The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley
—ROBERT BURNS
Feathers from the giant black grouse of the Italian Alps stole the show. Long, shiny, and black, a spray was attached to the white combat helmets of the 2nd Battalion of the Bersaglieri. Then some of the 518 Italian sharpshooters arrived not in march step, not at the double, but at a flawless, syncopated dead run. Like their black plumes, the high-speed march had been their hallmark since their formation by the king of Sardinia in 1836. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bruno Tosetti, was so handsome, and his troops so dramatic, the world’s cameras collectively zoomed in on the beaming Bersaglieri. The Italians were the most colorful members of the multinational force created by the United States to protect the defeated Palestine Liberation Organization. French Foreign Legionnaires and American Marines wore only battlefield dress. They were mostly grim and meant business. The Italians’ arrival took the edge off the daily pandemonium surrounding the expulsion of Yasser Arafat and 14,000 Palestinian Liberation Organization soldiers from Beirut in August of 1982. The French, Italian, and American troops, an instant Multinational Defense Force assembled hurriedly by US negotiator Philip Habib, were ordered to protect the fleeing PLO and provide port security. A massacre by Israeli troops was a possibility acknowledged by the Jerusalem government.
Defeated and reviled by Israeli troops, Christian militias, and Muslims subjected to bogus PLO taxes, Arafat’s warriors left in a blaze of gunfire. Trucks full of warriors staged a chattering celebration of automatic weapons. It was designed to mask the third humiliating expulsion for the PLO since 1948. This time they were scattered to reluctant Arab nations forced to accept them by diplomatic pressure. The PLO could celebrate surviving 66,000 artillery shells and two months of endless air attacks on West Beirut by Ariel Sharon. The Israeli minister of defense was watching through a telescope in East Beirut as 1,066 soldiers boarded ships on the first day of the PLO’s departure from Beirut harbor on August 22, 1982. The waterfront—West Beirut—was rubble. At least 3,500 Lebanese were dead. Thousands more Lebanese were injured.
“It’s a great day for Israel,” Sharon told reporters. With the PLO expulsion, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Ronald Reagan had achieved the first phase of Sharon’s Operation Big Pines. Phase two started the same day. More than 2,000 Syrian troops agreed to retreat from Beirut. Syria’s 85th Regiment’s troops and tanks completed their withdrawal August 30. That was the Israeli-American’s first step in ousting 32,000 of President Hafez al-Assad’s soldiers from eastern Lebanon. To Reagan, the PLO and Syria were clients of the Soviet Union. The American president had launched a worldwide attack on governments aided by the Kremlin. Phase three was completed the very next day when Bashir Gemayel, the 34-year-old Phalange warlord, was elected president by the parliament of Lebanon. Israeli occupiers helped produce Gemayel’s narrow victory. Camille Chamoun, a Christian leader opposed to Gemayel, changed his mind after a conversation with Begin’s adviser Rafael Etian. Chamoun’s six votes were ratified with Gemayel’s cash. The American president also helped. Ambassador Habib, Reagan’s personal representative in the Mideast, spread the word of American support to the Muslim community. Now, Gemayel was in position to approve a peace treaty that would give Israel a trade-rich and dominant position in Lebanon. From the White House in Washington, President Reagan applauded. “The President has noted this morning the election of a new President in Lebanon,” his deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, announced, “and he has sent a message of congratulations to the new President. We also congratulate the Lebanese Parliament in electing the new President through the traditional, constitutional processes during this difficult and trying time.”
A week later, President-elect Gemayel was flown to Nahariya, in the north of Israel near the border with Lebanon. Begin was no longer charmed by the young man who wheedled $200 million in Israeli military supplies. Gemayel had already broken a series of solemn promises to Begin and Sharon.
“Where do we stand with the peace treaty?” Begin demanded.
