Israel wages ‘chosen war’ in Lebanon: 1977-1982

THE FIFTH ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

On 6 June 1982, Israel went to war against its northern neighbour, killed some 20,000 people,¹ overwhelmingly civilians, in three months of land, sea and aerial assault; laid its first ever siege to an Arab capital, Beirut; drove out Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership; destroyed the guerilla state-within-the-state; and presided over the Phalangists’ massacre of Sabra and Shatila, by no means the largest such genocidal, or quasi-genocidal, slaughter of the twentieth century, but perhaps the most hideously ironic.

The Fifth Arab-Israeli War - or the First Lebanon War as, since July/August 2006, some Israelis now call it - had its roots in two historic developments, neither of which had anything particular to do with Lebanon. One was the coming to power of Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party; the other was the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Begin’s electoral triumph in May 1977 had been a political earthquake. As we have seen, the Labour Party, which had ruled Israel since its creation, practised what the Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, with his doctrine of the Iron Wall, had preached, even as it ostensibly disowned it. But here, coming into his own after twenty-nine years in the wilderness, was Jabotinsky’s direct political heir, the embodiment, or not far from it, of what at the time was Zionism at its most chauvinist and extreme. Here was the man who, as chief of the Irgun terrorists, had, at Deir Yassin, perpetrated the atrocity which did more than any other to put the Palestinians to flight in 1948; the man of whom Ben-Gurion had said that, when listening to his speeches, he ‘heard the voice and screeching of Hitler’, and that - if he ever came to power - ‘he [would] lead the State of Israel to its destruction’.² Two days after his election Begin chose the West Bank settlement of Kaddoum from which to proclaim that, as ‘the property of the Jewish people’, the ‘liberated’ territories of ‘Judea and Samaria’ would never be yielded up. That, at a stroke, made an utter nonsense of Arafat’s diplomacy of ‘moderation’. It was also a resounding snub to Jimmy Carter, the least anti-Palestinian American president since Eisenhower, who had formally acknowledged this moderation, led the Palestinians to believe that it would earn them the response it deserved, and dared to assert, to the consternation of Israel and the ‘friends of Israel’ in America, that a ‘homeland’ should be found for the refugees,‘who have suffered for many, many years’.³

The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was the first between the Jewish state and any of its neighbours. Originating in President Sadat’s historic pilgrimage to Jerusalem in October 1977 and concluded in March 1979, it wrought a fundamental change in the whole Middle East balance of power. Indeed, a great many Arabs perceived it at the time as an historic calamity, a lineal descendant of those earlier ones - the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the rise of Israel and the 1967 war - which had befallen them in the twentieth century. It put the very concept of an ‘Arab nation’ in jeopardy. For here was Egypt, its ‘great power’, seeming to opt out of it altogether, allying itself with the Zionist intruder and enormously enhancing Israel’s ability to disrupt what was left of the existing Arab order. It should have been a step towards comprehensive peace; that was how Carter understood it. In fact it was Begin’s and the interventionists’ golden opportunity for war.⁴

It had been all but pre-ordained that Lebanon, other peoples’ battleground, would pay the price of this double conjuncture. In the event, it took Begin five years to reach his openly proclaimed ‘war of choice’. All the evidence suggests that he would have got there sooner or later anyway. But the Palestinians set him on his way - with a savage act that furnished the occasion for a larger one of his own.

‘MODERATION’ IN ATROCIOUS GUISE

In March 1978, Dalal Mugrabi, a young woman from Sabra refugee camp, and twelve male comrades mounted ‘Operation Deir Yassin’. They sailed from Tyre for a Tel Aviv beach with orders to seize a sea-front hotel, take its guests hostage and demand the freeing of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for their release. They ended up hijacking a bus instead; thirty-seven Israelis, together with Mugrabi and most of her companions, died in the shoot-out which ensued. In response to this came ‘Operation Litani’,⁵ a first, full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon up to the river of that name.

The mayhem on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway had not formed part of the traditional ‘border wars’, in whose tit-for-tat cycle the Palestinians usually attacked first and Israelis responded with disproportionate force. In that department, since the coming of Begin, the Israelis had already become much the more aggressive of the two. It was mainly they who initiated hostilities at times and places of their choosing. And it was mainly the Palestinians who responded, usually with cross-border artillery or rockets. It was an unequal combat. When, in July 1977, the Palestinians retaliated for the killing of three Lebanese fishermen in the coastal town of Tyre, and their rockets killed three civilians in the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, Israel killed over a hundred, mainly Lebanese civilians, in its retaliation for that. Indeed, its aircraft virtually wiped out the entire hamlet of Azziya; but only three Palestinians were found among the sixty-plus bodies unearthed from the ruins, for this was a Shiite community that had tried to keep the guerillas out. As they rained down indiscriminate slaughter from the skies, the Israelis had also been pushing their recently formed surrogate force, the Maronite-dominated Army of Free Lebanon (AFL) led by Major Saad Haddad in the border enclave they had created, to engage in stepped-up proxy warfare against the Palestinians and their local Lebanese allies on the ground. In the course of this, a certain Eli Hobeika - whose greatest infamy, at Sabra and Shatila, was yet to come - and twenty other Phalangist militiamen had come down from Beirut, via Israel, to lead an AFL offensive against another border village, Yarin, that did harbour Palestinians; they had rounded up eighty people, mostly Lebanese, outside the local school and shot them all.⁶

Nor, paradoxical, specious or frankly preposterous though that might seem, was ‘Operation Deir Yassin’ a departure from Arafat’s policy of diplomatic ‘moderation’. It was - or it was supposed to be - one of those occasional, deliberate, spectacular exploits designed to reinforce it, or at least to prevent American-led international diplomacy from taking a particularly unfavourable turn at the Palestinians’ expense. Which is precisely what, with Sadat on his way to a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace, it appeared to be doing. At first, the Carter Administration, striving for a ‘comprehensive’ Arab-Israeli settlement, had seemed embarrassed and nonplussed by Sadat’s astonishing, go-it-alone gamble. But then it latched on to it with a vengeance. And if- as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski none too subtly intimated - the PLO did not do likewise, then it would be ‘bye-bye, PLO’.⁷ So, ‘by hitting at the heart of Israel,’ said Abu Jihad, Fatah’s second-in-command, ‘we [wanted] to show that there will never be peace in the Middle East without the Palestinians’.⁸

Diplomatic message it might have been. It was also the deadliest, and most politically disturbing act of Palestinian terrorism that Israel had ever endured, and any new, Likud-style retaliation for it was going, quite simply had, to be more condign, more disproportionate than anything Labour had ever attempted. But, as in Labour’s ‘border wars’ against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the fifties, there was to be more to it than mere revenge and punishment; there was higher strategy too. Operation Litani’s official objective was to ‘liquidate the PLO’. But the 30,000 men, with tanks and artillery backed by massive air power, who executed it didn’t do that at all; the guerillas had time in plenty to run for safety north of the river. What they did do was to kill between one and two thousand, mainly Shiite, Lebanese, turn 250,000 of them into refugees, destroy or damage some 6,000 of their homes - and leave behind unexploded cluster bombs that were still blowing people up by the time of the next, and very much greater invasion, which was to leave behind a great many more.

