Washington Report, November 4, 1985, Page 9

Policy

The Passionate Attachment

An Address by George W. Ball September 5, 1985 at the National Convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

In the best homiletic tradition, I shall begin my sermon this evening with a text, then suggest a thesis and an anecdote to illustrate that thesis.

I shall take my text from George Washington's Farewell Address published on September 19, 1796, as he approached the completion of his second term. That address reflected the collective insights of some of the sharpest minds in American history; it was edited and revised by James Madison and John Jay, and particularly by Alexander Hamilton, yet it was still very much Washington's own testament of advice to his country. Although called an "Address," the President did not personally deliver it, as would be the case today, with a frenzied advance build-up of media speculation and the aid of a concealed teleprompter; in fact, he did not deliver it orally at all. Instead, the President arranged for it to be published at the then seat of government in the columns of the Philadelphia Daily American Advertiser.

He packed the address with sage advice for the young American republic. Washington cautioned the nation to be neutral, and particularly "to observe good faith and justice toward all nations," and to "cultivate peace and harmony with all." He particularly admonished Americans to avoid "permanent, inveterate antipathies" against particular nations and "passionate attachments" for others. A passionate attachment toward a favored nation produces, he pointed out, "a variety of evils"; sympathy for the favored nation facilitates "the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and by infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification."

The wisdom of Washington's advice has recently been dramatically validated by an incident that has confused and angered American citizens—the skyjacking of TWA Flight 847 during which a group of Lebanese Shias killed one American Marine and held hostage the remaining 152 American passengers. As we all know, the affair quickly became a television obsession that absorbed the rapt attention of millions of people all over the world. In America, at least, it was watched with anxiety and bitterness—and almost complete incomprehension. Why, troubled Americans asked, were the Shias doing this dreadful thing to our countrymen when, so far as they knew, our country had never done anything to harm them?

As is customary in times of crisis, public discussion focused on the immediate problems of how to secure the return of the hostages; and how to find and punish the perpetrators. So the haunting question of "why" remains largely undiscussed. Yet, if we are to learn anything useful from that searing hostage experience, it is important, even at this late date, that we try to come to grips with the central issue of motivation in the context of history and of larger policy.

Although few realized it at the time, what the exhausting television ordeal revealed to all the world was the latest chapter in a particularly ill-conceived and unedifying episode—Israel's invasion of Lebanon and America's role in that misguided enterprise.

When, in early 1982, Israeli government representatives warned Secretary of State Alexander Haig that, in order to put Israeli soil outside the range of PLO cannons and rockets, Israel's armed forces might cross into Southern Lebanon and establish a new border (or "security area") forty kilometers north, the Secretary replied with words that subsequently became meaningless through repetition:

Without an internationally recognized provocation, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon would have a devastating effect on the United States.

Those words—stylized as they were—at least committed Haig not to let the event of an invasion pass without some visible reaction. So, when the Israeli forces pushed across the border on June 6, 1982, our government ritualistically supported a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. As everyone expected, Israel disdainfully ignored that Resolution and, as those who knew any history expected, our government then demonstrated that its affirmative vote had only been a public relations gesture. Thus, two days later, when William Clark, then National Security Advisor, in a quiet moment during the NATO Conference at Windsor Castle informed Haig that the United States Mission in New York was about to vote for a resolution condemning Israel for its invasion and threatening—though not imposing—sanctions, Haig frantically telephoned our Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and in categorical tones instructed her not only to veto the resolution but to disregard contrary instructions from any other quarter.

Although Haig thus blocked any effective action by the United Nations, America had other cards to play had it chosen to do so. Whenever we provided Israel with military equipment our government required that Israel give us an unambiguous written commitment that it would use that equipment only for purposes of "legitimate self defense." That commitment was standard procedure; it was required by American statutes and we had rigorously enforced it against Turkey in 1975 when the Turks had used American-supplied weapons in their 1974 invasion of Cyprus. In spite of strong protests from Ankara we cut off all military sales to Turkey for two whole years. But no one called that to the Israelis' attention in a serious manner.

“A passionate attachment toward a favored nation . . . facilitates ‘the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and by infusing into one the enmities of the others, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification.’”