Gemayel began evasively and ended with “A hasty signing of a treaty is not justified, either from a political or security standpoint—”
Begin interrupted. “We believe that the first thing you must do as president is to visit Jerusalem or at least Tel Aviv. Such a visit is of great importance in terms of assuring the people of Israel of your sincerity and desire for normal relations. Isn’t that why we went to war and paid the price of hundreds of dead?” The icy, blunt Begin left the president-elect humiliated and angry.
Sharon thought negotiations with Gemayel would still lead to a peace treaty, crown jewel of Operation Big Pines. Other people saw the emergence of an Arab government leader who would likely tolerate Syria’s continued occupation of Lebanon rather than a military confrontation. When the Israelis leaked word of Begin’s meeting with Gemayel—Gemayel had pleaded for secrecy—the president-elect became testy. Gemayel announced he was severing all ties with Israel. There would be no peace treaty, no visit to Jerusalem and the Knesset. Once again, Bashir Gemayel had betrayed Israel.
Even so, Sharon continued to meet with Gemayel on the future of Palestinians remaining in West Beirut. In talks with US ambassador Morris Draper, who had replaced Habib as Reagan’s Mideast representative, Sharon argued 2,500 PLO fighters remained hidden among 200,000 refugees in Sabra, Shatila, and other refugee camps in West Beirut. While some avoided exile, Draper insisted the number was far smaller—only a handful. Once in power, Sharon urged Gemayel to use the Lebanese army—along with Phalange militia—to inspect the camps for fighters and ammunition dumps. Any hint of letting the Phalange into the camps was a recipe for slaughter. Sharon was eyeing the camps, and that worried PLO leader Arafat. He was fearful of Christian attacks on the old men, women, and children the fighters left behind. Arafat insisted the United States guarantee the safety of PLO families in West Beirut. It was spelled out in Article 4 of the agreement Israel, the PLO, and the United States signed: “Law-abiding non-combatant Palestinians who remained in Beirut” would be protected. In addition, Habib—as the president’s representative—had repeatedly assured the PLO that Reagan was guaranteeing the protection of PLO families. The document showed the American guarantee was based on support from Israel and the Phalange. That foundation was crumbling with talks between Sharon and Gemayel about cleaning out the camps. Arafat was reassured by the Bersaglieri. The Italians had stowed their feathered helmets, donned the red fez, and set up professional defensive positions just outside the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. Commander Tosetti invaded the poverty-ridden urban warren with Italian food and medical care. Almost daily he was photographed beaming at a different baby in his arms. His boss, Brigadier General Franco Angioni pulled his pistol and broke up a fight between a Phalange thug and a Palestinian. The Italians were heroes in the PLO camps.
Wearing his signature checkered keffiyeh and military green, Arafat seemed relaxed and smiling as leader of the PLO rearguard on August 30 in Beirut harbor. Arafat grinned and waved a branch of an olive tree, a symbol of Mideast peace. The final group of exiles was under the security of the US Marines, commanded by the Scotland-born Lieutenant Colonel Robert Johnston. When the French government sent Ambassador Paul-Marc Henry with a 50-man honor guard to give Arafat a sendoff, Johnston ordered Marine jeeps to block the way.
“This has been agreed with the American ambassador,” Henry complained.
“Well, it hasn’t been communicated to me,” Johnston said. Three of Henry’s jeeps pushed by the Marines, and Johnston decided to let them go.
The last of the PLO left the next day. Arriving in Beirut soon after was Defense Secretary Weinberger. Johnston told the defense chief that the Marines’ mission was completed. Weinberger favored their departure. Only Habib, now retired and in California, urged extending the stay of the multinational defense force of American, French, and Italian troops. So on September 9 the Marines started to go back to their ships for a return to Naples. The French left next. The Bersaglieri disassembled their defensive position around the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Five days later, the swirl of the Lebanese chaos changed everything. Preparations were made at Phalange headquarters in East Beirut for another Tuesday afternoon speech by President-elect Gemayel. His routine made it easy for Habib Tanious Shartouni, whose sister had a third-floor apartment in the building where Gemayel would speak. They were members of a family with personal ties to the Phalange. Militia guards had no idea Shartouni was secretly a member of the Syrian National Party at war with the Christians. They paid no attention as Shartouni loaded the apartment with high explosives. He detonated the bomb at 4:10 p.m., September 14, with a remote control. That night, two Israeli officers confirmed what the Phalange militia refused to accept—Bashir Gemayel, his faced crushed beyond recognition, was dead in the Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital. The watch on his wrist, a white-gold wedding ring, and notes of congratulations in the pockets of his blue suit were proof. The man Begin, Sharon, and Reagan were betting on to redraw the map of the Levant was a victim of the same sort of violence he lived by.
