Actualité - Behind the rise of Hezbollah: Two decades of Israeli occupation

Franc-Parler présente un texte historique relatant les multiples invasions d'Israël en terre libanaise. Sans scrupule, le gouvernement d'Ehoud Olmert répète les horreurs passées pour s'imposer par la violence dans un pays fragilisé. Au nom de la "guerre au terrorisme", à l'instar des États-Unis, les civils meurent par centaines, victimes du "nettoyage ethnique" meurtrier du sionisme pour dominer cette région.

Israel and its apologists claim that Israel’s brutal terrorisation of the Lebanese people is an act of self-defence following a cross-border raid by the Lebanese organisation Hezbollah, which captured two Israeli soldiers. However, Israeli aggression against Lebanon goes back many years.

In the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) set up bases in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees lived. Israel began relentlessly bombing Palestinian refugee camps and south Lebanon towns and villages from 1968 on. In the March 7, 1975 New Times, US journalist Judith Coburn reported that scores of Lebanese villages, bombed since 1968, were being attacked “almost daily in recent months by ... airplane, artillery, tanks and gunboats... the Israelis are using the full range of sophisticated savagery known to our own military in Indochina: shells, bombs, phosphorus, incendiary bombs, CBU's [cluster bombs] and napalm”.

In March 1978, Israel launched an full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and leading the UN Security Council to adopt Resolution 425 calling for Israel to withdraw it troops and establishing an international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). When it pulled its troops back in June 1978, Israel remained in occupation of a part of Lebanon south of the Litani River.

Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation

On June 3, 1982, the Israeli ambassador in London was killed by an assassin connected to the extreme anti-PLO Palestinian group headed by Abu Nidal, who had also ordered the killing of numerous PLO leaders. Three days later, Israel used the ambassador’s assassination as a pretext to launch another full-scale invasion of Lebanon. The death toll in the following three months was estimated at 19,085, with 30,000 wounded.

Yet earlier, in July 1981, the PLO had declared a ceasefire in cross-border raids and stuck to it. This absence of cross-border attacks was worrying Israel, as this was enhancing the PLO's international diplomatic position. Israel was losing its ability to paint the PLO as a group of terrorists.

After three months of heroic resistance, the PLO's condition for leaving Lebanon was that Palestinian non-combatants in the refugee camps be assured of safety. The US agreed to this, and a multi-national force, consisting of US, French and Italian troops, was authorised to oversee the evacuation of the PLO leadership and guerrilla units. The PLO withdrew from Lebanon in August 1982.

The Arab countries and the PLO then jointly accepted a peace plan calling for Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza) and the formation of an independent Palestinian state in these territories with its capital in East Jerusalem, and guarantees for “peace among all states in the region”.

Israel and the US rejected this. On September 3, Israeli forces advanced towards the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in west Beirut, clearing minefields that had been laid to protect the camps. The multi-national force had withdrawn ahead of schedule.

On September 15, Israeli tanks surrounded the camps. The following day, the commander of the Israeli forces, General Amos Yaron, authorised units of the ultra-right Christian Phalangist militia to enter the camps to “clean out the terrorists”, with the full approval of Israeli war minister Ariel Sharon. For 42 hours, Israeli units surrounded the camps while their Lebanese neo-Nazi allies slaughtered 3000 defenceless Palestinian men, women and children.

By the end of 1982, Israel remained in occupation of all of southern Lebanon, leading to a resistance movement by Lebanese organisations, including the Communist parties and the Shiite-based organisations Amal and Hezbollah. PLO forces returned to Lebanon to help the Lebanese resistance. In 1985, Israel was forced to withdraw from most of Lebanon, but again remained in occupation of a “security zone” south of the Litani.

The Shiites, who mostly reside in southern Lebanon, are the largest and poorest of the country’s three major religious communities, the Christians being the smallest and richest. The Shiites had been largely excluded from the sectarian Lebanese political system, which mandated that the Christian minority have most seats in parliament, followed by the Sunni Muslim community. However, the brutality of the post 1982 Israeli occupation radicalised the Shiites.

