Chosmky on Reprisal, Terrorism
Israeli Military Operations in Lebanon in the 1970s
Israel’s attacks in Lebanon over the years were generally described in the U.S. as retaliation against PLO terrorism. As usual, the categories of “terrorism” and “reprisal” are more ideological than descriptive. One might, for example, raise the question of what the Palestinians were doing in Lebanon in the first place; they did not move there because they liked the scenery. The comparable question would not be regarded as irrelevant in the case of some official enemy conducting “retaliatory” or “preemptive” strikes against “terrorism,” say, attacks by the Russian-sponsored Afghan army against Afghan refugees in Pakistan (see note 4). Other questions also arise. For example, two days before the PLO terrorist attack in Ma’alot in May 1974, where 20 teen-age Israeli hostages from a paramilitary youth group (Gadna) were killed during an attempt to rescue the hostages after Israel had rejected negotiation efforts (the terrorist unit, from Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front, had previously killed five other Israelis, including 2 Arabs), an Israeli air attack on the village of El-Kfeir in Lebanon killed four civilians. The PLO raid is (properly) described here as terrorism, but not the Israeli air attack—which, in fact, is known (though barely known) here only because it happened to be the native village of the parents of U.S. Senator James Abourezk. According to Edward Said, the Ma’alot attack was “preceded by weeks of sustained Israeli napalm bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon” with over 200 killed. The aggressors concocted an elaborate and largely successful propaganda campaign in an effort to show that it was Nasser who was planning an attack, not they, comparing him to Hitler while they effectively mimicked Goebbels.
