By Robert Barwick
The history of Israel and the confl ict with Palestinians is a history of a century of massacres and reprisals. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Jewish perpetrators of massacres were acknowledged to be terrorists, most notoriously the Irgun, commanded by future PM Menachem Begin, who blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 people including 29 Britons. (Benjamin Netanyahu attended a 2006 celebration of the 60th anniversary of the King David Hotel bombing.) After 1948 Israeli forces continued to perpetrate massacres—such as the October 1953 Qibya massacre of 69 Palestinians, two thirds of them women and children, and the 29 October 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre of 49 civilian Palestinian farm workers, including 19 men, 6 women and 23 children, for breaching a curfew which the Israeli soldiers who shot them knew they were unaware of—but now these killings were state-sanctioned; only attacks by Palestinians were labelled terrorism.
Israeli Defense Secretary Ariel Sharon (right), with his US counterpart Caspar Weinberger in 1982, the year after ordering a wave of terrorism
in Lebanon that killed hundreds of civilians. Photo: Frank Hall/Wikipedia
But terrorism is terrorism, and in light of Israel’s current operations in Lebanon, it’s instructive to look back on a wave of blatant, monstrous terrorist attacks Israel committed in Lebanon in 1981, under the authority of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Newly appointed by PM Menachem Begin, Sharon hoped to provoke a Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) counterattack which would be in breach of a ceasefire negotiated by the United States, and would give Israel the pretext to launch a full-blown invasion of Lebanon.
Following are excerpts from Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, who recounts Sharon’s deadly terrorism campaign which preceded Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the resulting formation of Hezbollah, which Israel accuses of being a terrorist organisation to justify its current deadly bombing campaign in Lebanon.
“Sharon thought, correctly, that every day that went by peacefully gave Arafat and his people a gift of time to consolidate their position in Lebanon and improve their military deployment there. He decided to speed things up a little so he could execute his plan, and to activate [IDF special ops specialist Meir] Dagan’s secret apparatus in the Northern Command. ‘The aim of the second phase of this activity,’ according to [Northern Command senior officer Efraim] Sneh, ‘was to sow such chaos in the Palestinian areas of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut that there would be a genuine and cast-iron reason for an Israeli invasion.’
“By mid-September 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities. One went off in the Fakhani quarter of Beirut on October 1, killing eighty-three people and wounding three hundred, including many women who were trapped in a fire in a clothing factory owned by the PLO. Another one exploded next to the PLO headquarters in Sidon, killing twenty-three. In December 1981 alone, eighteen bombs in cars or on motorcycles, bicycles, or donkeys blew up near PLO offices or Palestinian concentrations, causing many scores of deaths.
Rise and Kill First
“The car bombs were developed in the IDF’s Special Operations Executive (Maarach Ha-Mivtsaim Ha-Meyuchadim), and they involved the use of one of the earliest generations of drones. These drones would relay the beam that would set off the detonation mechanism of the device. One of Dagan’s local agents would drive the car to the target, under aerial or land observation, park it there, and then leave. When the observers identifi ed the moment they were waiting for, they’d push a button and the car would explode. Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defence of the Christians.
“Yasser Arafat was not hoodwinked by this ploy. He accused the Mossad of being behind the blasts and the ‘front’ [Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, created by Sharon’s operatives to claim credit for the attacks]. That was not quite right, either, however. The Mossad was in fact vehemently opposed to what [IDF Northern Command head Major General Avigdor] Ben-Gal and Dagan were doing. ‘With Sharon’s backing,’ one Mossad officer of the time said, ‘terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians, too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?’
“Another Mossad man who was in Lebanon at the time said, ‘I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.’” (Emphasis added.)
Australian Alert Service, 4 Nov. 2024
