by David Landau
In March 1978, with Begin now in power, a group of nine Palestinian terrorists reached Israel from Lebanon by boat, killed a young woman swimmer, hijacked two buses, crammed all the passengers into one of them, drove it down the coast, and were eventually halted in a murderous firefight outside Tel Aviv in which thirty-five of the passengers were killed and another seventy-one injured. All nine terrorists were killed. The IDF, under Minister of Defense Ezer Weizman, launched a swift sweep into south Lebanon, Operation Litani, aimed at killing or capturing PLO fighters or driving them north out of the border zone. It was a success and ended with the deployment of a UN force in the area. Israel withdrew most of its troops from Lebanese soil but retained what it called a “security zone,” patrolled by a local Lebanese militia commanded by a Christian officer, Major Sa’ad Hadad, in close liaison with the IDF.
Gradually, the PLO filtered back into the south, and a guerrilla war developed between the Palestinian fighters and the south Lebanese militia and IDF forces. The PLO’s Soviet-made Katyusha rocket launchers and 130-millimeter cannon could fire from north of the “security zone” and hit Israeli towns and kibbutzim across the border. Weizman kept the Israeli response to pinpoint reprisal raids. But after his resignation in 1980, and with Begin now the defense minister, Chief of Staff Eitan steadily escalated the situation with repeated IDF attacks and air strikes against Palestinian bases north of the “security zone.”38
In April 1981, when Christian militia forces in the mountains to the east of Beirut found themselves hard-pressed by Syrian forces—the Syrians had meanwhile switched their support from the Christians to the Muslims—Begin sent in warplanes to shoot down a pair of Syrian troop-transport helicopters in a signal to Damascus to back off. The Syrians stopped their attack, but they deployed ground-to-air missiles in the Beqáa Valley, threatening Israel’s aerial ascendancy.
For Begin, the Lebanese Christians were more than a strategic ally; their plight was a test case for Israel’s most profound moral and historical mission as he understood it. The Syrians had turned against them, and they faced a coalition of hostile Muslim forces inside their country. “Yigael,” Begin admonished his deputy prime minister, Yigael Yadin, his voice thick with drama and pathos. “Yigael, the danger of annihilation hangs over them. They are our allies. We will not behave toward them the way Chamberlain and Daladier behaved.” Yadin, citing intelligence reports and backed by the deputy defense minister, Mordechai Zippori, and the chief of Military Intelligence, Yehoshua Saguy, warned Begin that the Lebanese Christian politicians were a feckless and self-serving bunch who “mean to drag us into their war. What interest do we have in supporting them?”
By the summer of 1981 the IDF was taking increasing casualties. The north of Israel was close to paralysis. Begin, in his campaign speeches that summer, declared, “Watch out, Assad, Raful and Yanosh are waiting for you.” (Raful was Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan; Yanosh was CO of Northern Command Avigdor Ben-Gal.) The crowds loved it. But Begin’s words rang increasingly hollow after the election as the border war intensified. Israeli warplanes bombed PLO bases in the refugee camps around Beirut, taking a heavy toll. But the Katyushas and artillery shells continued raining down across the border.
The Americans rushed in their top Lebanon expert, the veteran diplomat (and scion of a Lebanese-American family) Philip Habib, to negotiate a cease-fire. Sharon, the new defense minister, and Eitan urged a massive ground operation. But Begin bowed to the American pressure and overruled them. A cease-fire—Begin refused to use that term since it implied equality between the two combatants; he referred to a “cessation of hostilities”—went into effect on July 24, 1981. The border war immediately subsided. “I strenuously opposed the cease-fire,” Sharon recalled. “No doubt the PLO would reduce its activity along the Lebanon border in accord with the letter of the agreement, but … it would step up its activities elsewhere.” In the months that followed, Sharon cited every terrorist incident at home and abroad to bolster his case.39
The cabinet meeting at Begin’s home on December 20 ended with a vague instruction from the prime minister to the generals to come up with an alternative, impliedly less sweeping plan. But Sharon proceeded in the confident expectation that the original one would eventually “ripen” to approval. On January 12, he flew secretly to Jounieh to meet with Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian Phalange Party and commander of the Lebanese Forces militia. The handsome young Gemayel drove his Israeli guest around Beirut incognito. Sharon was impressed by Gemayel’s obvious popularity. He met his wife, Solange; his father, the veteran Lebanese Christian leader Pierre Gemayel; and Pierre’s longtime ally cum rival Camille Chamoun, a former president of Lebanon.
