7
In the wake of the PLO’s withdrawal from Beirut, Israel seemed to be on an unstoppable run of winning hands. Arafat and his men had been uprooted from their last independent base of operations and were dispersed around the Middle East in the grip of various Arab regimes, thereby eliminating them as a direct threat to Israel. At the same time, the Syrian air force and antiaircraft units had been badly mauled in their confrontations with Israel and would take several years to rebuild. Syria’s historic influence over Lebanese politics seemed to be in real danger of being broken. With some 14,000 PLO and Syrian fighting men having been evacuated from Beirut, the Lebanese Muslims were more or less disarmed and exposed to the dictates of the Phalangist militia and their Israeli backers. This made it possible for the Israelis and Phalangists to “persuade,” through a combination of intimidation and bags of unmarked bills, enough Muslim members of the Lebanese parliament to elect Bashir Gemayel as the new President of the republic of Lebanon on August 23, 1982. Bashir was the only candidate. During his six-year term, Begin and Sharon expected him to consolidate all the military gains the Israeli army had achieved during the first three months of the invasion, and thereby make it possible for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon without the country reverting to its old ways. Bashir was supposed to rebuild the Lebanese army so it could take over from the Israelis, keep the Syrians out of Beirut, prevent the PLO from ever taking root again in the Palestinian refugee camps, and, to top it all off, sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state. Begin and Sharon had bet everything on Bashir and now, it seemed, they were going to be able to cash in on his victory. The promised “forty years of peace” would soon be at hand.
But poker is a funny game. You can be winning all night long and then comes the final hand. You get cocky, so you bet the pot on four kings. It’s virtually a sure winner, you tell yourself. Suddenly, the dealer smiles at you and says he wants another card. Right before your eyes he draws a card from the bottom of the deck and then lays his hand on the table: four aces.
All summer long Syria’s President Hafez Assad had been losing his shirt in Lebanon. With Bashir’s election, it looked as though Assad was going to have to resign himself permanently to an Israeli victory. But in Middle Eastern poker when the pot is at stake, the rules go out the window. The only rules become Hama Rules and Hama Rules are no rules at all. On the last hand of the summer, Assad topped the Israelis’ four kings with an ace, which he pulled right off the bottom of the deck. The Israelis cried for the sheriff, and Assad just laughed.
“Around these parts,” he told them, “I am the sheriff.”
At 4:10 on the afternoon of September 14, 1982, Bashir Gemayel was meeting with a group of Phalangists at the party’s Ashrafiye branch in East Beirut; Bashir came to the three-story apartment house every Tuesday afternoon at the same time. The purpose of this week’s meeting was to discuss some details about how the Phalangist Party and militia would turn over power to Bashir’s government and the Lebanese army that would be under his command.
What Bashir did not know, or had ignored, was the fact that living in this building were relatives of a twenty-six-year-old man named Habib Tanious Shartouni, who was a member of the pro-Damascus National Syrian Socialist Party, which espoused the idea of a merger between Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and was an active agent of Syrian intelligence. Shartouni had been assigned by his masters to observe Bashir’s comings and goings in the building; since his sister lived inside, the Phalangist guards paid him scant attention. According to research by Jacques Reinich, a former senior officer of Israeli Military Intelligence who wrote his doctorate for Tel Aviv University on Bashir Gemayel, the Syrians decided to eliminate Bashir shortly after his election and before he was sworn in. Shartouni was ordered to come over to West Beirut by a senior NSSP official, Nabil al-’Alam, and was trained in operating an explosive device that fit into a suitcase and could be detonated by a remote-control button the size of an electronic garage door opener. On September 11, Shartouni, while ostensibly on a visit to his sister, moved the bomb into the apartment building where Bashir was to speak. On September 13, according to Reinich, Shartouni received a telephone call from a “Syrian intelligence officer” in Rome, who instructed him to assassinate Bashir the next afternoon. Shartouni placed his suitcase on his sister’s living-room floor, which was directly above the room in which Bashir would be speaking. He then set the numbers on the bomb’s digital readout to “51,” which was the numerical code that primed the explosive to go off as soon as it received the proper radio signal.
Late the next afternoon Shartouni called his sister and told her to come over to his house immediately, saying that he had cut his hand; this was simply a ruse to get her out of the building. Shartouni himself climbed up to the roof of an adjacent apartment block and waited for Bashir and his caravan to arrive.
According to Reinich, Bashir began the meeting with a story about a statue that had been erected years ago of Lebanon’s first President, Bishara al-Khouri. President al-Khouri’s sons had complained at the time that the statue was not a very good likeness, but were told by those who erected it that they would “get used to it.” “To all those who don’t like the idea of me as President,” Bashir told the Phalangist gathering, “I say, they will get used to it.”
Moments later, Shartouni pressed the button on his remote-control device, emitting a radio signal that set off the bomb and shattered the apartment building, collapsing it into a cloud of dust and rubble. My colleague, Washington Post Middle East correspondent Jonathan Randal, said the only way they recognized Bashir’s mangled corpse was from what remained of his prominent nose, the dimple on his chin, and his hexagonal wedding ring. Shartouni was arrested a short time later and confessed to the crime.
The Israelis immediately panicked, and for good reason. Bashir had been the keystone on which their entire invasion had been built. Having lost Bashir, Begin and Sharon decided they had better invade West Beirut and complete for themselves their immediate objective of wiping out the PLO as both a military and a political threat. The rest of their political objectives could be dealt with later. Ignoring an oral promise to the United States not to enter West Beirut after the PLO evacuated, Israeli troops fanned out across the western half of the capital in the early hours of September 15.
Two targets in particular seemed to interest Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition, and no fighters. But there was evidently something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab community in Palestine, and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, that is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: Palestinian? What’s that? and Palestinians, fuck you, and Arafat, I will hump your mother. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)
The other target was the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, which had been two of the PLO’s main bases of popular support since its arrival in Beirut in 1970. Sharon claimed he had intelligence that the PLO had left 2,000—3,000 guerrillas behind in these camps; I suspect this information was given to him by Phalangist intelligence. While the PLO undoubtedly left men behind, as much to protect their own civilians as to serve as cells for future organization, I am convinced that this figure was grossly exaggerated. In any event, the Israeli army would not enter Sabra and Shatila, only surround them. They had suffered too many losses trying to secure control of the Palestinian refugee camps around the south Lebanese port of Sidon earlier in the summer. It was time for their allies to do some work. So, on Thursday, September 16, 1982, two days after Bashir’s death, the fateful Order Number 6 went out from the Israeli army general staff to Israeli troops in Beirut. It stated that the “refugee camps [Sabra and Shatila] are not to be entered. Searching and mopping up the camps will be done by the Phalangists and the Lebanese army.”