SAVING THE MARONITES

In fact, strategically speaking, it was things Lebanese, rather than Palestinian, to which the Israelis were now chiefly attending. And the clearest indication of that was the new politico-military order which- along with the cluster bombs - they also left behind. When, three months after the invasion, they withdrew their forces they should, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 425, have handed over the whole of the evacuated territory to the newly created peacekeeping force, UNIFIL; but, instead, they bestowed a large swathe of it, running the whole length of the frontier, on Major Haddad and his Army of Free Lebanon. Thus was born the so-called ‘security zone’, or ‘Strip’ as it was popularly known. For the next twenty-two years, this Strip, which varied in size according to circumstance, was to serve as a buffer between Israel and its enemies in Lebanon, who likewise varied in identity. But, at the time, it also looked very much like the first great practical step towards something very much grander: nothing less than the creation, at long last, of the ‘Christian Lebanon‘, allied to Israel, of which Ben-Gurion and his generation of interventionists had dreamed. And it looked all the more like it because, ever since he came to power, Begin had been exhibiting a very special, perfervid concern for the well-being and safety of the Maronites, a concern which, by the time of the invasion, had turned into an exalted moral crusade. He whom Ben-Gurion had likened to Hitler habitually saw Arafat in that guise, with the Palestine National Charter as his Mein Kampf In such a histrionic scheme of things, it was but a logical progression to cast the Maronites as potential victims of another holocaust, a progression which Begin duly made. ‘Saving the Christians from genocide’ - no less - became ‘a responsibility of the Jewish people’.⁹

And the Maronites themselves were ready, in their fashion, to be ‘saved’. Or at least their ‘pro-Zionists’ were. And that now mattered. For after the almost continuous, forty-year dominance of the ‘Arabists’, the ‘pro-Zionists’ were once more in the ascendant at last, and hardly more inhibited about it than their predecessors - the Eddés and the Aridas - had been in the thirties. They had not liked the political outcome of the 1975-6 campaign, even though, militarily speaking, they had been the principal beneficiary of the Syrian intervention which brought it about. Nor did they like the national reconciliation and reconstruction which the new, Syrian-favoured president, Elias Sarkis, was trying to achieve. His efforts would, in essence, have preserved the sectarian state, and - with some modification in the Muslims’ favour - the Maronites’ ascendancy within it. That was in line with what the Muslim oligarchs had originally proposed, and what, on the face of it at least, their Christian counterparts had accepted; for by this time the Muslim/leftists had virtually given up their ambitions for fully-fledged de-confessionalization, and - especially following Syria’s assassination of their outstanding leader, Kemal Jumblat - they had fallen into demoralization and disarray. But with their ‘pro-Zionists’ in the saddle that was no longer good enough for the Maronites. Of course, all sides wanted reconciliation on their own terms; but theirs were the most exorbitant. In consequence, Sarkis was not getting very far with his reconstruction. It was a classic case of chicken and egg. The state institutions, army foremost among them, on which he depended for the furtherance of reconciliation could not be reconstructed without reconciliation - but reconciliation itself required the dismantling of those non-state institutions, each side’s militias, which had taken the state institutions’ place. For the Maronites, that meant that the ‘Cairo agreement’ of 1968 should be abrogated, and the Palestinian guerillas, whose presence it had legitimized, be disarmed. So should the Muslim/ leftists. Until they were, the Maronites would not disarm themselves. There was no question of their doing so first, or even simultaneously. For, in their view, it was they who represented Lebanese ‘legitimacy’, while the others were ‘rebels’ against it. Arafat, though not in principle averse to national reconciliation, was not going to throw away his state-within-the-state for nothing in return. The deadlock was therefore complete.

BASHIR GEMAYEL, MARONITE CHRISTIAN PALADIN

The Maronites, or their ‘pro-Zionists’, now reckoned, however, that not merely could they break this deadlock, but that historic opportunity lay in the breaking. They were in exultant and defiant mood. In 1978 a militia spokesman claimed that for the first time since the fourteenth century the Christian ‘resistance’ boasted a unified regular army to protect and preserve its own.¹⁰ They thought that, militarily at least, they had won the last campaign, and that now, with the coming of Begin, they would win the next, decisive one. Israeli help under Labour had been discreet and indirect, designed only ‘to help the Maronites help themselves’.¹¹ They had very good reason to believe that, under the Likud, it would become open, direct - and very large. Their leader was Bashir Gemayel, the younger son of ‘Sheikh Pierre’. He headed the ‘Lebanese Forces’, as the Phalangist militia came to be known after he had bloodily suppressed its rival, the Chamounist ‘Tigers’. Ambitious, ruthless, barely thirty, he was the first Maronite leader ever to command such undisputed, autocratic sway over the whole community. For him, as for Begin and the interventionists, force was but an instrument for the achievement of political goals.¹² He had been wooing the temperamentally not dissimilar Israeli prime minister ever since he came to power. With certain reservations, each had impressed the other.¹³ But nothing had impressed Bashir like Begin’s first invasion. He wanted another, and larger, one.¹⁴ Thus it came about that, under this youthful paladin, the community that had traditionally looked to the Christian West for its protection or advancement, and had then briefly, opportunistically - and with great distaste - turned to Arab/Muslim Syria, sought ultimate deliverance at the hands of the Western-created newcomer, now full-grown regional superpower, just next door. Gemayel resolved that, with Israel’s assistance, the Maronites would regain the Greater Lebanon which they had lost; and if, perchance, they did not manage that, they could always fall back on ‘Marounistan’ - their tight little ‘Christian Lebanon’ of old - still securely in their hands.¹⁵

BEGIN PUTS WAR ON THE AGENDA - WITH OFFERS OF PEACE

It was in the wake of the second historic development, the conclusion of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, that Begin first put full-scale war in Lebanon on the agenda - albeit in the guise of peace. In May 1979, he made the first of a series of theatrical ‘peace offers’, which came, characteristically, in the wake of a bloody reprisal raid. Striking at what they may have thought were Palestinian military targets, Israeli warplanes had killed Lebanese civilians instead, among them the bride and four of her guests at a wedding. Israel, Begin pledged, would go on hitting these ‘Palestinian murderers’ by land, sea and air in order to ‘destroy them completely’. Then, after the threat, the offer: ‘I hereby invite President Sarkis to come’ - like Sadat before him - ‘to meet me here in Jerusalem.’ He himself was ‘ready to go in an aircraft to Beirut or any neutral place to meet President Sarkis ... and the only subject we would discuss would be the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon’. Turning to the Syrians, he said that their ‘army of occupation must leave at once’. It was ‘destroying Lebanese villages and firing on innocent Christians’. As for the Palestinian refugees, they should all be resettled in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Libya, ‘very big countries rich in resources and petroleum, with millions of square kilometres of land’. Neither Lebanon nor Israel had any territorial claims on the other and a peace treaty could be worked out ‘in two days or so of talks’. Jordan, he forecast, ‘would also then make peace with us’. President Sarkis spurned the offer, while the prime minister, Salim al-Hoss, said that Israel, through ‘blackmail, terrorism and brute force’, was planning to tear Lebanon away from its Arab moorings. In the words of the Beirut newspaper al-Safir, it was intended to ‘blow up Lebanon from within’. Bashir Gemayel, and the Maronite ‘pro-Zionists’, were the only ones to welcome it; naturally enough, considering that they were to be its indispensable instruments.¹⁶

SHARON PLOTS THE ‘HOW’ AND ‘WHEN’

After this it was essentially a question of how and when Begin would make war. The ‘how’ went through various formulations, by various quarters; eventually, however, it was chiefly determined by General Sharon, whom Begin made his defence minister after his second electoral victory in the summer of 1981. Even he, superhawk though he was, had had the deepest misgivings about this choice, less because Sharon was - as Israelis put it - ‘a war looking for a place to happen’ than because he himself knew he was liable to be overborne and misled - as indeed he ultimately was - by this notoriously most ‘reckless, duplicitous, untrustworthy’ of Israel’s military heroes. The inevitable upshot of his and other appointments was that, in the Israeli decision-making process, the last restraints were swept away; and pure, unbridled extremism ruled.¹⁷

