Frontpage magazine has published the worst commentary on the Israeli involvement in Lebanon ever. The article is by somebody named Steven Plaut. I was thinking about responding to it, but the errors are so vast and so numerous, this calls for a good old-fashioned fisking. Here it is: (Plaut’s article is in italics)
It is not well understood overseas to what a great extent Israel's Left was radicalized by Israel's "Peace for Galilee" invasion of Lebanon in 1982-3. This radicalization was very similar to the way that the American Left was radicalized by the War in Vietnam. Just as the American Left emerged from its "campaign" against that war as little more than a movement of anti-Americanism, now ever-so-evident in the pro-Saddam marchers against "War for Oil" on US campuses today, so the Israeli Left emerged from the Lebanese War as little more than a movement of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, and increasingly even of anti-Semitism.
So now even Jews can be anti-Semitic. Interesting.
This is important to understand for lots of reasons. It explains most of what transpired in Israel over the past decade. And it even explains such things as the sudden determination of Belgium and perhaps some others to indict Ariel Sharon as a "war criminal". The Western media has long regarded Sharon as a war criminal and mass murderer. But in reality, Sharon's only "war crime" was to upset the newly radicalized Israeli Left in the early 1980s and their amen choruses abroad. We thought it behooves us to refresh some poor memories about what exactly Sharon's "war crime" really was.
Yes, please, refresh me. This should be interesting.
Before 1982, most of the Israeli Left was a patriotic Zionist Left, strongly pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, wanting nothing to do with the PLO, strongly pro-defense, and parts of it were even strongly supportive of building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Left differed from the Israeli Right only on secondary aspects of these matters, mainly on its insistence that Israel must remain "contingently pro-peace", that is, willing to discuss hypothetical partial withdrawal from the "occupied territories" on the off-chance that the Arabs might some day hypothetically be willing to pursue peace, but militant and obstinate as long as the Arabs were unwilling. Even the "Peace Now" protest movement back then was not pro-PLO nor pro-capitulation to the Arabs, and it did not call for a PLO-led Palestinian state, although no doubt some of its members did support this.
The PLO had long turned Lebanon into an inter-Arab killing field, and all those do-gooders and bleeding hearts today pretending to be outraged by the Sabra and Shatilla massacres have long forgotten the tens of thousands of people butchered in the Lebanese civil wars, in which the PLO was detonator and played a leading role. The PLO had also turned Lebanon into a launch pad and rocket base for attacking Israel, all this under Syrian auspices. Syria was the puppet master behind the scenes, perpetuating the Lebanese butchering and civil war to allow itself to take over most of Lebanon in salami tactics. Among the many atrocities launched by the PLO and its sister affiliates against Israel were the massacres of children at Avivim in 1970 and at Maalot in 1974.
His facts here are correct, but his only point seems to be that Sabra and Shatilla weren’t too bad considering the people the PLO was killing in Lebanon. What the PLO did in the civil war is beside the point. And the two Israeli massacres he mentions weren’t nearly as bad as Sabra and Shatilla.
On June 3, 1982, Palestinians from the Abu Nidal group tried to murder Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov. He was badly injured, but recovered and went on to become an Oslo Leftist. But the Likud government of Prime Minister Menahem Begin used this as causus belli, as a basis for invading Lebanon and clearing out the Palestinian terrorists. To do so, he had established ties with some of the Christian militia forces fighting the PLO in Lebanon, and particularly the Falange, a militia led by Pierre Gemayal, brother to Lebanese President Bashir Gemayal. Because of their links to the Gemayals, the Falange was as close as one could find in those days to a legitimate governing force in Lebanon.
I don’t get this at all. First of all, Pierre Gemayel was Bashir’s father, not brother. The fact that Plaut does not know this indicates the quality of his research. Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalange (not Falange) decades ago after observing Hitler’s Nazi soldiers in the 1936 Olympics in Munich. He was in no condition to run a militia in 1982. Bashir was the clear leader of the Phalange at the time.
