This is background on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, with the full support of the Reagan administration, giving them the Proverbial Green Light for it.
This is background on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, with the full support of the Reagan administration, giving them the Proverbial Green Light for it.
The Bidenites have likewise given Israel the Green Light for their attack on war crimes and crimes against humanity against Lebanon today. All the Biden administration had to do was order Israel to terminate its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. If that were to occur, Hezbollah had stated it will stand down. The same for the Houthi government in Yemen. Instead, the Biden administration is now supporting Israel’s aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against Lebanon. The real Israeli agenda here again as before is to steal Lebanese territory up to and including the Litani River to create their long planned Greater Israel, including all the former Mandate for Palestine and the Golan Heights: Lebensraum. fab
From my The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy (Transnational Publishers Inc. 1989).
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PART TWO
NUCLEAR FLASHPOINT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Chapter 4
Dissensus Over Strategic Consensus
The Machiavellian Origins of Strategic Consensus
At the outset of the Reagan administration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and his mentor, Henry Kissinger, devoted a good deal of time to publicly lamenting the dire need for a "geopolitical" approach to American foreign policy decision making, one premised on a "grand theory" or "strategic design" of international relations. Their conceptual framework toward international affairs consisted essentially of nothing more sophisticated than a somewhat refined and superficially rationalized theory of Machiavellian power politics. Consequently, Haig quite myopically viewed the myriad of problems in the Middle East primarily within the context of a supposed struggle for control over the entire world between the United States and the Soviet Union. Haig erroneously concluded that this global confrontation required the United States to forge a "strategic consensus" among Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in order to resist anticipated Soviet aggression in the region.
In reality, Haig's proclaimed objective of founding a U.S. centered "strategic consensus" in the Middle East quickly degenerated into a reincarnated version of Kissinger's "Nixon Doctrine," whereby regional surrogates were intended to assist the United States "police" its spheres of influence throughout the world by virtue of massive American military assistance. According to Haig's logic, Israel would become America's new "policeman" for stability in the Middle East, filling the position recently vacated by the deposed Shah of Iran, whom the Nixon/Kissinger administration had unsuccessfully deputized to serve as America's "policeman" for Southwest Asia. Hence, the Reagan administration would more fully support the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, even during the pursuit of its patently illegal policies in Lebanon (e.g., "preemptive retaliation" against the PLO; preservation of Haddad's Christian enclave along the border; provision of military assistance to the Phalange) and in the territories occupied as a result of the l967 and 1973 wars (e.g., construction of Jewish settlements; deportation of inhabitants; collective punishments; the so-called Milson Reforms). Courtesy of the United States government, Israel's overwhelming military superiority over any Arab state or combination thereof except Egypt, which had been effectively neutralized by its l979 peace treaty with Israel,1 would make the Israeli army an ideal surrogate for spearheading the forceful concatenation of Haig's "strategic consensus" in the Middle East.
Whereas the Shah fell over internal domestic conditions that were only exacerbated by the large-scale U.S. political and military presence in Iran, Haig's scheme was fatally flawed from the very moment of its conception. Haig totally disregarded the fundamental realities of Middle Eastern international politics, where traditionally all regional actors have been far more exclusively concerned about their relationships with surrounding neighbors than about some evanescent threat of Soviet aggression. The more immediate danger to stability in the Middle East was not the distant prospect of Soviet intervention but rather a continuation of the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict.
Nevertheless, the Begin government shrewdly manipulated Haig's Machiavellian delusions in order to procure from the Reagan administration either active American support for, or tacit acquiescence in, or at least merely rhetorical opposition to various elements of a comprehensive scheme of internationally lawless behavior that was designed to impose a pax hebraeica upon the region. The creation of peace in the Middle East demanded vigorous American leadership acting in strict accordance with the rules of international law and in full cooperation with the relevant international institutions (e.g., the U.N. Security Council). Instead, with the active collusion of the Reagan administration, the Begin government launched a unilateral policy of hegemonial imperialism that would render Israel a pariah state within the international community, produce a series of unmitigated disasters for the United States, seriously undermine the integrity of the international legal order, and almost irreparably set back the cause of peace in this turbulent region of the world.
