"Hijack a plane and celebrate the event as if it were the victory of Waterloo; seize an Israeli school, murder a few children, and announce it as if it were the sinking of the French fleet by Lord Nelson. But this strategy of terror did not advance the Palestinian cause....

"The Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia professors who went along with them for years, were they allies or accomplices? ....They institutionalized the political ignorance of the Palestinians, raising the PLO to the category of a national liberation movement despite its internal chaos, its lack of a coherent program, its terrorist practices, its stupid brutality, and its negation of history."

Excerpted from: Jacobo Timerman (translated from the Spanish by Miguel Acoca), The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon. New York,  Alfred A. Knopf, 1982

6 April 2002: Allies or accomplices? Students (at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) carry Palestinian flags, and dress up like Yasser Arafat for a pro-Palestinian rally. Ho Chi Minh is  (New York Times, photo by Alex Maness)

The Longest War is an anguished, angry, diary of life in Israel during the war in Lebanon. Jacobo Timerman's writing remains powerfully pertinent twenty years later.

Much of Timerman's anger was directed at the Begin government. Of the need for peace, Timerman wrote all too prophetically, "History tells us that the new wave of [Palestinian] fighters will be more radical, better trained, and more desperate."

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It is possible that we are living through crucial moments in the Middle East's history. Yet for the cycle to end without more death and desolation, the two peoples who are playing out their destiny here must learn not to fool themselves and not to let themselves be fooled.

 The Israeli people will fool themselves if they begin to believe—or let themselves be led to believe—that the political solution will be a result of the horrors produced by the invasion [of Lebanon]. Before the war there was already enough margin to work out a political solution. A lot of patience and honesty would have been required, but it was feasible. To say that every war has a positive aspect—in this case, a growing realization that in the Middle East there is no military solution—is an obscenity when one thinks of Lebanon's demolished cities, of the dead, of the mutilated; in brief, of the consequences we'll have to live with for years.

 When in 1970 King Hussein massacred the Palestinians in Jordan, just as General Sharon is now doing in Lebanon, he thought that the Palestinian issue had been locked away for a long time. He was mistaken. It rebounded with greater force than ever, and, unhappily for the rest of us, the Palestinians still clung to their old errors. They were convinced there was a military solution to their plight. Both Israelis and Palestinians have paid a high price indeed for their belief in military solutions.

 It is possible that the Palestinian people are only in an embryonic stage of their historical development and for this reason cannot achieve a political understanding of the Middle East. Unable to work out for themselves a relationship between their newly found identity and the regional context within which it must exist, they chose the easy way of terrorism. It was the simplest of ways: hijack a plane and celebrate the event as if it were the victory of Waterloo; seize an Israeli school, murder a few children, and announce it as if it were the sinking of the French fleet by Lord Nelson.

 But this strategy of terror did not advance the Palestinian cause. It did not check the Israeli hard-liners; if anything, it strengthened them. Terrorist strategy failed in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Spain, West Germany, Italy, and Uruguay even before the terrorists were savagely repressed. That the Palestinians have not drawn any sensible conclusions from their own experience, or that of others, is as much a failure of their allies as themselves.

 The Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia professors who went along with them for years, were they allies or accomplices? Or were they simply vain and frivolous academics who wanted to prove a thesis? They institutionalized the political ignorance of the Palestinians, raising the PLO to the category of a national liberation movement despite its internal chaos, its lack of a coherent program, its terrorist practices, its stupid brutality, and its negation of history. They seized upon the idea of the historical inevitability of a Palestinian state, an idea shared by all progressive people. But the day, month, and year of the inevitable depended on the sacrifice of one, two, or three generations.

The principal task of the academics should have been to confront Palestinian terrorism with a clear and convincing picture of the political reality, not to save lives and property in Israel—whose existence they never quite accepted—but at least to save Palestinian lives. They preferred to feel important glorifying an obsolete and reactionary image, that of terrorist machismo....But hiding from the Palestinian people the true relationship of forces in the region was a veritable act of suicide, conveniently, however, of other people. Had they worked with the moderates among the Palestinians and the Arab world within the bounds of a political strategy, had they understood—as it was their obligation to understand—that President Sadat was an ally, they could have forced the creation of a Palestinian state despite the obstructions of Israeli reactionary groups.

