April 25, 2000

Lebanon is where Palestinians were most loved and most hated, said Shfiq El Hout, a former PLO Executive Committee member and now the top PLO official in Lebanon, at the 1983 PNC Algiers meeting. Listeners could not have missed the reference to the cold-blooded massacre of about 2000 Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Seventeen years after El Hout's remarks, prominent journalist Robert Fisk, reiterated the same conclusion: Lebanon is where the Palestinians "have endured their greatest suffering, their greatest victories and their greatest defeats." Always a pawn in the cruel games of Middle East actors, Lebanon and its Palestinians, may witness the most dangerous summer in 2000, as the region awaits the fallout from the planned Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, Lebanon is debating the Palestinians' right of return-to anywhere except Lebanon. "The right of return has been transformed into the right to leave Lebanon," said Fisk.

Fisk forecasts a dangerous summer curtsey of Israel, which may seek to teach Lebanon and Syria a lesson if its troops are attacked while retreating from Lebanon. After twenty-two years of occupation, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, has decided to withdraw his forces in partial compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 425 of 1978, which calls for immediate and unconditional withdrawal from South Lebanon. The planned July withdrawal will be neither immediate nor unconditional, leading to fears of Hizbollah reaction and Israeli retaliation against both Lebanon and Syria. What follows are excerpts from his lectures at G eorgetown and the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (CPAP).

Fisk spoke at CPAP as part of a speaking tour sponsored by MERIP in mid-April. He also spoke at Georgetown and George Washington Universities. Author of "Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War" and other books, Fisk has reported from Lebanon for twenty-four years for papers on both sides of the Atlantic and now writes for The London Independent. He has received many awards for his excellent coverage.

The Lebanese, who lost 150,000 citizens in the long and destructive civil war, still refuse to admit their responsibility for the conflict, which they call "the war of the other. Everyone-Israel, America, Syria, Iraq, Iran, the United Nations, the Palestinians-was responsible" for it, except for the Lebanese themselves, Fisk said. There is very little, if any, self-criticism of what occurred in Lebanon, where the revision of history has become an art form. Many books on the civil war, including "Pity the Nation" are banned in Lebanon. The seeds for the seemingly unending Lebanese conflict were sown in the 1920s, when the French, ignoring the people's wishes to remain Syrians, drew the country's borders so as to separate it from Syria. Ever since, Lebanese have fought over their identity. "How we love drawing lines on maps, we Westerners. How easily we support nations of convenience." Britain's failure to resolve what Churchill called the "hell-disaster" of Palestine produced Israel, which created the refugees in Lebanon and the Maronites' provocation for the civil war.

"A garbage tip" hides the mass grave of 500 of Sabra and Shatila victims at Sabra and Shatila. "Shiite Muslim" children now play there. As Fisk said, the brutal war did not alter the well-entrenched sectarian political structure. "The hierarchy of the 'zaim,' the great families, still exists, though it has been replaced by ...a world of technocrats and soldiers." Like in other Arab countries, the technocrats are accused of corruption. The Taif agreement, which was supposed to radically overhaul the system, "provided first aid relief, Band-Aids on the worst Lebanese sores." The agreement did not change the basic power dynamics among the various political factions. "Sectarianism does, of course, provide a balance, a balance of fear." The resulting vulnerability necessitates constant foreign involvement in the country.

UN Security Council Resolution 425 (1978) calls for the immediate and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Hizbollah fighters who have fought Israel on Lebanese territory-in effect to implement 425-are called "terrorists" by Western governments and media, while the Israeli occupiers are called soldiers or commandos. The 10% of Lebanese territory that Israel has occupied since 1978 has become "Israel's security zone, [the] most insecure part of the Middle East," an Israeli jargon that became the norm for western media. After twenty-two years of occupation, the planned Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, "can scarcely be immediate," and the "unconditional" withdrawal has been saddled with a "host of conditions: early warning stations inside Lebanon, ... and a few changes in the border between Lebanon and Israel," which will not be to Lebanon's advantage. And when Lebanon opposes these conditions and calls for a peace agreement on both Syrian and Lebanese fronts, Western media announce that Lebanon and Syria "do not want peace." Israel has lost the war and wants to leave Lebanon now because its soldiers there "are bleeding, at the rate, sometimes, of six Israeli dead in a week. They are not bleeding on the Golan. And they are thus not in a hurry to leave the Golan," Fisk added. Without an agreement on Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, Israeli soldiers will continue to be attacked even while retreating, risking Israeli retaliation directed at Lebanese infrastructure.

This coming summer, Fisk concluded, "is going to be among the most dangerous in Lebanon's modern history. A fighting Israeli retreat out of Lebanon will mean war." Syria, Lebanon and Hizbollah will surely be blamed by the State Department. To Lebanon, it is a "cruel equation, for Syria will allow Lebanon's people and its land to be used as battleground for the return of Golan," Fisk said. Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976, he added, came at the request of Lebanon's Christians. The US and Israel approved, provided Syrian troops did not cross the Litani River.

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