The Counterproductivity of Arms Sales
Pursuant to Haig's "strategic consensus" rationale, the better part of the Reagan administration's first year in office was improvidently exhausted trying to obtain Congressional approval for its proposed sale of the AWACS system to Saudi Arabia. The Reagan administration chose to rely upon the wholesale provision of American military equipment to various governments in the Middle East as an ineffectual and ultimately self-defeating substitute for the hard task of formulating a set of coherent principles for the conduct of American foreign policy on some basis other than Haig's Machiavellian predilections. The Reagan administration's promiscuous purveyance of sophisticated American weapons systems and technologies to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan proved to be a most disruptive factor when added to the endemic conflicts already prevalent in the region.
As events in Iran recently demonstrated, U.S. arms sales can easily become counterproductive. Any U.S. arms transfer policy should have been based upon the legitimate defensive needs of these countries as defined by international law and interpreted in good faith by the United States government. Unilateral and self-serving policy pronouncements by these foreign governments did not provide adequate criteria. Thus the Reagan administration should never have offered complicated weapons systems to the Saudi government, let alone a guarantee of survival against its internal adversaries (i.e., the so-called Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine), simply in order to curry favor and thus secure a stable flow of expensive oil to the West. Or to Jordan for the purpose of creating a regional surrogate for the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force designated for probably illegal military intervention throughout the Middle East.
Nor should such American weapons systems have been given to any state in this region of the world that manifested a distinct tendency to employ them in a manner violative of international law. Hence, during the summer of 1981, the illegal Israeli air strikes with American-made planes and weapons systems against the Iraqi nuclear reactor as well as against the PLO headquarters in Beirut, followed by Israel's blatantly illegal invasion of Lebanon one year later, should have created grounds for additional concern and reevaluation by the Reagan administration.2 Israel bore a heavy burden of proof in regard to pending American arms transfers that was not discharged in a manner satisfactory to the essential requirement of both international and U.S. domestic law that they only be used for the purposes of legitimate self-defense.
The Israeli Invasion of Lebanon
The next several years of the Reagan administration's foreign policy toward the Middle East were fruitlessly spent trying to cope with the tragic consequences resulting from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.3 Consistent with Haig's "strategic consensus" policy, there were several indications from the public record that the Reagan administration willingly consented in advance to the Begin government's flagrantly illegal invasion of Lebanon shortly after Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Sinai on April 25, 1982 pursuant to its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. This second invasion of Lebanon by the Begin government constituted a clear-cut violation of U.N. Charter articles 2(3)4 and 33, mandating the peaceful settlement of international disputes, as well as the article 2(4) prohibition against the threat or use of force in international relations directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, that could not be excused as a legitimate exercise of the right of self-defense recognized by article 51 or by accepted principles of customary international law concerning the use of force. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was clearly intended to destroy the PLO, establish a Phalangist puppet government in Beirut, drive the Arab Deterrent Force composed primarily of Syrian troops out of Lebanon, and further consolidate Israel's illegal military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. The Begin government's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was simply part of its announced intention to implement the gradual de facto annexation of these occupied territories in explicit violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967)5 and 338 (1973),6 as well as of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 19497 and the basic principle of customary international law prohibiting the annexation of occupied territories prior to the formal termination of hostilities.
By its sponsorship of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Reagan administration committed a "crime against peace" as defined by the Nuremberg Principles.8 Accordingly, to the extent the Reagan administration permitted Israel to use American weapons in explicit violation of international law and of U.S. domestic statutes applicable to arms transfer agreements, it had to assume full legal responsibility for all further crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed or condoned by Israel and its allied Phalange and Haddad militia forces operating in Lebanon. Such American accomplice liability would include the savage massacre of several hundred innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by organized units of the Phalangist militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut.9 As the Occupying Power in West Beirut at the time, Israel was fully responsible under international law for the barbarous treatment inflicted upon these innocent Palestinian and Lebanese refugees by the Phalange militia.
