Since March, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have displaced more than a million civilians and killed or wounded more than 17,000 people. Al Jazeera reported last month:

Israeli artillery shelling is still causing uncontrollable fires. Lebanese civil defense and firefighters are not being allowed by the Israelis to reach these areas and put out the flames. More than 60 towns in southern Lebanon are still occupied by the Israeli army, where the Israelis are carrying out a systematic campaign of demolitions.

The war in Iran and the continued carnage in Gaza have squeezed out American media coverage of Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon and Beirut. But Israel is repeating the same strategy with the same storyline that it has used to justify attacking Lebanon since the dawn of the Reagan era.

In June 1982, a terrorist organization headed by Abu Nidal (the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s) attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. Nidal’s forces had previously killed many Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in shootings and bomb attacks, since they considered Yasser Arafat a traitor for his willingness to negotiate with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin exploited the shooting in London to send the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) into Lebanon to crush the PLO. Yet, as Thomas Friedman noted in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, “the number of Israeli casualties the PLO guerrillas in Lebanon actually inflicted were minuscule (one death in the 12 months before the invasion).” The Israeli invasion was originally scheduled for the previous summer but was postponed after U.S. envoy Philip Habib negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO.

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Israeli cabinet that his “Operation Peace for Galilee” would extend only forty kilometers into Lebanon. However, Sharon sent his tanks to Beirut, determined to destroy the PLO once and for all. Foreign Ministry Director General David Kimche announced, “We have no aspirations for a single inch of Lebanese territory. Our sole aim is to free ourselves from the threat of terrorism.” As David Martin and John Walcott noted in their superb 1988 book, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism, the U.S. embassy in Beirut “sent cable after cable to Washington, warning that an Israeli invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Arab world, but not a word came back.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent estimated that fourteen thousand people, mostly civilians, were killed and wounded in the first month of the Israeli attack. When Palestinians fought back tenaciously, the IDF responded with indiscriminate bombing of Beirut. The IDF bombed the buildings housing the local bureaus of the Los Angeles Times, United Press International, and Newsweek. The Israelis cut off Beirut’s water and electricity supply and imposed a blockade.

The United Nations brokered a peace deal in which the United States and other multinational troops entered Beirut to buffer a ceasefire, allowing the PLO to board ships and transport to Tunisia, which had agreed to provide a safe haven. The U.S. government signed an agreement with Arafat, pledging that........

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