One might have forgiven Haig's performance had he been ignorant of the larger ambitions of Israel's Defense Minister, General Ariel Sharon. In spite of Prime Minister Begin's repeated assurance to President Reagan, Sharon was not leading Israeli forces into Lebanon merely to insure "Peace in Galilee" or even to destroy the headquarters of the PLO; he had in mind a Grand Design. Sharon's Realpolitik plan was to try to secure the election of a friendly Maronite, Bashir Gemayel, who would, on taking office, sign a peace treaty with the Begin government and thus neutralize Lebanon just as the Camp David Accords had already neutralized Egypt. But to assure that required Israel's forces to reach Beirut prior to the presidential election scheduled for August 23rd. Only thus could Sharon bully the Lebanese parliament into electing Bashir Gemayel, with whom the Israelis had long been conspiring.

Did Haig know what Sharon was scheming? The evidence is clear that while visiting Washington in May 1982 Sharon told Haig and his staff of his intentions, including the plan to attack Beirut and even confront the Syrians. But Haig did not greet this demarche with vigorous protests; he merely repeated his stylized comment about the need for "a recognized provocation," and he later repeated those same words in a letter to Prime Minister Begin on May 28, 1982—a letter which, in the view of knowledgeable Israelis, Jerusalem interpreted as a "green light."

In any event Haig could hardly have been unaware that the IDF was preparing a project for a geopolitical adventure. On April 8, two months prior to the invasion, John Chancellor had described on NBC News what, according to the distinguished Israeli defense correspondent Ze'ev Schiff, "amounted to a virtual exposure of the Israeli war plans," including the plans for attacking Beirut and confronting the Syrian forces in the Beka'a Valley. Thus, Schiff concludes, Washington was "duty informed" about Sharon's plans "that went beyond Southern Lebanon."

Why Secretary Haig did not react more forcefully can now be clearly seen: He was basically in favor of Sharon's scheme provided it could be quickly executed and would not involve the United States too deeply. As Haig himself wrote in his memoirs, he held roughly the same goals as Sharon; he wished the PLO purged from Lebanon; he wanted Syria's influence destroyed; and he hoped to have Syria's protege, President Sarkis, replaced by a Maronite strongman who could impose law and order.

Thus, as Schiff and another respected Israeli journalist, Eh'ud Yaari, later wrote:

...Israel could not have asked for a better spokesman for its cause than Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Washington—unsolicited, it seemed—was going to do its part by protecting Israel's political flank, giving Menachem Begin good reason to feel that he was standing on solid ground.

Inevitably, the word spread throughout the Middle East that, by acting as it had, the United States government had indeed improved the invasion. That produced profound repercussions in Israel because, as Ze'ev Schiff has written:

A more resolute American response would have strengthened moderate elements in the Cabinet and would have prevented the two months' shelling of Beirut.

Thus Israeli Cabinet members who were against extending the war to Beirut said, so Schiff reported, that they could not oppose Israel's imperialistic plans so long as Washington did not come out against them, and he quoted one minister as saying:

I cannot show myself to be less of a patriot than the Americans.

Later, when the Israeli government was considering plans to enter West Beirut, the same minister said:

The Americans have got Israel into a mess. They have to climb up a high tree and now it's a hell of a job climbing down again.

That comment followed a classic Israeli tradition of blaming their country's primary benefactor, the United States, for any reckless move taken by any Israeli government that might lead Israel into a costly or awkward position. Invariably it is all America's fault.

But if the politicians in Jerusalem held America responsible for the Israeli government's foolish moves, Arab leaders reached a more accurate and even less flattering conclusion. Their suspicions were initially aroused by America's conspicuous failure to use even half-protective measures to dissuade Israel from attacking Lebanon. Then Arab opinion changed to indignation and incredulity when the Reagan Administration showed its patent flaccidity by vetoing the Security Council resolutions. Finally Arab doubts seemed definitively confirmed when the President courteously asked the Begin government to pause in its brutal assault on West Beirut long enough for our Ambassador to complete his negotiations to secure the PLO withdrawal that Israel was seeking. Although the Begin government granted that favor it did so with arrogant condescension, adding the qualification that it would hold back its forces only briefly. "Habib will have to hurry," the Israelis said; "Israel was losing patience." In other words, the Americans had better get on with it or Israel would intensify its murderous assault.

