1982

In 1982, Israel claimed that its military objective was to attack, not Lebanon, but the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon in order to 'safeguard the Galilee region from enemy artillery and infiltration'.

Facts

The facts are that Israel invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982 in order to totally destroy the PLO, not only its insignificant military capability, but also all of its civilian functions. The other basic war aim was described by Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon:

"The bigger the blow and the more we damage the PLO infrastructure, the more the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, [the Biblical name for the West Bank used for obvious political reasons by Israel] and Gaza will be ready to negotiate with us"
-- The Times, 5 August 1982 --

Israel had hoped that, with the destruction of the PLO, Lebanon could be ripped from its Arab moorings in order to create an Israeli puppet regime of pro-Israeli Maronite Christian Lebanese, a minority of the population. As early as 1954, David Ben-Gurion had urged that one of the "central duties" of Israel's foreign policy should be to push the Maronite Christians to "proclaim a Christian state". Moshe Dayan had said that:

"[the] Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel"
-- Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism, op.cit., pp. 24-30.
Also see, Laura Zittrain Eisenberg: My Enemy's Enemy: Zionist Intentions in Lebanon.

The Israeli claim that it had invaded Lebanon "in self-defense" is false. Between August 1981 and May 1982 the PLO maintained a truce, sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia, on Lebanon's southern border. Israel, on the other hand, violated the truce 2,777 times (United Nations records cited by Robin Wright in the Christian Science Monitor, 18 March 1982; Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, Village Voice, 22 June 1982). [For the most thorough, as well as the most compelling treatment of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, see Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation]

Once again Israel only needed an excuse to make war. This time the casus belli was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London, an act determined by Scotland Yard to have been conducted by the PLO-dissent Abu Nidal group. In any case, Israel's excuse was so flimsy that, for the first time in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli propaganda was not taken on board without question by the international community.

At first the Israelis operated under the pretense that they were only securing their borders and stated that they did not intend to go beyond a 25 mile limit. But the truth was very different as described by the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, Aharon Yariv:

"I know in fact that going to Beirut was included in the original military plan"
-- Jerusalem Post, 24 September 1982.

Israel's invasion of Lebanon has no validity in international law. Israel thus had no grounds to rely on the provision of the Charter of the United Nations concerning self-defense, while the means used to effect the invasion clearly lacked proportionality. The cease-fire of July 1981 had been observed scrupulously. The objective of the 1982 invasion and war, therefore, was to achieve certain political and strategic aims at a high cost, which included breaches of some of the most fundamental rules of international law.

As for the Israeli justification for the conduct of hostilities, the principle of military necessity cannot excuse the massive number of civilian casualties which resulted from Israeli attacks on refugee camps, hospitals, schools, cultural, religious and charitable institutions, commercial and industrial premises, Lebanese government and PLO offices, diplomatic premises and urban areas generally.

Particularly heinous was the August 8th bombardment of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, which some correspondents compared to the WWII bombing of Dresden in its ferocity. Hundreds of innocent Beiruti civilians died as a result of this war crime. [See Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation; Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments; Chris Giannou, Besieged: A Doctor in Lebanon.]