A HISTORY OF NEGATION
Rashid Khalidi’s chronicle of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Netanyahu's latest desperate moves -
I first came to Beirut more than a year after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, when it was clear that the men then in charge in the White House—George Bush and Dick Cheney—were going to respond to the fanatic Osama bin Laden by going to war against Saddam Hussein’s secular government in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. I conducted the first of what would be several long interviews with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah. His Shiite militia provoked anxiety and fear throughout the Middle East, as well as in official Washington. Nasrallah’s initial message to me was one I’d heard earlier from a prominent Middle Eastern oil man: America will not change Iraq, but Iraq would change America—forever.
That trip was the first of many to Beirut, and there were further meetings with Nasrallah over the next years, but what never failed to startle and then depress me were the leftover signs of the 15-year civil war that eventually involved Israel and Syria, as well as the various political parties and military factions inside Lebanon. The apartment buildings on both sides of the Green Line, a main thoroughfare that had divided the Christian and Muslim communities, were filled with bullet and rocket holes, some patched and some not. I had European friends who lived in one of the pockmarked buildings, and it was unsettling to visit there, as if I was in bombed-out Berlin in the aftermath of World War II. It turned out that the Israeli bombing that shattered Muslim society in 1982 had been justified by Israel’s phony allegation that the PLO had targeted an Israeli diplomat in London. Israel got what it wanted with its bombs: the forced exile that summer of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and more than 8,000 members of his battered army to Tunis.
All of that history was alive for me. I had written earlier about Henry Kissinger’s disregard —maybe contempt is a better word—for the PLO’s lack of understanding that the only Middle East issue of importance at the time for the White House was to hold off Russian influence there. Arafat, Kissinger dismissively noted in his 1979 memoir The White House Years, was demanding the creation of a “democratic secular state” in Palestine, “theoretically permitting Jews, Arabs [Muslims], and Christians to live together with equal rights.”
Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to the October 7 attack by Hamas brought me back to the works of Rashid Khalidi, a charismatic and much respected professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. I knew Khalidi slightly as a former University of Chicago professor who was one of many liberal and even radical academics there who had befriended Barack Obama and his wife when he was teaching at the law school there. Obama dropped many of them, very coldly, during his during his meteoric rise from state senator to a US Senate seat to the presidency.
I knew Khalidi far better for his academic writings and public statements on America’s refusal to be an honest broker in the constant Middle East conflict. His now seminal study of the PLO’s struggle for survival, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, published in 2020, includes a brutal analysis, from a Palestinian’s point of view, of how the leaders of Israel achieved their goal during the 1979 Camp David peace talks led by President Jimmy Carter. That goal, Khalidi asserts, was to put the “Palestine issue on hold,” in return for getting Israel to agree to restore the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, and effectively remove Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Khalidi shrewdly writes, that agreement “completed Egypt’s shift from the Soviet to the American camp, defusing the most dangerous aspects of the Superpower conflict in the Middle East.”
Carter’s intentions as to the fate of the Palestinians may have been noble, but the widely praised peace treaty that emerged, Khalidi writes, “signaled US alignment with the most extreme _expression_ of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights.” It was “an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration.” Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and his successors in the right-wing ruling Likud party—Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu—were, wrote Khalidi, “implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” Palestine belonged only to the Jewish people, “and a Palestine people with national rights did not exist.”
Flash forward to June 4, 1982, a Friday: Khalidi was at a meeting at the American University of Beirut, where he had been teaching for the past six years. Suddenly, 2,000-pound bombs, clearly from Israel aircraft, began falling. There was the usual panic to round up wives and children and get them to safety. There had been no advance warnings of the intense attacks, which continued into Saturday on targets in Beirut and in the south of Lebanon, which was firmly under Hezbollah control. An Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon followed. “During the siege,” Khalidi wrote, “entire apartment buildings were obliterated and large areas devastated in the western [Muslim] half of the already badly damaged city.” Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in what was the most serious attack on an Arab capital since World War II. It would not be equaled until America invaded Iraq in 2003.
During the ten weeks of fighting, which ended in mid-August of 1982, more than 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Three large Palestinian refugee camps were attacked by Israel or its Lebanese allies in the following weeks, including the infamous Sabra and Shatila camps, whose refugees were slaughtered. Water, electricity, food, and fuel also were cut off to survivors by Israel.
It was a murderous playbook that would be repeated in Gaza forty years later. Then and now, Khalidi writes, America was all in for Israel, with weapons, advice, and money. The 1982 decision to invade Lebanon was made by the Israeli government, Khalidi acknowledges, “but it could not have been implemented without the explicit assent given by Secretary of State Alexander Haig or without American diplomatic and military support, combined with the utter passivity of the Arab governments.”
Khalidi’s criticism of the moral and political failures of America and the Arab nations are validated, in my view, by his willingness in his book to criticize the PLO’s leadership harshly for what he calls “its heavy-handed and often arrogant behavior” that had significantly eroded popular support for the movement. The PLO’s retaliatory attacks inside Israel, he writes, “were often directed at civilian targets and visibly did little to advance the Palestinian national cause, if indeed they did not harm it.” Khalidi specifically faulted the PLO leadership for its inability “to see the intensity of the hostility prompted by its own misbehavior and flawed strategy was among the greatest shortcoming of the PLO during this period.”
The New York Times published a warning essay by Khalidi on its op-ed page eight days after the Israeli invasion of Gaza. He cautioned the Biden administration to think carefully about its offer of what amounted to unconditional support for Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7.