As a party to the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the United States government had an affirmative obligation under common article 1 to respect and to ensure respect for their observance in all circumstances by other contracting powers such as Israel.10 This obligation became irresistibly compelling in a situation where Israel was enabled to invade Lebanon by means of weapons, munitions, and supplies provided primarily by the U.S. government at concessionary rates. Under these and numerous other circumstances of complicity, the Reagan administration had an absolute duty to employ the tremendous leverage over Israel afforded by its arms supply relationship and economic subsistence in order to secure strict obedience to the humanitarian laws of armed conflict by Israel and its allied Phalange and Haddad militias, as well as to obtain Israel's immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon as required by U.N. Security Council Resolutions 508 (1982)11 and 509 (1982),12 both of which were legally binding on Israel and the United States under Charter article 25.13 Yet the Reagan administration willfully refused to perform even these most elementary obligations incumbent upon it under international law.
The Gemayel Puppet Government
Alexander Haig's rubber-stamp ratification of the grandiose scheme by Begin and his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to exterminate the PLO leadership in Beirut at the disproportionate cost of inflicting horrendous civilian casualties, and to physically oust Syrian troops from Lebanon at the substantial risk of precipitating a general war between Israel and Syria proved to be an enterprise too brutal, inhumane and dangerous for most Reagan administration stalwarts to endorse. The White House effectively forced Haig to resign less than three weeks after the start of the Lebanon invasion, and George Shultz took his place on July 16. Shultz should have seized the opportunity presented by a transition in power to completely repudiate the misconceived policies of his Machiavellian predecessor. But under the direct tutelage of Henry Kissinger and his protégés, the ignorant and impressionable Shultz wholeheartedly embraced the Kissinger/Haig "strategic consensus" approach to U.S. Middle East foreign policy decision making. The Reagan administration would quite imprudently continue to rely upon the Israeli army for the imposition of America's will upon Lebanon despite the Begin government's manifest propensity for recalcitrance, atrocities and generally lawless behavior.
Thus Shultz readily approved the Begin-Sharon plot to install a minority Phalangist regime in power at Beirut for the twin purposes of establishing pro-Israeli central control over the warring factions in Lebanon, as well as negotiating an overall peace settlement decisively favorable to Israel. The Phalangist regime of Amin Gemayel was created by and as a surrogate for the Israeli and American governments that never represented anything more than a minority faction among several groups fighting for control over Lebanon. Given the circumstances surrounding the self-styled election of the Gemayel regime amidst a cordon of Israeli troops, it would most accurately be characterized under international law as a "puppet government." Indeed, the Gemayel regime never exerted effective control over any region of Lebanon except for a few limited sectors in the city of Beirut. Essentially, therefore, Amin Gemayel was never even the "Mayor of Beirut," let alone the President of all Lebanon and all Lebanese.
Consequently, the Gemayel regime possessed absolutely no authority under international law to request U.S. military intervention for the purpose of defeating its internal adversaries. The Reagan administration's accession to its puppet government's request constituted an impermissible act of intervention into Lebanon's civil war that violated the international legal right of the Lebanese people to self-determination as recognized by article 1(2) of the U.N. Charter. The basic principle of international law and politics dictating nonintervention in the domestic affairs of another state indicated quite clearly that the Reagan administration should have refrained from taking sides in favor of the Phalangists.
If the Reagan administration had really wanted to restore peace and stability to Lebanon, it should have worked in conjunction with the U.N. Security Council and its already present U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to create political, military, and economic conditions that could have eventually permitted the establishment of a truly independent and representative government acceptable to all of Lebanon's diverse ethnic and religious groups. Instead, the Reagan administration unquestioningly accepted at face value the Begin government's spurious charge that UNIFIL could not be trusted because the United Nations Organization as a whole was supposedly biased against Israel. This self-serving canard obfuscated the legal and political fact that UNIFIL operated under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council, not the General Assembly, where the United States could have exercised a veto power if necessary to protect Israel's legitimate security needs as defined by international law. The record of evidence clearly established that UNIFIL had proven to be quite effective at preventing the large-scale infiltration of PLO fighters across the Israeli-Lebanese border from the moment of its installation after the Begin government's first invasion of Lebanon in 1978.14 A renewed and strengthened mandate for UNIFIL would have enabled it to continue to perform that task until the Lebanese army was reconstituted as an effective military force under the control of a truly independent and representative central government.