I had gone on vacation after the PLO’s withdrawal and was at New York’s Kennedy Airport on my way to a few more days of relaxation in London when I heard myself being paged at the TWA terminal. It was my editors, with orders that came in a clipped staccato: “Bashir Gemayel has been assassinated. Go directly to Beirut. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” Beirut Airport was closed, so I had to fly to Damascus and take a taxi to Beirut. Normally this was a three-hour ride, but the Phalangists had blocked all the roads into Beirut from the east because of Bashir’s funeral, so after a trans-Atlantic flight, I had to spend the night sleeping in my taxi driver’s half-finished home in the Bekaa Valley. I literally didn’t know where I was. All I remember was that there was so little light around I could see every star in the sky.
My driver and I rose early the next morning and headed for Beirut. It was Friday, September 17, 1982. Just as we got over the Mt. Lebanon ridge line and I could peer down into the city below, I saw someone fire a phosphorus shell, with its distinctive white smoke, into the area of town that I knew to be the Shatila camp. What could that be about, I wondered. When I finally reached the Commodore Hotel and met a few of my American press colleagues, they told me that they had heard a rumor that Phalangists were in Shatila. The camp was sealed off by the Israelis, though, so no one had been able to get inside. That night at dinner, my friend from Time magazine, Roberto Suro, told me he had managed to get to the edge of Shatila earlier in the day and it had left him with an uneasy feeling. He had gone as far as the Kuwaiti embassy traffic circle, which overlooked Shatila from the west, and found a group of Phalangist militiamen relaxing, being fed and provided for by a group of Israeli soldiers.
“There was this one Phalangist militiaman wearing aviator sunglasses who looked as though he might be in charge, so I decided to try to talk to him,” Roberto told me. “He was a tall, skinny guy, and as we talked you could hear bursts of gunfire and explosions coming from the camps, but this guy didn’t flinch. In fact, he behaved as though it was perfectly normal. I asked him what was going on inside and he just smiled. Not far away there were these Israeli soldiers sitting on a tank. Even though there was gunfire in the camp, they were just lounging around, reading magazines and listening to Simon and Garfunkel on a ghetto blaster. It was pretty clear to me that whatever was happening, the Phalangists were going to be in charge of this area when it was all over, so I asked this Phalangist officer what they were going to do with Sabra and Shatila. I’ll never forget what he said: ‘We’re going to turn it into a shopping center.’”
What none of us knew at the time was that a day earlier some 1,500 Phalangist militiamen had been trucked from East Beirut to Beirut Airport, which they used as their staging ground. From there, small units of Phalangists, roughly 150 men each, were sent into Sabra and Shatila, which the Israeli army kept illuminated through the night with flares. The Phalangists wanted to avenge not only Bashir’s death but also past tribal killings of their own people by Palestinian guerrillas, such as the February 1976 massacre by Palestinians of Christian villagers in Damour, south of Beirut. Sharon would give them their chance. From Thursday, September 16, until Saturday morning, September 18, Phalangist squads combed through the Sabra and Shatila neighborhoods, liquidating whatever humanity came in their path.
Early Saturday, September 18, the Israelis “discovered” that the Phalangists had been massacring Palestinians in the camp for three days. The Israeli army command ordered the Phalangists out of the camps, and then got as far away from the area as they could so as not to be associated with the mass killings. That was why when all of us showed up Saturday morning to check out the rumors, there was no one to stop us from going in and recording in detail everything that had happened.
The first person I saw in Shatila was a very old man with a neatly trimmed white beard and a wooden cane by his side. I would guess he must have been close to ninety. By the time I met him, he had been dead for hours. It was a clean job—a single bullet fired from close range that left only a tiny hole of dried blood in the center of his left temple. The killer probably looked him in the eyes, then pulled the trigger. He was sprawled on the ground near one of the western entrances to the camp, only a hint of what lay ahead in the death-scented alleyways. Farther inside, I saw a woman with her breast sliced open; a hastily dug grave of red dirt with an arm and a leg protruding from some poor soul almost demanding not to be forgotten; even horses were so riddled with bullets their bellies had burst. But mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire. Where were the 2,000 PLO fighters supposed to have been left behind in the camps? If they ever existed, they certainly would not have died like this.
One old woman in a shabby brown dress, clearly out of her mind with grief, stood over a bloated body, waving a scarf in one hand and letters in another. She was shrieking over and over again in Arabic, “Yi, yi, are you my husband? My God, help me. All my sons are gone. My husband is gone. What am I going to do? Y’Allah. Oh, God, oh, God.”
Across the street another mother emerged from the death scene in her house holding a faded color photograph of her son, Abu Fadi, and a wooden birdcage with a live yellow parakeet inside. While the bird danced and sang, the woman stumbled about and wailed, “Where is Abu Fadi? Who will bring me my loved one?”
No one knows exactly how many people were killed during the three-day massacre, and how many were trucked off by the Phalangists and killed elsewhere. The only independent official death toll was the one assembled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose staff buried 210 bodies—140 men, 38 women, and 32 children—in a mass grave several days after the massacre. Since most victims were buried by their relatives much earlier, Red Cross officials told me they estimated that the total death toll was between 800 and 1,000.
Afterward, the Israeli soldiers would claim they did not know what was happening in the camps. They did not hear the screams and shouts of people being massacred. They did not see wanton murder of innocents through their telescopic binoculars. Had they seen, they would have stopped it immediately.
All of this is true. The Israeli soldiers did not see innocent civilians being massacred and they did not hear the screams of innocent children going to their graves. What they saw was a “terrorist infestation” being “mopped up” and “terrorist nurses” scurrying about and “terrorist teenagers” trying to defend them, and what they heard were “terrorist women” screaming. In the Israeli psyche you don’t come to the rescue of “terrorists.” There is no such thing as “terrorists” being massacred.
Many Israelis had so dehumanized the Palestinians in their own minds and had so intimately equated the words “Palestinian,” “PLO,” and “terrorists” on their radio and television for so long, actually referring to “terrorist tanks” and “terrorist hospitals,” that they simply lost track of the distinction between Palestinian fighters and Palestinian civilians, combatants and noncombatants. The Kahan Commission, the Israeli government inquiry board that later investigated the events in Sabra and Shatila, uncovered repeated instances within the first hours of the massacre in which Israeli officers overheard Phalangists referring to the killing of Palestinian civilians. Some Israeli officers even conveyed this information to their superiors, but they did not respond. The most egregious case was when, two hours after the operation began on Thursday evening, the commander of the Israeli troops around Sabra and Shatila, Brigadier General Amos Yaron, was informed by an intelligence officer that a Phalangist militiaman within the camp had radioed the Phalangist officer responsible for liaison with Israeli troops and told him that he was holding forty-five Palestinians. He asked for orders on what to do with them. The liaison officer’s reply was “Do the will of God.” Even upon hearing such a report, Yaron did not halt the operation.
