CHAPTER SEVEN

The Massacre of Sabra and Shatila

Israel’s imperial nemesis: 1982-1985

‘A PEACE WITH LEBANON BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR’

Driving out the Palestinians, however important in itself, had always been the minimum prerequisite for the larger, more creative elements of Sharon’s geopolitical grand design. He was now free to concentrate on the first of these, the final consummation of that early Zionist dream of ‘Christian Lebanon’ as Israel’s ‘natural ally’ in the Arab world. For him and Begin, establishing such a Lebanese ‘new order’ had been the real point of the war.¹ Without it their whole enterprise - not to mention the unexpectedly high price in blood and treasure it had already incurred - would lose its justification. And six weeks into the invasion, had not the ‘King of Israel’, his glory at its still untarnished height, assured a vast, adoring throng that ‘before the end of the year we shall have signed a peace treaty with Lebanon’?²

On 23 August, even before the Palestinian exodus was complete, they accomplished another, vital step in that direction. On that day, Bashir Gemayel, the man in whom they had vested all their hopes, the only man, idol of his community, who could ever in fact have fulfilled them, was chosen as the next president. In Lebanon, it is parliament that does the choosing, and it is certainly the most democratic process of its kind in an otherwise very undemocratic Arab world. All the same, though members of parliament cast the actual votes, greater states, both near and far, exert an influence over the way they do. In 1976, it was largely in deference to Syria that they had plumped for Elias Sarkis, because Syria was the master then. This time it was Israel’s turn. Gemayel’s elevation was accomplished in the Fiyadiya barracks, just outside Beirut, where Phalangist militiamen formed an inner cordon, with Israeli soldiers just behind them. It had not been an entirely foregone conclusion, and Sharon and company had been obliged to exert themselves on his behalf with pressure, threats, cash - and even the helicoptering of one elderly parliamentarian from an isolated village in the Beqa’a before the Syrians could get at him.³

Occasion for rejoicing though this was - and even Mossad agents joined the Phalangists in their celebratory gunfire - there were still good reasons for apprehension too.⁴ The use of military power for the achievement of quasi-imperial, geopolitical goals had proved problematic enough in the siege of Beirut; it was threatening to prove even more so now.

‘SHEIKH BASHIR’ TURNS AGAINST HIS ISRAELI BENEFACTORS

It was, in fact, that old, old story - that abiding conflict within the Maronite psyche.⁵ Here it was, re-emerging again, and at this, the most critical moment it ever could have - Maronite ‘Arabism’ staging its comeback even as Maronite ‘pro-Zionism’ stood on the cusp of final victory. And it was doing it, irony of ironies, in the breast of a single man, ‘Sheikh Bashir’ himself. To be sure, that young blood would never have got where he was without Israel and its interventionists, or without the hearty show of ‘pro-Zionism’, sincere or otherwise, through which he had encouraged them into intervening so spectacularly on his behalf in the first place. He knew that. But, president-to-be, he also knew that he had better respect, insofar as he could bring himself to do so, the inter-communal conventions and compromises of the sectarian state. Yes, the Maronites were still primus inter pares; he would brook no doubts about that. Nonetheless, the time had surely come to shed the image of the militant Christian warrior who would very likely lord it over the Muslims with the same violence and coercion, so far mainly directed against his own community, which had stained his rise to supreme office; to be a ‘strongman’ perhaps - for surely the unruly Lebanese could do with one of those - but a strongman who could woo and conciliate too. Already he was having some success in that regard. He also had to shed the image of Israeli puppet pure and simple. That, indeed, was something he had already begun to do - and just when Sharon could least afford it. He had reneged on what the Israelis had, or claimed to have, expected of him: that his men, not theirs, would take on the job of storming West Beirut. Nor was that all: he had not even allowed Sharon to land his combat troops at Junieh, ‘Marounistan’s’ principal port. And after his election he began to sound positively unfriendly, even hostile, towards his Israeli benefactors, insisting that he would never make peace with Israel without the consent of ’all’ Lebanese.⁶

It disturbed the Israelis, and all the more so because the Americans were actually encouraging him in this stand. The Reagan Administration had appreciated the expulsion of the PLO and the humbling of Soviet-backed Syria; but it had also been disturbed at various Israeli excesses, as well as at the sheer enormity of Sharon’s geopolitical grand design, not least his ambition to transform America’s loyalest of allies, Jordan, from Hashemite kingdom into Republic of Palestine. It thought that they were pushing Gemayel too hard, that it was unreasonable of them to expect him, hardly installed as president, to defy at least half of his population, and most of the Arab world, for the sake of a ‘separate peace’.⁷ A serious divergence was opening up between Israel and the infinitely indulgent superpower. It found expression in the ‘Reagan peace plan’, an initiative designed to restore at least some of the favour which its indulgence had cost it in the eyes of its Arab friends. The plan was far from prescribing what Arafat wanted, an independent Palestine state in Palestine itself; in fact it seemed to herald a return of Hashemite rule over the West Bank - with formerly Egyptian-ruled Gaza thrown in - which Arafat had once regarded as little better than the Israeli variety. But at least it was something. And it infuriated Begin, putting paid as it did to expectations that, via Lebanon and the crushing of the PLO, he could now proceed with the full-scale absorption of the occupied territories into his Greater Israel in the making. It was, as ever, in Lebanon that Israel once again made known its displeasure at a diplomatic initiative it did not like. In blatant violation of the evacuation agreement, its ground forces advanced 600 metres from their existing positions on the outskirts of West Beirut to the very edge of Sabra and Shatila. And it peremptorily summoned Gemayel to a meeting in Nahariya with Begin and Sharon.