U.S. Military Intervention in Lebanon
By contrast, the Reagan administration pursued the exact opposite course of conduct, which produced predictably disastrous consequences for the Lebanese people as well as for U.S. marines and diplomats stationed in Lebanon. Since UNIFIL was subject to the jurisdiction of the U.N. Security Council, the Reagan administration could not have manipulated UNIFIL to buttress the minority Phalangist regime against its internal rivals. Hence the United States and Israel launched a conscientious and coordinated effort to eviscerate and eventually supplant UNIFIL in order to expand the power of their puppet Gemayel government. To accomplish that illicit objective, the Reagan administration first proceeded unilaterally to introduce a U.S. marine corps expeditionary force into Beirut.15
When the lawless transparency and pernicious consequences of this maneuver became obvious to the U.S. Congress and the American people, the Reagan administration then induced its NATO allies to contribute troops toward the formation of a self-styled "multinational force" in order to provide a thin veneer of multilateral legitimacy. But the "multinational force" had absolutely no authorization from either the United Nations, the League of Arab States, or any other source recognized as valid by the contemporary international legal order to perform its so-called peacekeeping activities in Lebanon that were really designed to bolster Gemayel against his political adversaries. Even more ominously, the presence of the "multinational force" that consisted of troops drawn from NATO countries in the environs of Beirut raised the specter of rapid escalation into a general European war in the then likely event of a Sharon-inspired clash by the Israeli army with Soviet troops stationed in Syria and operating in the Bekaa Valley.
The U.S. War Powers Act of 197316 mandated that President Reagan remove the American marine contingent he introduced into Lebanon on September 29, 1982 within sixty days, unless Congress specifically authorized their continued use. Yet the marines remained and needlessly endured enormous casualties until February of 1984. The U.S. Congress should have adamantly insisted that the President respect its constitutional and statutory prerogatives in this matter by demanding that all American military forces be immediately withdrawn from Beirut and their positions occupied by UNIFIL troops. UNIFIL would have proven far more effective at keeping the peace among the various factions in Lebanon and at protecting the lives of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians from additional gross violations of their fundamental human rights perpetrated by the Phalangists, the Haddad militia forces, and other irregular paramilitary groups organized by the IDF than American marines and some "multinational force" ever could have.
The Shultz "Peace Treaty" for Lebanon
For equally Machiavellian reasons, the Reagan administration willingly acquiesced in the Begin government's dissembling claim that the arguably lawful presence of the Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) in eastern and northern Lebanon somehow justified the egregiously illegal occupation of southern Lebanon by the Israeli army. The ADF, composed primarily of Syrian troops, had been stationed in Lebanon and conducted its peacekeeping operations with the consent of the Lebanese government and with the approval of the League of Arab States. The League was the appropriate regional organization under Chapter 8 of the U.N. Charter for the purpose of sanctioning such international peacekeeping activities in a member state such as Lebanon.
Indeed, with the explicit encouragement of the U.S. government during the Ford/Kissinger administration, Syrian troops had originally intervened into the Lebanese civil war in 197617 to protect the Maronite Christian forces from defeat by the PLO, though without obtaining prior approval from the Lebanese government. In this matter Syria simply followed the international legal precedent already set by the U.S. government in order to legitimize, on an ex post facto basis, its illegal military intervention into and occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965. Thereafter, the Johnson administration resorted to the Organization of American States for its approval to transform American soldiers into an Inter-American Peacekeeping Force.18 Thus, by virtue of its behavior in both 1965 and 1976, the U.S. government was effectively estopped from denying in 1982 that the League of Arab States could lawfully authorize the occupation of Lebanon by Syrian troops integrated into the Arab Deterrent Force, provided (1) the ADF had the consent of the Lebanese government, (2) it was subject to the overall supervisory jurisdiction of the League, and (3) it operated for the limited purpose of ameliorating the civil war that then mercilessly raged throughout the country.
