By Jennifer Thompson
According to Noam Chomsky's April 23 article, "Israel, Lebanon, and the 'Peace Process'", the day after Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres took office, the New York Times reported "approvingly" that Israeli war planes attacked targets near Beirut, thus proving Peres' hardline security credentials.
These credentials were necessary, according to the spin masters running Peres and Labor's May 29 re-election campaign. The campaign has also been strongly backed by the US administration, including with a March 14 joint press conference in Tel Aviv of Peres and US President Bill Clinton, who also faces an election this year.
According to the London Independent's reporter, Robert Fisk, Israel's hawkish foreign affairs minister, ex-general Ehud Barak's comments to Le Monde in January were revealing of the Israeli government's real aim in the fortnight-long assault, which claimed around 200 Lebanese lives in April. Then, he warned that Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel would be met with attacks on Lebanon's infrastructure and people — "against Lebanon and the victims will be Lebanese" — without mentioning that Hezbollah attacks would be a response to a series of deliberate Israeli breaches of the 1993 cease-fire.
Peres' Grapes of Wrath operation was in most respects a failure. It did not improve his poll standing. Both the Lebanese and Syrian governments refused to disarm the Lebanese resistance, which has been claiming Israeli soldiers' lives in the occupied zone of southern Lebanon. It failed to pressure Syria to accept Israeli demands in return for withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights.
And after the truth of Israel's deliberate bombing of the UN post sheltering 500 Lebanese civilians was revealed, western public sympathy for Israeli was dented despite the best efforts of the western media and US administration.
The operation did set back Lebanese efforts to rebuild the country after 15 years of war and to return to being the financial and cultural centre of the region, a role Israel covets for itself.
In the "understandings" to end the mini-war reached after extensive French and US diplomatic efforts, Israel's attempts to constrain Hezbollah military resistance to the occupation were not advanced on the 1993 agreement. The US stepped in again, however, days after the cease-fire, with an announcement of a major military cooperation agreement giving Israel access to the US spy satellite network and reviving the Pentagon's Nautilus anti-missile system.