THE DOUGHTY CHRISTIAN WARRIOR CRIED: ‘PUT THE HANDCUFFS ON; I AM YOUR VASSAL’

Both these men considered that the first instalment had now fallen due on the huge debt their newly elected protégé owed them. But what they got was further evidence of his evasiveness and ingratitude. They kept him waiting for two hours and then - the champagne and welcoming cordialities swiftly dispensed with - Begin told him, in his starchiest tone, that ‘the first thing you must do as president is to visit Jerusalem or at least Tel Aviv’. When Gemayel demurred, Begin demanded that they set a date for signing a peace treaty; and before the inwardly seething young president-elect could even respond to that, Begin decreed that it should take place before the end of the year. Finally, when Begin suggested that Major Saad Haddad, the commander of the Army of Free Lebanon whom Gemayel despised and wanted to put on trial for desertion, be appointed chief of staff in his administration, a shouting match ensued. It was, however, Sharon who shouted loudest, pointing out that Israel had Lebanon in its grasp and that he would be well advised - like Haddad - to do what Israel expected of him. Whereupon, the doughty Christian warrior thrust out both his arms, crying: ‘put the handcuffs on; I am your vassal’.⁸ The meeting ended in acrimony and without an agreement of any kind. ‘He treated me like a child,’ Gemayel confided to his father on his return to Lebanon. And his indignation was of a piece with sentiments now seeping into his community’s consciousness at large. After exposure to Israelis in large numbers, at close range and for a prolonged period, many a Maronite, especially if young and female, found little in them of the blue-eyed, fair-skinned ‘Europeans’ of their fond imagining. On the contrary, they seemed so scruffy, slovenly, so sour a lot and - a great many of them - so positively ‘Arab’ in appearance; and even worse, it soon became apparent that these ‘Arabs’ — for that, in origin, is what so many of them were - in turn looked down on them, the Christians they had been sent to save from ‘genocide’, as just another species of Arab themselves. And anyway, some now muttered out loud, who, if not the Israelis, had saddled their country with these wretched Palestinians, source of all its woes, in the first place?⁹

THE ASSASSINATION OF ‘SHEIKH BASHIR’

If Bashir was already trouble enough in life, he became trouble writ large in death. His ‘Arabist’ attitudes had come too late to save him and, like King Abdullah of Jordan or President Sadat before him, he suffered the fate to which Arab leaders who went too far in the service of the enemy were inherently liable. On 14 September he and twenty-six others died when a remote-controlled bomb went off in the Phalange party headquarters where he was making his last, weekly address to the faithful before assuming the presidency.

It was a huge setback for Sharon; in fact, his whole political future now hung in the balance. The Lebanese ‘new order’ of which Gemayel in person was to have been the central pillar was collapsing like a house of cards before it had even been erected. Sharon panicked; drastic action was required. He decided that his army had to go into Muslim West Beirut- and the Phalangists with it. The first of his official reasons for doing what Israel had solemnly assured the Americans that it would never do was to protect the Palestinians, or Lebanese Muslims, from the likely vengeance of these self-same Phalangists. The first of his real reasons was to try to ensure that, whoever succeeded Gemayel, Israel would retain its ability to shape the ‘new order’. The Phalangists had immediately to fill the political vacuum left by their leader’s disappearance; otherwise, he melodramatically warned them, the Muslims, backed by residual Palestinian ‘terrorists’, might turn the tables on them, destroy the very basis of the sectarian state and seize the presidency, that sacrosanct Maronite preserve, for themselves.¹⁰ Could ever a man have more knowingly engineered the very horror he ostensibly sought to prevent?

In the fifteen years that, by the standard reckoning, it was destined to endure, the Lebanese ‘civil war’ yielded a rich variety of atrocities, in the perpetrating of which no protagonist, Muslim, Christian, Lebanese, Arab or Israeli, was innocent. But if any one of them stood out, qualifying as an atrocity in what is generally felt to be its gravest form, ‘genocide’, it was not the one - of Christians by Syrians or Palestinians - about which Begin had so loudly warned. That one never did come to pass. It was the one which his own side, Israelis and Maronite Christians - those ‘two progressive peoples of the Middle East‘, as Weizmann once called them - now jointly perpetrated against the Palestinians. The UN General Assembly pronounced it an ‘act of genocide’ by a vote of 98 to 19, with 23, including all the Western democracies, abstaining. Its critics contended, with some justification, that, coming from such a body, this was less objective definition than automatic anti-Israeli attitudinizing. But it was harder to say that of other bodies - such as the international commission of inquiry into the massacre headed by Sean MacBride,¹¹ four of whose six members also deemed it ‘a form of genocide’ - or of individuals, especially Jews, around the world who saw it likewise.

It had in fact been inherently likely from the outset that the Israeli invasion would bring some such grisly climax as Sabra and Shatila. That was why, in the negotiations over the withdrawal of the PLO the thorniest issue had always been the guarantees which Arafat demanded for the safety of the Palestinian civilians the fighting men were to leave behind. To the end, he had been agonizingly aware of the inadequacy of those that he finally accepted. True, the US had given its ‘word of honour’ that the Israelis would never enter West Beirut, and special envoy Habib had written to the Lebanese prime minister, Shafiq Wazzan:

The government of Lebanon and the United States will provide appropriate guarantees for the safety ... of law-abiding Palestinian non-combatants left in Beirut, including the families of those who have departed ... The United States will provide its guarantees on the basis of assurances received from the government of Israel and the leaders of certain Lebanese groups [i.e. the Phalangists] with which it has been in contact.¹²

The truth was, however, that for all the passion, and righteous indignation at their scepticism, which he used to persuade both Lebanese and Palestinians, even Habib himself had ‘minimal confidence’ in the purely oral assurances from the parties in whose hands he had so imprudently placed his country’s ‘honour’.¹³ Nor was he at all happy that the multi-national force that supervised the evacuation was mandated to stay for only a month - and even less happy, enraged in fact, when it actually departed a full two weeks before it need have. The US Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, fearful of casualties, had insisted on that, against the advice of the colonel in command of the US contingent. So it was that the Americans, last in, had been the first out, with a smiling Marine holding up for photographers a sign reading ‘mission accomplished’.¹⁴

Just six days later, at 3.30 in the morning of Wednesday, 15 September, Chief of Staff Eitan and General Amir Drori, commander of Israel’s northern region, met with Phalangist leaders at their military headquarters in East Beirut. Together with Fadi Frem, commander-in-chief of the ‘Lebanese Forces’, and Elias Hobeika, the head of intelligence already well known to them as the ‘hero’ of Yarin,¹⁵ they drew up the plan for Phalangist participation in the seizure of West Beirut. It was decided that - in order to spare Israeli lives - the Phalangists would be exclusively entrusted with ‘searching and mopping up’ the refugee camps. That was necessary because of a second, official reason which the Israeli government now adduced for going into Beirut, namely the presence of some 2,000 terrorists, equipped with ‘modern and heavy weapons’, whom the departing PLO had deceitfully left behind. Not merely was this absurdly incompatible with the first reason - protecting the Palestinians from the Phalangists - it was also, if not a fabrication pure and simple, the most ludicrous of exaggerations; and nothing more eloquently illustrated that than the size of the force, a mere 150 to 200 men, which both Israelis and Phalangists deemed sufficient to deal with them.¹⁶

