6
All your friends are false; all your enemies are real.
—Mexican proverb
Ariel Sharon never sent Yasir Arafat flowers.
Whatever one thinks of the former Israeli general and Defense Minister, Sharon did not play games with his enemies. He killed them. After a few years in Beirut, I came to understand a little why the Jews had a state and the Palestinians didn’t. The European Jews who built Israel came out of a culture of sharp edges and right angles. They were cold, hard men who always understood the difference between success and failure, and between words and deeds. Because the Jews were always a nation apart, they developed their own autonomous institutions and had to rely on their own deep tribal sense of solidarity. This gave them a certain single-mindedness of purpose. They would never settle for a substitute homeland; life for them was not just another Mediterranean life cycle or fatalistic shrug.
The single-mindedness of the European Zionists also had a certain ruthless aspect to it. They emerged from ghettos in which they were never invited by the outside world to drink coffee. They were never part of a Middle Eastern kaleidoscope, like Lebanon, where today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s friend. For the Jews coming out of Europe, today’s enemy was tomorrow’s enemy. The world was divided into two: the Jews and the goyim, or Gentiles. The Arabs, for the Zionists, fell into two subsets of goyim—agents and enemies. Agents you ordered and enemies you killed.
The rhythm of life in the Arab world was always different. Men in Arab societies always tended to bend more; life there always moved in ambiguous semicircles, never right angles. The religious symbols of the West are the cross and the Jewish star—both of which are full of sharp, angled turns. The symbol of the Muslim East is the crescent moon—a wide, soft, ambiguous arc. In Arab society there was always some way to cushion failure with rhetoric and enable the worst of enemies to sit down and have coffee together, maybe even send each other bouquets.
My landlord in Beirut, Fast Eddy Ghanoum, was forever shouting at me from his balcony in his baritone voice: “Thomaaaaaas, come have coffee.” I always thought of this invitation as a mating call, beckoning me into Eddy’s diwan for some sort of Arabesque negotiating encounter. It always meant that Eddy wanted something from me: more rent, a new lease, a phony receipt for the tax man, in one case, an autographed picture of Ronald Reagan—but always something. And always, over coffee, we would work out some compromise.
When he was a young boy, my friend Fouad Ajami used to be sent out by his landlord father in Beirut to collect rent. “Before I would go,” Fouad once told me, “my father would always say to me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t have coffee or tea with anyone. You are going to collect rent. If you have coffee or tea you won’t come back with the rent.’ Islamic society always threw a web over men that restrained them, but the European Zionists came out of a different culture and faith and they were not shackled by any webs. That was how they made a state. The Sephardim, the Arab Jews, never could have built Israel. They would have had coffee with the Palestinians instead.”
Ariel Sharon epitomized the ruthless single-mindedness of the European Zionists. I will never forget a story he once told me about a secret visit he made to East Beirut in 1982, five months before Israel’s June invasion.
“I wanted to see the Phalangists at home, to see how they looked there,” Sharon recalled with a whimsical air. “The thing I remember most was coming into their harbor [Juniyah] at night. There were all these lights around. So I asked them, What are all these lights? They said, ‘They are from our ships.’ I said, What ships? They said, ‘Our ships—we are trading. Ships are unloading here, and then the goods are being taken across to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and all over.’ They told me, ‘Arik, war is war and business is business.’ Then we drove all around Beirut. Bashir Gemayel drove me in his own car. We had a few guards, but we were driving around the city ourselves. I saw all these beautiful girls and everything that was going on there. They were in a war, but people were going about their business. Could we conduct our lives the same way? No. In Lebanon everything is a compromise. Compromises, compromises, all the time compromises. The question is, can we, the Jews, live here with a compromise, and I think the answer is no. When a country like Lebanon loses a war, the consequences of military defeat are a number of casualties, loss of prestige, and other things. With the Lebanese nothing ever comes to an end. Nothing is ever final there. Nothing. But with the Jews it can come to an end.”
Then pausing for a moment to contemplate his own analysis, Sharon added tersely under his breath, “To a bitter end.”
So Ariel Sharon never had coffee with anyone. He invaded Lebanon with a devastating singleness of purpose. But Lebanon, like any house of mirrors and illusions, is always easier to step into than it is to find a way out of. Arafat at least understood Beirut; he knew just what the city was and why he was there. Sharon, despite his secret visits, didn’t have a clue about the place—the same was true of most Israelis—which was why, in the end, Sharon and his army would have to crash their way out almost the same way they crashed their way in.
I saw them come and I saw them go, and a strange group of invaders they were indeed. They arrived in Beirut like innocents abroad and they left three years later like angry tourists who had been mugged, cheated, and had all their luggage stolen with their traveler’s checks inside.
Around 10:00 p.m. on June 13, 1982, the news first crackled over the Phalangist militia’s radio station in a bulletin from East Beirut. We all huddled around the old German radio at the Reuters office and tried to imagine what our ears were telling us: The Israeli army had arrived at the gates of Beirut.
Today it is hard to remember how remarkable and shocking it was to us, and the world, that Israel was surrounding an Arab capital. One week after the invasion had begun, a column of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers were five miles from downtown Beirut, parked on a bluff near the Lebanese presidential palace in Baabda, with a deluxe view of all Beirut below. As a result, the main highway from Beirut to Damascus was effectively cut, and since all other roads leading into the city from the south had earlier been severed, Beirut was under siege.
The next morning, June 14, I rose early from my room at the Commodore Hotel and ventured across the Green Line dividing Muslim West Beirut, where I was living, from the Christian eastern half of the city; reporters and noncombatants could still move back and forth freely, if they didn’t mind running a gauntlet of armies, militiamen, and freelance snipers. To be honest, I wanted to see for myself these Israelis, these fellow Jews, whom I suddenly found pitching tents at my doorstep and creating fear inside me as well as my Muslim neighbors. I came to Beirut thinking I would be virtually the only Jew there; suddenly I had company.
Their brown, dust-caked armored personnel carriers, about thirty in all, were parked in a perfectly straight row along the road leading into Baabda. Some Israeli soldiers with grizzled beards and tousled hair were lounging against the iron treads of their vehicles, either snoozing or eating breakfast from tin cans. Others were snapping pictures of Beirut from automatic cameras. I walked between the vehicles, notepad in hand, asking, “Does anyone here speak English?” I got mostly hostile stares, until one friendly boy sitting atop his APC shouted down at me, “Yeah, I do. Where are you from?”
“I’m from The New York Times,” I said.
“The New York Times!” exclaimed the soldier in American-accented English. “Do you know Bill Farrell?”
Bill, who unfortunately has since died of cancer, was helping me cover the story in Lebanon. Several years earlier, though, he had been the New York Times bureau chief in Israel.
“Sure,” I answered, “he’s with me here in Beirut.”
“Well,” said the soldier, “he knows my folks from Jerusalem. Tell him when you see him that Rose Weinberg’s son says hello.”
