A review of Israel’s wars since 1947 (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second of a three-part recap of Israel’s wars since 1947.

Southern Lebanon conflict, 1978.

During the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s, Israel invaded Lebanon to fight against the Palestinian Liberation Organization which had been operating there for a decade. Israel bombed in Lebanon repeatedly during that 1968-1978 decade. The invasion known as Operation Litani basically lasted a week (March 14-21):

In September 1977 Israeli troops crossed into southern Lebanon to support right-wing Christian forces. On March 11, 1978, a Palestinian raid into Israel killed three dozen civilian tourists and wounded some 80 others, and Israel invaded southern Lebanon three days later (Operation Litani). On March 19 the UN Security Council passed resolution 425, calling for Israel to withdraw and establishing the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The Israelis withdrew their forces only partially and continued to occupy a strip of Lebanese territory along the southern frontier, in violation of this resolution. They had been only partly successful in their aim of destroying Palestinian guerrillas and their bases south of the Litani River. Several hundred of the Palestinian guerrillas had been killed, but most of them had escaped northward. Estimates of civilian casualties ranged from 1,000 to 2,000. (1)

First Lebanon War, 1982-2000.

Many of the PLO were in Lebanon, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered an attack on Lebanon that established the ten-kilometer wide demilitarized security zone in southern Lebanon, the “south of the Litani River” zone that Netanhayu’s government is now demandng to be re-established. Since Israel is again in a clinch with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Dieter Vieweger’s description of that event has acquired new relevance:

In June 1982, the Israeli army once again penetrated deep into Lebanon. The trigger for the invasion was an assassination attempt on Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador in London, on June 3, 1982. Although the three attackers belonged to the group "Abu Nidal" - a group rival to the PLO - it developed into a military confrontation between Israel and the PLO in Lebanon under the name "Peace for Galilee". The PLO fighters were expelled from southern Lebanon and fled to Beirut. This achieved the actual war goal, the destruction of the PLO's military infrastructure.

Nevertheless, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had his army advance into the capital and encircle West Beirut. For ten weeks, besieged West Beirut was bombed and the PLO was ordered to surrender. The civilian population suffered severe damage. Yasser Arafat and his fighters found themselves in an increasingly hopeless situation and are said to have signaled his decision to retire from the field to American negotiators. This led to the armistice on 21 August and finally to the evacuation of the PLO to Tunis on 4 September. (2)

The Reagan Administration arranged for the evacuation of the PLO fighters to Tunis in order to keep them functioning as a potential partner for a peace deal. Despite his militaristic streak – and it was real - Reagan and his team weren’t eager to see Israel set the whole Middle East on fire or to have the US get sucked into a ground war there. Not least because the US at that time was still very vulnerable to an oil boycott. (The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had, among other things, caused yet another oil crisis in the West.)

Israeli forces remained in Lebanon until 1985. In September of 1982, Israel’s reputation took a hit in the West including the US due to a brutal slaughter of Palestinians carried out by Israel-allied Lebanese Phalangists (Christian militia) at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Between 700 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians were killed. And though that number pales in comparison to the civilians killed in Israel’s current war targeted at civilians, it was a scandalous event in 1982. As Jim Lobe recalls:

The Reagan administration reacted with anger. In a meeting with the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger demanded an immediate withdrawal by the IDF. “We appear to some to be the victim of deliberate deception by Israel,” he charged, according to memos declassified by the Israeli State Archives.

But Israel didn’t comply. …

September 18, the day that Sabra and Shatila the massacres ended, Reagan released a statement, expressing “outrage and revulsion over the murders” and “demanding that the Israeli Government immediately withdraw its forces from West Beirut to the positions occupied on September 14.” But the damage had already been done.

The rest, as they say, is history, and it’s not a good one. The Israeli campaign, while it succeeded — at great human cost, the total dead numbered close to 18,000 — in evicting the PLO’s leadership and most of its military forces from Lebanon, the peace treaty it sought lasted all of nine months, from May 1983 to February 1984 when it was repudiated by the country’s parliament.