The Israelis had so demonized Sabra and Shatila as nests of Palestinian terrorism and nothing more that they didn’t even know that probably one quarter of the Sabra and Shatila neighborhoods was inhabited by poor Lebanese Shiites who had come to Beirut from the countryside and bought the cinder-block homes of Palestinians who had managed to earn enough money to move from these shantytowns into the city. In fact, the street of the Shatila camp where the massacre began was populated largely by Lebanese Shiites. A picture in the As-Safir paper the day after the massacre was exposed captured the blind tribal rage of the Phalangists who tore through the camps. The picture, which occupied most of the top of the front page, consisted of a single hand. The fingers of this hand were locked around an identity card that could easily be read. The card belonged to Ilham Dahir Mikdaad, age thirty-two. She was a Shiite woman whose entire family, estimated to be forty individuals, was wiped out by the Phalangists. Her body was found lying on a main street in Shatila, with a row of bullets running across her breasts. It was clear what had happened: she must have been holding up her identity card to a Phalangist, trying to tell him that she was a Lebanese Muslim, not a Palestinian, when he emptied his bullet clip into her chest.
Sabra and Shatila was something of a personal crisis for me. The Israel I met on the outskirts of Beirut was not the heroic Israel I had been taught to identify with. It was an Israel that talked about “purity of arms” to itself, but in the real world had learned to play by Hama Rules, like everyone else in the neighborhood. The Israelis knew just what they were doing when they let the Phalangists into those camps. Again, as the Kahan Commission itself reported: during meetings held between Bashir Gemayel and Israeli Mossad secret agents, Israeli officials “heard things from [Bashir] that left no room for doubt that the intention of this Phalangist leader was to eliminate the Palestinian problem in Lebanon when he came to power—even if that meant resorting to aberrant methods against the Palestinians.”
The Israelis at least held an investigation when they were involved in a massacre, which is more than the Syrians ever did. But for all their inquiring, what was the final outcome? Sharon, who was found by the Kahan Commission to bear “personal responsibility” for what happened in the camps, was forced to step down as Defense Minister and become a minister-without-port-folio instead, until the next Israeli government was formed, when he became Minister of Industry and Trade. Israel’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, who was also assigned blame for what took place in the camps, who had lied to dozens of world newsmen when asked if Israel had sent the Phalangists in, was allowed to finish his tour of duty with dignity and was then elected to the Israeli parliament. Brigadier General Yaron was told he could never get another field command, but was then promoted to major general and put in charge of the manpower division of the Israeli army, which handles all personnel matters. After fulfilling that job, in August 1986 he was handed one of the most coveted assignments—military attaché in Washington.
An investigation which results in such “punishments” is not an investigation that can be taken seriously. It was my introduction to a popular form of hypocrisy I would discover often on the road from Beirut to Jerusalem, what a Lebanese friend of mine liked to call “moral double bookkeeping.” All the players in the Middle East do it. They keep one set of moral books, which proclaim how righteous they are, to show the outside world, and one set of moral books, which proclaim how ruthless they are, to show each other.
At the time, though, I didn’t understand this kind of moral accounting. I took Sabra and Shatila seriously as a blot on Israel and the Jewish people. Afterward, I was boiling with anger—anger which I worked out by reporting with all the skill I could muster on exactly what happened in those camps. The resulting article—an almost hour-by-hour reconstruction of the massacre—was published across four full pages of The New York Times on September 26, 1982; it eventually won me a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. I worked day and night on that story, barely sleeping between sessions at my typewriter. I was driven, I now realize, by two conflicting impulses. One part of me wanted to nail Begin and Sharon—to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their army had been involved in a massacre in Beirut in the hope that this would help get rid of them. I mistakenly thought at the time that they alone were the true culprits. Yet, another part of me was also looking for alibis—something that would prove Begin and Sharon innocent, something that would prove the Israelis couldn’t have known what was happening. Although an “objective” journalist is not supposed to have such emotions, the truth is they made me a better reporter.
A week after the massacre, the Israelis granted me the only interview given any Western journalist with Major General Amir Drori, the overall commander of Israeli troops in Lebanon. I was driven up to Aley, northeast of Beirut, to the Israeli headquarters at the summer palace of a Kuwaiti sheik. The interview was held at a long wooden conference table, with Drori seated at the head. Around the table sat all his staff, including Brigadier General Yaron, as well as my escort officer, Stuart Cohen, a gentle Israeli reservist from England whom I had taken a day earlier up to the roof of the Lebanese apartment building the Israelis had used as their headquarters outside Sabra and Shatila. I showed him through my own cheap binoculars—which were nowhere near as powerful as those used by Israeli troops—just how well one could see into certain open spaces in the camps, where the freshly turned dirt from mass graves used by the Phalangists to dump bodies was still clearly evident; Stuart was shocked. This was not the line that he had been fed from headquarters.
I must admit I was not professionally detached in this interview. I banged the table with my fist and shouted at Drori, “How could you do this? How could you not see? How could you not know?” But what I was really saying, in a very selfish way, was “How could you do this to me, you bastards? I always thought you were different. I always thought we were different. I’m the only Jew in West Beirut. What do I tell people now? What do I tell myself?”
Drori had no answers. I knew it. He knew it. It was clear his men either should have known what was happening, or did know and did nothing. As I drove back down to Beirut, I was literally sick to my stomach. I went back to the Commodore Hotel and called theTimes foreign editor, Craig Whitney.
“Craig,” I said, “the guy didn’t have the answers. I really don’t want to shovel this shit anymore. Let somebody else write the story.”
“C’mon,” said Craig softly, “you were there. You have to write it.”
Of course I did, and I knew that, too. So the next morning I buried Amir Drori on the front page of The New York Times, and along with him every illusion I ever held about the Jewish state.
I saw Yasir Arafat in Amman, Jordan, a few weeks later, on October 9, 1982. The bodies from Sabra and Shatila were all buried, and Arafat had come to meet with King Hussein. It was his first visit to the Jordanian capital since the little King had ousted him in 1970. The first night Arafat was in town he addressed a rally in his honor at the PLO headquarters in Amman. He stood on the rostrum and with great fury and gesturing of arms told the thousands of Palestinians who had come out to greet him, “We lost 5,000 in Sabra and Shatila and we are ready to lose 50,000 before we liberate our homeland.” Arafat always exaggerated the number of Palestinians killed in Sabra and Shatila. I felt that by exaggerating the number he only cheapened the lives of those who really did die, turning them into just another statistic to serve the PLO. The real figure was horrendous enough. But on that October evening in Amman, no one else seemed bothered by Arafat’s arithmetic.
What I remembered most was that they just wanted to touch him. Arafat was like a rock star after a concert and the Palestinians there were grabbing at his clothes, trying to rub his beard or pat his checkered kaffiyeh as he ran a gauntlet of flying hands and arms. As he left the rostrum Arafat’s guards had to drag him through a crush of people, and when he went by me all I saw was his head and smiling face being carried along on a sea of hands.
What was this all about? Arafat was supposed to be finished. What were these Palestinians touching? I think they were touching themselves in a way, making sure they were still there, still alive, still visible to the rest of the world. By all rights Yasir Arafat did muff it during the summer of ’82, and in any other national liberation movement he would have been deposed as leader. But Arafat was saved by events. The abandonment of the Palestinians by the Arab world, the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, coupled with Syrian President Assad’s attempt a few months later to depose Arafat from the PLO leadership, intensified tenfold the bonding between Arafat and the Palestinian people at large.