Whenever I think of the Israelis invading Lebanon, I always think of Rose Weinberg’s handsome, rosy-cheeked boy introducing himself on that sunny Beirut morning. He had the fresh face and warm innocent eyes of someone who belonged on a poster selling Jaffa oranges. Before the summer was over, though, Lebanon would erase both our smiles.
Today, nine out of ten Israelis will tell you that they opposed the Lebanon invasion from the start; this is sheer nonsense. The war did have a few outspoken opponents from the beginning, but the truth is that the myths, fears, and expectations that drove Defense Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin to launch the invasion were widely shared, and not just in the right-wing Likud Party but in the traditionally left-of-center Labor Party as well. The Labor Party probably never would have initiated a Lebanon invasion, but once the attack had begun, they jumped on the bandwagon and became willing accomplices in the early months. Labor’s initial backing for the invasion was based on the same basic perception as the Likud’s: that this war was only the latest round in Israel’s long struggle for survival against its eternal enemy, the Palestinians, as represented by the PLO. The consensus view in Israel was that Arafat and his men had concentrated too much firepower in southern Lebanon, shelled northern Israel too many times over the years, and were gaining too much international legitimacy through their mini-state in West Beirut. Never mind that the number of Israeli casualties the PLO guerrillas in Lebanon actually inflicted were minuscule (one death in the twelve months before the invasion); never mind that the PLO was drifting aimlessly in Beirut, spending most of its time fighting with other Lebanese Muslim militias, especially the Shiites. The bogeyman Arafat had to be tamed before he grew any bigger. That is why none other than Yitzhak Rabin, the former Labor Party Prime Minister, stood with Ariel Sharon on the outskirts of West Beirut in the first month of the war and urged him to “tighten” his siege of the city and to cut off the water supply. That is why, around the same time, Hebrew University political theorist Shlomo Avineri, one of the Labor Party’s leading ideologues, was understood to have lectured a gathering of reserve officers from the Israeli Army Education Corps that Israeli troops would be justified in entering the heart of Beirut to excise the PLO. Only when the war started to go sour, drag on, and become unpopular did the Labor leaders vociferously protest that they favored only a 25-mile-deep invasion—not a blitzkrieg all the way to Beirut—and that no one had told them about the war’s “grand designs.” Had those grand designs worked, however, Rabin and others would have cheered them along as well, because those designs, too, were based on myths and longings which ran as deep into the Labor Party as into the Likud. No war was ever launched or fought by one or two men, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was no exception. This wasn’t just Begin’s war and it wasn’t just Sharon’s war. It was Israel’s war, and this is precisely what makes it worth reexamining.
The first weeks after the invasion began were heady days for the Israeli boys in Lebanon, days of discovery and, they thought, of making new friends. Every other Israeli soldier I met in Lebanon told me about his new Lebanese acquaintances “Pierre” and “Leila.” More than a few Israeli officers enjoyed playing Lawrence of Lebanon, as they were put in charge of this or that occupied Lebanese village and treated like Lord-High-Everythings by natives bearing gifts who wanted to ingratiate themselves with Lebanon’s newest occupiers. It seemed as though every Israeli soldier had brought his camera and was constantly taking pictures of the huge Lebanese hilltop mansions, the Swiss-chocolate-wrapper scenery, the Mediterranean fish restaurants in Juniyah port, and the buxom, Cleopatra-eyed Lebanese girls in designer bikinis that left little to the imagination. This was not the Sinai, filled with cross-eyed Bedouins and shoeless Egyptian soldiers. This was the world’s biggest duty-free shop, and Israeli troops came back from the first weeks of the war loaded down with pastries, videos, cherries, and even some world-class Lebanese hashish. Many soldiers smuggled these goodies by stuffing them into the hollow armor plates covering their Merkava tanks. Who said war was hell?
Neri Horowitz, a young Israeli from Jerusalem who served as a paratrooper in Lebanon and had a keen eye for war’s incongruities, once remarked that one of his first recollections of Beirut was not of a battle but of a shopping spree.
“My mother is crazy about Danish butter cookies and English tea,” said Horowitz. “When I came home from Beirut for the first time I brought my mother tea and cookies and my sister a T-shirt with a Lebanese cedar tree painted on it. It was as if I had just been to Europe or something. I simply went into a supermarket in Baabda one day and went shopping. I actually took a shopping cart and pushed it down the aisles, alongside all these Lebanese housewives, with my Galilee rifle slung over my shoulder.”
And then the American Jews came. The Hadassah women and the big donors to the United Jewish Appeal were bussed up to East Beirut and taken by the Israeli army on special tours of the front, where they got to pose in flak jackets atop mud-splattered tanks and peer through binoculars at real live artillery blasting real live “terrorists.” The really big donors—$100,000 a year and above—got special intelligence briefings with topographical maps. There is nothing better for priming an American Jewish donor than giving him a ride with victorious Israeli troops. This wasn’t like planting a tree or going to a kibbutz and watching some Israeli farmer milk thirty cows at a time. This was power, raw Jewish power, and the American Jews were made to feel part of it. Everywhere you went in Lebanon, Jews were getting their pictures taken. This was not a nation at war, it was a nation on tour. Admittedly, there were a few nasty street fights with pockets of Palestinian resistance around the south Lebanon port of Sidon that spoiled some pictures, but these would soon be “mopped up.” The Israelis were always using terms like “mopping up”; Lebanon was just a dirty floor and they were there to clean it and restore its original shine.
Captain Teddy Lapkin, an intense and devoted young officer in the elite Golani Brigade that spearheaded the Israeli invasion, recalled the moment when his unit first crossed the Lebanon border. “We were by the village of Taibe, and you could see the Beaufort Castle [a mountaintop PLO stronghold in south Lebanon] perched on the hill, and you could see our planes, the Skyhawks, swooping in and dropping their bombs, and you could see the artillery fire impacting on the castle, and we just said to ourselves, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ I remember we passed one of the United Nations observation posts just across the border and this American captain walked out. We had so many tanks on the road, they were all congested in a traffic jam, so I started talking to this guy. Talk about hubris and arrogance. I said to him, ‘We’re going to finish this goddamn problem once and for all.’”
Two months later, recalled Lapkin, after his first tour in Lebanon was over and he had gained some inkling that this “goddamn problem” might not be so easy to finish, most Israelis still thought Lebanon was a nice place to visit, even if you didn’t care to live there.
“I was hitching a ride up to Beirut with a reserve unit at the end of July,” remembered Lapkin. “They were just going in for the first time. I think they belonged to the southern command and they were like a bunch of tourists. They were out with their cameras and shouting, ‘Hey, stop the bus! We want to take a picture.’ I was just freaking out. They reminded me of Israeli tourists on a bus going around London. I didn’t say anything, but I remember thinking, What the hell do these people think they’re doing? You see, there was a period until about September when it was fun to be in Lebanon. You would go up to Juniyah port and see the Christian enclave and take a jeep and just tell your officer, ‘Hey, Yossi, I’m gonna take a jeep and go down to the restaurant, have some fish.’ A lot of guys were carrying on with the Lebanese women in [the village of] Monte Verde above Beirut. A lot of the Lebanese women were gorgeous and their husbands were away working in Brazil. Guys were talking like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go skiing here when the snow comes.’ It was the Indian summer of the Israeli invasion, like the last flash of summer before autumn would come and the roadside bombs would begin.”
