Arabs (87 page)

The Israelis unleashed the full force of their military on Lebanon. While Lebanese towns and cities were bombed from the air and sea, the Israeli army advanced rapidly through South Lebanon to lay siege to Beirut, where the PLO had its headquarters in the southern suburb of Fakhani. The residents of Beirut became the helpless victims of a conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Syrians. The Israelis targeted the leadership of the PLO in particular, hoping to decapitate the movement by killing Yasser Arafat and his top lieutenants. Arafat was forced to change residence daily to avoid assassination. The buildings in which he was reported to take shelter were quickly targeted by Israeli bombers.

Lina Tabbara, who assisted Arafat with his 1974 speech at the UN General Assembly, had survived the first phase of the Lebanese civil war with her family in Muslim West Beirut. Her marriage, however, did not, and she reverted to her maiden name, Lina Mikdadi. Living in West Beirut during the 1982 siege, Mikdadi witnessed the leveling of an apartment building that Arafat had left only minutes earlier. “I noticed a space where a building had been, right behind the public gardens.... I ran to the spot. An eight-story building had disappeared. People ran around half-crazed, women screamed their children’s names.”
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The destruction of that one building in which Arafat had been taking refuge claimed 250 civilian lives, according to Mikdadi. One of Arafat’s commanders said the raid had left Arafat distraught. “What crime has been committed by these children, now buried under the rubble?” Arafat asked. “All they are guilty of is having been in a building I visited a couple of times.” Thereafter, Arafat slept in his car, away from built-up areas.
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For ten weeks of unspeakable violence the siege continued. Survivors reported hundreds of raids conducted within a single day. There was no safe haven, no place to take refuge. As casualty figures spiraled into the tens of thousands, international
pressure mounted on Israel to bring its siege of Beirut to a close. The violence reached its peak in August 1982. On August 12 the Israelis carried out eleven hours of nonstop air raids, dropping thousands of tons of ordinance on West Beirut. An estimated 800 homes were destroyed, with 500 casualties. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan placed a call to Prime Minister Begin in Israel and convinced him to stop the fighting. “President Reagan,” Mikdadi asked rhetorically, “why didn’t you make your phone call earlier?”
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Begin relented under U.S. pressure, and the Reagan administration brokered a complex cease-fire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The PLO combatants would withdraw from Beirut by sea, and a multinational force composed of U.S., French, and Italian troops would be deployed to take up positions vacated by the Israelis.

The first stage of the disengagement plan went very smoothly. French troops arrived on August 21 to take control of the Beirut International Airport. The next day, the first of the PLO forces began their withdrawal from Beirut’s sea port. There was a great deal of concern for the security of the departing Palestinians. Many Lebanese had grown hostile to the Palestinian movement, blaming the PLO for causing the civil war in the first place and for provoking the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982. Yet when Lina Mikdadi, herself half-Palestinian, went to the assembly point to bid the Palestinian men farewell, she found that many citizens of West Beirut had done the same. “Women lean out of windows that no longer have any panes to throw rice; they wave from half-destroyed balconies. Many cry as they watch the trucks go by. The Palestinians have already said goodbye to their children, wives and parents at the municipal stadium.”
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The departing Palestinian fighters were to be scattered among a number of Arab countries—Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, and Tunisia, where the PLO established its new headquarters. Their expulsion from Beirut marked the end of the PLO as a coherent fighting force. Yasser Arafat was the last to leave, on August 30, and with his departure the siege of Beirut was effectively over. The whole process had gone so smoothly that the international forces, originally deployed for thirty days, withdrew ten days early, believing their mission accomplished. The last French contingent left Lebanon on September 13.

The retreating Palestinian fighters left behind their parents, wives, and children. The Palestinian civilians that remained were left completely defenseless. One of the main tasks of the multinational forces was to ensure the security of the families of Palestinian combatants who were vulnerable in a hostile country. As those forces began to withdraw, no one was left to protect the Palestinian refugee camps from their many enemies.

