The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance

by Rashid I. Khalidi

Warnings of Israeli war preparations had reached Lebanese and Palestinian leaders, the media, and others. One of these warnings was delivered in a spring 1982 briefing for researchers that I attended at the Institute for Palestine Studies. It was delivered by Dr. Yevgeny Primakov, who was director of the Soviet Oriental Institute and reputed to be a senior officer of the KGB. Primakov was blunt: Israel would soon attack Lebanon, the United States would support it fully, and the USSR did not have the capability to prevent the attack or to protect its Lebanese and Palestinian allies. Moscow, he said, would be hard pressed to prevent the war from extending to Syria or to preserve its main regional ally, the Syrian regime. We were told that he had said much the same things to the PLO leadership.11 So none of us should have been surprised when the war started with the bombing of Beirut on June 4, 1982, although the scope and scale of what followed was much greater than I and others expected.