Between Gaza and Lebanon
How histories of wars and withdrawals led to today's violence.
I believe all my readers are broken-hearted at the death of civilians in war. Differences in framing, by dint of heritage or temperament, may account for whether one is more sensitized to the deaths and displacement of Palestinians, Israelis, or now Lebanese. We wish we could lean on levers of power that would cause the parties to relent from violence. But we also ascribe responsibility for this violence according to different impositions of narrative. When an Israeli air strike kills Lebanese civilians, many naturally hold Israel responsible, as the literal source of fire. Those who see Israelis as the address of calls to end these wars must also ask how Israelis, rightly or wrongly, interpret the war’s consequences.
Israelis hold Hizbullah responsible for civilian deaths, for a number of reasons: Hizbullah began firing at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, killing dozens and driving nearly 100,000 from their homes, many of which are now destroyed. Hizbullah will not negotiate with Israel and is dedicated to its destruction. Israelis thus feel there was no non-military method to remediate the ongoing threat Hizbullah posed to its citizens.1 And because Hizbullah forcibly garrisons its launching sites and rockets in civilian homes,2 Israelis believe Hizbullah is accountable for the lives lost in a fight that the Lebanese militia initiated. Hizbullah avers that its fire the past year has strengthened the Palestinian cause by tying down Israeli forces on two fronts. But on a deeper and more important level, Hizbullah has further occluded an already jaundiced Israeli understanding of the Palestinians.
A catastrophic consequence of Oct. 7th is that it made Israelis less capable of distinguishing between Hamas’ attack, in all its horror, and the Palestinian cause writ large. What seems impossible now and what is required going forward is for Israelis to recognize that the Palestinians remain a stateless people whose demands for sovereignty, self-rule, civil rights, and security are legitimate and inalienable. Thus, if Israelis are unable to see the Palestinians as anything but another example of “territorial withdrawal leads to our deaths,” the fundamental issue at the core of the conflict will continue to get buried beneath false visions of endless war as the only path, oxymoronically, to survival. And we cannot even fathom what this will mean for those who survive the carnage that follows.
The entanglement of Lebanon and Gaza, Hizbullah and Hamas, reinforces a fatalistic public sentiment in Israel: “we’re surrounded by implacable foes who want to kill us, no matter what we do.” That last clause is the most important. It collapses any initiative to resolve the conflict. This was not always the prevailing view in Israel, and it is critical to learn how this view ultimately swallowed the Palestinian issue. It’s a history, in fact, that shifts between Gaza and Lebanon.
A friend recently asked me how the current war has differed from Israel’s wars in Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006). I feel uniquely trained on this topic: a chapter of my doctoral dissertation deals with the first Lebanon War and how it impacted Israeli and Palestinian poetics. To understand the differences between the wars, we need to look back to the 1948 War, when Israel was established.
In 1948, Lebanon and Gaza were both destinations for Palestinian refugees deported by – or fleeing from – Israeli troops. 190,000 refugees went to Gaza (then occupied by Egypt) and 100,000 more went to Lebanon.3 Gaza and Lebanon were then used as staging grounds for Palestinian militants conducting cross-border raids into Israeli civilian communities.4 Israel conquered and occupied Gaza in 1967. The border with Lebanon was relatively quiet until the PLO moved their headquarters there following the Black September massacres of 1970 in Jordan, their previous base of operations. In southern Lebanon and particularly in West Beirut, the PLO effectively created a state within a state, complete with its own militias, control of ports, and much of the social and cultural architecture of a nation-state, albeit one in exile, forever poised to return to their lost lands. Guerillas (fida’iyin) lay claim to those lands by conducting military and terror operations against the Israeli civilians they viewed as their usurpers. Israel typically responded with air strikes, which often killed civilians alongside militants.
