Despite 162 Deaths in Lebanon, Peres Re-Election Remains Precarious

by Richard H. Curtiss

“The United States has muffled criticism of Israel for the killings of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, and has voiced no genuine objection to its prolonged military occupation of Lebanese territory and collective punishments of civilians in the occupied territories in the name of fighting Hezbollah and Hamas. Wouldn’t the criticism reach the stentorian if the sufferers were largely Jews or Christians?”

—Legal affairs writer Bruce Fein, Washington Times, April 23, 1996.

“President Clinton, in a White House appearance, applauded the cease-fire, while continuing his stance of avoiding even veiled criticism of Israel. He said America’s ‘thoughts and prayers are with the innocent civilians and their families in Lebanon and Israel who have suffered so much during the last two weeks.’”

—Staff Writer William Drozdiak, Washington Post, April 27, 1996.

President Bill Clinton’s White House remarks on the cease-fire in Lebanon, equating the “innocent civilians and their families in Lebanon and Israel” sounded impartial, but were purposely misleading. In Lebanon 162 are dead, of whom 13 were Hezbollah fighters and the rest were civilians, hundreds more are maimed for life, and of the 500,000 Lebanese who were driven out of their towns and villages, several thousand returned to find their homes, or entire neighborhoods, blasted to rubble. Schools and universities in Beirut and central Lebanon were closed to house refugees from the south, many mountain roads will be impassable for weeks, and electricity in Lebanon’s capital has been largely shut off and may remain so in some areas for weeks or even months to come.

In Israel, by contrast, there are no civilians or soldiers dead, only one person is seriously injured, and virtually all of the 20,000 people who sought temporary shelter with relatives living outside the 13- mile range of the Katyusha rockets were able to return to their homes on the day the cease-fire was announced. In every country in the world except the United States, official and media reaction has stressed the lack of “proportionality” in a strike by U.S.-armed Israeli forces that destroyed one-tenth of Lebanon in response to actions of a guerrilla organization over which even the Israeli government admits the Lebanese government has no control.

How can such savagery be explained? Perhaps the story begins in the events of 1981, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sought to stave off what seemed to be inevitable defeat in his Likud bloc’s re-election campaign by mounting airstrikes against Palestinians all over Lebanon, killing a number of Syrian soldiers by shooting down two troop-carrying Syrian helicopters over northern Lebanon, and bombing Iraq’s French-installed experimental nuclear reactor at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

The Iraq bombing, in which a French technician was killed, prompted world-wide condemnation and strained U.S. relations with both Saudi Arabia and Jordan, whose airspace the Israeli military aircraft had violated. However, when all the dust had settled, Begin, whose Likud party had been running far behind his Labor coalition rivals in pre-election polls, had won the Israeli election.

A Page out of Begin’s Book

From April 11 to 26 of this year, therefore, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres took a leaf out of Begin’s election campaign strategy. After the November 1995 assassination of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, public sympathy touched off a rise of 10 to 15 points in Labor’s lead over Likud in Israeli public opinion polls. Rabin’s successor, Peres, chose to capitalize on the upsurge by moving Israeli elections, which by law had to be held before November 1996, up to May 29.

Then came four suicide bombings by Islamist extremists which killed 59 persons in Israel in addition to the four bombers. The bombings seemed such a setback to the “peace process” that, briefly, the two major Israeli parties were neck-and-neck in public opinion polls and Peres feared that another suicide bombing, particularly in the two or three weeks before the election, could sink his chances.

On April 11, therefore, two days after the Jewish Passover holiday, Peres launched his “Grapes of Wrath” operation. It was carefully calculated. Ever since 1993 both Israeli forces in their nine-mile-wide “security zone” carved out of southern Lebanon and the Iran-funded Hezbollah “Party of God” militia, which opposed the Israeli occupation, had operated according to unwritten rules of engagement carefully crafted by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher. It was understood that Hezbollah would refrain from attacking Israel proper and would confine its attacks to the forces of Israel and its puppet militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), in the security zone.

In return, Israel would confine its strikes to Hezbollah rocket launchers, to ambushes of Hezbollah troops trying to infiltrate or fire into the security zone, and to Hezbollah training and headquarters installations. If Israeli forces killed Lebanese civilians in the course of these military operations, Hezbollah would strike back at civilians in Israel.