Yet when, as we all know, Habib did get on with it, General Sharon still did not halt the carnage. On August 11, even after Israel had accepted the evacuation plan "in principle," Sharon ordered his air force to launch the next day the most ferocious attack of the war—an eleven-hour shelling and bombing of West Beirut—which continued relentlessly until frantic Lebanese authorities felt compelled to suspend the peace talks.

As two Israeli correspondents commented:

What made "Black Thursday" so terrifying was the sense of brute violence run wild, given the sharp contrast between the progress in the negotiations and the savage attack on the city.

The sustained August 12th attack was so wantonly vicious as to exceed even President Reagan's high threshold of tolerance. He telephoned Prime Minister Begin to express his "outrage"; for, as the President said, those attacks had caused "needless destruction and bloodshed."

But that protest was too weak and came too late. Inevitably the implications of our irresolute conduct and our willingness to accept humiliation from the Begin Government, resonating through the Arab capitals, confirmed the suspicions raised by our other gestures of acquiescence and failures to act. Since the Israeli invasion had, the Arabs concluded, been sanctioned by the United States government, America was thus an accessory before, during, and after the fact. The contradictions implicit in the Reagan Administration's pattern of conduct were interpreted as an effort to appease the Arabs with soothing evasions while America unqualifiedly backed Israel on every substantive issue.

Thus, not only did America's willingness to indulge the whims and fancies of the Israeli ward infuriate the various Arab factions in Lebanon; it identified our country with Israel as a co-aggressor. The Shias in particular were bitterly alienated; for their disenchantment need never have occurred.

When the Israeli armies first crossed the border, the Shias in South Lebanon had greeted the invading forces with smiles and flowers, regarding them as deliverers from the suffocating presence of the PLO—with its brutal occupation and heavy-handed extortions. Had the Israelis maintained restraint and discipline over their own forces—and had they not ostentatiously flaunted their longer-term economic and imperialistic designs—they presumably could have built a lasting friendship with the Shias and even enlisted them as allies in restraining the PLO.

But, unfortunately, the Israeli leaders behaved with a total disregard for Shiite vital interests. The facts and the resultant atmosphere are vividly recorded in contemporary diaries kept by Israeli soldiers such as Lt. Colonel Dov Yermiya, a Sabra company commander who had participated in every Israeli war.

His diary covers his period of service day by day during the early months of the invasion in the summer of 1982. After describing the behavior of the Israeli Defense Forces (the IDF) toward the local inhabitants he concludes:

The Jewish, Israeli soldier, whose hypocritical commanders and politicians call him the most humane soldier in the world, the IDF which claims to preserve the "purity of arms" (a sick and deceitful term), is changing its image. For this is what I ran into every step of the way: despicable actions of humiliation, of striking at women and children who wandered, confused and miserable, along the sidelines of the war and its aftermath, not knowing their own souls in their fright, hunger, and thirst.

While searching for terrorists and weeding them out, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are captured, They undergo an infinite number of degradations, are left thirsty, hungry, and mercilessly beneath the rays of the hot sun. And when they leave, some of them having been battered and beaten, and return to their homes or to whatever is left of them, it is not possible that they will love the soldier that came to "liberate" them.

Nor were such casual acts of insensitivity and cruelty what most disturbed the Shias. Only as the evidence accumulated that the Israelis intended to stay indefinitely did the Shias grow dangerously restive. They expressed their discontent in sporadic acts of violence, particularly after it became clear that the Israelis were sponsoring the hated Maronite Phalange and its "Lebanese Forces" militia (a pack of gangsters, only by courtesy called an army). The Phalangists were notorious for their dark record of pillage and bloody massacres, which is presumably why General Sharon later chose them to comb through the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

But now Israel was urging that same group to move into southern Lebanon and fill the power vacuum created as the Palestinians moved out. Thus, Yermiya noted in his diary of June 30, 1982:

We go to the Mayor's office and find some armed Phalangists there. A conversation develops. It turns out that the Phalangists are rushing to introduce their men into the area which is now free of terrorists and that they have already placed more than fifteen hundred of their soldiers in concentrations at Sidon, Nabatiya, Gezin, etc ... The IDF's intentions are beginning to become clear. The Phalangists are the force that Israel is going to encourage and rely upon. Incidents of insulting behavior on the part of the Phalangists are becoming a daily occurrence. At every meeting with Shiite notables, a subtle or open complaint about the imposition of the Phalangists with the aid of Israeli weapons is expressed.

