Chapter 19 — “Surrounded by enemies” — the zionist terror campaign against Lebanon
Lebanon: the fascist angle
Lebanon had existed under centuries of foreign domination. And after World War I, Lebanese Christians supported the French Mandate that followed centuries of Ottoman control. Lebanon would eventually gain its independence shortly after World War 2.
The Phalange, or Phalanxes (Kataib in Arabic) was formed in 1936 as a Maronite paramilitary youth organization by Pierre Jumayyil (who modeled it on the fascist organizations he had observed while in Berlin as an Olympic athlete).
With a base of wealthy Maronite families whose main trade was in drug trafficking. Israel will see them as a “solution” in Lebanon.
(The Israeli Connection, Who Israel Arms and Why, Benjamin Brit-Hallahmi, p20)
It was also during this time that the World Zionist Organization would start soliciting new customers for Germany, through the Ha’avara Agreement (see Chapter 2), in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Eventually the Zionists began exporting oranges to Belgium and Holland using Nazi ships. By 1936 the WZO began to sell Hitler’s goods in Britain.
(Reflections, Palestine Post (14 November 1938), p.6.
Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, p.129.)
It was also in Lebanon under the Vichy regime (French fascists) that late in 1940, Lehi representative Naftali Lubenchik would go to Beirut to meet German official Werner Otto von Hentig. Lehi documents outlined that its rule would be authoritarian and indicated similiarites between the organization and Nazis. (Chapter 3)
(The Jews: A Contrary People Yehuda Bauer pages 77–78)
During World War II, Lebanese troops fought alongside (pro Hitler) Vichy French forces against British and Free French forces. After the surrender of Vichy forces in the Middle East in July 1941, volunteers from the Troupes Spéciales du Levant were enlisted in the Free French forces and participated in combat in North Africa, Italy, and southern France.
Zionist interference begins
The Oded Yinon Plan first came to (public) light in 1982. It was a kind of roadmap on how zionism could cultivate and manipulate already existing internal divisions within Middle East countries. And they have generally followed this roadmap to the present day. But this roadmap had existed many years before. Intellectual Israel Shahak broke the 1982 version down:
“The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.
This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach’s study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties.”
(The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, Translated and edited by Israel Shahak, Published by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. Belmont, Massachusetts, 1982)
As regards Lebanon, Oded Yinon himself had this to say:
“Th[e Arab Moslem] world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon…is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems…
Lebanon is torn apart and its economy is falling to pieces. It is a state in which there is no centralized power..
Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world…and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target…”
(A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties by Oded Yinon, Published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, February 1982)
It was during the “Suez Crisis” in 1956 that expansionist zionism would touch upon their plans for Lebanon through the pompous, racist pronunciations of David Ben Gurion (See Chapter 6):
Lebanon suffered from having a large Muslim population which was concentrated in the south. The problem could be solved by Israel’s expansion up to the Litani River, thereby helping to turn Lebanon into a more compact Christian state. …
(The Protocol of Sèvres,1956: Anatomy of a War Plot, Avi Shlaim, pp509–530; Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country, Patrick Tyler, p105; Defending the Holy Land, Zeev Maoz, p70)
This blatantly racist statement came shortly after zionism showed how they had proposed to solve this “problem”. The Shatila massacre of 1948:
In 1948, 70 Lebanese civilians from the village of Saliha were herded into the village square and machine gunned to death by members of the Haganah Jewish militia. They did this after being told that no harm would come to them. It was later claimed that the corpses were left there for four days. Haganah returned to bulldoze their bodies towards the mosque and blew it up to cover up their war crime.
(Zionism’s first Lebanese victims remembered, Daily Star Lebanon, May 1998; “Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, September 2004)
The Franco-British boundary agreement of 1920 placed Saliha, a predominantly Palestinian Arab village, within the French Mandate of Lebanon border, thus classifying it a part of Lebanese territory. It was one of the 24 villages transferred from the French mandate of Lebanon to British control in 1924 in accordance with the 1923 demarcation of the border between the Mandatory Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. It thus formed part of Palestine until 1948 when it was completely depopulated (ethnically cleansed).
(Wiki)
This was simply a continuation of zionist policy. Remember that Ben Gurion’s statement, which also actually discussed the overthrowing of Jordan and occupation of the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, came about just a few years after they had ethnically cleansed Palestine.
“the entire expanse of the State of Israel allocated to us under the terms of the UN resolution is in our hands, and we have conquered several important districts outside those boundaries… we will remain constantly on the offensive, which will not be confined to the borders of the Jewish State”,
(Report to the Provisional Government of Israel by Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Ben-Gurion, 03 June 1948)
Manufacturing the Lebanese civil war
Israel had cultivated a relationship with Lebanon’s Christian community almost from the advent of the Zionist movement. Some Zionist politicians had envisaged a Jewish-Maronite alliance to counterbalance Muslim regional dominance. After Israel’s independence in 1948 [Note: otherwise known as ethnic cleansing of Palestine], some Israeli leaders advocated extending the northern border to encompass Lebanon up to the Litani River and to assimilate the Christian population living there. In 1955 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and General Moshe Dayan conceived a plan to intervene in Lebanon and install a Lebanese Christian president amenable to improving bilateral relations.
