translated from the Spanish by Noah Mazer
Rodolfo Walsh was already a legend when he went to Lebanon in 1974: he had invented the nonfiction novel with Operation Massacre (1957) and founded Prensa Latina in Cuba alongside Gabriel García Márquez, becoming a living example of the Latin America committed intellectual. In 1973, he joined the revolutionary Peronist organization Montoneros, one of the two main guerrilla organizations that fought Argentina’s 1976-1983 military-civilian dictatorship.
In May ’74, he was working as an editor for the Montoneros daily Noticias, the role in which he ostensibly went to Beirut to write on the Palestinian question. In fact, Walsh was sent to Lebanon to make contact with Fatah in his capacity as a Montoneros intelligence officer—the texts that came out of the trip were incidental. Returning to Buenos Aires, he published “The Palestinian Revolution,” a series of articles in Noticias that introduced readers to Zionist colonialism and the state of Palestinian struggle in installments during the week of June 12.
This article was actually published in Asuntos árabes, a separate magazine, shortly after the Noticias pieces came out. It discusses the DFLP’s May 15 attack on Ma’alot and the Israeli “reprisal,” which came in the form of bombing seven villages and refugee camps in southern Lebanon.
TERROR IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Once again, Phantom jets have rained down rockets onto the villages of Lebanon, a small country with no army or air force whose only sin is having sheltered 300,000 Palestinians–one tenth of the total expelled from their homeland by the Israelis.
Again, the refugee camps are called “guerrilla bases.” I visited Nabatieh, one of those camps, the day after it was almost completely destroyed by Israeli planes on May 16 of this year. I saw the little houses flattened as if by bulldozers, kitchen utensils scattered women’s clothing hanging from the charred trees.
This was no base.
That does not mean that in Lebanon, in Syria, in any Arab country, there are no fedayeen bases. They exist. But they are not visible, nor do they house civilian populations in the thousands, nor are they undefended, nor are they bombed. For 25 years, Israel has been anticipating attacks in a perpetual state of “retaliation.” A propaganda which begins to grow clumsy describes every action by Israeli forces as coming in response to an act of terrorism.
At every opportunity the story of that terrorism is revived, invoking Ma’alot, Kiryat Shmona, Lod, Munich. A continuity is established between these events and the Nazi concentration camps; we go back to tsarist pogroms, to the eternal persecution of the Jews. Any glimpse of truth is lost in this process: the Palestinians, stripped of their land, are made into the aggressor. The victim is transformed into the persecutor.
People debate methods. Why do the Palestinians attack schools? I saw the school in Nabatieh razed to the ground. Why would the Palestinians throw grenades in a marketplace? After Israel’s 250-kilo bombs fell last week in Ain al-Hilweh, not even the market was left standing.
Arguing over methods is one way of evading discussion about the heart of the matter, of replacing the why with the how.
But even that secondary discussion should not be shied away from.
WHOSE TERROR?
Take Ma’alot, for example. Things did not start in Ma’alot on May 15, 1974, with the killing of 22 Israeli students. They started on May 15, 1948, with the state of Israel. Because Ma’alot’s name was not Ma’alot but Tarshiha and it was not a Jewish town but an Ara village. Where is Tarshiha today? Gone; wiped off the map.
Let’s go back to Deir Yassin, another Arab village that now lies under Kfar Shaul, a suburb of Jerusalem. April 9, 1948: Haganah and Irgun forces attack the village, kill 254 inhabitants, dismember the bodies, and throw them in a pit. Let’s listen to the testimony of Israeli coronel Meir Pa’il, who took 24 years to come forward: “The soldiers combed the house, throwing explosives into it and using every weapon they had. They fired indiscriminately at everything inside, including women and children. Their officers did not lift a finger to stop the atrocities being committed. Alongside other residents of Jerusalem, I implored that the soldiers be ordered to hold their fire. It was in vain. 25 men were put on a truck, driven
through Jerusalem in a ‘victory parade,’ taken to a quarry, and shot in cold blood.”
Let’s go back to January 30, 1948. The village’s name was Shaykh.1 The method was the same. 60 were left dead.
Sa’sa’. February 14, 1948. 20 houses blown up with their occupants still inside. 60 dead.
Remember Lydda. January 11, 1948: the Haganah represses a popular uprising. 250 dead, according to an Israeli source; Arab sources say between 500 and 1700.
October 14, 1953. Jordanian villages are bombed. 75 dead. In Qibya, machine gun fire trapped villagers in their houses, which were then blown up.
Gaza Strip, February 8, 1955. 38 dead.
August 31, 1955. Attack on Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. 46 dead.
December 11, 1955. Attack on Syrian villages. 50 dead.
Khan Younis again, April 1956. 275 dead.
October 10, 1956. Attack on Jordanian villages. 48 dead.
October 1956, Kafr Qasim. 51 villagers murdered for violating a curfew they had not been informed of.
November 13, 1966. Attack on villages in Gaza and Jordan. 200 dead.
November 1967. Karameh, Jordan. Children leaving school are attacked with mortars.
The list is endless. Between 1949 and 1964, the Arab countries denounced 63,000 acts of aggression. Between 1950 and 1966, the United Nations and the Armistice Commission condemned the state of Israel 78 times. Later nobody bothered keeping the count. “Retaliation” became the norm.
RETURN TO THE SOURCE
If, on the scoreboard of terror in the Middle East, Israel leads all its adversaries; if the state of Israel itself was the work of terrorist organizations; if those organizations invented or updated the majority of the modern period’s methods of terror (remember the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the bombing of the King David Hotel, the execution of the English hostages, the letter bombs), the discussion about methods does not end here.
Terror is a method of struggle that every revolution has used, as has every reaction. Despite the attitude that prefers to condemn terror “in and of itself” (as if it existed in and of itself), its humanity or inhumanity depends on its methods. Our May Revolution was terroristic. So was General Aramburu.2 With these details in mind, it becomes possible to reframe the question of terror in the Middle East, overcome the barriers of a propaganda that(coincidentally) is the propaganda of western imperialism, and decide who has the share of reason that the circumstances allow.
The objective of Palestinian terrorism is to recover the homeland the Palestinians were stripped of. Even in the most questionable of their operations, that legitimacy remains. Israeli terrorism sought to dominate a people, to condemn them to poverty and exile. Even in the most reasonable of its “retaliations” emerges this original sin.
1Walsh appears to refer to the massacre at Balad al-Shaykh, which took place on January 1, 1948.
2The May Revolution of 1810 began the independence process of what would eventually become Argentina. General Eugenio Aramburu was one of the military plotters who overthrew President Juan Perón in 1955, ruling as dictator until 1958. Aramburu himself was kidnapped and executed in 1970 by Montoneros, the revolutionary Peronist organization that Walsh joined in 1973 and on whose behalf he traveled to Beirut in 1974.
* Title photo is of DFLP fighters in Lebanon c.1980
Noah Mazer is a poet and translator. His most recent full-length translation, Valeria Román Marroquin's ana c. buena, is out now with Cardboard House Press.