The attitude that Lebanon was a friendly place, where the Israelis might soon be able to come skiing in the winter, reflected the profound Israeli ignorance about the true nature of Lebanese society and the players there. Before the 1982 invasion, Israeli scholarship and intelligence on Lebanon was extremely scanty. Lebanon had never been an active enemy of Israel’s, so few resources were devoted by the army or academic institutions to learning about it. Since few Lebanese Jews had settled in Israel, there was also a real shortage of people who knew the country and the subtleties of its politics firsthand. The few authentic Israeli experts on Lebanon tended to rely largely on newspaper clippings and radio broadcasts for raw material in making their assessments, and naturally these public media conveyed little of the richness and mendacity of Lebanese political life, which was like a gigantic Kabuki play, where everyone wore a mask, and where the politicians almost always did the opposite of what they said.
I once asked my friend Avraham Burg, who had served as an Israeli paratroop officer in south Lebanon, how well he had been prepared for the invasion; his answer really summed up what most Israelis, including government ministers and military officers, knew about their neighbor. “We knew that there were Christians in the south, but we didn’t know anything about what was north of that belt,” said Burg. “We knew it was some kind of complicated Middle East Belfast. Okay, so they had lots of tribes. It meant nothing. We didn’t know about the differences between Sunnis and Shiites. And then, all of a sudden, we went in. It was like there was this window and we knew something was behind it, but we didn’t know what. We went through it anyway. We discovered it was a kaleidoscope that keeps changing.”
Indeed, instead of entering Lebanon with a real knowledge and understanding of the society and its actors, Israel simply burst in with tanks, artillery, and planes in one hand and a fistful of myths in the other—myths about the nature of Lebanon as a country, about the character of Israel’s Lebanese Maronite Christian allies, about the Palestinians, and about Israel’s own power to reshape the Middle East. It would take three months, but eventually these myths would undermine all that the Israeli military hardware achieved.
What the Israelis did not understand about Lebanon as a country was that the real Lebanon was two Lebanons—at least two. As I noted in the introduction, the real Lebanon was built on the merger between Maronites, representing the Christian sects, and the Sunnis, representing the various Muslim sects. It was a merger between equals. The reason most Israelis did not understand this simple fact was that their basic impressions of Lebanese society were formed not in 1982 but during the 1930s and 1940s, when contacts were first made between Zionist officials in Palestine and Maronite Christian representatives in Beirut. On the surface, the Maronites and the Jews thought they had much in common: some Maronites saw themselves as modern-day Phoenicians bringing all the Phoenician diaspora back to Lebanon, just as the Zionists were doing with the Jews; together they would restore the ancient Mediterranean civilization. Other Maronites and Jews saw themselves as kindred “beacons of Western civilization,” bringing light to the hordes of Arab-Muslim unwashed still living in the Dark Ages. Through their contacts with the Lebanese Maronites (the Lebanese Muslims were not interested in the Jews, and vice versa) a view began to take hold among early Zionists that Lebanon was a Christian society in the same way that theirs would be a Jewish society. Sure, like Israel, Lebanon also had an Arab—Muslim “minority,” said the Zionists, but it was basically a country dominated by Christian businessmen who would gladly recognize a Jewish state as soon as just one other Arab nation went first.
After the 1948 war, Lebanon, in line with all other Arab states, sealed its border with Israel and severed all links. As a result, I am convinced, the original romanticized Israeli views about Lebanon forged during the first contacts with the Maronites became fixed in the Israeli psyche. Between 1948 and 1982 if you asked any Israeli about Lebanon he would repeat the standard Israeli cliché: “We don’t know which Arab country will be the first to make peace with us, but we know which will be the second—Lebanon.”
I found that whenever I told Israeli soldiers in Lebanon that there were also Muslims there, it was like telling them that there were also Arabs in Israel. They would say, “Yes, yes. I know, but the Christians are the real Lebanese,” just as they saw themselves as the real owners of Palestine. Who could blame them? Each Israeli soldier entering Lebanon was given a red-and-white pamphlet entitled Lebanon, published by the Israeli army education corps. The entire 14-page pamphlet, a condensed history of Lebanon, contained only two passing references to the Shiites, Lebanon’s largest single religious community in the 1980s. As for the political objectives of the invasion, the pamphlet said: “The main goal of the Israelis in Lebanon is to secure the existence of the Christians and to make possible a political arrangement that will enable Lebanon to recover its sovereignty.”
Had Israelis understood that the real Lebanon was two Lebanons, they would have understood that the only way to restore stability and sovereignty to the place was not by supporting only the Christians and driving out Yasir Arafat and his PLO guerrillas. The PLO’s presence was only a symptom of Lebanon’s ills; it exacerbated those ills, but it was not their cause. The real source of Lebanon’s troubles was the fact that these two Lebanons—Christian and Muslim—frequently were at odds with each other, going back to the very foundation of their state, when they were literally thrown together. The PLO, the Syrians, and the Israelis were all at one time or another drawn into Lebanon by the Muslims and Christians, each of whom looked for outside help when they felt they might be vanquished by the other. The only time Lebanon was relatively peaceful and stable was when there was a balance of power between its Muslims and Christians—“no victor and no vanquished,” as the Lebanese themselves liked to say—so that neither community felt the need to whistle up assistance from abroad.
Had the Israelis understood that the real Lebanon was two Lebanons, they also never would have entertained the notion that Lebanon could ever be the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state. Lebanon made its living—a very good living at that—being the entrepôt between the West and the Arab world. Goods from the West were dropped off or manufactured in Beirut and then sent by plane or truck to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and as far away as Oman. Lebanese were educated in Western systems and then shipped off to run hotels and businesses in the Arab hinterland. In return, the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Syrians, and other Arabs used the Beirut banking system to handle their finances, its educational institutions to teach their children, and its mountains to relax in during the heat of the summer. With an economy so dependent on the Arab—Muslim world, Lebanon was destined to be the last Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, because only after all the other Arab countries had reconciled themselves to the Jewish state could Lebanon afford to do so.
One myth begets another. Since Israelis mythologized the nature of Lebanon, they also mythologized Bashir Gemayel and his Maronite Phalangist militia, with which they teamed up to fight the PLO in the summer of 1982. Because Menachem Begin, Israel’s Prime Minister from 1977 to 1983, saw Lebanon as basically a Christian country threatened by Muslims, he viewed the Maronites and other Lebanese Christian sects as similar to the Jews. Begin was forever asking aloud why the Christians of the world never spoke out when their co-religionists were being “slaughtered” in Lebanon by the Muslims. It was as though they were the Jews of Eastern Europe in the 1940s and Israel was going to save them. One of Begin’s closest associates once told me, “You always have to remember that Begin grew up in a Catholic country, Poland, where he was persecuted by Catholics when he was a little boy. Begin absolutely loved the idea that he could now be in a position to save the Catholics of Lebanon. He was going to be their St. George, and he was going to do it all while snubbing his nose at the Catholics of Europe. It was his ultimate revenge. The Maronites also knew how to play Begin like a guitar. They were always reminding him of the story in the Bible about King Hiram of Tyre [a port in south Lebanon], who sent the cedars for Solomon’s Temple. They all had that story down pat, and Begin loved to hear it.”