So when the war finally came, it was no surprise at all. Neither were its dimensions. The range of possible objectives had been endlessly rehearsed. The minimum aim was to enlarge the ‘security zone’, to a width of some forty kilometres, in order to protect northern towns and settlements against Palestinian rocket and artillery bombardment. A more ambitious, much-canvassed objective was, as its proponents usually and somewhat vaguely put it, to ‘destroy the PLO infrastructure’. But more ambitious still, a throwback to Ben-Gurion’s ‘fantastic’ geopolitical grand designs of the fifties, was the so-called Sharon Plan. There was more to this than the mere reconstitution of Lebanon as a Christian or Christian-dominated state that would make peace with Israel. That was just a start. In addition, the Palestinians should be driven out of the country to Jordan, and not just those who, in their tens of thousands, had descended on it with Arafat and the PLO, but all those ‘legitimate’ residents, the refugees who had fetched up there in the original, 1948 flight from Palestine. That the final solution to the ‘Palestine problem’ lay in Jordan had long been one of Sharon’s idées fixes. Palestinians already made up more than half its population and all they had to do in order to satisfy their national aspirations was, with Israel’s assistance, to replace the Hashemite kingdom, whose power base was essentially Transjordanian, with a Republic of Palestine. That, in turn, was intimately bound up with his plans for the occupied Palestinian territories. In the West Bank, he had recently introduced a new-fangled scheme to create a quisling leadership; known as the Village Leagues, many of its personnel, recruited and armed by Israel, were known criminals.¹⁸ It was supposed to furnish the necessary Palestinian ‘cover’ for all his Greater-Israel, expansionist designs. Achieving this was ‘the most important political battle Israel had fought since its creation’. But West Bankers and Gazans would have none of it; the only leadership they acknowledged was the PLO’s. So destroying that organization in Lebanon became the prerequisite for destroying their resistance to the Village Leagues in Palestine. Once that was achieved, they could be induced to cross the Jordan to become citizens of their very own ‘Palestine state’ that awaited them on the other side.¹⁹ As for Syria, if Sharon’s Lebanese project meant full-scale war with it, that was no great tragedy; had he not, in any case, frequently advocated pre-emptive attack on the neighbour which Israel regarded as its most implacable foe?

‘THE TOTAL DISINTEGRATION OF LEBANON IS THE PRECEDENT FOR THE ENTIRE ARAB WORLD’

Nor was the Sharon Plan even the most far-reaching of the geopolitical fantasies which, with the rise of the extreme right, were now entering mainstream Zionist thinking. The learned article entitled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’, which appeared in the World Zionist Organization’s periodical Kivunim on the eve of the invasion, could not be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic fringe. The author, Oded Yinon, was formerly a senior foreign ministry official.

The total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional, localized governments is the precedent for the entire Arab world ... The dissolution of Syria, and later Iraq, into districts of ethnic and religious minorities following the example of Lebanon is Israel’s main long-range objective on the Eastern front. The present military weakening of these states is the short-range objective. Syria will disintegrate into several states along the lines of its ethnic and sectarian structure ... As a result there will be a Shiite Alawi state, the district of Aleppo will be a Sunni state, and the district of Damascus another state which is hostile to the northern one. The Druze - even those of the Golan - should form a state in Hauran and in northern Jordan ... The oil-rich but very divided and internally strife-ridden Iraq is certainly a candidate to fit Israel’s goals ... Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation ... will hasten the achievement of the supreme goal, namely breaking up Iraq into elements like Syria and Lebanon. There will be three states or more around the three major cities, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, while Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni north, which is mostly Kurdish ... The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for [dissolution] ... Israel’s policy in war or peace should be to bring about the elimination of Jordan ... ²⁰

So much for the ‘how’. As to the ‘when’, all but inevitable though this most overtly ‘chosen’ of wars might have been, Israel still had to await - even as it simultaneously sought to shape - at least a semblance of justification for waging it. Indeed, one thing might even have prevented it altogether. That was if President Sarkis had somehow managed to put Lebanon together again. The Israelis therefore made sure that he did not. The South was key. It was indispensable for national reconciliation and reconstruction that the central government regain sovereignty over it. Otherwise, it would remain ‘like a gangrened limb’ that ‘spread its poison throughout the country’.²¹

Time and again, Sarkis tried to send the national army south. Thus it came about that, in April 1979, there happened exactly what had already happened on two occasions before. But this time, coming in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and Begin’s menacing ‘peace offer’, it was more serious. Amid the enthusiasm of the southern population, showering them with rice and flowers, the soldiers did get a bit further than they ever had previously. But when the usual shooting started, and stopped them in their tracks, it did not just kill and injure Lebanese, it killed recently installed UNIFIL peacekeepers too. Private Jarle Warger became the first Norwegian to die at his post, struck down by the artillery round which exploded in the centre of the village of Ebl Saqi, his contingent’s headquarters. The 155-mm shells, American-made and supplied for ‘self-defence’ purposes only, had, as usual, been fired from Israel or the ‘Strip’, though Israel, as usual too, indignantly denied it. The PLO was responsible, said General Ben-Gal, the head of the Israeli Northern Command, both for this and for all the other ordnance that rained down on the UNIFIL headquarters at Naqura that day. But two American officers serving as UN observers were so incensed at this lie that, breaking the rules, they went to the press to denounce it. Like most international peacekeepers, the Norwegian general in charge had originally come to the Middle East with a prejudice in the Israelis’ favour; but, like most too, he had quickly shed it:

We expected the Israelis to be honest types ... never in my wildest fantasy had I imagined we were confronting an organization [Israel] which considered itself served by fooling people, by telling stories which they insisted we should believe, or deny things we had seen with our own eyes.²²

MURDERING IRISH PEACEKEEPERS

Actually, from time to time, Palestinians did kill UNIFIL peace-keepers, not just in battle but in cold blood. Usually, it was the ‘rejectionists’, who had never taken kindly to them, making some viciously explicit, intra-Palestinian point about ‘surrender solutions’ and their determination to prevent the all too ‘moderate’ Arafat’s acquiescence in them. In 1979 the PFLP shot three Fijians in an ambush; in 1981 they kidnapped three more, and began ‘executing’ them, a bullet to the head, one by one; after abuse and torture, chance alone saved the life of the third.²³

But it was not some renegade guerilla band which had murdered two Irish peacekeepers the year before. It was a UN member-state, the member-state that owed its very existence to the UN.²⁴ Once upon a time, in pre-state days, the Irgun underground over which Begin presided had hanged two British sergeants from a eucalyptus tree and booby-trapped their dangling corpses;²⁵ thirty years on, as Karsten Tveit recounts in his book A Pattern for Defeat,²⁶ the state of Israel over which he presided not merely connived in, it wilfully instigated similar villainies in the South Lebanese ‘badlands’ of its own creation.

