Another Summer, Another Siege:
Israel's War on the PLO
For forty years, my mother kept every article and letter I wrote
from war zones, revolutions, and uprisings on five continents. She collated
them, with her notes from our telephone conversations, in bulbous legal
binders. I now have a hundred and twenty-six of them stored, floor to ceiling,
in two closets that have been converted into bookshelves. This week, as the
events in Gaza dominated the news, I pulled out the volumes from the summer of
1982.
I returned to Beirut, off a
turbulent flight from the Gulf, just as Israeli warplanes began bombing
Palestinian sites near the airport on June 5, 1982. Amid the deafening blasts
and sirens that followed, the few of us on the plane scrambled across the
tarmac to seek cover in the terminal.
Yasir Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization had moved its headquarters from Jordan to Beirut twelve
years earlier, and Lebanon had been Israel’s biggest threat ever since.
Palestinian rockets landed on Israeli settlements in the northern Galilee. A
fragile ceasefire, brokered by the United States, had held for almost a year,
with only one violation. But a sense of looming confrontation had been building
since Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights the previous December. All it
needed was a spark.
Two days before I arrived,
a Jordanian gunman shot Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador in London, as he
left a diplomatic banquet at the Dorchester Hotel. Israel blamed the P.L.O.
(Britain subsequently tied the attack to the Abu Nidal Organization, a radical
group named after a renegade who had turned against Arafat. Its goal was
apparently to discredit the P.L.O., which had been gaining acceptance in
Europe, amid a peace initiative proposed by the Saudis. Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher later said that a hit list, uncovered in the investigation of Abu
Nidal’s London cell, included the P.L.O. representative in London.)
Israeli warplanes
immediately pummelled Palestinian targets across Lebanon, especially in the
warren of refugee camps near the airport. On the day I landed, President
Reagan, pledging to increase U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict,
urgently appealed to Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, for restraint
along the border.
The next day, twenty-five
thousand Israeli troops invaded Lebanon by land, sea, and air. Three long
columns of tanks barrelled across a thirty-three-mile frontier, blitzing past
seven thousand U.N. peacekeepers in a border buffer zone and through the olive
and orange groves of southern Lebanon, on a mission to destroy Palestinian
positions concealed in caves, wadis, and refugee camps. Begin assured Reagan
that Operation Peace for Galilee sought only to push the Palestinians back
twenty-five miles, beyond rocket range of the Galilee. “The bloodthirsty
aggressor against us is on our doorstep,” he wrote. “Do we not have the
inherent right to self-defense?”
Over the next week, Israeli
troops, under the command of General Ariel Sharon, penetrated twice as far,
capturing about a third of Lebanon and encircling the capital. The siege of
West Beirut had begun.
About a half million people
lived in the Muslim-dominated half of the capital, a densely packed area of
about ten square miles that was home to both the P.L.O. and the American
University of Beirut. The Israelis dropped hundreds of thousands of
leaflets—white one day, pink, blue, or yellow on other days—that warned the
Lebanese against sheltering guerrillas and advised civilians to leave. I
remember thinking that it looked, in the middle of the torrid summer heat, as
if snow were falling on Beirut. I found one of the pink leaflets in my mother’s
volumes.
Lebanon had already endured
seven years of sporadic civil war, largely street battles with vintage
weaponry. The Israeli invasion, with its battleships, advanced U.S.-made
bombers, and high-tech tanks, was far more serious. The smell of war’s
detritus—the bitter cordite and stench of decaying bodies, mixed with
uncollected garbage—was inescapable. I’d covered many conflicts by then, but
the bombs and sonic booms from warplanes rupturing the night scared me.
“The windows (now
crisscrossed with masking tape to lessen the implosion of glass from bombs)
began to rattle from the rockets landing nearby from Israeli gunboats,” I wrote
to my parents. “I can’t decide which is worse: the thunder and shaking from
shelling or the whizzing rumble of warplanes as they dive on us to offload
their bombs.”
It was a summer of chaos and fear, often without
water, electricity, or phones, and with dwindling food stocks. I used to go to
fetch water from a UNICEF pump and
then carry it up seven flights to my apartment. The siege went on week after
week, ceasefire after broken ceasefire.
At one point, I reported, “Many private wells
are now dry, including the one at Red Cross headquarters,” where officials
warned that the cutoff of electricity and fuel for emergency generators
threatened all of West Beirut’s hospitals with imminent closure. The local UNICEF director
was particularly frustrated by his inability to get permission from the
Israelis to bring in baby food, milk, and basic drugs to deal with rampant
gastroenteritis among children.
Senior Israeli military
officers repeatedly insisted that their mandate was to destroy the enemy while
avoiding civilian casualties. I did see Palestinian fighters among the dead and
wounded, but the P.L.O. had hidden its fighters, as well as tons of war
matériel—rockets, mortars, howitzer shells, ammunition, and more—in an
extensive network of tunnels.
The subterranean corridors,
which I toured after the war, were reinforced with concrete and included a
conference center, showers, and a kitchen. One tunnel had three floors. Some
storage areas were large enough to conceal small trucks. I saw thirty rooms and
still didn’t see them all. Palestinian commanders had reportedly visited
Vietnam in the nineteen-seventies and modelled their network on the tunnels
used by the Vietcong fighting the Americans.