Begin’s mind was so clouded by his own mythology that he, along with most other Israelis, did not notice that these “Christians” they were going to save in Lebanon were not a group of hooded monks living in a besieged monastery but, rather, a corrupt, wealthy, venal collection of mafia-like dons, who favored gold chains, strong cologne, and Mercedeses with armor plating. They were Christians like the Godfather was a Christian. Motivated by a combination of fear and greed, these Christian warlords were determined to do anything necessary to hang on to the predominant governmental positions of power assigned to them by the 1943 national pact, despite the fact that in the intervening decades the Muslims had become the overwhelming majority in Lebanon.
The world did not speak out when these Christians were being killed, because frequently they were being done in not by Muslims but by each other, in wars for control over turf and the spoils that went with it. Only two years before the Israeli invasion, I was on hand to witness what became known as the “Day of the Long Knives.” On July 7, 1980, Bashir Gemayel tried to wipe out his main Christian militia allies-cum-rivals in East Beirut, Danny Chamoun’s Tigers. This was not a battle over dogma or sacred texts. It was about whose militia would control the illegal ports and patronage and insurance rackets in East Beirut. Gemayel’s men launched a surprise attack against Chamoun’s Tigers in their barracks and at the Safra Beach Club, where many of them were relaxing. Witnesses related that some of the Chamounists were shot in the head while Phalangist gunmen sat on top of them by poolside; others were cut down with machine guns, along with the innocent sunbathers who had the misfortune of being at the club that morning. Still others were thrown screaming out the windows of the Safra Hotel and shot in the air like ducks in a penny arcade. Gemayel was something of an expert in gangland murders. Back on June 13, 1978, he did the same to his other main Christian rival, Tony Franjieh, son of former Maronite President Suleiman Franjieh. Bashir Gemayel’s hit team, led by a Maronite medical student, Samir Geagea, burst into Tony’s bedroom in the northern village of Ehdene at 4:00 a.m. and riddled him and his wife, Vera, with machine-gun fire while they were sleeping; they did the same to the Franjiehs’ three-month-old baby, Jehane, their maid, their chauffeur, and, for good measure, the family dog. Gemayel was quite at home with Hama Rules. As he once told Israel Television’s Arab affairs correspondent, Ehud Ya’ari, when Ya’ari reproached Bashir for mistreating some Druse, “Ehud, this is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark.”
Another reason the Israelis never saw who their Maronite allies really were was that the Israelis are terribly vulnerable to anyone who winks at them. This is understandable considering that Israelis have lived their entire history surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab faces. Naturally, they constantly long for a smiling face, some validation of their existence that will enable them to feel at home. One day from the back row of this hostile ring someone winked at them; his name was Bashir Gemayel. But Gemayel didn’t just wink; he whispered the idea that the two of them could reshape Lebanon and forge a peace treaty. As a former Israeli Mossad secret service official described it: “The Maronites wined us and dined us. They gave us information about the PLO. Who would reject this? Only a fool. It was just a dose, but we got an overdose. It was like drugs. It was an addiction. You would come to Juniyah on secret visits and see beautiful girls in the harbor and Arab high society and get intelligence on the PLO on top of it. And then this camaraderie developed. Some of our people stayed behind to train some of theirs and became enchanted. It was an entree into the Arab world we had never had before with anyone—with a little taste of James Bond tossed in. Who could resist it?”
An Israeli friend told me of being at the Tel Aviv home of David Kimche in the late 1970s, at the time contacts were being intensified between Israel and the Maronite militias. Kimche, then a senior Mossad official, was one of the early architects of the alliance between Israel and the Gemayels. That particular evening he was hosting Danny Chamoun at his house and had invited several Israelis to join the discussions. As the evening at the Kimches’ wore on, the wine began to flow and Chamoun got looser and looser. At one point Chamoun took my friend aside and told him in a wobbly voice, “Look, never forget something. You Israelis are instruments for us. If you don’t help us, we will just turn to the Syrians.”
My friend said, “I immediately went over to Kimche and told him what Chamoun had said. Kimche just dismissed it with a flick of his wrist. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ he said. ‘He’s drunk.’”
Chamoun may have been drunk, but his comments were sober and should have been heeded. But Kimche, and many of his colleagues in the Mossad, were not ready to listen. Whenever senior Phalangist officials used to talk about the Palestinians, they did so in the most blood-curdling terms, which prompted Israeli leaders to believe that the Phalangists hated the PLO even more than they did. What the Israeli leaders did not know was that the Phalangists often talked about the Lebanese Druse, Sunnis, and Shiites in equally deprecatory language. For the Phalangists, the summer of ’82 was simply another round in the Lebanese civil war that had begun in 1975. Their prime objective was not to get the PLO out of Lebanon as an end in itself; their prime objective was to win, definitively, the Lebanese civil war, so they would not have to make any power-sharing concessions to the Lebanese Muslims. Like a good Lebanese tribe, the Maronites wanted the egg and its shell. The Israelis were the pigeons they thought would bring them both. And they knew just how to appeal to the Israelis: they would dangle the Palestinians in front of them, like worms before hungry birds.
An Israeli friend of mine who was a paratrooper in Lebanon told me of the day he realized he was being had. “Our battalion was based in the Shouf Mountains near Aley,” he said. “One day a Phalangist officer came to our liaison officer in the Shouf and told him that he had some special intelligence: a house down the road from us had four Palestinian terrorists from Saiqa [a pro-Syrian PLO faction] inside. So we were ordered to go down and destroy the house. We really put fire on it. I mean we used rockets, everything. When we cleared the rubble we found four bodies. They were all Druse. We felt really bad about it.”
The Phalangists were always ready to fight to the last Israeli. They hung back throughout the first three months of the war and let the Israelis do all the dirty work inside the Palestinian camps.
“In August 1982, I was stationed with a unit on the roof of this Christian guy’s house in East Beirut, near Baabda, not far from the Green Line,” recalled Neri Horowitz, the Israeli paratrooper. “Nearby we had a tank. We would keep an eye on Palestinians trying to move from house to house with ammunition on the other side of the Green Line, and if we saw any we would call in tank fire onto the specific house. Well, this Christian guy who owned the house we were on was always kissing us and coming up to the roof to look through our binoculars whenever our tank fired. Whenever we hit anything, he would cheer and jump up and down. So one day the Palestinians figured out what we were doing and they fired a shell at us. The guy’s house got a little damaged. He immediately ran up to the roof and screamed at us, ‘Get out, get out of here, go away.’”