ISRAEL SENDS THE PHALANGISTS INTO SABRA AND SHATILA

At five o’clock that morning the Israelis began their entry. It was easy: the multi-nationals had conveniently removed mines and barricades and resistance from the Muslim/leftists was little more than symbolic. In the entire operation the Israelis lost only seven killed and a hundred wounded.¹⁷

At nine o‘clock, Begin, receiving Habib’s deputy Morris Draper, told him that Israel’s sole objective was ‘to maintain order in the town. With the situation created by the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, there could be pogroms.’¹⁸ What he did not tell Draper was that Israel itself was now about to send into Sabra and Shatila the very people it most expected to carry out such pogroms. ‘If we had been told ... I would have let out a howl,’ said Draper, already aghast at Israel’s action, and what, to him, it signified: a flagrant breach of promise, an ‘unheard-of, straight-out, 100 per cent, baldfaced lie’ told ‘by the prime minister of a friendly state ... to the United States government, his great friend’.¹⁹ In fact, at that point, Begin didn’t even know about the Phalangist involvement himself. Typically, neither his defence minister, nor Chief of Staff Eitan - though both in regular contact - had yet deigned to tell him.²⁰ And in any case it would not be till the evening of the following day, Thursday, 16 September, that Hobeika and his men finally did go in.

But if Begin had known, he would also have known perfectly well what the Phalangists were going to do when they got there. So would any reasonably observant Israeli who knew anything at all about them. And many Israelis knew them very well indeed. They had after all been training them in Israel since 1976. The military correspondent of Yediot Aharonot had called them ‘an organized mob, with uniforms, vehicles, training camps, who have been guilty of abominable cruelties’.²¹ It was common knowledge, too, just what special hatred they reserved for the Palestinians; that, indeed, was the foundation of Israel’s alliance with them. For Gemayel there had been ‘one people too many: the Palestinian people’.²² In his dealings with the Israelis he had left no doubt that, when he came to power, he would ‘eliminate the Palestinian problem’ - even if that meant resorting to ‘aberrant methods against the Palestinians in Lebanon’.²³ His militiamen had never concealed their murderous ambitions. When a group of Israeli parliamentarians visited the southern border Strip, one such militiaman told them: ‘One dead Palestinian is a pollution, the death of all Palestinians, that is the solution.’²⁴ Bamahane, the army newspaper, wrote on I September, just two weeks before the massacre:

A senior Israeli officer heard the following from the lips of a Phalangist: the question we are putting to ourselves is - how to begin, by raping or killing? If the Palestinians had a bit of nous, they would try to leave Beirut. You have no idea of the slaughter that will befall the Palestinians, civilians or terrorists, who remain in the city. Their efforts to mingle with the population will be useless. The sword and the gun of the Christian fighters will pursue them everywhere and exterminate them once and for all.²⁵

Political objectives as well as mere bloodlust drove them. In their meetings with Israeli representatives their leaders had confided that it would be necessary to resort to violence in order to bring about a Palestinian exodus from Lebanon.²⁶ ‘We knew that they wanted to destroy the camps’, said General Amos Yaron, the commander of the Beirut area.²⁷ In this they saw themselves as mere executants of Sharon’s scheme to overthrow King Hussein and dump all Lebanon’s Palestinians on Jordan.²⁸

The Israeli army also knew, at the highest level, just what vengeful feelings had indeed taken possession of the militiamen after the assassination of their idol. Even after inflaming those feelings yet further - by telling them that Palestinians were surely behind the assassination and should be made to pay for it²⁹ - and arranging for their entry into the camps, the chief of staff told a cabinet meeting that Phalangist officers had ‘just one thing left to do, and this is revenge; and it will be terrible ... it will be an eruption the like of which has never been seen; I can already see in their eyes what they are waiting for.’³⁰ They also knew, from his exploits in South Lebanon and before that at the siege of Tal al-Za‘atar in 1976, what free rein Hobeika would be likely to give his men. After Sharon had decided to ‘cleanse the camps’, someone proposed that an Israeli liaison officer be seconded to the Phalangists. But a superior, aware of Hobeika’s past, vetoed the idea, arguing that the Israeli army should not get itself mixed up in atrocities.³¹

After passing through the Israeli roadblocks set up at its entrance the first unit of the ‘Lebanese Forces’ entered Shatila camp at sunset on Thursday. Some carried knives and axes as well as firearms. The carnage began immediately. It was to continue without interruption till Saturday noon. Night brought no respite; the Phalangist liaison officer asked for illumination and the Israelis duly obliged with flares, first from mortars and then from planes.³² Anything that moved in the narrow alleyways the Phalangists shot. They broke into houses and killed their occupants who, not suspecting anything, were gathered for their evening meal, watching television or already in bed. Sometimes they tortured before they killed, gouging out eyes, skinning alive, disembowelling. Women and small girls were raped, sometimes half a dozen times, before, breasts severed, they were finished off with axes. Babies were torn limb from limb and their heads smashed against walls. Entering Akka hospital the assailants assassinated the patients in their beds. They decorated other victims with grenades, or tied them to vehicles and dragged them through the streets alive. They cut off hands to get at rings and bracelets. They killed Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and Syrians as well as Palestinians. They even killed nine Jewesses who, married to Palestinians, had been living in the camps since 1948. Bulldozers were brought in to bury their victims. These also demolished houses which Israeli aircraft had not yet destroyed; for then, roofless as well as terrorized, all the Palestinians would surely have to flee.³³