For all his failings, Arafat’s mere ability to survive against the forces that wanted to erase him, his ability to constantly bounce back, symbolized for Palestinians their own determination not to be forgotten and not to have their cause erased by the Arab and Israeli forces that were so intent on doing so. The Palestinians would not give these lions Arafat’s head—as much as he might have deserved it—because his head was their head.
After the summer of ’82, Arafat became more than ever a symbol, and maybe nothing more than a symbol, of the Palestinian refusal to disappear. He was judged by Palestinians less for what he produced than for what he represented. No one put it better than a Palestinian coed at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit University. When I asked her why she stood by Arafat when he had brought his people nothing but defeat, she said with tears in her eyes, “Arafat is the stone we throw at the world.”
Arafat’s ability to turn himself into a symbol of Palestinian survival, a human Palestinian flag, as it were, enabled him to remain the leader of the PLO as if the summer of ’82 had never happened; a movement may trash its leaders, but it would never trash its own flag. That became clear to me at the Algiers meeting of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, which convened for the first time after the Lebanon invasion in February 1983. To begin with, the meeting, instead of being a serious critique of the PLO’s behavior in Lebanon, was turned into a festival of bombast about the “glorious PLO victory in Beirut”—a victory, it followed, which did not necessitate any change in the PLO leadership. An observer delegation from Hungary presented Arafat with a bronze trophy, the Chinese brought him a little red book, and a group of West Bankers delivered a scarf knitted in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
When PLO moderate Issam Sartawi demanded to address the PNC assembly, Arafat blocked him, so Sartawi resigned from the organization in protest. As Sartawi was stomping out of the conference center he said to me, “It was outrageous that all the secretaries general of the PLO organizations painted a picture of Lebanon as a glowing victory. Lebanon was a disaster. I bow my head to the courage of the people who fought there. But if Beirut was such a great victory, then all we need is a series of such victories and we will be holding our next national council meeting in Fiji.”
Sartawi added that the PLO had already accepted the Brezhnev Middle East peace proposal that implicitly recognized the right of Israel to live in peace; so, he asked, why not come out and declare this recognition explicitly and derive all the political benefits from it—American recognition and support from the Israeli peace camp to name two? Of course Begin was making it difficult for them by rejecting a priori any negotiations—ever—with the PLO, but that was all the more reason to put Israel on the spot. But such compromises with reality were not to be—and neither was Sartawi for much longer. On April 10, 1983, some two months after he walked out of the Algiers PNC, a Palestinian gunman walked up to Sartawi in the lobby of a hotel in the Portuguese coastal resort of Albufeira and pumped six bullets into his body at point-blank range. Sartawi had been attending the 16th Socialist International. In Damascus, the Palestinian radical Abu Nidal claimed credit for the assassination, saying Sartawi was “a cheap servant of the CIA, Mossad, and British Intelligence.”
Instead of taking Sartawi’s advice, the Algiers PNC adopted an approach which the Palestinians there dubbed la’am, a combination of the Arabic words for yes and no, which was a perfect depiction of PLO policy, then and for the coming years. La’am basically meant rejecting the Reagan Middle East peace plan and other initiatives that were then on the table, but not rejecting them so categorically that Arafat might run the risk of becoming totally irrelevant or leave an opening for King Hussein to supplant him as negotiator for the Palestinians.
I was naive to have expected more than this. In the lobby of the Club des Pins conference center, where the Algiers PNC meeting was held, the PLO had set up a 50-foot-long photo display of huge, gruesome color photographs of men, women, and children who had been massacred at Sabra and Shatila. As I looked at these photographs, all I could think of was that what they should really have displayed was a series of blown-up color photographs of every Israeli settlement in the West Bank. But the PLO preferred to play the victim, because the victim never has to criticize himself. The PLO leaders also didn’t really want to know what was happening in the West Bank, because really knowing would have required really doing something about it—“to be pressed by time,” in Abu Jihad’s words—and really doing something about it would have meant making either real concessions for peace or real preparations for war. Even after Beirut, Arafat was unable or unwilling to do either. He still behaved as though time were on his side, and in his view of history it was. In his view, the Zionists had no deep roots in Palestine; they were simply a post-Holocaust phenomenon foisted on the Middle East by the West and would one day wither away like other colonial implantations. In the interview he gave toPlayboy in September 1988, Arafat was asked whether, when he began, he knew the struggle for Palestine would take this long.
“Yes,” he answered. “We had a slogan from the beginning: ‘It is not a picnic. It is a long hard struggle.’ The Vietnamese took 35 years of continuous war. The Algerians, 150; the Rhodesians, about 100; the Saudis, 500. But from the beginning we believed that sooner or later, we would achieve our goals, because we are WITH the tide of history, while Israel is AGAINST it.”
So, instead of presenting an accurate picture of Israel’s reality and framing immediate political choices from it, Arafat did what he always did. He gave meaning to the suffering of the Palestinian refugees he represented by indulging them with hopes and slogans. To formally recognize Israel would be to say to the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, whose homes were in Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee, that their forty years of suffering, and their dying in Beirut, were in vain. By refusing to do this, by holding out for the whole myth, Arafat was telling them that as long as they remained displaced, their suffering might eventually bring liberation. It is always easier to give significance to suffering than to compel people to face a reality that offers only two choices: bad and worse—either a tiny Palestinian state in part of the West Bank and Gaza, possibly independent, possibly federated with Jordan, or nothing at all.
Viewed from Arafat’s time perspective, Beirut was a minor setback, a historical hiccup, but nothing which necessitated urgent decisions, let alone historical concessions. So while I was standing in the lobby of the Club des Pins looking at my watch and saying, “Why don’t you people get your act together, accept Israel’s right to exist, and save as much as you can for yourselves?” Arafat and his colleagues were looking at their watches and making their own calculations. Whereas on mine the dial was in minutes and hours, on theirs the dial seemed to be marked in decades and centuries.
Any lingering doubts I had about Arafat’s inability to face this choice were erased in Amman in April 1983, when the PLO chairman came to meet with King Hussein for a final round of negotiations over the September 1, 1982, Reagan plan. The Reagan peace initiative called for the creation of a self-governing Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, confederated with Jordan. The plan gave no direct role to the PLO as long as it formally refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But it did give the PLO an indirect role. It called for a Jordanian—Palestinian delegation to be established to negotiate with Israel over the return of the West Bank, and it was understood by everyone that the Palestinians in the delegation would have to be approved and directed by Arafat. Put bluntly, the Reagan plan was the best opportunity for the Palestinians to recover their land and end the Israeli occupation that had been laid on the table since Camp David. More important, the American President was squarely behind this proposal, which would have created a Palestinian entity that could have developed into an independent state or something very close to it. King Hussein formally sought from Arafat either PLO acceptance of UN Resolution 242, which implicitly recognized Israel, or some kind of mandate for Jordan to at least begin negotiations on the Reagan plan, which the Begin government staunchly opposed. Had Arafat said yes, Begin would have been in a bind. But instead, Arafat and the PLO leadership said no to Hussein and no to Reagan. When several of my colleagues and I pressed Abu Jihad as to why, he shouted at us, “What’s in it for the PLO?” Not much up front—but there was potentially plenty in it for the Palestinians, especially those in the West Bank and Gaza.