No sooner had UNIFIL arrived than Israel wanted it out, portraying it as an incompetent, worthless accessory of an ill-intentioned Lebanese authority, if not an outright collaborator of the terrorists themselves.²⁷ One method which - it thought - might achieve this was to hound and harass one or other of its contingents beyond the political endurance of the nation that contributed it. It singled out the Irish. ‘Get your troops out of South Lebanon,’ the deputy defence minister, Ezer Weizmann, told the Irish ambassador, even as a certain Major Haim Misrah - one of Israel’s two unofficial ‘bosses’ in the Strip - was organizing a violent confrontation, between a local mob and Irish troops, in which stone-throwing children were deployed as human shields in front of an advancing Army of Free Lebanon armoured car. Two UNIFIL soldiers were killed. But so were two children. Whereupon AFL commander Major Haddad personally radioed Irish headquarters with his ultimatum: ‘the UN must pay 40,000 Lebanese lira [about $10,000] in reparations for the two children you have killed - or give me the bodies of two Irish soldiers’.²⁸ Thus was the time-honoured clan or family ‘blood feud’, the lex talionis, enlisted in the service of state policy. Major Misrah told Mahmoud Basi, brother of one of the dead ‘children’ - a sixteen-year-old aboard a tank which had fired on the Irish and on which the Irish had fired back - that he wanted him to ‘take a UN soldier and kill him’.²⁹ Basi and his gang duly took three, and murdered two of them; the third, shot in the stomach, miraculously survived.³⁰

Even the US, Israel’s great benefactor, did not escape its homicidal attentions. Its ambassador to Beirut, John Gunther Dean, a German Jew who fled Nazi persecution as a child, had been trying his courageous best to carry out stated US policy in Lebanon, fundamental to which was the deployment of the Lebanese army in the South. Twice he found himself condemning Israeli actions which subverted that policy, a stand which first earned him a public disavowal from his own, ‘Lobby’-shy masters in Washington, and then an unsuccessful attempt by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate him. The anti-tank missiles fired at the convoy in which he and his family were travelling had been supplied to Israel by the US.³¹

THE SHIITES TURN AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS

Keeping the war option open, by keeping Lebanon in unreconstructed turmoil, meant keeping all those non-state actors that profited from it in business. And that, in turn, meant not just Israel’s friends, ‘Sheikh Bashir’ and his Maronite warriors, but its enemies, Arafat and his Palestinian ones, too. That necessity did not bother Israel very much. On the contrary, it was in one important respect positively beneficial, if not - till ‘D-day’ came - its active desire. For the fact was that while the Muslim population might still have looked to the PLO as a bulwark against Maronite revanchism, it was steadily losing its popularity among them, and that was a process it was well worth Israel’s while helping along - especially among the Shiites. The Shiites had never been as ideologically committed to pan-Arab causes as the Sunnis in the first place, and yet, by the late seventies, this poorest and most oppressed of Lebanon’s communities had suffered vastly more in the name of Palestine than any other. They had first been driven, under Israeli retaliatory raids, from their homes in the South to Beirut’s ‘belt of misery’, only to be driven in large numbers from there, by Israel’s Phalangist proteges, in the ensuing civil war. From the South to Beirut and back - it was an infernal cycle that went on and on. And Israel deliberately exacerbated it.

The ‘policy of pre-emption’ which Defence Minister Weizmann announced in January 1979 required the bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods with the express intention of turning them against the Palestinians in their midst. Not surprisingly, the policy did not earn it any affection among its victims.³² But it remorselessly achieved its purpose; the Palestinians were doubly blamed - for their own misdemeanours, and for the Israeli ones they brought down on the Shiites’ heads. ‘Everyone’, said a militia leader, ‘knows Israel’s game. But the Palestinians are the visible cause of their misfortunes.’³³

Thus, what the Palestinian refugees once felt about the Lebanese army and police - that they, not the Israelis, were the direct oppressor - the Shiites now felt about these refugees-turned-guerillas. And the Palestinians had indeed done much to bring it on themselves. Their leadership itself admitted to the many, reprehensible ‘excesses’ of ‘undisciplined elements’ - elements which, however, it was seemingly unwilling or unable to discipline. Some of the ‘excesses’ came, so to speak, in the official line of duty. ‘We know the Israelis usually start the shooting,’ said a disillusioned Shiite sympathizer, ‘but we don’t see much point in Palestinian bombardments at all. It does Israel no real damage. If someone starts shooting from Nabatiyah [a market town which, by 1980, had been almost emptied of its inhabitants] Haddad will reply here in Tyre [where a third or more of them still hung on].‘³⁴ He, like other Southerners, had by then concluded that the Palestinians, nursing a long-standing sense of betrayal by their fellow Arabs, were imbued with a kind of egoism that made them indifferent to the sufferings which the redressing of their own injustice inflicted on others. But for other ‘excesses’ - petty warlordism, theft, ‘confiscation’, the occupation of houses and land, ‘protection money’ and the levying of ‘taxes’ on local produce, the hamfisted exploitation of parish pump politics - there could be no such excuse or extenuating circumstance.

Like other communities, Maronites especially, the Shiites were also worried - or so they claimed - about Tawteen, ‘implantation’, and al-Watan al-Badil, the ‘alternative homeland’, which, the longer they stayed, the more the Palestinians would be tempted to establish in Lebanon instead of Palestine itself.

By 1980, the Shiite militia, Amal, which had come into being to defend Southern villages against Israel, was turning the arms with which the Palestinians had first supplied it against those self-same Palestinians instead. Not all its members were so inclined - a minority, precursors of a Hizbullah that was yet to be, definitely were not - but those that were took on the Palestinians wherever they found them, in the south of the country, or in Beirut’s Dahiya.³⁵ It was - to take just one serious example - some rather trivial ‘excess’ that provoked the fighting in the southern village of Zifta that summer. The Palestinians, far better armed, subjected it to an artillery bombardment. The Shiite militiamen, having no means of reply, just waited till it was over. Then, as the Palestinians and their Muslim/leftist allies approached, presuming it was pacified, they shot twenty-six of them from close range.³⁶ Before long Amal was able to seal off substantial parts of the South to the Palestinians and Muslim/leftists, as well as - through its inroads into the Dahiya — to wrest control of parts of their urban heartland.³⁷ The Palestinians and Muslim/leftists were also losing sympathy and support, though to a lesser extent, in their natural, bedrock Sunni constituency. And there were growing tensions and disenchantment between these allies themselves.

BOMBING THE PALESTINIANS OUT OF THEIR ‘MODERATION’

What did worry the Israelis was less the PLO’s continued existence than its ‘moderation’. The moderation became more pronounced, and therefore more exasperating, the more the Israelis tried to ‘bomb’ the Palestinians out of it, and especially after the so-called ‘artillery war’ of July 1981 in which - for once replying - the Palestinians bombed them back more effectively than they had ever done before. This ‘artillery war’ had grown out of a spiral of tit-for-tat exchanges which Israel had initiated and perpetuated, evidently with the original intention of expanding it into an invasion which would have been very big, yet - since superhawk Sharon had not yet joined the cabinet - not quite as big as it eventually turned out to be.³⁸

In April, Israeli aircraft shot down two Syrian helicopters. These were supposedly on their way to ‘kill Christians’. The truth was that, in a ground offensive devised and supervised by Mossad ‘advisers’ on the spot, Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists were mounting an intolerable challenge to Syria’s control of the region, the Beqa’a Valley, over which the helicopters had been shot down.³⁹ In retaliation, Syria introduced surface-to-air (SAM) missiles into the Beqa‘a, prompting Begin to declare that, as a threat to Israel’s security, these could ‘under no circumstances’ be permitted to stay. Thanks largely to American pressure, however, stay they did. Then, in a diversion from the ‘missile crisis’, Begin made another incautious pledge: no more Palestinian rockets would fall on Kiryat Shmona. But they soon did - and with a vengeance.

