When Israel invaded in 1982, there’d been a lot of recent
violence across the border, all from Israel north. There had been an
American-brokered ceasefire which the PLO had held to
scrupulously, initiating no cross-border actions. But Israel carried
out thousands of provocative actions, including bombing of civilian
targets—all to try to get the PLO to do something, thus giving Israel
an excuse to invade.
It’s interesting the way that period has been reconstructed in
American journalism. All that remains is tales of the PLO’s
bombardment of Israeli settlements, a fraction of the true story (and
in the year leading up to the 1982 Israeli invasion, not even that).
The truth was that Israel was bombing and invading north of the
border, and the PLO wasn’t responding. In fact, they were trying to
move towards a negotiated settlement. (The truth about earlier
years also has only a limited resemblance to the standard picture, as
I’ve documented several times—uselessly, of course.)
We know what happened after Israel invaded Lebanon. They
were driven out by what they call “terrorism”—meaning resistance
by people who weren’t going to be cowed. Israel succeeded in
awakening a fundamentalist resistance, which it couldn’t control.
They were forced out.
They held on to the southern sector, which they call a “security
zone”—although there’s no reason to believe that it has the slightest
thing to do with security. It’s Israel’s foothold in Lebanon. It’s now
run by a mercenary army, the South Lebanon Army, which is
backed up by Israeli troops. They’re very brutal. There are horrible
torture chambers.
We don’t know the full details, because they refuse to allow
inspections by the Red Cross or anyone else. But there have been
investigations by human rights groups, journalists and others.
Independent sources—people who got out, plus some Israeli
sources—overwhelmingly attest to the brutality. There was even an
Israeli soldier who committed suicide because he couldn’t stand
what was going on. Some others have written about it in the
Hebrew press.
Ansar is the main camp. They very nicely put it in the town of
Khiyam. There was a massacre there by the Haddad militia under
Israeli eyes in 1978, after years of Israeli bombing, that drove out
most of the population. That’s mainly for Lebanese who refuse to
cooperate with the South Lebanon Army.
ann
(Ann)
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