[The following article appeared in the October 12 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor, published in Paris. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
TEL AVIV - In recent months there has been a lot of discussion about the Israeli air force: first, following the June 7 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear power station at Tamouz near Baghdad; then with the July 17 bombing of Beirut in which several hundred people were killed. One would almost think that the future of the peoples of the Near East will be played out in the halls of the Israeli air force high command.
Some people thought that the terrible adventure in the skies above Baghdad was simply an election maneuver that was in poor taste. But they soon had to change their opinion. Since the voting in June and the return to power of the Begin government, the military offensive has resumed on a larger scale, and has forced everyone — in Israel, in the Arab countries, and abroad — to take seriously the election slogans of Menachem Begin and his group.
Begin's political aims were clearly defined during his campaign, even though they were expressed in a manner more reminiscent of marketplace shouting than of the hushed atmosphere of the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee.
Begin's aims, as revealed in the election campaign, are to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to prevent any build up in the military strength of the Arab states, and to maintain Jewish sovereignty in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Each of these objectives, and all three taken together, requires a policy of permanent aggression that must, in the end, lead to a total confrontation in the region. But the Israeli government does not fear such an eventuality. In fact it hopes for it with all its heart, for several reasons.
Question of the West Bank posed
First and foremost, the racist leaders of the Zionist state and army have no doubt that they could win a military victory that would change the relationship of forces between Israel and the Arab states.
Six months from now the withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula will be completed, unless of course the Sadat regime falls or the pressures from the Gush Emunim settlers succeed in forcing Begin to stop carrying out the provisions of the peace treaty with Egypt.
At that point the question of the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be posed in all its sharpness. These territories make up the second stage of the Camp David accords.
Begin is not willing to listen to talk about an Israeli withdrawal from these territories, which he views as an integral part of the national patrimony. Dragging out the automony talks is only a temporary palliative, which will be completely ineffective once Sadat has recovered all of the Sinai.
The only way to put a stop to the pressures from the Egyptian president and the United States, which Egypt and the Arab regimes see as the guarantor of the Camp David accords, is to radically change the relationship of forces in the Arab East, even if such a policy might push some Arab states into the arms of the Soviet Union. That would not necessarily displease the Zionist leaders, who dream of once again being the only serious support for imperialism in the region.
A far-reaching military victory against one or more Arab states would cause a chain reaction. One result would be to significantly reduce the centrality of the Palestinian question in the overall strategy of imperialism and its Arab allies.
Pressures from within
To this large point, we must add two lesser factors that increase the chance of war. While they are of secondary importance, they have their own weight in the Begin government's choice of policies.
The first is the growing importance of the officer caste, which has numerous links with the government and the political apparatus of the Zionist state. For the officer caste, war is a necessary objective for their own advancement and the realization of their ambitions.
The second is the hope, shared by a number of politicians in both the Likud and the Labor bloc, that a war might end the serious social crisis, stagnation, and breakdown in national unity that the Jewish state has been going through for several years.
The Begin government's openly warlike orientation was immediately confirmed by the appointment of General Ariel Sharon — former commander of the infamous murder squad called Commando 101 and a fierce supporter of Gush Emunim — to head the Ministry of Defense, and the changes in personnel that Sharon immediately made in the high command.
Sharon replaced a number of "intellectual" officers with some brawlers from the new generation, for whom war is not only a career but an ideal, and who view politics as too subtle and encumbering.
In Lebanon, less than ten days after the July 30 election, the new government put into practice its political and military plans. The Lebanon events unequivocally confirmed, and before the eyes of the whole world, that Begin's hysterical election campaign speeches were
Zionist settlement. Begin aims to hold West Bank and Gaza.
not demagogy but rather expressed the program that Likud wants to carry out as rapidly as possible.
The fourteen day war
The Zionist state's ongoing political and military presence in Lebanon has a two-fold objective: first, to destroy the military and political strength of the Palestinian national liberation movement, which has been located in Lebanon since its September 1970 defeat in Jordan; second, to extend the Zionist state's political and military influence and, in addition, its markets.
This two-fold objective has been pursued through various means: the de facto Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon; a political and military alliance with some of the far-right Christian forces; and continuous military intervention in the form of land attacks, aerial and maritime bombardment, and constant overflights of Lebanese territory.
Long before Begin came to power, the Zionist leaders viewed Lebanon as an Israeli and Syrian protectorate, not as an independent state. It is not accidental that Israel supported the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1975.
