I think I know why most people in this country

SYDNEY -- ``The worst round of violence between Israel and Lebanon-based guerillas in 11 years continued unabated despite a drive by the US for a cease-fire. The fighting has killed more than 122 people.'' This was how the Sydney Morning Herald, in a front-page article, described the recent Israeli attack on Lebanon.

How many lies can be fit into one small paragraph? This is what this paragraph tells us was happening:

Firstly, there was a step-up in the fighting between Israel and some guerillas in Lebanon. The truth is that there was a massive Israeli air and sea attack on Lebanese civilians throughout southern Lebanon, obliterating their villages and forcing 500,000 out of their homes.

Secondly, we are told of the existence of ``Lebanon-based'' guerillas. Perhaps the guerillas who have been fighting Israel's illegal 15-year occupation of southern Lebanon are not really Lebanese?

Thirdly, there was a US drive for a ceasefire. Come on, pull the other one!

Fourthly, between Israeli troops and ``Lebanon-based'' guerillas, there have been 122 killed. This is the way the slaughter of 122 Lebanese civilians by Israeli bombing is described.

You have to turn to the continuation of the article on page 17 to find the information that 500,000 people had been expelled from their homes (no big deal apparently) -- in the very last paragraph. Yet, back on the front page, we find the apparently more important information that the guerillas, in response, had launched 275 Katyusha rockets into ``Israel and the security zone''. In fact, this information was repeated twice in two paragraphs.

The rockets were fired into ``Israel and the security zone''? This piece of information suggests they were mainly hitting Israel and some strip along the border. However, ``security zone'' is simply newspeak for the chunk of Lebanon up to the Litani river which Israel has occupied since 1978. The great bulk of the rockets were fired at occupation troops in this zone. Indeed, the ``pretext'' for the invasion was the death of eight occupation troops.

``Security zone'' implies that Israel needs security from outside attack. However, the massive bombing of Lebanese villages by Israel since 1968 has been well-documented by people such as Jewish-American writer Noam Chomsky, but it is almost never reported by the media. The fact that since that time, the number of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths is literally hundreds of times higher than the number of Israeli civilian deaths says something about who has the security needs.

That this ``security zone'' is in fact an occupation zone is also obscured in other ways. For example, in a full page Herald article by ren Osmond (when has an anti-Zionist point of view ever had a full page?), a map of the area can even be contorted in such a way as to make this occupation zone look minuscule. Australian Lebanese from the town of Machgara confirm that the occupation reaches the outskirts of their town, whereas the map showed nothing of the sort.

Another type of bias is revealed in an article that is much more supportive of the Lebanese side, that by Robert Fisk in the July 31 Herald. Tucked in a paragraph describing various faces of suffering in Lebanon, he writes ``an 80 year-old woman with almost all her skin burnt off by an Israeli phosphorous shell, naked and dying in a hospital ward''.

An Israeli phosphorous shell? That is usually called chemical warfare, and if used by any opponent of the US would rate screaming front-page headlines, demanding action, etc. Here it's an obscure sentence towards the end of an article.

This blatant disregard for any balance on this issue is the rule in the incredibly monopolised Australian media. For example, when National Party leader Tim Fischer made some quite mild criticisms of Israeli policy and merely called on Israel to respect UN resolutions, he was hammered by the Liberal and Labor parties, and all sections of the capitalist media gave prominent coverage to the reactions of the Israeli ambassador and other leading Zionists. Yet no such coverage was given to the views of the ambassador of Lebanon, the country being occupied and invaded.

Compare this to Australian government participation, with full media backing, in the US economic embargo of Iraq, resulting in the death of over 200,000 Iraqi children, under the pretext of enforcing Iraqi compliance of UN resolutions (two years after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait).

While hundreds of thousands were being driven out of their wrecked homes in Lebanon, the bulk of television footage concerned the suffering of infinitely smaller number of civilian victims in Israel.

