ISRAEL WAS WRONG
Schroth, Raymond A.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was wrong. The more frankly we face this the sooner we will be able to put the pieces together in the Middle East. As the immediate, bloody human and...
...A year and a half ago I ran from Qaaqaiye to Qsaibe...
...Immediately after the attack news reports said Begin's bold action had strengthened his political position at home...
...And once again, if he is still Premier, Menachem Begin will revert to his own terrorist past and swear revenge...
...The shedders of innocent blood shall not go unpunished," Begin vowed to his Knesset...
...bombs for hours on the residential sections of the port of Tyre and leveling half the town of Uzai, a suburb of Beirut...
...B'nai B'rith has calculated 1131 killings in ten years...
...They have accelerated the insane cycle of violence with a fanatical reply to a fanatic's crime...
...For the time being they had achieved what they wanted— war—and in a few weeks or months they will strike again—from the sea, or the air, or in downtown Jerusalem...
...The Tel Aviv hijackers had come from the sea...
...Two weeks ago the Israelis came in with a juggernaut of 5000 men plus tanks, artillery and U.S.-made warplanes—Skyhawks and Phantoms —indiscriminately dropping 1000-lb...
...And a Moslem refugee told a New York Times reporter: "We can't even count the dead...
...so rapidly converted into political as well as military liabilities as by the rash action in Lebanon—however efficient it s may have been from the viewpoint of military technique...
...As Meir Merhav wrote recently in the Jerusalem Post, "Never before have gut reactions been so recklessly substituted for a calculating statesmanship and potential political assets...
...Israel's real friends should tell him the same thing...
...But revenge ranks with its brother hate as the most corrupting human ISRAEL WAS WRONG RAYMOND A. SCHROTH emotion...
...As the Washington Post reported on March 25, Israelis have devastated Lebanon the way the U.S...
...And if he strikes, another Palestinian mother will shout to reporters, "Write, write, tell the Israelis I still have two sons and they will grow up to take revenge...
...Now, the more dispassionately we view his behavior the more he seems in danger of compromising Israel's moral legacy...
...When President Jimmy Carter tells Begin he has become an obstacle to peace he is telling the truth...
...Within four days they had killed over 700 people and, by the end of the war, created 265,000 refugees...
...Certainly the terrorist leaders foresaw the Israeli massive retaliation and cared little more for their own people than for the Jews...
...Now I am running to Beirut...
...Threefifths of their armed forces had already melted away before the Israelis attacked...
...But whom was he going to punish when the bus hijackers had already been captured or killed...
...Since 1970, according to Israeli Embassy figures, Palestinians had killed 258 Jews...
...But, during the same time, Israel had killed over 2000 Arabs in retaliation...
...Is there no conscience in the world...
...Peace will come in the Middle East when the issues of justice are squarely faced, when the occupied territories are returned as UN Resolution 242 requires, and when the Palestinian Arabs, like the Jews, have some place they can call a home...
...As the immediate, bloody human and long-range political consequences have made all too clear, the misnamed operation Stone of Wisdom was neither a morally justified response to the previous week's Palestinian terrorist Tel Aviv bus hijacking that left 35 Israeli dead, nor a politically justified policy decision that had a chance of bringing us closer to peace and justice in the Holy Land...
...Indeed, on the psychological ana personal, as well as military, level, it seems that the Israelis have played into the terrorists' hands...
...North of Tyre an Israeli commando team stopped two cars on the road and gunned down 18 men, women and children...
...devastated Vietnam, using tactics that made a mockery of their claim that the air raids were "surgical" strikes...
...We are just leaving them behind and running...
...In recent months terrorist attacks from the Lebanon border had virtually stopped...
...They have delivered a few more crippling blows to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's and the United States' peace initiatives and, by so overwhelming the enemy, posed questions about the real seriousness of the PLO threat and the wisdom of Israeli leadership...
...Having denied his motive was revenge because "there cannot be any retaliation or retribution for the blood of innocent citizens," he launched an invasion that, like Lyndon Johnson's bombing of North Vietnam, had been planned for some time and which shed far more blood of innocent citizens than any just sense of proportion could allow...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 8