“ ‘In case there is a war,’ Bashir asked, ‘what would you expect of us?’ ‘The first thing you should do is defend your borders here,’ Sharon replied. ‘We will not be able to come to your rescue if you lose ground little by little. Second, that hill over there, the defense ministry hill [in the Beirut suburb of Ba’abda]. That hill is vital. If there is a war, take that hill. [The hill was vital because on its slopes ran the Beirut–Damascus highway.] Third, Israel will not enter West Beirut. That’s the capital, the government, the foreign embassies … West Beirut is your business and the business of the Lebanese Army.’ ”40
Sharon reported to Begin and the inner cabinet on his talks in Lebanon. Clearly, the idea of IDF forces linking up with the Christians, and, presumably, helping Gemayel in his bid for the Lebanese presidency, was still very much alive despite the cabinet’s reservations over Operation Pines. Begin himself met with Bashir Gemayel in Jerusalem on February 16.
On April 3, 1982, an Israeli diplomat was shot dead by a terrorist in Paris, and the inner cabinet decided that from now on any such attack would bring an Israeli response against the PLO. On April 21, just days before the Sinai handover, Israeli warplanes were sent to bomb Palestinian targets in Lebanon, for the first time since the July cease-fire, following a mine explosion inside the south Lebanon “security zone” that took the life of an Israeli officer. The PLO did not retaliate; the Americans reportedly warned it that to do so would be to trigger an IDF invasion.41
On May 7, following terrorist attacks in Ashkelon and Jerusalem, the air force bombed again in Lebanon. This time PLO guns and Katyusha launchers responded, but all their hundred-odd shells fell wide, and it was clear the Palestinians were trying to avoid escalation.
It was clear, too, that as far as Israel was concerned, the war was just a matter of time. No evidence was adduced linking the explosive charges laid in Ashkelon and Jerusalem to the PLO in Lebanon. The shooting in Paris, too, could not be pinned directly on Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The specific provenance of specific acts of terrorism was plainly irrelevant. Israel was determined to act against what it saw as the chief source of Palestinian terror: the PLO in Lebanon.
How extensive would the Israeli military operation be? There had been a certain scaling back of the military planning in the wake of the December 20 cabinet meeting. Among those in the loop, there was vague talk of “Small Pines” as opposed to “Big Pines.” But as meeting followed meeting of the inner cabinet and the full cabinet, that key question was still unresolved.
On May 16, Eitan submitted a more limited plan to the cabinet, and Begin asked for an approval in principle, with the precise timing still to be settled. But while both Sharon and Eitan spoke in terms of clearing south Lebanon of PLO artillery, the maps displayed before the ministers were essentially those of Operation Pines, showing the IDF columns striking north toward the Christian-controlled areas. Sharon did not speak explicitly of linking up with the Christian forces. He did say, though, that the Israeli operation would have an influence on affairs inside Lebanon. He also said the IDF incursion would last only twenty-four hours.42
The ministers knew, of course, that Begin and Sharon’s original plans called for a deeper penetration and presumed it would take considerably longer. Yitzhak Modai, minister without portfolio (and Sharo
n’s friend and erstwhile fellow officer), asked: “Given that there are always unexpected developments on the battlefield, would the cabinet be asked for approval of movements farther north?” To this Begin responded that the cabinet could be called to meet at any time such a question came up.
Begin, in a passionate speech, said Israel’s problem was not one of three miles or ten miles but of the interpretation of the cease-fire. The PLO had announced that it would continue its attacks inside Israel. “They are declaring war on the people of Israel, that they will make every form of trouble, massacre and assassination of men, women, and children, all over Israel … Every nation would react to that.”