While the Gemayals and their fighters pretty much sat back, Israeli troops drove the terrorists out of southern Lebanon (and later set up their own Southern Lebanese Army, manned by Christians and Shi'ites in southern Lebanon allied to Israel, and patrolling Israel's security zone there). When Israel first invaded southern Lebanon, polls showed that 92% of the Israeli public, including Israeli Arabs in the count, supported the invasion. The proportion of the Israeli press OPPOSING the campaign was close to the same 92%. The Israeli media were already under the near-totalitarian domination of leftist extremists.
Or maybe the Israeli media were right. By the way, by “terrorists” he means Palestinians.
Quickly it became clear that Prime Minister Begin and his Defense Minister Sharon did not intend to stop at the 40 km. marker they had originally announced as their target. They continued up to the perimeters of Beirut and then conquered parts of the city. They had Arafat surrounded, but due to the usual US interference, they allowed Arafat and his terrorocracy to evacuate for Tunis on US ships. There Arafat sat and rotted until Shimon Peres and the Israeli Left rescued the PLO from oblivion and invited it back into Israeli territories to resume murdering Jews.
Damn USA always interfering! Like Sharon didn’t want America’s help at the time.
While originally support for the campaign in Israel was almost unanimous, it started to waver due to high Israeli casualties. Israel was fighting in built-up areas, and rather than pulverize these areas into smithereens with artillery to save Israeli lives, something that would have caused Lebanese civilian casualties, Begin and Sharon tried to reduce the bad press by taking these areas in house-to-house fighting. This pre-Oslo niceness cost Israel hundreds of soldiers. It also did not buy any good will for long. If there is any "war crime" for which Begin and Sharon should have been prosecuted, allowing so many Israeli troops to die for good press was it.
So that Lebanese civilians would have died instead? He just said that it would have been better to kill innocent Lebanese caught up in this war than Israeli soldiers, who were the ones invading. This is how warmongers think, folks. And they claim to care about innocent Iraqis.
On Sept 14, 1982, the Lebanese President was assassinated in a bomb explosion, probably planted by the PLO. His brother Amin was elected in his place. Two days later, the Lebanese Felange troops entered Sabra and Shatilla, passing Israeli troops and checkpoints along the way. The camps were thought to contain 2000 fully-armed PLO terrorists. Israeli troops were not inside the camps. All those Monday Morning Wiseacres who now think the massacres were clearly foreseeable did not foresee what would happen. They also ignore the fact that as the personal militia of the Lebanese President, Israeli troops did not have a legitimate basis to block the movements of the Felange in their own country.
He’s now spelled Phalange two different ways, both wrong. Anyway, it’s not a mystery who killed Bashir Gemayel. The Syrians did it, not the PLO. A Syrian agent was caught and later confessed. Thomas Friedman tells all about it in From Beirut to Jerusalem. By suggesting the PLO may have done it, he’s implying that maybe Sabra and Shatilla deserved what they got. On top of that, Israel was given plenty of warning not to send the Phalange into those camps. The Phalange were known for their ruthlessness.
What happened next is pretty well know. The enraged Felange militia men went on a revenge killing spree. The exact number of Palestinians killed is unknown: probably around 400, although the anti-Israel propagandists put it at 700-800 or more. It was still peanuts compared with the numbers murdered in the Lebanese civil wars by the PLO and the Moslem and Christian militias there. It was also tiny compared with the numbers of Belgian Jews murdered when the Belgian authorities collaborated with the German Nazis, those same Belgians now selectively judging the leaders of the world for their "war crimes".
Wait, so now he does care about Lebanese civilians? I like the Belgian segway as well.
The killing though shocked Israelis and galvanized the Israel-bashing street urchins around the world. It also was the trigger for a campaign by the Israeli Left to delegitimize and demonize the Likud, Ariel Sharon, and indirectly their entire country.
