The remarkable disappearing act of Israel’s car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not) talk about when we talk about ‘terrorism’

“With Sharon’s backing, terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians, too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?”

– Mossad officer, quoted in Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations

On August 29, 1982, Ariel Sharon took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to argue that Israel’s “most immediate achievement” following its invasion of Lebanon had been the “crushing defeat” of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). As a result, the Israeli Defense Minister explained, Katyusha rockets had stopped raining down on Israeli villages “from terrorist sanctuaries in Lebanon.” The “kingdom of terror” established by Yasser Arafat’s organization on Lebanese soil was “no more,” and Israeli troops had been “greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered.” This had been the case, Sharon insisted, “despite the casualties that were the inevitable result of fighting against P.L.O. terrorists who used civilians as human shields and who deliberately placed their weapons and ammunition in the midst of apartment houses, schools, refugee camps and hospitals.”

Indeed, “No army in the history of modern warfare ever took such pains to prevent civilian casualties as did the Israel Defense Forces.” A Hebrew expression, “tohar haneshek,” perfectly expressed this notion, the Defense Minister added. It means “the moral conduct of war” and all Israelis were “proud our soldiers followed this Jewish doctrine scrupulously.” They had warned civilians that they were coming in spite of the “heavy costs” to themselves, had attacked “only predetermined P.L.O. positions” and bombed or shelled “buildings only when they served as P.L.O. strongholds.” “This policy,” Sharon concluded, stood in “vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”

1979-1984: Israeli Officials Launch a Massive Public Relations Campaign Condemning  the Evil of “Terrorism” …

Ariel Sharon’s OpEd came out as Israel was conducting a deliberate and ultimately remarkably successful public relations offensive aimed at influencing the emerging American discourse on “terrorism” in ways that would coincide with its own interests.

In July 1979 in Jerusalem, a major conference on “international terrorism” had been organized by the Jonathan Institute, a group with intimate ties to the Israeli government and named after Jonathan Netanyahu, who had lost his life during a famous raid by Israeli special forces at Entebbe.

Benzion Netanyahu, a historian of Judaism and Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s former personal secretary, was a major force behind the institute and gave the conference’s opening statement. This event, he explained, announced the beginning of “a new process – the process of rallying the democracies of the world to a struggle against terrorism and the dangers it represents.” “Against the international front of terrorism,” the father of Jonathan and Benjamin argued, “we must build an international front of freedom – that of organized public opinion which will move governments to act.”

Speakers at the 1979 Jerusalem conference represented a veritable who’s who of conservative political leaders, academics and commentators, mostly from Israel and the United States. One after the other, they insisted that taking a strong stance against “terrorism” was about demonstrating “moral clarity,” and “moral clarity” required clarity in language. The term “terrorism” had therefore to be precisely defined, and efforts made to prevent the “terrorists” from “distorting language” by claiming to fight for freedom.

Benzion Netanyahu thus condemned the “easy moral relativism of “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”” and insisted that it was “important to establish at the outset the fact that a clear definitional framework exists, regardless of political view.” “Terrorism,” he explained, “is the deliberate and systematic killing of civilians so as to inspire fear.” It is, “beyond all nuance and quibble, a moral evil,” one that “infects not only those who commit such crimes, but those who, out of malice, ignorance or simple refusal to think, countenance them.” He then went one step further, and insisted that the means and ends of the “terrorists” were “indissolubly linked, and both point to a single direction: an abhorrence of freedom and a determination to destroy the democratic way of life.”

For his part, Prime Menachem Begin claimed that the PLO was “the basest armed organization since the days of the Nazis.” The seriousness of the “terrorist” threat posed by the Palestinians and their Arab allies was such, he argued, that it justified the pre-emptive use of military force. “What should we do?” Begin asked. “Use only so-called retaliation, wait between attacks upon the civilian Jewish population in our country, in other words, condemn an unknown number of our citizens to die?” No, he answered: “We hit them and this is the most sublime, most legitimate national self-defense.”