(Politics in Lebanon, The Creation of the Lebanese Army, Ayman Ghazi)
Charles Hilu (Helou) became president in 1964. Hilu and his army commander refused to commit Lebanese troops to the June 1967 War, enraging many Lebanese Muslims. In the aftermath of that war (which was in reality a zionist land grab of its neighbour’s territory — See Chapter 15), the army and its Deuxième Bureau turned a blind eye to Palestinian guerrillas infiltrating Lebanon from Syria, an attitude that angered Christians.
[Note: It was in effect the aggressive actions of zionism and the Palestinian refugees who had fled the violence to Lebanon, that lead to what was largely a dormant Palestinian resistance to resurge, and a base of operations being created. What did zionism actually believe would happen?]
On the other side of the coin, Lebanese troops didn’t react when Israel launched raids in to, and attacked Palestinians on Lebanese soil.
In December 1968, the government was humiliated when Israeli commandos landed at Beirut International Airport and destroyed Middle East Airlines aircraft with impunity.
In October 1969, the Lebanese Army took a more active role in fighting Palestinian forces. Nevertheless, it was clear that the army could decisively defeat the Palestinians only at the risk of splitting the nation.
Therefore, army commander General Emil Bustani signed the Cairo Agreement in November 1969 with Palestinian representatives. The Cairo Agreement remains officially secret, but it apparently granted to the Palestinians the right to keep weapons in their camps and to attack Israel across Lebanon’s border. By sanctioning the armed Palestinian presence, however, Lebanon surrendered full sovereignty over military operations conducted within and across its borders and became a party to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 1970, the PLO made a bid to topple Jordan’s King Hussein, but it was crushed and evicted from the country — an event known as “Black September.” The PLO leadership and guerrillas moved their main base of operations from Jordan to Lebanon, where the Cairo Agreement endorsed their presence. The influx of several hundred thousand Palestinians upset Lebanon’s delicate “confessional balance” (where the three main religions — Sunni, Shia and Christian — held a power sharing agreement). It polarized the nation into two camps — those who supported and those who opposed the PLO presence.
The Israeli Air Force launched raids against the Palestinian refugee camps supposedly “in retaliation for” PLO attacks in Western Europe.
Even going so far as to infiltrate Beirut itself for assassinations of PLO leaders. The Lebanese army was suspected of allowing these attacks while simultaneously attacking the PLO themselves. The subsequent battles between the PLO and Lebanese army lead to the Melkart Agreement, which on the one hand obligated the PLO to respect the “independence, stability, and sovereignty” of Lebanon but on the other hard ceded to the PLO virtual autonomy, including the right to maintain its own militia forces in certain areas of Lebanon.
(Politics in Lebanon, The Creation of the Lebanese Army, Ayman Ghazi)
Zionism thrives in this chaos. And did so in Lebanon in 1975 when full scale civil war erupted there.
“unidentified gunmen opened fire at a congregation outside a Maronite church in Ayn ar Rummanaha, Christian suburb of Beirut. In apparent retaliation, members of the Christian Phalange Party ambushed a bus filled with Palestinians and shot the passengers. These events initiated the escalating cycle of retaliation and revenge that came to characterize Lebanon for the next decade.”
[Note: This is pure speculation on my part — based on events yet to occur — but this shooting had all of the hallmarks of a false flag operation. A purely sectarian, random attack that would lead to further inevitable bloodshed. What point did it serve? When you read what happened in the years that followed, you’ll understand my remarks.]
Thousands died in massacres in the years that followed. West Beirut became a Palestinian and Muslim stronghold, while East Beirut became Christian controlled. Reminiscent of the situation in Belfast.
In 1976, threatened by the escalating Civil War, a new generation of Lebanese Christian leaders turned to Israel for military support against the ascendant PLO and the Muslim left. After a series of clandestine meetings between Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, and militia leaders Bashir Jumayyil and Dani Shamun, Israel began supplying US$50 million per year to arm and equip the Christian fighters.
Other sources place the figure as high as $150 million.
(The Israeli Connection, Who Israel Arms and Why, Benjamin Brit-Hallahmi, p21)
Covert Christian-Israeli cooperation (on the face of it) tapered off after Syria intervened on the Christian side in June 1976 and quelled the sectarian fighting…the Maronites’ fear of Muslim dominance was then replaced by fear of Syrian dominance. Jumayyil, recognizing that only Israel was powerful enough to expel the Syrians, renewed contact with Israel under Menachim Begin.
At the same time, Begin perceived the Maronites as a fifth column in Lebanon to check the power of the Palestinians (of course he did). Arms shipments were stepped up, hundreds of Phalangist and Tiger’s militiamen were trained in Israel, and Israeli intelligence and security advisers were dispatched to East Beirut.
In 1977 Israel started to equip and fund a renegade Christian remnant of the Lebanese Army led by Major Saad Haddad. Haddad’s force, which became known as The Free Lebanon Army, and later as the South Lebanon Army (SLA), grew to a strength of about 3,000 men and was allied closely with Israel.
A PLO operation in March 1978 where they landed in Haifa, hijacked a bus, and shot dead thirty seven Israelis as they drove towards Tel Aviv, lead to an invasion of Southern Lebanon to control the border and bolster SLA power in the area. They pushed north and captured all of Lebanon south of the Litani River (as Ben Gurion and Dayan had always wanted), inflicting thousands of casualties.