Nevertheless, the Reagan administration's acceptance of Begin's unjustifiable "linkage" between IDF and ADF withdrawals from Lebanon became the guiding principle for the one-sided negotiations imposed upon Gemayel by Israel that were brokered by U.S. diplomats. These desultory talks eventually resulted in the conclusion of what the Begin government touted as a "peace treaty" that essentially would have established a nineteenth-century-style colonial protectorate over southern Lebanon by Israel. Because it was procured by means of the blatant threat and use of force in egregious violation of the most basic principles of international law, this May 17, 1983 Agreement on Troop Withdrawal19 concluded between the regime of Amin Gemayel and the Begin government under the personal auspices of George Shultz was void ab initio under article 52 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.20 The agreement was entitled to absolutely no international legal significance whatsoever. The Reagan administration's mere attribution of any semblance of legal validity to this document simply constituted a reward to the Begin government for the aggression it had perpetrated against Lebanon.
The foreign and domestic policies of Lebanon should have been determined by the Lebanese people themselves without interference or compulsion from any external source. The most effective means to have ensured the success of this endeavor would have been for the Reagan administration to demand that Israel immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon and turn over evacuated territory to UNIFIL without any prior conditions. An expanded and strengthened mandate for UNIFIL could then have been obtained from the U.N. Security Council that eventually would have permitted the withdrawal of the Arab Deterrent Force by the League of Arab States at the request of a truly independent and representative Lebanese government, and the deployment of UNIFIL troops along the Lebanese-Syrian border in the ADF's positions. UNIFIL could have remained in Lebanon for as long as a truly independent and representative government felt it was needed to ensure the restoration of internal peace and stability to that country and in its foreign relations with immediate neighbors.
By the fall of 1984, the new Israeli coalition government organized under the joint leadership of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir intimated that Israel might finally be prepared to consider an expanded role for UNIFIL as a major element of some troop withdrawal arrangement.21 The height of tragic irony here was that the Begin government, acting in cooperation with the Reagan administration, could have easily obtained an invigorated mandate for UNIFIL from the U.N. Security Council in the spring of 1982. But for their own deranged reasons, Begin and Sharon, aided and abetted by Haig and Reagan, preferred an IDF invasion to a UNIFIL expansion. As a direct result, over twenty thousand people were wantonly killed in Lebanon, including almost six hundred fifty Israeli soldiers and three hundred American soldiers and diplomats, all of whom needlessly lost their lives.22 The Israeli invasion of Lebanon shall stand as one of the great international crimes of the post World War II era. Yet so far domestic public opinion in Israel and the United States have not held their respective popularly elected leaders accountable for the commission of numerous crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and acts of genocide in Lebanon. Have both the Israeli and the American peoples so readily forgotten the Nuremberg Principles?
The Reagan Administration's Middle East "Peace Plan"
Because of the presence of almost 350,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a long-term solution to the problems of that country can only be achieved when Israel is willing to recognize the international legal right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Despite the Camp David Accords,23 neither Egypt, Israel, the United States, nor Jordan has any right under international law to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian people. Yet that is precisely what the Reagan administration proposed to do when it announced its stillborn Middle East "peace plan" on September 1, 1982. Not surprisingly, as reported by Morton Kondracke in The New Republic of October 4, 1982,24 the progenitor of the so-called Reagan Peace Plan was none other than Henry Kissinger, who stole the idea from an October 1976 article in Foreign Affairs by former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon.25
From the perspective of international law, the Reagan/Allon Plan was severely deficient for a number of basic reasons. First, and foremost was the fact that Reagan administration had absolutely no right or standing under international law to exclude unilaterally and in advance of any negotiations the creation of an independent sovereign state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip from among the various options open to the Palestinian people when they finally have the opportunity to exercise their international legal right of self-determination. When the Reagan administration unilaterally foreclosed the option of an independent sovereign state to the Palestinian people, it betrayed the fact that the keystone of its foreign policy toward the Middle East still remained considerations of Machiavellian power politics. By universal acclamation, such despicable motivations are not entitled to the respect of other nations or the support of the American people.
