Under Siege Page 3

  It is worth noting that even the harsh remonstrance that Eagleburger addressed to Arens on September 16 mainly focused on how Israel’s decision to enter West Beirut violated assurances the U.S. believed it had received from the Israeli government. The Under Secretary of State was instructed to read talking points to the ambassador which noted that Israel’s seizure of West Beirut was “directly contrary to a series of assurances made in the course of the summer by the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister that Israel had no intention of occupying West Beirut.” Similarly, Draper’s feeble and unheeded protests to Sharon and Shamir on the following day were largely about the Israeli entry into West Beirut and the necessity for a speedy withdrawal (which Sharon and Shamir refused to entertain), rather than specifically addressing the possibility of massacres of Palestinian civilians in violation of U.S. assurances to the PLO.

  It was only after news of the massacre had finally been relayed to Washington by the sole American diplomat remaining at the embassy in West Beirut on September 18, 1982,30 that Secretary of State Shultz met with Ambassador Arens, producing an exchange that is reproduced in the third of these newly declassified documents.31 This time, it was the American who did most of the talking to a clearly chastened Arens, who responded with an expression of sorrow but also with a thoroughly deceptive description of Israel’s actions over the previous days that he said he had just received from Sharon.32 Alluding to the “horrible picture” of the massacre that had just been perpetrated, Shultz told Arens bluntly and forcefully that “the President has asked me to demand of you that you get your forces out of West Beirut.” He reiterated the American view that they had all along being assured by Israel that it never intended to occupy that part of the city. Shultz then went beyond a simple demand for withdrawal, going as far as any American official would to accuse the Israelis of complicity in the massacre. He stated: “When you take military control of a city you are responsible for what happens. I don’t say you wanted this but what happens rests in your hands. We find it very hard to accept that this would take place if you had really asserted yourself in those camps.” He concluded by saying that “the President is deeply upset” and was “deeply depressed by these events.” Shultz thereby firmly slammed the barn door shut long after the horse was gone. The United States finally acted assertively towards Israel, but it was far too late for those lying dead in Sabra and Shatila.

  What can one make of these and other exchanges contained in these three declassified documents? One is that the PLO was grievously mistaken in relying on American assurances to protect the Palestinian civilian population of the camps after the withdrawal of their forces, as these assurances involved restraining an Israeli government over which the United States exercised, or chose to exercise, only very limited influence. This was the second of three significant American pledges over nearly fifty years regarding Palestine or the Palestinians, none of which were honored by the United States. The first of these had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promise to the Saudi ruler, ‘Abd al-’Aziz Ibn Sa’ud, to take no action regarding Palestine that would harm the Arabs, or without consulting with the Arab states. This pledge was conveyed in a letter to the Saudi king on April 8, 1945, after the two men had met in Egypt while Roosevelt was on his way back to the U.S. from Yalta.33 These commitments were completely ignored by Harry Truman and the rest of Roosevelt’s successors in the White House.

  The third commitment was embodied in the U.S. letter of assurances offered to the Palestinians on October 18, 1991, before the Madrid Peace Conference later that month. This letter affirmed that the U.S. intended to oppose actions that would prejudice or preempt outcomes yet to be negotiated, notably “unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be resolved through negotiations” such as “settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967.”34 Over twenty-two years later and three presidential administrations on, the United States has yet to make good on this much-proclaimed intention. One might think that such an unbroken record of broken promises would convince Palestinian leaders of the foolishness of relying on such assurances from a superpower. Unfortunately, some of them apparently have not been convinced of this.

  Another striking feature of these exchanges is the tone of casual arrogance used by Israeli ministers and envoys towards American officials, a characteristic which has surely become familiar to these officials’ successors in office. One of those present on the Israeli side during the first of these meetings was the young diplomat Benjamin Netanyahu, who seconded the bluff tone of his superior, Moshe Arens.35 During these exchanges with their American counterparts, Defense Minister Sharon, Ambassador Arens, Foreign Minister (and later Prime Minister) Shamir, and even more junior officials (like David Kimche and Netanyahu) are brusque to, and sometimes well beyond, the point of rudeness. They clearly do not feel in the least awed by dealing with the top officials of a superpower. Nothing has changed in this regard in more than twenty years. Indeed, if Netanyahu’s lecturing of President Barack Obama before the cameras at the White House in 2011 is any indication, at least one of the personae on the Israeli side in 1982 appears to have learned well from his Likud mentors.36 Netanyahu is now at the pinnacle of the Israeli political system as Israel’s only prime minister besides David Ben Gurion to have been elected to a third term.

  The last enduring element to emerge from these three meetings is the utter feebleness of American diplomacy when it comes to dealing with an obstreperous and uncooperative Israeli ally on the Palestine issue. Some of the reasons for this are commonly known, from the strength of the Israel lobby in Washington to the absence of wide support for the Palestinian narrative in the U.S. public, dynamics which are only beginning, albeit very slowly, to change. Other reasons, as I set out in Brokers of Deceit, include the fact that the interests of the Arab Gulf autocracies are not in contradiction with, and indeed in many respects can be seen to be aligned with, those of Israel. Thus it is not surprising that the formidable “lobby” which staunchly supports these petro-monarchies and is primarily constituted by some of the most powerful titans of the oil, defense, and aerospace industries is rarely engaged on the issue of Palestine.

