Jeremy Corbyn’s Failure to Rebut the ‘terrorist’ label played a major part in his downfall
It
began with an interview on Channel 4 with Krishna Guru-Murphy on 13th
July 2015 when Corbyn was pressed as to why he used the term ‘friends’ in
relation to Hezbollah and Hamas. He blustered and got angry but never nailed
down the lie at the heart of the question which was that neither organisation
was a terrorist organisation. They are both Islamists and both reactionary, but
they come from the people they work among and represent. Terrorists are people
who, despairing of mass support, use violence as a substitute.
Corbyn’s
proffered and increasingly thin excuse that he was a ‘peacemaker’ which
completely evaded the question of whose side you take in what were imperialist wars
of mass destruction. Either you are on the side of the Palestinians and the Lebanese
or the Israelis. ‘Peace making’
completely avoids having to take a stance. It is a coward’s way out.
It was
Lord Carrington, Margaret Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary, who stated that ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s
terrorist’. Corbyn could have thrown the whole terrorist thing back in
Murphy’s face. Hamas was the
creation of the Israeli state.
Indeed so was Hezbollah, which only came about as a result of Israel’s
genocidal invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which killed 20,000 people.
Below
is a story from Mondoweiss. It is not a
story that is likely to appear in the British press any time soon because it
runs counter to the narrative that Israel fights ‘terrorism’ rather than it is
a terrorist state. Because after all our
friends couldn’t possibly be terrorists and plant bombs in the middle of cities!
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| Ariel Sharon (right) Israel's mass murdering Prime Minister |
Yet for
two years, the Israeli Defence Forces and Mossad used a cover name, the Front
for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, to plant dozens of bombs in
market places and public areas in Lebanon killing hundreds of civilians and
injuring many more.
Israel’s
actions were classic actions of destabilisation, blaming the bombings on a war
between Palestinian factions. As Rémi Brulin observes, it wasn’t Hezbollah and
Hamas but Israel which developed the art of the terrorist bomb. Indeed they could be said to have learnt
their skills from their Zionist teacher.
Tony
Greenstein
Rémi
Brulin on October 23, 2019 11
Comments
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Front page story in the New York Times in 1983 on a terrorist bombing that killed Palestinians in Lebanon. The bombing campaign has now been confirmed as an Israeli one that claimed 100s of innocent lives.
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June, 1980. Over the previous weeks Israeli
air and sea attacks on “Palestinian and leftist positions” have been “almost nightly events.” According to Christian Science
Monitor journalist
Helena Cobban, however, a “more
sinister Israeli hand is seen behind some of the increased unrest throughout
the country.” Indeed, “several
enormous car bombs have exploded here recently in locations with a heavy
concentration of Palestinian or Syrian population.” At least two were
claimed by a group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from
Foreigners (FLLF).
The
mysterious group’s modus operandi, Cobban writes, “seem[s] to indicate the influence of some Israeli extremist groups”
like the ones behind car-bomb attacks against three Palestinian mayors in the
West Bank on June 2. To an “embittered
Palestinian scholar,” who spoke to Cobban, they also brought to mind “the terror-bombings launched against
Palestinian villages by Mr. Begin’s own Irgun extremist group” in the
1940s. “Then, the aim was to drive us out
of Palestine, and they largely succeeded… Now they want to drive us out of
Lebanon. Where can we go? The Israelis are going mad, but this time round, the
world cannot support their terror. Or can it?”
Over the
following 3 years, hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed,
and many more wounded, by explosive devices hidden in baskets, on bicycles or
mules, in cars or trucks. After each attack, calls to the media were placed
claiming responsibility in the name of the FLLF. Palestinian and Lebanese
officials repeatedly insisted that the FLLF was merely a fiction intended to
hide the hand of Israel and its Christian rightist allies. Israeli officials
rejected such accusations, insisting rather that the bombings were part of an
internecine war amongst rival Arab factions. Several of these bombings are
included in the RAND and START
“terrorism databases.”
In August
2012, the New Yorker published a profile of
Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad. Dagan was known as a “ruthless
agent,” David Remnick writes, and his career was rumored to have included “operations of all kinds – car bombing,
poisoning, cyberwar.” Indeed, before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982
Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir, two reporters for the Israeli daily Yediot
Ahronot, had investigated the possibility that Dagan had “led a secret unit across the border whose
mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion.”
Remnick adds: “Military censors killed
the story, Sarna told me. Dagan acknowledges the censorship but denies the
thrust of the story.”
Israeli
journalist Noam Sheizaf posted Remnick’s story on his Facebook page and, as he wrote
in 972 Magazine, Sarna commented as follows: “Indeed, the censorship [on these stories] has been on for years.
Horrifying things were done there, not just planned.”