Teddy Lapkin, the captain in the Golani Brigade, recalled how at the end of the summer of ’82 he was ordered to go with a unit of Phalangists into the Muslim town of Mashghara, in the southern Bekaa Valley, where the PLO and some local Muslims had stored arms. “We took some prisoners. My men tied their hands behind their backs and then the Phalangists just started beating the shit out of them. I had to stop them myself, otherwise they would have killed them. I put the prisoners all in a room and had one of my people stand guard all the time to make sure the Phalangists didn’t kill them. The Phalangists were good for parades. Sartorially they were well put out. They were well-armed hairdressers. It was like a military fashion contest among them. If a guy had a Kalashnikov with a sniperscope on it, they would all go, Oohh, aahh, and if someone had a nifty knife, then he was hot shit. They were paper soldiers: whooosh, you could just blow them over. But they sure knew how to use us.”
Whenever Israeli officers complained about the behavior of the Phalangists, the word usually came down from on high to stifle it. “Don’t upset Bashir” was a popular phrase around the Israeli headquarters in Lebanon. As one Israeli intelligence officer explained it, “Once we were inside, we discovered a lot of things we didn’t like, but it was too late then to turn back. We needed the Phalangists to lead us around, show us who was who. They were our only allies. But mostly we needed Bashir. The whole thing was built around him.”
Not only did the Israelis enter Lebanon with a myth about their allies, the Phalangists, but also with one about their enemies, the Palestinians. Many Israelis had convinced themselves that there was no such thing as a legitimate Palestinian nation with a legitimate national claim to any part of Palestine. They saw the Palestinians instead as part of an undifferentiated Arab mass stretching from Morocco to Iraq and with no particular cultural, historical, or ethnic identity linked to the land of Palestine. This myth was one of the oldest and most enduring in Zionist history. In the early twentieth century, when the Zionist movement was just taking off, it may have been a necessary myth. To be able to convince Jews to pick up and leave their homes in Moscow, Johannesburg, New York, Mexico City, London, and Montreal and come to settle in Palestine, the Zionists had to look through the Arabs to some extent. If the Zionists had come to Jews around the world and said, “Look, we want you to come to Palestine, but you had better understand that there is another legitimate nation there, the Palestinians, who claim it as theirs and will fight you to the death,” many Jews might never have come. So the Zionists had to believe, as the saying at the time went, that they were “a people without a land” coming to “a land without a people.” Arafat wasn’t the only political leader in the area who understood that at times the optimal way to achieve things—sometimes the only way—is by ignoring the facts and living instead by myths. Myths are precisely what give people the faith to undertake projects which rational calculation or common sense would reject.
Nevertheless, what distinguished Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion from Yasir Arafat, and most other Israeli leaders as well, what gave him his lasting impact on Jewish history, was his keen understanding that while it was necessary to ignore some realities in order for a movement like Zionism to begin, at a certain point down the road it was also necessary to let reality in; the beginning myth will always destroy the desired end if it is not tempered with reality. Therefore, starting in the 1930s, Ben-Gurion accepted the notion of partitioning Palestine into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Palestinian Arabs—a program that was eventually adopted by the United Nations in 1947. Ben-Gurion felt that if the Jews were ever going to get their own state they needed international legitimacy and support, and the only way to get that was by compromise.
Ben-Gurion’s archrival at the time, Menachem Begin, never accepted this accommodation with reality. He rejected the UN partition plan and consistently held out for Jewish sovereignty over all the ancient land of Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and beyond, in line with the original Zionist program. After Begin’s Likud Party defeated Labor for the first time in the 1977 elections and Begin became Prime Minister, he used his position to bring many Israelis around to his point of view. This was not all that difficult, since even many Labor Party supporters never really believed the Palestinians were a legitimate nation with whom they had to share the land. It was former Labor Party Prime Minister Golda Meir who said in a 1969 interview with The Sunday Timesof London, when asked about the Palestinians, “They do not exist.” Labor’s support for partition in 1947 had been largely tactical; once they got the state, many laborites, too, preferred to think of the Palestinians as simply “Arab refugees” who should be resettled in the surrounding Arab states, with which Israel would eventually sign peace treaties. Even after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and was again confronted with large numbers of Palestinians, most Israelis preferred either not to see them, or referred to them, as Begin did, as “Arabs of the land of Israel.”
Because Begin fundamentally rejected the notion of a legitimate Palestinian nation, with a legitimate claim to Palestine, anything done politically or militarily on behalf of this “bogus” Palestinian nationalism was viewed by him as illegitimate and potentially criminal. But the PLO did not just pose a physical threat in Begin’s eyes. It also posed a deeply troubling existential threat to the Zionist enterprise. The PLO officially embodied the Palestinian national claim to Palestine, which was the negation of the Zionist-Jewish claim to Palestine. Wherever the Israelis went, the PLO followed, holding up the deed to Palestine and telling whoever would listen that the land did not belong to the Jews. Whenever I talked to Sharon about the PLO, he would always refer to them as a “cloud” that hung over Israel’s head. Then he would wave his hand above his head as though he were trying to sweep this cloud away.
In very simple terms, then, the “Palestine Problem” for Begin and Sharon, and a good many other Israelis, was not one of two equally legitimate national communities—Jews and Palestinians—seeking a national home in Palestine. The Palestine Problem was the problem of marauding Arab bands killing Jews, engaging in terrorism, and refusing to accept the Jewish people’s God-given right to the land of Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The Arab organization that was most responsible for killing Israelis and spuriously claiming Jewish land as their own was this thing called the PLO. Therefore, the PLO was the Palestine Problem; if they could get rid of the PLO, thought Sharon and Begin, they would get rid of the Palestine Problem. Because with the PLO out of the way, they figured, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would stop demanding independence and accept some form of limited autonomy according to the Camp David accords. Israel would then be in a position to dominate all of Palestine, without having to share any land or real power with the “Arabs” living there, the same way the Maronites hoped to dominate all of Lebanon without having to share any real power with the Muslims.
The idea that Israel might finally be able once and for all to bring an end to the physical and existential challenge of the Palestinians was an intoxicating notion that touched the soul of the vast majority of Israelis, and this explains why so many of them were ready to join Begin and Sharon on their march to Beirut. Like all the other Middle Eastern tribes, the Israelis also knew how to reach for the egg and its shell.
In order to pull off the invasion, though, one more Israeli myth was necessary: the myth of power. Begin, who was born in 1913, spent the formative years of his youth in Poland in an era of rampant anti-Semitism, in a world in which Jews were spat upon. He lived for the chance to correct the indignities that he and his forefathers had suffered for centuries. Begin loved the idea of Jewish power, Jewish generals, Jewish tanks, Jewish pride. They were his pornography. He needed a war to satisfy his deep longing for dignity and to cure all his traumas about Jewish impotence. Begin, I am convinced, needed a chance to lead 500,000 Jewish soldiers in a battle against Arafat, who for him was only the latest in a long line of anti-heroes who had risen up to slaughter the Jews. It was no surprise that at the height of the war, Begin declared, almost with enthusiasm, that in besieging Arafat he felt as though he were going after “Hitler in his bunker.”
