In Lebanon, Israel Is Only Sowing the Seeds of More Bloodshed and Terror
The history of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon are a series of lessons in futility and the arrogance of power. If only anyone were paying attention.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history is repression works only to strengthen and knit the oppressed.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is appealing for fuel to run its generators amid a siege and evacuation order by the Israeli military that threatens the lives of its patients, including more than a dozen children in the Intensive Care Unit. At the southern end of the Strip, the Mohammed Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital was forced to cease operating by Israeli military pressure—depriving Gaza of its only kidney dialysis unit. Elimination of hospitals has become a normal aspect of what the United Nations calls Israel’s “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.” It is worth reflecting not only on the two hospitals’ fates but also on their names: Kamal Adwan and Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar. They tie Gaza to Lebanon, where I was living on the night both of them were murdered.
Adwan and Najjar, senior officials in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), were asleep in their beds in Beirut’s relatively affluent Verdun area on April 9, 1973, when Israeli death squads shot them both. The joint Mossad-Israeli army “Operation Spring of Youth” also killed Najjar’s wife and PLO spokesman Kamal Nasser. A unit of the same hit-team blew up a building in another Beirut neighborhood to kill 35 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“It was one of the biggest targeted killing operations of the twentieth century, if not the biggest,” wrote Ronen Bergman in his definitive account of Zionist assassinations from 1907 to 2018, Rise and Kill First. The murders enhanced Israel’s reputation for effective elimination of enemies—but also helped to spark Lebanon’s civil war and, as a result, Israel’s invasions of 1978, 1982, 2006, and, here we go again, 2024. Half a million people, mainly Palestinians and Lebanese Sunni Muslims, showed up for the funerals of Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser. Furious pro-Palestinians blew up the Lena Car agency that unknowingly rented the cars to Mossad’s agents, while the ABC News bureau chief, Peter Jennings, was asleep in his apartment upstairs. The Lebanese government, shown incapable of defending the country, resigned. A month later, the Lebanese Army attacked the Palestinian refugee camps in a futile effort to disarm the commandos whose suicidal cross-border missions provoked Israel’s assaults on Lebanon.
Adwan, Najjar, and Nasser were born in British Mandate Palestine, from which the new Israeli army expelled them along with 750,000 of their compatriots in 1948. The Israeli leadership obstructed their return, insisting in a meeting in 1948 that the refugees “would be crushed” and “die,” that “most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries.” From refugee camps in Gaza, Adwan became an engineer, Najjar a lawyer and Nasser a poet. They helped to found Yasser Arafat’s Al Fateh commando movement. The humiliating defeat by Israel of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan over six days in June 1967 had convinced many Palestinians that they alone could undo the reverses of 1948 and 1967.
Al Fateh and other commando groups launched pinprick raids into Israel and the occupied territories from Jordan, until King Hussein crushed them in 1970, when they moved to Beirut. Their relative military and financial strength vis à vis the weak Lebanese Army and state led inevitably to clashes with Lebanese, mostly Christian, nationalists, and eventually to the Israeli invasion that expelled them from Beirut in the summer of 1982. But after achieving its objective of driving out the PLO, Israel found itself confronting a more effective, intransigent, and indigenous adversary in the form of the Shiite Muslim Party of God—Hezbollah—established under Iranian aegis and patronage in 1982. Israel captured and tortured Lebanese partisans and assassinated those it suspected of resisting the occupation. It paid collaborators like the self-proclaimed South Lebanon Army to kill fellow Lebanese. As a journalist covering that conflict from 1983 to 1985, I observed the radicalization of once-quiescent peasants aroused by a brutal occupation. Israel put its fist into the hornets’ nest and, predictably, got stung.
Israel employed a tried, tested, and counterproductive solution: assassination. Its killing of Hezbollah leader Abbas Musawi in 1992 only achieved the installation of a more astute and effective successor, Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah’s strategy of wearing down the occupiers worked. Israeli Defense Forces casualties forced it to cede territory, gradually withdrawing further and further south, until it left the country altogether in 2000. The Lebanese civil war had officially ended 10 years before, and Israel’s departure should have led to the disarming of Hezbollah in line with the Taif Agreement that disbanded the many militias who had fought the civil war. Hezbollah, however, had not fought other Lebanese in the war, having confined itself to the guerrilla campaign against Israeli troops in Lebanon. While Sunni, Druze, and Christian militias disbanded, Hezbollah was exempted while it confronted the occupation.
When Israel left the country in 2000, Hezbollah, in line with its Iranian sponsor, kept and augmented its arsenal. Its pretext was that Israel occupied a small area called Shebaa Farms—which it took from Syria in 1967 and most Lebanese did not know existed. In 2006, Hezbollah guerrillas penetrated the Israeli border, killing two soldiers and taking another two back into Lebanon.
Israel invaded to get them back, bombing most of Lebanon’s infrastructure and sending ground troops into the south, where 120 of them died. When the campaign ended with more than a thousand Lebanese killed and Israel’s withdrawal, Nasrallah apologized for provoking an invasion he did not expect. Yet his popularity ran high as the first Arab leader to defeat Israel in battle.
Hezbollah, like Israel after its 1967 triumph, succumbed to arrogance. Its forces ceased to be guerrillas when they fought in Syria as regular infantry against rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Basha al-Assad. While Hezbollah concentrated on Lebanese politics and became Iran’s cat’s paw in the Arab world—building an offensive missile capacity as a deterrent to discourage Israel from bombing Iran—Israeli intelligence penetrated Nasrallah’s organization and refined its technology of surveillance and attack.
On October 8, 2023, when Israel assaulted Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s murderous attack the day before, Nasrallah made the fatal mistake of launching rockets into northern Israel. Those of us who were in Lebanon that day feared the worst, but for nearly a year Hezbollah and Israel traded fire in what a Western diplomat called a “calibrated” manner that confined the conflict to the border areas. Israel, however, had a greater ambition: to destroy Hezbollah as it said it was destroying Hamas in Gaza—with all that implied for civilian casualties. Israel decapitated Hezbollah’s command structure and disabled its communications. It killed Nasrallah. Then it invaded, again.
Nasrallah was the child of war, galvanized to action by Israel’s treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians alike. He knew the humiliation that south Lebanon’s Shiites felt when Israeli soldiers demolished their mosques, like that of the popular cleric Rageb Harb, assassinated those it suspected of resisting the occupation, and put thousands into miserable prison camps where torture was not unknown.
Just as the Palestinians of 1948 gave way to a more determined and desperate generation, so the Lebanese being expelled from their homes in the south today are suffering the bitter trauma of loss. Many of them are children reduced to begging during the day and sleeping on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, among other places in Beirut, at night. If Israel does not let them return to their farms and villages along the border, where will they live? When they grow up and attempt to go home, will Israel invade again to “teach them a lesson” as it has done in the past?
The distinguished president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Rabbi Judah Magnes, warned in 1946, “If I do not want a Jewish state, it is because I do not want perpetual war with the Arabs.” There has been a Jewish state since 1948, and ending the state of war that accompanied its birth must involve reaching a mutually acceptable accommodation with the Palestinians. A responsible great power would bang heads together to force a resolution to the core conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, rather than spread the bloodshed to the whole Middle East. The alternative, as Magnes predicted, is war in perpetuity.