Maronite leader Bashir Jumayyil was emboldened by the Israeli invasion and used the zionist presence to attack a Syrian Christian militia (so no, it wasn’t all about religion) in a provocative move against Syria, nearly leading to all out war when Israel threatened to attack Syria if they moved against Jumayyil.
It wouldn’t be Jumayyil’s last move against fellow Christians.
Once again, Jumayyil took the opportunity to strengthen his grip over the Maronites. On July 7, 1980, the Phalangists launched another surprise attack, wiping out Shamun’s Militia, the Tigers. Through this process of elimination, Jumayyil emerged as the dominant Maronite military leader.
Jumayyil persevered in his plot to embroil Israel in a fullscale war with Syria. In late 1980, after a series of meetings with Begin, he reportedly obtained a secret Israeli pledge to provide a defensive umbrella against a potential Syrian air attack. This pledge virtually committed Israel to fight Syria at Junmayyil’s behest, although Israel admonished the Phalangists not to attack the Syrians (allegedly).
Jumayyil repeated this ploy again in 1981, this time targeting and occupying a proSyrian Greek Orthodox (Christian) town called Zahlah. Using it as a base to shell Syrian positions with the threat of Israeli aggression if they were attacked by air. They downed two Syrian helicopter troop transports.
(Politics in Lebanon, The Creation of the Lebanese Army, Ayman Ghazi)
The piece quoted above maintains that Jumayyil had gone rogue but there’s no way his actions were carried out without Israeli approval.
Abu Nidal, the Mossad asset
It wasn’t until recent years that the layers of zionist intrigue in Lebanon would be exposed (as if their role there wasn’t bad enough as it is). One of the layers was the concrete accusation that Israel had control over a “splinter group” of the PLO. A group whose actions benefited Israel and created circumstances in which zionism could further its aims.
In 1974, one Abu Nidal broke off from the PLO and set up Fatah, thus weakening Arafat’s PLO. This worked in the interests of Israel.
Reportedly, Abu Nidal, was a spy for the USA.
Documents which are now in the hands of The Independent, written by Saddam Hussein’s security services, state that Nidal had been “colluding” with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to manufacture evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa’ida.
(Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, ‘was a US spy’, Robert Fisk, The Independent, 25 October, 2008)
What this piece doesn’t mention is the fact that Israel was front and center in this intrigue.
Middle East expert Patrick Seale laid out a detailed synopsis in his 2005 book Abu Nidal : A Gun for Hire : The Secret Life of the World’s Most Notorious Arab Terrorist as to why all evidence points to Nidal being in the pockets of Mossad.
Abu Nidal killings continually damaged the Palestinian cause to Israel’s advantage. Without exception. His group also murdered top moderates within the PLO.
Remember that Israel needs Palestinian violent (splintered) resistance as an excuse on the global stage to maintain its brutal, racist policies “for security reasons”. The moderates, who wanted to negotiate, were the real danger and had to be eliminated. They are still a target today.
Nidal’s group never attacked Israel itself on Palestinian soil (much like modern day al Qaeda and ISIS). In fact, they were nowhere to be seen during the First Intifada.
Only 10% of its victims were Jewish. The rest were “bystanders”.
And the most telling? Lack of Israeli retaliation. Nidal supposedly survived thirty years unchecked — he allegedly committed suicide in Baghdad in 2002 when Saddam’s security services suspected him of colluding with the CIA.
Remember also that these were the years of Operation Gladio, a network of fascist mercenaries with which Israel had been deeply involved with from the sixties. Their M.O. was exactly the same as Israel’s. False flag terrorism.
(See Chapter 12)
He (Nidal) had staged attacks in 20 countries over more than three decades, had visited eastern Europe during the Warsaw Pact years, had even arranged the murder of one of the Palestinians’ first envoys to Britain.
(The Two Deaths of Abu Nidal, Robert Fisk, The Independent, August, 2002)
“Israeli penetration of Palestinian organizations was common, but it was clearly not the whole story. Most intelligence sources I consulted agreed that it was standard practice to use penetration agents not simply to neutralize or destroy the enemy but to try to manipulate him so that he did one’s bidding without always being aware of doing it.
Whatever jobs [Abu Nidal] might have done for Arab sponsors, and they had been numerous and nasty, he had done many other jobs from which Israel alone appeared to benefit.”
Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent. Practically every job he did benefited Israel.
(Abu Nidal : A Gun for Hire : The Secret Life of the World’s Most Notorious Arab Terrorist Hardcover — February 5, 1992, Patrick Seale)
In Seale’s book, this point of view was shared by Middle East terrorism experts, intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal’s own organization.
Abu Nidal’s most well-known attack was on a Greek cruise ship in 1988 that left nine people dead and 80 wounded. As Seale points out regarding this attack, “no conceivable Palestinian or Arab interest was served by such random savagery.”
In fact, Greece was the European country most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, its prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, often defending Arabs against Israel’s charges of terrorism. After the attack, Greece was furious with the Palestinians, who had damaged the Greek tourist trade and hastened the fall of the Papandreou regime.
The motive, as in the Achille Lauro attack, was apparently to cast the Palestinians as heartless murderers.
As Seale concludes:
Abu Nidal is a professional killer who has sold his deadly services certainly to the Arabs and perhaps to the Israelis as well. His genius has been to understand that states will commit any crime in the name of national interest. A criminal like Abu Nidal can flourish doing their dirty work.