 

At the same time the PLO was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Lebanese parliament was scheduled to meet on August 23 to elect a new president. Due to the civil war,
there had not been a parliamentary election since 1972. The parliamentarians’ numbers had been reduced by mortality from 99 to 92, of which only 45 were actually in Lebanon. Only one candidate had declared his intention to run for office: Israel’s ally Bashir Gemayel of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party. To this Lebanon’s vaunted democracy had been reduced. Yet for the war-weary and pragmatic Lebanese, Gemayel was a consensus candidate. His connections to Israel and the West might just win the Lebanese some much-needed peace. There was genuine celebration across Lebanon when Gemayel’s election was confirmed.

Bashir Gemayel’s presidency proved short lived—as did Lebanon’s peace. On September 14, a bomb destroyed the Phalangist Party headquarters in East Beirut, killing Gemayel. There is no evidence of any Palestinian involvement in the assassination; in fact, a young Maronite named Habib Shartouni, a member of the pro-Damascus Syrian Socialist National Party, was arrested two days later and confessed to the crime, denouncing Gemayel as a traitor for his dealings with Israel. Yet the Phalangist militiamen harbored such deep hatred for the Palestinians, cultivated over seven years of civil war, that they sought revenge for the assassination of their leader in the Palestinian camps.

Had the American, French, and Italian troops of the multinational force seen out their full thirty-day mandate, they might have been able to provide the necessary protection for the unarmed Palestinian refugees. Instead, the Palestinian camps had come under the protection of the Israeli army, which reoccupied Beirut immediately after Gemayel’s assassination was announced. On the night of September 16, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and chief of staff Raphael Eitan authorized the deployment of Phalangist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps. What followed was a massacre of innocent, unarmed civilians—a crime against humanity.

Though the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were conducted by Maronite militiamen, they were given full access to the camps by the Israeli forces, which had secured all points of entry to the area. The Israelis knew their Maronite allies well enough to know the danger they posed to the Palestinians. Any doubts about Maronite intentions were dispelled when Israeli officers overheard the radio exchanges between the Phalangists shortly after they entered the Palestinian camps. One Israeli lieutenant followed an exchange between a Phalangist militiaman and Maronite commander Elie Hobeika. Hobeika had lost his fiancée and many family members in the Palestinian siege of the Christian stronghold of Damour in January 1976—his hatred of Palestinians was legendary. The militiaman reported to Hobeika in Arabic that he had found fifty women and children and asked what he should do with them. Hobeika’s reply over the radio, the Israeli lieutenant recounted, was: “This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do.” Raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist militiamen following the radio exchange. The Israeli lieutenant confirmed he “understood that what was involved was
the murder of the women and children.”
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Because of their complicity in the massacre, the Israeli armed forces—and General Ariel Sharon in particular—were stained by the Maronite crimes against the Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila.

Over a thirty-six-hour period, the Phalangists systematically murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Maronite militiamen made their way through the fetid alleys of the camps, killing every man, woman, and child they found. Jamal, a twenty-eight-year-old member of Arafat’s Fatah movement, had remained in Beirut after the PLO’s withdrawal and was an eyewitness to the massacres. “On Thursday the flares over the camp began at 5.30 P.M. . . . There were aircraft dropping light bombs too. The night was like day. The next few hours were terrible. I saw people running in panic to the small mosque, Chatila Mosque. They were taking shelter there because apart from being a sanctuary it was also built with a strong steel structure. Inside were 26 women and children—some of them had horrible injuries.” These may well have been the refugees that Hobeika had condemned over the radio.