As Fatal, a Shiite friend of the diarist, said, "You are sowing the seeds of the next catastrophe."

It is a characteristic of the Middle East that religion engages mens' passions more than nationalism, and that is particularly true of faction-ridden Lebanon, Thus had the Israelis merely interfered in civil and political affairs—as they did to a suffocating degree—the Shia population might have stayed reasonably quiet. But Sharon's occupation forces were incapable of such restraint; they meddled in everything.

No doubt the final straw was the behavior of an Israeli patrol that broke up an Ashura religious procession in Nabatiya toward the end of October 1983. (For Shias, as most of you know, the month of Ashura—a month of mourning for the martyrdom of Hussein, the son of Ali, in 650—began the Shiite movement.) In the ensuing melee several Shias were killed. Mullahs expressed their anger by unleashing a flood of denunciation, and on November 4, 1983, Shia factions exploded a bomb at Tyre which killed, among others, 29 Israeli security personnel. Thereafter, anger and violence took over and made Lebanon a living hell for the Israelis.

"Videotapes widely circulated in South Lebanon—and seen by the Americans held hostage—showed our great battleship New Jersey firing its inaccurate but devastatingly destructive 16-inch shells into Shiite neighborhoods."

Still, in spite of America's casual indulgence of every Israeli move, our country need not have acquired the stigma of active collaborator had we not directly involved our forces in the war. We took the first step in that direction in August 1982, when we initially committed an American Marine unit to a multinational force to oversee the withdrawal of PLO leaders from Beirut. It was a tragically ill-conceived and quite unnecessary decision reluctantly taken by the President at Israel's insistence against sound contrary advice. Key Senate and House leaders pointed out that it would be highly unwise to inject American fighting men into the Lebanese conflict, While Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger warned that the United States should not send troops into such a volatile area.

It was, as I told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, a mistake to commit United States units as part of a multinational peacekeeping force since a peacekeeping force should "consist only of units from nations that had no special interests in the area or special relations with any of the contending parties." Thus, I testified, "We would imprudently hazard the lives of our Marines to commit them to an area where anti-Americanism is a dominating sentiment." And I added further that although America might facilitate the removal of the PLO leaders, "There will be plenty of frustrated individuals left behind and they may be driven to desperate acts of terrorism by the atmosphere of death and violence that has enveloped the city." If there must be some third party intervention, I urged that we "let the troops of other nations undertake it—young men who are not Americans and hence not the natural targets of assassins."

Well, we all remember what happened after that. Providentially our Marines got into and out of Lebanon in an elapsed time of ten days. Yet after the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla camps we foolishly sent them back again. In the climate of violence and ethnic hatred exacerbated by the massacre of the Palestinians, that decision was not only spectacularly imprudent but quite unnecessary since the peacekeeping role could have been effectively assumed by the United Nations using the 5000-member UNIFIL forces in South Lebanon whose mission no longer had a purpose. But we meekly abandoned that proposal when the Israelis advised that they would not let the UNIFIL forces pass through their lines.

By that time America had lost the last shreds of its credibility as a result of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre. In his effort to obtain the approval of Yasser Arafat to the final evacuation plans, Ambassador Habib had given the PLO assurances that, even without the protection of the PLO forces, the Palestinians left behind would be safe from harm—and that included the families of the PLO fighters being evacuated. Though he had given those assurances in the name of the United States government, he was relying on the solemn promises our government had received from the Israelis. Because he explicitly guaranteed to the PLO leaders that the United States would "do its utmost" to assure that that commitment was honored, our word was badly compromised when we left the whole matter in the hands of the Israelis who promptly threw open the camps to the murderous Phalange.

In view of the anger and anguish that prevailed following the massacre, our Marines were in a far from happy position. In addition, their physical situation on their second deployment was signally unhealthy. They were based at the Beirut Airport at the foot of the overhanging Shouf Mountains. Though then under Israeli occupation, those mountains were normally inhabited by the Druse, and the Israelis had infuriated the Druse by introducing Phalangist ruffians into the region. Israel was concentrating at that time on trying to strengthen the Lebanese Army while the Beirut Government sought to consolidate its control of the capital. But all that proved abortive, particularly when it was revealed that the United States had coerced the Beirut government into signing an agreement that accorded Israel special status in southern Lebanon without consulting the Syrians and against the wishes of the Shias.