Ironically, the beautiful, verdant hill country of the Galilee (northern Israel/Palestine) and southern Lebanon looks indistinguishable from either side of the border fence. One of the most richly mined veins in Palestinian literature concerns the clandestine crossing of this border. Palestinian refugees sneaking back into Israel, whether to consummate love affairs, conduct guerilla operations, or reunite with family, is a central narrative motif in canonical Palestinian texts.5 These books deal with the figure of the guerilla fighter, the Fida’i, much romanticized during the heyday of the PLO’s power in Lebanon. But the fida’iyin were also responsible for grisly attacks across the Galilee: they killed nine children and three adults on an Israeli school bus in 1970. In 1974, Palestinian terrorists took over an elementary school in Ma’alot, ultimately killing 25 children. Four years later, a squad of fida’iyin crossed from Lebanon by sea and perpetrated what was then one of the deadliest massacres in Israel’s history, shooting to death 38 civilians, including 17 children, along Israel’s Coastal Road. This led to a limited Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978. By 1982, these kinds of attacks, combined with shelling of Israel’s northern kibbutzim, led Israel’s right-wing government to invade Lebanon, ostensibly to clear the borderlands of PLO militants. Darwish wrote that the invasion “proposed to guarantee the safety of Galilee against the armed longing which the sons of Galilee bear for the land of Galilee.”6
Infamously, Israel’s defense minister, Ariel Sharon, misled his Prime Minister Menachem Begin about the war plans, and within 48 hours Israeli troops had advanced all the way into Beirut. For the first time, this placed the IDF within an Arab capital – one plunged, in that moment, in a vicious and complex civil war. Much like today with Hamas, there were inherent contradictions to the war’s purpose. Domestically, there was popular support for the goal of securing Israel’s border communities. But some of Israel’s leaders, like Sharon, believed this could not be done as long as their enemy continued to run a cohesive proto-state. Thus there could be no security (or victory) until the PLO was vanquished: as a political movement, as a military force, and in effect, as representatives of the Palestinian people on the world stage. As Israel has already found in Gaza this past year, it is very difficult to liquidate an organization that has embedded itself within a refugee population to the point that one cannot fight the enemy without exacting a morally intolerable toll on the civilian population. Not surprisingly, in 1982, Israel was criticized very harshly on the world stage. President Reagan even told P.M. Begin that Israel’s strikes on southern Lebanon constituted a “holocaust”.
At this point of the story, an important distinction comes into play. Unlike in 2024 Gaza, when Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, Israel had local allies: the Maronite Christian militias who had been fighting the PLO (and their left-wing allies, for other reasons) for seven years by that point. As the IDF besieged Beirut, pressure mounted on the PLO. By the end of August, the organization had evacuated its leaders and fighters under supervision from a multinational deployment of American, French, and Italian soldiers. However, on Sept. 14, 1982, Palestinians assassinated Lebanon’s newly-elected Maronite President, Bashir Gemayel. Days later, Israeli troops allowed Christian Phalangist militias into two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, ostensibly to eliminate “terrorists”. But the Christians spent the next two days torturing and murdering between 1-2,000 civilians in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila Massacre.
Here the comparisons with Gaza today diverge further. In Israel, the largest rally in the nation’s history took place as 400,000 Israelis, nearly 10% of the state’s population, took to the streets to decry Sabra and Shatila. Protesters demanded an end to the war and the resignation of the government.7 This rally was in many ways the first giant step toward the mainstreaming of an Israeli peace movement directed specifically toward the Palestinians.8 The war in Lebanon was viewed as Israel’s first “war of choice”9 (Israel’s other major wars having been initiated, at least technically, by the Arab states). Refusal to serve in Lebanon spread amongst Israeli youth.10 Unlike with Netanyahu’s present coalition, Israel’s 1982 government appointed a commission to investigate its culpability for the massacre.11
Following the commission’s report that Israel bore “indirect responsibility” for Sabra and Shatila, in early 1983, a march against the government was organized by Peace Now, which was becoming a leading movement on the Israeli Left. At the rally, a counter-protester lobbed a grenade that killed a Peace Now leader and war veteran, Emil Grunzweig. As Shapira writes, “This was the first time that a Jew had been killed in the State of Israel by another Jew because of his political beliefs.” This murder was a gloomy preview of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination at a peace rally in 1995. The decade plus that separated these assassinations was characterized by an intense split over Israel’s war in Lebanon and its policy toward the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli poets were prominent in the anti-war movement. Dahlia Ravikovitch,12 a poet I write about in my dissertation, was not subtle in her verse at the time: some titles from the early-mid ’80s include “You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice”, “Get Out of Beirut”, and “They’re Freezing Up North”, which connects the suicide of her mentor, Baruch Kurzweil, to the plight of Palestinian refugees: “Babies are freezing / in the slanted lashings of the rain. / Mothers are burning / their canvas tents / to make a nice little bonfire in winter. / He stands up, passes on and he’s free. / This bloody mess / is all on my head now, / all on me.”13
During the ’80s, the locus of Palestinian resistance shifted to Gaza, where a mostly non-lethal intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation took hold amongst the youth. This intifada highlighted the transformation of the Israeli soldier from heroic self-defender to hyper-militarized occupier. The peace movement built on the groundswell against the occupation of Lebanon by advocating for an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Ironically, at the time of the second Lebanon War (2006), three films were in production that would change Israeli cinema by depicting the devastating, existential moral cost of the first. Beaufort (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (2008) were nominated for the Oscar for Best International Film, while Lebanon (2009) won the highest prize at the Venice Film Festival. On purely cinematic terms, these films are extraordinary; but they also pointed to an anti-war consciousness14 that remained a quarter-century after Israeli troops crossed the northern border. Today, outright antiwar voices are fewer and farther between, though I would like to highlight a recent publication available in English: The Gates of Gaza: Critical Voices from Israel on October 7 and the War with Hamas.
