If politics is the art of the possible, then the impact of the Kahan Commission Report has to be understood as “beyond politics,” Israel’s final victory in the Lebanon war is not the expulsion of the PLO or even the extension of its sovereign reach to challenge Lebanese territorial and political independence. The full measure of Israel’s victory is rather its vindication, despite all, as a moral force in the region—as a superior state, especially as compared to its Arab rivals.
Until the war in Lebanon, official Israeli policy toward the Palestinians under its occupation rested on the premise that the PLO was the only obstacle on the road to what Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir called “the fullest advancement of the process that began in Camp David.” [1] The elimination of the PLO, according to this logic, would produce Palestinians willing to take part in an Israeli-defined autonomy. Through the so- called Civil Administration, then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had started the process of extirpating “PLO influence in the territories.”
Jonathan Kuttab works as an attorney in Ramallah. He grew up in the West Bank. After finishing college in the US and getting a law degree from the University of Virginia, he returned to the West Bank in 1979. He recently obtained accreditation from the Israeli bar. He works with Law in the Service of Man, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, which analyzes the military orders and legal mechanisms used to implement Israeli policy and documents human rights violations. He spoke with Joe Stork in Baltimore on April 12, 1983.
What is the situation in the West Bank since the Lebanon war?
The residual areas of Palestine occupied by Israel in June 1967 (generally referred to as the West Bank and Gaza) contained a population of between 1,300,000 and 1,350,000 Palestinians. At that time, this population represented over half of all the estimated 2,650,000 Palestinians in the world. At present, the number of Palestinians who remain in these zones does not exceed 1,300,000—approximately the same number as lived there 15 years ago. Had the population of 1967 remained in place, natural increase would have yielded a present population in post-1967 occupied Palestine in excess of 2 million. Therefore, we estimate that the June 1967 war and subsequent occupation were responsible for the dispersion from their homeland of over 700,000 additional Palestinians.
George Hazboun is a leading Palestinian trade unionist. He was dismissed from his elected position as deputy mayor of Bethlehem by a January 22 municipal council decision, spearheaded by Mayor Elias Freij, for his alleged abstention from attending council meetings since May 1982. Coming as it did three weeks before the convening of the Palestine National Council in Algeria, this dismissal was interpreted by the national movement as an attempt to clear the ground for pro-Hashemite elements in the West Bank to make their presence known in the Algiers meeting and to mute anti-Jordanian sentiment locally.
Snow fell seven times on the hill towns north of Jerusalem this past winter, and the warmth of spring did not come until after the middle of April. But the welcome spring did not bring relief from the harshness of the Israeli occupation. In the town centers, Israeli troops were a constant reminder of the military authority, fingering their machine guns, one member of the unit holding a radio with an enormous whip antenna, ready to summon further forces at a moment’s notice. There are now more soldiers than before—on the hilltops, on the roads, in the squares, patrolling, lounging, harassing. The fines are higher, the jail sentences are longer, restrictions are tighter on personal movement, censorship of newspapers is more onerous.
Israeli authorities openly acknowledge that the invasion of Lebanon was part of a strategy to break Palestinian resistance in the West Bank and Gaza so that de facto annexation could proceed. Palestinian resistance has not been broken, but Israeli settlement building continues at a rapid pace and occupation policies are harsher than ever. In this issue, we examine the current situation in the occupied territories and the continuing struggle there. Another issue in the near future will complement this one with articles on the economy, water, settlements, land policy and other questions, as well as a bibliography, for which there was not sufficient space here.
Michael Jansen, The Battle of Beirut: Why Israel Invaded Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1982).
Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982).
A survey covering the inhabitants of the territories who work inside Israel, conducted by the manpower planning section of the Department of Employment, reveals that in 1981 some 76,000 of them were working in Israel. In 1971, the equivalent figure had been 21,000 and in 1975 it had been 66,000. According to the survey, financed by the Defense Ministry through the coordinator of activities in the territories, the inhabitants of the territories constitute about 5.5 percent of workers in Israel.