The Israeli army had been making no secret about its intentions: ‘We are the aggressors’, proclaimed military spokesman Brigadier-General Yaakov Even, ‘we push through the so-called border to the so-called sovereign state of Lebanon and we are going after them (the Palestinians) wherever they might hide.’⁴⁰ But this time it had pushed a bit too hard. It was not Arafat, but his commanders, who, fretful at his docility, ordered the gunners to fire. They did so for twelve days solid; 1,230 shells and rockets struck thirty-five settlements and seven army camps in northern Israel. The cost in reprisals was high, for when, in the course of it, the attacks killed three civilians in Nahariya, the Israelis struck back at Fakhani, the PLO’s Beirut headquarters itself. Choosing the height of the Friday rush hour in which to do it, they killed 150 civilians, more Lebanese than Palestinian, and injured 600 in a single air raid; some thirty PLO personnel also died. And by the end of the ‘artillery war’ the casualty ratio stood, typically enough, at about forty to one: at least 2,500 Palestinian and Lebanese dead and injured against some 65 for the other side. Still, with tens of thousands fleeing Kiryat Shmona and the north, the Israelis had never experienced anything quite like this before. It shook and angered Begin - but, maddeningly for him, only strengthened Arafat in his moderation.⁴¹

There was both a fundamental strategic and tactical reason why the more extreme they grew themselves, the more Israeli leaders so detested the Palestinians’ movement in the opposite direction. The strategic one grew out of the fact that while the PLO might have been weak and vulnerable militarily, it had in recent years been making steady headway diplomatically. Its spirit of compromise, its readiness to settle for half-a-loaf, half-Palestine - indeed less than a quarter of it - in a final settlement, won it international credit. The Soviet Union was soon to ‘recognize’ it; it looked as though Europe might one day do so too. It was President Reagan’s special envoy, Philip Habib, who had negotiated an end to the ‘artillery war’; and that - some mischievous people were saying- meant that, implicitly at least, the US, if not Israel itself, had thereby ‘recognized’ it as well. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, a close friend of Washington, was trying to interest it in a ‘two-state’ Middle East ‘peace plan’. If things had gone on like this, Israel might have found itself dragged into peace talks to which the PLO would have been a party. Heaven forbid! So the more accommodating, the more ‘civilized’, this abhorrent organization became the more it alarmed the Greater-Israel expansionists who, in power at last, were bent on securing the whole of Palestine for themselves, and extinguishing any rival national claim to the territories on which the Palestinian nation-state would have arisen. And what, after the ‘artillery war’, now made matters even worse was the way the PLO was so scrupulously respecting the ceasefire. For the Israeli government, wrote Professor Yehoshua Porat, Arafat’s ability to persuade his guerillas, even the most radical of them, thus to abide by it presaged a ‘real catastrophe’. For it meant that they could eventually have approved a broader, longer-term agreement too, ‘and if, in the future, we approach a period of negotiations between ourselves and certain Arab parties other than Egypt, will our government be able to claim that the PLO is a gang of uncompromising assassins who are not legitimate interlocutors?’ The government therefore wanted the PLO to ‘return to its earlier terrorist exploits, to plant bombs all over the world, to hijack plenty of aeroplanes and to kill many Israelis’.⁴² ‘If’ - concurred another scholar - ‘it were to “go political” and gradually renounce military action and terrorism, it would increase the political menace of a Palestinian state. To escape this trap... Israel could do only one thing — go to war.’⁴³

‘IT’S POSSIBLE I WILL BE IN BEIRUT TOMORROW.’

But even the most brazen of aggressors can hardly go to war without at least the semblance of a pretext. Therein lay the Israelis’ tactical problem; for even the US was insisting that - while an invasion might be inevitable - it must not take place without a ‘recognizable provocation’ that was ‘understood internationally’.⁴⁴ And the PLO just would not provide it. For over eight months following the ceasefire UNIFIL forces reported not a single hostile act directed against Israel from Lebanon. Nor could Israel prove any. So, as Begin and company orchestrated a steady crescendo of threats to ‘destroy’, ‘crush‘, ‘annihilate’ or ‘finish off’ what one of them called ‘those bastards on the other side of the northern frontier’‘, they simultaneously cast about for reasons for doing so.⁴⁵ When, in January 1982, five guerillas crossing the Jordan planted mines in the West Bank, Israel denounced this as ‘a grave violation of the ceasefire’. The US disagreed: it wasn’t ‘reason enough’ for Israeli retaliation. According to Israeli newspapers, an attack on Lebanon was called off at the last moment.⁴⁶ In April, the second secretary of the Israeli embassy in Paris - actually a Mossad agent - was assassinated by a group calling itself the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions. Israel promptly blamed the PLO; it was therefore another ceasefire violation. Not so, said the State Department; and the Israeli opposition accused the government of a ‘demagogy’ that threatened to drag the country into a conflict for which there was no ‘national consensus’. But again the army mobilized for an invasion which, it was forecast, might carry it to Beirut. Again, bowing to the US pressure, Begin called it off.

It was the Israelis themselves who, in April, first violated the ceasefire with an air raid, killing twenty-five and wounding eighty, on a string of Palestinian positions between Sidon and Beirut. What, according to Chief of Staff Raful Eitan, had finally ‘broken the camel’s back’ was the killing of an Israeli officer by a landmine in Major Haddad’s border enclave. For Eitan, the question of what the officer was doing in Lebanese territory was beside the point. The Palestinians did not reply. And the Israelis blithely asserted that, so far as they were concerned, the ceasefire was still in effect. Three weeks later a boy and a girl were injured by a bomb blast in Jerusalem. This, too, was supposedly a south Lebanese ceasefire violation; so the planes struck again, killing eleven and wounding twenty-eight. This time the Palestinians did reply with rockets and artillery, but, since they deliberately avoided population centres, there were no casualties. The Israeli cabinet now decided, however, that all these Palestinian violations had rendered the ceasefire ‘null and void’. Eitan could not hide his eagerness for the fray: ‘Now that I’ve built a military machine which costs billions of dollars I have to use it. It’s possible I will be in Beirut tomorrow.’⁴⁷

Clearly the Israelis had just about dispensed with pretexts altogether. For form’s sake, however, they did claim one for the launching of the Fifth Arab-Israeli War. The attempted assassination, on 3 June, of the Israeli ambassador in Britain, Shlomo Argov, was not the doing of the PLO, which promptly denounced it. It was another exploit of Arafat’s arch-enemy, the notorious, Baghdad-based Fatah dissident Abu Nidal, who directed his particular brand of pure, unbridled terrorism more against the mainstream PLO leadership, particularly moderates within its ranks, than against the Israel enemy - for whom, it was said, he also later worked.⁴⁸ One of the assassins was actually a colonel in Iraqi intelligence; for reasons of their own the Iraqi Baathists were desperately anxious to provoke an Israeli onslaught on their Syrian rivals. The Israelis scorned such distinctions. Arabs had attacked a Jew. It didn’t matter where. That, too, had become a ceasefire violation. This time Begin didn’t hesitate. The assassination attempt, said his spokesman, had ‘put an end to a long period of Israeli restraint. Those who believed that the ceasefire ... on the Lebanese front meant that everywhere else Jewish blood could flow with impunity are mistaken.’ He unleashed his air force on Sabra and Shatila. Sixty to a hundred people were killed, some 275 wounded. Palestinian artillery opened up on northern Israel. One person was killed and four wounded. The planes came back the next day: 130 died. Palestinian artillery killed three in northern Israel. An Israeli minister went to Galilee and told the inhabitants: ‘Begin pledged that not a single rocket will fall on Kiryat Shmona. Tsahal [the Israeli army] will ensure that this pledge is respected.’⁴⁹

