A historic defeat for Zionism The Israeli retreat from Lebanon looks more and more like a political rout for Zionism, an unprecedented disaster for the historic project of Zionist colonization of the Middle East. It has exposed the Achilles Heel of Israeli power and profoundly shaken up the Israeli Jewish masses.
"The Tsahal [Israeli army] can chop whole armies to pieces, but it can do nothing against an entire country that has gone mad," Eytan Haber, Yediot Aharonot's military correspondent wrote in his paper, which is one of the biggest-circulation dailies. (Between them Yediot Aharonot and its competitor for the newspaper "down market" Maariu, claim a readership of 70% of the Jewish population.)
Eytan went on to say, "We must get out and let Lebanon drown in its own blood. Honor? That's for the kind of patrioteers whose sons do their fighting on the San Fransisco beaches. The families who are burying their dead have no use for honor. We have to get out and get out as fast as we can."
were the hardcore of the Gush Emumim [the Block of the Faithful, a leading force in the movement to establish fortified Jewish settlements on the West Bank]. "They were more than a little bit shocked during the Lebanon war. Because they were in combat units and they suffered very heavy lessons. I think that about 10% of the casualties in the Lebanon were in these units because they are elite units.
"I think that this shocked them, because it is one thing to be for the supremacy of the Jewish people in your own quiet home, and another thing to see your best friends dying around you. And also some of them were shocked by Sabra and Shatila. Even though they were right wing people and in the forefront of the occupation, they are not monsters. They are educated people who believe strongly in the morality of their own actions. Some, not all, and not even most, were shocked by Sabra and Shatila. They came face to face with what their ideology means."
Keller went on to explain that this phenomenon was at the root of the development of Netivot Shalom (Paths of Peace), an orthodox Jewish peace group that played a key role in broadening the antiwar movement among Israeli Jews. Counter productive terror
It was the experience of serving in the occupation forces in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war that started him moving toward the peace movement, Gideon Spiro told me. He is one of the leaders of Yesh Gvul, the organisation of reserve soldiers who refuse to serve in Lebanon.
"Suddenly I saw what tremendous power I had in my hands as an occupier, how civilians are so frightened, how you can actually do whatever you want. This situation where I controlled other people was something alarming in my eyes. This can deteriorate very easily, lead to moral degeneration. There are so many possibilities of misusing it, this total power that you have in your hands ... in dealing with other human beings as enemies ... I still remember of the eyes of the people, how frightened they were."
The disaster the Zionist rulers are suffering, in which they have been forced to retreat from an occupied territory for the first time in a combination of the pressure of mass resistance and the disillusion of the Jewish people, can only be magnified by the reprisal tactics they are resorting to now.
It is generally a pretty good indication that a ruling class is losing its grip when it forgets the elementary political principle that for terror to work you have to have the power to make it total and prolonged. 1. Starting in the seventeenth century, the English state tried to finalize the conquest of Ireland by settling the country with Protestants from England and Scotland. Taken as a whole, the project failed, although it established a strong garrison colony in the northeast corner.
International Viewpoint 25 March 1985
Gerry FOLEY
In what had been one of the most jingoistic papers in Israel, Eytan exposed the fundamental weakness of the Israeli state, while scorning what has been seen traditionally by Israeli Jews as its only reliable support in the world, the Zionism of the Jewish diaspora in general and American Jews in particular.
The basic weakness of the Zionist colony in its conflict with the Arab people of the region, in fact, is its relatively small numbers and the attachment of its population to a relatively secure and comfortable style of life. Such a population will not make the same sort of sacrifices as desperate and dispossessed oppressed masses. That is precisely the contradiction that has wrecked previous colonization projects in Ireland and Algeria. (1)
It is not any special religious fanaticism on the part of the Shite masses of Lebanon that creates this problem. It comes from the material conditions of the oppressed community.
The occupation of southern Lebanon had turned into a death trap for the Israeli army. According to the Zionist military authorities themselves, the Tsahal was the target of a minimum of three attacks a day by the Lebanese resistance. Recently, the Israeli army paper, Bama hane, reported that 17% of young recruits supported those soldiers refusing to serve in Lebanon. Among the older reservists, who make up the bulk of Israeli military forces, the proportion was a multiple of that.
Of the first phase of the retreat, the February issue of The Other Israel, the newsletter of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, wrote: "There can be little doubt that the withdrawal is popular in Israel. One proof of this was 12 the open joy of soldiers in Lebanon at leaving and their zeal in dismantling the army installations (according to Yediot Aharonot, one unit, by working in night shifts, managed in eight days a dismantling job which the army planners calculated would require a whole month.)"
Furthermore, the right-wing Zionists failed even to arouse a reaction from the people of the most vulnerable Jewish settlement on the Lebanese border.
"Another indication is the response of the inhabitants of Kiriat Shmona, the northern border town for whose sake the whole 'Operation Peace in Galilee' [that is the invasion of Lebanon, the northern part of Israel is called "Galilee"] was supposed to have been fought. When a demonstration and general strike against the withdrawal were called by the Likudcontrolled Kiriat Shmona municipality, the inhabitants (most of whom are Likud [Zionist hawk] voters) had 'voted with their feet' and the right-wing action ended in a dismal failure."
Occupation duty far from Jewish settlements had to be particularly demoralizing for an army like the Israeli one, which has depended more on moral and patriotic incentives (the need to defend and "redeem" the Jewish people) than traditional military discipline.
Last August in Israel, I talked to Adam Keller, editor of The Other Israel about the effect of the Lebanon war experience on the religious Jews who have represented a sort of second wave of Zionist enthusiasm, trying to make up for the past opposition of orthodox Jews to the Zionist project and the exemptions of religious Jews from military service. These are people educated in the special religious schools, the Yeshivot Ha-Seder.
