I write this in the context of my finding it almost impossible to maintain any hope for a two state solution for Israel and Palestine.
This outstanding article in the New York Times Magazine is about Israeli efforts and actions with respect to targeted assassinations, and how mid and sometimes high level military personnel refused to carry out orders from then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to blow up civilian planes or kill civilians while targeting Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat. Nonetheless, in the margins, it shows that Israel was carrying out other targeted assassinations along the way, and doing their otherwise best to disrupt any Palestinian leadership.
What is missing from the article is how the Israeli governments, over twenty years or more, not only tried to kill Arafat, but were also building up the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood that eventually became Hamas. This was another way to undermine Arafat and the PLO, by creating a powerful internal to Palestinians opposition group. One of the men in charge of military intelligence for Israel in the early days of that strategy, Yehoshafat Harkabi, wrote a book, after his retirement, in the late 1980s about his own change of heart and apology for building up religious fundamentalism among Palestinians, as it was already getting hard to remember that Arafat was an engineer who was a secular person (Christian by birth), and was not enamored with Islamic orthodoxies (Just watch, to take an analogous example, Egyptian president Nasser, in 1966, making fun of right wing Islamic fundamentalists). Otherwise, one had to read Chomsky's citations from news articles inside Israel and elsewhere for this information.
The article also glosses over a couple of truths that were so virulently denied by most Zionists in the US at the time: (1) Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was not only NOT a defensive war, but an outright, imperialist offensive war. It was also a disaster as Israel ended up helping destroy Lebanon as a nation (Syria had been doing a good job before, and Israeli fighter pilot bombings since the late 1970s were "helping," too), and from the ashes of that war crime of a war, Hezbollah arose; and (2) Sharon and other military officials knew that allowing the Phalange fighters into the two Lebanese villages, Sabra and Shatila, would lead to a massacre of men, women, and children there.
In the U.S. in 1982, it was almost impossible find this information unless one was reading the Village Voice columns of Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway (here is an example reprinted from the Institute for Palestine Studies). They were regularly quoting Israeli newspapers, particularly Ha'aretz and The Jerusalem Post (back when the latter was not a right wing rag), and the reporting of Israel's leading military correspondent, the now late Ze'ev Schiff. I was stunned by this reporting, and while I was already exposed to Abba Eban and other Israeli doves, had read Mohamed Heikal's (a top Egyptian reporter who was close to Sadat from the beginning of the 1970s) Road to Ramadan (1975), and was also going to the local university library to read, from time to time, the journal of the Institute for Palestine Studies and Edward Said, it was unbelievable to me that the lead story of the war, that Israel went to war in Lebanon because the PLO, stationed in part in Lebanon, had tried to kill the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. (it was in fact the work of an offshoot of the PLO, against Arafat's wishes), was itself a lie in the sense of being a pretext. Another justification had been that the PLO had been regularly shelling northern Israel in violation of a peace agreement with the PLO, when in fact, it had been almost completely quiet on both sides for the previous year, and it was more often Israel that was doing the shelling.
Then when the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, there were reports almost immediately that the Israeli generals had approved the Phalange forces to go in and clean up. It was reminiscent of the way the Germans sometimes let local Lithuanian and other such national forces go in and kill Jews. Yes, I said it, and it fits. Sharon knew what would happen.
Ze'ev Schiff eventually co-wrote a book called "The Lebanon War" (1984) that was based upon his intimate knowledge inside the Israeli military machines (fighting machine and intelligence machine) and his access to the commission the Israeli government convened to study what happened, and why the two official reasons for the war were lies. The Kahan Commission's report was partially blocked from release, and Schiff knew its contents. The weird thing was that the US media did not clearly tell this story, and so many of my fellow Jews in temples and synagogues across the land continued to believe the War against Lebanon was totally defensive, totally necessary, and that the US government and US corporate media were against poor little Israel. And I would say, whoa, read the Jerusalem Post. Read Ze'ev Schiff. I started realizing Israeli citizens were, at least back then, getting better news on the subject that was far more critical and open than American citizens on the subject.
