Israel's Aim Is To Destroy the Peace Talks Along With Southern Lebanon

By Rachelle Marshall

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is not the first leader who has left another country in ruins while boosting his popularity at home. His artillery and aircraft have laid waste to southern Lebanon, leaving a 30-mile arc of devastation from the Mediterranean to the Syrian border. The destruction is "vast and encompassing," according to one U.N. official.

A European officer who surveyed the region during the bombardment said, "A sizable area is being forcibly depopulated and virtually all habitation is being destroyed. These people will never be able to come back." The people he was referring to were the 300,000 refugees, in a country of only three million, who fled northward to escape the inferno brought on by unremitting Israeli bombing.

They were not incidental victims but deliberate targets: Rabin stated publicly that "Israel aims to cause a mass flight of residents" from southern Lebanon.

The Conventional Wisdom

What motivated Israel's savage seven-day attack on an already shattered country? The conventional wisdom was best expressed by a San Francisco Chronicle editorial of July 27 that blamed Syrian President Hafez-Assad and the Shi'i militia, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon for escalating the violence in an attempt "to drag Israel into a war and thereby sabotage the peace process." In fact, the opposite is likely to be the case.

The anti-Israel guerrillas in southern Lebanon undoubtedly receive aid from Iran and Syria. Since 1985, however, their principal aim has been to force an end to the Israeli occupation.

South Lebanon's Shi'i population originally welcomed Israel's 1982 invasion as a way of driving the Palestinians from their territory. Their resistance began after Israel first refused to leave the southern half of Lebanon, and also established a nine-mile wide "security zone" across southern Lebanon.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, although Israel's occupation followed an almost universally condemned invasion, the West dismisses those who are resisting Israel's continued presence in Lebanon as "terrorists" and considers Israeli troops in Lebanon to be acting in self-defense.

In the recent cycle of violence, the Hezbollah killed over a period of two weeks in July seven Israeli soldiers, all of them within Lebanon, not Israel. In retaliation, Israel targeted at least 54 Lebanese villages, towns and refugee camps for concentrated bombing and shelling that killed 130 and wounded some 500 people. The ferocious Israeli attacks on civilians provoked—for the first time in months—Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli settlements in which three Israeli civilians were killed. Although all attacks are reprehensible, no matter what their magnitude, Israel's bomb tonnage, and the number of casualties it produced, far outweighed the force used by the other side.

As for sabotaging the peace negotiations, Israel's massive bombing of areas patrolled by Lebanese and Syrian troops, in which one Lebanese soldier and three Syrian soldiers were reported killed, was more likely than Hezbollah attacks on Israeli troops in Lebanon to cause a break in the talks. Israel's actions aroused almost unanimous condemnation from Arab leaders—including the normally noncommittal Egyptian government—and undoubtedly fueled opposition to the peace process among enraged Arab citizens.

In fact, Israel has escalated the violence in southern Lebanon before when a peace conference was imminent. In November 1991, just before the start of the Madrid meetings, Israel shelled Lebanese villages for six days in retaliation for earlier attacks on Israeli soldiers. In January 1992, two days before the second round of peace talks, Israel bombed a Bedouin camp near Beirut, seemingly without reason, killing 12 people. A month later, a week before the third round, Israeli forces assassinated a prominent Shi'i sheikh and his wife and child, provoking a new outbreak of fighting in southern Lebanon.

Coincidence? Perhaps. On the other hand, at this point Rabin may believe a delay in the peace talks might be more to Israel's advantage than to that of its adversaries. He knows Israel eventually must offer substantial territorial concessions if he is to reach any agreement with Syria or the Palestinians. He also knows that any territorial compromise he makes will be bitterly attacked by his right-wing political opponents. The only way out of this dilemma is to distract attention and stall for time.

Raining bombs on the terrified villagers of southern Lebanon may have seemed like the best solution. But sooner or later Israeli leaders will have to accept the fact that there can be no peace—and only a semblance of security—without substantial territorial compromise by Israel.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of New Jewish Agenda, she writes frequently on the Mideast.