But what made Begin even more dangerous was that his fantasies about power were combined with a self-perception of being a victim. Someone who sees himself as a victim will almost never morally evaluate himself or put limits on his own actions. Why should he? He is the victim. At one point during the Lebanon war, a little Lebanese boy was injured, reportedly during an Israeli air strike, and President Reagan put a picture of his bandaged body on his desk. When Begin heard about this, he put on his desk a famous picture from World War II of a small Jewish child wearing a yellow armband with a Jewish star on it, raising his arms in surrender to some Nazis. Begin always reminded me of Bernhard Goetz, the white Manhattanite who shot four black youths he thought were about to mug him on the New York subway. Once you have been mugged enough times, as Goetz had, no one can tell you that you are not entitled to blow out the brains of some black kid for even thinking about mugging you. Begin, unfortunately was a victim with more than a Saturday-night special; he was Bernhard Goetz with an F-15.
Yet for all his need for a war, Begin did not quite have the guts or the know-how to manipulate a whole country and a whole army to satisfy his quest. Ariel Sharon did. Sharon didn’t share Begin’s victim complex, but he had his own fantasies about power. Sharon knew how strong Israel was, and he believed, wrongly, that this military strength could, in an almost mechanical fashion, solve a whole knot of complex, deeply rooted political problems—that tiny Israel could drive the PLO out of Lebanon, install Bashir Gemayel as President, neutralize Syria and the Lebanese Muslims, get Lebanon to sign a peace treaty, and then force the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to accept Israeli rule. Unlike Hafez Assad, Sharon did not know when to stop; he did not understand the limits of power in a fragmented, unpredictable place such as Lebanon. Assad was a brutal realist with a very limited agenda—survival. Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design, or, as Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi liked to say, “Sharon was a realist at the tactical level and both a mythmaker and a man possessed by myths at the strategic level.” That is precisely what made him so dangerous in Lebanon. He behaved with a decisiveness and unwavering sense of direction, as though he knew exactly where he was going strategically, when in reality he didn’t have a clue about the world he was charging into. His strategic design in Lebanon was based entirely on self-delusions, which is why it eventually led Israel into a disaster. His was a classic example of false leadership.
But Ariel Sharon is a historical type which some people find very seductive, and one of them was Menachem Begin. Sharon understood that Begin needed a war, and Sharon, aided and encouraged by his Arab-hating Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan, had just the war for him—with maps and plans and even willing allies. Sharon understood, though, that the Israeli people would not accept his grand designs; they would not spill their blood to make Bashir Gemayel President. So Sharon called the Israeli invasion Operation Peace for Galilee, an operation designed to clear the PLO away from Israel’s northern border. It was simple, modest, and logical—something all Israelis, Labor and Likud alike, would support. They would discover the full agenda later.
So the man-with-the-maps joined with the victim-in-search-of-dignity and together they led their country into Lebanon, promising that when it was all over there would be “forty years of peace.”
The minute the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, Arafat’s world of illusions started to crumble. The first to go was the notion that the PLO was still the vanguard of an Arab nationalist revival and the conscience of the Arab world. Arafat had repeated this notion so many times in speeches, he had clearly become convinced of it. What Arafat hadn’t seemed to notice was that in the decade between 1973 and 1982 the Arab world had been broken, either by wealth or by the whip. The wealthier states had grown tired of the PLO’s revolutionary rhetoric, its endless waffling, and its shakedown operations. At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary takeover of Iran in 1979 posed a radical Islamic threat that the Arab oil states found far more frightening, both militarily and ideologically, than anything coming out of Israel.
Since the Arabs were unwilling to give the Palestinians enough resources or sacrifices to see them through to success, they compensated them instead with money and rhetoric. They adorned all the PLO’s failures, whether in Amman or in Lebanon, with victory bouquets, and indulged them in all their revolutionary bravado, which the Palestinians, as a weak and victimized people, needed as compensation. The one thing the Arabs never did, though, was to take Arafat aside and tell him, “Look, my friend, the power realities are stacked against you. Your people got in the way of a bad storm called the Zionist movement. It could have happened to any of us, but it happened to you. If you really want to help your people, cut the best deal you can now with the Jews. Save whatever land you can and forget the rest.” Instead, as Fouad Ajami put it, “the Arabs walked away from the Palestinian cause while swearing eternal fidelity to the Palestinians.”
In the 1970s, Arafat used to boast that the Palestinian guerrillas would spread out around the Arab world like “fish in the sea,” but thanks to Arab indifference in the summer of ‘82, they became fish in a barrel. Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal fought the 1973 war with the oil weapon, but nine years later all that his successor King Fahd would lift to defend Beirut was his telephone to call President Reagan and plead with him to get the Israelis to turn the water back on to West Beirut. Given a choice between watching highlights about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the World Cup soccer matches that were being played during the summer of ’82, most Arabs tuned in to the World Cup. This came as a bitter shock to many Palestinians. The PLO finally had its war and nobody came—nobody but Sharon.
This stone-cold reality was first brought home to Arafat not by the Arab leaders themselves but by their Lebanese surrogates—the Sunni Muslim bosses of West Beirut. The Sunnis of West Beirut had used the PLO as their club in the Lebanese civil war, and the PLO in turn had used them to be able to stay in town. But when the Israeli army began bombarding West Beirut, their bargain broke down. The cost of carrying the PLO became too great for the Lebanese Muslims to bear. So, after the Israeli army had been besieging West Beirut for almost a month, the Muslim leaders finally put the screws to Arafat to leave during a climactic confrontation on July 3, 1982.
The setting for this historic moment was a fitting one—the white three-story mansion of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam, which had been built by his father in 1912, when he was a deputy in the Ottoman parliament. On that Saturday afternoon the eight leading Sunni Muslim figures of West Beirut gathered in Salam’s marble-floored dining room to discuss how to persuade the PLO to leave encircled West Beirut. Arafat and his top political adviser, Hani al-Hassan, were invited to join the group at 12:30 p.m. Salam later described the scene for me.
When Arafat arrived wearing his tightly creased pea-green army uniform and cap, he and his aide were ushered into the dining room and seated around the long Chippendale table lighted by an antique chandelier. Salam, a crafty seventy-seven-year-old politician, opened the discussion by praising Arafat and reaffirming that his men had fought the good fight against impossible odds. “The PLO has covered itself in honor,” said Salam, “and now it is time to leave with honor.”
Arafat was seated to Salam’s right. His cap was resting on the table. He listened to the various remarks of the Sunni bosses as to why he should quit Beirut, and he responded with counterarguments of his own. The dignity and honor of the PLO were at stake, he declared. This was a question of “saving face,” and his men would never lose face before the Israelis. They would prefer to die fighting street to street, said Arafat, rather than walk out of West Beirut in disgrace. Seeing that his soft-spoken approach was not having its intended effect, Salam began to raise his voice. The military battle was obviously over, he shouted, and now was the time for the PLO to transform itself into a purely political organization—for its own sake and for the sake of the people living in West Beirut.