I was also optimistic things would be better because, hardly covered in US newspapers and television, there were major demonstrations by Israeli citizens, many of them soldiers, and some freshly back from service in the Lebanon War, during the war itself in 1982 and continuing thereafter. It was that outcry against the war, against what Sharon was doing to provoke further and wider war, and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, that led to Begin resigning in personal disgrace (he knew he had been misled by Sharon) and the Commission continuing its investigation.
Time Magazine did publish a story on the hidden part of the Kahan Commission report, but Sharon sued for libel, and amazingly won at least a pyrrhic victory, where the jury saw what the ignorant district court judge refused to see, which was that Time was reporting on what was hidden from the public, and was essentially true. And then some dumb New York socialite-reporter, Renata Adler, yes, she was Jewish, too, wrote articles in the New Yorker covering the case, with the New Yorker embarrassing itself with her pro-Sharon side reportage.* As a lawyer who was already handling libel cases from time to time, I saw through her shallow and misleading (not maybe intentional, just dumb) reporting, and that Ze'ev Schiff's book had already exposed why Sharon's lawsuit was a lie. Nobody ever stopped to ask, why didn't Sharon sue Schiff? Why didn't Sharon sue Schiff in Israel? Why did the judge in the libel suit accept the Israeli government's refusal to produce the hidden portion of the commission report Time reported on, and accept a misleading summary? It was a horror show of the American legal system with Americans, including unfortunately American Jews, who instinctively believed the Israeli government when they had no basis to do so.
At that time, and until recently, I always thought the type of individuals the NY Times Magazine article talks about would prevail. People who stood up to illegal, murderous orders in ways that are outstanding and admirable. But Israeli society has continued to harden, and those voices are now old, and no longer in power. Israeli politics is a settlers' politics. The majority of Israeli citizens no longer have any pretense to following better rabbinic values. The type of actions the various immediate subordinates to Sharon took are now less likely to occur at all. For too many Israelis today see those types of values as "Ashkanazi" weakness, and they exult Erik Lehnsherr aka Magneto values.
* She wound up writing an equally dumb book about the Sharon v. Time Magazine and Westmoreland v. CBS libel cases, where she essentially missed the story that the information about Westmoreland playing games with military information for political reasons was true. What I had objected to, in real time, in the original documentary on CBS was making Westmoreland's actions too much of a personal centerpiece. Westy was merely a large cog in a larger machine, and his duplicity for the American National Security State is what got him to where he was leading US forces in Vietnam in the first place. George Crile, the producer and "author" of the documentary, loved to emphasize personalities and not structures or systems. He did the same later with his book about crazy Congressperson Charlie Wilson and the Russian Afghan War. The best book on the Westmoreland lawsuit was by a former Vietnam War vet, who was a writer for the Village Voice, Bob Brewin, and it captures the great legal examination and other work of NY super lawyer, David Boies, who beat the crap out of Westmoreland and Westy's lawyers.
UPDATE 1/28/2018: I hesitated to add it, but now will: One thing I found "amusing" in the New York Times Magazine article is that it further confirmed what I had written about near the end of my novel, A Disturbance of Fate, about the Israeli generals like Sharon and Eitan, who dreamed of a Palestinian state on the Jordan side of the Jordan River, essentially replacing then-King Hussein in Jordan. Of course, in September 1970, King Hussein showed how Arab leaders would have likely reacted if they had defeated Israel in any of the wars up through that time, with the killing of thousands of uprising Palestinians in what is now called "Black September." In my novel, the Israeli military, in the face of a more pro-revolutionary world, help the Palestinians overthrow Hussein...Well, you gotta read the book to see how and why that becomes feasible and even "logical."
UPDATE 1/28/2018: I hesitated to add it, but now will: One thing I found "amusing" in the New York Times Magazine article is that it further confirmed what I had written about near the end of my novel, A Disturbance of Fate, about the Israeli generals like Sharon and Eitan, who dreamed of a Palestinian state on the Jordan side of the Jordan River, essentially replacing then-King Hussein in Jordan. Of course, in September 1970, King Hussein showed how Arab leaders would have likely reacted if they had defeated Israel in any of the wars up through that time, with the killing of thousands of uprising Palestinians in what is now called "Black September." In my novel, the Israeli military, in the face of a more pro-revolutionary world, help the Palestinians overthrow Hussein...Well, you gotta read the book to see how and why that becomes feasible and even "logical."
