Fateful Triangle

”Limited War” in Lebanon866The same attitudes prevail today. H.D.S. Greenway of the BostonGlobe, who reported Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon graphically, nowwrites that “If shelling Lebanese villages, even at the cost of lives, anddriving civilian refugees north would secure Israel’s border, weakenHezbollah, and promote peace, I would say go to it, as would manyArabs and Israelis. But history has not been kind to Israeli adventures inLebanon. They have solved very little and have almost always causedmore problems,” so the murder of civilians, expulsion of hundreds ofthousands of refugees, and devastation of the south is a dubiousproposition. 17 Can one imagine an article recommending a murderousand destructive attack on Israel, if only it could secure Lebanon’s borderand promote peace?The assumptions are so deeply implanted as to be unnoticeable.Thus few react when the cover of the New Yorker magazine, in July1993, depicts children happily building castles in the sand—including areplica of the World Trade Center—as a crazed child wearing Arabheaddress leaps down to destroy them with an ugly leer; the childrenare Black, Latino, and White, a deft touch, designed to absolve theauthors of any charge of racism, while at the same time highlighting thedepravity of the ethnic group that is to be despised by right-thinkingpeople.Having failed to elicit the desired PLO reaction, Israel simply manufactureda pretext for its long-planned invasion of Lebanon: the attemptto assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to London, which, as Israel wasaware, was carried out by the terrorist Abu Nidal organization that hadbeen at war with the PLO for years and did not so much as have anoffice in Lebanon. 18The preferred version in the U.S. was that “Operation Peace for Galilee”—theIsraeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—was undertaken toprotect the civilian population from Palestinian gunners, and that “theClassics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky