So that’s the “security zone.”
Israel dumped scores of deportees in Lebanon in the 1970s and
1980s. Why has that changed now? Why has Lebanon refused?
It’s not so much that it has refused. If Israel dropped some
deportees by helicopter into the outskirts of Sidon, Lebanon
couldn’t refuse. But this time I think Israel made a tactical error.
The deportation of 415 Palestinians [in December 1992] is going to
be very hard for them to deal with.
According to the Israeli press, this mass deportation was fairly
random, a brutal form of collective punishment. I read in Ha’aretz
[the leading Israeli newspaper] that the Shabak [the Israeli secret
police] leaked the information that they had only given six names of
security risks, adding a seventh when the Rabin Labor government
wanted a larger number. The other four hundred or so were added
by Rabin’s government, without intelligence information.
So there’s no reason to believe that those who were deported
were Hamas [Islamic fundamentalist] activists. In fact, Israel
deported virtually the whole faculty of one Islamic university. They
essentially deported the intellectuals, people involved in welfare
programs and so on.
But to take this big class of people and put them in the mountains
of southern Lebanon, where it’s freezing now and boiling hot in the
summer—that’s not going to look pretty in front of the TV cameras.
And that’s the only thing that matters. So there may be some
problems, because Israel’s not going to let them back in without
plenty of pressure.
I heard Steven Solarz [former Democratic congressman from
Brooklyn] on the BBC. He said the world has a double standard:
700,000 Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a
word (which is true); 415 Palestinians get expelled from Gaza and
the West Bank and everybody’s screaming.
Every Stalinist said the same thing: “We sent Sakharov into exile
and everyone was screaming. What about this or that other atrocity
—which is worse?” There is always somebody who has committed a
worse atrocity. For a Stalinist mimic like Solarz, why not use the
same line?
Incidentally, there is a difference—the Yemenis were deported
to their country, the Palestinians from their country. Would Solarz
claim that we all should be silent if he and his family were dumped
into a desert in Mexico?
ann
(Ann)
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