Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
27 September
THEFT AND PILLAGE DURING INVASION OF LEBANON
On this day in 1982, Israeli looting of Lebanon was in full swing. The Los Angeles Times reported: “Israeli trucks loaded with household appliances were seen driving south towards Israel, while flatbed trucks loaded cars, taking them presumably to Israel. Eyewitnesses reported that appliance and television shops were cleaned out, and the airport computer reservation system was stolen. At the College of Science of the Lebanese University, there was wanton destruction and looting of scientific laboratories”.
انتشار السرقة والسطو أثناء غزو لبنان
سبتمبر27
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1982، كان نهب إسرائيل للبنان على قدم وساق. ذكرت صحيفة لوس أنجلوس تايمز: “شوهدت شاحنات إسرائيلية محملة بالأجهزة المنزلية وهي تتجه جنوبًا نحو إسرائيل، في حين أن الشاحنات المسطحة حملت سيارات، وأخذتها على الأرجح إلى إسرائيل. أفاد شهود عيان أنه تم تنظيف متاجر الأجهزة والتلفزيون، وسرقة نظام حاسوب الحجوزات في المطار. في كلية العلوم في الجامعة اللبنانية، حدث دمار وحشي ونهب للمختبرات العلمية.
The New York Times reported with a straight journalistic face on Oct 9, 1982 that "A military court sentenced an army private to three and a half years in prison today for looting a Lebanese store, the military command said. Pt. Shimon Barzilai was convicted of stealing property from a store in Aleih, a town overlooking the Beirut-Damascus highway east of Beirut. The command did not say what items were stolen."
Lebanese report that private homes, universities, hospitals, and at least one mosque were looted and damaged. “And in its thoroughness and the particularity of its targets, the vandalism seems to many Lebanese to have gone beyond what might ordinarily be expected from troops in wartime, living with both fear and boredom.” The head of a study commissioned by the Lebanese Information Ministry gave a preliminary estimate of perhaps $100 million in damage. Apart from “random looting and damage,” he said, “all major institutions connected with governments unfriendly to Israel - including homes, embassies, cultural centers, banks, etc - were damaged in some way, either by being hit, looted, burned or otherwise damaged.” An American diplomat confirmed that the US government had been asked to intercede to have a $375,000 bulldozer returned to the Lebanese company from which it was stolen.
American marines joined in a ‘‘massive cleanup effort’’ at the Lebanese University campus, but after two weeks, “piles of garbage and broken glass lay five feet high in the corridors of the fifth floor” and many laboratories were littered with files that had been taken from drawers and thrown down, while laboratories were bare of equipment, “much of it, according to professors at the college, having been taken or destroyed by the Israelis who moved into the college between June 15 and 20.”
Israeli soldiers took the entire scientific library at the college, along with its archives, while taking much scientific material, including the contents of the only polymer laboratory in Lebanon. At the Berbir Hospital, which Israel had repeatedly shelled, “doctors’ clinics and apartments were ransacked during a four-day period of Israeli occupation, according to doctors there.” Chairs were broken, dirt and food spread everywhere, soldiers had drawn on carpets with lipstick, defecated in pots and pans, stolen lecture tapes, cameras, etc. A mosque on the main east-west thoroughfare was desecrated. “Many of its rugs were stolen, others were defecated upon and beer cans were scattered about the floor,” according to people who live near the mosque.
Conquering armies are rarely well-behaved, even those able to enter a virtually undefended city after it had been mercilessly bombarded and besieged. Few such armies, however, are provided with a corps of admirers in the country that finances their operations [USA] who marvel at their unique moral standards, purity of arms, incredibly polite behavior “with no reported instances of looting” (Rabbi Balfour Brickner in a religious pacifist journal)
Noam Chomsky in The Fateful Triangle, pp 513-4
Before they withdrew from West Beirut, Israeli troops looted the research center of the Palestine Liberation Organization, its director said today. Several Israeli soldiers also reportedly broke into the offices of the Institute for Palestine Studies, a private establishment, but removed only a few items.
Dr. Sabry Jiryes, director of the P.L.O. research center, said the troops took away its entire library of 25,000 volumes in Arabic, English and Hebrew, a printing press, microfilms, manuscripts and archives. He said they smashed filing cabinets, desks and other furniture and made off with telephones, heating equipment and electric fans.
Refrigerators and caviar, champagne and carpets – a first-ever comprehensive study by historian Adam Raz reveals the extent to which Jews looted Arab property during the War of Independence, and explains why Ben-Gurion stated: ‘Most of the Jews are thieves’"
“All along the way there is no house, no store, no workshop from which everything was not taken… Things of value and of no value – everything, literally! You are left with a shocked impression by this picture of ruins and heaps of rubble, among which men are wandering, poking through the rags in order to get something for nothing. Why not take? Why have pity?”
Ruth Lubitz, testimony about looting in Jaffa
“Many parts of the Israeli public – civilians and soldiers alike – were involved in looting the property of the Arab population,” Raz tells Haaretz. “The pillaging spread like wildfire among that public.” It involved the contents of tens of thousands of homes, stores and factories, of mechanical equipment, farm produce, cattle and more, he continues. Also included were pianos, books, clothing, jewelry, furniture, electrical appliances, engines and cars. Raz focuses on movables only, items that could be stuffed into bags or loaded onto vehicles.
Israeli historian Tom Segev described how
during the war and afterwards PLUNDERING AND LOOTING were very common. "The only thing that surprised me," said David Ben-Gurion at a Cabinet meeting, "and surprised me bitterly, was the discovery of such moral failings among us, which I had never suspected. I mean the mass robbery in which all parts of the population participated." Soldiers who entered abandoned houses in the towns and villages they occupied grabbed whatever they could. Some took the stuff for themselves, others "for the boys" or for the kibbutz. They stole household effects, cash, heavy equipment, trucks and whole flocks of cattle. Behor Shitrit told his colleagues of the Ministerial Committee for Abandoned Property that he had visited some of the occupied areas and saw the looting with his own eyes. "From Lydda alone," he said, "the army took out 1,800 truck-loads of property."
Video: BBC documentary about medical volunteers and their patients at the Gaza Hospital in West Beirut. The filming took place in the days immediately before the infamous 1982 Sabra-Chatila massacre, carried out by Lebanese Phalangist troops under Israeli military control.