Shortly before Arafat rejected the Reagan plan, he gave a news conference in Amman at the PLO office there. It was a four-story building and there were so many reporters crushed inside that we were lined up on all four flights of stairs to get into the room. While I was standing on the stairs sandwiched between shoving cameramen, Yasir Abed Rabbo, the PLO’s official spokesman and a political hack of no small proportions, came down the stairs. As he brushed by me and beheld the scores of reporters jostling each other to get into the press conference, his eyes lit up. He smiled a big smile, shook his head back and forth, and said, “Great, great.” Once again prime time would substitute for Palestine.
Arafat apparently thought he could continue forever not making the real concessions for peace that would satisfy the Israeli moderate camp, or the real preparations for war that would have satisfied the Palestinian hard-liners. He talked “armed struggle” and dabbled with King Hussein, but he did not do either to the degree that would have made a difference. Beginning in the spring of 1983, however, the narrow fence Arafat was balancing upon after he left Beirut gradually began to be cut out from under him.
His troubles started with a mutiny in May 1983 from within his own al-Fatah wing of the PLO led by Colonel Saed Abu Musa, a longtime opponent of Arafat’s. Abu Musa’s revolt was in its origins an authentic protest movement, which began among al-Fatah guerrillas based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The mutiny was touched off when Arafat named two of his cronies to senior command positions in the Bekaa and south Lebanon. One, Colonel Hajj Ismail, had been the PLO commander in south Lebanon, until he fled from his post in an ambulance on the second day of the war, leaving his men to fight undirected and taking the office safe with him. The other, known as Colonel Abu Hajem, had a long record of living high off the revolution. Anyone who was serious about confronting Israel would not have named such men to command posts. In an interview with the Arabic weekly Al-Kifah al-Arabi, Abu Musa, a widely respected guerrilla fighter, explained why he thought it was time for a change at the top of the PLO. “Arafat turned the Palestinian revolution into a bureaucracy so rotten that it is worse than the bureaucracy in any underdeveloped country. Naturally this institution was not capable of fighting. So when the war broke out, the leadership ran away, leaving the rank and file to pay the price.”
Abu Musa also pointed out that the PLO was supposed to be a revolutionary movement, different from those Arab regimes where the leader gets to remain for life, no matter what he does. “Arafat did not inherit the PLO from his father,” Abu Musa remarked on several occasions.
Abu Musa was a professional soldier who found that the PLO army he joined was much more corrupt than the Jordanian army he had left. But he had one problem: he was an honest man in a region that did not reward honesty. As soon as he declared his rebellion, the Syrians and Libyans rushed to embrace him with support, both ideological and on the ground. Arafat used this Syrian and Libyan backing to completely discredit the rebels. I was on hand when the Syrian-backed Abu Musa fighters finally cornered Arafat’s men in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, in September 1983. Arafat, who had sailed in to lead his flock, summoned several of us reporters to a news conference in an olive grove outside Tripoli. First a group of his guerrillas arrived and formed a kind of honor guard, and then Arafat drove up in a green Mercedes. He got out of the car with his walking stick, marched through the honor guard in the middle of the olive grove, and gave a press conference under a tree. Newsweek had been promised an exclusive interview, and so Arafat took the magazine’s correspondent, Jim Pringle, behind a tree all by himself. When we asked Arafat about Abu Musa, he said with a flick of his wrist, “Don’t ask me about the puppets and the horses of Troy.”
But how did Arafat explain this revolt? we asked. At that point Arafat removed a gold Cross pen he kept in his breast pocket, held it up in the air, and said, “This. Assad wants my pen. He wants the Palestinian decision, and I won’t give it to him.”
It was a brilliant move. Arafat—with Assad’s unwitting help —turned a legitimate protest movement against his leadership into a Syrian plot against the Palestinian people. Naturally, when it became a choice between Arafat and the Syrians, all Palestinians sided with Arafat. Sure, they said, the PLO needs to be cleaned up and Arafat is a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch and the only son-of-a-bitch we have who is really recognized and accepted around the world. Once again Arafat would survive, not because of what he had produced, but because of what he symbolized. This was the key to his Teflon, and the reason the Abu Musa revolt just wouldn’t stick.
Arafat talked about making Tripoli his “Stalingrad,” just as he had about Beirut, but when the ships came to take him and 4,000 guerrillas to safety—this time under French protection—Arafat again opted for life as a symbol rather than death as a martyr. My colleague Bill Barrett, then the Middle East correspondent for the Dallas Times Herald, interviewed Arafat shortly before his evacuation from the northern Lebanese port.
“I asked the chairman if he had ever heard of the Alamo,” recalled Barrett. “‘Yes, yes,’ he replied, ‘that famous castle in Texas.’ Then I asked if he saw any similarities between the Alamo and his current plight. ‘Yes, indeed,’ the chairman replied, and then he proceeded to talk about bravery and being surrounded by enemies and the importance of fighting for a cause and all that stuff. He was really warming to the topic. Then I asked the chairman if he was aware that almost everyone at the Alamo died. There was a pause—a very long pause. ‘Come to think of it,’ Arafat said, ‘the Alamo really isn’t that similar,’ and then he went off to another topic.”
When Arafat quit Tripoli, he lost his last rail of fence to sit on. He was now disconnected on a day-to-day basis from that body of Palestinians whom the PLO had both nurtured and developed out of—the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Arafat would no longer lead them in any direct sense of the word, only through surrogates. He was also disconnected from his last direct point of contact with Israel. He could no longer hope to bring any significant military pressure on the Jewish state.
History, though, works in strange ways. Sharon thought that by going to Beirut and destroying Arafat he could impose permanent Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza. But what Sharon never understood, because he had so demonized the PLO, was that Beirut was theater and Arafat was ready to star in it for a long time. All Arafat really wanted was a little turf for himself and his people and a chair in the Arab councils of power; Beirut afforded him that. It wasn’t Palestine, but it was tolerable. It had become the substitute homeland and had Sharon left well enough alone, the PLO might still be there today. But Sharon took the Lebanese theater seriously. By driving Arafat and his guerrillas out, he re-created their dilemma of homelessness and made them wandering men again. He left them no option but to invest virtually all their energy in diplomacy, as opposed to armed struggle, with the aim of recovering precisely the turf where Sharon had planned to impose his rule: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. That was where the largest concentration of Palestinians resided, and where the direct confrontation with Israel would continue.
Arafat had to keep contact with the West Bankers, and make sure that King Hussein did not try to make a deal with them and the Israelis that might exclude the PLO. In order to constrain King Hussein and to keep a land bridge to the West Bank, Arafat reached an agreement with Jordan on a joint negotiating strategy on February 11, 1985. Even though this agreement was bitterly opposed by PLO hard-liners, such as George Habash, it really constituted just more la’am. For instance, while the February 11 accord affirmed the principle of trading land for peace, King Hussein was never able to pin Arafat down on the details—such as his accepting UN Resolution 242 or confederation with Jordan. Arafat gave Hussein just enough to keep him interested, but not enough to create a breakthrough with the Israelis. A year later, Hussein nullified the accord and threw the PLO out of Jordan, putting Arafat back into orbit. Yet, even with all the ground cut out from under him, Arafat, instead of falling flat on his face, floated in midair—drifting from New Delhi to Cairo and Prague to Geneva, held aloft by the Palestinian aspirations for national independence that he still represented.