(Abu Nidal : A Gun for Hire : The Secret Life of the World's Most Notorious Arab Terrorist Hardcover – February 5, 1992, Patrick Seale)
The 1982 invasion of Lebanon
Abu Nidal, for me, was fully exposed during the events in Lebanon during and after the 1982 invasion.
First off, the Israeli narrative about their invasion of Lebanon in response to PLO attacks, or threat of attacks, was a complete and utter lie (surprise, surprise).
Apparently, the best available analysis of the Israeli army's structure and of the aims of Israel's invasion of Lebanon was written by Col. Emmanuel Wald of the Israeli General Staff.
According to Wald, Israel "had been under preparation during the preceding 14 months."
He also says of the invasion that, "during its first days, it was quietly approved by the U.S."
(Col. Emmanuel Wald of the Israeli General Staff, 1987 book, “The Curse of the Broken Vessels: The Twilight of Israeli Military Might (1967-1982)”)
That is, the invasion was being planned by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon as early as 1980.
The plan was to quickly invade Lebanon, defeat Syrian troops, and be within striking distance of Damascus.
On June 6, 1982, the Israeli army opened a three-pronged advance into Lebanon. Its advance on the eastern front was halted, however, by the Syrian army in the battle of Sultan Yakub. The central Israeli advance also was halted by the Syrian army, at the battle of Ain Zahalta.
Following those battles, the Israeli army was unable to resume its advance until after the cease-fire of June 12. Those two defeats by Syrian forces were decisive factors in thwarting Sharon's plan to conquer all of Lebanon and destroy Syria as a military power.
(Israel Considers War With Syria as It Ponders 1982 Invasion of Lebanon By Israel Shahak, WRMEA, August/September 1992, Page 23, 24)
The following is very important.
The excuse which would play best in Washington and other world capitals, the Israelis knew, would be provided by some heavy PLO shelling from South Lebanon into Israel. But the problem was that the PLO, for nearly 10 months of a U.S.-sponsored ceasefire, had not been carrying out any such attacks—except for one minor incident on May 9, in response to an Israeli air raid.
The PLO leadership, in fact, had come under strong criticism from many of its own rank-and-file because it chose to abide by the ceasefire even when Israeli troops were killing unarmed Palestinian teenagers on the West Bank during the rioting there last March and April. Nor had the PLO responded to frequent Israeli goading, such as the carrying out of Israeli "training maneuvers" with tanks and live ammunition on Lebanese soil right near PLO position sanctions which UN observers in their official reports called "intensive, excessive and provocative."
(Lebanon Invasion: The Record, When And How It Began, WRMEA, June 28, 1982, Page 3)
Fast forward 30 or 40 years and you have the same situation repeatedly happening in Gaza.
The FLLF
Keep in mind that the invasion of Lebanon had been planned as early as 1980. And that since late 1981 until June 1982, the month of the Israeli invasion, the PLO had maintained a globally recognized unilateral ceasefire in the face of constant provocation. But it wouldn’t come to light until 2016 that there was another layer of zionist intrigue and war criminal activity in Lebanon during this period. The creation of a fake terrorist organization by Israel that murdered hundreds of innocent civilians in Lebanon. The FLLF.
In 1979, four senior Israeli officials: Raphael Eitan the IDF Chief of Staff; Meir Dagan, the commander of the South Lebanon Region; head of Northern Command, Avigdor Ben-Gal; and Shlomo Ilya are the architects of a fake Lebanese “terrorist group” called the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF).
This murder campaign would end in 1983 with more than 1,000 persons being killed and injured by FLLF bombs (between September 1981 and August 1983). In one two week period 308 were killed.
The mainstream media completely ignored these revelations, exposed in Rise and Kill First, the secret history of Israel’s targeted assassination by Ronen Bergman, released in 2018.
Before the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, military correspondent Amir Oren “claimed that on orders from the IDF, under cover of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF), deadly strikes were being carried out against Palestinian targets, and the casualties included innocent civilians.”
That anonymous complaint “reached the press,” he said..
The complaint named the four senior Israeli officials mentioned above, and Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Military Intelligence, looked into the allegations and concluded that they were accurate.
This extensively-researched book contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly terrorist campaign.
The group was created by Eitan, Ben-Gal and Dagan in 1979. In the words of David Agmon, head of the Northern Command Staff of the IDF, the objective was to “cause chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.” Bergman makes no reference to Shlomo Ilya, the intelligence officer mentioned in Oren’s Haaretz article.
In its early stage, the group used explosives “concealed in cans of oil or preserves” that were built in a metal shop of Kibbutz Mahanayim where Ben-Gal lived at the time. The explosives themselves were sourced from the IDF’s bomb disposal unit so as to “minimize the chance that any connection with Israel might be revealed.”
As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
[Note: the author of the book tried to claim that career war criminal and mass murderer Begin was unaware of this operation!]
Sharon “hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel,” Bergman writes, “which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians.”
“By mid-September 1981,” he explains, “car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities.”
On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
The FLLF claimed responsibility, but a PLO official blamed Israeli agents for planting the bomb in “sort of a secret war” against Palestinians. Lebanese Prime Minister Chafik Wazzan agreed.