Caught between the antagonistic Druse and uncooperative Gemayel government, which seemed clearly unable to impose a Maronite government on the whole of Lebanon, disgusted with Amin Gemayel and disturbed because their forces were taking heavy casualties, the Israelis decided to cut their losses and withdraw the IDF from the Shouf Mountains. Although motivated by the logic of sauve-qui-peut, they were quite unaware that, in redeploying in the south, they were moving from a frying pan into the fire.

Just as it was evident that by evacuating the Shouf area, the Israelis were conceding that Sharon's geopolitical scheme had been a pipe dream, so too our government should have recognized that the Israeli evacuation would leave our Marines in an exposed and untenable position. Located at the airport next to a Lebanese army unit, they were in the direct line of fire between the Lebanese army and the Phalange on the one hand, and the Druse on the other. Since the Lebanese army and Phalange were both seeking to drive the Druse from their mountain homes, it was inevitable that, once the Israelis had announced their decision to withdraw and had relaxed their hold on the Druse, our Marines would begin taking casualties.

Thus in August two Marines were killed and fourteen others wounded and in September two more were killed and three wounded. Because our Marines were returning fire and getting more and more actively engaged in the fighting, no one should have been surprised when in October 1983 a truck bomb destroyed our headquarters at the Beirut Airport and killed 265 Americans. Almost everyone agreed that the act was committed by a Shiite group, angered by America's role in the invasion of their country.

The tragedy had not only been signaled in advance; it could have been easily avoided. Our government could—and should—have faced up to military realities. Once Israel announced that it was pulling out we should—as many of us urged at the time—have brought our Marines home with the entirely reasonable explanation that, under the radically changed conditions created by the Israeli redeployment, our small Marine unit could no longer perform its peacekeeping function. But instead, the President made what in retrospect appears as one of the most incomprehensible decisions in modern times. He not only failed to bring the Americans out, he dug our country in more deeply and committed our forces to a hopelessly impossible task.

Instead of insisting that America continue in the peacekeeping role it had originally undertaken, the President now committed our country as an active player in a local war only remotely related to our interests, allied with a minority government the Israelis had written off.

The President's decision was not the result of impulse but of fuzzy thinking; almost immediately after first deploying our Marines in Lebanon he had announced that they would leave Beirut only after Lebanese authorities had assured us that the Lebanese government could itself provide for the nation's security. Then, on October 24, 1983, the President eerily echoed an earlier rhetoric from Vietnam days by telling reporters that the United States had "vital interests" in Lebanon because "if Lebanon ends up under the tyranny of forces hostile to the West, not only will our strategic position in the Eastern Mediterranean be threatened, but also the stability of the entire Middle East."

Meanwhile reacting to White House sentiment, some of our press and television commentators fell into the slothful practice of referring to any military units opposed to the Gemayel regime—which meant the great majority of the Lebanese—as "leftist forces," while some even called the Gemayel regime "our ally."

“[Americans] were totally unprepared for the fortnight-long ordeal of the hostages on TWA Flight 847; in part because no one in authority even tried to explain the causal connection between the incident and our automatic support of Israeli projects and ambitions . . .”

The President never precisely or consistently defined the mission of our Marines. On some days he suggested that the Marines were assisting the Lebanese Army to recapture the Druse mountain positions. On other days it was claimed that they were merely responding to fire to protect themselves even though the action was not directly related to their own security.

Nor was our military involvement confined to our Marines. The White House also injected our Navy into the action. Our armada of warships standing off the Lebanese coast was first authorized to fire at Druse, Syrian and Shiite artillery positions that had shot at our overflying aircraft, then within a few days it was authorized to use artillery and air strikes to support the Lebanese army. Videotapes widely circulated in South Lebanon—and seen by the Americans held hostage—showed our great battleship New Jersey firing its inaccurate but devastatingly destructive 16-inch shells into Shiite neighborhoods.

Thus, step by step, we permitted ourselves to become an active participant in the Lebanese civil war. Now—as though by conditioned reflex following the practice established in South East Asia by earlier presidents—President Reagan once again committed American forces to try to help a weak, narrowly based government impose its control on highly motivated, rival factions which, as with the North Vietnamese, were being armed by a neighboring country—in this case Syria. But whereas in Vietnam we failed to achieve our goal even after committing 560,000 men, in Lebanon we sought to accomplish a similarly impossible objective with only 1800 Marines backed by a flotilla of United States naval vessels firing from offshore.