Keller said. "The Yeshivot Ha-Seder
It obviously cannot be total or seem likely to last in the context of a retreat. The Israelis' quisling forces in southern Lebanon have already drawn this conclusion, deserting en masse.
In the circumstances of a retreat, what the Israeli authorities call their "ironhand" operations can only rouse the Lebanese people to more united and more violent opposition to the Zionist forces. This is exactly what has been happening, and it is quite clear to the critical foreign correspondents.
For example, P.J. Fraceschini wrote March 10 on the front page of Le Monde: "Despite their 'operation iron hand,' the grapes of wrath are ripening rapidly in southern Lebanon, and the Israelis are apt to find the wine bitter. On Friday, March 8, alone, they were the target of seven attacks."
On Sunday, March 10, 12 Israeli soldiers were killed and 14 wounded in a suicide bombing of a convoy near the Israeli frontier.
The following day, Israeli forces launched a full-scale attack on the village of Zrarier, a half a mile north of the part of Lebanon they still occupy. This town is actually a pocket of left-wing strength in southern Lebanon, not specifically of Shiite "fundamentalism" . (2)
The Zionist military authorities announced that they had killed 24 "terrorists". Lebanese civil defense said that 58 civilians had died in the attack. Official Lebanese radio said that the local population had joined with Lebanese government soldiers in defense of the town. In a previous clash in the area, three Lebanese army soldiers were killed.
Since February 16, Lebanese army forces have been involved in battles with the Israeli forces four times, according to a report by Selim Nassib in the March 12 issue of the Paris daily Liberation.
While the international press has generally looked at the Lebanese opposition to the Israeli occupiers only in terms of guerilla attacks, it has been marked in fact by very powerful mass mobilizations. There was a very strong community response to the bombing of a Shiite mosque in the southern Lebanon town of Maarake on March 4, in which leaders of the Amal organization were killed, and to the car-bomb explosion in a Shiite suburb on March 8.
These bombings were attributed not only by Shiite leaders but by the Lebanese government to the Israeli secret services.
The Zionist government's denial that it would use such methods is belied by a long history of terrorist actions organized by the Israeil secret service, Mossad, in particular against PLO leaders, even in West European countries. In both these recent bombings, no Lebanese force had anything to gain, and the March 8 bombing in particular seemed to be aimed against the community as a whole.
In fact, the list of car bombings since January 28, 1983, given in Le Monde on March 10, shows that the majority of them have been against targets that the Israelis would not be sorry to see hit.
The Zionist government has also tried to suggest that what lies behind these bombings, as well as the attacks on its retreating troops, is rivalry between the various Lebanese community-based groups. In fact, this obvious falsehood only highlights still more the fact that the Zionists' occupation of southern Lebanon has united all the Lebanese communities against them.
To all intents and purposes, Israel seems to have lost all its former communalist pawns in Lebanon, finding itself now in conflict with the Shiites and the Druses and, apparently, more and more even with the Christians.
Indeed, Jean-Pierre Langellier wrote in a dispatch from Jerusalem in the March 12 Le Monde: "What is causing particular worry here is that the attack on Sunday March 10, near the 'good border' , that is, in a region where the large majority of the population are Christian and where there has been no guerilla activity up till now. On February 10, already, two soldiers touched of a land mine almost in front of one of the cabins at the Metullah border post."
The Zionist disaster in Lebanon, moreover, can hardly fail to have an effect on the Arab population under Israeli military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For example, the February issue of The Other Israel: "The same Lebanese precedent is also, of course, affecting the Palestinians. Some attacks carried out recently were definitively Lebanese style: such as the killing of an Israeli soldier in Ramallah's (3) main street, in broad daylight, and a few paces from the city's main police station - a kind of act which became all too common in Lebanon but which is almost unprecedented in the West Bank."
Now that the Zionists' Lebanese adventure has ended in disaster, and the majority of the Israeli population has turned against it, the ball is in the court of the anti-Zionists and peace forces.
The Israeli defeat in Lebanon puts in question the basis and the perspectives of the Israeli state up till now. So, there should be an unprecedented opportunity to put forward new alternatives to the Israeli Jewish population and the Arab people under Israeli rule.
The Israeli authorities are trying to reconsolidate Zionist patriotism now by playing on the fears of an Arab terrorist campaign against Jews in Israel and of military attacks from without on the Jewish communities. What political line the Palestinian organizations take in this situation toward the problem of the Jewish population and what they do to mobilize the oppressed people take on a new importance.
The new situation is also a crucial test for the peace movement in the Israeli Jewish community. It has been on the decline for some time for a number of reasons. Two are particularly important. The government's announcement of the withdrawal convinced many activists that the problems were being solved. Secondly, the majority still look to the Labour Party, which has been back in the government since the formation of the National Unity cabinet last fall.
In an article in the January issue of Matzpen, the paper of the Israeli Fourth Internationalists, Moshe Halevy wrote in an article entitled "Whither the Peace Movement?": "Most of the activists and a significant minority among the leadership were not prepared for confrontation with a government including leaders of the Labor Party."
Halevy also pointed out that, in fact, the mass peace movement had its origins in the contradiction between the aggressive policy of the Likud government under Begin and the hopes aroused by the peace treaty with Egypt for a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Now, in order to survive and meet •the challenge of the new situation, the peace movement will have to face the deeper problems involved in the basic role of the Israeli state in the region and the relations of the Jewish colony with the Arab people. 2. Cf. Selim Nassib in Liberation, Paris March 13. 3. A large Arab town close to east Jerusalem.
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Lebanese border post (D.R.)
International Viewpoint 25 March 1985
INDONESIA