Because the cease-fire was preventing Israel from “persisting in its acts of destruction and killing in Lebanon through its air force or other attacks,” he argued, it was “looking for other tactics, the cowardly ones to which it is currently resorting either directly or through agents.’ Israeli officials rejected such claims, insisting instead that the bombings were part of a ‘war among gangs which make up the PLO.”
A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
The FLLF bombing campaign would continue until late 1983. Its deadliest attacks were covered on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The actual number of victims of this Israeli “terrorist” campaign will probably never be known. Still, it seems quite clear that, as Lee O’Brien, a UN official, wrote in MERIP in October 1983, between 1979 and 1983 the FLLF bombs did kill at least several hundred civilians, wounding countless more.
(Rise and Kill First, the secret history of Israel’s targeted assassination, Ronen Bergman, 2018; MERIP, Campaign of Terror, Car Bombings in Lebanon, Lee O’Brien, October 1983; UPI, A 165-pound bomb ripped through an empty schoolhouse in..., Fred Schiff, October 1981; BOMB AT P.L.O. OFFICE KILLS AT LEAST 50, NYT, John Kifner, October 1981; 18 DIE IN BOMBING AT P.L.O.'S CENTER IN WESTERN BEIRUT, NYT, Thomas Friedman, February 1983; A CAR BOMB KILLS 33 AND WOUNDS 125 IN LEBANESE TOWN, NYT, Thomas Friedman, August 1983; Mondoweiss, How the Israeli military censor killed a story about ‘terrorist’ bombing campaign in Lebanon in 1980s, Remi Brulin, October 2019)
Are you getting a clearer picture yet? While the PLO was on ceasefire, to the point where just 16 people died (allegedly) at their hands over ten months, Israel was not only provoking retaliation due to their actions in Lebanon and Palestine, but carrying out a terrorist campaign within Lebanon’s borders which killed hundreds of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese civilians.
Israelis eventually had to twist their “interpretation” of the ceasefire to extend it globally. That is, if any Israeli anywhere in the world was targeted, whether or not the PLO could be positively linked to it, it would be seen as a breach.
In stepped the aforementioned Abu Nidal.
Shlomo Argov, Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, was shot in the center of London on 3 June 1982 by members of Nidal’s group, which London police were to confirm. But before any type of investigation was carried out, Israel unleashed two days of hell on Palestinian refugee camps and towns in Lebanon.
Hundreds of people were killed or injured in Beirut alone. It was the heaviest and most sustained attack on Lebanon since the July, 1981 raids on Beirut which led to the ceasefire agreement, and the Israelis got the expected result: PLO gunners, driven by fury and frustration and unable to sit by calmly any longer while other Palestinians were being killed, began to shell and rocket towns in the Galilee area of Israel. According to Israeli accounts, only one person was killed by the bombardment. But that was quite enough: Israel now had its casus belli. The same Israeli officials who had earlier justified the air raids on the basis of the attempted assassination of the ambassador, were now arguing that PLO shelling across Israel's borders had reached "intolerable" limits, and that the guerrillas must be pushed back from the border, out of artillery range. The invasion was on.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 28, 1982, Page 3, Lebanon Invasion: The Record, When And How It Began)
Statistics
By the most conservative of estimates, ten thousand people were killed or wounded during the first week of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. By other accounts, at least ten thousand died, and tens of thousands more suffered injuries. Whichever estimates are correct, there is general agreement that only a very small number of the people who became casualties had ever fired a weapon at an Israeli or lobbed a shell into Israel. The great majority of them were housewives, construction workers, farmers, schoolchildren, and other ordinary people who got caught in the wrong place or happened to live in the wrong place.
A substantial number of the victims were Palestinians, but most of them, as might be expected in Lebanon, were Lebanese—people with whom the Israelis say they have no quarrel. In addition to those who were killed or maimed, hundreds of thousands of others were made homeless. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Lebanon put the number at 600,000—about one fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.
Countless people were killed by random attacks. Some may well have been "mistakes," as claimed by the Israelis—such as the bomb which was dropped on a Beirut apartment building five minutes after a declared ceasefire, burying nearly one hundred people in the ruins. Or the attack with 11 cluster bombs — a particularly lethal weapon which explodes above the ground and spreads small "anti-personnel" bomblets over a wide radius on a sanitarium in the mountains above Beirut. The pilots may have mistaken it for a "Palestinian stronghold," although there was a red cross painted on the roof. But much of the random action was clearly designed to intimidate and terrorize. From the waters off Beirut, day after day, Israeli naval vessels fired shells aimlessly into the center of the city: one shell killed a number of children on a playground. Palestinian refugee camps were also peppered regularly. Western correspondents visiting one saw bodies being buried 30 deep in mass graves. Almost anything might be a target.
Large numbers of civilians who came under Israeli control were also terrorized. In Tyre, several thousand of them were left on the beach without food, water or shelter for two days while the Israeli army refused to allow any United Nations relief convoys to cross the border into Lebanon.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 28, 1982, Page 3: The Blitz)
The permanent middle finger to the world
For many, the process of progressive humiliation began its course back on July 4, when Israel chose to ignore the U.S.'s first public request to give a break to the battered civilian population of West Beirut. The request of that day was made through the United Nations, when the U.S. took the unusual step of voting for a Security Council resolution critical of Israel—one which called for "the restoration of the normal supply of vital facilities, such as water, electricity, food and medical provisions." Israel not only ignored the U.S.-backed resolution at the time it was voted, but continued to ignore it throughout practically all of the siege.
