The propaganda of the deed
Patrick Desmond
Mr Begin is a terrorist. This is not to accuse him of being an uncouth and insensitive thug: in private Mr Begin is
courteous, softly-spoken, curiously deferential and, for a politician, unusually interested in the discussion of general ideas. Whatever his powers of platform rhetoric, and they are considerable, his personal style is discursive, conversational, almost in- tellectual.
But he is a terrorist nonetheless, in the classic European sense of one who believes in 'the propaganda of the deed'. He believes, of course, in other things too: in the rebirth and destiny of Israel, and its right to occupy the land God gave, the boundaries of which are certainly more widely drawn than those achieved by vic- tory in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-8. But, though interested in ends, what distinguishes Mr Begin from the broad mass of Zionists is his particular choice of means. Mainstream Zionism is a mass movement, based politically on moderate socialism, militarily on a national militia. Beginite Zionism is elitist and extremist. By origin Mr Begin is a Revisionist, which means that he followed Jabotinsky in seeking a larger territory for the rebirth of Eretz Israel than British Mandate Palestine offered. But, while Jabotinsky was not dogmatic about how his Eretz Israel was to be achieved, Begin from the start — he arrived in Palestine from Russia in 1942 as a private in General Anders's Polish army-in-exile was committed to the policy of exemplary violence. His manifest dedication to that policy almost immediately brought him the leadership of Irgun Zvei Leumi, the secret society which had split from the Haganah militia precisely on the terrorism issue, and led him by its logic to commit, in July 1947, the most notorious of the terrorist acts against the Mandate.
That was the murder, by slow hanging, of two British sergeants who had been kid- napped. and held against the eventuality that three arrested Irgun terrorists would be judicially executed, as they eventually were. There had been other and bloodier acts, like the dynamiting of the Secretariat offices ih the King David Hotel, which killed 91 Britons, Arabs — and Jews. But nothing quite chilled the British imagination like the photographs of the two hooded figures swaying in the eucalyptus grove, where they had been left by Mr Begin's hangmen. The Manchester Guardian headed its leader on the outrage 'Time to Go' and, though some Britons thought a better answer was to break Jewish shop windows and smear swastikas on synagogues — in the last ex- tensive outbreak of anti-semitic display seen in England — the paper seemed better to
have caught the national mood. Ten mon- ths later the British left Palestine for good.
It was not, of course, Irgun which had sent them on their way. Widespread and mounting violence between Jews and Arabs and worldwide misrepresentation of British motives had driven the Labour government to accept the futility and thanklessness of its responsibilities, which it eventually decided simply to abdicate since no one else — certainly not the United Nations, with which they ultimately rested — would take them on. But Irgun was nevertheless entitled to argue, as it certainly believed, that the roots of victory lay in its campaign. Since the days of the Narodniks, it had been the credo of terrorists that a regime which could not guarantee the safety of its agents, nor find the stomach for a more severe and effective repression, was doomed. Ter- rorism might not, indeed did not, work against a pitiless force, like Nazism, or a superior nationalism, like the Turks', as the Czechs and the Armenians had each discovered. But, given even the least con- cession of rationality and decency by the other side, terrorist acts would inevitably pick out the foundations on which its power rested.
Does this sketch of the Irgun mind help us to understand what has been going on in Beirut these last weeks? On the face of it, the Israeli campaign is senseless. It is not directed against the Syrian 'Arab Deterrent Force', since that was beaten in fair fight in the first days of invasion. It is not directed against the Lebanese national army, since that disintegrated in all but name eight years ago. It is not aimed, at least im- mediately, at the setting up of an alternative government in Lebanon, since the official, though shadow, government of Lebanon is by now ready to fall in with any policy which Israel dictates. It is apparently not even meant to break the indigenous Muslim Lebanese militias, hostile though they are to Israel's allies in the Christian com- munities. It is, of course, designed to expel the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its six thousand armed men from West Beirut, where they are spatchcocked in among several hundred thousand unarmed fellow-Muslims. The news this week that Israel has apparently accepted Mr Habib's plan for the withdrawal of the PLO — pro- bably to Syria — does not mean that it will go.