With the inglorious defeat and withdrawal of the U.S. sponsored multilateral interventionary force in Lebanon during February of 1984, the Reagan administration purposefully decided to disengage from any further direct involvement in attempting to resolve the numerous problems of that country, or even in trying to carry out the terms of the congenitally defective Reagan Peace Plan against vigorous Israeli opposition. Instead, the Reagan administration chose to wash its hands of any further responsibility for the plight of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples and left them to the tender mercies of the Israeli army. But the survivors of the carnage in Lebanon could not forget the U.S. government's direct responsibility for their suffering, and in a fit of pathetic rage would lash out against the interests of the United States throughout the Middle East and Europe. The resurgence of international terrorist attacks against the United States was the direct result of the Reagan administration's callous and inhumane foreign policies toward the Arab states and peoples of the Middle East. Hence, the subsequent course of the Reagan administration's foreign policy toward the Middle East would necessarily be consumed by its self-proclaimed yet self-inflicted holy war against international terrorism and international law.
Israel's "Iron Fist"
I spent the last two weeks of May 1986 traveling up and down the West Bank and Gaza Strip and meeting with various representatives of the Palestinian people. Almost all of them expressed the opinion that they considered Yasir Arafat and the PLO to be their sole and legitimate representative. Many also stated that they would be prepared to live in peace with Israel if only they would be given a state of their own. No Palestinian I talked with wanted to be returned to the not-so-tender mercies of the Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan.
No point would be served here by listing the numerous material breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 194926 and the 1907 Hague Regulations27 that are practiced by Israeli occupation authorities on a daily basis in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem: torture, murder, unlawful detention, deportations, collective punishments, confiscation of private property, construction of illegal settlements, etc. When I complained about these reprehensible practices to the appropriate high-level legal officials at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I was told that they were all required by and could be justified under the doctrine of "military necessity."28 Rather than engaging in an extended debate over this point, I simply responded to all these lawyers that this was precisely the argument used by the Nazi war criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 to justify their own incredible outrages upon humanity, including the Jewish people. The international community did not accept these arguments in 1945, and I opined that they would not accept them as of 1986.
Even more distressingly, upon a visit to the office of the Legal Adviser to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the prospects for peace, I was immediately informed that Israel had a "claim" under international law to the West Bank: it might not constitute the basis for perfect title, but it was nevertheless a "claim." At the time I recalled the fact that of course Hitler had a "claim" to the Sudetenland as well. Although the Munich Pact of 1938 permitted German occupation and annexation of the Sudetenland into the Reich, this act of cowardice by Great Britain and France ultimately paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War one year later, with all the tragic consequences that conflagration entailed for the Jewish people, among others.
Today, the United States and Israel are striving to consummate a Middle East version of the Munich Pact that will sell out the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Only history will tell if the consequences shall be as tragic for the fate of the Arab and Jewish peoples in the Middle East, if not the rest of the world. I fear that there is a high probability that history will repeat itself.
What most concerned me, however, was the total absence of any concern on the part of high-level Israeli government officials to negotiate a deal with the Palestinian people on the basic principle of trading land for peace. Clearly, in the former's estimation, the land is far more important than the peace, especially when the United States government is willing to bankroll the Israeli economy, army, and occupation policies. Meanwhile, the Israeli government continues to consolidate its de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and has already formally but illegally annexed the Golan Heights and all of Jerusalem.29 The massive uprising by the Palestinian people in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and Israel-proper starting in December of 1987 was a natural reaction to what they perceive to be the tragic plight of hopelessness, oppression, desperation and injustice that has been inflicted upon them since at least 1947.
