On August 4, 1982, Israeli forces captured Beirut’s airport and began to move into the city center. The United States tried to mediate an end to the attack by seeking a refuge for the PLO fighters, but initially no one would take them. Finally, Syria and Jordan agreed to accept a few thousand each.
Ambassador Habib succeeded in reaching an agreement under which U.S., French, and Italian troops would enter Beirut while the PLO and Syrians were evacuated and the Israelis pulled back their troops. Begin agreed, but before implementing the deal, Defense Minister Sharon ordered the bombing of West Beirut, resulting in the death of at least 300 people. An infuriated Reagan called Begin and made it clear that if the bombing did not cease, there would be “grave consequences” for U.S.–Israel relations. The bombing stopped, and a cease-fire was put in place.
On August 21, 1982, Palestinian fighters began to withdraw just as the French contingent of the multinational force arrived. Over the course of 12 days, approximately 14,000 Palestinian and Syrian combatants were evacuated. Although the Israelis suspected some PLO terrorists remained, they ended the siege of Beirut—during which, they had cut the water and electricity supplies—and began to retreat southward.
The international contingent withdrew from Lebanon in mid-September. Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian militia, was subsequently elected president of the country, and the prospects momentarily looked bright for Lebanon to return to stability. The fighting was far from over, however, and Israeli troops would remain in the country and the war would continue.
The Least You Need to Know
Reagan’s primary aim was to contain the Soviet Union, but the Arabs maintained that Israel, not the Soviet Union, was the real danger.
Saddam Hussein got French help to build a nuclear bomb, but Begin ordered a dramatic raid that destroyed Iraq’s reactor and probably saved U.S. troops from facing nuclear weapons in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
Sadat’s assassination raised fears that the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty would collapse, but Mubarak proved an able successor who reassured the Israelis.
The PLO controlled southern Lebanon, terrorizing Lebanese Muslims and launching attacks against Israel, which ultimately provoked an invasion.
Part 6
Inching Toward Peace
Israel finds itself enmeshed in a protracted conflict in Lebanon, which grows increasingly costly and saps the nation’s morale. As in its past wars, Israel’s victories on the battlefield are not translated into political gains or even peace.
The Palestinians begin an uprising, which stimulates new interest in Israel and the United States in resolving their grievances. President Bush succeeds in bringing all the parties together for the first time in a conference in Madrid, and a peace-negotiation process begins that continues to the present. A turning point is reached when the PLO recognizes Israel and renounces terror. Secret talks in Oslo ultimately result in the first peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
The United States, meanwhile, finds itself drawn into a war in the Middle East after Iraq invades neighboring Kuwait and threatens the Saudi oil fields.
Chapter 19
Sticks and Stones and Breaking Bones
In This Chapter
Reagan tries his hand at peacemaking
Murders at Sabra and Shatila shock the world
Ethiopia’s Jews reach the Promised Land
Palestinian anger bubbles over
The PLO had been unceremoniously escorted out of Beirut, but Israel had not yet extricated itself from Lebanon. The country remained a violent place where tribal, religious, and ethnic hatreds ran deep. But the momentary lull in the fighting raised hopes in Israel for an end to the war and for the signing of a peace agreement with the Lebanese government.
The Lebanese Christians hoped to reassert their dominance over the country’s political system and free the nation from Syrian influence. This was a naive hope, given Syrian president Assad’s interests in the country and the existence of hostile, armed Muslim and Druze forces that were not prepared to be second-class citizens in a Christian state. The United States hoped to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon that might serve as a springboard to other peace agreements. No one expected that American soldiers would soon find themselves in the crosshairs.
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Hieroglyphics
The Druze are a Muslim sect that lives primarily in Lebanon, southern Syria, and northern Israel. The basis of the Druze religion is the belief that at various times God has been divinely incarnated in a living person and that his last, and final, such incarnation was al-Hakim, the sixth Fatimid caliph, who announced himself at Cairo about 1016 as the earthly incarnation of God. The Druze believe in one God. The Druze do not pray in a mosque and are secretive about the tenets of their religion.
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Reagan Has a Plan
When the situation in Lebanon had stabilized, Reagan launched a surprise peace initiative in a speech on September 1, 1982. Later dubbed the Reagan Plan, the president called for allowing the Palestinians self-rule in the territories in association with Jordan. The plan rejected both Israeli annexation and the creation of a Palestinian state. Reagan also called for a freeze on all settlement activity.
Worsening the already-strained relations with the Reagan administration, Israeli prime minister Begin immediately denounced the plan as endangering Israeli security. He believed that it would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state and would compromise Israeli claims to the territories.
Reagan was further stunned by the harsh reaction of the Arab leaders, who also rejected his proposals.
The Reagan Plan clearly was going nowhere, and Reagan’s effort to shift the focus away from Lebanon was overtaken by events. On September 14, President-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in a bomb attack that also killed 25 of his followers. The Israelis broke the cease-fire and moved into West Beirut to root out the remaining Palestinian terrorists.
