Right to Exist by Yaacov Lozowick

Author:Yaacov Lozowick [Lozowick, Yaacov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83388-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

6

THE 1980s: WRONG DECISIONS

Acommon Hebrew adage says that people who do nothing make no mistakes. The idea is that anyone who makes decisions and acts upon them will have to live with their consequences; staying on the sidelines will save you from the danger of doing wrong, but at the cost of never doing right.

Zionism is the decision of the Jews to make choices that influence their national existence and living with the consequences. Mistakes were indeed made from time to time, and some have been mentioned already. The surprising thing was how few really significant ones were made: as a century of Zionist activity was marked in about 1980, the movement had succeeded beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations. The centenary, however, was also to be marked by grievous miscalculations that would tarnish Israel’s record. Initially they were simple miscalculations, but as time went on they were based on a basic misreading of Israel’s role and her ability to influence the direction of events in the Middle East.

The underlying theme was the ongoing Palestinian refusal to accept Israel and their insistence on murdering Israeli civilians. By 1976, the Israelis had effectively sealed the border with Lebanon, forcing the terrorists to circumvent it, often by sea. In March 1978, two squads landed on the coast and committed the worst single terrorist event to date. They murdered the first person they saw, an American tourist, then hijacked a bus of families returning home from a holiday on the main road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Shooting and throwing grenades as they went, the hijackers raced toward Tel Aviv. The bus was stopped at the northern entrance to town, and in the ensuing battle thirty-five Israelis were killed and dozens wounded.

Previous Israeli policy had been to put pressure on the country harboring terrorists. This worked in Egypt in 1957, in Jordan in 1970, and to a lesser extent in Lebanon in the early 1970s. By 1978, however, the Lebanese state was disintegrating in a protracted and brutal civil war in which the Palestinians were playing a destabilizing role. The writ of the central government was worthless, with Maronite Christians, Druze, Sunnis, Shiites, and Palestinians all controlling their own fiefdoms and warring with the others. In the eastern Bekaa valley, the PLO was running training camps for terrorists from as far away as Japan, Italy, and Germany—an early version of the Taliban’s Afghanistan. The most powerful player was Syria, which had historically regarded Lebanon as rightfully part of its territory; its president, Hafez al-Assad, most famously demonstrated his opinion of human rights in early 1982, when he quelled a rebellion of the Islamic Brotherhood by killing some twenty thousand of his own citizens in the northern town of El-Hama.

Following the attack on the bus, Israel embarked on a lethal path of intervention in Lebanon, which provided her worst moments. The first step down this path was not understood as such at the time.

In March 1978, Israel occupied a swathe of southern Lebanon, carefully avoiding the Palestinian refugee camps on the coast.

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