“The last time,” Khalidi wrote, “a president and his advisers allowed an unimaginable loss to drive policy was after September 11th, when they unleashed two of the most disastrous wars in American history, which devastated two countries and resulted in the death of a half-million or more people and brought many people around the world to revile the United States.”
Khalidi has not graced the Times op-ed pages since and I, after a careful rereading of Khalidi’s book, am left with the puzzling fact that the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982 was not in direct response to a specific act of aggression, as was last fall’s invasion of Gaza. The Israeli leadership clearly believed then that the mere presence of the often assertive Arafat and his PLO justified the all-out bombing that took place.
Did the autocratic Hamas leadership, who were secretly subsidized by hundreds of millions from Qatar, with high-level Israeli knowledge and approval, pose the same immediate threat in 2023 to Israel as Arafat did in 1982? If not, was a casus bellinecessary to justify the end of another Palestinian threat, once and for all?
There has been a series of stories in the Israeli media about high-level Israeli intelligence reporting, based on intercepts and other technical intelligence, that provided details about Hamas’s planning throughout much of last year for a cross-border invasion into southern Israel. The feared attack came to pass with shockingly little resistance and the Israeli leadership, led by Netanyahu, have repeatedly assured the Israeli public that there will be a full inquiry into the failure of the intelligence community to adequately assess and forward those reports. It was also made clear that any such investigation will not take place until the ongoing war in Gaza has ended.
The inquiry issue has faded from the headlines as the planned assault on Gaza turned into bloody house-to-house urban warfare, with a steadily increasing number of Israeli combat deaths amidst the untold number of Palestinian innocents who are the collateral damage, in every way, as in every war, of the violence.
I have often written about American secrets over the past seven decades, and I am left with two pieces of information that, when placed side by side, suggest either gross incompetence by the Israeli politicians and generals now running the war, or a plan to draw the Hamas leadership into an attack and a war it could not win.
It has been widely reported in Israel that a bright, watchful female officer attached to the country’s highly classified signals intelligence group, Unit 8200, began observing and reporting last summer on what clearly was a Hamas training program whose intent was to find a way to break into Israel and seize military hostages. Her reports went nowhere, and she took them public. There have been stories galore in the local and international media, with official explanations ranging from—I’m only exaggerating slightly about the first one—the notion that the officer concerned was just an excitable girl to the idea that there was just no way Hamas could pull off such an operation. What she was seeing was just an exercise in possibilities.
I had been told independently in November, as the Unit 8200 issue dimmed, that America’s highly classified and high-powered satellite cameras and sensors had delivered a video of the Hamas training that Israeli officials had debunked. The American video showed that Hamas had set up a simulation kibbutz, similar to those murderously attacked on October 7, and the resulting video was complete with dialogue.
The New York Times was later provided with copies of the original Unit 8200 reports and concluded, in a front-page dispatch, that the attacking Hamas units had “followed the blueprint,” as laid out in the initial Unit 8200 intelligence reports, “with shocking precision.” The Times also reported that it was “unclear” whether Netanyahu, the man running the war, saw the original Unit Unit 8200 documents as well.
In fact, as I have been told this week by a well-informed Israeli source, Netanyahu did “see and read” the Unit 8200 assessment, and he was made aware at the time by the Israeli Army’s intelligence branch that his “regime-changing scheme was becoming a major theme in high-level internal discussions”—obviously intercepted by Unit 8200—“in Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. And they are accelerating plans for an attack on Israel in the belief that the Israeli military and public have been significantly weakened by political division and acrimony.”
The Israeli source said that Netanhayu “is now engaged in a desperate last-ditch campaign to stay in power by blaming the military, Shin Bet, and Mossad”—Israel's two main intelligence units—“for hiding information from him.”
I learned forty years ago while reporting on a sensitive story for the New York Timesinvolving an illicit shipment of nerve gas to Germany, the home of Zyklon B, that Netanyahu, then the deputy Israeli ambassador to America, was the go-to guy for the Times Washington bureau on the most secret of American intelligence. (I was writing about American intelligence, and the top secret satellite photos—part of a project known as TALENT KEYHOLE—were not meant to be shared with foreign governments.)
I had left the paper in 1979 to write a book, but Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s executive editor, loved stories that made news and allowed me to jump onto the paper’s front page anytime I had the goods. (Abe told others it was like getting the milk from a cow without owning the cow. My view was I was getting stories in the paper without being on the paper. It worked for the both of us until Rosenthal retired.)
Any story dealing with Germany and a death-dealing gas was a tough one, and I was told by a senior reporter for the Times Washington bureau to go see Bibi. I made a call and was invited to meet with him at the Israeli Embassy in northwest Washington late that night. I had a brief chat with the man, who was bright and quick, and he told me that he would be in touch. The next afternoon a large envelope was delivered to me at the Times, and it contained two very top secret satellite photos of crates loaded with nerve gas being unloaded somewhere identifiable in West Berlin. The photos, which I did not use, were the evidence I needed to get the story published. What other reporters at the Times did was none of my business, but I was troubled by the interaction.
I chased intelligence, if necessary, to get a story that the public needed to know in print. I believed then and still do that Bibi was going all out to ingratiate himself with the Times, America’s most important newspaper, because he saw a political path to the top in Israel and the Times was an essential asset in that ambition.
The unanswered question in all of this is why wasn’t the issue of Hamas’s intent to attack, as articulated by Unit 8200, followed up? Too little resources? The crush of day-to-day reporting? Incompetence? Or was it a conscious decision to look the other way. Whatever the reason, those who desired an excuse to attack Gaza and push the Gazans out got what they wanted.