Israel’s wars repeat the 1980s on steroids
Secretary of
State George Shultz listens as President Ronald Reagan warns Israeli Prime
Minister Menahem Begin in an August 12, 1982, phone call. Credit: The New York
Times
By James M. Dorsey
Subscribing will allow you to listen to the podcast, and/ or watch the video. To subscribe, please click here.
Thank you for your support and loyalty.
Appalled by Israel’s carpet bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, US President Ronald Reagan didn’t mince his words with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin.
“I was angry. I
told him it had to stop, or our entire future relationship was endangered.
I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was
becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off,” Mr. Reagan
noted in his diary.
The August 1982 phone call between Messrs. Reagan and Begin
provides a template for the United States’ ability to twist Israel’s arm and
the limits of America’s influence.
Mr. Begin wasted no time in halting his saturation bombing
of the Lebanese capital in response to Mr. Reagan’s threat.
Yet, he rejected the president’s demand that he allow an
international force to enter Beirut to protect the hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees in the Israeli-besieged city.
Mr. Begin’s refusal had dire consequences.
Credit: The
New Arab
A month later, at least 800 Palestinians, many of them women
and children, were massacred in their homes in Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut
by Lebanese Christian gunmen under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military.
Public outrage in Israel forced Mr. Begin to resign, ending his career.
More than four decades later, President Joe Biden understood
the stakes when Israel went to war in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023,
attack on Israel. He also knew
the levers of power at his disposal after test-driving Mr. Reagan’s
approach in 2021.
At the time, Mr. Biden, like his predecessor, picked up the phone to read Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu the riot act.
It was his fourth phone call to the Israeli leader in ten
days in which behind-the-scenes diplomacy and cajoling failed to end fighting
between Israel and Hamas.
The president advised the Israeli leader that he “expected a
significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.” When Mr. Netanyahu
sought to buy time, Mr. Biden replied: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.”
Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire a day later.
Even so, Mr. Netanyahu knew then and now that he had less to
worry about than Mr. Begin did with the Reagan presidency.
In contrast to Mr. Reagan’s administration, which allowed
the United Nations Security Council to pass 21 resolutions criticising, if not
condemning, Israel’s policies, Mr. Biden gave
Israel blanket diplomatic cover and provided it with the arms it needed to
prosecute wars that make 1982 pale in comparison.
Mr. Biden’s test-driving of Mr. Reagan’s template,
familiarity with the Israeli interventions in Lebanon and annexationist
policies in the 1980s and beyond, and his predecessor’s willingness to confront
Mr. Begin at the time of the 1982 war leave the president with little excuse
for refusing to reign in Israel over the past year.
Mr. Biden’s failure has tangibly devastating consequences
for the Palestinians and yet to materialise fallouts for Israelis and the rest
of the Middle East that will haunt the region for a generation, if not more.
Like Mr. Begin, Mr. Biden will likely see his legacy sullied
by Israeli conduct on the Middle East’s battlefields.
Then
Delaware Senator Joe Biden challenges Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin in
1982. Source: Facebook
A heated encounter with Mr. Begin during the 1982 war, which
involved finger jabbing and fists pounding on a table, spotlights Mr.
Biden’s lack of an excuse.
Echoing Mr. Reagan, Mr. Biden warned Mr. Begin that Israeli
settlement policy could cost it US support. In response, Mr. Begin snapped, “I
am not a Jew with trembling knees.”
Forty-two years later, Mr. Biden studiously ignores the fact
that Israel’s latest Gaza and Lebanon wars are a repetition of the early 1980s
on steroids.
Mr. Begin created
the template for Israel’s systematic targeting of militants irrespective of the
risk to civilians with the 1981 bombing of Fakhani, a densely populated
Beirut neighbourhood that was home to the Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO) and its affiliates.
The bombing destroyed a seven-story building and damaged
four nearby structures, killing some 90 people and wounding hundreds of others.
In a letter to Mr. Reagan, written during Israel’s 1982
invasion of Lebanon, Mr. Begin
compared the carpet bombing of Beirut to the Allied destruction of Berlin during World War Two.
“I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant
army facing 'Berlin' where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen
hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface,” Mr. Begin said.
Mr. Begin’s equation of Yasser Arafat and his PLO with Adolf
Hitler and his associates, like Mr. Netanyahu equating Hamas with the Nazis,
served to justify civilian casualties in operations that were as much about targeting
fighters as they were designed to incite the local population against the
militants.
“In certain cases, the Israeli shelling and bombing were
carefully targeted, sometimes on the basis of good intelligence. All too often,
however, that was not the case. Scores of eight-to twelve-story apartment
buildings were destroyed… Many of the buildings that were levelled…had
no plausible military utility,” recalled historian Rashid Khalidi, who
lived in Beirut at the time of the 1982 bombings.
The strategy produced mixed results but, on balance,
hardened rather than weakened popular resistance to Israeli policies.
There is little reason to believe that the impact of
Israel’s current wars will be any different. Israel has already prepared the
ground by turning Gaza into what onetime Australian human rights commissioner
and United Nations rapporteur Chris Sidoti calls a
”terrorism creation factory.”
Dr.
James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and podcast, The
Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
Comments
Post a Comment