Each time the US put out a public statement calling for a peaceful resolution, the Israelis increased the bombings. Even going so far as to use American supplied F16s to carry out manouevres in proximity to US helicopters “carrying an American military liaison team from the aircraft carrier Forrestal to the Lebanese port of Juniyah. The team had been on its way to a meeting with U.S. mediator Philip Habib to discuss evacuation plans for the PLO. The very next day, when the helicopters were again heading towards Juniyah with the liaison team, a gunboat believed by the pilots to be Israeli aimed its machine gun at them. When the U.S. officers landed, Israeli troops prevented them from going to meet Mr. Habib on schedule, and drove trucks onto the landing zone to prevent the helicopters from returning to pick up the Americans.”
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 23, 1982, Page 3, Humiliation For U.S.)
According to Lebanese police records, more than 4,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who had nothing to do with the war were killed during the siege (of West Beirut), and uncounted others injured. Large areas of the city, including some in which no Palestinians were living, were devastated. Most of the death and destruction was inflicted by fierce and protracted shelling by land artillery and naval guns and bombing from the air. In one assault lasting 14 hours, it was estimated that 180,000 shells were fired and 200 bombing sorties made.
Much of the shelling of West Beirut was of a random nature—perhaps in order to make Palestinians feel that no place of refuge was safe for them. During a 20-hour shelling on August 4 of downtown Beirut, which had few if any Palestinian military targets, Israelis hit not only mosques, movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, newspaper offices, shops, banks, apartment buildings, and hospitals, but also the Central Bank of Lebanon, the Ministry of Tourism and the Prime Minister's office. The Israelis hammered home their point—that no place was safe—but at a cost of an estimated 300 lives on that day, most of them Lebanese.
The people of West Beirut were not even safe in their hospitals, all of which were hit at least once during the siege, and many of them repeatedly. An asylum housing more than 500 mental patients was hit three times. The Babir Hospital, close to Israeli ground positions on the edge of West Beirut, was blasted so often that even the badly wounded balked at going there.
The suffering of West Beirutis was intensified during most of the siege by an Israeli cut-off of water and electricity and an embargo on import of food, fuel and medicine.
The lack of water, which in normal times was piped in from East Beirut, forced the population to depend on artesian wells, which soon became virtually impotable from over-use. When the water supply was occasionally turned on, in response to international appeals, the continued absence of electricity made it impossible to pump the water through the system. Much of it gushed from broken water-mains through the rubble and garbage-strewn streets. International relief officials said a number of children died from dehydration in the summer heat, and that there were serious cases of dysentery, scabies, eye diseases and gastroenteritis. Rats, flies and cockroaches proliferated. When fires were set off by the Israelis' liberal use of phosphorus bombs during their assaults, the shortage of water allowed the fires to rage out of control.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 23, 1982, Page 2, Siege of Beirut, Horror For Lebanon)
On one occasion, on August 4, the IDF attempted a ground attack, but withdrew after 19 Israeli soldiers were killed. The IDF then returned to safer tactics, keeping to bombing and shelling from land and sea, against which there was no defense, in accordance with familiar military doctrine. The population of the beleaguered city was deprived of food, water, medicines, electricity, fuel, as Israel tightened the noose. Since the city was defenseless, the IDF was able to display its “lighthearted abandon”, as on July 26, when bombing began precisely at 2:42 and 3:38 PM, “a touch of humor with a slight hint,” the Labor press reported cheerily, noting that the timing, referring to UN Resolutions 242 and 338, “was not accidental.”
(Fateful Triangle, p419, Noam Chomsky)
The guerillas now spreading out across the Arab world did what all the combined Arab armies have never been able to do: they denied Israel its victory. For the first time after an Israeli-Arab war, the ending is not recorded in pictures of long lines of Arab troops marching off to captivity and humiliation with their arms over their heads. The world is seeing triumphant soldiers carrying their arms and their flags to new battles. For the first time an Arab-Israeli war has produced a cadre of veterans who know what it is like to face the full strength of the Israeli army, navy and air force—and to stop them dead in their tracks.
(Fateful Triangle, Chomsky , p535-6)
It is estimated that between June 6 and August 25 that year, the Israeli onslaught killed more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians.
Sabra and Shatila…and Nidal again
Even when the PLO agreed to Lebanese appeals to vacate West Beirut, the slaughter continued. But this particular wave of barbarism was carried out up close and personal. And again, Abu Nidal’s group was the catalyst when pro-Israeli Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel was assassinated by his men shortly after the PLO had abandoned Lebanon.
Arafat had threatened to turn Beirut into a "second Stalingrad," to fight the IDF to the last man. His negotiating stance grew tenuous, however, after Lebanese leaders, who had previously expressed solidarity with the PLO, petitioned him to abandon Beirut to spare the civilian population further suffering. Arafat informed Habib of his agreement in principle to withdraw the PLO from Beirut on condition that a multinational peacekeeping force be deployed to protect the Palestinian families left behind.
With the diplomatic deadlock broken, Habib made a second breakthrough when Syria and Tunisia agreed to host departing PLO fighters. An advance unit of the Multinational Force (MNF), 350 French troops, arrived in Beirut on August 21.