  But this weakness of American officials extends well beyond the point that would be dictated by what is politically expedient in terms of not being seen to alienate Israel. It seems to stretch to the point of accepting (and even fully adopting) highly questionable baseline Israeli assumptions. President Obama used virtually every well-worn trope of Zionist rhapsody known to American politics in his speech to Israeli students in Jerusalem on March 21, 201 3.37 This wholehearted acceptance of the entire approach of one party to this conflict resonates in the language of American officials over a number of administrations. During the Sharon-Draper exchange, the Palestinians were utterly dehumanized by their Israeli opponents in the encompassing description of them as “terrorists.” What is important here is the fact that this well-worn Israeli approach has come to be adopted by their American interlocutors. We can see that Sharon and his Israeli colleagues’ jackhammer repetition of these words to describe the situation in West Beirut—they used them on average once every 3.5 minutes during a meeting that lasted one and a half hours—finally had its impact on Draper. Draper had been tasked by his superiors with telling the two senior Israeli ministers that the United States wanted Israeli troops to withdraw immediately from West Beirut; these instructions are apparent judging from Under Secretary Eagleburger’s uncompromising tone to Arens the day before. Nevertheless, we have seen that Draper was finally worn down and diverted, in large part by an unrelenting linguistic barrage from the intimidating Israeli defense minister. Virtually the sole time Palestinians are described in different terms by American officials in the forty-nine pages of transcripts from the Israel State Archives made available by the New York Times was in the wake of the massacre, when Secretary of State Shultz described the message he was conveying to Arens as “heavy with grief for these Palestinian people …”38

  The American acceptance of an Israeli-derived narrative to frame events in Beirut in the summer of 1982 goes a long way in explaining why the United States did not then restrain Israel as it had promised to do. The use of that same narrative to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general (as has been done by most recent American presidents, including President Obama in all of his speeches on the topic, up to and including his much-remarked ones in Cairo in 2009 and in Israel in March 2013) is a major part of the larger problem in the Middle East.39 U.S. policy makers and diplomats have shared for too long many of the same skewed assumptions, as well as the perverse and dishonest language that expresses these beliefs, with Israeli leaders. This is why the American officials portrayed in these declassified documents simply could not see that what Ariel Sharon was really talking about on September 17, 1982, amounted precisely to the massacre of innocents, and not the “cleansing” or “neutralizing” of pockets of “terrorists.”

  Ultimately, this still-ongoing abuse of language to conceal and mis-portray reality is why this new edition is still relevant twenty-seven years after Under Siege was first published. So long as the unequal conflict wherein Israel op presses the Palestinians and denies them their inalienable rights is framed for Americans by their leaders and their media in terms derived from the lexicon of these oppressors, there is no hope of the United States contributing to the resolution of this conflict. In these circumstances, American efforts can only exacerbate the conflict, as they have been doing for many years. Worse, if and when further atrocities against the Palestinian people take place, there is the terrible danger that what could be done to prevent them will not happen, as had occurred in Sabra and Shatila in 1982.

  Finally, it is worth noting that to this day, over thirty yea
rs after the event, no one has been punished for the deaths of the nearly 1,400 innocent people who lost their lives in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, or for those of the many thousands of other Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who perished during the 1982 war.

  Notes

  I benefitted greatly from the comments and suggestions of Seth Anziska and Ismail Khalidi in writing this new introduction.

  1. In 2005 Israel unilaterally redeployed its troops and removed its settlers from the Gaza Strip. However, Israel retains full security control over Gaza: regulating entries, exits, imports, and exports; controlling the population register, airspace, and coastal waters; and launching periodical air, land, and sea incursions into the supposedly autonomous area. In the eyes of the international community, including the United States, the Gaza Strip is still effectively under Israeli control, and therefore technically still occupied, after this evacuation. U.N. Security Council resolution 1860 “stress[ed] that the Gaza Strip constitutes an integral part of the territory occupied in 1967” (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/sc9567.doc.htm). The Gaza Strip is listed under “Occupied Territories” in the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report (http://www.state.gov/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/index.htm?dynamic_load_id=186430), while the CIA World Factbook states: “Israel still controls maritime, airspace and other access to the Gaza Strip” (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html).

  2. Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister and long-time defense minister, stated to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot on May 2, 2008: “We entered into Lebanon … [and] Hizbollah was created as a result of our stay there.” It has been argued that among the many factors that contributed to Hizballah’s methods and success was its inheritance from the hundreds of Lebanese students who fought with the “student battalion” of Fateh and in other PLO formations. See Shafiq Ghabra, Hayat ghayr amina: Jil al-ahlam wal-ikhfaqat [An insecure life: The generation of dreams and failures] (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2012), and the fascinating interview with former Fateh military commander Mu’in Tahir, Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filistiniyya 24, no. 94 (Spring 2013): 85–117.

