We Must Not Look Away as Lebanon Dies

In less than half a century a great Jewish calamity has led in part to a great Palestinian calamity, which has led in part to a great Lebanese calamity.

American policy did not cause any of them. But in one way or another we have played a significant role in the history of all three. Since history is my living and its legacy is my lot as citizen, parent, taxpayer and Jew, I found myself thinking about this last week as I studied the handwriting on a wall in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, and read the latest on the 15-week Shia Muslim siege of the same Palestinian camps in Beirut where Maronite Christians had already conducted a memorable slaughter in 1982.

“Think Globally, Act Locally,” declared one message on the wall. “Stop Israeli (U.S.) Amal (Arab sectarian) Oppression of Palestinians,” said another. “A debate on Palestine between pro-Zionist and Palestinian views should be heard sometime soon,” said a third. It wasn’t clear if the message was urgent or wistful. There was nothing on the hostages held in Lebanon, but they naturally came up in the morning paper. The story, in fact, was on Page 1. It reported that Amal’s Nabih Berri, leader of the relatively moderate Lebanese Shia majority, was angling for Israeli release of 400 Palestinian prisoners in a multi-lateral trade for Western hostages and an Israeli airman.

But the story that held my attention was buried on Page 4. Even as Berri was negotiating on behalf of the Palestinians held by Israel, the objects of Amal’s siege in the Palestinian camps were said to be boiling rats after first eating all their cats and dogs. Meanwhile, they were reportedly awaiting a Sunni Muslim religious opinion on the propriety of eating human bodies.

With years to confirm that truth is war’s first casualty, I hesitate to take this story at face value. But, given at least as much evidence for the sincerity of Middle Eastern hate, I also hesitate to dismiss it as untrue. Even if it is, it should be clear by now that any truth in Lebanon is bad enough.

Since then the hostage deal has apparently fallen through and some food has gotten into the camps. Yet nothing suggests that this is a lasting solution. So assuming a next time--and why not?--this leads to some obvious questions about what we can and should do.

Of course, there are ways to relativize and even explain last week’s scene in Beirut. For what consolation that it offers, the Palestinians share their experience with Leningraders of 1942 and Parisians of 1871. That their lives have been only marginally more miserable than their besiegers is unremarkable, too. Even underdogs have underdogs. And how Berri could act on their behalf in the case of the prisoners in Israel while starving them into submission in Beirut can be looked up in Machiavelli. The Middle East is hardly the first place where today’s adversary is tomorrow’s--or yesterday’s--ally and the enemy of an enemy is a friend.

There is also no lack of candidates to blame for last week’s horror. Transients and foreign powers have helped brutalize Lebanon for generations. Other Arabs have carried on their murderous rivalries there for at least as long. Since at least the middle 1970s, Israeli brutality and fecklessness, like American irresolution and acquiescence, have only added to the Goyaesque tableau.

Yet this hardly makes the Lebanese and the Palestinians simple victims, either. The bloody arabesques of Maronites, Sunni, Shia and Druze are practically the common denominator of their national identity. Three generations, at least, of Palestinian arrogance, illusions and default are central to their current plight. But historical liability goes only so far as explanation when thousands of people, including women and children, are reduced to boiling rats, and it is not much guide to action the next time we hear that bell that tolls for us.

Given the basic political realities, no one can expect, or even can reasonably ask, Americans or Israelis to challenge Amal. It is at least as unrealistic to ask Shias, Israelis or Americans to bail out reinfiltrated PLO guerrillas, whose presence is presumably the reason for that extended siege.

But however plausible our helplessness or even indifference, the fact remains that we stood by--or looked away--last week while people who were not wholly foreign to us came so close to extermination.

This is not good news scarcely 40 years since Auschwitz and with another reminder of the death camps under way this very week in a Jerusalem courtroom. The only long-run hope that I see is the “debate between pro-Zionist and Palestinian views” referred to in the writing on the downtown wall. Even this is unlikely to provide much relief for Lebanon. In the short run, unfortunately, little more occurs to me.