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An Insider's Account, April 25, 2006
This review is from: Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (Hardcover)
When examining the 1982 war in Lebanon, there are many different aspects that one can study. Books have been written explaining Israeli motives for the invasion, analyzing the international reaction, studying American intervention, and debating the war's impact on Lebanese society. In writing Under Siege, Rashid Khalidi attempts to fill a gap in the scholarship by focusing on the P.L.O. Khalidi's personal experience and sympathies are a part of his narrative - he lived in Beirut during the summer of 1982 as a witness to the siege. In describing the situation of the P.L.O., Khalidi utilizes and contributes to a narrative that juxtaposes victim and aggressor, and his sympathies clearly lie first with the Palestinian people and second with their sometimes misled liberation organization. In his preface, he dedicates his book to those who gave their lives in "defense of the cause of Palestine and the independence of Lebanon."
The Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut were a high-water mark of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was a military, political, and diplomatic showdown between Israel and the P.L.O. In the introduction to his work, published in 1986, Rashid Khalidi states that "few Lebanese or Palestinians have had the chance to record their view of events in 1982." These views, and Khalidi's, reject the narrative that Israel invaded, surrounded, and forced the P.L.O. to flee Lebanon in something approximating a Palestinian surrender. "It is wrong to assume that... Israel's defeat of their forces... [meant] that the P.L.O. was summarily forced to leave, with the only question ever at issue being when and how." A large part of his work is devoted to showing the P.L.O. as an actor in the events, rather than a group that was acted upon.
Khalidi begins his work with an overview of the P.L.O.'s experience in Lebanon in an attempt to show the change in Lebanese opinion towards the guerrillas and their leadership. Initially, the P.L.O. participated in the Lebanese civil war, fighting alongside the Lebanese National Front (L.N.F.). The L.N.F. consisted of various leftist militias composed of Sunni Muslim lower classes, factions of the Shia Amal militia and led by the charismatic Druse chief Walid Jumblatt. The P.L.O. and the L.N.F. created a command called the Joint Forces (J.F.) against the rightist Lebanese Forces (L.F.) Khalidi suggests that the P.L.O.'s growing strength and its sense of entitlement ultimately led to the isolation of the Palestinian leadership in Lebanon. The guerrillas, who had previously fought alongside the L.N.F. against the rightist militias and the Syrian army, found themselves without allies on the eve of the invasion. This isolation at the beginning of the war was only exacerbated by the punishment the Lebanese suffered under the Israeli assault. Lebanese opposition under siege meant that the P.L.O. could draw on no domestic support against the Israeli position.
In describing the terrific difficulties of confronting the ultra-modern Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.), Khalidi takes numerous occasions to remark on the surprising performance of the P.L.O. fighters who "fought longer than had all the Arab armies put together in all their wars with Israel, doing better than anyone could have expected." In his chapter titled `Military Inputs", the author lists numerous Israeli failures to advance on certain fronts, and P.L.O.'s ability to delay the invasion and exploit weaknesses in the Israeli attack. Khalidi also describes numerous Israeli attempts to force a capitulation of the leadership through military and unconventional means, including car bombs to terrorize the population, psychological warfare such as public radio announcements of the P.L.O.'s retreat, and using precision-guided munitions to assassinate and destroy the Palestinian leadership. By the time the I.D.F. arrived at the gates of Beirut, behind schedule and uncertain how to prosecute the siege that lay ahead, Khalidi comments, "Israel was fighting a war of attrition which it was far from wining... nothing said publicly by the P.L.O.... indicated that Israel's military pressure had achieved anything." In describing how the Palestinian guerrillas fought so admirably against the soldiers of Israel, Khalidi states that the greatest tool the Israelis had at their disposal was air power: this meant that Israel could "destroy and starve Beirut if they wanted to," without any Palestinian interference, but the "hours of non-stop bombing were proof that it had not yet succeeded in its aims."
The research done by Rashid Khalidi fulfills a large part of his mission to exonerate the P.L.O. from failure. By relying on primary sources from within the P.L.O. and Beirut, he accomplishes two tasks: first, he portrays the Organizations internal discourse on the issues facing it, and second he legitimizes the P.L.O. by offering a broadly uncritical view of their documentation. Using unpublished Palestinian material and asserting its credibility on par with (and sometimes exceeding Israeli documentation in credibility) other sources, Khalidi places his own sympathies within the narrative provided by the P.L.O. documentation. His selective use of secondary sources, especially Israeli sources and others from the Israeli-American side, suggests that he may be more concerned with the credibility of the side, rather than the source.
This book's success is its portrayal of the P.L.O. both as the Organization saw itself, and as it wished to be seen by the international community. Khalidi wrote this book in the aftermath of the 1982 war, at a time when Israel seemed ascendant and the Palestinians defeated; their movement in exile, their people massacred in camps. Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War reads like an exoneration, and this seems almost intentionally `unintentional': that when documenting an exiled, besieged, outnumbered and isolated revolutionary movement, one can't help but come to their defense. Ultimately, Khalidi's narrative insists that history will be an apologia for the Palestinian movement, rather than an epilogue.
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