In general the agreement had been observed by both sides over the three years it had been in force. Meanwhile, however, Hezbollah was exacting a steady toll of Israeli and SLA military personnel in the security zone. In 1994, 21 Israeli and 43 SLA soldiers were killed. In 1995, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed, and in the first four months of 1996, 7 Israeli soldiers had been killed.

On March 30 of this year, in the course of striking back at Hezbollah fighters, Israeli forces killed two civilians in the Lebanese village of Yatta. In retaliation, Hezbollah forces fired Katyusha rockets over the border into Israel, presumably ending that tit-for-tat cycle.

Then, on April 8, a 16-year-old Lebanese boy was killed and his younger brother injured near the village of Barasheet by what Lebanese authorities said was an Israeli remote-controlled bomb placed by the roadside to be detonated when a vehicle passed by. Although Israeli forces denied responsibility, Hezbollah retaliated in the early morning of April 9 with a barrage of Katyusha rockets which wounded 34 Israeli civilians, one of them seriously. This time, however, the cycle did not end with the Hezbollah missiles.

Instead, two days later, Israeli forces began the 16-day land, sea and air operation that ultimately dropped 13,000 artillery shells onto Lebanese homes, factories, roads and vehicles and launched 1,200 aircraft sorties, many of them targeted at electric power plants and relay stations, bridges, and other parts of Lebanon’s war-battered basic infrastructure which will take months to replace. The campaign’s low point was reached on April 18 when Israeli artillery, which had been harassing U.N. observers and their attempts to supervise civilian evacuation convoys for several days, was fired into a compound of U.N. troops from Fiji. The Israeli shells supposedly were targeted automatically on an area between 300 and 400 yards away from which Katyusha rockets had been launched into the security zone.

Under the rules of engagement, Israeli forces were supposed to notify U.N. personnel before firing near their vehicles or installations so that the U.N. personnel could take cover. The Israeli firing commenced at 2:13 p.m. and the telephoned warning came at 2:16. By that time five shells had demolished the unit’s open-sided, thatch-roofed recreation hall, in which hundreds of refugees had taken shelter.

Ninety-two men, women and children were literally blown to bits, and the wounded, including Fijian soldiers, were taken to hospitals all over southern Lebanon. The toll of that one attack exceeded the total dead in the four unrelated suicide bombings by Palestinian Islamists that so traumatized all of Israel only a few weeks earlier.

Galvanizing Horror

The horror of the attack on the U.N. compound, and the deliberate rocketing of an ambulance by an Israeli helicopter in which four children and two adults being evacuated from southern Lebanon died, and the killing of a mother and her seven children—including a four-day-old baby—in their home finally galvanized the world community. The Israeli public, which had been complacent about the attacks until international media criticism began reaching Israel, then began wondering how Shimon Peres was going to bring matters to an end.

By then the Russian, French and five other foreign ministers and a number of diplomats from other countries had traveled to Syria to help negotiate a cease-fire.

The irony of the negotiations escaped no one, including the Israeli public. Israel was punishing the Lebanese over a situation for which it already had admitted the Lebanese government had no control.

In fact the Israeli government had refused to leave its “security zone” when it withdrew from the rest of Lebanon in 1983 on grounds that the Lebanese government was unable to control the Hezbollah militia. Lebanese of all religious and political persuasions subsequently had concluded that in fact Israel had no intention of ever leaving the area. Lebanese believed that Israel hoped, instead, that in a final Israeli-Syrian settlement based upon “full peace for full withdrawal” from Syria’s Golan Heights, Israel would be allowed to keep the territory between Lebanon’s Litani River and its border with Israel.

This was an area originally claimed by the Zionists after World War I for inclusion in their Jewish homeland-to-be, but the claim was rejected by the victorious Allied powers. Subsequently, associates of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, schemed to take it by guile. The plan was outlined by then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan at a May 1955 Israeli cabinet meeting recorded in the famous and revealing diary of Moshe Sharret, another early Israeli prime minister. Sharett wrote: “According to him [Dayan] the only thing necessary is to find an officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israel army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right.”*

Most Lebanese believe the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982, on the pretext of wiping out the PLO there, was the first step in implementation of the plan. The fact that it failed, the Lebanese believe, did not end Israeli hopes that the second part of the plan, involving annexation of “territory from the Litani southward,” could be realized.

