The Slopes of Lebanon, redux
Plus Dr. Small Talk in NYRB
Hello dear readers. I’m sick and very tired but did not want to let Israel’s major escalation of the war go unremarked. I also wanted to share my recent New York Review of Books essay, aptly titled “What the New Right Wants,” which came out last week.
Unless you’re living under a rock or in a cabin in the woods (in which case, stop reading now), you’ve probably heard that Israel has launched a full-blown offensive on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon and has, as of last night, begun a ground invasion. So far over 1000 Lebanese have been killed and 1 million displaced in what is assuredly only the early rounds of fighting. According to Israel, the goal is to eradicate Hezbollah positions south of the Litani river and enable displaced Israelis to return to their homes near the northern border. Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israeli territory since the outset of the Gaza war, and has repeatedly said that only a ceasefire will compel them to stop. But Bibi’s government has long been unwilling to commit to a ceasefire/hostage exchange with Hamas, so has decided to invade Lebanon instead. Just let the insanity of it all sink in. The IDF is his hammer and the man can only see nails.
The IDF in Lebanon - 1982
It’s hard not to hear the rhymes of history. In the 1970s, the Palestinian Liberation Organization set up shop in Lebanon, effectively becoming a state within a state much like Hezbollah today. The result, as historian Seth Anziska has written about in his wonderful book Preventing Palestine, was an increasingly unstable country divided between the PLO-controlled south and Lebanese Christian-controlled north — eventually culminating in a fifteen year civil war. Hezbollah emerged out of this confrontation, ironically to represent the interests of impoverished Shi’a Muslims living in the south who had their lands confiscated by the PLO. As Anziska details, border skirmishes and rocket fire from the PLO were routine hazards faced by Israelis in the north. When Likud founder Menachem Begin became Prime Minister, he used the rockets as a pretext to try to (in Anziska’s words) “destroy the PLO military infrastructure throughout Lebanon and undermine the organization as a political entity in order to ‘break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism’ and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank by Israel.”
Begin managed to secure support of the Reagan administration—who viewed the PLO as little more than a Soviet proxy—and promised to act as the protector of Lebanese Christians who were, in his telling, facing a Muslim population intent on their eradication. “Today I am a proud Jew,” Begin remarked. “We were once helpless and massacred and now by divine providence we have the means to help other people whose destruction is being connived by a brutal enemy.” The broader strategic goal was an alliance and eventual peace treaty with right-wing Maronite Christians, led by Bashir Gemayel, all while eradicating any vestiges of Palestinian national aspirations.
I won’t go into great detail about how it all went down—you can and should read Seth’s book for the best treatment around—but the short version is poorly. The Israeli army began a large-scale invasion on June 6, 1982, including a siege of Beirut. This conversation Anziska unearthed from the archive between Philip Habib (US Ambassador and Special Envoy in Lebanon) and Menachem Begin is extraordinary:
HABIB: I have received a message from our embassy in Beirut. The city has no electric power, no gas. Men without uniforms are moving about with arms. It is a city of two million people. What I wish to ask is, can you stop the bombing of Beirut?
BEGIN: Did we bomb Beirut?
HABIB: Yesterday.
BEGIN: We bombed the PLO headquarters and we do not know if Arafat survived it. He is a little Hitler. Those days are gone forever. Now we rely on our own strength.
HABIB: What I am suggesting is that the bombing in that area be stopped. I know you bombed the headquarters but people get hurt and damage to property is inflicted. I know how you feel about hurting civilians.
Though it had given the green light, the Reagan administration quickly soured on Israel’s invasion as civilian casualties rose. The US voted with the UN security council to call for a ceasefire, which Israel ignored. At one point Reagan wrote directly to Begin, “There must be an end to the unnecessary bloodshed, particularly among innocent civilians. I insist that a ceasefire in place be reestablished and maintained until the PLO has left Beirut. The relationship between our two nations is at stake.” But in practice the US proved unable to restrain Israel, so a compromise was found instead: an offer to remove PLO militants from Lebanon (which is how they ended up in Tunisia).
US Marines intervened to supervise the evacuation of PLO forces, along with Italian and French troops, with Ambassador Habib offering assurance to PLO leader Yasser Arafat that Western powers would provide for the security of Palestinian civilians left behind. Over ten thousand fighters left Lebanon between August 21-30, 1982. But on Sept. 14, Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel was assassinated by Syria militia members, which Israel used as pretext to push the occupation into Beirut over American objections. Meanwhile, reeling from the assassination of Gemayel, Phalangi militias attacked the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila beginning on September 16. These camps were within Israel-controlled territory and Phalangi forces were ushered through Israeli lines into the camps where they raped, killed, dismembered at least 800 women, children, and elderly men all while lit by Israeli flares. Israeli officials denied this all to US, claiming that they were routing out terrorists — effectively ignoring nature of those left behind after the PLO evacuation.
Memorial to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacres
Outrage over the Sabra and Shatila massacres was felt around the world, and per Anziska, “radically altered global perceptions of Israeli and U.S. actions in Lebanon, and the very nature of the Palestinian question.” As he continues:
Many supporters of Israel abroad were paralyzed by the invasion of Lebanon and its aftershocks, and Sabra and Shatila intensified these feelings. Begin had described the invasion as a “war by choice,” which was an anathema to the defensive ethos of the dominant Zionist narrative that animated Jewish support for Israel abroad. “It was shameful, it was shocking,” explained Rita Hauser, a prominent lawyer and Republican Jewish activist who had served as U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council. “People were really horrified, they were shocked at it. Many Israelis were. It’s simply something that Jews, Israelis are not supposed to do.”