“Delegitimize" is not a real word. And any demonization Sharon got was deserved.
The Israeli Left was out in force in 1982, with banners screaming that Begin and Sharon were murderers and war criminals. These were the very same leftists who just a few years later would denounce Israel's anti-Oslo Right as collectively guilty of killing Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin because of "incitement" and because "words kill". Nanoseconds after the Israeli Left proclaimed Sharon and Begin as war criminals, the anti-Semites of the world took their cues from them. It was also the precursor for the Solidarity-with-Saddam street protests in 1991 and then again now.
Once again, using the most radical fringes of a movement to smear them all. Even if there were anti-Semites who took advantage of the situation, that doesn’t mean what Sharon did was okay. It’s a separate issue entirely.
The Sabra and Shatilla massacres were murders of Palestinian Arabs by Christian Lebanese Arabs. Not a single victim was killed by an Israeli or a Jew. The very most that Sharon can be legitimately accused of in all of this is possible foolishness, of not having the prescience to see what the Felange would due if it entered the camp.
The Phalange are not Christian Arabs. They don’t look Arab at all They’re mostly Maronite Christians, and they look like Greeks or Italians.
Foolishness is not a "war crime" and it is not "genocide". If it were, President Bush should be in the dock for not foreseeing September 11 and perhaps President Roosevelt could have been prosecuted for lacking the foresight to prevent Pearl Harbor. If it were, most of Europe should be prosecuted for what went on in Rwanda.
Bush should be in the dock for not foreseeing September 11. But Sharon is still a different story. You cannot plausibly claim that he had no idea what the Phalange would do, unless you want to claim that he had no idea what was going on in Lebanon at the time. Everybody knew the reputation of the Phalange. He got them to do what he secretly wanted to do, which undercuts Plaut’s point about no Israelis doing the killing. Of course they didn’t do the killing; they needed a scapegoat.
The article goes on, but I’ll spare you. He repeats many of the same points and then goes on a long tirade about the anti-Semitic Left. This should give you a good idea of the mindset of those who want war so bad. Scary, isn’t it?
It is not well understood overseas to what a great extent Israel's Left was radicalized by Israel's "Peace for Galilee" invasion of Lebanon in 1982-3. This radicalization was very similar to the way that the American Left was radicalized by the War in Vietnam. Just as the American Left emerged from its "campaign" against that war as little more than a movement of anti-Americanism, now ever-so-evident in the pro-Saddam marchers against "War for Oil" on US campuses today, so the Israeli Left emerged from the Lebanese War as little more than a movement of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, and increasingly even of anti-Semitism.
So now even Jews can be anti-Semitic. Interesting.
This is important to understand for lots of reasons. It explains most of what transpired in Israel over the past decade. And it even explains such things as the sudden determination of Belgium and perhaps some others to indict Ariel Sharon as a "war criminal". The Western media has long regarded Sharon as a war criminal and mass murderer. But in reality, Sharon's only "war crime" was to upset the newly radicalized Israeli Left in the early 1980s and their amen choruses abroad. We thought it behooves us to refresh some poor memories about what exactly Sharon's "war crime" really was.
Yes, please, refresh me. This should be interesting.
Before 1982, most of the Israeli Left was a patriotic Zionist Left, strongly pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, wanting nothing to do with the PLO, strongly pro-defense, and parts of it were even strongly supportive of building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Left differed from the Israeli Right only on secondary aspects of these matters, mainly on its insistence that Israel must remain "contingently pro-peace", that is, willing to discuss hypothetical partial withdrawal from the "occupied territories" on the off-chance that the Arabs might some day hypothetically be willing to pursue peace, but militant and obstinate as long as the Arabs were unwilling. Even the "Peace Now" protest movement back then was not pro-PLO nor pro-capitulation to the Arabs, and it did not call for a PLO-led Palestinian state, although no doubt some of its members did support this.
