. The offensive culminated in a seven-week siege of Beirut that finally ended with a cease-fire on August 12. During the siege, entire apartment buildings were obliterated and large areas devastated in the western half of the already badly damaged city. Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, while the siege constituted the most serious attack by a regular army on an Arab capital since World War II. It was not to be equaled until the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COfLyqDX0OE&ab_channel=TheElectronicIntifada