Clearly hurt and on the defensive, Arafat shot back, “Do you want to push us out? Is that it?”
“With all the sacrifices we have made for you and your cause,” stammered Salam in a still louder voice, “you cannot say that about us. It is better for you, and for us, that you go—with your honor.”
The discussion continued in this tone for four and a half hours, with others occasionally interjecting remarks to cool things down. At one point a crew from Lebanese Television arrived to take some posed footage of the meeting, but even as the cameras were rolling, the talks exploded into another shouting match between Arafat and the others. One of the Sunni leaders at the meeting had to use his influence with Lebanese Television to get the film destroyed before it could be shown on the nightly news. At 5:15 p.m. Arafat agreed to study what had been discussed and to put it before his colleagues in the PLO leadership. As it was Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn until dusk, Salam suggested that Arafat leave and return for the traditional eveningIftarmeal.
Two hours later, Arafat and Hani al-Hassan returned and joined the Sunni notables and the Salam family around the dinner table. Everyone agreed that there should be no talk of politics during the meal of ground meat, cold yogurt, and eggplant. Arafat listened as the others exchanged anecdotes. He ate little except for the black olives set in the middle of the long table. After dinner Arafat, a devout Muslim, asked if he could be excused to perform the evening prayers alone. He went into Salam’s den, faced south toward Mecca, and recited the ritual prayers on the white carpet in solitude. When he returned to the dining-room table, Arafat said he had something to deliver. He removed the ever-present notepad from his breast pocket and slipped out a folded piece of white PLO stationery. Putting on his black glasses, a distressed Arafat began to read from the document, written in his own scrawl under the letterhead of the PLO commander in chief. His voice full and resonant, Arafat read: “To our brother, [Lebanese] Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan. With reference to the discussions we have had, the Palestinian command has taken the following decision: The PLO does not wish to remain in Lebanon.”
When he finished reading the crucial lines, Arafat handed the note to Salam, who immediately had it photocopied. Later that evening Salam had the note relayed to American special envoy Philip C. Habib.
But old myths die hard, and the bigger they are the harder they die. Three days after Arafat first signaled his willingness to leave West Beirut—a move which I always believed was a tactical stall on his part, designed to buy enough time for outside powers to rein in the Israelis and enable the PLO to remain in Beirut—I interviewed him at the PLO’s press office on that shrapnel-littered street in the Fakhani neighborhood of West Beirut. He seemed buoyant of spirit, but the war was clearly taking its toll on him, which was registered in the red rims of his eyes and the way he nervously tapped his toe on the floor as he spoke. At one point I asked him if he was disappointed in the Arab response to the invasion. He looked me in the eye and asked rhetorically, “How long will the Arabs remain silent?”
The tone of Arafat’s voice suggested he still believed the Arab world would jump into the war on his side, or do something meaningful to take the pressure off while the PLO fought for its life. After another month of Israeli bombing and shelling of West Beirut, though, he would have no such illusions; neither, for that matter, would any other Palestinians.
During the last weeks of August 1982, when it was clear to the PLO guerrillas that their sojourn in Beirut was finished, some anonymous person who called himself Ayoub began hanging cardboard signs with Arabic messages on them on the shutters and door handles of shops just off West Beirut’s main shopping street, Hamra. Each morning a new batch of signs would appear from the mysterious Ayoub, and Ihsan Hijazi and I would go out and read them before the shopkeepers tore them down. They were clearly the work of some frustrated Palestinian poet, and they expressed the bitterness of the whole Palestinian nation, a bitterness that was not so much directed against the Israelis, who were their avowed enemies, but toward the Arabs, who were their avowed family—family who had failed to lift a finger militarily to save the Palestinians in their dire hour of need.
“There are two kinds of Arabs today,” read one sign. “The Arabs of fear and the Arabs of sheep. But we alone in West Beirut are making history—Ayoub.”
“Today we are in shelters,” read another sign, “but tomorrow the Arab leaders will be on shish-kebab skewers—Ayoub.”
But the sign that intrigued me most, and seemed to be repeated most often, was the one that truly expressed the existential sense of abandonment which the Palestinians and the PLO felt that summer of ’82. It read: “Tell your children what Israel has done. Tell your children what the Arabs have done. Tell your children what the world has done—Ayoub.”
Ayoub is the Arabic name for Job, the biblical figure of endless, patient suffering.
The other myth the Israelis punctured was that the PLO was a real military force. The fact is, the Israeli invasion, for all that it was predicted, caught the PLO rather unprepared. While many of the Palestinian guerrillas fought bravely, the Israeli army cut through their lines and reached Beirut in less than a week with relatively little difficulty, except around the Palestinian camps in Sidon and in the Shouf Mountains, where Syrian tank units were posted. Had Israel not chosen for political reasons to avoid entering West Beirut in the second week of the war, the PLO, which was then in a state of confusion, might have been routed in a matter of days.
But for many of the Palestinians it didn’t matter that they were being overrun on the field of battle. There was always a compensation—always a badeel. For some Palestinian guerrillas the compensation was just getting the chance to fight the war against the Jews that some of their fathers and grandfathers never fought in 1948. There were no Arab armies in the way this time; it was just the Jews and the Palestinians face to face. A few days after Israel had crushed all the PLO bases in south Lebanon, I met George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in an underground bunker beneath an apartment building in West Beirut. This pediatrician-turned-guerrilla had been fighting the Israelis since 1948, when he was twenty-one, and was easily the most charismatic of all the Palestinian leaders. The air in the bunker was stale and musty and “Dr. George” sat erect behind a small table, surrounded by a knot of young guerrilla devotees. To him the fact that the battle in south Lebanon had been lost seemed totally insignificant. The most important thing was that there had been a battle at all. By marshaling their entire army to fight the Palestinians, the Israelis were in effect granting them the most profound form of recognition. His silver hair shining in the dim light, Habash punctuated all his comments by slamming his left arm down on the table, sending little puffs of dust into the air.
“I thank God,” he shouted, oblivious to the irony of the great Arab Marxist invoking the Almighty. “I thank God,” he continued, bringing his fist down onto the table, “that I lived to see the day that a Palestinian army fought an Israeli army. Now I can die. I don’t need to see any more.” Waving his arm around at his young acolytes, he added, “I feel sorry if anything happens to these young men, but now I can die, for we really fought them.”
Habash didn’t die, and neither did Arafat. Despite all their tough rhetoric, they agreed in the end to evacuate West Beirut. They said they were leaving to spare the city, but I don’t think the Arab world or even many Palestinians bought it. They were leaving because they were surrounded, and were lucky to be getting out alive. The real tragedy is that all their theatrics and miscalculations had been staged on the backs of sincere Palestinians—guerrillas, refugees, and bureaucrats—men and women who had picked up and left Jordan, Syria, or other refuges to follow the PLO. They were entitled to a much better leadership than they ever got.