Sharon now flew to Washington to make essentially the same presentation to Secretary Haig and, hopefully, get a green light from the Americans to proceed. At least now Washington’s fear of Israel not withdrawing from Sinai had been laid to rest.
The question of what color light, green, yellow, or red, Sharon actually received from Haig has been exhaustively discussed over the years. The two men themselves, as might be expected, both denied there was any green light. “They [the Americans] were against. Totally against. I have to admit that,” Sharon said in an interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci during the war. “There was no collusion,” he insisted in a later interview. “The most one could say is that Haig understood our situation better than others in Washington.”43
Sharon’s report to the cabinet when he returned gave the ministers the distinct impression that the United States would be sympathetic when the IDF struck.44 Haig, probably apprised of this, wrote to Begin on May 28 urging “complete restraint.” To this the prime minister replied, “Mr. Secretary, the man has not been born who will ever obtain from me consent to let Jews be killed by a bloodthirsty enemy.”
* * *
a One of the Begin team’s first instructions when it came to power was to the Israel Broadcasting Authority to stop referring to “the West Bank” (implying the area was part of Jordan) and use instead the biblical designation “Judea and Samaria.”
b See p. 82.
c Carter’s understanding “certainly made sense,” the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, observed years later. “Certainly in Carter’s mind he was talking about a settlement freeze of indefinite length through the period in which you were negotiating over autonomy. And that’s what [U.S. secretary of state Cyrus] Vance thought they were talking about. [Nevertheless,] my hypothesis to this day is that it was a genuine misunderstanding, not a deliberate double cross by Begin. Carter thinks the opposite. He thinks Begin lied to him at Camp David. And he was there” (Sam Lewis interview, Jerusalem, February 2, 2009).
d The name appears in the Bible (Gen. 12:6).
e “From the moment the peace treaty was signed,” Weizman wrote in his memoir The Battle for Peace, immediately after his resignation,
Begin … turned his back on this chink of hope that had opened for Israel after thirty years of bloodshed. More than anyone else, Begin turned the peace into something banal, something not to be proud of. Instead of surging forward to lead Israel into a new age, Begin preferred to sink back into his fanciful dreams. Perhaps he didn’t truly understand the historic significance of the moment. Perhaps because of conflicts with his lifelong ideological beliefs … It sometimes seemed that the very prospect of peace was depressing him. An air of depression wafted through the corridors of power and spread throughout the land.
f On one such visit, Sharon was taken to the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. Gazing up at the huge pillars and listening to the guide explain the hieroglyphic annals of the ancient pharaohs, he asked his close aide: “Do you think I’ll be written about too, in the annals of Jewish history?” The aide replied, “It depends what you do,” but remembered thinking how the determination to leave a lasting mark was such an essential part of Sharon’s being (Eli Landau interview, Herzliya, October 30, 2007).
g Singular: Mitzpeh, or lookout post, the name given to these hilltop villages. By 1999, the number of mitzpim had grown to fifty-seven, and Sharon took the credit for all of them. In the 2001 election campaign for prime minister, he spoke of settling another half million Jews in the Galilee, all in the existing towns and villages. There was no need, he declared, to build any more places, just to bring in more people (“The Target: Half a Million More Jews in the Galilee,” Haaretz, January 18, 2001).
h According to some subsequent accounts, Sharon and not Eitan was the third man on the committee. Either way, Sharon clearly stayed intimately involved.
i The legislation provided that “the law, jurisdiction, and administration of the State of Israel” should henceforth apply to the Golan Heights. This is the same language that Israel used when it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and is tantamount to annexation, though the word “annexation” was not used.
CHAPTER 6 · THROUGH THE MIRE
A bloodthirsty enemy struck in London on June 3, 1982. His Jewish victim was the Israeli ambassador to the U.K., Shlomo Argov, shot through the head by a lone assailant as he left a dinner at the Dorchester hotel. The injury left him mentally and physically incapacitated for the rest of his life.
The attack was perpetrated by the Abu Nidal group, headquartered in Baghdad. Abu Nidal, or Sabri al-Bana, broke away from the PLO years before and was a virulent foe of Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, whom he called “the Jewess’s son” and had tried in the past to assassinate.1 But none of that was of any interest to the cabinet, which convened in emergency session the next day. “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” Chief of Staff Eitan retorted to the intelligence briefings. “They’re all PLO. We need to f—k the PLO.”2 He was out of line, but he perfectly expressed the sense of the meeting.