In retrospect, one could say that from the moment Arafat quit Beirut in August 1982 he was like an actor in search of a role. He had lost his stage, much of his crew, and virtually all his supporting cast. He had always wanted to star as the Moses of his people, who would lead them back to the Promised Land, but the only role he was offered after Beirut was that of Noah, the great survivor.
Little did I know when I last saw him in Tripoli that five years later I would be on hand to watch him land a new part on a new stage. That part would be delivered to him by a different Palestinian cast from the one Arafat led in Lebanon. It would come from the West Bankers and Gazans under Israeli occupation, who would rise up against Israel one morning in December 1987 and find themselves in need of someone to speak their lines to the world. Arafat would be offered the starring role, but under one condition: he had to read the lines which the West Bankers and Gazans wrote, and those were different, much more difficult, lines than any he had been asked to speak in Beirut. But speak them he would, and they would pave the way for his comeback on the world stage. Humpty-Dumpty would be put back together again. But more about that later down the road.
Menachem Begin would also crack under the pressure of the Lebanon war, but he would not be put back together again.
From the day Israel invaded until the moment before Bashir Gemayel was assassinated, it didn’t really matter what myths and illusions Begin or Sharon held about Lebanon, the Palestinians, or themselves. This was a conventional war, and Israel brought to the conventional battlefield such overwhelming superiority of force that she could and did literally steamroll over any mistakes or misperceptions on the way to her targets.
After Bashir was assassinated, however, the Israelis could no longer depend on his brute force replacing their brute force so that the Israeli army could withdraw. Israel would have to find its own way home, and in the process all her myths and misperceptions about Lebanon would come back to haunt her.
There were really only two ways for Israel to create a Lebanese government strong enough and stable enough to make sure that Lebanon would not return to the status quo ante bellum. One approach would have been to address the source of Lebanon’s instability—the absence of a consensus between Christians and Muslims over how power should be divided. The only way to deal effectively with this problem would not be by helping the Phalangists definitively win the Lebanese civil war—because they could never hold their ground without Israeli support—but by encouraging the Phalangists to accept constitutional reforms that would involve sharing more power with the Muslims, while at the same time encouraging the Muslims to moderate their demands as much as possible. Only through such an approach might both communities feel that they had some stake in the emergence of a reasonably strong central government. To pull off such an arrangement would have been extremely difficult for even the wisest power. It would have required painstaking political maneuvering and a sophisticated use of carrots and sticks; it also would have required abandoning any notion of a formal Israel—Lebanon peace treaty—since Lebanon’s fragile political consensus could not bear the strain of such an accord—and settling instead for quiet, de facto security arrangements.
The other approach was much simpler: Instead of treating the source of Lebanon’s instability, the Israelis could treat its symptoms—the chronic lawlessness—by installing a strongman at the top of the Lebanese pyramid and relying on him to use an iron fist to stabilize Lebanon from above.
Since Begin and Sharon had no conception of how to play Lebanese politics, no time to wait around Beirut, and no stomach for telling the Phalangists that they had to make political concessions to Lebanon’s Muslims, they naturally opted for this latter approach, seeking out a new “man on horseback” to replace Bashir. They settled for a pale imitation—Bashir’s older brother, sometime playboy, sometime businessman, all-time zero, Amin Gemayel. Amin, then forty years old, was elected President immediately after Bashir’s death. He had all of Bashir’s weaknesses and none of his strengths. In his younger days, Amin had been known around East Beirut as Mr. Two Percent, because he and his Phalangist loyalists seemed to have their fingers in every major business deal in East Beirut. He lacked Bashir’s killer instinct, and always seemed to be much more concerned about the part in his perfectly coiffed hair than with serious affairs of state. His greatest accomplishment in life was being born the son of Pierre Gemayel, the founder of the Phalangist Party. Although previously known as a political “moderate,” compared to his brother, as soon as Amin became President he evinced all of Bashir’s contempt for the Lebanese Muslims—particularly Druse leader Walid Jumblat and Shiite Amal militia leader Nabih Berri. For reasons which I will explain in the next chapter, Amin ran roughshod over Lebanon’s Shiites and Druse, driving them into the arms of the Syrians and turning up the ever-simmering Lebanese civil war to full blast. By the spring of 1983, the Israelis found themselves occupying a house on fire.
Begin was so obsessed with getting a peace treaty from Lebanon to justify the invasion that he barely seemed to notice the country was going up in flames. He had promised his people forty years of peace and he had to have a treaty to show for his troubles—not to mention 650 Israeli lives—and he used every available means to squeeze Amin for the document. Begin reminded me of a man determined to get a check from another man for an unpaid bill—even though everyone else knew the man had no money. The Lebanese, great wheeler-dealers that they were, were happy to provide the hot check. On May 17, 1983, Amin Gemayel’s government signed a peace treaty with Israel, which included elaborate provisions for protecting Israel’s northern border. Not one article of the treaty was ever enacted. The Syrians, through their Lebanese allies, put so much pressure on Amin he could not even consider implementing the document.
So, on the first anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Begin must have understood that he was really in trouble. Bashir Gemayel was actually dead and Amin Gemayel was politically dead. Israel had run out of strongmen. Its choices, too, were between bad and worse: bad was staying in Lebanon indefinitely to preserve the military gains of the war; worse was unilaterally withdrawing, without leaving any peace treaty or formal security arrangements behind. But the choice would no longer be Begin’s. Like Arafat, Begin finally discovered that if you don’t gradually let reality in to temper your mythologizing, it will sooner or later invade on its own. By the end of the summer of 1983, Begin was bowled over by such an invasion of reality, which came on the heels of the death of his beloved wife, Aliza, in November 1982. Together these two events drove him into a deep depression from which he has never emerged.
On August 30, 1983, the haggard and depressed sixty-nine-year-old Israeli Prime Minister convened his Cabinet for the last time. His remarks were brief: “I cannot go on any longer.” Two weeks later he formally resigned, cleaned out his drawer, and locked himself in his Jerusalem apartment at 1 Zemach Street. Since then, he has rarely ventured outdoors. It remains one of the most remarkable cases in political history: a man totally engaged in his country’s politics from even before its birth, his nation’s greatest orator, who overnight became a man of silence. Israeli papers labeled him “the Prisoner of Zemach Street.” It was not an inappropriate moniker, since for all intents and purposes Menachem Begin seemed to have tried himself, found himself guilty, and locked himself in jail.