What was happening in the camps could hardly escape the attention of the Israeli soldiers surrounding them. Their forward command post was a mere 200 metres from the main killing ground, and from the roof of this seven-storey building they had a direct line of sight into the heart of the camps. It was, said one officer, ‘like the front row at the theatre’.³⁴ Hobeika spent Thursday night on the roof of the command post. At 8 p.m., within an hour of the Phalangists’ entry, Lieutenant Elul, General Yaron’s chef de bureau, overheard a radio conversation in which a Phalangist officer inside the camp asked Hobeika what he should do with a group of fifty women and children. ‘This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that’, Hobeika replied, ‘you know exactly what to do.’ Raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist personnel on the roof and Elul understood that the women and children were to be murdered. He rushed to tell Yaron - who, not for the first time, warned Hobeika against harming civilians.³⁵ Later, another Phalangist officer, Jesse Suker, liaison man to the Israelis, was asked what to do with forty-five captured men. ‘Do God’s will,’ Israeli wireless monitors heard him reply. Then Suker turned up in person at the Israeli command post itself with the news that ‘up to now 300 civilians and terrorists have been killed’. Then, a short while after that, Yaron’s chief intelligence officer informed him that the Phalangists had actually found none of those ‘2,000 terrorists’ in the camp at all; instead they were ‘gathering up women, children and probably old people’. He said they ‘don’t know quite what to do with them ...’, but that he didn’t like the sound of Suker’s ‘do what your heart tells you because everything is from God.’ However, Yaron cut him off, assuring him, on the strength of assurances he had just had from Suker himself, that no harm would come to them.³⁶

As dawn broke on Friday, 17 September, Israeli officers and men atop the command post could see the bodies piling up. Later they were to see bulldozers, one or two of them Israeli-supplied, shovelling them into the ground. Soldiers from an armoured unit stationed a mere hundred metres from the camp recalled how visible the killing had been. Their report went to the higher authorities, who were receiving similar ones from other points around the camp.³⁷ Lieutenant Avi Grabowski, second-in-command of a tank company, said that he had seen Phalangists killing women and children, and when his men asked them why, one replied: ‘women give birth to children, and children grow up into terrorists’. Israeli soldiers were instructed to do nothing. ‘We don’t like it,’ an officer told his men, ‘but I forbid any of you to intervene in what is happening in the camps.’³⁸ The soldiers blocked the camp entrances, several times turning back refugees frantic to get out, and on one occasion a tank pointed its cannon at a group of 500 who, white flags held aloft, tried to explain that the marauders were ‘assassinating everybody’.³⁹

At about 4 o‘clock on Friday afternoon generals Eitan and Drori met Phalangist commanders, some of them fresh from the camps. Eitan congratulated them on their operation and the Phalangists, explaining that the Americans had called on them to stop, asked the Israelis for ‘just a bit more time to clean the place up’.⁴⁰ It was agreed that all Phalangists would leave the camps by Saturday morning and that, meanwhile, no extra forces would be sent in. However, even as Eitan left Beirut airport for Tel Aviv, a new Phalangist unit of some 200 men set off for Shatila, mowed down a group of women and children as soon as they got there, massacred all the occupants of the first house they came across and demolished it with a bulldozer. They seemed even less concerned about concealing their deeds than the first unit. They paraded Palestinian women on trucks through the streets of East Beirut, ‘gleefully introducing them to passers-by as brand-new Palestinian widows courtesy of Phalangist guns’.⁴¹

About the same time, Sharon and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir were again meeting Habib’s deputy Draper, who asked that the Israelis hand over their positions to the Lebanese army immediately. Sharon told him that nothing could be done because it was the Jewish New Year. Besides, his own army’s presence was already ‘preventing a massacre of the Palestinian population in the Western part of the city’.⁴² Later that evening, after hearing stories of summary executions and other ‘horrors’ from Israeli officers, the military correspondent of Israeli television, Ben Yishai, telephoned the defence minister and told him that something had to be done immediately. ‘In a few hours the press of the entire world will know about it, and then we’ll be in a real mess.’ Sharon listened attentively and asked if he had any more details. He supplied some. ‘The minister did not react,’ he was later to recall. ‘He thanked me and wished me a happy New Year. My impression was that he knew what was going on in the camps.’ He knew very well, and so did most of the high command, both in the field and back at headquarters in Israel; but no one lifted a finger to stop it.⁴³

The next day the world did indeed learn. Journalists descended on Sabra and Shatila to find the hundreds of bodies which the Phalangists had not had time to bury, the limbs which protruded from the hastily dug graves of those they had, the naked women with hands and feet tied behind their backs, the victims of car-dragging, one of them with his genitals cut off, piled in a garage, the baby whose limbs had been carefully laid out in a circle, head crowning the whole. They stumbled across evidence of resistance from those ‘2,000 heavily armed terrorists’ - the sporting shotgun that lay by the body of a young boy.⁴⁴

The Lebanese army, local and international relief and medical teams attempted to count the putrefying remains as they buried them. But these did not include the many bodies that lay undiscovered in the mass graves and the rubble of demolished homes. Nor did it include those of the missing - those who, during the massacre, had been taken away to an unknown destination. How many had died? A Phalangist commander was asked. ‘You’ll find out’, he replied, ‘if they ever build a subway in Beirut.’⁴⁵ But it could have been a good 3,000.⁴⁶

THE GREATEST MISFORTUNE

It was as a supremely ‘moral nation’ that Israel had invaded Lebanon in the first place. That at least was what Begin had said, and perhaps sincerely believed. The Christian West had once abandoned the Jews to the tender mercies of Hitler and the Nazis; and if, similarly, it were now to do nothing for its co-religionists, the embattled Maronites, the Jews-as-Israelis would be different - and better.⁴⁷ It is from the Holocaust, perhaps above all, that Israel, as a haven for the Jews, has derived its moral raison d’être, its most passionately invoked, most unanswerable reason for being. It was, therefore, above all a moral crisis that Israel faced - the most grievous in its history - now that, far from saving the Maronites, it had joined with them in doing to others, on however reduced a scale, what the Holocaust had done to the Jews.