Prime Minister Begin preferred not to grace Palestinian terrorists with any name or initials. They were all hamenuvalim, the swine. No country on earth would fail to respond to an attack like that, he said. Israel had desisted for long enough from hitting the PLO in Lebanon. To continue to desist would be absurd.3 But Begin did not propose the invasion of south Lebanon at this stage. His decision was to bomb PLO bases and depots in south Lebanon and in the Beirut suburbs. The PLO’s response would determine whether Israel would make do with that or launch its long-planned ground assault.
The Israeli warplanes hit nine targets, including a sprawling sports center in south Beirut that served the Palestinian fighters as a training camp. The PLO “signed its own death warrant,” in the words of Ambassador Lewis, by responding with a massive artillery barrage all across the Israeli border zone. Interestingly, neither Arafat nor Sharon was involved in this preliminary round of hostilities. The PLO leader was in Jeddah, on a mediating mission to end the Iran-Iraq War.4 Sharon was on a discreet official visit to Romania.
When the cabinet met again, on Saturday night, June 5, in Begin’s official residence, Sharon was back, and the shelling in the north had continued unabated for twenty-four hours. Begin made it clear that he would ask the ministers to approve the ground assault. “It is our fate in Eretz Yisrael to fight and sacrifice. The alternative is Auschwitz.” He asked the minister of defense to take them through the details of the proposed operation once again, “as though for the first time.” Sharon and Eitan described a short, multipronged incursion designed to clear the entire border region of the PLO. The army would advance some forty to forty-five kilometers, they said, the farthest range of the PLO’s artillery. “What about Beirut?” the always-skeptical Ehrlich asked. “Beirut’s out of the picture,” Sharon replied.
Begin acknowledged Ehrlich’s question by saying, “In war, you know how it begins, but you never know how it ends. But let me state very clearly: nothing will be done without a cabinet decision.” Ehrlich was unconvinced and abstained, as did his fellow Likud-Liberal the energy minister, Yitzhak Berman. “You know Sharon,” Ehrlich whispered, as they walked out together. “He’ll dupe everyone. He’ll take us much farther than 40–45 km.”5 The communiqué, meticulously edited by Begin himself, informed the w
aiting world that
1. the cabinet has decided to instruct the IDF to place all the civilian population of the Galilee beyond the range of the terrorists’ fire from Lebanon, where they, their bases, and their headquarters are concentrated;
2. the name of the operation is Peace for Galilee;
3. during the operation, the Syrian army will not be attacked unless it attacks our forces; and
4. Israel continues to aspire to the signing of a peace treaty with independent Lebanon, its territorial integrity preserved.
This language, and the fraught exchanges leaked from inside the cabinet room, were immediately subjected to the most intense parsing and speculation by Israeli and foreign commentators. Did the reference to the PLO’s “headquarters”—everyone knew they were in Beirut—mean that the IDF was headed for Beirut after all? And what would happen if the Syrians did attack “our forces”? Would there be war between Israel and Syria? What was the reference to a “peace treaty with independent Lebanon”? Did that mean Israel would stay and intervene in Lebanese politics in order to install its ally the Maronite Christian leader Bashir Gemayel as the country’s new president? There was no explicit mention of the forty- to forty-five-kilometer line that ostensibly was the limit of the IDF’s intended advance.
In many ways, this ongoing exegesis was a microcosm of the months to come and indeed of the years of political and historical argument that followed. The same questions resounded: What did Sharon say? And what did he conceal? How much did Begin know? Were the ministers misled?
For Sharon, Begin’s state of mind was crucial. If the defense minister left the prime minister out of the loop, then he was guilty, in effect, of a sort of putsch. If, on the other hand, Sharon acted in close concert with Begin, then the awareness or understanding of the other ministers at any given point was less important in terms of constitutional propriety. In wartime, after all, a small cabal of ministers led by the prime minister always runs things, to the exclusion of others.