Arafat agreed to start evacuating his guerrillas from Beirut, beginning on August 21, 1982. I arrived at Beirut port early that day to wait for the international peacekeeping troops to land and escort the PLO out. The French peacekeepers were the first to hit the docks, and I accompanied some of them as they fanned out to take control of the main intersection on the road leading into the port from West Beirut, which they were supposed to take over from a unit of the Syrian-controlled Palestine Liberation Army. The PLA officer in charge had been out of touch with his commanders for weeks, however, and didn’t have any orders that the French were coming. He demanded that the French officer sit down and write him a letter saying that the Palestinian officer had turned over his post “with dignity.” The Frenchman borrowed a paper and pen from me and wrote out the letter in longhand. Then the Palestinian officer insisted that a formal turning-over ceremony be conducted. On one side, he lined up all his men, a ragtag lot who probably had not bathed for weeks, most of them wearing different helmets and pieces of uniforms. Facing them stood a unit of suntanned French Foreign Legionnaires, all of them wearing mirrored sunglasses and clean khaki uniforms, with their shirt-sleeves rolled up to reveal arms rippling with muscles.
They stood for a few minutes, each side barking out military commands, moving their guns from shoulder to shoulder. When the ceremony was complete, the Palestinian officer dismissed his men. They turned to run off, but one of them tripped and several others fell on top of him like Keystone Kops. But nobody laughed. Something about those guerrillas and the way they insisted on all the formalities after having held out for so many weeks bespoke a dignity which could not be tittered at. As I watched them I could not help but shake my head in awe at their commitment. They had guarded the approaches to West Beirut, armed with nothing heavier than rocket-propelled grenades, against an Israeli army deploying the most up-to-date weapons in the world; it was practically a suicide mission. They were nothing more than boys, but the look in their eyes said that, unlike their leaders, they would have fought to the end.
“Arafat muffed it,” said Manchester Guardian reporter David Hirst, who had covered the PLO from its early days in Beirut. “The PLO was on the verge of its first real heroic moment. People were ready to go on. He blew it.”
Maybe Arafat was wise to leave Beirut in order to fight another day, as he argued at the time. But the PLO was never quite the same after it quit Lebanon, and neither for that matter was the Arab world. Something in the Arab world died on August 30, 1982, the day Arafat himself boarded the Greek cruise liner Atlantis and sailed for Athens. (He refused to make any Arab country his first stop, so disgusted was he with the Arabs.)
Arafat’s retreat marked the end of an era in Arab politics. After the fiasco of 1967, the PLO had emerged from the ashes like a phoenix that promised, and for a moment even seemed to deliver, a restoration of the lost dignity of the Arab nation. The guerrillas were going to lead a revolution that would sweep away the corrupt old regimes and make the Arabs again a force to be reckoned with. For the young, it was an age of political romance, and thanks to the OPEC oil revolution, there was plenty of money and Western sycophants around to feed the wildest expectations and illusions. But in the heat of the battle of Beirut the Arab nationalist dream, to which the PLO had anointed itself heir, crumbled into a heap of silk-screen heroes and empty slogans.
Lina Mikdadi, a half-Palestinian, half-Lebanese writer, was on hand August 30 when Arafat said goodbye to his Muslim allies at the home of Walid Jumblat. In her book Surviving the Siege of Beirut (1983), Mikdadi, who grew up in the heyday of the Che Guevara-style Arab nationalist era of Beirut, with its student strikes, protest marches, and revolutionary poses, described the scene. “At Walid Jumblat’s, the two men tried to maintain a brave front. ‘I’m glad my father [assassinated Druse leader Kemal Jumblat] is not here to see this day,’ Walid Jumblat said … . The show of bravado kept cracking; the wan smiles and niceties served to no avail. I felt a surge of anger and despair: Arafat might be going out alive, but we were defeated, utterly beaten. No, I refused to think that way: The Israelis didn’t make it into the heart of West Beirut. Arafat stood up to leave, and I sobbed my heart out as the women threw rice in a last gesture of farewell. I cried for our lost Arab nationalism, the indifference of the Arab world, the thought of the Israelis at Beirut Airport.”
Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi went down to Beirut port that day to watch Arafat actually walk up the gangplank. “What I remember most,” said Salibi, “was Walid Jumblat. He was no great friend of Arafat’s, but he accompanied him to the ship. When Arafat was about to leave, Walid took out a pistol and in the middle of this big crowd he fired it into the air as a salute. It was a very symbolic thing. It was not about the person Arafat, but about what the whole thing represented. West Beirut had become the last repository of the conscience of the Arab people. That was why in the last weeks of the summer many West Beirutis actually began to sympathize with the PLO. As much as they had wanted the guerrillas to be gone, they did not want to give the Israelis Arafat’s head. It was as though West Beirutis recognized that in standing with the PLO against Israel they represented the last vestige of Arab dignity. It became a badge of pride to be in West Beirut in those last weeks of the summer. That was why I stayed. I wanted to be there. It was something you could touch, and this is what actually brought Walid to tears. To hell with the Arab world, he was saying, we are the only Arabs left. The only Arabs are the people of West Beirut.”
Before he got on board, Arafat told his Lebanese friends with a certain unintended candor, “I am very proud because we had the honor of defending this part of Beirut. I am leaving this city, but my heart is here.”
Some time after the PLO evacuation, I ran into Kemal Salibi in Amman, Jordan. Salibi was a true Arab nationalist, and a real lover of Beirut and all that it stood for. As we sat in an Italian restaurant, I asked him to reflect back on that moment in August 1982 when Arafat left. What did it signify for Arafat, the PLO, and the whole sixties generation of Arab politics? Instead of answering me straightaway, Salibi began reciting from memory a poem, “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. While a waiter stood at tableside holding two bowls of soup, Salibi intoned:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Instead of turning West Beirut into his Stalingrad, as he vowed, Arafat moved on to Tunis, where he relocated his headquarters in the five-star Salwa Beach Hotel. I visited his men there shortly after the evacuation. It was a strange scene: PLO officials lodged in a 200-room hotel featuring an arboretum filled with strutting peacocks in the lobby and waiters serving endless rounds of Arabic coffee to retired guerrillas playing endless rounds of chess and Ping-Pong. When people found out I had come from Beirut, all they wanted to hear about was the only homeland many of them really knew—West Beirut. The real Palestine was a dream: Lebanon was the concrete Palestine, where they had lived their lives, gone to school, and controlled the streets. They pumped me for information on friends and family and their favorite haunts. As we sat in beach chairs, and the Mediterranean breeze danced across the empty, pink-painted miniature golf course that guarded the entrance to the hotel, there was a melancholy spirit in the air, a sense that something was over, that an opportunity had been lost.
“In Beirut, we were in exile,” one of Arafat’s senior aides remarked. “Here we are in exile from exile.”