The Palestinian evacuation by sea to Cyprus and by land to Damascus commenced on the same day. On August 26, the remaining MNF troops arrived in Beirut, including a contingent of 800 United States Marines. The Palestinian exodus ended on September 1. Approximately 8,000 Palestinian guerrillas, 2,600 PLA regulars, and 3,600 Syrian troops had been evacuated from West Beirut.
On the evening of September 16, 1982, the IDF, having surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, dispatched approximately 300 to 400 Christian militiamen into the camps to rout what was believed to be the remnant of the Palestinian forces [Note: The author tries to soften the blatant murder at this point]. The militiamen were mostly Phalangists under the command of Elie Hubayka (also seen as Hobeika), a former close aide of Bashir Jumayyil, but militiamen from the Israeli-supported SLA were also present. The IDF ordered its soldiers to refrain from entering the camps, but IDF officers supervised the operation from the roof of a six-story building overlooking parts of the area. According to the report of the Kahan Commission established by the government of Israel to investigate the events, the IDF monitored the Phalangist radio network and fired illumination flares from mortars and aircraft to light the area. Over a period of two days, the Christian militiamen massacred some 700 to 800 Palestinian men, women, and children.
[Note: Many were mutilated, tortured and raped]
(Politics in Lebanon, The Creation of the Lebanese Army, Ayman Ghazi, 1997)
In 1983, in the wake of the aforementioned slaughter of women and children in Lebanon, the weapons that the PLO had left behind — in the belief that their loved ones would be left alone — were given to the "Contras" through the Honduran military. At the request of the US government:
"Israel's presence in Central America, which is concentrated in Guatemala and Honduras, involves mainly arms sales, military training and consulting with governments about intelligence operations.
The new Israeli role, which the United States did not wish to publicize, was disclosed by a foreign source. The information was confirmed by Administration officials.
The commander of the Honduran armed forces, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, examined samples of the captured Palestinian weapons during an unpublicized visit to a Central Intelligence Agency training center in Virginia earlier this year (1983), according to sources familiar with the visit.
Defense Intelligence Agency listed the captured arms as 290 Soviet tanks, 216 armored vehicles, 215 artillery pieces, 10,000 tons of artillery shells, 40,000 mortar rounds, 5,700 Katyusha rockets, 11,619 mines, 18,950 hand grenades, 6,000 tons of small ammunition and 24,000 rifles."
(ISRAEL SAID TO AID LATIN AIMS OF U.S., NYT, July 21, 1983)
In sum, not only did Israel slaughter and maim their way through Lebanon after they invaded, an onslaught that had been planned for 18 months, it was also a continuation of the terrorist campaign they ran during the PLO unilateral ceasefire. And when the PLO left Beirut, only on the promise that family and fellow Palestinians wouldn’t be harmed, Israel enabled the slaughter, rape, torture and debauchery of hundreds of them in refugee camps. And if that wasn’t enough, they sold the PLO weapons surrendered to other state-sponsored murderers on the other side of the globe - the Contras.
And zionism would fulfill it’s decades old mission (up to a point) of occupying south Lebanon. Through sheer terrorism and slaughter.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah, a Shia militia, came in to being during the early 1980s with the help of Iran, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 1990, with the Taif Agreement ending the civil war there, despite the call for the disbandment of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias, Syria, which controlled Lebanon at that time, allowed Hezbollah to maintain their arsenal and control Shia areas along the border with Israel.
(New Yorker, 14 October, 2002)
In the 1990s, Hezbollah transformed from a revolutionary group into a political one, in a process which is described as the Lebanonisation of Hezbollah. Unlike its uncompromising revolutionary stance in the 1980s, Hezbollah conveyed a lenient stance towards the Lebanese state.
(Ranstorp, Magnus (Summer 1998). "The strategy and tactics of Hizballah's current Lebanonization process". Mediterranean Politics.)
In 1992, Hezbollah stood for elections winning the twelve seats it contested.
At the end of that year, Hezbollah began to engage in dialog with Lebanese Christians. Hezbollah regards cultural, political, and religious freedoms in Lebanon as sanctified, although it does not extend these values to groups who have relations with Israel.
(Elie Alagha, Joseph, “Hizbullah’s Documents From the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto, pp41-45)
On 25 July 1993, following Hezbollah's killing of seven Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon, the IDF carried out their heaviest artillery and air attacks on targets in southern Lebanon since 1982. Remember that the Israeli soldiers were legitimate, military targets on occupied territory.
In April 1996, Israel again launched a ferocious attack on southern Lebanon allegedly in response to “rocket attacks on northern Israel”.
100 Lebanese refugees would pay the price in Qana. This massacre took place on April 18, 1996, near Qana, a village in Southern Lebanon.
The IDF fired artillery shells at a UN compound. Of 800 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge in the compound, 106 were killed and around 116 injured.
(Wiki)
A ceasefire agreement was reached where civilians should not be targeted, which meant that Hezbollah would be allowed to continue its military activities against IDF forces inside Lebanon.
By 2000, Israel withdrew from large parts of south Lebanon, ending an 18 year long occupation.