The failure to protect civilians led the Reagan administration to redeploy US troops to Lebanon, 241 of whom were later killed in a 1983 attack by Hezbollah. Knowing this history should give American leaders pause as they ramp up US troop presence in the region. It’s bad enough that American weapons and diplomatic cover enable this foolish expansion of the war — we need not subsidize Netanyahu’s belligerence with the blood of American soldiers as well.
What did the 1982 war accomplish? Bring about a lasting Christian government in Lebanon allied with Israel? No. Destroy the PLO? No. Extinguish Palestinian desires for self-determination? No. Kill a lot of innocent people and cost Israel a great deal of political capital? Yes! Perhaps the most important consequence was that the war forced a reckoning within Israel concerning the limits of military power. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets in protest, a special commission was convened to investigate the government’s role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and Menachem Begin resigned from office in August 1983.
Begin’s disastrous “war of choice” served to catalyse the Israeli peace movement, eventually paving the war for recognition of the PLO and the Oslo process. The author Amos Oz wrote a remarkable book of essays, The Slopes of Lebanon, that testified to the war as a turning point in Israelis’ self-perception. Anziska includes this bit in his account:
After Lebanon, we can no longer ignore the monster, even when it is dormant, or half asleep, or when it peers out from behind the lunatic fringe. After Lebanon, we must not pretend that the monster dwells only in the offices of Meir Kahane; or only on General Sharon’s ranch, or only in Raful’s carpentry shop, or only in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It dwells, drowsing, virtually everywhere, even in the folk-singing guts of our common myths. Even in our soul-melodies. We did not leave it behind in Lebanon, with the Hezbollah. It is here, among us, a part of us, like a shadow, in Hebron, in Gaza, in the slums and in the suburbs, in the kibbutzim and in my Lake Kinneret.
For the first and arguably only time, after Lebanon a plurality of Israelis came to recognize that security would only come through recognizing and dealing politically with the Palestinian people. The moment was squandered for reasons that are too complex to recount today, but fundamentally stemmed from the flawed nature of the Oslo accords, the expansion of Israeli settlements, and the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt character of Arafat and the PA.
So here we are again, with an Israeli invasion of Lebanon aimed at eradicating a state-within-a-state, the US struggling to restrain its protégé, and Israelis embracing the myth that eliminating Hezbollah will bring peace to the north without having to contend with Palestinian national aspirations. One can be forgiven for feeling a little deja vu. And yet… History might rhyme but it never repeats, and I am not optimistic that this invasion will bring about a sea change within Israel itself. It’s evident that the Netanyahu government finds a broader regional war more appealing than dealing politically with the existence of the Palestinians, and that much of the public does believe that political problems can be solved through military means. Hammers all around. As for the violence inflicted on civilians, don’t expect a population that has cheered the wanton destruction of Gaza to be scandalized by another Sabra and Shatila.
The unfortunate truth is that liberals like Amos Oz are either dead, living abroad, or completely marginalized within Israel today, where it is the genocidal Ben-Gvir—not my comrades at 972 Magazine—who hold the reins of power. “Peace through strength” is the only game in town. That this strategy has always failed to bring peace does not deter its champions.
In other news, I have a new essay out in the New York Review of Books, titled “What the New Right Wants.” I started working on this piece over the summer, but it stems from my long-standing fascination with the adoption of progressive economic positions by New Right intellectuals. As I wrote in this post, there is growing recognition on the right that unfettered capitalism and markets work against a social order composed of stable, patriarchal, nuclear families.
Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts
In the US, Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass have emerged as the New Right’s most strident critics of market fundamentalism and its degrading social effects. They are new converts to historical materialism — the view that regards social, ideological, and cultural forms as byproducts of material conditions. It’s been fascinating to watch this crew face off with a Republican establishment—remade in the image of Donald Trump but still fundamentally united on fiscal policies that favor the wealthy—that prefers to explain social decay in cultural terms. Ergo, nothing fundamental about the economy and the provision of resources has to change, people just need to be more virtuous, work harder, bootstrap more efficiently, etc.
I argue we should read the notorious Project 2025 as a sloppy compromise between these two forces: an attempt to capitalize on New Right energy without alienating Old Right donors. The resulting, largely incoherent document reads precisely like the sort of policy agenda Oren Cass (note: American Compass is on the Project 2025 advisory board) warned about in his speech at NatCon last July:
But for conservatives to not only win our internal battles, not only “own the libs,” but also build a durable governing majority, we have to replace that market fundamentalism with a new, conservative economic narrative: one that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.
I’m not sure that’s happening. Instead, many on the Right seem to have learned precisely the wrong lesson from Donald Trump’s success, believing that the old playbook will work just fine, so long as it comes with a sharper cultural edge and more vulgarity.
The same old regressive taxation, deregulatory fetish, attacks on organized labor and the power of workers, laced with a vitriolic contempt for racial equity, reproductive rights, and trans kids? Yet, that’s Project 2025 in a nutshell.