Gemayel’s legacy unfolded the same night, as Begin and Sharon anticipated the course of certain Christian revenge on Sabra and Shatila. Five months later, a commission headed by Yitzhak Kahan, president of the Israeli Supreme Court, shocked the world with grisly details of events between September 14 and 18, 1982. The panel spattered blood from what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre on the most senior members of the Israeli government and Israel Defense Forces. Sharon was forced from office, generals were relieved, and courts-martial were ordered. Step by step, the Kahan Commission used evidence and testimony to show Israel’s culpability in the killing of between 750 and 2,500 old men, women, children, and infants by knife-wielding members of Gemayel’s militia. The panel harked back to the days of pogroms of murder and rape by local hooligans against residents of the European Jewish shtetls.
“The Jewish public’s stand has always been that the responsibility for such deeds falls not only on those who rioted and committed the atrocities, but also on those who were responsible for safety and public order, who could have prevented the disturbances and did not fulfill their obligations in this respect,” the commission said. Over four months, the panel called 58 witnesses to testify during 60 different sessions. Its staff collected 180 statements from 163 people, including one young Israeli soldier who was on a rooftop monitoring Phalange operations in the camps below. The youth heard women screaming from inside the camps.
“What was that?” he asked. A more senior soldier just laughed at him.
The very night of Gemayel’s assassination, Begin, calling it purely a protective measure, gave Sharon permission to enter West Beirut. Sharon alerted commanders and, according to one officer, discussed sending Phalange forces into the PLO camps, which Sharon denied before the Kahan Commission. Israeli tanks seized key West Beirut junctures the next morning. Tanks were lined on both the west and east entrances to the sprawling camps, blocking escape. The same day, Sharon met with Phalange militia leaders, including Elie Hobeika, branded as a “psychopathic killer” by US ambassador Robert Dillon. Sharon stressed the goal of destroying PLO infrastructure remaining in West Beirut and the dangers of terrorists running loose in the city.
“I don’t want a single one of them left,” Sharon said.
“How do you single them out?” Hobeika asked.
“We’ll discuss that at a more restricted session,” Sharon said.
The Israel Defense Forces set up a command post on the roof of an abandoned five-story building overlooking Sabra and Shatila. IDF Major General Amir Drori was in command. His deputy was Brigadier General Amos Yaron. The IDF was greeted by gunfire when it secured the camps. An estimated 200 men were firing from PLO positions, but the opposition soon faded. General Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the IDF, reported to Sharon in Jerusalem at 10 a.m. on Thursday, September 16. Eitan said the camps were surrounded by tanks. All was quiet. If the Phalangists or the Lebanese army were willing to enter, they would be welcome, Eitan told Sharon. Both men knew the Lebanese government refused Lebanese army participation.
“I’d send in the Phalangists,” Sharon said.
“They’re thirsting for revenge,” Eitan said. “There could be torrents of blood.”
Later that day, at the main IDF command post overlooking the camps, Hobeika showed up on the rooftop to coordinate Phalange operations with General Drori of the IDF. Drori admonished Hobeika to act properly when he and his 150 men moved through the camps. More than a dozen such warnings were issued by IDF officers on the spot, evidence that they expected the worse from the Phalange.
According to the Kahan report, the United States was warned about the looming slaughter at 5 p.m. when President Reagan’s personal emissary showed up for a meeting with Sharon and IDF generals. A month earlier, Israel had made a pledge to the United States never to invade Beirut. “Circumstances changed,” Sharon coldly told Ambassador Morris Draper. He had debated with Sharon about remaining PLO fighters and the need to clean out Sabra and Shatila. Now the West Beirut camps were under Israeli control.
