The Battle of Beirut: Why Israel Invaded Lebanon

By Michael Jansen. London: Zed Press, 1982. 142 pp.

The Longest War

By Jacobo Timerman, New York, N.Y.: Alfred Knopf, 1982. 167 pp. $11.95

Reviewed by Shakib Otaqui

These two books on Israel's invasion of Lebanon could not be more different. While both condemn the invasion, were written at about the same time and published within days of each other, the two writers approach the subject from totally opposed perspectives.

Jansen does not hide her sympathy for the Palestinians, nor for the innocent Lebanese caught in the crossfire of their conflict with the Israelis. She places the invasion firmly in the context of previous Israeli aggression and expansionism, showing clearly that it differed only in degree—not in kind—from earlier Israeli operations.

Timerman, however, sees the invasion as an aberration from what he imagines to be the mainstream of Zionist ethics. Timerman is an Argentinian Jew who found refuge in Israel after his release from a period of imprisonment and torture by the junta. He appears to accept all the standard Zionist myths about the creation and development of Israel, including the old chestnut about "making the desert bloom." Thus the horrors of the invasion were more of a shock to him than they would have been to someone better informed of the history. Much of the book is therefore given over to lengthy descriptions of the psychological traumas which he, and like-minded Israelis who opposed the war, suffered.

Tracking What Happened

Jansen's writing is much more dispassionate, although the reader is left in little doubt as to the depth of her feelings on the subject. Much of her book is an orderly collation of press reports on the invasion's progress. This serves two crucial purposes. First, it puts on the record much that might have been forgotten, overwhelmed by Israel's—and its Zionist supporters'—tendency to rewrite history.

Perhaps more important, the book concentrates on reports that appeared in dribs and drabs over more than four months, by which time many newspaper readers and television viewers had' become bored with the story.

This concentration turns the horror of the invasion into an almost overwhelming nightmare, especially as most of the reports she quotes are written in the Western media's familiar "objective" style. It is notable that few reporters made any attempt to go beyond factual description into an analysis of the real motives for the invasion.

This Jansen does in a short chapter at the end of her book, which could usefully be expanded into a whole volume. In it, she traces Israel's policies towards the Palestinians in particular, and neighboring Arab countries in general. This leaves little doubt that the invasion was not, as Timerman believes, an "aberration."

Perhaps the most useful part of Jansen's book is an extended quotation from an article describing Israel's plan for a fragmented Middle East dominated by itself. This was published, in Hebrew, in Kivunim (Directions) in February 1982 by the World Zionist Organization, which works closely with the Israeli government. The author, Oded Yinon, was formerly a senior Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry official.

Sectarian Mini-States

Yinon argues that Israel must strive to break up the Middle East into sectarian mini-states incapable of presenting a challenge. The first step would be the transfer of power in Jordan to the Palestinians, helped along by "accelerating the emigration of Palestinians from the West to the East Bank."

Egypt would be split into a Coptic Christian state in the south, "alongside a number of weak states" for the Muslims. Syria would have one Alawite, two Sunni and one or more Druze states. Iraq would be divided into separate states of Kurds, Sunnis and Shia. "The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution," Yinon says, although he does not go into detail.

Lebanon is to be split into five regions-Muslim, Maronite, Christian, Druze, and one each dominated by Israel and Syria respectively. Israeli actions since the end of the full-scale war in Lebanon-particularly in the Chouf mountains-makes it evident that Yinon's blueprint is already being put into practice.

Many Western writers on the invasion expressed some surprise at Israel's willingness to risk international opprobrium for so little apparent return. Jansen's analysis makes it clear that, at least in the eyes of Israeli policy-makers, the risk was well-worth taking. It is this reality which Timerman, with his romantic ideas of Zionism, fails to comprehend. While his book is a poignant demonstration of the mental anguish he and his fellow moderates in Israel suffered, it leaves the reader deeply pessimistic about the Israeli antiwar movement's chances of success. The depth of their misunderstanding of Israel's reality makes one more than dubious that they will ever succeed in changing it.

This review has been re-printed from The Middle East Economic Digest, London.