But again, how do the first two Lebanon wars differ from today? From 1982 to 2006, there was no was no event on the scale of Oct. 7th, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Politically, however, the Israeli public was already in a different frame of mind from 1982 (or ’06) before October 7. The peace movement had become small, discredited, and insignificant. There is now a large protest movement in favor of a ceasefire – but they’ve found no traction in spurring the government to change its bellicose policy, mainly because of a parliamentary (if no longer popular) majority that sits to Netanyahu’s right on the war.
Some of the tectonic political changes that led to today’s Israel derive from the conclusion of the first Lebanon War.15 In 1999, Israel’s then most-decorated soldier, Ehud Barak, defeated erstwhile Prime Minister Netanyahu in a landslide election, one predicated on Barak’s advancing the peace process on all fronts. Since 1982, the IDF had continued to occupy a “Security Zone” in southern Lebanon, between five and 20 kilometers deep. This led to the formation of Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed militant group and political movement that aimed to eject Israel from Lebanon and destroy the Jewish state. By 2000, the Israeli public was largely exhausted by the toll of its long occupation of Lebanon. Because Hizbullah would not negotiate with Israel, Barak ordered a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Lebanon, completed in June, 2000.
A month later, at Camp David, Barak offered Yasser Arafat 95% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and the evacuation of all Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory that were not adjacent to Israel. Though there is much contention over the details, in broad strokes, Arafat refused the offer of a “final-status” peace agreement, and a violent Intifada erupted that September. This (second) Intifada included suicide bombings deep in Israeli population centers and violent reprisals by the IDF, who temporarily retook control of Palestinian cities that had been handed over during the years of the Oslo Peace Accords (1993-2000). In October, 2000, three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped in a Hizbullah raid and held until a massive prisoner exchange for their dead bodies took place in 2004.
This violent period concluded in 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (who beat Barak in a snap election in 2001) pursued another unilateral withdrawal, this one of about 8,000 Jewish settlers and hundreds of soldiers from the Gaza Strip. A year later, Hamas won parliamentary elections, and a year after that, forced out the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in a brutal civil war. Since then, Israel has imposed a crushing blockade on the Gaza Strip, and Hamas has shot rockets at Israeli cities, leading to four significant wars in which Israeli forces struck at Hamas in Gaza, but also killed thousands of Palestinians.
Separately, in 2006, Hizbullah conducted another cross-border raid in which they killed almost a dozen soldiers, two of whose bodies they took captive. This led to the Second Lebanon War, a month-long salvo in which Hizbullah rained rockets on the northern third of Israel, while Israeli airstrikes and ground offensives killed hundreds of civilians and caused over a million Lebanese to flee further north. The fighting ended with a UN resolution calling for Hizbullah to withdraw from the Lebanese border. They never did.
What are the takeaways?
Hizbullah’s kidnappings and rocket fire did much to poison the concept of “unilateral withdrawal.” Israelis tried not responding (2000) and launching a war (2006), and neither option removed Hizbullah’s threat.
Hamas’ rocket fire and domination of Gaza since Sharon’s “unilateral withdrawal,” culminating in October 7th, has amounted to the death knell for that concept amongst the Israeli electorate.
Sharon pursued the unilateral path, however, in order to avoid bilateral negotiations with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. These negotiations could have led to the foundation of a Palestinian state – which Sharon opposed. Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, did negotiate with Abbas, but Olmert resigned upon being indicted for corruption, before Abbas responded to his last offer. This took place just before the first Israel-Hamas war erupted, in December, 2008.
The takeaway: for roughly the last 15 years, under Netanyahu, the Israeli government has opposed a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu was explicit about supporting Hamas rule in Gaza in order to prevent any chance of a negotiated resolution (with the P.A.) that would result in a Palestinian state. This was electorally viable because many Israelis believed the peace negotiations of the ’90s led to the suicide bombings of the ’00’s. Of course, there are other (tactical, strategic, and existential) explanations for the collapse of the peace process. But Netanyahu’s main political achievement has been to convince Israelis that the Left’s vision of peace through negotiation and territorial withdrawal is to blame for every deadly outcome since 2000.
One would hope that October 7th would shatter the above conception. How could a Palestinian state run by Mahmoud Abbas, who renounced violence decades ago, have ever given birth to something as monstrous as Oct. 7th? Yet the Israeli political establishment, from the “center” to the far-right, are united in opposing a Palestinian state, characterizing it as a “reward” for terrorism. The 1990s peace process is thus still being (successfully) blamed for the results of two decades of right-wing policy, which preferred Hamas over Palestinians who sought a two-state solution.