That is the sad story of our creeping involvement in the internal feuding and fighting of Lebanon.

To be sure, the Administration finally awakened to the ultimate fatuity of America's position, and, under mounting pressure from the Congress and the American people, it recalled our Marines. But meanwhile, we had hopelessly prejudiced our position throughout the Middle East. We had identified our country irrevocably with an impotent minority government in Beirut at odds with the aspirations of the great majority of the Lebanese people and disabled by its own parochial politics and lack of political will from making the essential concessions to rival factions.

Since our country is distant from the scene of operation, Americans remained almost untouched by our involvement, particularly because no draft call was involved. Thus they were quite unaware of the resentments being fostered by our absent-minded commitment and our apparent complicity with Israel. And they were totally unprepared for the fortnight-long ordeal of the hostages on TWA Flight 847; in part because no one in authority even tried to explain the causal connection between the incident and our automatic support of Israeli projects and ambitions even when they contravened American interests.

In contrast to America, the Israelis were not caught unprepared. They had come to recognize ever since 1983 that "Operation Peace in Galilee" was an hallucination. They had learned the hard way that a drive for colonial domination inevitably generates resistance, and that is what they encountered in southern Lebanon. When it became clear that the Israelis intended to carve out a piece of the south part of the country for themselves, the Shias reacted as any self-respecting people would react; they tried to make the life of Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon so hazardous and miserable—and often short—as to force the invaders to flee in considerable disorder.

In order to warn off the Shias from extending their attacks across the border after the IDF had withdrawn, the Israelis used needlessly brutal retaliatory methods which the Shias not only countered with equal vigor and effectiveness but with an utter disregard for their own lives. That behavior led Israel's demoralized military leaders to threaten shrilly that they would employ an "Iron Fist" and adopt a policy of "scorched earth," apparently ignorant of—or indifferent to—the fact that such terms were identified with the Nazis. As the IDF's commanders grew more and more rattled, Israel practiced increasingly fierce and indiscriminate tactics of reprisal; thus as early as March 1985 the army announced that just since the beginning of their "Iron Fist" policy five weeks before, its forces had killed a total of 73 Shias on suspicion of "terrorist" activities.

Israel should have read these events as scenes in an unfolding morality play that demonstrated what its leaders repeatedly fail to understand—that an effective imperialist policy requires at least a minimum degree of sensitivity to the reactions of the local population. The Israelis fancied that they knew Lebanon but if they did know more than some economic and political facts—if they even faintly understood the people and their history—they could have foreseen that young Shias might behave in the tradition of their Assassin ancestors and sacrifice their lives to try to repel the Israeli forces seeking to occupy their country. The Israelis never even tried to conceal their intentions. They came as invaders ostensibly to dislodge the PLO, but, once that was achieved, they had no intention of giving southern Lebanon back to its Shia inhabitants; they planned instead to entrust control to a mercenary force of their own creation—the South Lebanese Army or SLA, armed, subsidized and controlled by Israel.

Such a prospect was obviously repugnant to the Shias and their Amal militia, and they expressed their discontent by the ferocity with which they harassed the Israeli forces. All of this was tragically unnecessary, for with only minimal Israeli attention to Shia concerns such violence could well have been avoided. Thus the Jerusalem Post (International Edition) for the week ending June 15 quoted a "senior Israeli defense official" as stating: "Amal does not want the return of the PLO, but neither does it want the SLA, a predominantly Christian force, controlling the South."

Finally, in panic and seeking desperately to cover their retreat, the Israelis rounded up large numbers of Shias—more than 1,100 in all—and, holding them, in effect, as hostages on the flimsiest of evidence or no evidence at all, locked them in prison—first in Lebanon, then later moving them to Israel. Although our State Department officially pointed out that the forcible removal of civilian prisoners from the country was a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, our government, as usual, complaisantly concurred in this breach of international law. Thus there were still more than 700 Shias in the Atlit Prison in Israel when the skyjacking occurred, and even at this late date [September 5, 1985], 135 are still there.