Lebanon is also seen as a propitious area for launching an escalation against Syria when Tel Aviv feels one is necessary, as shown by the Zahle provocation last April [when two Syrian helicopters were shot down by Israeli warplanes].
From the Israeli side, therefore, the July offensive against Lebanon and the Palestinian armed forces was nothing out of the ordinary. except for the savagery of the bombing of Beirut.
But the military response by the Palestinian national movement, and the combined consequences of that response and the Beirut massacres, have led a number of commentators to describe what in Israel is already called the "Fourteen Day War" as a turning point in the situation in the Near East.
The fact is that in southern Lebanon and northern Galilee a real war took place between the Israeli armed forces and those of the Palestinian national movement. The Palestinians responded to each Israeli bombardment by firing Katyusha rockets and artillery, and their effectiveness was as great as that of the Israelis.
The two Israeli attempts at land invasion were bloody failures, according to the military specialists of the daily Ha'aretz, as the Palestinians fought virtually hand-to-hand to drive back the Zionist forces.
For fourteen days, the Israeli army was unable to gain the upper hand, not only in its offensive plans, but even in defense of its own territory.
For the second time in less than six months, the Begin government got bogged down in its own provocations, taking initiatives without calculating their consequences and enormously underestimating the political and military capability of its adversaries to respond.
Begin's threats were shown to be bluster. The Syrian missiles were not withdrawn from Lebanese soil. Not only did Katyusha shells fall on [the Israeli town of] Kiryat Shmona, but the Zionist army was shown to be unable to stop the bombardment, even if only for a time.
...and the Israeli rout
"You cannot defeat a guerrilla army through aerial bombardment. It is as ineffective as bombing flies, " Eitan Haber was forced to acknowledge in an article in the July 24 Yediot Aharonot. In that article Haber drew a balance sheet of the unquestioned military setback in the Fourteen Day War and predicted that Lebanon would become the Vietnam of the Middle East. It was time, he added, for the Israeli leaders to learn from the American experience that bombs are ineffective in resolving political problems.
The Palestinians can rightly congratulate themselves for having inflicted a political as well as military defeat on the Israeli state. First of all, they showed that far from being a small group of terrorists, they were capable of stopping one of the best armies in the world.
Secondly, they showed in real life that a military solution to the Palestinian question was becoming more and more utopian and that in the long run Israel will have no choice but to deal with the Palestinian national movement.
Finally, they forced, for the first time, a cease-fire on the Zionist army. The Israeli army was obliged to deal directly and openly with the PLO, a movement that all the Zionist formations refuse to recognize. The Labor opposition had the pleasure, moreover, of criticizing Begin for having given de facto recognition to the PLO and having concluded a ceasefire with it.
But the Israeli rout goes far beyond the limits of the conflict between the Zionist and Palestinian forces in July. Washington was able to use this new situation to reduce the Zionist state's room for the maneuver in Lebanon. Israel will find it difficult to launch an operation aimed at forcing the Syrians to withdraw their missiles from Lebanon.
The bombings and other military provocations by the Christian militia of Col. Haddad had to be significantly reduced, and the United States and the Saudi regime were able to push the Lebanese Christian forces to distance themselves from Israel.
On this question, Yoram Hamizrahi, one of the best specialists on Israeli policy in Lebanon, made a rather pessimistic assessment in the September 9, 1981 issue of the daily Ha'aretz. "In recent days," Hamizrahi wrote, "it is hard to shake the impression that certain politicians still do not realize that their friends [Lebanese rightists Pierre] Gemayel and [Camille] Chamoun are quite capable of turning their backs, even though most experts on the Lebanese question are convinced that the erosion in relations [between the Israelis and the Lebanese rightists] is going to deepen. ... If this is the case, we can state that the era of intensive Israeli intervention in Lebanon is finished, or at least has qualitatively changed, which necessitates a rapid reevaluation of the situation and a new approach... . All the reactions to the latest developments lead one to think that Israeli policy in Lebanon has no long-term plan, no precise objective."
Kiryat Shmona voted with its feet
Washington was the main force that forced Israel to stop fighting in southern Lebanon, by preventing the Zionists from carrying out an escalation that threatened to turn the whole region into a conflagration. But Begin rushed to accept the American ultimatum after having grasped the extent of the war's impact on the Israeli population.
The residents of Kiryat Shmona, a typical immigrant city on the Lebanese border, do not love the Palestinians. They voted for the Likud in their great majority and applauded Begin's bluster. During the campaign Begin had promised that an artillery shell would never again fall on their town, and that Yanosh and Rafoul (affectionate dimimutives for the chief of staff on the Northern region and the chief of the Israeli army) were ready to remove the Syrian missiles from Lebanon if Reagan's emmissary Philip Habib failed in his mission.