Furthermore, Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which effectively began in 1978 and was formalized in 1985, provoked the resistance of the largely Shiite population and fueled the rise of what became Iran-backed Hezbollah, whose militias not only forced the IDF to withdraw completely from Lebanon in 2000, but which currently poses a far greater threat to Israel than the PLO ever did. [my emphasis] (3)

Notice that time frame: 1982-2000. Most of the active combat was in 1982-83, as just described. The conventional dating of the First Lebanon War as lasting until 2000 includes the full period of the Israeli occupation. As just noted, Hezbollah, which formed during that did wage low-level guerrilla warfare against the IDF during that period. Most Israeli forces had been withdrawn by mid-1985.

But, at least Israel’s hawks got the creation of Hezbollah out of it, which is still providing excuses for Israel’s actions.

The next two items are about the intifadas, which were periods of sometimes violent protest which can]t reasonably be understood as wars.

First Intifada 1987-1993.

The two periods of intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) were periods of actual popular protest including strikes, though organized violent militants played a role. The period was also called the “war of stones” because it featured so much stone-throwing by protesters.

Dieter Vieweger writes, “The first intifada was a full-scale Palestinian popular uprising. It took place mainly in the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip [illegally] occupied by Israel since 1967.” (4)

Granting that throwing rocks could cause real harm if they hit someone, it would be hard to say the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) responses were proportionate to the threat, something that will surprise absolutely no one who has been following the news from there since last October. Vieweger comments somewhat sardonically, “The violent conflicts between young people and soldiers produced new victims almost every day, especially on the Arab side.” (5)

But the protesters didn’t all limit their weapons to rocks:

Most of the Palestinian rioting took place during the intifada’s first year, after which the Palestinians shifted from throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli targets to attacking them with rifles, hand grenades, and explosives. The shift occurred mainly because of the severity of Israeli military and police reprisals, which intensified after Palestinian attacks became more violent. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, nearly 2,000 deaths due to violence occurred during the first intifada; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was slightly more than 3 to 1. (6)

Yitzhak Rabin was later assassinated because hardliners thought he was too willing to promote the peace process. But it was during the first intifada that he made one of his best known statements about intifada participants in his role then as Defense Secretary in 1987, “Break their bones!” Back in 2020, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cancelled her planned participation in an event honoring Rabin.

Looking at that decision by AOC, Amijad Iraqi explains:

[W]hen faced with Palestinian civil disobedience in the First Intifada, then-Defense Minister Rabin gave the army a simple doctrine: “break their bones.” When that failed to pacify the Palestinians, he had no choice but to change strategy. Oslo eventually became Rabin’s final contribution to the Zionist cause: a cloak of “peace” to disguise the next stage of colonial rule. (7)

In fact, the Oslo Accords of 1993 which produced the iconic photo of President Bill Clinton presiding over a handshake between Rabin and Yassir Arafat did turn out to be pretty much the end of the peace process that nominally was based on progress toward a two-state solution.

But whatever contribution “Oslo” made to the attitudes of the Palestinians, it did seem to contribute to the dying down of the active intifada. (8)

Notes:

(1) Khalidi, Rashid & Faris, Nabih Amin (2024): Palestine. Encyclopedia Britannica 10/02/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/International-recognition> (Accessed: 2024-03-10).

(3) Lobe, Jim (2024): Responsible Statecraft 09/18//2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/sabra-shatila-massacre/> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).

(4) Vieweger op.cit., 198.

(5) Ibid., 218.

(6) Araj, Bader & Brym, Robert J.. "intifada". Encyclopedia Britannica 09/17/2024, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/intifada> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).

(7) Iraqi, Amijad (2020): The myth of Rabin the peacemaker. +972 Magazine 09/27/2024. <https://www.972mag.com/yitzhak-rabin-oslo-accords-aoc/> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).

(8) Hawaleshka, Danylo (2023): The first Intifada against Israel. Aljazeera 12/09/2023. <https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/8/history-illustrated-the-first-intifada-against-israel> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).
See also: Araj & Brym, op.cit.