Meanwhile, a demonstration called on July 30 outside the Israeli consulate received no media coverage whatsoever, despite the ABC, SBS and the Herald being informed. The same occurred with a demonstration outside the Sydney Town Hall the following day.

While the Israeli ambassador and other leading Zionists (whether Jewish or not) have been given plenty of coverage, the views of those Jewish Australians opposed to the Israeli government's actions were meticulously kept out of the media until four members of the Women in Black put a paid advertisement into the Herald on August 4.

The advertisement read: ``The Israeli government claims to represent Jews worldwide. As Australian Jews we cannot abide Israel's bombing of southern Lebanon and the deliberate creation of more than 300,000 refugees, the continuing occupation of Palestinian land and the appalling human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. We urge other Australian Jews -- break your silence''.

Vivienne Porzsolt, one of the signatories, told Green Left the group was very heartened by the response to their ad. While a subsequent Herald article concentrated on the couple of hate calls they received, around half of those who rang up were supportive. Of the other half, while being strongly opposed to the advertisement, gave serious debate.

``By talking and breaking through, it has produced positive discussion with many people who would not have spoken to us before'', Porzsolt said.

The advertisement also forced some of the ``mainstream'' media to take them seriously. On Andrew Ollie's morning show on 2BL, Marta Romer from Women in Black and Jeremy Jones representing a pro-Israeli position were interviewed together. In the subsequent discussion a very prominent Jewish Australian feminist rang in support of Women in Black's position, complaining that the reason she hadn't been involved in the issue was because of this stifling of debate by the media.

Turning to the second major example of the pre-Reagan period, in southern Lebanon from the early 1970s the population was held hostage with the "rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities" and acceptance of Israeli arrangements for the region (Abba Eban, commenting on Prime Minister Menachem Begin's account of atrocities in Lebanon committed under the Labor government in the style "of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name," Eban observed, recognizing the accuracy of the account).³¹ Notice that this justification, offered by a respected Labor Party dove, places these actions squarely under the rubric of international terrorism by any reasonable definition, unless, again, we consider them to fall under the more serious crime of aggression -- as of course we would if an enemy state were the agent of the crimes.

Thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes in these terror attacks. Little is known about them because it was a matter of indifference that Arabs were being murdered and their villages destroyed by a Western state armed and supported by the United States. ABC correspondent Charles Glass, then a journalist in Lebanon, found "little American editorial interest in the conditions of the south Lebanese. The Israeli raids and shelling of their villages, their gradual exodus from south Lebanon to the growing slums on the outskirts of Beirut were nothing compared to the lurid tales of the `terrorists' who threatened Israel, hijacked aeroplanes and seized embassies." The reaction was much the same, he continues, when Israeli death squads were operating in southern Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion. One could read about them in the London Times, but U.S. editors were not interested. Had the media reported the operations of "these death squads of plainclothes Shin Beth [secret police] men who assassinated suspects in the villages and camps of south Lebanon," "stirring up the Shiite Muslim population and helping to make the Marine presence untenable," there might have been some appreciation of the plight of the U.S. Marines deployed in Lebanon. They seemed to have no idea why they were there apart from "the black enlisted men: almost all of them said, though sadly never on camera, that they had been sent to protect the rich against the poor." "The only people in Lebanon they identified with were the poor Shiite refugees who lived all around their base at the Beirut airport; it is sad that it was probably one of these poor Shiites...who killed 241 of them on 23 October 1983." If any of these matters had been reported, it might have been possible to avert, or at the very least to comprehend, the bombing in which the Marines were killed, victims of a policy that "the press could not explain to the public and their information officers could not explain to the Marines themselves" -- and which is now denounced as unprovoked Arab terrorism by George Shultz and the commentators who admire his "visceral contempt for terrorism."³²

