On This Day

6 June

 في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1982 ، شنت القوات الأسرائيلية "عملية سلام الجليل" ، وهو غزو آخر للبنان. وكان مجلس الأمن الدولي قد اصدر عدة إدانات تطالب إسرائيل بسحب قواتها على الفور ودون قيد أو شرط. وحث قرار 8 يونيو على فرض عقوبات ما لم تنسحب إسرائيل من لبنان. لكن أرييل شارون أظهر ازدراءه للأمم المتحدة وذلك بقصف بيروت في الأوقات – 2.42 و 3.38 – اشارة الى قراري الأمم المتحدة (242,338) الداعيان لتسوية سلمية لقضية فلسطين.

"On one occasion, on August 4, the IDF attempted a ground attack, but withdrew after 19 Israeli soldiers were killed. The IDF then returned to safer tactics, keeping to bombing and shelling from land and sea, against which there was no defense, in accordance with familiar military doctrine. The population of the beleaguered city was deprived of food, water, medicines, electricity, fuel, as Israel tightened the noose."Since the city was defenseless, the IDF was able to display its lighthearted abandon, as on July 26, when bombing began precisely at 2:42 and 3:38 PM, “a touch of humor with a slight hint,” the Labor press reported cheerily, noting that the timing, referring to UN Resolutions 242 and 338, “was not accidental.”  Israeli daily, Davar, July 28, 1982, reported in Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle p 420
It is not known how many casualties those "humorous" salvos of shells contributed to the final tally of about 50,000 civilians killed by the 1982 Israeli invasion.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

To many people, in fact, the siege of Beirut seemed gratuitous brutality... The arsenal of weapons, unleashed in a way that has not been seen since the Vietnam war, clearly horrified those who saw the results firsthand and through film and news reports at a distance. The use of cluster bombs and white phosphorus shells, a vicious weapon, was widespread...In the last hours of the last air attack on Beirut, Israeli planes carpet-bombed Borj el Brajne [a Palestinian refugee camp]. There were no fighting men left there, only the damaged homes of Palestinian families, who once again would have to leave and find another place to live. All of West Beirut, finally, was living in wreckage and garbage and loss.

A former Israeli Army Chief Educational Officer described how

“the PLO’s desperate and heroic fight has, in addition to its other accomplishments, brought it glory in the eyes of the Palestinians…it is already clear that even those moderate leaders who had been somewhat reserved towards the PLO leadership and methods, today feel impelled to express their admiration for the heroism of their brothers in Lebanon (Chomsky, p.535)

“Of all the declared, implied and hidden objectives of the war in Lebanon, there is no doubt that the central aim was to deal a crushing blow to the national aspirations of the Palestinians and to their very existence as a nation endeavouring to define itself and gain the right to self-determination.”

"Anyone who visited Southern Lebanon during and even after the fighting would see that the war was fought not just against terrorist organizations and the PLO, and not even solely to destroy the PLO’s military infrastructure in the region. It was fought against the very existence of the Palestinians as a community with its own way of life, which had been evolving in Lebanon since 1948, and at an enhanced rate since 1975... [against the] health and educational services, political and social organizations, judicial and self-management systems, etc. Now that all these autonomous social systems have been utterly destroyed, the Palestinian refugees have once again become a faceless mass of people, uprooted, evacuated and torn away from any form of collective life." (Chomsky, p.443)

90 sec video on Israel's repeated invasions of Lebanon