I was struck by two profound quotations from top people in Israel reacting to last week's historic retreat from the Lebanon. The first was from Ephraim Seh, head of Israel's armed forces. He was explaining his decision to allow soldiers from the defeated mercenary South Lebanon Army to enter and settle in Israel. He said he was initially reluctant to welcome his former allies because "it is very cruel to turn someone into a refugee".
That's very true. It was, for instance, very cruel to throw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes in 1948. The Palestinians were turned into refugees, many of them clutching the keys to their homes and bits of paper, bearing the official stamp of the forces of law and order guaranteed by the British mandate in Palestine, establishing their legal rights to their homes and land.
In the half century since, none of these legal titles were enforced by law. Instead, hundreds of thousands more Palestinians have been cruelly turned into refugees, for example after Israel invaded the West Bank of the Jordan in 1967 and illegally occupied yet more territory.
The second quotation came from Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister. He delared that any armed person who crossed the border from Lebanon into Israel would be committing "an act of war". This profound interpretation of international law seems to apply in one direction only. If armed forces cross the border from Lebanon into Israel they are committing an act of war.
But when armed forces crossed the border from Israel into Lebanon in 1982, bombing schools, hospitals, towns and villages, there was no talk from Israeli ministers of an act of war. In Beirut, the Israeli invaders unleashed the fascist Falange on the refugees camps of Sabra and Chatila. The Falange militia bravely slaughtered thousands of unarmed Palestinians, mainly women and children.
In his wonderful book about Lebanon, Pity the Nation (1990), Robert Fisk wondered what the dead of the Holocaust would have said had they witnessed the massacre at Chatila, as he had done. What would Anne Frank have said? She had written in disgust about how the Nazis planned to "cleanse" Utrecht of Jews, "as if they were cockroaches". In a committee of the Israeli parliament in 1983, General Rafael Eitan boasted of his triumphs on the West Bank. "All the Arabs will be able to do is scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle".
A common mistake made by opponents of Israeli expansionist policies is to assume that everyone in Israel approves them. There are, however, lots of courageous Israelis who are angry and ashamed. I cite only one: Mordecai Vanunu, who committed the unforgivable crime of telling the truth about his government's nuclear policy.
Without Vanunu, we would not know that the butchers of Lebanon have access to nuclear weapons. For this disclosure, Vanunu was seduced in London by an Israeli agent and spirited away from the not-very-watchful eyes of the Sunday Times, whose editors used his story to great acclaim but did not protect their source. His consort took him to Rome. He was knocked out, drugged and whisked off to Askelon prison in Israel where he has spent 14 years, mostly in solitary confinement.
Not that Israel is alone is wrongfully putting people in prison. In February I met Robert Fisk for the first time at the Savoy Hotel, where he was receiving his umpteenth award for outstanding coverage of international affairs. As we shook hands, he muttered: "I am still looking for Mograbi". Mograbi was the name given to the man who hired the car which was used to bomb the Israeli embassy and offices in Finchley in London in 1994. Jawad Botmeh, the young Palestinian Mograbi persuaded to help him hire the car (without disclosing his purpose), and his friend Samar Alami, were later convicted of conspiring to carry out the bombing.
They claimed from first to last that, as Palestinians campaigning against the Oslo accords for the future of Palestine, they had been set up by Mograbi. Both had cast-iron alibis for the bombing - Alami's emerged by chance and could not have been arranged by her. The prosecution triumphantly produced a document found in Alami's flat which, they alleged, was a map of the bombed buildings in Finchley. Oh dear. The map turned out to be of Sidon in the Lebanon.
In spite of a complete absence of any direct evidence to link them to the bombing (and the complete absence of Mograbi), the two young people were convicted and sent to prison for 20 years. Now that Lebanon is free at last, is it too much to hope for a powerful campaign to free Mordecai Vanunu, Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh as well?