Massacres at Sabra and Shatila
On September 16–17, 1982, Israeli troops allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia men to enter two Beirut-area refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, to root out Palestinian terrorist cells believed to be located there. It had been estimated that up to 200 armed men were operating out of the countless bunkers built in the camps by the PLO over the years and stocked with generous reserves of ammunition.
The Phalangists went on a killing spree, settling old scores with the Palestinians and avenging the murders of Gemayel and his followers who had been killed earlier that week. When Israeli soldiers ordered the Phalangists out, they found hundreds dead. (Estimates ranged from 460, according to the Lebanese police, to 700–800, calculated by Israeli intelligence.) The dead, according to the Lebanese account, included 35 women and children. The rest were men: Palestinians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Iranians, Syrians, and Algerians. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila shocked the world.
Israel had allowed the Phalange to enter the camps as part of a plan to transfer authority to the Lebanese, and accepted responsibility for that decision. The Kahan Commission of Inquiry, formed by the Israeli government in response to public outrage and grief, found that Israel was indirectly responsible for not anticipating the possibility of Phalangist violence. Following publication of the report, General Raful Eitan, Israel’s chief of staff, was dismissed, and Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon resigned, but remained a minister without portfolio in the government.
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Sage Sayings
The Kahan Commission was] a great tribute to Israeli democracy…. There are very few governments in the world that one can imagine making such a public investigation of such a difficult and shameful episode.
—Henry Kissinger
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Whereas 300,000 Israelis demonstrated in Israel to protest the killings, little or no reaction occurred in the Arab world. Outside the Middle East, a major international outcry against Israel erupted over the massacres. The Phalangists, who pe
rpetrated the crime, were spared the brunt of the condemnations for it.
On September 20, 1982, after the horror of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila had sunk in, the United States, Italy, and France agreed to send their troops back into Beirut to serve as peacekeepers.
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Mysteries of the Desert
By contrast to the furor over Sabra and Shatila, few voices were raised in May 1985 when Muslim militiamen attacked the Shatila and Burj-el Barajneh Palestinian refugee camps, killing 635 and wounding 2,500. During a 2-year battle between the Syrian-backed Shiite Amal militia and the PLO, more than 2,000 people, including many civilians, were reportedly killed. No outcry was directed at the PLO or the Syrians and their allies over the slaughter.
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Israelis Grow War Weary
The Lebanon war provoked intense debate within Israel. For the first time in Israel’s history, a consensus for war did not exist (though it had at the outset). After the first 6 months of the operation, 41 percent of Israelis said they believed the war was a mistake. Already, more than 450 soldiers had been killed and 2,500 wounded—a sizeable total for a country Israel’s size. (It was half the total dead in the entire 1956 Suez war.)
The Lebanese were also turning on the Israeli government. When Israel first invaded Lebanon, the IDF was welcomed by the Shia Muslim population as liberators who were relieving them of the terror inflicted by the PLO. When the Israeli troops did not quickly withdraw, however, the Muslims feared that one oppressor was simply replacing another. Muslim militias then began to join in attacks on Israeli troops in the south. On November 11, 1982, the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was blown up, killing 74 people. It was the worst military disaster in modern Israel’s history.
The Israelis began to focus their attention on negotiating with Amin Gemayel, who had replaced his brother Bashir as Lebanon’s president. After months of negotiations, Gemayel signed an agreement with Israel on May 17, 1983. Although falling short of a full-fledged peace treaty, the accord satisfied Israel’s principal concerns. A year later, however, Syria forced Gemayel to renege on the agreement.
In July 1983, just over a year after Sharon had ordered the invasion of Lebanon, his successor, Moshe Arens, pulled Israeli troops back 20 miles from their forward position and slowly began the move toward ending the war. Lebanese militias quickly moved to fill the vacuum created by the IDF withdrawal. Druze forces, for example, moved into Christian villages where they slaughtered approximately 1,000 civilians and forced 50,000 out of their homes.
America Gets Sucked In
Syria was agitating against the Gemayel government and the U.S. Marines who had been left to protect the Beirut airport after the Israelis withdrew. The Americans soon found themselves targets of antigovernment forces. In August, Reagan sent U.S. Navy warships to the coast and ordered them to fire on Druze positions to relieve the pressure on the Marines. The offensive was viewed by the Druze and Muslims as American intervention and an end to their role as impartial peacekeepers. As far as the Lebanese were concerned, the gloves were now off.
In October, a suicide bomber blew up the Marines’ barracks, killing 241 soldiers. This convinced the American public and Congress that the U.S. effort to pacify the country had been a failure. Rather than entering further into the conflict, the decision was made to withdraw, and, in February 1984, the last American Marines departed.
The End of Begin
Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin resigned on September 15, 1983, as demands for an end to the fighting grew louder. The national coalition government that took office in 1984 decided to withdraw from Lebanon, leaving behind a token force to help the South Lebanese Army (SLA), which Israel had long supported, patrol a security zone near Israel’s border.
