The Longest War:Israeli Occupation in Lebanon

The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon
May 27, 2000


Israeli’s hasty pullout from the Lebanese territory this week where they have been occupying illegally for 22 years against UN resolution has a sense of dejavu in the humiliating abandonment of Ho Chi Min city (Saigon) by the American soldiers.
Lebanon is a state where its stronger neighboring countries can invade and destroy everything with impunity, but they could never leave without paying heavy prices for what they had done.

1. Gen. Sharon’s War: the Butcher of Lebanon
The invasion of Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had the significant ramification in the Israeli society because it was the first war launched by the state of Israel that the Jews began to feel the shame to be the victimizers and its moral standing has been eroded by its actions and words.
Since 1978, the IDF have been occupied in the southern tip of 750 square-mile long of 6 to 12 mile-deep zone declaring that the buffer is necessary to interdict the Katyusha attacks by the Shiite Hezbollah, a Party of God, and Palestinian guerrillas stationed in Lebanon.
In 1982 during Menachem Begin regime, the Defense Minister Arik Sharon had mounted an all-out attack against the Lebanon and penetrated deep into the Lebanese territory and engaged in total destruction of many cities, Tyre, Sydon, Damur, and Beirut, with the conviction that any political contradiction can be resolved with the proper military move.

General Sharon’s original battle plan that he explained to the Israel’s cabinet and the public was to drive the Palestinian guerrillas back from the 40 kilometer behind Israel’s northern frontier not longer than the period of two or three days, as the invasion was called by Israeli government as Peace for the Galilee War.
Instead, the Israelis have been stuck in Southern Lebanon for two decades hoisted by its own petard and the war has gradually become ‘Vietnamized’ that the IDF have lost over 900 young men in the conflicts that have become the Israeli nightmare, and in 1983 the United States had lost 241 young men when the Hezbollah suicide team drove the dynamite-ridden truck into the US marine barracks and another 63 Americans in their embassy compound where the bombs exploded.

It was basically Sharon’s War, whose sobriquet was Butcher of Lebanon, that he turned the blind eyes against the massacres of over 1,000 Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by the Phalangist militia, when the camps were surrounded and controlled by the invading IDF soldiers.
Israeli soldiers knew just what they were doing when they were allowing the Christian Phalangists into the camps and turned other way around when they heard the horrible cries of women and children, and the IDF’s sanction for the massacre had triggered massive protest rally in TelAviv of over 100,000 Israeli intellectuals

2.Hezbollah, a Party of God
The IDF retreat from the occupied territory was a series of messy pandemonium when they have turned the tail leaving tanks, ammunitions, artillery, heavy equipments and even sack of heir uniforms behind the South Lebanon Army (SLA), the 2,500 strong of Israeli proxy fighters which collapsed like a house of cards. The Israeli generals had hoped that their mercenary fighters would hold the front line for them to make the Israeli army pull out safely, but the commander of the SLA traveling with the Israeli passport left for Paris leaving his henchmen holding the bag and hundreds of them deserted and surrendered to the Hezbollah fighters.
It is irony that the American taxpayer’s money was spent to equip their enemy, Hezbollah terrorists. (I am not sure it is proper to call them terrorists when they fight for the recovery of their lost land against the invading forces.)

The Hezbollah movement that was a spin-off from the Iranian Revolution and was funded by the Iranian government has the two separate divisions of the operation in the Shiite community (30 percent of 3 million Lebanese population): its military wing with the battle-hardened 5,000 guerilla fighters was trained and equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In the civilian operation, the Hezbollah runs the schools, hospitals, TV station, Radio stations and maintains 9 seats in the Lebanese Parliament.
They are not under the control of the 35,000 Syrian forces in Lebanon, even though Syrians would not intervene what the Hezbollah guerrillas attack the Israeli frontiers along the Southern borders until the Israeli government agrees to turn over the Golan Heights.


3. Why did the IDF retreat?
One of the many reasons the Israelis were forced to withdraw from the Lebanon is that they can not afford to suffer from the daily casualties any more of their soldiers as the United States had eaten crows in the Vietnam War (58,000 fatalities), without seeing any light at the end of Lebanese tunnel.
The second reason is the Israelis try to pre-empt Syrians in the negotiation of the Golan Heights withdrawal where Israeli has been occupying from 1967 Arab-Israel War, hoping that Syria would be solely responsible for the possible renewal of the violent attacks from the Hezbollah fighters, and Syria, as a power broker in Lebanon, is not serious enough to hold the peace talks with Israel.
Contrary to the Israeli claim that the Golan Heights holds the vital strategic point in defense of its land, water resources in the disputed northern section of the Sea of Galilee is the main stumbling block in the peace talk that the Israeli government does not want to give up.
Basically, Israel has been lackluster in every land-for-peace negotiations with any Arab nations, because Israeli Zionism that is the official state ideology promotes the exclusive right of Redemption of Land that the great realtor in the sky had given them in perpetuity the lands of Judea and Samaria which span much wider Biblical borders than the present Israeli territory.

Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, stated that Israel has the right to retaliate any cross border attack from Lebanon because they withdrew according to the demarcation line defined by the UN and suggested that they will hold Syria responsible for any attack by Hezbollah on northern Israeli towns.
However, the Shiite guerrillas claimed that they do not think Israeli pullout has been completed because the IDF still occupy and maintain the radar installation in the Shebaa Farm territory at the foot of Golan Heights that was taken by Israelis during 1967 war and Israeli police still has kept their leader as hostage for the bargaining chip for the lost Israeli pilot.
The Israeli government has detained a dozen of Lebanese people for years without any specific charge until recently, as they routinely arrest and hold hundreds of Palestinians for administrative detention without any judicial process.

The United States, the military and economic sponsor for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, has offered $300 million aid for the costs of Israeli retreat from Lebanon and called for the blue-helmeted UNIFIL intervention, conveniently forgetting that America and Israel were only two nations in the UN general assembly to vote against the UN resolutions for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon numerous occasions in the past.
The United Nation has maintained 4,500 mumbo-jumbo of Ghanaian, Finnish, Indians and Irish army to create the buffer zone between the Israeli-SLA invading forces and the Shiite guerrillas.
The peace keeping mission of the United Nation is viable and effective on the condition that both parties in the conflicts agree to accept and respect its mandate and the UNIFIL operation was miserably failed due to the flagrant violations of Israeli aerial bombings, artillery fires, naval blockades and frequent sorties by the commando squads, resulting in hundreds of casualties and injuries of UNIFIL.

4. The hegemonic aspirations of Zionism
Contrary to the popular belief that the detente between Israel and PLO would lead to peace in the Middle East, the state of Israel, a regional super power that has stockpiled 400-odd nuclear and chemical bombs at Dimona, has been furtively entertaining their people with the hegemonic aspirations: their strategic targets has not been limited in and around of the present borders but involved in entire Middle East from North Africa to Iran, and the Israeli government can not tolerate their monopoly in the nuclear capability to be broken by their neighboring countries, especially by Iran.

The Israeli people believe that they have Yasir Arafat already in their back pocket as the proxy that performs the dirty works of beating and jailing rebellious Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli civil administration in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and Arafat has buckled under the semblance of an independent autonomy that he no longer raises the issues for the right of return of 5 million Palestinian refugees who lost and dispersed all over the world. (He sold his people down the river at Oslo accord in return for a governorship of autonomous regions, as DJ Kim did to the South Korean people.)
While leaving their backyard under the authoritarian care of Arafat proxies, the Israelis have not been lesser global trotters than their boss, the United States, poking their noses every nook and corner around the world such countries as Turkey, China, Taiwan, Koreas, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Malawi, Zaire, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Morocco, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, Columbia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Chile, to name a few.

For example, just before the Oslo Accord and when the North Korea was in dire financial straits, a high-ranking official from the Israeli Foreign Ministry had offered the investment of $500 million via a Mossad-controlled Canadian bank in return for the North to stop the sale of Scud missiles to Iran and Syria. The deal was almost finalized in the meeting between the Israeli deputy director of the Foreign Ministry and the daughter of the North’s Great Leader, when the Uncle Sam drove Israel away from the North arguing that the US could press the North to sever the tie with Iran during their talks regarding the nuclear issues.
When Yitzhak Rabin, the late Prime Minister, went to China, he strongly suggested that China should stop to sell the missiles technology to Iran, promising that Israel would become a go-between to ease the tension between China and the U.S. (When Rabin was assassinated by a fanatic Haredi, some critics said he got a condign punishment for his ordering the Israeli army soldiers “to break the bones of Palestinian detainees.)
In addition, few Americans have known the irony that the Chinese tanks at the Tianamen Square in Beijing where the People’s Army put down the student riot were equipped with the cannons and spare parts sold by Israeli government with which the US taxpayers contribute over $3 billion pro bono annually through the medium of their federal taxes.

Israel is not the state of its citizen, but the religious state of the Jewish people, those living in Israel and in Diaspora, who adhere to the Zionistic ideology that the Land of Israel belongs to all the Jews or Gush Emunim movement that aims to initiate new and to expand already existent Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The Jewish Israelis always refer the Palestinians as ‘Arabs living in Israel’ and they are not friendly to their politicians who would dare to barter the Jewish Settlements in Gaza Strip or West Bank with Yasir Arafat or return the Golan Heights to Syrians for peace.
It is the received wisdom that the Oslo accords and Wye agreements have pretty much settled the Israeli-Palestinian disputes, disregarding the fact that these talks had not dealt with the Palestinian refugee problems with which both Barak and Arafat simply wish to dissipate into the foggy Mediterranean horizon.

However, it can be concluded that the state of Israel has already built up the military advantages of the nuclear capabilities against the neighboring Arab countries and has succeeded to corral the vociferous Palestinians into the small enclaves surrounded by the IDF security fortress.
As for the Golan Heights, Israel has no reason to rush to surrender the precious water resources to Syria whose ailing president Hafez Assad desperately wants to retrieve the lost land before his death.
As an unchallenged and undisputed regional bully with no serious enemy in sight, Israel can afford to look beyond the horizon of the Middle East for the economic and geo-political interest of Israeli Zionism.