Excerpts from Noam Chomsky´s book "Necessary Illusions" on
Israel´s crimes in Lebanon
Noam Chomsky, "Necessary Illusions - Thought Control in
Democratic Societies", 1989, Appendix III - The Sanctity of Borders,
(p. 267):
During the same period, Israel stepped up its terrorist
activities within the “security zone” as well. Wire services
reported that at least 76 people were deported from the region by
Israel’s terrorist mercenaries in January 1989, and that an “uproar”
was caused in Israel when a Norwegian officer of the U.N. forces
patrolling the region compared the Israeli practice of expulsion to
the methods used by the Nazis in trying to expel Jews from Norway
under occupation; no uproar was caused by the expulsions, either in
Israel or in the country that funds the operations.
Noam Chomsky, "Necessary Illusions - Thought Control in
Democratic Societies", 1989, Appendix III - The Sanctity of Borders,
(pp. 264-268):
The response to the Nicaraguan incursions has been considerably
more selective than the Globe and Mail indicates, as revealed by
Israeli operations in southern Lebanon at exactly the same time. The
reaction to these events can be gauged by a review of New York Times
reports.
On March 12, Israeli planes bombed Palestinian refugee camps near
Sidon, unreported. On March 18, a sentence in an article on another
topic noted that “Israeli warplanes struck targets in Lebanon
southeast of Beirut, … apparently in reprisal for a small-scale
rocket attack on northern Israel.” A few days later, Israeli troops
joined South Lebanon Army mercenaries in attacks north of the “security
zone,” also unreported. On March 24, the Times carried a brief
notice of another attack, reporting that fifteen people were killed
or wounded according to Lebanese police. Others were “feared buried
under the rubble,” some killed when “the planes returned and dropped
more bombs … while relief workers were digging through the debris”
of the first wave of attacks, a standard device to augment
casualties. The March 24 report also gave the first passing mention
to the March 12 bombing. An Israeli attack the following day near
Sidon with five casualties merited twelve lines. On March 31, a
brief notice reported five killed and several houses set ablaze in
an Israeli attack on another village north of the security zone
under cover of a heavy artillery barrage, as Lebanese Muslims were
observing a general strike in support of Arabs commemorating Land
Day in Israel.
Wire services added a few details to this casual record, reporting
that victims of the March 23 attack included four children aged
seven to ten who were hospitalized with “critical wounds,” and that
most casualties were attributed to the third round of bombing,
during relief operations. They described the “smoke and dust” that “engulfed”
four villages after the raids the following day and reported nine
killed, bringing the total killed for the year in Israeli air
strikes to forty-seven. In the March 30 attack, at least seven more
were killed, including two Egyptians and three Lebanese civilians. “Dozens
of mortar shells and rockets crashed in and around the market town
of Nabatiyeh” and four nearby villages, badly damaging at least
fifteen houses, while “Israeli helicopters strafed the rugged
territory with machine guns during the withdrawal.”
Nothing remotely comparable happened in Honduras. Israeli forces
were not engaged in hot pursuit, but were moving beyond the “security
zone” that Israel has virtually annexed in southern Lebanon,
controlled by Israeli forces and a terrorist mercenary army. The
right of annexation, and of destruction and killing beyond its
borders as well, is granted to Israel by virtue of its status as a
leading U.S. client state. The significance of the alleged concern
over the sanctity of borders is dramatically revealed.
Subsequent developments merely confirmed the point, as have the
Israeli bombings in Lebanon since the early 1970s. In October 1988
Israeli bombing attacks killed fifteen and wounded thirty-five,
police reported. According to police, most of the twenty wounded in
the Bekaa valley town of Mashgara were civilians in a clinic,
including Lebanese physicians and nurses. “Wailing women beat their
chests while workers pulled victims from the rubble of Hezbollah’s
clinic.” “The raids were apparently to avenge seven Israeli soldiers
killed in a suicide car bombing earlier this week” by a Lebanese
Shi’ite - a bombing inside Lebanon, where soldiers of the occupying
army were providing support for the mercenary force employed to
control the so-called security zone. The State Department spokesman
“called for an end to violence between Israel and Lebanon,” a
balanced and judicious assessment.