While the killing was going on, the Phalangists set to work leveling the refugee camp with bulldozers, often killing the people sheltering inside. “They killed everyone they found, but the point is the
way
they killed them,” Jamal recounted. The old were cut down, the young were raped and murdered, family members were forced to witness the murder of their loved ones. The Israelis estimated 800 were killed, but the Palestinian Red Cross reported that over 2,000 died. “They must have been crazed to do things like that,” Jamal concluded. He spoke of these events with some detachment and saw the massacre as part of a bigger plan. “Psychologically it is clear what they were trying to do to us. We were trapped like animals in that camp, and that is how they have always tried to show us to the world. They wanted us to believe it ourselves.”
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The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps provoked widespread condemnation across the world—not least in Israel, where opposition to the Lebanon War had grown increasingly vocal over the course of the summer. On September 25, some 300,000 Israelis, representing 10 percent of the total population of the country, gathered in a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv to protest Israel’s role in the atrocity. In response, the Likud government was forced to convene an official commission of inquiry—the Kahan Commission—that in 1983 would charge the most powerful Israeli officials involved—Prime Minister Begin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Chief of Staff General Eitan—with responsibility for the massacre. The commission also called for the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

More immediately, the international outcry led to the return of the multinational forces and American engagement in resolving the crisis in Lebanon. U.S. Marines, French paratroopers, and Italian soldiers returned to Beirut on September 29, too late to provide the security they had promised the families of the deported PLO fighters.
If at first they had been deployed to see out the Palestinian fighters, the multinational forces were now sent in as a buffer for the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut. The Israelis, for their part, did not want to move until they had concluded a political agreement with Lebanon. First a replacement president had to be elected. On September 23, the day Bashir Gemayel had been due to take up office, Lebanon’s parliament reconvened to elect his older brother Amin as president. Whereas Bashir had worked closely with the Israelis, Amin Gemayel had better relations with Damascus and showed none of his brother’s enthusiasm for close cooperation with Tel Aviv. However, with nearly half his country under Israeli occupation, the new President Gemayel had no choice but to enter into negotiations with Begin’s government. Talks opened on December 28, 1982, and shifted between Khalde, in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, and the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona. Thirty-five rounds of intense negotiations were conducted over the next five months, facilitated by American officials. U.S. secretary of state George Schultz spent ten days in shuttle diplomacy to help conclude the Israeli-Lebanese agreement on May 17, 1983.

The May 17 Agreement was condemned across the Arab world as a travesty of justice, in which the American superpower forced the powerless Lebanese to reward its Israeli ally for invading and destroying their country. Less than the full peace treaty the Israelis initially hoped for, the agreement nevertheless represented more normalization with the Israeli occupier than most Lebanese could accept. It terminated the state of war between Lebanon and Israel and placed the Lebanese government in the difficult position of ensuring the security of Israel’s northern border from the Jewish state’s many enemies. Lebanon’s army was to be deployed in the south to create a “security region” covering approximately one-third the territory of Lebanon, extending from the town of Sidon south to the Israeli border. The Lebanese government also agreed to integrate the South Lebanon army, an Israeli-funded Christian militia that had gained notoriety as collaborators, into the Lebanese army. It was, in the words of one Shiite official, a “humiliating accord” concluded “under the Israeli bayonet.”
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The Syrian government was particularly aggrieved by the terms of the May 17 Agreement, which would only isolate Syria and alter the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. In the course of the negotiations, the United States had deliberately bypassed Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, knowing he would obstruct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon. Nor did the May 17 Agreement include any concessions for the Syrians. Article 6 of the agreement would have required the withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon as a precondition for Israel’s withdrawal. Syria had invested too much political capital in Lebanon in the six years since it first intervened in the civil war to permit the country to pass into Israel’s sphere of influence under U.S. auspices.

Syria quickly mobilized its allies in Lebanon to reject the May 17 Agreement. Fighting resumed as the opposition forces began to shell Christian areas of Beirut,
underlining the weakness of the Gemayel government. They also fired on the American troops of the multinational forces, whose role as disinterested peacekeepers had been fatally compromised by the regional politics of the United States. When American forces returned fire—often very heavy fire from the massive guns of U.S. warships—they went from being intermediaries above the fray to participants mired in the Lebanon conflict.