The dimensions of the crisis were measurable in the instantaneous and worldwide outrage. Inside Israel, the Peace Now movement, whose main role was to agitate against Israeli policies towards the Palestinians and the occupied territories, was first in the field with an immediate, thousand-strong demonstration outside the prime minister’s residence. ‘Begin terrorist, Begin assassin, Beirut-Deir Yassin 1982’ were their slogans. Among them was an eighty-year-old Professor Epstein, who sobbed: ‘after what happened in Beirut I’m ashamed to be an Israeli. It reminds me too much of the Nazis who brought Ukrainians into the ghetto to massacre the Jews. I don’t understand how that could happen to us.‘⁴⁸ ‘War crime in Beirut,’ headlined Haaretz, Israel’s leading newspaper, above an article by its military correspondent Zeev Schiff, who wrote that, with the knowledge of the Israeli authorities, the Phalangists had done to death men, women and children ‘in exactly the same way as the pogroms against the Jews’. ‘This massacre’, said al-Hamishmar, ‘has made of the war in Lebanon the greatest misfortune to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust.’⁴⁹ Under immense pressure from home and abroad, the Labour opposition, which had generally supported the invasion because of its popularity with most of the electorate, joined the hue and cry calling on the government to resign. ‘The Jewish people’, said Labour leader Shimon Peres, ‘is face to face with its conscience ... The fate of Israel, David Ben-Gurion said, is dependent on its strength and righteousness. Righteousness, not just strength, has to guide our deeds.’⁵⁰

In the US, a very angry President Reagan pointed out that Israel had justified its entry into West Beirut on the ground that it would thereby forestall just the kind of tragedy which had now taken place. Like Reagan, Israeli supporters everywhere felt a kind of betrayal. This was not the Israel they thought they knew. Nowhere was this more potentially dangerous than in the US - its Administration, Jewish community or the public at large. A New York woman, interviewed by National Public Radio, said that if Jews could not retain their ethically high standards, she no longer wanted to be one. A Jewish lawyer in Connecticut said he now believed that even Jews were capable of genocide.⁵¹ The Washington correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer, called the massacre ‘a disaster for Israel in Washington-indeed throughout the US. It will take many years - if ever - to regain its once very high moral image in America.’⁵² It did indeed look as though Israel had squandered much of the moral credit on which it had so often to draw in order to wrest political, military and economic support from a sometimes reluctant, if basically subservient, administration.

‘GOYIM ARE KILLING GOYIM, AND THE WORLD IS TRYING TO HANG THE JEWS FOR THE CRIME’

The dimensions of the crisis were also measurable by the outrage against the outrage, the blatant falsehoods and preposterous exculpations, that issued from the Israeli government. Begin chaired an emergency cabinet meeting whose agenda was not the massacre itself, but ‘the frontal assault against the State of Israel and its people’. ‘Goyim are killing goyim,’ he raged, ‘and the world is trying to hang the Jews for the crime.’⁵³ At a cost of $54,000 his government took a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post to denounce the ‘blood libel’ and declare that ‘any direct or implicit accusation that the Israel Defense Forces bear any blame whatsoever for this human tragedy is entirely baseless and without foundation. The people of Israel are proud of the IDF’s ethics and respect for human life.’ According to another official pronouncement, the survivors of Sabra and Shatila had ‘thanked the Israeli army for coming so swiftly to [their] aid’.⁵⁴ In the US, Julius Berman, Chairman of the Conference of the Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, contended that ‘the injunctions of Jewish law are too powerful a force in Jewish consciousness to have permitted or even countenanced a Jewish role in this awful incident. Any suggestion that Israel took part in it or permitted it to occur must be categorically rejected.’ If the apologists blamed anyone, it was the Israeli leaders only, guilty of an ‘aberration’ of which the state and society were innocent.⁵⁵

When denial failed to still the fury, but merely exacerbated it, the government resorted to damage control, to the commission of inquiry for which Israelis - in a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv - and the world clamoured. Its partners-in-crime had already beaten it to it. Lebanon’s official report was completed, signed, sealed and delivered within eleven days of the massacre. It was a total cover-up, part of the campaign on which the Phalangist leadership had immediately embarked to shift all blame to the Israelis - and thereby overcome any Muslim reservations about the choice of Amin Gemayel, brother of Bashir, as president in his place. The report was never published. Indeed, it was said to have ‘disappeared’ from the files of the Lebanese government, or of any person connected with it, including its author himself. However, it is known to have completely exonerated the ‘Lebanese Forces‘, the inference therefore being that, unless ghosts had done the dreadful deed, it could only have been the Israelis themselves, or just possibly - as ‘Sheikh Pierre’, the Phalangists’ grand old man, would privately concede to Muslim oligarchs ready, for the sake of inter-communal co-existence, to connive in such a fiction - those ‘Israeli agents’, those ‘good many Judas Iscariots’, whom Sharon had planted ‘in our ranks’.⁵⁶

Israel’s own commission of inquiry replied in kind. Like the Lebanese one its report was a product of the ruling establishment, and in one respect its purpose, to assuage a grave internal crisis, was not dissimilar. But it also had another, closely related one: to secure, if not the total, then at least the maximum possible exoneration from a credulous US public.⁵⁷ It did tolerably well on the home front, where, symptomatic of a nation’s conscience broadly speaking cleared, the Jerusalem Post waxed lyrical about this ‘splendid example of Israeli - not to say Jewish - justice at work’.⁵⁸ It did even better in the US, where the New York Times announced the advent of a ‘Jerusalem ethic‘, no less, and exclaimed: ‘how rare the nation that seeks salvation by such means’.⁵⁹ The report certainly was not as shamelessly mendacious as its Lebanese counterpart. But it was a blatant whitewash all the same. It exemplified a propensity for moral and intellectual sophistry by which, since the earliest days, official keepers of the Zionist conscience sought to persuade themselves and the world that theirs has always been a humane and righteous creed.

The Kahan Commission - so called after its chairman, Itzhak Kahan, President of the Supreme Court - enunciated its own, judicially spurious and morally expedient doctrine of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect responsibility’.⁶⁰ The Phalangists’ responsibility turned out to be the direct, and therefore truly culpable, one, that of the Israeli authorities merely indirect. The latter’s only fault lay in the fact that, although they sent the Phalangists into the camps for the legitimate reasons they said they did, their decision to do so was taken ‘without consideration of the danger that the Phalangists would commit massacres and pogroms’ when they got there, without ‘proper heed’ being paid to reports of killings as they came in or ‘energetic and immediate action’ being taken to stop them.⁶¹

Although the Commission was charged with examining ‘all the facts and factors’ connected with the massacre, it confined itself in practice to the narrowest of spheres, treating it as an isolated, exceptional event, unrelated to the whole conduct of the war, let alone the larger moral, ideological and historical context in which it took place. Nor did it examine all the clearly relevant ‘facts and factors’ themselves. Or if it did, it did not, by its own admission, disclose any of those that could be injurious to Israel’s ‘national security’ - among them, for example, the fact that Phalangist commanders not only took orders from Israelis but actually received salaries from them too.⁶² The Kahan Report was also notable for its errors, omissions and contradictions. Of the errors, perhaps the most grievous and demonstrable was its assertion that ‘it was impossible to see what was happening within the alleys in the camp from the roof of the [forward] command post’. This assertion was based on the evidence of the soldiers concerned, who would have incriminated themselves had they admitted it was possible. According to other, independent witnesses, such as Newsweek correspondent Ray Wilkinson, the seven-storey building (not five-storey as the Commission had it), a mere 250 paces from the camps, provided a direct, grandstand view that would have enabled anyone on it, with the aid of binoculars, ‘to see even the smallest details’.⁶³ The concept of ‘indirect responsibility’ would have been utterly unsustainable without such errors or omissions. It was in any case hard enough to sustain in the light of the ‘facts and factors’ which the Commission did expose, and even harder still when these were placed in that larger context which the report ignored.