Yet another profile
of Dagan published in Haaretz in 2016 presented a more detailed
account of the story and, this time, explicitly mentioned the FLLF.
Before the
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, military correspondent Amir Oren reported, an
officer who served under Dagan “claimed
that on orders from the IDF, under cover of the Front for the Liberation of
Lebanon from Foreigners, deadly strikes were being carried out against
Palestinian targets, and the casualties included innocent civilians.” That
anonymous complaint “reached the press,”
he said, “and from there – even though
the military censor forbade publication – it reached Begin.”
The
complaint named four senior Israeli officials: Raphael
Eitan, the IDF Chief of Staff; Meir Dagan, the
commander of the South Lebanon Region; head of Northern Command Avigdor
Ben-Gal; and Shlomo Ilya,
an intelligence officer. Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Military Intelligence,
looked into the allegations and concluded that they were accurate. His
complaint led nowhere however: according to Oren, Prime Minister Menachem Begin
“didn’t want to believe it, especially on
the eve of an election.”
In February
2018 Ronen Bergman, at the time the senior correspondent for military and
intelligence affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, published Rise
and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassination.
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Ronen Bergman with his book at the Fifth Avenue Barnes and Noble in February 2018. Photo from Instagram.
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This
extensively-researched book contains several pages devoted to the FLLF
operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who
were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had
been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious
group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly
‘terrorist’ campaign.
The group
was created by Eitan, Ben-Gal and Dagan in 1979. In the words of David Agmon,
head of the Northern Command Staff of the IDF, the objective was to “cause chaos among the Palestinians and
Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the
feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense
of insecurity.” Bergman makes no reference
to Shlomo Ilya, the intelligence officer mentioned in Oren’s Haaretz
article.
In its early
stage, the group used explosives “concealed
in cans of oil or preserves” that were built in a metal shop of Kibbutz
Mahanayim where Ben-Gal lived at the time. The explosives themselves were
sourced from the IDF’s bomb disposal unit so as to “minimize the chance that any connection with Israel might be revealed.”
Eitan,
Ben-Gal and Dagan were unable to keep their operation airtight however. In Rise
and Kill First, Bergman provides fascinating accounts of early (and
unsuccessful) efforts by senior officers and members of the government to push
back against such methods, accounts that confirm the accuracy of Remnick’s and
Oren’s stories.
In 1980
Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Military Intelligence, informed Deputy Defense
Minister Mordechai Zippori that Ben-Gal was conducting “rogue operations”
inside Lebanon. In one instance, a car bomb meant for PLO personnel had
detonated on a main road in southern Lebanon, killing an unspecified number of
“women and children.”
In June
1980, the month when Helena Cobban’s Christian Science Monitor story was
published, a meeting was convened in the Prime Minister’s office. Zippori
accused Ben-Gal of conducting “unauthorized actions in Lebanon” and insisted
that “women and children have been killed.”
Ben-Gal replied that this was incorrect (“Four
or five terrorists were killed. Who drives around in Lebanon in a Mercedes at 2
a.m.? Only terrorists”) and assured Menachem Begin that he had received
permission for the action. The Prime Minister accepted these assurances and,
Bergman writes, from that point on “the
top brass realized there was no point in asking the prime minister to rectify
the situation.”
The story
investigated by Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir was accurate. And Dagan’s denials
to Remnick were lies.
When the
Israeli military censor banned publication of the story, therefore, it covered
up serious state crimes that had already been committed. Even more
problematically, this decision made it possible for Israel to continue,
following Likud’s (very narrow) victory in the 1981 legislative elections, to
use the FLLF to conduct an ever deadlier, and fully covert, campaign of
“terrorism.”
On August 5,
1981, Menachem Begin picked Ariel Sharon to replace him as Defense Minister. As
Israeli
historians
have long documented, for the next 10 months the Begin government engaged in
military operations, from the air and the ground, in order to goad the
Palestinians into a military response that would be used to justify a major military
offensive into Lebanon.
As Rise
and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part
of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister
immediately decided to “activate” the
FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time
Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
Sharon “hoped that these operations would provoke
Arafat into attacking Israel,” Bergman writes, “which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the
Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense
of the Christians.”
“By mid-September 1981,” he explains, “car bombs were exploding regularly in
Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities.”
Several of
these bombings were covered in the US press at the time.
On September
17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO
and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing
over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment
buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
Two days
later, another “terrorist bomb” killed
four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF
claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the
group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
On October
1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing
90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with
explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and
leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
The FLLF
claimed responsibility, but a PLO official blamed Israeli agents for planting
the bomb in “sort of a secret war”
against Palestinians. Lebanese Prime Minister Chafik Wazzan agreed. Because the
cease-fire was preventing Israel from “persisting
in its acts of destruction and killing in Lebanon through its air force or
other attacks,” he
argued, it was “looking for other
tactics, the cowardly ones to which it is currently resorting either directly
or through agents.’ Israeli officials rejected such claims, insisting
instead that the bombings were part of a ‘war
among gangs which make up the PLO.”