ITS ‘GREATEST FOLLY’: THE ISRAELI ARMY ENTERS THE MORASS OF LEBANON

The next morning - fifteen years, almost to the day, after its greatest triumph, the Six-Day War - the Israeli army embarked on what its well-known historian, Martin van Creveld, called its ‘greatest folly’.⁵⁰ It entered what was famously to become the ‘morass’, the ‘quagmire’ of Lebanon. It did so with an enormous force. Composed of up to 90,000 men, or six and a half divisions, plus one in reserve, with some 1,300 tanks and 1,500 armoured personnel carriers, it was twice the size of the one which, in 1973, had checked the entire Egyptian army. For the first time, they were pitted not against one or more regular Arab armies, of comparable size and comparably equipped, but against a hybrid, guerilla-cum-conventional force of some 10,000-15,000 men-perhaps only 4,000 of those real fighters - without any air or naval power, only recently and hastily thrown together, poorly coordinated, poorly armed, indifferently trained, and seriously lacking in popular support.⁵¹

Years in the making, this was also a war that had been planned and prepared down to the minutest detail.⁵² So when, at 11 o‘clock in the morning of Sunday, 6 June, Israeli ground forces - greeted with rice and rosewater by southern Maronites and even some Shiites too - crossed the frontier at three points and pushed, unresisted, through UNIFIL lines, while others made amphibious landings near Tyre and Sidon, they were very confident of swiftly and smoothly accomplishing what ‘Operation Peace in Galilee’ called upon them to do. That, according to the first communique, was to ‘place the whole of the civilian population of Galilee out of range of the terrorists who have concentrated their base and their headquarters in Lebanon’. It was hardly a modest aim, involving as it did the seizure of a third of the country. But this was no more than the minimum objective of any invasion, the creation of the forty-kilometre-wide ‘security belt’, as both government and opposition had long anticipated it. Within twenty-four hours the invaders appeared well on the way to achieving it. ‘Tyre, Beaufort [the celebrated, guerilla-held, medieval fortress that commands the central approaches to Galilee] Fall As Israel Defence Forces Operation Nears Completion’, was the Jerusalem Post’s headline of Tuesday, 8 June. Evidently the newspaper really believed what Begin had promised the Knesset: that the campaign would be over within forty-eight hours.

AN AMERICAN ‘HUNTING LICENCE’ FOR SHARON

In officially confining itself to this objective, the government was only seeking to mollify the opposition and those among the public who, though very uneasy, were ready to support a military action that went no further than that. It was also seeking to reassure the US, confirming what Begin had privately assured Reagan: that Israel had no intention of going beyond that 40-km limit, still less of attacking the Syrians.⁵³ Not that, should it actually do so, the US was going to be very angry, or very surprised. If the coming to power of the Likud and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty had been the two most important factors behind the Fifth Arab-Israeli War, the advent of the Reagan Administration, in 1981, had undoubtedly constituted a third - if subsidiary - one. As Begin himself acknowledged, there had never been an administration as favourable to Israel as this one. It included many luminaries, largely Jewish, of the ‘neoconservative’ movement, now achieving real influence for the first time, and was impregnated with their ‘good-versus-evil’ view of the world, their crusading zeal against the Soviet Union, their strident advocacy of military power, and, above all, their devotion to Israel, especially the militant, expansionist, right-wing Israel of Begin and Sharon. For them American and Israeli interests were one and the same, and the PLO was an enemy of peace, a Soviet proxy, which, as Sharon said, had ‘converted [Lebanon] into the world centre for terrorism operated by the Soviet Union’.

America’s love affair with Israel was no longer an embarrassment, or liability, in its relations with the Arab world; Israel was now elevated, more clearly than ever before, to the status of ‘strategic asset’, and - in Reagan’s words - the only ally on which, thanks to its ‘democratic will, national cohesion, technological capacity and military fiber’, the US could ‘truly rely’ for the prosecution of its policies in the region.⁵⁴ In General Alexander Haig, his secretary of state, the Israelis rejoiced to have a vintage Cold Warrior, who saw the Middle East from one, simplistic perspective only: as an arena of superpower conflict, with Israel as a vital Western bulwark against the Soviet bloc, global terror and Arab extremism. For all his admonitions about a ‘recognizable pretext‘, and a ‘proportionate response’, Haig effectively gave Sharon a green light to proceed, or, as his assistant secretary for the Middle East, Nicolas Veliotes, later put it, he spoke to him in such a way that, ‘however [he] intended it’, a man like Sharon could only see it ‘as a hunting licence’.⁵⁵

But the real, larger ambition was already implicit in that first communiqué. Israel, it had said, would not attack the Syrians unless the Syrians attacked first. But no sooner had Sharon’s troops reached the forty-kilometre line than they were heading down the coastal highway to the outskirts of Beirut and pushing through the thinly defended Shouf mountains where they were poised to cut the Beirut-Damascus highway and Syrian communications with the capital. It had actually been Sharon’s intention to take on the Syrians and go to Beirut all along. But he had pretended otherwise. From the outset there had been two versions of his campaign. The so-called ‘Big Pines’ was the real one, and the one he did not reveal to his cabinet, the Americans, or even many of his army commanders. ‘Little Pines’ was - officially at least - the only one they knew about. But Little Pines was already accomplished. In other words, wrote Sharon’s biographer, he, Begin and Chief of Staff Eitan had lied to just about everyone, joining forces in a ‘national deception the likes of which had never been seen in the State of Israel’.⁵⁶ And they would effect the transition from Little Pines to Big Pines with innumerable further lies, with allegations that Syria had violated the latest ceasefire whereas in fact they had violated it themselves, and with excuses for further advances which supposedly unforeseeable, but in reality deliberately engineered, battlefield developments provided. However hard they tried to keep out of the way, the Syrians were drawn into unequal combat, in which they took heavy and humiliating losses: 1,200 men killed, 300 taken prisoner, over 300 tanks destroyed.⁵⁷ On 11 June, in a long promised, technological tour de force, the Israeli air force took out their SAM missiles in the Beqa‘a Valley and shot down some eighty aircraft, about a quarter of the Syrian air force, for the loss of only one of their own. On 13 June Sharon, in full battle dress, exultant ‘like a latterday Tamburlain‘,⁵⁸ led a column of tanks towards Lebanon’s presidential palace, from which a hapless Elias Sarkis, overlooking a blitzed and burning Beirut, enjoyed sovereignty over about six square miles of his country. With the Beirut-Damascus highway now cut and the capital encircled, Sharon was linking up with Bashir Gemayel and his Phalangists. It was a military exploit whose political symbolism was also plain: henceforward Israel would shape its neighbour’s destiny through the presidency itself- with Bashir as its next incumbent.