‘In all the testimony we have heard’, it said, ‘there has been unanimity regarding the [fact] that the battle ethics of the Phalangists differ greatly from those of the Israel Defence Force.’ Higher standards were naturally to be expected from a regular army than from a private militia, but after that was taken into account, was there really any substantial difference? Since when had ‘purity of arms’ become anything more than the nostalgic memory of something that had never really existed in the first place? Not for a very long time, according to General Mordecai Gur, chief of staff during the previous, 1978, invasion of South Lebanon. Asked whether, during Operation Litani, the Israeli army had bombarded Lebanese civilians ‘without discrimination’, he replied:

‘I’ve been in the army thirty years. Do you think I don’t know what we’ve been doing all those years? What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really, where do you live? Since when has the population of South Lebanon been so sacred? They know very well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre of Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombarded without authorization.’

‘Without discrimination?’

‘What discrimination? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a non-Palestinian town in north Jordan] done to deserve being bombarded by us?’

‘But the military communiqués always spoke of returning fire and counterstrikes against terrorist targets.’

‘Be serious ... You don’t know that the whole Jordan Valley was evacuated during the War of Attrition?’

‘You maintain that the civilian population should be punished?’

‘And how! I am using Sabra language: and how! I never doubted it, not for one moment. When I said ... bring in tanks as quickly as possible and hit them from afar before the boys reach a face-to-face battle, didn’t I know what I was doing ... ?’⁶⁴

Gur was a pillar of the ‘moderate’ Labour establishment. What was to be expected of the Likud ‘extremist’ who succeeded him? There was a difference, certainly, but it was one of degree, not kind, of posture rather than conduct. Ethically speaking, what the army did under Eitan represented an aggravation, no more, of what it had done under Gur. It was Begin himself who, in the Knesset, deftly and deliberately stressed the essential continuities of Israeli military practice. When, sixty-eight days into the invasion, the Labour opposition was growing restive at the brutalities of the campaign and the bad impression they were making on the outside world, all that Begin had to do, in his own defence, was to cite the text of that famous interview.

‘PERSONALLY I WOULD LIKE TO SEE THEM ALL DEAD.’

If anything, then, Sabra and Shatila merely highlighted what Israelis and Phalangists had in common, the main difference between them being an essentially operational one, whereby, characteristically, the high-tech Israelis killed civilians from afar, with aircraft or long-range artillery, while the low-tech Phalangists did it ‘face-to-face’, and, as Eitan so delicately put it, ‘in conformity with their code of conduct in warfare, if one can put it that way’.⁶⁵ And the two certainly had motives and aims in common beyond the strictly military. In this larger sense, Sabra and Shatila was not an ‘aberration’. On the contrary, it was a culmination - and a dreadful one - for a state, a society and the ideology which infused them.

One does not [wrote Larry Davidson, an American commentator] enter upon the ruination of most of a neighbouring country, culminating in complicity in a genocidal act, and then turn round and excuse it simply as a deviation from one’s normal way of doing things ... What happened in Lebanon was the consequence ... of a 34-year effort to create and preserve a racially-based state ... Israeli law has created first and second-class citizenship based on race and religion, which affects most areas in, and the right of immigration to, Israel. Over time large numbers of non-Jews have been pressured or evicted from land on which they had lived for generations. Not surprisingly, these efforts fostered an enemy which Zionists feel obliged to castigate. Therefore the Palestinians have been labeled terrorists and identified with the Nazis and anti-Semitism.⁶⁶

That was putting it mildly. By the time of Sabra and Shatila that time-honoured Israeli reflex⁶⁷ — demonizing all enemies as terrorists and thereby legitimizing any means of combating them - had reached a new level of intensity; and it was all the more effective in that it coincided with the new American one, which the Israelis themselves had done much to foster, of portraying ‘international terrorism’ as the great new global menace, the ‘vogue evil’ that made of ‘anti-terrorism ... the fashionable crusade’.⁶⁸ And the reflex came, in this Begin era, laced with a contemptuous, racist terminology, which was replete with genocidal overtones and tended to reduce the Palestinians to a ‘subhuman’ category. He himself called the Palestinian militants ‘two-legged beasts’. And he never tired of his Nazi analogies; the alternative to the invasion of Beirut, he said, was Treblinka.⁶⁹ Shortly before the massacre, a group of Israeli ‘doves’ had discussed the pernicious influence of such expressions as ‘nests of terrorists‘, their ‘purification’, and the ‘extermination’ of the ‘two-legged beasts’ who inhabited them. ‘Every child now killed in the bombardment of Beirut’, said one, ‘is being murdered by an Israel journalist.’ These journalists’ ‘original sin’ was the very use of the word ‘terrorist’, first to denote ’all PLO fighters‘, then ‘all PLO members - diplomats, officials, teachers, physicians, nurses in the Palestinian Red Crescent’ - and finally ‘the whole Palestinian people’.⁷⁰ An Israeli soldier did not conceal the effect which this insidious propaganda had had on him. ‘Listen,’ he said:

I know you are tape-recording this, but personally I would like to see them all dead ... because they are a sickness wherever they go ... Seeing dead children and women here is not really nice, but everyone is involved in this kind of war, the women too, so we can’t always punish exactly the right people because otherwise it would cost us a lot of deaths. And for us, I guess, I hope you understand this, the death of one Israeli soldier is more important than the death of even several hundred Palestinians.⁷¹

In short, concluded Davidson, ‘once a nation starts down the road the Zionists have followed in order to build the Jewish state, one comes to Sabra and Shatila. There are no aberrations here.’⁷² And no essential differences in the ‘battle ethics’ of Weizmann’s ‘two most progressive peoples in the Middle East’. The finding of ‘indirect responsibility’ was based on the single premise - and even that one was debatable⁷³ - that Israeli soldiers did not pull the triggers; they merely got their protégés to do so. ‘If you invite the Yorkshire Ripper to spend a couple of nights in an orphanage for small girls,’ said novelist Amos Oz, ‘you can’t, later on, just look over the piles of bodies and say you made an agreement with the Ripper - that he’d just wash the girls’ hair.’⁷⁴

For all its casuistry and emollience, the Kahan report produced demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in the streets and - with the grenade that killed a young soldier protesting the war from which he himself had just returned - the first political murder of its kind in the history of the state. A few hours after Emile Grunzweig’s death, the Begin cabinet accepted the Commission’s findings, as well as its indulgent recommendations, the most far-reaching of which was that Sharon, the chief culprit, should resign.