During my 1986 trip to Palestine, I was particularly struck by a conversation I had with a young Palestinian college student at An Najah University. To paraphrase his statement: "We Palestinians are a peaceful people and would be willing to live in peace with the Israelis if only they would leave us alone. But after twenty years of a very brutal military occupation, no one has done anything to help us. If we are going to make any progress, then we will have to become like the Irish and turn our country into Belfast. The IRA have gotten somewhere. So have the comrades in South Africa. We must follow their example!" That is precisely how Palestinian youths in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, Israel-proper, and the diaspora feel today. The entire world has now witnessed the awesome manifestation of their justifiable rage. If U.S. and Israeli leaders had any foresight and compassion, or even basic commonsense, they would strike a deal with Arafat and the PLO for a two-state solution before it becomes too late.
If history is any judge, however, it is highly unlikely that the leadership elites of either Israel, or more importantly, of the United States will demonstrate the requisite degree of sagacity on their own accord. For example, toward the end of my 1986 trip to Palestine, I visited the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to complain about some of the Israeli occupation practices. An assistant U.S. political attaché informed me that such matters concerned "internal affairs" of the Israeli government. I stridently objected: Under basic rules of international law, the Israeli government is what is known as a "belligerent occupant" of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Jerusalem. Pursuant to article 4 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, all non-Israelis living in these occupied territories are what are called "protected persons."30 Article 147 thereof provides that any of the following acts committed against "protected persons" are "grave breaches" of the Convention: "wilful killing, torture or inhumane treatment . . . wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health. . . ."31 Furthermore, article 146 mandates all state parties to impose "effective penal sanctions for persons committing, or ordering to be committed, any of the grave breaches of the present Convention. . . ."32 Thus, any Israeli political leaders or military officers who have ordered or committed such "grave breaches" are "war criminals" within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles. These Israeli war criminals can and must be tried by any state in the world community that obtains jurisdiction over them.
Finally, under common article 1 to the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, all state parties are obliged not only to respect, but also "to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances."33 When a party to the Conventions such as Israel is committing "grave breaches," such practices are not "an internal affair" but rather international crimes and therefore a matter of international concern. The United States government, inter alia, has an absolute obligation to use its enormous political, military and economic leverage over Israel to terminate such criminal practices. Yet for the past forty years the United States government has had no response to make to the desperate pleas by the Palestinian people for freedom, justice, dignity, respect and independence--in other words, for self-determination. After twenty years of an incredibly inhumane military occupation, the only really effective manner for all states party to the Geneva Conventions to ensure respect for the terms of the Fourth Convention in these occupied territories would be to compel Israeli military forces to withdraw by all means possible, both individually and collectively.
The Solution
In defensive reaction to American Jewish critics of his country's latest rendition of the "iron fist" policy against the Palestinian uprising on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli President Chaim Herzog invited the former to propose a constructive alternative. There has been one solution readily at hand for the past forty years. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II), which called for the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an international trusteeship for the city of Jerusalem after the termination of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.34 The international legal right of the Jewish people to found the sovereign state of Israel stands on no better legal footing than the international legal right of the Palestinian people to found an independent state of their own.
The self-determination of peoples has been a fundamental principle of American foreign policy and of international law and politics since President Woodrow Wilson's famous Fourteen Points Address of January 8, 1918.35 That speech set forth the war aims and peace terms pursued by the U.S. government throughout the First World War, the last one of which called for the creation of the League of Nations that ultimately granted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in 1922.36 The fundamental interdependence of universal peace among nations and the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples was explicitly reaffirmed in article 1(2) of the Charter of the United Nations, which became the successor to the League.37
As fully documented in the Kahan Commission Report (1983) and Israeli's Lebanon War (1984) by the Israeli journalists Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, the Begin/Sharon government's pursuit of a policy tantamount to genocide against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon demonstrated precisely why they require an independent state of their own in order to better protect their physical existence and to preserve their cultural heritage. In the aftermath of the Second World War, identical sentiments motivated the international community to support the creation of the state of Israel for the protection of the Jewish people against a repetition of the Nazi holocaust. Despite dramatic improvements in the utility of international human rights law in direct reaction to the genocidal horrors of World War II, as Woodrow Wilson correctly foresaw, an independent state still remains the only effective means that the international community has so far devised to defend one national group from physical and cultural annihilation by another national group.