A few days later, with no pretext, Israeli planes bombed the Mieh
Mieh refugee camp near Sidon, wounding forty-one people, according
to police; “a family of six and three other persons were missing and
feared dead under the rubble.” The raid hit a “battered Palestinian
shantytown.” In the attack on Mieh Mieh and two villages, seventeen
were reported killed. Meshgara was again hit by “heavy barrages of
shellfire, from artillery batteries stationed inside Israel.” The
same villages and others were attacked a few days later, killing
four and wounding twenty-two. Palestinian refugee camps and other
targets were attacked by Israeli helicopter gunships shortly after,
including the shop of a boat dealer who was “thought to have rented
two motorboats to Palestinian guerrillas and suspected of selling
spare parts to the guerrillas.” Israeli bombing of the Ein el-Hilweh
refugee camp later in November, unreported to my knowledge, killed
six Palestinians, including a woman and her four-year-old daughter
who were buried in the rubble. “Police said smoke billowed from the
teeming camp as ambulances raced from Sidon to evacuate casualties”
from this bombing “as the country marked the 45th anniversary of its
independence from France.” Other raids near Sidon killed five and
wounded fifteen, including nine civilians. The last of these, on
November 25, was the twenty-third Israeli air strike on Lebanon
through November, bringing the toll for 1988 to 119 killed and 333
wounded.
The final police count for the year was 128 killed and 356 wounded
in Israeli air attacks on Lebanon in 1988, continuing right through
the period when Arafat’s every gesture and phrase was being
scrutinized to determine whether he really meant to renounce
terrorism.
During the same period, Israel stepped up its terrorist activities
within the “security zone” as well. Wire services reported that at
least 76 people were deported from the region by Israel’s terrorist
mercenaries in January 1989, and that an “uproar” was caused in
Israel when a Norwegian officer of the U.N. forces patrolling the
region compared the Israeli practice of expulsion to the methods
used by the Nazis in trying to expel Jews from Norway under
occupation; no uproar was caused by the expulsions, either in Israel
or in the country that funds the operations. Julie Flint reported in
the Guardian (London) on the expulsion of dozens of old men, women,
and children from the town of Shebaa, because of “their refusal to
support the Israeli-controlled South Lebanon Army” (SLA), the
victims said. Norwegian troops tried to prevent the expulsion by
blocking the main street with a jeep, but it was “crushed” by an SLA
armoured car. Israeli troops “stormed the town before dawn, seized
48 people from their beds, drove them out of the region and
blockaded the town,” informing villagers that “the siege will be
lifted only when they agree to form a ‘coordination bureau’ and join
the SLA.” Israeli troops surrounded the town, “depriving its
inhabitants of food for refusing to cooperate with the
Israeli-sponsored local administration, a U.N. source said.” Ten
percent of Shebaa’s 15,000 people have been “forced into exile” by
such practices. Young men are informed that they “have to be
soldiers with the SLA or we will cut off your town.” Deportees
report that the headmaster of a school was “bruised and beaten”
while detained by the Israeli army for refusing to collaborate.
Another victim reported electric torture on the fingers and
testicles. A woman expelled with her eight children reports that
“Israeli troops stormed the house at five in the morning. They took
the children out in their night clothes, though it was bitterly cold.
They put us in a jeep, covered us with a tarpaulin and drove off.
Later, we were all put into a truck. My husband’s father and mother
were there. He is 90 years old.” U.N. spokesman Timur Goksel reports
that “Most of those expelled were women and children” and the
Norwegian UNIFIL commander condemned the expulsions as “inhuman acts.”
Israel reacted to the protests only by continuing the expulsions.
The director of political affairs at the Lebanese foreign ministry
said that the Lebanese “fear that Israeli policy in the occupied
south may aim at gradually emptying that area of all those who
oppose Israel hegemony over that zone, and that it may turn into a
sort of creeping Israeli colonization.”
These events, sometimes reported, elicited no response apart from
occasional expressions of regret over the “violence between Israel
and Lebanon.” The reaction to PLO bombs in Israel, or Nicaraguan
efforts to drive U.S. proxy forces from their territory, is slightly
different.