It was a specious acceptance. All that Begin did was to move Sharon from one cabinet seat to another - that of minister without portfolio. This hypocrisy cried out to heaven, commented the leading newspaper Haaretz. It nonetheless accorded with the dominant mood of the country. According to the Jerusalem Post, the man in the street was largely indifferent to Grunzweig’s death. ‘You should put them all up against the wall and shoot them,’ said a taxi-driver about the Peace Now movement.⁷⁵ Opinion polls showed that 51.7 per cent of the population thought the Commission had been too harsh. Only 31.4 per cent deemed it just, while a tiny minority, 2.17 per cent, deemed it too lenient.⁷⁶ The columnist Yoel Marcus concluded:

In the matter of Sabra and Shatila, a large part of the community, perhaps the majority, is not at all troubled by the massacre itself. Killing of Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, is quite popular, or at least ‘doesn’t bother anyone’, in the words of the youth these days. Ever since the massacre I have been surprised more than once to hear from educated, enlightened people, ‘the conscience of Tel Aviv’, the view that the massacre itself, as a step towards removing the remaining Palestinians from Lebanon, is not terrible. It is just too bad that we were in the neighbourhood.⁷⁷

ISRAEL IN DECLINE ...

Sabra and Shatila, profoundly shocking and damaging in itself, was part and parcel of the much larger debacle - strategic, diplomatic and political as well as moral - which the Fifth Arab-Israeli War represented and which, in retrospect, was a turning-point in Israel’s history. In its own eyes and those of much of the world, the Third Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the quintessential war of ‘self-defence’, had marked the high point of Zionism, the supremely just and well-nigh miraculous triumph of an historically persecuted race; but this war, the imperial ‘war of choice’, had the opposite significance. It marked the beginning of Israel’s decline. The decline was in the first instance military. But, given the primordial importance which Israel, because of the nature of the struggle in which it was engaged, assigned to military power and performance, military questions almost by definition begged much larger, existential questions too.

For historian Martin van Creveld, writing many years later, Operation Peace in Galilee was perhaps the first great landmark in an unfolding tragedy that would reduce the Israeli army from the superb, completely trusted, fighting force of a ‘small but brave people’ it had been in its heroic, early days into a ‘high-tech, but soft, bloated, strife-ridden, responsibility-shy and dishonest army’, ever more mistrusted by the people.⁷⁸ It would take a decade or two for that degeneration really to make itself felt, but what did quickly become obvious, even as the invasion was still under way, was that Israel had thoroughly overreached itself at last, that it lacked the intrinsic strength, the moral conviction and the will, the manpower and the economic resources, to sustain the adventure into which its generals, in their overweening pride and self-confidence, had dragged it.

Indeed, the whole enterprise soon proved itself to have been completely useless. By 1985, after sustaining greater losses, proportionally, than the Soviet Union in its disastrous Afghanistan war, Israel was back in the South Lebanese ‘security zone’ from which it had started out, subject, yet again, to those ‘rockets on Kiryat Shmona’ which Begin had sworn forever to eliminate. But it was altogether worse off than before. Among other things, Israel had suffered serious damage to its aura of invincibility, to that sacrosanct ‘deterrent power’ by which it presumed to keep its Arab enemies permanently in awe. Worse, perhaps, it had widened and deepened the circle of hatred and hostility that surrounded it, and created a new, principally Shiite enemy, from whose ranks had arisen an authentic grassroots resistance movement altogether more formidable than the Palestinian one it had largely defeated.

... AND THE MARONITES LOSE THEIR PRIMACY

As for the underlying assumption of the invasion - that the greater the force deployed the more far-reaching the political ‘facts on the ground’ it could create - that was shattered beyond repair. Little Lebanon alone, never mind the region as a whole which Sharon’s larger purposes had also encompassed, utterly frustrated the interventionists. All hopes for the consummation of the ‘minority alliance’, for the fulfilment of the six-decade-old dream of a Maronite-run Lebanon finally and completely throwing in its lot with Israel, evaporated almost overnight. Indeed, it was actually in the wake of this intervention, designed to reinforce and perpetuate the primacy of the Maronites, that they most seriously began to lose it to the other communities, and, above all, to the Shiites, the underdogs of old now poised for an historic reversal of fortunes.

True, the Maronites retained their constitutionally prescribed pre-eminence within the sectarian state. But having come to power, like his late brother Bashir, at the point of Israeli bayonets, Amin Gemayel proceeded to abuse it. He ‘Phalangized’ his administration and used the army, in conjunction with the Phalangist militia, to intimidate, repress and lord it over the other communities⁷⁹ until eventually these rose up against him. In a blood-letting reminiscent of the massacres of 1860, the Druzes drove the Israeli-assisted invading militia, and virtually every Maronite, out of the Shouf highlands, where the two communities had lived cheek by jowl for centuries, and, in the ‘uprising’ of 4 February 1984, Nabih Berri’s Shiite militia Amal, the Druzes and the Sunnis joined forces to seize control of the whole of West Beirut and strategic areas around it. Once again, though in very different circumstances from 1976, the national army disintegrated after Berri called on its Shiite members to defect. Once again a Maronite president’s writ was reduced to little more than his palace. Once again - but more than ever - his whole community were plunged into collective fear and paranoia, with refugees fleeing in droves from the port of Junieh, ‘capital’ of ‘Marounistan’, that last remaining 20 per cent of the country which, thanks to the Phalangists rather than Gemayel himself, the Maronites could still call their own. But it was not Israel to whom they turned for salvation - though that is what diehard ‘Bashirians’ still wanted - because Israel, most of them now realized, had brought them only disaster the last time it presumed to save them. In the person of Gemayel, they turned once more to the Syrians. President Asad was ready to forgive him, and preserve him in the office from which his Lebanese adversaries had been bent on driving him — provided only that he repudiated Israel and all its works, and especially the infamous ‘17 May agreement’.