The 2006 invasion…and defeat
On July 12 2006, again after Israeli military targets were attacked by Hezbollah, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, set up a naval and air blockade, destroyed infrastructure and killed up to 1300 people, “the vast majority of whom were civilians”. [Talk about overkill….] ”Israeli warplanes launched some 7,000 bomb and missile strikes in Lebanon."
Hezbollah saw this as a breach of the 1996 ceasefire agreement where civilians were not to be targeted and launched thousands of missiles in to northern Israel. 165 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed.
On 30 July, the Israeli Air Force bombed the village of Qana in southern Lebanon…again…, killing 28 civilians, of which 16 were children; 13 people were reported missing.
(Why They Died, Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War, HRW, September 2007)
What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.
In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.
The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.
Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.
International law forbids the use of weapons that cause “excessive injury and unnecessary suffering”, and many experts are of the opinion that phosphorous rounds fall directly in that category.
(IDF Commander: We Fired More Than a Million Cluster Bombs in Lebanon, Haaretz, September 12, 2006)
But 2006 was the year that zionism suffered its first real bloody nose in decades.
In fact, Israel had been planning for war against Hezbollah for more than two years. In 2005, a senior Israeli army officer began giving off-the-record Power-Point presentations to American diplomats, journalists, and think tanks, setting out in great detail the plan for the expected operation. “Of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared” (Gerald Steinberg, quoted by Matthew Kalman).
As it became increasingly likely that Israel would fail to debilitate Hezbollah quickly through its massive air campaign, Washington and London provided for it the political support and cover to continue the war, in spite of the international protests and calls for an immediate ceasefire.
After some initial successes, the Israelis were stunned at Hezbollah’s powerful response, including its firing of thousands of Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. Rather than facing an amateur militia, the Israelis soon realized that they were fighting a well-trained and well-equipped guerilla army. Hezbollah even used a Chinese-made C-807 missile against an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast, catching the Israelis off guard and disabling the ship. Israeli intelligence had failed to discover in full before the war what Hezbollah had amassed in its arsenals. The Lebanese fought a high-tech war and paid as much attention to the media battle as they did to the fighting on the ground. Hezbollah fighters cracked the codes of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports on the casualties they had inflicted. Whenever an Israeli soldier was killed, Hezbollah confirmed it by listening to the Israeli radio and then sent the reports immediately to its satellite TV station, Al-Manar, which broadcast the news live. Thus Arab audiences knew the names of Israeli casualties and where they had been killed well before the Israeli army had a chance to inform the soldiers’ families. The psychological impact of this on the Israelis, who had grown accustomed to superiority over the armies of their Arab neighbors, was devastating. By the end of the thirty-four day war, Hezbollah had won a stunning victory by simply having withstood and survived Israel’s onslaught. Rather than strengthening and reinforcing the image of Israel’s invincible deterrence, the war that was to weaken Iran only made Israel itself more vulnerable.
(David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213-223, 2007)
Conclusion
Lebanon was always going to be an easy target for outside forces to manipulate. Especially when those outside forces have no conscience whatsoever. Most people refer to the Oded Yinon plan (written in 1982), rightly, as the template of most zionist intrigue and war planning in the Middle East. But these plans existed long before 1982. Basically their strategy is to foment already existing sectarian, historical or tribal differences to break states up in to smaller, easier to control entities.
These plans were openly discussed as Palestinians had just been ethnically cleansed from their land. The blood hadn’t dried yet, and they were already planning to spill more blood outside the Palestinian borders. Or more specifically, where possible, let others do it for them.
Lebanon fitted this bill perfectly.
Zionism allied itself with Lebanese Christian fascists for decades, culminating in them taking full advantage of the civil war there. A civil war that was instigated through the actions of a Palestinian splinter group connected to Fatah, lead by Abu Nidal. Overwhelming evidence pointed to Nidal being in the pockets of Mossad and the CIA. It was the actions of this group that kicked off the civil war; who gave Israel the excuse they needed to invade Lebanon in 1982 after the PLO had stuck to a ten month unilateral ceasefire; and who gave the Phalanges, under Israeli supervision, an “excuse” to carry out the atrocities in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps when they assassinated their leader.
Israel not only backed the fascist atrocities in Lebanon, they took part in them when they created a fake Palestinian terrorist group which murdered hundreds in massive bomb attacks. They laid a siege on West Beirut and ignored international pleas against this war crime. They murdered 17,000 civilians. Palestinians and Lebanese alike. And continued with their barbarism sporadically throughout their 18 year occupation of southern Lebanon. And in 2006, 6 years after the occupation ended.
What they did to Lebanon from 1948, their attempts to become a “regional imperial power”, involved the attempt to destroy their neighbours. There was no other game plan. There was no PLO. There was no Hamas or Hezbollah. These groups came in to being because of zionist actions. What zionism did to Lebanon was on the books for decades whether there was armed resistance or not.
And when the opposition put a spanner in the works by sticking by the dreaded ceasefires zionism detests, they created their very own “terrorist group” to murder hundreds in provocative horrific acts. Or called on the services of mercenary “splinter groups” such as Abu Nidal’s to strike at pivotal times.
The “surrounded by enemies” siege mentality that they portray internationally is a sham that attempts to cover up the fact that they have been meddling in the affairs of neighboring states to mould them to their liking. Obedient, subservient satellites. If they can’t steal the land, they want to control them from Tel Aviv. And they don’t care how many die or how much they destroy in the process. Always the victim.