“Who will go in? The Lebanese army and security forces?” Draper asked.
“And the Phalange,” interjected Major General Yehoshua Saguy.
“Not the Phalange,” Draper cried out.
Then Draper got an oral face-slapping from Eitan, the IDF chief of staff. “Lebanon is at the point of exploding into a frenzy of revenge,” Eitan told Draper. “No one can stop them. They’re obsessed with the idea of revenge. I’m telling you some of their commanders visited me and I could see in their eyes that it’s going to be a relentless slaughter.” No hint that Eitan and Sharon had surrounded the camps and opened the door to the Phalange.
Draper and US ambassador Samuel Lewis were not told by either Sharon or Eitan of Israel’s facilitation of the Phalange’s plans. But it was an easy guess for the two veteran US diplomats. As the meeting was ending in Jerusalem, Hobeika’s men were slipping into the south and west entrances to Sabra and Shatila. It was getting dark, and PLO defenders began firing rifles at the invaders. The Phalangists’ liaison with the IDF, Jesse Soker, showed up at the command post and asked for support. The IDF complied by firing 81 mm mortar flares, turning night into day for the Phalange mayhem. Later, Israeli aircraft dropped flares over the camps. The Phalange were killing men, women, and children, mainly with knives. In some instances, live grenades were hung around individual necks and then exploded. There was one instance of a man in spiked boots crushing an infant to pieces. The Christian cross was carved in the chests of many victims. The Phalange radio net monitored by the IDF recorded one exchange shortly after the militia entered the camps.
“We’ve rounded up 50 women and children,” one of Hobeika’s men reported. “What should we do with them?”
“That’s the last time you’re going to ask me,” commander Hobeika replied. “You know what to do.”
Another intercept asked what to do with 45 men.
“Do God’s will,” replied Soker. The Phalange liaison showed up in the IDF mess hall later and boasted 300 people had been killed (he later changed that number to 250). Yaron, the IDF general in charge of the command post, grew increasingly uneasy. Yaron criticized Soker for the civilian killings. Soker promised to do better. But Yaron got a stomach full when his intelligence officer gave him an update on Phalange bloodletting at 8:40 p.m. The Kahan Commission reproduced the report as recorded by the IDF History Department soldiers on the scene.
“One has the impression that the fighting is not particularly serious,” the officer told Yaron. “And it seems that they’re trying to decide what to do with the people they find inside. On the one hand, there are no terrorists in the camps; Sabra is empty.… Apparently, some decision has been made to concentrate them together and they’re leading them off somewhere outside the camp. Yet I also heard from Jesse [Soker on the radio], ‘Do what your heart tells you because everything comes from God,’ meaning I don’t—”
Yaron cut him off. He had talked to Soker. “They’re not having any problems.” The intelligence officer asked Yaron: “And there’s no danger to their lives?” They won’t harm them, Yaron said. Yaron did not want to believe what an IDF tank officer saw outside the camps. Lieutenant Avi Grabowsky witnessed Phalange militia executing a number of Palestinians from Shatila.
“Why are you killing women and children?” Grabowsky shouted.
“Women give birth to children and children grow up into terrorists,” a Phalangist shouted back. Four Christian militias repeatedly raped a young woman who entered the camps Friday to visit her mother.
As the massacre was under way Friday, the Israeli cabinet was still meeting at 9 p.m. General Eitan informed them the Phalange were operating in the camps but under control of watching IDF officers. The IDF chief of staff’s effort to minimize events was instantly ridiculed by David Levy, a Moroccan-born Jew who led an increasingly large bloc of Sephardi voters. Perhaps because of his origin, elite Israelis ridiculed Levy as stupid, so stupid that those Polish jokes became David Levy jokes in Israel. But he showed instant recognition that Israel and the world would not tolerate the IDF’s role as handmaiden to a calculated slaughter, that no one would believe Israel’s intention had been to go in to create order and that whatever explanations it gave for what ensued would not stand up.
