‘The Israeli invasion has struck blindly … The destruction of villages and towns, the massacres of civilians, have been confirmed … The State of Israel is applying in southern Lebanon the method that proved effective in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is turning southern Lebanon into another Palestine … Israel’s actions are regarded as legitimate reprisals, even when they seem disproportionate, whereas those of the Palestinians are treated exclusively as terrorist crimes. And an Arab death does not carry the same weight or value as an Israeli one … Israel can count on almost unanimous complicity.’

These words did not appear in the wake of Black Wednesday, 8 April this year, when Israeli aircraft killed more than 350 Lebanese civilians in minutes and injured nearly 1,500. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote them in Le Monde on 7 April 1978. condemning Operation Litani, which Israel launched a year before the Iranian revolution and four years before the full-scale invasion of 1982, which left more than 18,000 dead, forced around a million Lebanese into exile and contributed to the emergence of Hizbullah.

Nearly five decades later, the Israeli army is again conducting a major operation in Lebanon. And again, as in Gaza, Tel Aviv seems unable to convert its military offensives into a lasting political settlement. ‘Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics,’ former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger famously said, and it’s true that the advance of messianically inspired ideologies – some of them advocating a ‘Greater Israel’ that would include, among other territories, southern Lebanon – is transforming its domestic political life as much as it’s influencing its foreign policy – perhaps even to the point of reviving its old periphery doctrine.

Alliances with non-Arab powers

This doctrine was developed in the 1950s and 60s under David Ben Gurion’s leadership. Its aim was to break Israel’s regional (…)

Full article: 1 652 words.