The history of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon are a series of lessons in futility and the arrogance of power. If only anyone were paying attention.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history is repression works only to strengthen and knit the oppressed.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is appealing for fuel to run its generators amid a siege and evacuation order by the Israeli military that threatens the lives of its patients, including more than a dozen children in the Intensive Care Unit. At the southern end of the Strip, the Mohammed Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital was forced to cease operating by Israeli military pressure—depriving Gaza of its only kidney dialysis unit. Elimination of hospitals has become a normal aspect of what the United Nations calls Israel’s “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.” It is worth reflecting not only on the two hospitals’ fates but also on their names: Kamal Adwan and Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar. They tie Gaza to Lebanon, where I was living on the night both of them were murdered.
Adwan and Najjar, senior officials in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), were asleep in their beds in Beirut’s relatively affluent Verdun area on April 9, 1973, when Israeli death squads shot them both. The joint Mossad-Israeli army “Operation Spring of Youth” also killed Najjar’s wife and PLO spokesman Kamal Nasser. A unit of the same hit-team blew up a building in another Beirut neighborhood to kill 35 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“It was one of the biggest targeted killing operations of the twentieth century, if not the biggest,” wrote Ronen Bergman in his definitive account of Zionist assassinations from 1907 to 2018, Rise and Kill First. The murders enhanced Israel’s reputation for effective elimination of enemies—but also helped to spark Lebanon’s civil war and, as a result, Israel’s invasions of 1978, 1982, 2006, and, here we go again, 2024. Half a million people, mainly Palestinians and Lebanese Sunni Muslims, showed up for the funerals of Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser. Furious pro-Palestinians blew up the Lena Car agency that unknowingly rented the cars to Mossad’s agents, while the ABC News bureau chief, Peter Jennings, was asleep in his apartment upstairs. The Lebanese government, shown incapable of defending the country, resigned. A month later, the Lebanese Army attacked the Palestinian refugee camps in a futile effort to disarm the commandos whose suicidal cross-border missions provoked Israel’s assaults on Lebanon…
Read the full article in The Nation.
Main image: IDF ground maneuver to Lebanon, September-October 2024, IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