‘UNDER THE PROTECTION OF ISRAELI BAYONETS’

As for the Israelis, Begin and his officials never tired of repeating that they would leave as soon as the Syrians and the ‘terrorists’ did. For they did not covet an inch of Lebanese territory. Yet some Israelis clearly did. They included Yuval Ne’eman, leader of the neo-fascist Tehiya Party, who became a cabinet minister during the invasion. Israel should prepare for ‘a long stay in Lebanon’, he urged, and ‘could possibly even reach an agreement on border rectification’ in a region ‘which geographically and historically is an integral part of Eretz Israel’.⁶¹ The Gush Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, the fundamentalist settler movement beloved of Sharon, rushed in with biblico-strategic claims of its own. Had not the conquered territory once belonged to the tribes of Asher and Naftali? One of its spiritual mentors, Rabbi Israel Ariel, called for the annexation of most of Lebanon, including Beirut, which ‘our leaders should have entered without hesitation’ and ‘killed every single one [of its inhabitants] ... not a memory or trace should have remained’.⁶²

Older conquests were not forgotten in the excitement of the new one. On the contrary Sharon vigorously enacted his conviction that the harder he hit the PLO the more readily the West Bankers and Gazans would acquiesce in the new order he had in store for them. ‘We can do anything we want now in the territories’, exulted a senior official, ‘and no one will be able to stop us. If they didn’t stop us from going to Beirut, then we will certainly be able to install an order favourable to us in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.’⁶³

The attitude of the United States at first seemed to keep pace with the expanding objectives of its protégé. In contrast with former President Carter’s disapproval of the much less ambitious, much less indefensible invasion of 1978, the Reagan Administration refused, again and again, to go along with Security Council draft resolutions calling for Israel’s immediate withdrawal. Secretary of State Haig said that there should be an evacuation of ‘all foreign forces’, thereby putting the Israelis on the same footing as the Syrians and the Palestinians who, however unwelcome, were at least Arabs in an Arab country, with Arab and Lebanese sanction for their presence. Privately, he said that the only way to accomplish that was to have the PLO and the Syrians believe that ‘if the Israelis were forced to, they were going to do what they had to do militarily: take Lebanon! Take West Beirut! And if necessary even go to Damascus.’⁶⁴

THE ‘KING OF ISRAEL’ PROMISES FORTY YEARS OF PEACE

No wonder Begin exulted, and his supporters with him. The ‘King of Israel’ had made good his electoral promise. No more rockets on Kiryat Shmona, of course - but that, by now, was subsumed within the infinitely grander, demonstrated fact of Israel’s power and impregnability ‘There is no other country around us that is capable of attacking us,’ he told the National Defence Council with a pride which, on this occasion, did not impair his objectivity. ‘We have destroyed the best tanks and planes the Syrians had ... Jordan cannot attack us ... and the peace treaty [with Egypt] stood the test.’ More than that, the King of Israel had acquired an empire that now reached beyond the bounds of Eretz Israel proper, or, at least, an ability to prosecute those quasi-imperial, hegemonic designs which, since Ben-Gurion’s day, Lebanon had been destined to be the first of Israel’s neighbours to experience. No, the ‘terrorists’ had not threatened Israel’s existence, only the lives of its citizens. But there was no moral obligation to launch a war only when there was no choice. ‘On the contrary, a free people ... which hates war, loves peace, but insists on its security must create conditions in which its war- though necessary - is not unchosen.’ And he forecast forty years of peace - more or less.⁶⁵

But that was just about the last time this most florid of orators was ever so plausibly to vouchsafe such florid pronouncements. For pride was soon to have its great, if long-drawn, fall: imperial hubris its steady, demoralizing nemesis. Unquestionably, the Israelis did quite quickly achieve one key objective. They did drive Arafat out of Beirut; they did destroy his state-within-a-state. But they only achieved that at the price of what amounted, in the long run, to a huge strategic setback of their own. For the first time in its history, their army, whose legendary prowess had held the entire Arab world in awe, found itself very seriously unequal to the waging of a war which should, in principle, have been its easiest ever. From the outset, wrote Palestinian scholar and on-the-spot observer Rashid Khalidi, it had been vital that, for the achievement of any of Sharon’s aims - from the ‘peace in Galilee’ to the grandiose feats of geopolitical engineering that were supposed to come in its wake - it score ‘a rapid, indisputable and psychologically overwhelming triumph. It was not enough simply to beat the PLO. It was essential that in virtually every battle, PLO forces [as well as the Lebanese Muslim/leftists and Syrian units in Lebanon] be routed, and their men killed, captured or sent streaming in flight, sowing panic before them.’⁶⁶

It did at first look as though something like that might happen; as though, having reached the gates of the guerilla-held, predominantly Muslim, western half of Beirut, Sharon’s troops would proceed to storm the city itself, and - as Philip Habib, Reagan’s special envoy, put it - ‘totally and visibly smash [the PLO] into oblivion’, or - as a Lebanese politician put it - ‘carry off Arafat like Adolph Eichmann in a cage’.⁶⁷ But whatever Sharon had originally intended or desired, those initial lightning advances had obscured a painful, unforeseen reality. Some of the guerillas may have been the cowards so many Israelis always said they were. Others were not. Surrounded in the camps of Tyre, Sidon and other southern strongholds, outnumbered and hugely outgunned, they fought till the end. One of their best commanders, Abdullah Siyam, died, along with dozens of his men, in a rearguard action which held up their enemy’s progress at the vital Khalde junction outside Beirut by a full six days. The casualties the Israelis were suffering- 269 dead within three weeks - were a warning of what awaited them if they tried to take the capital itself, a sprawling high-rise jungle, a street-fighter’s dream, on which the guerillas were falling back, organizing and fortifying it for their last stand.⁶⁸

BEGIN AND SHARON BEGIN TO LOSE THEIR WAR

So the Israelis halted at the gates. It was not clear at the time, but this was actually the critical moment of hesitation, failure of nerve even, when Begin, Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan began to lose their war, to lose the initiative that only complete and devastating success in its earliest phases could have assured them. On the one hand, they were flinching at applying that central tenet of their own, interventionist credo: that with force, and force alone, they would get their way. On the other, in the politico-diplomatic sphere that was increasingly impinging on the military one, they were ceding ground to others, and chief among them, of course, the US. Even Reagan’s America, uniquely friendly though it was, realized that it could not go all the way with its unruly protégé without incurring grievous risk to its larger, Arab interests in the region. It was, at least in part, precisely because he thought it could that Haig was driven from office a mere three weeks after the war began; and when he was the reins of diplomacy fell mainly into the hands of special envoy Habib, an altogether less partisan personality, who not merely confronted Sharon, but came to hate him, ‘with a deep, dark passion’, for what he considered him to be: a ‘killer’ and ‘the biggest liar this side of the Mediterranean’.⁶⁹

From the very outset of the seven-week siege an unaccustomed Israeli confusion and uncertainty reigned. Eitan said that, though his men had not been given orders to enter it, they would ‘encircle and completely destroy the terrorist nerve centre’. Their leaders had already fled, he claimed. But that was wish-fulfilment. For Arafat was very much in evidence. He popped up all over the place, touring his front-line positions, even playing chess with foreign correspondents. His men would never leave or, if they did, only for Palestine. He would sooner die at his post. That, however, was as rhetorical as the Israelis’ threat to come and get him; at the same time, through negotiations via Lebanese intermediaries with Habib, he was seeking a diplomatic solution, one in which he preserved at least something, if only the shadow, of his state-within-a-state.