To halt this spring’s fighting, the Lebanese government offered to send 35,000 of its troops to take control of the entire border area with Israel if Israel would agree to withdraw its forces from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah, which was created in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and which has evolved from an armed Shi’i Muslim militia to a political party which has five seats in the Lebanese parliament and a network of medical and social service installations in south Lebanon and Beirut, also offered to lay down its arms if the Israelis would withdraw once and for all from Lebanese territory. For its part, France offered to send troops to the Lebanese-Israeli border to help U.N. forces enforce the resulting cease-fire.

Peres, either because of the dream of retaining a part of Lebanon with its access to much-needed Litani River waters, or simply to avoid being regarded as the first Israeli prime minister to withdraw from Arab territory without exacting something tangible in return, announced that he would not accept mediation by the French or any power other than the United States. This put the ball squarely in the court of U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who prior to the current crisis already had made 17 trips to Israel and Syria in the three years the Clinton administration had been in office.

This time Christopher conducted seven more meetings, lasting a total of 22 hours, with Hafez al-Assad. Twice Christopher was kept waiting by Assad and a third time snubbed completely because Assad said he had no time to meet after Christopher arrived late from a protracted meeting with Peres.

After all this, Christopher once again produced a cease-fire, which took effect at 4 a.m. on April 27. Its terms, however, were those of the 1993 agreement, which the Israelis had just broken. The difference was that this time the agreement has been written down.

This, Christopher said, was a “significant improvement” and the U.S. therefore had “achieved the goal of our mission, which was to achieve an agreement that will save lives and end the suffering of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border.”

Privately, American officials admitted to The New York Times that Christopher was deeply humiliated by events in Damascus. “He took a major hit,” an aide said. “He’s a man without a big ego but he has pride. He was absolutely determined not to leave without a deal, and he told Assad we can’t work like this. Today he feels great.” However, a “senior American official” told the Times, “This is not a peace agreement and it won’t substitute for one.”

Peres, his eyes on the May 29 election, asserted blandly that “Israel comes out of this with more quiet and more strength.” Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who said he would sign the accord only to stop the systematic Israeli demolition of his country, put it more bleakly:

“All the killing we have seen and all the destruction was without any use. We said at the beginning that this problem cannot be solved by force; it can be solved only by negotiation and that’s what happened.”

In fact, however, the final results could not be foreseen. A Palestinian suicide bomber apparently blew himself up April 25 in Israel, indicating that extremists have not given up their attempt to derail the peace process by thwarting Peres’ re-election.

Should Hezbollah, an all-Lebanese group that nevertheless derives its support from Iran, decide to thwart the peace process by helping Peres’ rival, Benyamin Netanyahu, win the election, it could do so easily by firing another salvo of Katyushas at Kiryat Shemona, or any of a dozen other populated areas along Israel’s northern border.

Peres, therefore, is held hostage to Islamic radicals in two countries who have vowed to defeat him. His vulnerability is indicated by a poll taken after the cease-fire that showed 49 percent of Israeli voters supporting Peres, and 44 percent supporting Netanyahu.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the slaughter in Lebanon has outraged Israel’s own Arab community only a month before the Israeli election in which their votes could be decisive. In the past, most of Israel’s Muslims and Christians cast their votes for two small parties, and had little effect on the key Labor-Likud contest.

This year Israel’s electoral law has been changed to permit direct election of the prime minister separately from voting for representatives in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Israeli Arabs thus have unprecedented power if they choose to exercise it.

They had been expected to concentrate their votes for representatives in parliament on their traditional parties, but to unite behind Peres as their candidate for prime minister. However, as “Operation Grapes of Wrath” continued, many of Israel’s Arab citizens vowed to cast their votes as planned for Arab Knesset candidates, but to cast blank ballets in the Peres-Netanyahu contest.

This, alone, could produce exactly the electoral catastrophe that Shimon Peres sacrificed 162 Lebanese lives to avoid.