Some say that it was the numbers that did it. The Israeli antiwar movement, led by the Peace Now organization, used to hold up a huge placard outside Begin’s home that kept a running count of the Israeli boys who had died in Lebanon. Every day when he walked outside to go to work, Begin was confronted with those numbers. He wanted to be remembered as a man of peace, not war. But Begin was always a split personality: he had a manic side—in love with flags, medals, symbols, and determined to restore a dignity to the Jewish people that he was never able to enjoy in his youth—and he had a sober, punctilious, lawyerlike side, totally committed to the rule of law. The first side drove him to Beirut and the second side drove him home. The first side needed a war, a big war, a grand war, and the second side demanded justice when the true costs of that war were tallied. Faced with the real consequences of his own rhetoric, Begin went mute.
His was a lesson which more than a few Middle Eastern statesmen could well learn: whether you are an Arab or a Jew, you can’t heal your grandfather’s shame. The dead can never be redeemed—only the living can. He who is fixated on redeeming his father’s memory will never see the opportunities of his own world.
When it became clear that the May 17 peace treaty was meaningless, Israel, in September 1983, began to unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon. The first step was for Israel to pull back from the Shouf Mountains overlooking Beirut and to hunker down along the Awali River in predominantly Shiite south Lebanon. There, the Israelis vowed, they would sit indefinitely in order to protect their northern border. If Lebanon would not provide them with a policeman, they would be their own. But this was easier said than done. The Lebanese Shiites had originally greeted the Israelis as liberators from the PLO guerrillas, who had turned the Shiite villages into a battleground and frequently helped themselves to any home, car, or product that struck their fancy. But when they realized that the Israelis were intent on staying in south Lebanon, the Shiites turned on them with a vengeance. Israel compounded the Shiite wrath, however, by using local Christian militiamen to help them control the region and by being highly insensitive to Shiite religious feelings, of which most Israeli troops were ignorant, since there are virtually no Shiite Muslims in Israel.
If there was any single incident that turned the Lebanese Shiites from potential Israeli allies to implacable foes, though, it was a little reported fracas which occurred on October 16, 1983, in the south Lebanon market town of Nabatiya. On that day, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Shiites were gathered in the center of Nabatiya, celebrating the most important holiday in their calendar, Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom, in A.D. 680, of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson. Each year on Ashura, Shiites honor Hussein’s death and struggle against unjust political authority, even going so far as to flagellate themselves to the point of drawing their own blood. In the middle of the Ashura services, an Israeli military convoy tried to drive through Nabatiya, honking horns for people to get out of the way. It was the equivalent of someone turning on a ghetto blaster in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
The Shiites saw the Israeli intrusion as a crude violation of their most sacred moment, and they immediately began pelting the Israeli convoy with stones and bottles, even overturning some of the vehicles. The Israeli soldiers panicked and opened fire on the crowd, killing at least two persons and wounding fifteen others. Augustus Richard Norton, a former United Nations Truce Observer stationed in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, noted that while the Nabatiya incident was insignificant in the number of casualties involved, it crystallized all the resentment and anger that had been building in south Lebanon against the Israeli presence. Before the Ashura incident, attacks by Shiites against Israelis were sporadic and confined largely to tiny splinter factions. The mainstream Shiite community, which was represented by the Amal militia, remained on the sidelines. In the wake of the Nabatiya incident, Shiite clerics in south Lebanon warned that anyone who trucked with Israel would “burn in hell,” and Amal began competing with other Shiite militias to see who could take the most Israeli casualties.2
The Shiites attacked the Israeli troops any way and anywhere they could—with hit-and-run ambushes, nail bombs, suicide cars, roadside bombs, exploding donkeys, Red Cross ambulances packed with TNT, and snipers. Syria and Iran were only too happy to provide advice and material aid. The Shiites displayed a relentlessness which the Israelis had never encountered from an Arab foe before: they weren’t just ready to kill, they were ready to die; they didn’t issue communiques after each confrontation; they relished their successes in relative silence. South Lebanon became terrifying for Israeli soldiers, who grew to dread moving out of their base camps for fear that any object, rock, bush, or tree might explode next to them. By early 1984, the Israelis forgot about the Palestinian threat and began speaking of the “Israeli— Shiite conflict”; two years earlier, most Israelis hadn’t even known what a Shiite was. In order to hold their ground in the face of mounting local opposition, the Israeli army had to impose Draconian security measures on south Lebanon: car searches, checkpoints, travel restrictions, trade restrictions, which only angered the local Shiites even more.
Nobody saw that anger more clearly than Captain Teddy Lapkin, who, in 1984, found himself running the Israeli army checkpoint at Baader-el-Shouf, a mountain village along the Awali River. Teddy was a professional soldier, but having been raised in America, he knew a Vietnam when he saw one. When Israel pulled out of the Shouf and withdrew south to the Awali River, Baader-el-Shouf became the single crossing point for Lebanese wanting to move between south and north Lebanon—a bottleneck choked with frustrations. Lebanese had to wait as long as three days to pass through, and farmers often had to empty their entire vehicles of produce so that Israeli troops could search through the cucumbers and watermelons for hidden weapons. Twice, suicide car bombers drove their vehicles into the checkpoint and blew themselves up, taking a few Israeli soldiers and Lebanese with them each time.
“It was frustrating,” Lapkin recalled. “I don’t want to say that I didn’t know what I was doing there—that sounds like Vietnam. I knew what I was doing there, I just had my doubts about the wisdom of the operation. It was dehumanizing in a way, because when you finally managed to kill a Shiite you would feel happy about it. Your first emotion was that finally you were able to hit back. There was this gut satisfaction. But then you would think about it and remind yourself that there were 150 more out there where that one came from. It was pointless, that’s it—not frustrating, pointless. You were losing people and you would say to yourself, ‘What am I going to say to their families?’ It was a guerrilla war, and they won. There was no way we could win the hearts and minds of the population, so we were predestined to lose. Therefore, we should have cut our losses and gotten out, or allied ourselves with the Shiites from the beginning, instead of the Christians.
“I will never forget one day when we were up above the town of Jezzine. We knew it had been an infiltration route for people going south. So we decided to position an ambush there. We went to do a recon mission and tried to go up in jeeps from Jezzine to Arab Selim. It was a bad road and we couldn’t get up, so the next day we came back with armored personnel carriers. Evidently we were seen the day before, and that night someone laid a mine on the road. Our first armored personnel carrier stopped just by chance a few meters in front of it. I was about to step on it when one of our Bedouin trackers stopped me. The mine was freshly laid, so we started tracking the guy who laid it. We tracked him for seven hours. When we finally caught him, he was hiding in this crevice of a rock and I saw the tips of his fingers. I fired a couple of rounds in his direction, and instead of coming out with his hands up, he tried to run, so I shot him. He was a Shiite, and he was just saying—I don’t know if it was Shiite fanaticism or the Shiite version of the Hail Mary—but he kept just repeating, ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar’ [God is greater than the enemy] over and over and over. He had these worry beads, and he was shot in the lung, and when your lung is shot you spit blood. So he would say,‘Allahu Akbar—ppttuu’and spit blood. We tried to save him. We even gave him an infusion and called a chopper, but he died on the way—DOA. Hey, he shouldn’t have run. If he hadn’t run, I wouldn’t have shot him. But he had a rifle in his hand, so tough.