The PLO had long turned Lebanon into an inter-Arab killing field, and all those do-gooders and bleeding hearts today pretending to be outraged by the Sabra and Shatilla massacres have long forgotten the tens of thousands of people butchered in the Lebanese civil wars, in which the PLO was detonator and played a leading role. The PLO had also turned Lebanon into a launch pad and rocket base for attacking Israel, all this under Syrian auspices. Syria was the puppet master behind the scenes, perpetuating the Lebanese butchering and civil war to allow itself to take over most of Lebanon in salami tactics. Among the many atrocities launched by the PLO and its sister affiliates against Israel were the massacres of children at Avivim in 1970 and at Maalot in 1974.
His facts here are correct, but his only point seems to be that Sabra and Shatilla weren’t too bad considering the people the PLO was killing in Lebanon. What the PLO did in the civil war is beside the point. And the two Israeli massacres he mentions weren’t nearly as bad as Sabra and Shatilla.
On June 3, 1982, Palestinians from the Abu Nidal group tried to murder Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov. He was badly injured, but recovered and went on to become an Oslo Leftist. But the Likud government of Prime Minister Menahem Begin used this as causus belli, as a basis for invading Lebanon and clearing out the Palestinian terrorists. To do so, he had established ties with some of the Christian militia forces fighting the PLO in Lebanon, and particularly the Falange, a militia led by Pierre Gemayal, brother to Lebanese President Bashir Gemayal. Because of their links to the Gemayals, the Falange was as close as one could find in those days to a legitimate governing force in Lebanon.
I don’t get this at all. First of all, Pierre Gemayel was Bashir’s father, not brother. The fact that Plaut does not know this indicates the quality of his research. Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalange (not Falange) decades ago after observing Hitler’s Nazi soldiers in the 1936 Olympics in Munich. He was in no condition to run a militia in 1982. Bashir was the clear leader of the Phalange at the time.
While the Gemayals and their fighters pretty much sat back, Israeli troops drove the terrorists out of southern Lebanon (and later set up their own Southern Lebanese Army, manned by Christians and Shi'ites in southern Lebanon allied to Israel, and patrolling Israel's security zone there). When Israel first invaded southern Lebanon, polls showed that 92% of the Israeli public, including Israeli Arabs in the count, supported the invasion. The proportion of the Israeli press OPPOSING the campaign was close to the same 92%. The Israeli media were already under the near-totalitarian domination of leftist extremists.
Or maybe the Israeli media were right. By the way, by “terrorists” he means Palestinians.
Quickly it became clear that Prime Minister Begin and his Defense Minister Sharon did not intend to stop at the 40 km. marker they had originally announced as their target. They continued up to the perimeters of Beirut and then conquered parts of the city. They had Arafat surrounded, but due to the usual US interference, they allowed Arafat and his terrorocracy to evacuate for Tunis on US ships. There Arafat sat and rotted until Shimon Peres and the Israeli Left rescued the PLO from oblivion and invited it back into Israeli territories to resume murdering Jews.
Damn USA always interfering! Like Sharon didn’t want America’s help at the time.
While originally support for the campaign in Israel was almost unanimous, it started to waver due to high Israeli casualties. Israel was fighting in built-up areas, and rather than pulverize these areas into smithereens with artillery to save Israeli lives, something that would have caused Lebanese civilian casualties, Begin and Sharon tried to reduce the bad press by taking these areas in house-to-house fighting. This pre-Oslo niceness cost Israel hundreds of soldiers. It also did not buy any good will for long. If there is any "war crime" for which Begin and Sharon should have been prosecuted, allowing so many Israeli troops to die for good press was it.
So that Lebanese civilians would have died instead? He just said that it would have been better to kill innocent Lebanese caught up in this war than Israeli soldiers, who were the ones invading. This is how warmongers think, folks. And they claim to care about innocent Iraqis.