That neither the Israeli army nor Mr Begin — who has an electorate to think of — favours the direct solution ofl a Falklands-style boot-and-bayonet fight for the city is understandable. Street fighting is the costliest of all forms of infantry com- bat, one day of which last week cost 19
Israeli lives for no consolidated territorial gain; a fight to the finish might easily kill as many Israelis as there are PLO men present and thus equal the cost of the war of 1948-9, Israel's bloodiest. The lay mind, perhaps supposes that the current deluge 0' shelling, rocketing and bombing is a tactical alternative. But it is not. However good Israeli intelligence of PLO 'positions' (and it is claimed to be superlative), bombard- ment will not destroy the PLO. Its fighters will merely retreat to the cellars, while the Israeli shells create a plethora of defensive, positions and an artificial geography 01 obstacles to an Israeli assault. The bom- bardment, if it continues, may of course ultimately drive the West Beirutis into East Beirut, particularly if the denial of food and water continues. But that would leave the PLO quite as well placed to wage a street- by-street defence as it is already. Its men would certainly be able to find enough sustenance in abandoned household stocks to sustain themselves for weeks.
This staff appreciation — of which the Israeli generals are certainly more than capable — appears to exhaust the material options. We are left with the psychological effects of the current strategy. The most obvious may be dismissed out of hand: however hard the Israelis turn the screw of suffering, it will not drive the West Beirut's to expel the PLO on their own account. Even had they the necessary arms, which they lack, the PLO showed in Jordan in 1970 ('Black September') that it will fight fellow-Muslims as bitterly as Israelis to de- fend its strongholds. The strategy must therefore have another psychological target. Where is it located? Given that there is no longer any effective military force within Lebanon nor any out- side, legally competent to intervene, which might pressure the PLO into departing, the Israelis must be counting on some other force to conjure it away. It is not Arah.. however hard the PLO is hated — and it is execrated in Jordan and widely feared. elsewhere — no Arab state can, even if It could, move against it. It is not European. morbid fascination in front of the television screen describes Europe's attitude. It is not Soviet: Mr Brezhnev's two deprecatorY, delayed and widely-spaced pronouncements threaten Israel about as menacingly as a resolution of the Bandung Conference. The Third World we can forget. The Or', dances, at least from one foot to the other' That leaves America. The Fleet Marine Force of the Sixth Fleet tosses in its transports off shore. Mr Reagan wrings his hands but not Mr Shamir's. Washington cannot take any effective sanction against, Jerusalem, like an immediate freeze of dollar transfers or the promise of an extend- ed arms embargo, because its Middle Eastern policy stands on the existence of. a strong Israel to safeguard its material me terests in the region. And meanwhile the Israeli Stalin Organs — a weapon of terror in an exact sense — rain their rockets down on the men, women and children of West Beirut, threatening journalists of integritY' like Robert Fisk of The Times, with combat exhaustion but leaving the ebullient Yasser Arafat exactly where he was two months ago.
So where is the target of Mr Begin's cam- Paign? Increasingly one is driven to the con- clusion that it is located within the deepest recesses of his own mind. Mr Begin is a ter- rorist. He is committed to the idea that 'in the beginning was the deed', as Faust pro- claimed, and that deeds must have their in- evitable results. But Faust, in espousing the Devil and his works, took up his stance against the power of God. Mr Begin (and he may be remembered for nothing else) ap- pears to have invented an entirely new form of political policy and military strategy — a deed thrown in the face of no power at all, either in heaven or on earth. Classical siege- masters counted on the drain which 'useless mouths' — the non-combatant inhabitants of a besieged town — would make on its stocks to bring the commander of the gar- rison to surrender. Mr Begin has created a world of useless minds, which are affronted by the horrors which he visits on the inno- cent, but lack the means or will to call him to account. It is no consolation to anyone that in the end the Devil claimed Faust for his own.
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