The Institute organized a second conference in Washington DC in June 1984. Its proceedings were later edited by Benjamin Netanyahu and published under the title Terrorism: How the West Can Win. The book garnered rave reviews from major American newspapers, was famously read with great interest by President Reagan himself and became a remarkable publishing success. As Netanyahu explained, the 1979 conference had represented “a turning point in the understanding of international terrorism” and “helped focus the attention of influential circles in the West on the real nature of the terrorist threat.” This was “not enough” however, since a “coherent and united international response” was still nowhere to be found. “To advocate such a unified policy and to suggest what it might consist of,” Netanyahu concluded, had been “the principal objective of the Jonathan Institute’s second international gathering.”

Like his father a few years earlier, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations insisted that “terrorism is always unjustifiable, regardless of its professed or real goals” then went on to add that “the real goals of terrorists are in practice related to their methods.” “History has repeatedly given us advance warning,” he explained. People who “deliberately butcher women and children do not have liberation in mind,” he confidently stated, before adding: “It is not only that the ends of terrorists do not justify the means they choose. It is that the choice of means indicates what the true ends are. Far from being fighters for freedom, terrorists are forerunners of tyranny.”

By the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term, American elected officials had come to accept and adopt the main claims and assumptions that had, for years, been at the heart of the Israeli discourse on “terrorism.” The “terrorist” is the non-Western “other.” “He” uses evil, immoral means, in the service of evil, immoral ends. In that sense, “the terrorist” belongs to the pre-, non-civilized world. By contrast, “we” oppose, condemn and reject “all terrorism.” “We” stand for moral clarity, and have a profound respect for the sanctity of innocent, civilian life. “Our” ends, as our means, are pure. “Our” uses of force are legitimate, and always defensive. They come in response to or self-defense against the “terrorist threat,” and always aim to limit the loss of civilian lives.

Ariel Sharon’s Opinion piece represents one of the clearest illustrations of the extent to which such a discourse is pure, unmitigated ideology.

… While Several of its Most Senior Officials Are Busy Directing a Massive “Terrorist” Campaign of Car-Bombings in Lebanon

Indeed, from 1979 to 1983, that is to say precisely the period between the Jerusalem and Washington conferences, very senior Israeli officials conducted a large-scale campaign of car-bombings that killed hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians. In fact, by the time his New York Times OpEd was published Sharon had been personally directing this “terrorist” operation for a full year. Even more remarkably, one of the objectives of this covert operation was precisely to goad the PLO into resorting to “terrorism” so as to provide Israel with a justification to invade Lebanon.

These claims are not the product of a feverish, conspiratorial mind. A barebones description of this secret operation was published by Ronen Bergman, a well respected Israeli journalist in the New York Times Magazine on January 23, 2018. This article was adapted from Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, where a much more detailed account of the operation, entirely based on interviews with Israeli officials involved in or aware of the operation at the time, is provided.

As Richard Jackson explains in Writing the War on Terrorism, a political discourse is a way of speaking that attempts to give meaning to events and experiences from a particular perspective. Analyzing the discourse on “terrorism,” Jackson argues, involves “appreciating the rules guiding what can and cannot be said and knowing what has been left out as well as what has been included.” “The silences of a text,” he adds, “are often as important as its inclusions.”

The secret car-bombing operation Israeli officials conducted in Lebanon in the early 1980s represents a remarkable historical example of such “silences,” and of the “rules” that underlie the discourse on “terrorism” and ensure that certain things simply “cannot be said,” certain facts simply aren’t ever mentioned. Rise and Kill First has received the highest praise from reviewers in the American press. Over the last three months, its author has participated in countless media interviews and given high profile public talks around the country. And yet, in these reviews, interviews and public talks this secret operation has not been mentioned a single time. In fact, the public discussion that has surrounded the publication of Rise and Kill First has taken place as if the revelations contained in that book had never been published.

“Our” opposition to “terrorism” is principled and absolute. “We” by definition do not resort to “terrorism.” If and when evidence to the contrary is presented, the reaction is: silence.

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