And now, betraying their duty as scholars, they resort to the magic of symbols that don't serve to mark a course, nor to instill guilt feelings in General Sharon, nor to alter the relationship of forces in the Middle East. To speak of a Palestinian genocide, of a Palestinian Holocaust, to compare Beirut with Stalingrad or with the Warsaw Ghetto, will move no one and will only serve to feed their egos and settle accounts with other academics in whom these images can arouse guilt feelings. Jews know what genocide is, a Holocaust, a Nazi.

....All those who approached the Palestinians betrayed them. The democratic political leaders of western Europe led the PLO to feel that they formed part of the same institutional constellation, without warning them that the idea of a secular Palestinian state in which Jews would be a minority was simply the product of a dream, that history does not go back to such a point. When the western Europeans heard the PLO talk of a “Zionist Entity,” they did not respond with an explanation of the meaning and power of Israel. They did not warn against dreaming of the liquidation of a state whose power these politicians knew only too well. They allowed the PLO to avoid the issue with ambivalent insinuations that not even the goodwill with which some of us in Israel heard them could convince us that they accepted anything less than the destruction of our country.

....One of the wisest Palestinians, Elias Freij, mayor of Bethlehem on the West Bank, told a French newspaperwoman during President Mitterrand's visit last March that the PLO needed to recognize Israel at once, without any conditions whatsoever. The European politicians had the same information as Elias Freij, and greater experience. Why did they go along with the PLO's political babble? And if they did insist on strategy changes, how is it possible that they did not react to the PLO's ineffectual claims?

Each “political” triumph of the PLO marked by the establishment of a delegation in a Western country was actually one more push toward the abyss into which they fell. Each PLO diplomatic triumph in the UN was one more way of alienating the Palestinians from reality. The expression of “solidarity” by dozens of Third World countries was in reality, in its simplicity, a new ring of solitude around the Palestinians.

The Third World cannot help them. It can't help itself. It doesn't even exist. But the Palestinians were given top billing in the scenario that makes people believe in the Third World's power.

…. The Arab League was another betrayer of the Palestinians, giving them a sense of power and security….

The huge sums of money given to the PLO by some Arab countries inspired the belief that the Palestinians had an unlimited capacity to acquire weapons and ammunition. They brought joy to the arms industry, but none of their friends explained that with respect to the requirements of a modern war they were back in the Middle Ages; that Israel had reached a degree of military sophistication never before seen in the Middle East.

The Soviets recognized the imbalance of forces. They knew that the acquisition of weapons does not make an army, and even less so against Israel. They did not warn the Palestinians that their problem has no military solution, because for the Soviet Union Palestinian “rearmament” was its great Middle East opportunity.

….The Palestinians could not escape this enormous trap, which was embellished with a revolutionary romanticism that had life only in the days of Mao's Long March or in Fidel Castro's Sierra Maestra. The Israelis charged that Beirut was the international center of terrorism, and the Palestinians believed that several hundred dropouts and neurotics and maladjusted imbeciles gathered from some twenty countries added up to a revolutionary vanguard that would lead the way to a bright future. Why weigh the facts of reality soberly and why consider the disadvantages of their own relative backwardness if more than one U.S. scholar considered it a privilege to review the world situation with Arafat? Why ask Indira Gandhi for the benefits of her political experience if Arafat was received in India with pomp? Why not believe in the value of the terrorist strategy if Arafat could address the UN like a chief of state, a resplendent gun at his waist?

….Outside the window where I'm writing is a small military airfield on the edge of the Mediterranean. I know the significance of those helicopters that each minute head north or return from the north. They go to kill in Beirut or to bring back the wounded. They enrage me. So do the Palestinians, because they have been so stupid. Their innumerable friends, who have turned them into history's toys, also fill me with fury. And I'm angry, too, with us, with the Israelis, who by exploiting, oppressing, and victimizing the Palestinians have made the Jewish people lose their moral tradition, their proper place in history.