A RAND report on ‘recent
trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few
of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds
up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980
and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand
total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote
at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its
totality claimed 308 lives.
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Portion of database compiled by Rand on the Front for Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners
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Importantly,
at the exact same time Israeli officials were conducting an extensive public
relations (or ‘hasbara’) campaign aimed at convincing the rest of the
Western world, and especially the United States, of the seriousness of the
threat posed by “terrorism.” In this narrative, Israelis were the main victims,
and never the perpetrators, of “terrorism,” while the Palestinians were the
main perpetrators of “terrorism,” never its victims.
This
campaign was extraordinarily successful, and since the mid 1980s the American
and Israeli discourses on “terrorism” have been virtually indistinguishable. A
number of actors, from
elected officials to “terrorism experts,” played a central role in this
deeply ideological process of meaning production.
The military
censor’s decision to ban Sarna’s and Tal-Shir’s story, and thus to cover up the
fact that senior Israeli officials were, at that exact same time, conducting a
large scale campaign of “terrorism” in Lebanon, was just as central to this
process.
The censor’s
decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the
invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.”
Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New
York Times in August 1982 and insist
that Israeli troops “were greeted as
liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and
plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar
haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,”
Sharon added, a policy that stood “in
vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
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| Ariel Sharon drinks to the death of the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatilla |
When he
penned this Opinion piece, the Israeli defense minister had been personally
conducting “terrorist” attacks in Lebanon for a full year.
The FLLF
bombing campaign would continue until late 1983. Its deadliest attacks were
covered on the front pages of the New
York Times
and the Washington
Post.
The actual number of victims of this Israeli “terrorist” campaign will probably
never be known. Still, it seems quite clear that, as Lee O’Brien, a U.N.
official, wrote in MERIP in October 1983, between 1979 and 1983 the FLLF
bombs did kill at least several hundred civilians, wounding countless more.
Rise and
Kill First provides a clear picture of the inner workings of this Israeli
“terrorist” campaign. The explosives were “packed
in Ariel laundry powder bags” so as to look like “innocent goods” when going through roadblocks. Women were chosen
to drive “to reduce the likelihood of the
cars being caught” on the way to their target, and the cars themselves were
“developed in the IDF’s Special
Operations Executive.” As one Israeli intelligence officer told Bergman:
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?
Another one
added:
I saw from a
distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were
teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw
later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these
operations.
Rise and Kill
First was published in February 2018. It was very
positively reviewed in the US press. Bergman gave public talks, was
interviewed on TV news programs, and his work was praised by prominent ‘terrorism
experts.’ The book made several bestseller’s lists and was nominated for a
number of end-of-the-year awards.
And yet,
over the last 18 months Bergman’s extraordinary revelations about the FLLF
operation have
not been mentioned or discussed once in the US media. This is the case even
though, unlike Sarna and Tal-Shir, American journalists (including prominent
figures such as Thomas
Friedman, who personally covered FLLF bombings on the front page of the New
York Times in the 1980s) operate in a country where the press is free from
censorship.
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Front page of the New York Times from February 6, 1983 featuring an article by on Thomas Friedman on a bombing by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners
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As a
consequence, in the United States the terms of the public debate about Israel,
the Palestinians and “terrorism” have remained unchallenged. The Palestinians
continue to be presented as the perpetrators, and never the victims, of
“terrorism.” Israelis continue to be presented as the victims, and never the
perpetrators, of “terrorism.”
This public
discussion has thus been allowed to proceed as if the FLLF bombing campaign had
never happened, as if the Palestinians had never been the victims of this
widespread campaign of “terrorism,” as if this campaign hadn’t been directed by
some of the most prominent Israeli figures of the last decades, men who
repeatedly claimed to be absolutely opposed to “terrorism,” men who defended
their country’s repeated uses of force as justified by the uniquely evil nature
of the threat posed by “terrorism.”
It is time
to break the silence surrounding Israel’s “terrorist” campaign in Lebanon.
It is time
to question the validity of a discourse
that has only led to more violence and more deaths, a discourse that could
never have emerged but for an act of state censorship.
In the name
of historical truth.
In the name
of the FLLF’s hundreds of forgotten victims.
In the name
of victims of “terrorism” everywhere, regardless of the identity of the
perpetrators.
Rémi Brulin
Remi Brulin received his PhD at
La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris) in 2011. His dissertation is a historical analysis
of the American discourse on "terrorism," and can be accessed and
downloaded here. He has taught
at New York University, George Washington University and, currently, at John
Jay College of Criminal Justice. You can follow him on Twitter here: @rbrulin.
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