H.D.S. Greenway Faults Israel for Responding to “Pesky” Massacre

For David (H.D.S.) Greenway, smearing Israel is a bit of a bad habit. Indeed, the Boston Globe columnist’s desire to malign the Jewish state is seemingly more important to him than his obligation not to mislead readers.

At least one assertion in Greenway’s Feb. 12 column, “Israel’s close watch on Egypt,” is so misleading that it amounts, in essence, to an outright lie.

Greenway paints the following scene of a war-hungry Israel:

[N]one of us who were there at the time will ever forget the rejoicing throughout Israel when Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin said together: “No more wars.’’

That was the sublime moment that Israel failed to grasp, however. Instead of turning “no more wars’’ into a peace policy, Israel took it to mean that Egypt was now enabling Israel to make wars with other people. Within a year Israel sent its tanks into Lebanon up to the Litani River against pesky Palestinians … .

We will never know how the Middle East might have looked had Israel taken no-more-wars more literally, instead of using Egypt’s forbearance as a license to continue occupation and make wars elsewhere.

Got it? Israeli leaders regarded the peace treaty with Egypt as a green light go to initiate war against Palestinians in Lebanon, whose “peskiness” was apparently rubbing them the wrong way. Or so Greenway indicates to his readers. (Merriam Webster’s usage examples for the word “pesky“: 1. I’ve been trying to get rid of this pesky cold for weeks. 2. the pesky problem of what to do with all the leftovers.)

Israel launched its Operation Litani on March 14, 1978. Three days earlier, Palestinian terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon and perpetrated what Israelis call the “Coastal Road Massacre,” a bloodbath in which dozens of Israeli men, women and children were slaughtered.

Time Magazine called it “the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history,” and added:

[S]hortly after Saturday’s bloodbath, Al-Fatah, the commando group within Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed responsibility for the operation from its headquarters in Beirut. …

The attack seemed to be the opening salvo of a new policy by Palestinian leaders, launched in Tripoli last December at the Arab states’ rejectionist summit, to carry to Israel’s soil the war against Sadat’s peace initiative.

It may have been the worst, but it was hardly the only terror attack launched by PLO groups entrenched in southern Lebanon, whose mission was to kill Israelis and destroy the Jewish state.

Greenway’s polemic notwithstanding, Israel of course never promised, explicitly or implicitly, that its peace treaty with Egypt meant it could no longer respond to acts of war emanating from other hostile countries. His readers, at any rate, wouldn’t even know that there were any acts of war against Israel in 1978.