Sharon would not have it. The PLO must ‘disappear’, he told the Knesset. There must be no military presence - even just to protect the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Bourj al-Brajneh - nor a political or symbolic one. As the wrangling dragged on, the Israelis, in their frustration, repeatedly threatened to storm the city. But that was rhetoric too. Indeed the siege degenerated into the very antithesis of the Blitzkrieg brilliance in which they, and no one more than the daredevil defence minister himself, had once taken such pride. Instead of those swift, clean victories in the uninhabited wastes of Sinai or the sparsely populated Golan, here they were, reduced to the same tactics that the Syrians had used before them: stationary wars of attrition, endless artillery duels which slaughtered civilians by the hundreds but achieved no military objectives. They also emulated, outdid them in fact, in other, decidedly non-military activities, such as the looting of private homes, stealing cars, telephones, video and telex machines, even wooden school benches. And they left their distinctive calling card all over the country: human excrement in drawers, on beds, in churches and mosques, on hospital floors - and in the cigar boxes of the opulent.⁷⁰ The only difference, militarily, was the sheer weight and sophistication of the firepower at their disposal; in addition to the conventional ordnance, delivered from 800 tanks and artillery pieces deployed around the city, from gunboats offshore and an air force in total command of the skies, they launched concussion, cluster and phosphorus bombs.⁷¹ Their targets were not just, or even mainly, military, but every kind of civilian one: multi-storey apartment blocks demolished at a stroke, hospitals, hotels and embassies, schools and refugee camps. Sharon would usually unleash the air force - in raids that would kill one, two, or three hundred people at a time - not to reinforce Habib’s diplomacy, but in annoyance at its achievements.⁷²

There was more to this than hatred or vindictiveness: Sharon was afraid that diplomacy would forestall not only the total defeat of the PLO, but his larger geopolitical designs for installing Bashir Gemayel and the Maronite ‘pro-Zionists’ in power as well. But in the end the wantonness and brutality with which he conducted his campaign further undermined his ability to conduct it at all, by provoking unrest within his army- one distinguished commander and hero of an earlier war went into open rebellion against this one - unprecedented wartime protest at home, ministerial dissension, international outrage and, finally, the fury of President Reagan, who, after a particularly murderous air raid, told Begin that the onslaught must cease. To which Begin replied:

I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, among innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the altar of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate, so that which happened once on instructions from Berlin - with or without inverted commas - will never happen again.⁷³

But his confidence in Sharon had been shaken, and when, with the next great raid, the call that Reagan made to Jerusalem betrayed even greater fury still, he and his cabinet were moved to strip the defence minister of his powers to order ground or aerial bombardments at all, assuming them in his place.⁷⁴

Occasionally, under cover of massive bombardment, ground troops did push forward into guerilla-held territory, but whether they held what little gains they made or were forced to relinquish them, they got more very unpleasant foretastes of what awaited them if they attempted to take the whole of it. Indeed, if anything it was the guerillas who, in their particular form of combat, were displaying the panache, daring and ingenuity that the Israelis used to display in theirs. ‘We don’t want to sound arrogant’, said Abu Khalid, a front-line commander at the international airport, ‘but it is we who are teaching the Israelis now, we who have mobility. They wait in their tanks with their electronically controlled machine-guns. They have become cowards, really. And they lie about their casualties.’⁷⁵

‘BEIRUT IS NOT OURS TO DESTROY.’

In time, however, Arafat and his guerilla leadership decided that they would have to withdraw, leaving no military and very little political or symbolic presence behind. Their enemy’s firepower and overall strategic advantage were too great and it was apparently ready to use them to destroy the whole city over the heads of its inhabitants. The rank and file did not like this decision, and there were murmurings of ‘treason’ from some of Arafat’s harsher critics. Had they not already held out, far longer than any Arab country in any former war, against all that the most powerful army in the Middle East - and the fourth most powerful in the world, according to Sharon ⁷⁶ — could throw against them? Surely, if they held out longer still, the Israelis would be forced, under mounting international pressure, either to retreat or to take that decision they clearly dreaded: not just to go on bombing the city from afar, but to conquer it, street by blitzed, blood-drenched street, in an operation that might end up costing them hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers’ lives? It was probably Lebanese, American and Arab factors more than strictly Palestinian ones that swayed their leaders. In Lebanon, with Sharon’s blitz and the outrage it caused, the Palestinians had actually won back a good deal of the sympathy and support, among their natural Muslim and leftist constituency, which their pre-war conduct had cost them. But they knew that, if they expected too much, they could easily lose it again. ‘If this had been Jerusalem,’ they said, ‘we would have stayed to the end. But Beirut is not ours to destroy.’⁷⁷ Despite all the damage the Israelis had done themselves in American eyes, the PLO remained the bête noire, the bad guy, it always had been, its politically unconditional departure from Beirut almost as much an American as an Israeli demand.

But it was the Arabs who did most - or, to be more precise, least - to drive the Palestinians into their new, and far-flung, exile. Here, for the first time in the history of the Arab-Israeli struggle, was the hated ‘Zionist enemy’ besieging an Arab capital. Its arrogance and its savagery had surpassed all limits. Arafat was right: it would have been better for the Arab regimes if he had fled or his fighting forces had crumbled beneath the initial onslaught.⁷⁸ It would at least have spared them the ignominy and contempt they earned during the two and half months in which, as the Palestinians fought alone, they did nothing, by arms or diplomacy, to help them. The ‘kings and presidents’ could not even rise to that old stand-by, an emergency summit conference, let alone decide on a collective course of action. President Mubarak of Egypt denounced the invasion as ‘illegal, inhumane and contrary to the spirit of the Camp David agreements’, but he resisted all guerilla appeals to repudiate the agreements in retaliation. King Fahd said that Saudi Arabia was putting ‘all its resources and potentials’ at the disposal of the Palestinians but, as Israel rained down death and destruction with American-supplied weapons, this champion of Pax Americana in the Middle East just as steadfastly rejected Palestinian appeals to use its oil and financial power against Israel’s incorrigible superpower supporter. Syria, self-styled protector of Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance movement, did fight for a while. After its annihilation of Syria’s missile defences and other deadly blows, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire. The Baathist regime promptly accepted it - and staged victory celebrations in Damascus. For this, it said, was the first time in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Israel rather than an Arab country had asked for a ceasefire. When Israel proceeded to break its own ceasefire, not once but a dozen times - for every ceasefire was a ruse - the Syrians, withdrawing from the fray themselves, told the Palestinians to stand, fight and turn Beirut into ‘a cemetery for the invaders’. Any agreement achieved through Habib, they said, would be ‘like Sadat and Camp David’. As for Colonel Gadafi of Libya, patriot of patriots, he only had advice to offer: the Palestinians should commit suicide rather than withdraw.

Withdraw - under the protection of a multi-national force of Americans, French and Italians - 11,500 Palestinians and 2,700 Syrians trapped with them finally did. But it was no wonder, as they did, that the guerillas reserved their bitterest curses not for Israel - whose villainies they took for granted - but for their Arab brethren, whose ‘betrayal’, in this latest instalment of what Arafat once called an ‘Arab plot’, had exceeded what even they had expected. ‘Save your tears for the Arab rulers,’ shouted one departing fighter to his weeping kinsfolk. Ask them, ask Gadafi‘, shouted another, ‘where were their MiGs and Mirages.’ At the port, within earshot of clean-faced young Marines come to protect the ‘stability’ of the Middle East, a third fighter, younger even than they but hardened beyond his years, swore that ‘we are going to put Israel aside for five years and clean up the Arab world. All our rulers are traitors. There must be vengeance, assassinations.’ He clearly planned to be among the assassins. Gentler comrades smiled but did not dissent.⁷⁹

The Beirut siege was soon to pass into heroic legend. The PLO bravely called it a victory. Morally, and measured by the expectations of both sides, perhaps, on balance, it was. But historically, like ‘Black September’ 1970, or the cruel blow that Syria dealt it in 1976, it was another political and military setback for Arafat and the Revolution he had founded, the greatest, in fact, that he had suffered so far. He lost his one and only politico-military powerbase; most of his fighters were exiled to no fewer than eight Arab countries, some of them - the two Yemens, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria - a good thousand miles and more from the Palestine it was their mission to liberate. And he lost it for no political quid pro quo, no firm American or international promise, or even reasonable expectation, of that permanent state, in Palestine itself, for which he had aspired to trade in his provisional one in exile. Thereafter, his movement was to be racked by political dissension, and what was left of its forces in Syrian-controlled regions of Lebanon to be rent by a mini civil war. But first there was Sabra and Shatila, a tragedy for the Palestinians - but Israel’s much greater disgrace, and downfall as a would-be imperial power.