It did not stand up with the population of Israel, where many serve in the armed forces from youth to middle age. The IDF was a source of national pride. Shock and disbelief greeted news reports that swiftly circulated on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, on Sunday, September 19. The massacre at Sabra and Shatila had continued until General Yaron ordered the Phalange out by 6 a.m. Saturday, September 18. Within hours, the streets were flooded with reporters, photographers, and film crews, documenting the nightmare: mounds of bodies, an alleyway where a dozen men were lined up and gunned down, scattered corpses of small children and infants, a woman who had been stripped and disemboweled, and overpowering everything a stench that was too much for some. Odd Karsten Tveit, a Norwegian reporter, walked through narrating the scene to a tape recorder for later broadcast. Every few feet, Tveit would pause to vomit, then resume his narration. And then vomit again. Israel supplied a bulldozer—once IDF markings were removed—and trucked out some of the dead.
News dispatches, photographs, and network film produced a global shock. Interviews with IDF troops still surrounding the camps Sunday underlined Israeli government involvement with the Phalange massacre. The Israeli government later that day acknowledged “coordination” but said events got out of control. At one cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Begin predicted a short-lived furor. “Goyim killing goyim,” Begin said dismissively—non-Jews killing each other. His phrase was widely quoted.
Ze’ev Schiff, a brilliant reporter for the daily national newspaper Haaretz, sensed a sea change. “Something snapped in Israel over that holiday weekend…,” he wrote later. “The war had not crowned their country with a great political and military victory but had dragged it down to the sordid depths of the Lebanese maelstrom and stained its honor indelibly.… The government and army were implicated in the commission of atrocities. Sabra and Shatila had become synonymous with infamy.” A week later, 400,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv to demand the resignations of Begin and Sharon. SHAME, read a large banner. That a tenth of the population would show up to protest led to the organization of the Kahan Commission.
Begin continued to defend Sharon. The prime minister rejected the panel’s February 8, 1993, call to remove Sharon as minister of defense. The issue was debated at a crucial cabinet meeting February 10 as thousands of Israelis demonstrated outside. A large part of the crowd was calling for Sharon’s ouster. It included Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig, a Romanian-born immigrant. Another part of the crowd was cheering for Sharon. “Arik, King of Israel,” they shouted. A hand grenade tossed into the crowd exploded and killed Grunzweig. Shortly thereafter the cabinet voted 16–1 to remove the minister of defense.
Despite Kahan’s indictment, Begin kept mon general as a minister without portfolio. The divided crowd yelling for and against Sharon reflected a split in Israeli society that has only deepened with changing immigration patterns and attitudes. Fading fast were General Moshe Dayan’s appeals to understand the plight of Palestinians. “Before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived…,” the hero of the 1967 war wrote. “Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and await the moment when their hand will be able to reach our blood.”
To Begin and Sharon, that Arab hatred deserved refugee camps and death. The Polish immigrant had turned Palestinians into the new Nazis who deserved the worst because they threatened Jews. The extreme attitude was adopted by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a founder of the Jewish Defense League. Kahane launched his campaign for parliament in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and would eventually run commercials with blood dripping down ancient steps. Arab blood for sure. For Begin, Sabra and Shatila was an extension of the founding fathers’ fight for the land of Israel.
Near Jerusalem, the Muslim village of Deir Yassin came under attack on April 9, 1948, by Jewish paramilitary forces, including the Irgun. Houses were blown up with people inside, and other villagers were shot: 107, including women and children, were killed. The survivors were loaded on trucks that were driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade. (The village was later annexed to the new state of Israel.) On April 10, Albert Einstein, the celebrated physicist, revolted by the massacre, ended his support for American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. A New York Times op-ed reviling the Deir Yassin massacre was published December 2, signed by many prominent American Jews.
In their article, they singled out Irgun leader Menachem Begin.