  3. For an analysis of the genesis of these accords and why they produced this outcome, see Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the United States Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon, 2013).

  4. The lasting impact of the war is indicated by the animated 2008 film Waltz with Bashir. It was also adapted as a graphic novel, titled Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (New York: Metropolitan, 2009).

  5. The film was nominated for an Academy Award. See Shlomi Eldar, “‘The Gatekeepers’ Unmasks Israeli Security Apparatus,” Al-Monitor, December 31, 2012, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/6timesiia-ShlomiEldar.html.

  6. Barak Ravid, David Landau, Aluf Benn, and Shmuel Rosner, “Olmert to Haaretz: Two-State Solution, or Israel Is Done For,” Haaretz, December 29, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/news/olmert-to-haaretz-two-state-solution-or-israel-is-done-for-1.234201; Rory McCarthy, “Barak: Make Peace with Palestinians or Face Apartheid,” Guardian, February 3, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace.

  7. Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit.

  8. Ibid., 37–38: In a particularly revealing exchange in 2000, when “final status arrangements” were supposedly being negotiated, American envoy Dennis Ross asked his Palestinian counterpart: “Can you see circumstances under which they will have control over territory and you have sovereignty over it?”

  9. Estimates of the number of victims range from several hundreds to several thousand. Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout’s exhaustive 800-page study of the massacre, based on interviews with survivors as well as a meticulous comparison of all the available records, lists a total of 1,390 victims who were killed or disappeared. See Sabra wa Shatila: Aylul 1982 [Sabra and Shatila: September 1982] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2003); also published in English under the same title by Pluto Press in 2004.

  10. For details on the negotiations for and the nature of these guarantees, see the pages of Under Siege that follow this preface, as well as Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press), 167–71, 175–80.

  11. On pages 194–195 of Palestinian Identity, I argue that “repeated, crushing failure has … in some cases has been incorporated into the narrative of identity as triumph,” especially by the PLO and by Palestinian nationalist writers of the 1960s and afterwards. At the Sixteenth Palestinian National Council meeting, held in Algiers in February 1983 after the dispersal of PLO forces and cadres from Beirut to a half-dozen Arab countries, the claims by some Palestinian leaders that the 1982 war had been a victory provoked Fateh leader ‘Isam Sartawi to say that after any more “victories” like 1982, the PLO would end up in the Seychelles.

  12. A notable exception is Bayan al-Hout’s Sabra wa Shatila. In addition to other works cited in the supplementary bibliography of materials published since this book’s first edition, recent scholarship on the PLO includes Paul Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Recent memoirs of the PLO’s Beirut years include Shafiq al-Hout, My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2011); ‘Iz al-Din al-Manasra, al-Thawra al-filistiniyya fi Lubnan (1972–1982) [The Palestinian revolution in Lebanon, 1972–1982] (Amman: Dar al-Ahliyya, 2010); and Shafiq Ghabra, Hayat ghayr amina.

  13. These assaults include repeated letter-bomb, car bomb, and rocket attacks on the PLO Research Center in Beirut, which culminated in the confiscation of its contents during Israel’s occupation of West Beirut in September 1982 (the contents were later returned as part of a prisoner exchange in 1983); the aerial bombing in October 1985 of the main PLO archives, then in Tunis, where much of the research for this book was done in 1984; and the Israeli security services’ closure of the Arab Studies Society library and historical archives in Jerusalem from 2001 until the present day. The archive’s contents have been seized and moved to the Israel State Archives, where they are currently filed under the rubric “AP,” for “Abandoned Property.” They reside there, under the same rubric, alongside books looted in 1948 from homes in the Arab neighborhoods of Jaffa, Haifa, and West Jerusalem, as is described in the Israeli documentary film, The Great Book Robbery. http://thegreatbookrobbery.org/.

  14. See Lina Khatib, Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), as well as, among others, Ahmad Beydoun, Le Liban: Itinéraire dans une guerre civile (Beirut: CERMOC, 1993); Samir Kassir, La Guerre du Liban: De la dissension nationale au conflit régionale (Paris: Karthala, 1994); and Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and “The Historiography and the Memory of the Lebanese civil war,” Online Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, October 25, 2011, http://www.massviolence.org/Article?id_article=511.

  15. A Syrian infantry brigade, the 85th, was trapped in Beirut during the siege. However, the unit was deployed far from the front lines, and played no significant part in the fighting.

  16. Alexander Meigs Haig and Clare Boothe Luce, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1984); George Pratt Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993); Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); and Michael K. Deaver, Behind the Scenes: In Which the Author Talks About Ronald and Nancy Reagan … and Himself (New York: Morrow, 1988).

  17. Links to the newly declassified documents mentioned below and many others about the 1982 war, as well as other revelations from that year, can be found on the blog of the Israel State Archives: http://israelsdocuments.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/1982.

  18. Columbia University Department of History doctoral candidate Seth Anziska published “A Preventable Massacre” on September 16, 2012, the 30th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/a-preventable-massacre.html?pagewanted=all.