A History of Negation

I first came to Beirut more than a year after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, when it was clear that the men then in charge in the White House—George Bush and Dick Cheney—were going to respond to the fanatic Osama bin Laden by going to war against Saddam Hussein’s secular government in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. I conducted the first of what would be several long interviews with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah. His Shiite militia provoked anxiety and fear throughout the Middle East, as well as in official Washington. Nasrallah’s initial message to me was one I’d heard earlier from a prominent Middle Eastern oil man: America will not change Iraq, but Iraq would change America—forever.

That trip was the first of many to Beirut, and there were further meetings with Nasrallah over the next years, but what never failed to startle and then depress me were the leftover signs of the 15-year civil war that eventually involved Israel and Syria, as well as the various political parties and military factions inside Lebanon. The apartment buildings on both sides of the Green Line, a main thoroughfare that had divided the Christian and Muslim communities, were filled with bullet and rocket holes, some patched and some not. I had European friends who lived in one of the pockmarked buildings, and it was unsettling to visit there, as if I was in bombed-out Berlin in the aftermath of World War II. It turned out that the Israeli bombing that shattered Muslim society in 1982 had been justified by Israel’s phony allegation that the PLO had targeted an Israeli diplomat in London. Israel got what it wanted with its bombs: the forced exile that summer of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and more than 8,000 members of his battered army to Tunis. False Alarm: How Clima... Bjorn Lomborg Buy New $22.04 (as of 02:01 UTC - Details)

All of that history was alive for me. I had written earlier about Henry Kissinger’s disregard —maybe contempt is a better word—for the PLO’s lack of understanding that the only Middle East issue of importance at the time for the White House was to hold off Russian influence there. Arafat, Kissinger dismissively noted in his 1979 memoir The White House Years, was demanding the creation of a “democratic secular state” in Palestine, “theoretically permitting Jews, Arabs [Muslims], and Christians to live together with equal rights.”

Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to the October 7 attack by Hamas brought me back to the works of Rashid Khalidi, a charismatic and much respected professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. I knew Khalidi slightly as a former University of Chicago professor who was one of many liberal and even radical academics there who had befriended Barack Obama and his wife when he was teaching at the law school there. Obama dropped many of them, very coldly, during his during his meteoric rise from state senator to a US Senate seat to the presidency.

I knew Khalidi far better for his academic writings and public statements on America’s refusal to be an honest broker in the constant Middle East conflict. His now seminal study of the PLO’s struggle for survival, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, published in 2020, includes a brutal analysis, from a Palestinian’s point of view, of how the leaders of Israel achieved their goal during the 1979 Camp David peace talks led by President Jimmy Carter. That goal, Khalidi asserts, was to put the “Palestine issue on hold,” in return for getting Israel to agree to restore the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, and effectively remove Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Khalidi shrewdly writes, that agreement “completed Egypt’s shift from the Soviet to the American camp, defusing the most dangerous aspects of the Superpower conflict in the Middle East.”

Carter’s intentions as to the fate of the Palestinians may have been noble, but the widely praised peace treaty that emerged, Khalidi writes, “signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights.” It was “an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration.” Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and his successors in the right-wing ruling Likud party—Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu—were, wrote Khalidi, “implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” Palestine belonged only to the Jewish people, “and a Palestine people with national rights did not exist.”

Flash forward to June 4, 1982, a Friday: Khalidi was at a meeting at the American University of Beirut, where he had been teaching for the past six years. Suddenly, 2,000-pound bombs, clearly from Israel aircraft, began falling. There was the usual panic to round up wives and children and get them to safety. There had been no advance warnings of the intense attacks, which continued into Saturday on targets in Beirut and in the south of Lebanon, which was firmly under Hezbollah control. An Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon followed. “During the siege,” Khalidi wrote, “entire apartment buildings were obliterated and large areas devastated in the western [Muslim] half of the already badly damaged city.” Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in what was the most serious attack on an Arab capital since World War II. It would not be equaled until America invaded Iraq in 2003.

During the ten weeks of fighting, which ended in mid-August of 1982, more than 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Three large Palestinian refugee camps were attacked by Israel or its Lebanese allies in the following weeks, including the infamous Sabra and Shatila camps, whose refugees were slaughtered. Water, electricity, food, and fuel also were cut off to survivors by Israel. Fossil Future: Why Glo... Alex Epstein Buy New $19.69 (as of 02:01 UTC - Details)

It was a murderous playbook that would be repeated in Gaza forty years later. Then and now, Khalidi writes, America was all in for Israel, with weapons, advice, and money. The 1982 decision to invade Lebanon was made by the Israeli government, Khalidi acknowledges, “but it could not have been implemented without the explicit assent given by Secretary of State Alexander Haig or without American diplomatic and military support, combined with the utter passivity of the Arab governments.”

Khalidi’s criticism of the moral and political failures of America and the Arab nations are validated, in my view, by his willingness in his book to criticize the PLO’s leadership harshly for what he calls “its heavy-handed and often arrogant behavior” that had significantly eroded popular support for the movement. The PLO’s retaliatory attacks inside Israel, he writes, “were often directed at civilian targets and visibly did little to advance the Palestinian national cause, if indeed they did not harm it.” Khalidi specifically faulted the PLO leadership for its inability “to see the intensity of the hostility prompted by its own misbehavior and flawed strategy was among the greatest shortcoming of the PLO during this period.”

The New York Times published a warning essay by Khalidi on its op-ed page eight days after the Israeli invasion of Gaza. He cautioned the Biden administration to think carefully about its offer of what amounted to unconditional support for Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7.

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