“I had no doubt at that late stage how dedicated they were to getting us out of there. From our point of view it stopped being a war for an objective; it became a war for revenge. It became real personal: stay alive, get your revenge if you can, and stay alive until they pull us out. We just never broke out of that vicious cycle.”
Mercifully, the July 1984 elections that followed a year after Begin’s disappearance ended in a tie, and the Likud and Labor Parties were forced to join together in a national unity government led by Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. I say “mercifully,” because without Begin I don’t think the Likud on its own would have found the moral courage to admit that Lebanon was a fiasco and bring the troops home empty-handed. They needed Labor to hold their hand, to give them political cover. As it was, even in the national unity Cabinet, most Likud ministers voted against withdrawing from Lebanon, arguing that northern Israel would be exposed to constant rocket attacks. But they were defeated by a narrow majority. In April 1985, the Israeli army completed its unconditional pullout from Lebanon, save for a narrow security belt it retained along the border to protect northern Israel.
I had moved to Israel from Beirut by then, and I detected a certain wry sense of humor creeping into official Israeli discussions about Lebanon. It was the kind of humor men indulge in when they know they have been had. I recall visiting Itzhak Lior at the Israeli Foreign Ministry shortly after the Israeli withdrawal. Lior, who was in charge of the Middle East Department, had once been head of the Israeli liaison office in East Beirut. My visit happened to be at the time that Samir Geagea, the fanatical Maronite medical student, had seized control of the Phalangist militia and begun shelling the Muslims of the town of Sidon from nearby Christian villages for reasons which still are not clear to me. The shelling, which Geagea could not sustain or translate into any political gain, provoked the Muslim militias in the town to get together and not only drive Geagea and his men back but also overrun many of the Christian villages in the area—ousting from their homes Christians who had been living alongside Muslims peacefully for years.
“Tell me, Itzhak,” I said, scratching my head, “why did Geagea do it? Why did he shell Sidon when it was certain to provoke a retaliation against all the Christians in the area?”
Lior thought for a moment, rubbed his goatee, took a puff on his pipe, and then said, as though the answer were perfectly obvious, “He did it because he had the ammunition.”
No sooner were the Israelis gone than everything in Lebanon returned to abnormal. The civil war ebbed and flowed, the Palestinian guerrillas trickled back to south Lebanon and occasionally rocketed northern Israel, just as in the old days. For Israel, the final insult came in the winter of 1986, when it was reported in the Beirut papers that the Phalangists had started selling Lebanese passports and entry visas to the PLO so that some of Arafat’s men could return to Lebanon and join the local Palestinians in fighting the Lebanese Shiites, whom the Phalangists had come to view as the greatest threat to their efforts to dominate Lebanon. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” says the Arab proverb. So Arafat and the Phalangists were once again friends. Such is life in a political kaleidoscope.
Just as the PLO and the Arab world were never the same after the summer of ’82, so neither were Israel and the Jewish world. In “mopping up” Lebanon, Israel lost its luster. Esther Koenigsberg Bengigi, an American-born psychologist who immigrated to Israel in the late 1970s and married an Israeli paratrooper, once remarked to me that the Lebanon invasion actually changed her feelings toward Israel more than toward the Arabs. In this she was not alone, as a Jew or as an Israeli.
“It was always very important for me to feel that Israel was right, was smart, and that it always did things the right way, especially after having grown up during the whole Vietnam period in America and really feeling worked over by the government,” said Bengigi. “I was taught that Israel wants peace more than others and just wants to be left alone. After Lebanon, everything wasn’t so clear. I really felt anger.”
Most Israelis, however, seemed to feel only numb. Lebanon became the war everybody wanted to forget. As Shlomo Gazit, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, once said to me, “There would never be an Israeli Pentagon Papers for the Lebanon war. Too many people were guilty,” he explained. Too many people and too much party politics were involved. “It is part of the rules of the game,” said Gazit. “We should not embarrass each other to the very end. We cannot afford to go into a commission on Lebanon and hope to continue working together. We cannot allow ourselves to be demoralized completely. The cost is that the lessons may not be learned, but even if we have a commission, the lessons may not be learned.”
Instead of really learning from the war together, Israelis explained it away—each according to his own politics—just enough to be able to forget about it.
One popular explanation within the Labor Party was that the war was all Begin and Sharon’s fault. They were crazy. Begin was even proving it by locking himself in his house. Since these two had been put on the shelf, there was nothing more to worry about. A second explanation, popular among Likudniks, was that the Lebanon fiasco was all Labor’s fault: they never allowed Sharon to fight the war with the iron fist he wanted. But this school always ignored the follow-up question: Even if Sharon had been able to use his iron fist to smash Lebanon from one end to the next, who would have taken over when that fist was withdrawn?
But the most popular explanation of all, and the one that seems to have endured the longest, was that the reason the Lebanon invasion turned into a mess wasn’t Israel’s fault at all; it was Lebanon’s fault. It didn’t matter what Israeli policy was. In other words, instead of recognizing how specious were the Israeli preconceptions about Lebanon and how the Israeli presence there helped to make the situation even worse, Israelis held to their preconceptions and pronounced Lebanon insane—just another country where they hate the Jews. Whenever I heard this explanation from Israelis, I was always reminded of the cartoon by Pat Oliphant from the early days of the invasion, when the joke making the rounds in the Middle East was “Visit Israel before Israel visits you.” The Oliphant cartoon showed an Israeli tank on the border of Tibet, with two soldiers looking across a great divide. On the other side were two little Tibetans firing slingshots at the onrushing Israeli soldiers. Underneath, the little duck says, “Imagine, anti-Semitism even out here.”
This popular Israeli view of crazy Lebanon was perfectly, if unintentionally, enshrined in Two Fingers from Sidon, a movie the Israeli army made in 1985 to prepare troops for serving in Lebanon, though the army pulled out just after the filming was completed. The movie was shown to soldiers nevertheless and became so popular that the army eventually released it to the public. My favorite scene is when Gadi, a fresh-eyed young lieutenant just out of officers’ school, arrives at a base somewhere in south Lebanon and asks another soldier to fill him in on the political situation in Lebanon. The soldier, Georgie, a jaded veteran of the Lebanon war, sits in a field kitchen peeling potatoes and explains what the war is all about.
“Look,” says Georgie, “I’ll tell you the truth. Seriously, I didn’t know what was happening until yesterday. But yesterday, they brought in this expert on Arab affairs. He gave us a lecture on the present situation. Now I understand everything. It goes like this: The Christians hate the Druse, Shiites, Sunnis, and Palestinians. The Druse hate the Christians. No. Right. The Druse hate the Christians, Shiites, and the Syrians. The Shiites got screwed by them all for years, so they hate everyone. The Sunnis hate whomever their leader tells them to hate, and the Palestinians hate one another. Aside from that, they hate the others. Now, they all have a common denominator: they all hate us, the Israelis. They would like to blow us to pieces if they could, but they can’t due to the Israeli army. Not all of the Israeli army—just the suckers, those who are in Lebanon.”