This account by Shulamit Har-Even appeared in Yediot Aharanot on February 14, 1983. It was translated from Hebrew by Israel Shahak. According to Shahak, who was present at the demonstration himself, the pro-Sharon crowd was made up of West Bank settlers (“Gush Emunim types”) and young yeshiva students of the Agudat Israel Party, both of these largely Ashkenazi, and a separate group of young Oriental Jews brought in on special buses from Beit Shemesh. Shahak observed that while the Peace Now crowd was continuously joined by new marchers, virtually no individuals joined the pro-Sharon group during the demonstration.
Israel’s kibbutzim, each a block of neat cottages built round a communal dining room, have always concerned themselves with more than the shared tilling of soil pioneered by Jewish settlers in 1911. Since the prospect of a spring election appeared in the autumn of 1982, kibbutz members have been preparing their customary campaign on behalf of factions in the Labor opposition with which they are affiliated. Well organized and articulate, they have provided Labor with campaign bases, public speakers and leading political figures.
In a year when much of the world endured a protracted economic crisis, and Israel itself was politically torn by the invasion of Lebanon, that country&rsquos economy appeared deceptively unruffled. True, inflation rebounded to a near-record level of 131.5 percent, [1] but most of the country’s citizens seemed to be well cushioned from its effects. Unemployment stood even at 5 percent — about 65,000 persons — a rate that has not changed since 1979. Unemployment does not seem to have been exported to the Occupied Territories either, as a record number of workers from the West Bank and Gaza are currently employed in Israel.
Daniel Amit is a physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a founding member of the Committee Against the War in Lebanon and its predecessors, the Committee in Solidarity with Birzeit University and the Committee Against Settlement in Hebron. During the 1982-1983 academic year, he is Einstein Professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. He spoke with MERIP editors in New York at the end of January, just before the Kahan Commission issued its final report on the Beirut massacres.
What are the main accomplishments of the Committee Against the War?
There is a new wisdom, already becoming conventional, which explains Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the attendant massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese by reference to two crucially interconnected developments in Israel: the “orientalization” of Israeli society and the rise to power of the Likud government. “Sharon’s war” is seen as a consequence of Begin’s alliance with the Oriental Jews. [1] Even Chancellor Bruno Kreisky of Austria, a consistent and outspoken advocate of mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and of the establishment of a Palestinian state, has explained Israeli policy in similar terms: “So today Israel has a majority of Moroccan Jews, Jews from the Arab world….
This is the first of several issues we have planned which will examine the Middle East in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last June. This issue explores the existing political divisions inside Israel itself. Kenneth Brown investigates the complexities underlying Israel’s own “war between the Jews,” and dispels some of the more superficial characterizations of that country’s intersecting ethnic and political cleavages. Brown takes issue with the widespread notion that the most chauvinist and repressive features of Israeli politics can neatly be ascribed to the electoral weight of Jews of Arab and North African backgrounds.
It is with the deepest sadness that I have learned of the death of Manoucheir Kalantari, a dear friend and valiant comrade with whom I worked closely for several years. He was an Iranian socialist who worked for many years as a leader of the opposition in Britain and Western Europe to the Shah’s regime. Kalantari, a lawyer in his middle forties, belonged to the Fedayi-i Khalq guerrillas, who have been fighting the Khomeini government since June 1981. He was killed in a Tehran prison after being captured during a clash with Islamic Guards in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan in April 1982.
Sepehr Zabih, The Mossadegh Era: Roots of the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1982).
A sympathetic narrative of Mossadeq’s tenure as prime minister from April 1951 to August 1953, to the point of being unable to criticize some of the National Front’s more serious blunders. Zabih also exhibits a marked hostility to the Tudeh Party. While a number of useful factual details are provided, there is no insight into the social bases of Mossadeq’s support and no apparent understanding of the socioeconomic conditions which led to both the successes and failures of the National Front.
—Eric Hooglund
Nikki R. Keddie, Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (with a section by Yann Richard) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).
