Ellen Cantarow saw this: “Throughout the streets of Tyre, and in much of Sidon, lay the rubble—ragged masses of broken cement, twisted metal, shattered glass, garbage. Corpses lay still under these piles. You knew them by their smell — unmistakable, as powerful as the gasses from some putrefying swamp. As our reporters’ convoy drove up the Lebanese coast one day, the ghastly odour of rotting flesh suddenly enveloped our car.”
“You smelled much more of that last week,” a colleague told the American journalist. “They’ve been clearing the cadavers away since then.”
Forty-one years on, the same war is being fought again. As Israel’s savage bombardment of the Gaza Strip proceeds, the world is seeing hospitals deliberately bombed, based on thin evidence that they were being misused as military command stations. Schools, serving as shelters for the displaced, have been targeted, and the United Nations is warning of starvation and disease.
Past is the present
The memory of the 1982 campaign in Lebanon is not important just for the 17,000-odd civilian lives it claimed. Although the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) cut through their enemies, it was a strategic disaster. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s leadership was expelled to Tunisia, thousands of fighters remained. The IDF became mired in an unwinnable 18-year counterinsurgency. Hezbollah, a far more lethal adversary than the IDF, grew. The problem of terrorism remained.
“In only six weeks of combat and one year of occupation,” Bradley Jacobs noted in a paper produced for the United States Naval College, “the IDF suffered 3,316 dead and wounded. The cost in blood was demographically equivalent to the United States suffering 195,840 casualties in the same time frame.”
Enraged by the savage jihadist attack of 7 October 2023, which claimed the lives of at least 1,200 of its citizens, Israel could be forced once again to learn that righteous anger is a poor counsellor.
In 1982, there was no Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to involve the Biblical enemy of the Israelites, the Amalek, whom God commanded King Saul to “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Former IDF chief of staff Rafael Eitan, though, vowed that “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
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Trapped by triumph
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, famously observed that “in individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Israel’s former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Defence Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir believed Lebanon could be reshaped into a friendly nation. Even though experts presented data on demographics and politics that challenged this notion, political scientist Kirsten Schulze observed, their concerns were dismissed.
The hope was that by annihilating Palestinian nationalism in Lebanon—where the PLO had become entrenched—it would also be wiped out in the West Bank and Gaza.
Even though the PLO and Syrians had expected an Israeli offensive, they considered it to be a limited campaign—along the lines of Operation Litani, staged in 1978. This time, though, Israeli spearheads used amphibious landings and overland movement along trails to reduce enemy strong points. The IDF’s 40,000 men and 440 tanks overwhelmed the PLO and its Syrian sponsors’ 15,500 men and 110 tanks—some of World War II vintage, and incapable of movement.
Events went wrong for the IDF from this point of triumph. The PLO retreated into the dense urban milieu of western Beirut and melded into the Palestinian refugee population. The Shi’a population in southern Lebanon, which had chafed under the PLO rule, soon resented the Israeli occupation. Hezbollah rapidly expanded, filling the space vacated by the PLO and providing services in its stead.
Israel thus found itself at the gates of Beirut with no clear end-game, scholar Brian Parkinson wrote. An eleven-hour air bombardment exacted a hideous toll of civilian casualties, leading to political division within Israel and intense pressure from the West. US President Ronald Reagan threatened to withdraw support for Israel unless the strikes ended.
Like it has done in Gaza, the IDF engaged in siege warfare, cutting off water, food, electricity, and transportation to Beirut’s population of more than 6,20,000 people for over a month.
A ceasefire involving the evacuation of the PLO leadership was hammered out, but more tragedy followed. Israel pushed for the entry of Lebanese militia into Beirut to replace the PLO. The fascist militia of Elie Hobeika slaughtered more than 2,000 Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, and Israeli troops stood by. A subsequent judicial investigation in Israel whitewashed official culpability in the massacres, Uri Avnery and Ha’olam Hazeh recorded, but Israel’s international reputation was severely damaged.
Lebanon, for its part, remained unstable; terrorist threats to Israel proliferated; the nationalist rage that would explode into the Intifada simmered. Israel had achieved none of its strategic objectives.
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Another long war
Few figures on the IDF’s actual counter-terrorism campaign in Gaza have emerged, but much of Hamas’ highly decentralised leadership structure is intact, experts suggest. Hamas has also proved it has the skills to harass IDF tanks and patrols, and then melt into the population. As journalist Zvi Bar’el notes, Hamas has embedded itself in the Palestinian political scene, making it difficult to eradicate without raising a genuine political alternative.
The IDF likely knows what lies ahead. For an entire week during the Lebanese battle of Ain al-Hilweh, expert Sarah Parkinson wrote, cells of Palestinian insurgents thwarted the Israeli military by using a maze of urban debris, alleyways and tunnels. They blew up the IDF’s armoured personnel carriers and tanks using only small arms. The camp was so lethal to Israelis that the IDF withdrew each night for safety, sacrificing the territorial gains it made during the day.
“Eventually,” Parkinson writes, “the IDF resorted to bombarding the camp with conventional ordinance and incendiary weapons, including white phosphorus, in order to take it, bulldoze the ruins, and continue pushing north.”
However, the Palestinian defeat at Ain al-Hilweh did not yield a strategic victory for Israel. It was only a persistent insurgency that would bleed its resources, and inspire a new generation of enemies.
Hamas’ success, Josh Breiner noted, probably exceeded its own expectations too. Israeli intelligence officers now say that the killers were not expecting to encounter the hapless victims gathered for the music festival outside Kibbutz Re’im in October. Like 2008 Mumbai attacks, and many similar hostage crises where civilians get caught in crossfire, at least some of the Israeli civilians were almost certainly killed by Israeli forces as they fought pitched battles with the Hamas attackers.
The two sides have thus unleashed carnage, with no achievable political objective or strategic end. Israel’s conduct of urban warfare in Gaza shows it has learned few lessons from Beirut. Netanyahu’s open-ended vow to take security responsibility for Gaza illustrates that he has no political endgame.
As Sarah Parkinson wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The military and humanitarian lessons of Lebanon strongly suggest that the current catastrophic conditions in Gaza will grow only more acute and that there will be long-term, disastrous consequences for all parties.”
War can be useful as a tool to secure clearly defined political goals. In Gaza, though, war-making is being driven by primal passions and hatreds. Israel might get its revenge, but it won’t get the peace it desperately desires.
Views are personal.