592
PARTISAN REVIEW
"neoconservative" allies joined him. Nathan Glazer and Seymour
Martin Lipset wrote an Op Ed piece of their own, critical of this
unnecessary and "ill-advised" war. They argue on both existen–
tial-"Israel isn't threatened"-and political-"The crucial issue is
Israeli willingness to grant real self-determination to the West Bank
and the Gaza strip"-grounds. The ad in the
Times
putting forward
the statement of the American Friends of Peace Now was inspired by
Daniel Bell. (That statement was especially well spoken and fair
minded; the one placed by the New Jewish Agenda, in calling for the
withdrawal of Israeli but not PLO troops from Lebanon, was
insidious.)
But the greatest mystery-Luttwak would say it fits into his
theory-is how the far greater carnage during the 1975-1976 Civil
War in Lebanon, for which the PLO and the Syrians were largely,
though not exclusively, responsible, was ignored by the same critics
who jumped on Israel six years later. The Syrians crossed the border
\.
into Lebanon on May 31, 1975 because they were afraid that the
PLO was going to come out on top in the internecine warfare; they
opposed the PLO domination of Lebanon in 1975! During the next
eighteen months, between forty and fifty thousand Lebanese were
killed, though, to the best of my knowledge, Studs Terkel and Barry
Commoner had nothing to say about it. Radio Beirut claimed that,
in 1978, a further sixty thousand people lost their li ves.
Time
maga-
zine reported that some four hundred thousand Christians fled
Beirut and thirty-five thousand homes were destroyed. (This helps
explain the current Christian desire to "get theirs" now.) In 1979,
according to Nicholas Tatro, the Beirut AP reporter, only nine hun-
dred ninety Lebanese were killed; in 1980 (Tatro quotes police statis-
tics) 2183 were killed, 6815 wounded.
According to the Lebanese journal
A 'Liwa'a,
in April 1981 two
hundred were killed and fifteen hundred wounded in Beirut-in one
month alone! Where were the newspaper ads? Are Arab dead some–
how more palatable to the liberal conscience if the killers are Arab?
Anthony Lewis admits that he judges Israel by a "double stan–
dard." He justifies it by reminding everyone that Israel always
wanted to be considered" a li ght unto the nations." He has the right
to do so, to engage in what Ruth Wi sse call s "the art of solicitous
incrimination." After all, it is a kind of left-handed compliment for
which I am both grateful and ungrateful. The trouble is that the case
for Israel's right to exist among the community of nations cannot