The Israelis made much of the contention that the Shiite skyjackers need only to have bided their time, since Israel was planning to release the Shiite prisoners once Israel's forces had completely left Lebanon. But the Shia community still remained unconvinced—and, on the evidence, why should they have been convinced? They had seen the Israelis sulkily departing in June without releasing any prisoners from Atlit Prison, and the obvious failure of the United States to insist on their release simply confirmed, as they saw it, that the Americans and the Israelis were collaborators. As a result the Shias concluded that, as the allies of their enemy, United States citizens were fair game, and at least a small group concluded that only by kidnapping enough Americans could they persuade our government to use its leverage with Jerusalem to obtain the release of their countrymen from Aflit Prison. Primitive and misguided as was this scheme, one should be wary of applying the term "terrorist" to the Shia skyjackers, although in America spokemen constantly used that term on national media even though they would never have thought of applying it to members of the French Resistance.

To use the word "terrorist" to describe the Shias in the context of present-day Lebanon recalls Dean Swift's famous dictum: "That dog must be destroyed. He is vicious. When attacked he defends himself." The young Shias were simply zealous young patriots doing what they could to secure the release of their friends and relatives and, if their tactics were reprehensible—which they were—so were those of the Israeli invaders. Though skyjacking or terror methods are odious to civilized men and women—and rightly so—the young hias had few options. Ordered about by a powerful enemy army and having no effective military might of their own, they were forced to employ the traditional methods of the weak—trying to use the frustrations inherent in a hostage situation as a kind of equalizer. In the process it is hardly surprising that some brutal extremist elements injected themselves into the act.

Prior to the skyjacking the world had paid little attention to the Shia prisoners or to the grievances of the rest of the population. But the Shias were desperate to make known their unhappiness, and in most parts of the world they accomplished that purpose by the skyjacking episode. Only in the United States was that point largely missed—obscured, as it was, by cries of public outrage born of frustration, racial resentments, a lack of public awareness of even the most elementary facts about the Middle East, and a mindless conviction that any efforts to understand or explain the motives of skyjackers is to condone the practice. The press and television were the worst offenders; in the beginning they called the Shias "terrorists" and "fanatics" and only after receiving a volume of letters and protests did they change the terminology to "guerrillas," Shiite militiamen," and the "Shiite Resistance Movement."

The prejudices and lack of perspective of Americans became startlingly obtrusive when the elected spokesman for the hostages, the articulate and knowledgeable Allyn Conwell, suggested in a television interview (while the crisis was still in progress), that some of his fellow hostages had developed a "profound sympathy for the Shiite Amal movement" and personally expressed the hope that Americans would not remove the yellow ribbons displayed in recognition of the hostages' plight "until the Shiite prisoners in Atlit Prison are back home as well." The media responded with angry derision. It did not matter that Conwell's comments reflected a long observation of the Middle East; he was not saying what the American public had been conditioned to believe.

Before Conwell's airplane touched down in New York the Reagan Administration maneuvered to have him replaced as spokesman for the hostages, while omniscient commentators in the American media called him abusive names. One of Israel's most dependable cheerleaders, George Will, dismissed Conwell as a "Quisling ... an energetic collaborator ... an oil man who makes his living selling things in the Middle East." Few paid attention to the contrasting appraisal of Conwell offered by Captain Testrake, the pilot of TWA Flight 847, who having been present during the episode had some basis for his judgment: "We're proud of him. He did a super job, and he saved our lives." Testrake even called the Israeli detention of the Lebanese in Atlit Prison "an act of state terrorism" and concluded by observing that "these people (the Shiites) have a just grievance."

The vicious treatment accorded Conwell was scarcely a grown-up reaction for a country presumed to be as mature and civilized as the United States, and, before we close the book on the agonizing hostage crisis, we should rethink the whole episode. This time we should not focus obsessively on what alternative steps might have been taken after the hostages had been seized; instead we should scrutinize the incident in the larger context of our Middle East policy and the dangers inherent in the conditioned reflex that characterizes our relations with Israel and that impels us to give uncritical support to almost every initiative any Israeli government may launch.

For let us not overlook the fact that repeated experience is more and more validating George Washington's admonition that a passionate attachment to another country "...by infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification."

I can think of no better demonstration of that thesis than the searing melodrama of Flight 847. Lt. Colonel Yermiya's Arab friend Fatal was indeed prescient when he predicted that the IDF's insensitive handling of the Shias would "sow the seeds of the next catastrophe"; what he did not foresee was that, because of the United States' passionate attachment to Israel, it might create a near catastrophe for America as well.