But the shells did fall on Kiryat Shmona and on Nahariya and numerous other Jewish locations in Galillee. And Yanosh and Rafoul were unable to stop the deadly barrages.
The residents of Kiryat Shmona voted for the cease fire with their feet. Out of 15,000 inhabitants, less than 2,000 remained in the bombarded town. In Nahariya the factories had to close down and the hotels remained empty at the height of the tourist season.
Even in the kibbutzim, these elite of Israeli society evacuated their children to the urban society evacuated their children to the urban centers further south. Each visit by members of the government, and incidentally by the Labour opposition, gave rise to violent demonstrations, with the inhabitants demanding shelter, work, and various subsidies.
During the month of July, things had moved far from the blustering spirit that had marked the election campaign. Although demonstrations against the Israeli aggression in Lebanon remained limited to a small layer of activists, the media was unable to hide the growing opposition to Begin's Lebanon policy, a policy that correctly appeared to have no perspectives.
It is one thing to applaud when the air force destroys the Iraqi atomic power plant, but it is something quite different to accept a war of attrition and to directly pay the price that Begin's war policies demand of the Jewish population. Masses not ready to sacrifice
The reaction of the Jewish masses to the latest war adventure of the Zionist government radically contradicts the evaluation that the great majority of the left in Israel made of the meaning of the popular vote for Begin. The popular vote for the Likud in no way means that the Israeli masses are now more ready than they were to make the sacrifices that the new government's militarist policy demands. The latest developments tend to show the opposite.
The crisis of confidence of the Israeli masses regarding the policy of permanent aggression - the only consistent policy of the Zionist government — has become an irreversible fact in the Israeli situation, playing a big role in the deep social crisis in the Jewish state.
The Zionist regime's ability to militarily intervene against the Arab world today has been limited at least as much by the impact that the
Begin and Haig heroic resistance of the Palestinian people has had on the Jewish working masses as by the military relationship of forces between Israel and the Arab world.
The No. 1 objective of the new Israeli government is to prevent at all costs the withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied in June 1967. Begin tried to defend that position during his talk with President Reagan. But that is not easy to achieve. Washington wants to stabilize the regimes that are close to it, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia. To do this it is necessary to defuse the Palestinian bomb and eliminate the aftereffects of the Israeli aggression of June 1967. Israel has to pay the price for the imperialist stabilization of the Arab East, as is very clearly indicated by the Camp David Accords that Israel signed without any intention of fulfilling, at least in regard to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Mercenaries of U.S. imperialism
What alternative can Begin and Sharon present to Washington? A new attack against the Arab regimes that are still linked to the Soviet Union? For the moment that would be counterproductive to the interests of imperialism, which rightly fears a boomerang effect on the Arab masses.
Therefore Begin tried to sell Reagan a new bill of goods, one that was apparently more in line with the policy of the U.S. administration, which wants to place more emphasis on military intervention, whether in Central America or in the Middle East.
Begin therefore proposed "strategic collaboration" between Washington and Tel Aviv. This does not simply involve political-military services rendered to imperialism by the Zionist state. That has already been the very basis of relations between Israel and imperialism for many years.
What Begin has been trying to get lately is the right to directly serve the U.S. army (arms depots on Israeli territory, bases for the Sixth Fleet and the U.S. air force in Israeli ports and airfields), and to serve as an intervention force far from the borders of the Jewish state (United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Pakistan if that proves necessary against Soviet threats and other "subversion."
"We are a strategic investment for the United States, and a central element for the new policy of the Reagan administration" is the substance of what Begin told the new U.S. president. Begin is trying to get Reagan to share the view that, taken as a whole, the Palestinian question and the West Bank are of very little importance compared to these global considerations.
While it is possible that Ronald Reagan and his State Department chief Alexander Haig may try to use the Israeli military and the services of the Zionist state for their plans in Western Asia and the Horn of Africa, it is nonetheless doubtful that in exchange Washington would agree to place all its bets on the State of Israel and turn its back on Saudi Arabia and the other bourgeois Arab regimes.
What is even less sure is that the Israeli masses will be willing to directly play the role of mercenaries for U.S. interests. We already see more and more signs that the Jewish workers of Israel have little enthusiasm for making all the sacrifices that seem directly linked to the Jewish state's security. There is no reason for such sentiments to change when it comes to fighting for the interests of U.S. oil corporations like Exxon in the Persian Gulf.