The civilian toll far
exceeded the damage to either the P.L.O. forces or the organization’s
infrastructure. The Israeli use of U.S.-made cluster bombs, which explode
mid-air, unleashing many smaller grenade-size explosives, was particularly
lethal among children. Phosphorous bombs were equally deadly—and controversial.
“The bombardment has become more and more indiscriminate, killing hundreds of
civilians,” I reported.
“Famous landmarks have been erased. Buildings have been reduced to
mass graves. … Among the facilities hit by Israel over the past nine weeks are
five UN buildings, 134 embassies or diplomatic residences, six hospitals or
clinics, one mental institute, the Central Bank, five hotels, the Red Cross,
Lebanese and foreign media outlets and innumerable private homes and office
blocks. While some of these may conceivably have been used as cover for the
PLO, what is much more striking is how many undeniable PLO facilities have
remained intact.”
Washington
condemned the P.L.O. repeatedly, but, as the siege dragged on, relations
between the United States and Israel grew increasingly testy over the plight of
civilians. In early July, Reagan pressed Israel to lift the blockade of West
Beirut and to restore water and electricity. In late July, he put a hold on
cluster bombs sent to Israel.
On July 31st, Robert
Dillon, the American Ambassador to Lebanon, angrily cabled Washington, “Simply
put, tonight’s saturation shelling was as intense as anything we have seen.
There was no ‘pinpoint accuracy’ against targets in ‘open spaces.’ It was not a
response to Palestinian fire. This was a blitz against West Beirut. Our 21:00
ceasefire announced in advance over local radio stations was transformed
instead into a massive Israeli escalation.”
On August 1st, on the eve
of a meeting with Israel’s foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, Reagan told
reporters, “The bloodshed must stop,” adding that he would make sure that the
Israelis “understand exactly how we feel about this.” Pressed on whether he was
losing patience, Reagan replied, “I lost patience a long time ago.”
At the meeting the next
day, the President told Shamir, “When P.L.O. sniper fire is followed by
fourteen hours of Israeli bombardment, that is stretching the definition of
defensive action too far.” Both men were noticeably grim-faced in the official
photographs.
Reagan had begun to feel repercussions at home
and abroad. The American media savaged his Administration as weak and without
direction. Time’s Walter Isaacson wrote,
Israeli attacks on
West Beirut reinforced the impression that the U.S. is a helpless
giant that can neither influence Israeli actions nor come to grips with events
in the Middle East. Signs of U.S. ineffectualness in the current crisis
have been conspicuous since the day in June when Reagan sent a well-publicized
message from the Western economic summit meeting at Versailles urging Begin not
to invade Lebanon. Begin sent his troops in the next day. … The stability of
the Middle East and the credibility of American diplomacy hinge on whether
words or rockets settle the status of the PLO in West Beirut.
The siege lasted ten weeks.
More than seventeen thousand Lebanese and Palestinians died; most were
civilians. Lebanese officials claimed that a quarter of them were under fifteen
years old. Israel lost more than three hundred and sixty troops. In the
end, Israel got some of what it wanted. The P.L.O. was badly battered; Arafat
and three-fourths of his fighters were forced into exile. I watched while they
fired final rounds from their Kalashnikovs as they marched to ships waiting to
divvy them up in eight distant lands. Signs along the road exhorted, “Palestine
or Bust” and “This is not Goodbye.”
The Israeli campaign did
little, however, to solve the problem of rival nationalisms vying for land to
call their own. And its consequences triggered an entirely new set of
challenges. The Arab world had given only lip service to the P.L.O. during the
siege. Iran was the only country to step in, dispatching eighteen hundred
Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. They did not engage
Israel—they instead quietly fostered, funded, and armed the embryo of what
became Hezbollah.
After the P.L.O. departed,
Hezbollah launched its first suicide bomb—then a novel tactic—against Israeli
military targets. On April 18, 1983, a car bomber attacked the American Embassy
in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Six months later, suicide bombers blew
up a barracks housing U.S. Marines who had deployed to oversee the Palestinian
withdrawal. Two hundred and forty-one American servicemen died.
In 1985, Israel’s defense
minister, Yitzhak Rabin, looked back on the war and reflected,
I believe
that, among the many surprises, and most of them not for the good, that came
out of the war in Lebanon, the most dangerous is that the war let the Shiites
out of the bottle. No one predicted it; I couldn’t find it in any intelligence
report. … If, as a result of the war in Lebanon, we replace P.L.O. terrorism in
southern Lebanon with Shiite terrorism, we have done the worst [thing] in our
struggle against terrorism. In twenty years of P.L.O. terrorism, no one P.L.O.
terrorist made himself a live bomb. … In my opinion, the Shiites have the
potential for a kind of terrorism that we have not yet experienced.
Israel ended up lingering
in Lebanon, at various troops strengths, for nearly two decades. It even made
peace with Arafat before finally withdrawing, in 2000, under pressure from
Hezbollah. It was the first time that Israel withdrew unilaterally from
territory it occupied—without a peace treaty or any tangible political gain.
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