There will be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian people are likewise given the opportunity to exercise their international legal right of self-determination in whatever manner they choose, not in accordance with a limited set of alternatives pre-selected for them by the United States in collusion with Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Both the U.N. General Assembly and the League of Arab States have determined that the PLO is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.38 That determination must be respected by the United States, Israel and Egypt for the purpose of negotiating an overall settlement on the ultimate disposition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Revise Resolution 242
Mutual and simultaneous recognition of their respective rights under international law by Israel and the PLO must become the next stage in the development of the Middle East peace process. In this regard, there is one constructive step a successor government to the Reagan administration can undertake to break the current logjam and open the way for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The U.S. government should sponsor an amendment to U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (1967)39 along the following lines:
First, this amendment would affirm explicitly the international legal right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including an independent state of their own. This could be accomplished in part by having a revised Resolution 242 approve and adopt Resolution 181(II), thus confirming a two-state solution to the current problems of the former Palestine Mandate. The PLO has already publicly stated its willingness to accept Resolution 242 in conjunction with Resolution 181(II), inter alia. Israel has already officially agreed to abide by both resolutions.
Second, with respect to the need for ensuring Israel's existence, a revised Resolution 242 would continue to affirm the necessity for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."
Finally, Resolution 242 should be amended specifically to protect the state of Israel by name, which it does not now do, as well as the state of Palestine by name, which it does not now do.
Such a revised Resolution 242 should then be proposed for acceptance to Israel and the PLO. Their mutual and simultaneous acceptance of a revised Resolution 242 could then serve as the basis for opening formal negotiations over the ultimate disposition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip among the parties directly concerned (i.e., Israel, the PLO, and Jordan). A separate set of negotiations directly between Israel and Syria could deal with the permanent demilitarization of the Golan Heights and their return to Syria. Both sets of direct negotiations could occur within the overall framework of an international peace conference held under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, which ultimately will have to approve and guarantee whatever peace settlements are finally reached between the parties directly concerned in their separate sets of negotiations.
Any troop withdrawals, territorial rearrangements and demilitarization regimes will have to be supervised by a permanent U.N. Middle East Peace Supervision Force organized under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter and reporting directly to the Security Council. This Force could not be removed without the Security Council's explicit approval, including that of all five permanent members, each of which would retain indefinitely a veto power over the removal of the Force. In that manner, the U.S. government alone could prevent the hasty departure of the Force in the face of threatened hostilities. This would solve the problem that occurred in 1967 when U.N. Secretary General U Thant withdrew the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Sinai. The U.N. General Assembly had organized UNEF in 1956 as a peacekeeping force under Chapter 6 of the U.N. Charter. But because of the unique circumstances surrounding the creation of UNEF, the Secretary General did not believe that he had the legal authority to insist that UNEF remain in the Sinai against the express wishes of the Egyptian government. By contrast, the members of the Security Council can legally, politically, and if necessary, militarily impose their will upon aggressive states by virtue of Charter article 25 and their enforcement powers under Chapter 7.40
Finally, the United States government should be prepared to provide bilateral guarantees of an overall peace settlement to Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria if so requested. The Carter administration essentially did this in order to procure the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty that was based upon the 1978 Camp David Accords. If Israel so desires, the United States government should also be prepared to enter into a mutual defense treaty with Israel modelled along the lines of article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty to the effect that "an armed attack against" Israel "shall be considered an attack against" the United States.41 A U.S. guarantee has kept the completely surrounded and once beleaguered city of Berlin free and open for the past forty years. It should be able to do the same for Israel.