AN ISRAELI ‘HOUSEWARMING PRESENT’ TO THE MARINES

The debacle was such that the Israelis no longer had the slightest chance of securing the fully-fledged peace treaty on which they had set their sights; and the agreement which Lebanon and Israel concluded on 17 May 1983 was what the Americans negotiated in its stead. It had inevitably fallen to them to clear up the mess which the Israelis had left behind. This mess was not merely the one which confronted 1,500 US Marines, when, returning to Lebanon along with the rest of the ‘multi-national’ force, they took up position at Beirut international airport. Their first task there had been to remove the stinking mounds of excrement that, as in so many other places in the country, adorned just about everything, floors, elevators, chairs, desks and drawers. The Marines got the message. This, they quickly understood, was a ‘housewarming present’ from the Israeli soldiers whose place they were taking; it was their way of venting their spleen on those ‘Arab-loving’ American allies of theirs, who had bought all that Arab ‘propaganda’ about Sabra and Shatila, the Beirut blitz, and the iniquity of a nation that had done such things. Less disgusting, but decidedly more dangerous, was their other gift: the countless cluster bomblets, golfball-sized, which they had strewn the length and breadth of the airport buildings.⁸⁰

Even so, the real, and greater mess was the strategic one. The role of America’s ‘strategic asset’ in which, upon invading Lebanon, Israel had cast itself, and to which America, under Reagan, had for the first time wholeheartedly subscribed, had turned out to be way beyond its capacities to perform. Indeed, to any but the most ardent of the American ‘friends of Israel’, it had proved itself to be quite the opposite: a strategic liability, and menace to America’s interests and reputation throughout the Middle East. It was as troubling to the so-called ‘moderate’ Arab regimes, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, in which those interests were vested, as it was gratifying to their ‘radical’, pro-Soviet rivals, of which Syria was the chief.

To clear up this particular mess, the US now sought, on the surface at least, to distance itself from its troublesome protégé, to act as impartial arbiter, as ‘honest broker’ among all the parties, in the creation of a new Lebanese order. In accordance with the ‘17 May agreement‘, Syrians, Israelis and Palestinians would all, on the face of it, withdraw from the country. But, in practice, given its tolerance of Israeli overflights and military manoeuvres, its restrictions on Lebanese force deployments and the integration of Israeli-controlled proxy forces into a ‘territorial brigade’, the South would still, de facto, fall under Israeli control. These southern arrangements apart, the Lebanese state would in principle spread its exclusive authority over all the rest of its territory, and rebuild its governing institutions on pretty much the same old Maronite-dominated, multi-sectarian basis.⁸¹ The trouble was, however, that if the Israelis did not like the agreement, the Syrians and their Lebanese allies liked it very much less; for them it had the makings of another ‘Camp David’, another Sadat-like treachery against the common Arab cause. And in its determination to push it through, America became anything but an impartial arbiter. Indeed, said a former Lebanese prime minister, it became ‘just another sectarian militia’⁸² — albeit a militia extraordinary, with carrier-borne ground-attack aircraft of the Sixth Fleet, assembled offshore, strafing Syrian positions in the mountains above Beirut, and its mightiest battleship, the New Jersey, hurling shells the size of a Volkswagen car at Druze militiamen storming Gemayel’s loyalist troops engaged in their desperate, last-ditch defence of the Maronite heartland.

THE MARINES TAKE TO THE BOATS

But all this firepower was useless against the Muslim/Druze insurgency - and that deadly new weapon, the suicide bomber, which came with it. Two hundred and forty Marines died at a stroke in one of the earliest, and the most devastating truck-bombings of all times. The result was that, where America’s first ever military intervention in the modern Middle East - Lebanon, 1958 — had been a relative success, this, its second, was a humiliating fiasco. After the Shiite-led ‘uprising’, the Marines, now completely encircled by hostile forces, took to the boats, the Syrians and their army triumphantly re-established themselves as the indisputably preponderant foreign power in Lebanon, and the hapless President Gemayel, repentant ‘Arabist’ once more, repudiated the ‘17 May agreement’ — turning what was supposed to have been the first, indispensable building block of a wider Pax Americana in the region into its ruin for years to come.

Of all the diverse parties that inflicted these vicissitudes on the US, Israel and their Lebanese protégés, the most important and immediately effective was undoubtedly Syria. After the beating the Israelis gave him in 1982, the Reagan Administration had virtually written off President Asad as a major player in the region. It was a fundamental error. Thus scorned, this unforgiving, and most cunning of Arab leaders quietly plotted, and then exacted, his swift, spectacular revenge. But the most significant of them, in the longer run, were those new, militant, but still mysterious, Islamist forces of which Hizbullah would eventually emerge as the most potent and celebrated vanguard.

FIRST THE PALESTINIANS, NOW HIZBULLAH

In the first half of the Lebanese civil war the Palestinians had been the main source, and engine, of conflict, in its local, regional, and ultimately international dimensions. It was the Islamists who, after their expulsion in 1982, replaced them in the second half. These Lebanese militants were, of course, an intrinsic part of a much greater movement. By the 1980s, political, fundamentalist Islam had supplanted nationalism as the great new credo and popularly mobilizing force of the Middle East and beyond. Lebanon could not escape its consequences. Indeed, true to form, it found itself in their very cockpit. Unlike the Palestinians, Lebanon’s warrior-Muslims were native and home-grown, and that was a source of strength the Palestinians never had; but, like the Palestinians, they also had an agenda, allegiances and support which transcended Lebanon altogether. Their patron and other great source of strength was the only - yet pivotally important - country in the Middle East where Islamists had recently achieved the great objective of all their kind: the taking of political power. During the second half of the war, which came to an end in 1990, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its protégé, Hizbullah, were to forge a relationship which not merely long outlived that war, but played a role in the region’s affairs seemingly out of all proportion to the small and strife-ridden state on whose territory it was chiefly enacted.