On June 12, 1982, over half a million people demonstrated in New York, calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race. The demonstration was unusual in its size, and even more so in the favorable media coverage it received. About the same time, a few thousand people in scattered cities throughout the country actively protested the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the barely disguised US government support for it. A strong case can be made that the latter actions constituted the more direct and appropriate response to the very real danger of nuclear war.
I was working for an American network and I was on the coastal front during the first week. The battle of ‘Ayn al-Hilwa was still going and the Israelis were “mopping up” the resistance forces still there. Then we moved near Khalda, which became the new front. By the last day, I was already in east Beirut. The media teams just ran after the Israeli forces. The way the networks work is this: The correspondent, if he is brave, does a “standup” in the field. Otherwise, he does it in Tel Aviv. Usually the crews are sent independently, without a correspondent, to the field. Every major network has four or five crews covering the different fronts. So most of the work is done by the crews.
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist and literary critic. Nubar Hovsepian is a fellow of the Institute of Arab Research in Beirut. They spoke with MERIP editors Jim Paul, Joe Stork and Sheila Ryan in New York in July 1982.
What are Israel’s war aims?
As the Israeli invasion of Lebanon enters its third month, the polarization of the Israeli public continues. People there have become increasingly aware of the terrible destruction being wrought on the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples by their military machine. More important for most citizens, concern has spread over the heavy casualties that are certain if the Israeli army seeks to conquer West Beirut.
What is the meaning of the Israeli parliamentarian's comment that “in Lebanon we have entered with a policy that is a direct continuation of Dayr Yasin and Qibya”?
Thick clouds of disinformation covered the Israeli public at the outset of the invasion of Lebanon, the counterpart to the dark clouds and debris that cover the death, the gutted cities, the utter destruction along the Lebanese coast and its hinterland. The Israeli media itself indulged in the disinformation. Pictures would show an Israeli soldier giving some food to a young survivor of the intensive Israeli bombing of civilian population centers. The press carried very long accounts of a few Lebanese being treated in Israeli hospitals.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982 brings to an end the phase of Lebanese political history which opened with the 1975-1976 civil war. It is a logical outgrowth of Israel’s policies in Lebanon since 1975. The 1975-1976 war, in turn, marked a culmination of trends which had been developing at least since 1958. [1]
Dan Connell has covered the Horn of Africa for newspapers and broadcast media in North America and Europe since 1976. He spoke with the MERIP editors immediately after returning from Lebanon in early August.
Can you describe the situation in Beirut?
Mid-May: This weekend Yasser Arafat received an urgent message from Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. During the week, the British ambassador paid an unusual visit to the PLO political department offices in the Arab University area. On Saturday afternoon, Arafat sent a message to all PLO offices in Lebanon and abroad, stating that an Israeli invasion was expected within the next 48 hours. The Israeli attack would be on a scale greater than the invasion of southern Lebanon in March 1978, or the Palestinian-Israeli war of the summer of 1981 when Beirut itself was bombed.
On Sunday morning, June 6, 1982, 40,000 Israeli troops, with hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers, rolled across the 33-mile border with southern Lebanon. Israeli seaborne troops landed on the Lebanese coast at Sidon and near the mouth of the Zahrani River, while the Israeli air force continued the intense bombing of Palestinian camps in the south and around Beirut begun two days earlier.
It may never be possible to know who killed Bashir Gemayel. No one had more blood on their hands from the last eight years of civil war than the president-elect; his many enemies cut across the range of political and sectarian divisions in Lebanon. The circumstances and scale of the attack suggest that it involved at least the cooperation of some elements within his Phalange Party.
J. S. Birks and C. A. Sinclair, Arab Manpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1981).
Edward Said’s Covering Islam is one part of his project to analyze aspects of the Western view of Islam and the Middle East. Orientalism, the first and most substantial of these books, traced the evolution of European attitudes to the cultures of the Middle East from medieval times to the present. It examined specifically how US academics and policymakers adapted the legacy of European orientalism to the needs of US imperialism in the post-1945 era.
Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, The Political Economy of Nasserism: A Study in Employment and Income Distribution Policies in Urban Egypt, 1952-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
Ghali Shoukri, Egypte, la contre-revolution (Paris: Editions Le Sycomore, 1979).
These two assessments of the past decade in Egypt pose the question of approach: Can we most conveniently comprehend the period by studying the role Anwar al-Sadat played in it? Do this one man’s thoughts and deeds provide the lens for viewing the post-Nasser era as a whole? The two books give vastly different answers, reflecting the varying backgrounds of the authors no less than their own senses of purpose.
Osman Ahmed Osman, Egypt’s entrepreneurial tycoon, enjoyed a privileged status that cannot be attributed solely to his role as Sadat’s closest confidant, or even to his kinship by marriage with the president. Many Egyptians came to see him as Sadat’s alter ego, minus the latter’s presidential immunity.
Until shortly before his death, Sadat had denounced every attack on Osman as being directed at him personally, but the uproar occasioned by Osman’s recently published autobiography, My Experience, made this full endorsement no longer possible. Sadat had to accept Osman’s resignation as deputy prime minister.
According to data gathered by the UN Center on Transnational Corporations, the overwhelming majority of foreign investment in Egypt has been from the United States, with the exception of the banking sector. There has been very little European investment, and virtually no Japanese presence. The UN data, covering the period from 1978 through early 1982, is incomplete, as it relies on public sources. It reflects mainly Western corporate investments and understates Arab investment concentrated in tourism and real estate. It does not provide the sums invested, but does break down the investments by parent company, country of origin, and line of business.
Egypt’s armed forces number well over 300,000 men, the largest in the Arab world or in Africa. Some two thirds are in the army, and most of the rest in the air force. Since 1952, the top political leadership has been drawn from the armed forces. Since 1968, there has been a “demilitarization” of the top political structures. A recent study calculates that the proportion of cabinet posts held by military officers declined from 35 percent under Nasser to 15 percent under Sadat.
Egypt’s external debt—the sums owed to other governments, private multinational banks and multilateral agencies like the World Bank—increased on an average of 28 percent per year under Anwar al-Sadat, compared to 13 percent over the previous ten years. Sadat’s decade also witnessed important shifts in the origin and structure of this debt, in a manner that paralleled—and to a large extent financed—Egypt’s political reorientation.
We now know that the execution-style death of Anwar al-Sadat on the anniversary of the October war crossing was the prelude to neither a coup d’etat nor a popular uprising. Government institutions continued to function within the established legal framework and internal stability reigned. The trial of Khalid al-Islambuli and his accomplices also made clear that the assassination was not the work of an isolated or demented individual. It was carried out by a group with clear religious motivation; they sought to eliminate the leader but not to overthrow the regime itself.