The effect of removing Egypt from the conflict at Camp David was that "Israel would be free to sustain military operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activity on the West Bank," Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv observes ten years later; the point was obvious at the time, but remains an unacceptable insight in the euphoria about American "peace-making."³³ Predictably, then, Israeli terror in Lebanon continued after the Camp David agreements, probably escalating, though reporting was so scanty that one cannot be sure. There was enough to know that Palestinians and Lebanese suffered many casualties. Sometimes the Israeli operations were in retaliation or alleged retaliation; often there was no pretext. From early 1981, Israel launched unprovoked attacks which finally elicited a response in July, leading to an exchange in which six Israelis and several hundred Palestinians and Lebanese were killed in Israeli bombing of densely populated civilian targets. Of these incidents, all that remains in the collective memory of the media is the tragic fate of the inhabitants of the northern Galilee, driven from their homes by katyusha rockets.³⁴

After a cease-fire was arranged under U.S. auspices, Israel continued its attacks. The Israeli concern, according to Yaniv, was that the PLO would observe the cease-fire agreement and continue its efforts to achieve a diplomatic two-state settlement, to which Israel and the United States were strongly opposed. In the following year, Israel attempted with increasing desperation to evoke some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the planned invasion of Lebanon, designed to destroy the PLO as a political force, establish Israeli control over the occupied territories, and -- in its broadest vision -- to establish Ariel Sharon's "New Order" in Lebanon and perhaps beyond. These efforts failed to elicit a PLO response. The media reacted by urging "respect for Israel's anguish" rather than "sermons to Israel" as Israel bombed targets in Lebanon with many civilian casualties.³⁵ Israel finally used the pretext of the attempted assassination of Ambassador Argov by Abu Nidal -- who had been at war with the PLO for years and did not so much as have an office in Lebanon -- to launch Operation Peace for Galilee, while the New York Times applauded the "liberation of Lebanon," carefully avoiding Lebanese opinion. "Calling the Lebanon War `The War for the Peace of Galilee' is more than a misnomer," Yehoshafat Harkabi writes. "It would have been more honest to call it `The War to Safeguard the Occupation of the West Bank'." "Begin's principal motive in launching the war was his fear of the momentum of the peace process."³⁶

It was clear enough at the time that the perceived threat of the PLO was its commitment to a political settlement and renunciation of terror. PLO terror, in contrast, was no problem, in fact was desirable as a means for evading political settlement.

²⁹ Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Brookings Institution, 1987, 17).

³⁰ Ibid., 16f., 78f., 89f., 98; International Security, Winter 1987-88, 12. For more on these terrorist operations, see the references of chapter 5, note 25; also U.S. Army Captain Bradley Earl Ayers, The War that Never Was (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976); Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish is Red (Harper & Row, 1981); William Blum, The CIA (Zed, 1986); Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution (Cambridge, 1987).

³¹ Jerusalem Post, Aug. 16, 1981; see Fateful Triangle, chapter 5, sections 1, 3.4, for further quotes, background, and description.

³² Glass, text of talk at Middle East Studies Association Conference, Los Angeles, Nov. 4, 1988, published in Index on Censorship (London), January 1989.

³³ Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, 70. The October 1973 war brought home the lesson that Egypt could not be disregarded. The U.S. then turned to the obvious strategy: remove it from the conflict. See my 1977 article reprinted as chapter 11, Towards a New Cold War. Camp David consummated this strategy.

³⁴ See Towards a New Cold War and Fateful Triangle on the events, and Pirates and Emperors on how they have entered into memory. For a brief review from an expert Israeli perspective, see Schiff and Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War. It is difficult to know just what their original manuscript might have contained, since much was excised by the Israeli censor; 20 percent according to Ehud Ya'ari, 50 percent according to a "respected correspondent" cited by Middle East historian Augustus Richard Norton of the West Point Military Academy (Kol Ha'ir, Feb. 10, 1984; Middle East Journal, Summer 1985).

³⁵ Editorial, Washington Post, April 22, 1982; see Fateful Triangle for further background; and Yaniv, op. cit., for justification of these operations. See also appendix I, section 2, above.

³⁶ Harkabi, Israel's Fateful Hour, 100-1. See appendix I, section 2.