From 1982 until the mid-2000’s, “Lebanon” connoted an Israeli Vietnam: a national loss of morale, unity, and moral standing. But for the past two decades, these associations have given way to fears over Hizbullah’s enormous arsenal and its continued vow to eliminate Israel – as well as its leadership of the “ring of fire” that Iran has built out of client militias surrounding the Jewish state.
In Dexter Filkins’ July New Yorker feature on Hizbullah, he quotes a Western official who had met Hassan Nasrallah: “Nasrallah would never have ordered the October 7th attack. He doesn’t want to see Lebanon destroyed.” The official was contrasting Nasrallah with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who has said that he would countenance the death of “100,000 Palestinians” if it meant victory over Israel.16 Filkins' reporting suggested Israel would not kill Nasrallah, who was probably the most effective strategic leader in the Arab world in the past half century. We must now wonder/dread whether Nasrallah’s successors will be as capable, and how that will impact the conflict?
The summer of high-profile assassinations of Hizbullah and Hamas leaders have lifted Netanyahu in the polls, while reminding Israelis of precisely the self-image that October 7th destroyed, one of superiority in military intelligence. Will this allow Netanyahu to declare “victory” to his base and right-wing allies, possibly hastening a ceasefire in Gaza? Or will it harden Israel’s positions, “proving” that only military aggression can remove the threats to Israel’s citizens?
In these uncertain and horrific times, may the New Year bring blessings of life, liberation, and peace.
Hizbullah had pledged to cease its fire if Israel reached an agreement with Hamas. But even if this came to pass, with an arsenal of 150,000 missiles, rockets, and drones, Hizbullah would remain in a position to bombard Israel with fire at any time.
Here, veteran Middle East correspondent Dexter Filkins reports on the divergent fates of two Christian villages in southern Lebanon. One village, Rmayeh, successfully pressured Hizbullah not to use its homes as launching sites and was subsequently spared Israeli bombardment. A smaller village, Qaouzah, lacked the leverage, and is now nearly a ghost town. “Every Hezbollah volley prompted a nearly instantaneous counterstrike” by Israel.
By 2018, 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and 469,000 Palestinians in Lebanon were registered as refugees (including descendants) with UNRWA. Palestinians in Lebanon were not given citizenship.
Gaza in the 1950s-60s, Lebanon in the ’70s and ’80s.
I strongly recommend each of these books:
The Secret Life of Sa’eed, the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby (1974)
Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish (1982)
Arabesques by Anton Shammas (1986)
Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury (1998)
Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 80.
Darwish wryly wrote, “I didn’t rejoice over the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, which continues to rob us of all our roles… I listened to their radio but never understood the secret behind their crying. The victor was defeated from within. The victor was afraid to lose his identity as victim… From them the sin, and from them the forgiveness. From them the killing, and the tears.” Memory for Forgetfulness, p. 110.
As opposed to advocating for peace with surrounding Arab states, as Begin had done with Egypt, thereby sidelining the Palestinian issue.
P.M. Begin used this phrase the day before the war began, and continued: “There is no moral diktat that a nation must, or is entitled to, fight only when its back is to the sea or it is on the brink of the abyss.” Qtd. in Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, p. 380.
Shapira notes that the war witnessed the first refusal of a senior officer in Israel’s history. “The troops felt they were fighting for objectives far beyond what was necessary to defend Israel. Soldiers reacted bitterly… Apart from [high IDF casualties], the brutality of the actions in Beirut and the bombing with its attendant civilian casualties enraged both troops and officers who saw these actions as abandonment of the intrinsic values of the IDF’s principle of ‘purity of arms’ and protecting human life.” Shapira, 383-4.
A recent report by Ha’aretz’s senior military correspondent, Amos Harel, noted that in Gaza, “more and more soldiers are leaving the ranks due to wounds, mental difficulties or problems of motivation.” This was before Israeli ground troops invaded Lebanon.
The Kahan Commission was appointed ten days after the massacre. I presently write on the eve of a year since October 7th, and Israel’s government still refuses to investigate its failures in the lead-up to that massacre – of its own citizens, no less. Following the Kahan Commission’s report in February 1983, Sharon, the defense minister, was forced to resign his position. In September '83, P.M. Begin resigned and retreated from public life entirely.
Considered among the best, and by some, the best Israeli poet of her time. She was also something of a celebrity – a fact that reveals the public status of literature in Israel at that time.
Dahlia Ravikovitch, Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, Trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, New York: W. W. Norton, 2009, 192.
If you see the films and wish to navigate the debates about their meaning, I strongly recommend the following book chapter by my mentor Gil Hochberg, which I’m linking to here, from: Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
If you’re familiar with this history, you might just skip down to my numbered “takeaways.”
Hamas’ former leader Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July, had also said: “We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of Gaza – so it awakens our revolutionary spirit.”