How the Lebanon War changed Israel forever

BEN LYNFIELD: 40 years on, Former Peace Now leader GALIA GOLAN and historian GERSHOM GORENBERG explain why the Lebanon War destroyed Israel’s innocence and gave the Left influence it has never regained

In the early part of Israel's disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hebrew University graduate student Gershom Gorenberg's alarm clock sounded and by habit he immediately switched on the radio news.

The announcer was listing the most recent soldiers' deaths in the war that started forty years ago this week as Operation Peace for Galilee, ostensibly a limited 40 kilometer push into southern Lebanon to take northern Israeli towns outside the range of PLO Katyusha rockets.

But Gorenberg, who was then 26 and is now an eminent historian whose works include a landmark study of the origins of Israeli settlements, was jolted by the radio broadcast because of one of the names. "It was my friend's brother, whom I had put up in my apartment for Shabbat a couple of weeks before," he recalled during an interview with The Jewish Independent.

"I realised my friend's brother had been killed and the list of names became very real and that something was happening over and over again to people all over the country. Obviously immediate families were being shattered. But there was a larger ring of casualties. People were asking why this was happening or others were trying to justify it."

As the death toll mounted and fighting continued way beyond the government's initially stated aims, something unprecedented was afoot in Israel:  people increasingly protested against a war while it was being waged.

Indeed the war, and its horrific climax with the massacre by Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militiamen at Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps would become the most controversial conflict in Israeli history.