* * *
Ask the Sphinx
Begin never explained why he quit, but it was widely speculated that he was furious at being deceived by Sharon about the aims of the war, heartsick over the number of casualties, and unable to get over the death of his wife a few months earlier. For the remainder of his life, Begin was a virtual recluse, making no political statements and receiving few visitors. He died in February 1993.
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Israel had hoped the Shia Muslims would join the Christian SLA to jointly oppose any return of the PLO, but the Muslims wouldn’t countenance such an alliance and, over time, came to be a greater threat within Lebanon to Israel than the Palestinians had ever been.
Though the IDF succeeded in driving the PLO out of Lebanon, this action did not end the terrorist threats from that country. The war was also costly: 1,216 soldiers died between June 5, 1982, and May 31, 1985.
The war also contributed to the virtual collapse of the Israeli economy. In 1984, for example, inflation was raging at 445 percent and rising. The United States suggested the creation of a Joint Economic Development Group to work on Israel’s economic challenges, and it provided $1.5 billion in emergency assistance. Israel subsequently implemented a stabilization program that worked like a “mini-miracle.” Israel subsequently had one of the highest economic growth rates in the world, and in 2000, inflation was amazingly reduced to zero.
Black Jews Come Home
Although most of the news for Israel in the early 1980s was bad, one bright spot was the incredible rescue of the Jews from Ethiopia.
Little is known about the early origins of the Ethiopian Jewish community, but it is believed that they adopted Jewish beliefs around the second and third centuries. Ethiopian Judaism was based on the Torah, but did not include later rabbinic laws and commentaries, which never reached Ethiopia. Therefore, many of their practices differ from those of the rest of the world’s Jewry. These distinctions were a cause of some difficulty for many years because of a reluctance of Orthodox rabbis in Israel to recognize them as Jews (formal recognition came in the mid-’70s).
Within Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, the Jews were on the bottom rung of the economic ladder and often subject to persecution from their neighbors. For a variety of reasons, related primarily to domestic politics in Ethiopia, the Jews were not permitted to leave.
As economic and political conditions inside Ethiopia deteriorated, tens of thousands of people began to cross the border to neighboring Sudan. Many Ethiopian Jews joined the exodus. In 1979, the Israelis and, to a smaller degree, private groups, began to evacuate the Ethiopian Jews from Sudan by various covert means and bring them to Israel. As word reached the Jewish villages in Ethiopia that the route to Israel lay through Sudan, the flow of Jewish refugees across the border increased dramatically.
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Sage Sayings
For the first time in history, thousands of black people are being brought into a country not in chains but as citizens.
—The New York Times columnist William Safire
* * *
After cleaning out the refugee camps of most of the Ethiopian Jews by the winter of 1984, the Israelis discovered that the camps were soon being overwhelmed by new Jewish refugees. It became clear to the Mossad that their previous methods of rescue would not allow them to evacuate the Ethiopian Jews fast enough to prevent them from dying in large numbers in the squalid camps. A new plan was devised with the assistance of the United States and the acquiescence of the Sudanese.
Every night, except the Sabbath, from November 21, 1984, until January 5, 1985, buses picked up groups of about 55 Ethiopian Jews from the refugee camps and took them to Khartoum, where they boarded Boeing 707s. Altogether, 36 flights carrying approximately 220 passengers flew first to Brussels and then to Tel Aviv. A total of 7,800 Ethiopian Jews were rescued in what came to be known as “Operation Moses.”
News of the airlift eventually leaked out. When the Israeli government confirmed the stories, the Sudanese ordered the operation stopped. The Ethiopian government was outraged, but most Americans admired what Israel had done to save its fellow Jews.
Bush Lends a Hand
U.S. officials had cons
idered resuming Operation Moses, but when Vice President George Bush met with Gaafar el-Numeiry on March 3, 1985, he found that the Sudanese president did not want a repeat of the earlier “fiasco.” Instead, he agreed to a quick, one-shot operation. Numeiry insisted, however, that the planned operation be carried out secretly by the Americans and not the Israelis and that the flights not go directly to Israel to minimize the likely criticism from Arab governments. On March 28, 1985, the operation, code-named “Sheba” (also Joshua), began with Ethiopian Jews from Israel working for the Mossad identifying the Jews in the Sudanese refugee camps and taking them by truck to the airstrip. Camouflaged U.S. Hercules transports designed to hold 90 passengers each were prepared at the American base near Frankfurt, West Germany. They were filled with food, water, and medical supplies and then flown from an Israeli military base near Eilat to the airstrip in Sudan. These planes landed at 20-minute intervals to pick up their passengers. Sudanese security officers cordoned off the area and, within hours, all the Ethiopian Jews were evacuated.
The planes flew to an Israeli air force base outside Eilat, where the passengers were greeted by Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The organizers had prepared to airlift as many as 2,000 from the camps, but they found only 800, so 3 planes returned from Sudan empty.
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Ask the Sphinx
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict Page 32