On Sept 14, 1982, the Lebanese President was assassinated in a bomb explosion, probably planted by the PLO. His brother Amin was elected in his place. Two days later, the Lebanese Felange troops entered Sabra and Shatilla, passing Israeli troops and checkpoints along the way. The camps were thought to contain 2000 fully-armed PLO terrorists. Israeli troops were not inside the camps. All those Monday Morning Wiseacres who now think the massacres were clearly foreseeable did not foresee what would happen. They also ignore the fact that as the personal militia of the Lebanese President, Israeli troops did not have a legitimate basis to block the movements of the Felange in their own country.
He’s now spelled Phalange two different ways, both wrong. Anyway, it’s not a mystery who killed Bashir Gemayel. The Syrians did it, not the PLO. A Syrian agent was caught and later confessed. Thomas Friedman tells all about it in From Beirut to Jerusalem. By suggesting the PLO may have done it, he’s implying that maybe Sabra and Shatilla deserved what they got. On top of that, Israel was given plenty of warning not to send the Phalange into those camps. The Phalange were known for their ruthlessness.
What happened next is pretty well know. The enraged Felange militia men went on a revenge killing spree. The exact number of Palestinians killed is unknown: probably around 400, although the anti-Israel propagandists put it at 700-800 or more. It was still peanuts compared with the numbers murdered in the Lebanese civil wars by the PLO and the Moslem and Christian militias there. It was also tiny compared with the numbers of Belgian Jews murdered when the Belgian authorities collaborated with the German Nazis, those same Belgians now selectively judging the leaders of the world for their "war crimes".
Wait, so now he does care about Lebanese civilians? I like the Belgian segway as well.
The killing though shocked Israelis and galvanized the Israel-bashing street urchins around the world. It also was the trigger for a campaign by the Israeli Left to delegitimize and demonize the Likud, Ariel Sharon, and indirectly their entire country.
“Delegitimize" is not a real word. And any demonization Sharon got was deserved.
The Israeli Left was out in force in 1982, with banners screaming that Begin and Sharon were murderers and war criminals. These were the very same leftists who just a few years later would denounce Israel's anti-Oslo Right as collectively guilty of killing Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin because of "incitement" and because "words kill". Nanoseconds after the Israeli Left proclaimed Sharon and Begin as war criminals, the anti-Semites of the world took their cues from them. It was also the precursor for the Solidarity-with-Saddam street protests in 1991 and then again now.
Once again, using the most radical fringes of a movement to smear them all. Even if there were anti-Semites who took advantage of the situation, that doesn’t mean what Sharon did was okay. It’s a separate issue entirely.
The Sabra and Shatilla massacres were murders of Palestinian Arabs by Christian Lebanese Arabs. Not a single victim was killed by an Israeli or a Jew. The very most that Sharon can be legitimately accused of in all of this is possible foolishness, of not having the prescience to see what the Felange would due if it entered the camp.
The Phalange are not Christian Arabs. They don’t look Arab at all They’re mostly Maronite Christians, and they look like Greeks or Italians.
Foolishness is not a "war crime" and it is not "genocide". If it were, President Bush should be in the dock for not foreseeing September 11 and perhaps President Roosevelt could have been prosecuted for lacking the foresight to prevent Pearl Harbor. If it were, most of Europe should be prosecuted for what went on in Rwanda.
Bush should be in the dock for not foreseeing September 11. But Sharon is still a different story. You cannot plausibly claim that he had no idea what the Phalange would do, unless you want to claim that he had no idea what was going on in Lebanon at the time. Everybody knew the reputation of the Phalange. He got them to do what he secretly wanted to do, which undercuts Plaut’s point about no Israelis doing the killing. Of course they didn’t do the killing; they needed a scapegoat.
The article goes on, but I’ll spare you. He repeats many of the same points and then goes on a long tirade about the anti-Semitic Left. This should give you a good idea of the mindset of those who want war so bad. Scary, isn’t it?
posted by Matt at
12:21 PM