Amal was the main Shiite organisation fighting for greater Shiite inclusion in the country’s sectarian political system, established in 1943 before the country gained its independence from France. However, Amal had been prepared to deal with the Lebanese right-wing and with the Syrian Baathist regime of Hafez al Assad, leading to a series of Amal attacks on the Communist Party in the early 1980s, and brutal attacks on the Palestinian camps in 1985.

This was part of the attempt by Damascus to take control of the PLO. Israel had occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967, and annexed it in 1981. However, Damascus opposed the independence of the PLO, aiming to use it merely as a diplomatic tool to pressure Israel over the Golan.

The struggle against Israeli occupation had produced a new mood among the Shiites of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Reflecting this, Hezbollah arose as a more radical wing of Amal. Though formed in 1982, it came out into the open in 1985, under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. It vigorously denounced Amal's attacks on the Palestinians, and expelled Amal from its main base in south Beiruit.

National liberation movement

Hezbollah concentrated all its efforts on fighting the Israeli occupation, in cooperation with other Lebanese and Palestinian groups, and by the 1990s was the key force in the resistance. It is a national liberation movement, with religious colouration, rather than an “Islamist” movement.

If Islamic “fundamentalism” means imposing religious restrictions on how people live, dress and work, there is little evidence of it in the areas of south Beiruit under Hezbollah control, which I visited in 1997. As I reported in GLW #294 , there were women wearing scarves like anywhere in the Middle East, but just as many without scarves, dressed as they pleased, working in shops and offices alongside men.

Asked if Hezbollah had tried to impose a strict religious code of dress or behaviour on the population, Olfat Mahmoud, a social worker in the Bourj al Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp, told me: “We heard a lot about that in the Western media, but I never noticed it.”

There is a contradiction between mobilising people on the scale necessary to liberate a country and oppressing the population through reactionary restrictions on their daily lives. Hezbollah resolved this contradiction by forgetting about the latter.

“Everyone in the camp supports Hamas and Hezbollah”, Khalil, a young, secular Palestinian camp resident, told me. “We support them because they fight Israel. All the others just talk.”

Evidence of support for Hezbollah on the camp walls was far more obvious than for any PLO faction.

In 1993 and 1996, Israel again launched large-scale invasions of Lebanon, supposedly to punish Hezbollah for its continued resistance to the Israeli occupation. In both cases, hundreds of Lebanese civilians were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands driven were from their homes, and enormous destruction was inflicted on the country by Israeli bombing.

Occupation continues

In 2000, Israel was finally forced to withdraw from most of southern Lebanon. However, it remains in occupation of 28 square kilometres, known as the Shebaa. Neither Hezbollah nor the Lebanese government recognise the current border maintained by Israel and patrolled by UNIFIL.

Israel claims the Shebaa is not occupied Lebanese territory, but part of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. By some stretch of logic, the occupation of the Golan, a brazen violation of international law, is thus claimed as inoffensive. Yet this contradicts the claim made by Israel and its Western backers that Hezbollah is acting as a pawn for Syrian interests.

While Hezbollah is anything but a pawn of the Syrian regime — which massacred dozens of Hezbollah militants in 1987 — it is entirely natural that Syria supports Hezbollah military actions on the Israeli border, given the continuing Israeli occupation of Syrian territory.

Once again, Israel has used the pretext of a minor military action by Hezbollah to destroy Lebanon. Others have chimed in that, since Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, there was no excuse for Hezbollah's “aggression”. However, apart from the continuing occupation of Shebaa, Israel also continues to hold Lebanese prisoners it kidnapped decades ago. It was only a matter of time before Hezbollah would attempt to capture Israeli soldiers to force negotiations for a prisoner swap.

Israel's current horrific assault on Lebanon is aimed at trying to turn the Lebanese people against Hezbollah and thus to severely weaken it as a popular political movement. As Amin Saikal, director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, points out: “Israel has been increasingly uncomfortable with the speed of Lebanon's recovery following its [1975-90] civil war and democratisation. Israel's policy has been to do whatever it takes to ensure that its Arab neighbours remain weak and divided.”

A peaceful and increasingly prosperous multi-religious Lebanon, where the old sectarian constitution has been reformed, and where Hezbollah in 2005 won 23 seats in parliament and for the first time joined the Lebanese government, is a threat by example to the racist 'Jewish” state of Israel.

(Green Left Weekly)