Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (35 page)

In the west, too, the first week’s fighting against the PLO had proved harder and more costly than had been anticipated. Calls by the IDF to civilians in
Tyre and
Sidon to flee to the beaches were heeded in part, but the numbers of dead and wounded among noncombatants were still very high, and damage to civilian buildings and infrastructure was extensive. As they labored up the coast toward Beirut, the Israeli columns encountered ever tougher Palestinian resistance. Palestinian boys barely in their teens wielded rocket-propelled
grenade launchers to devastating effect. IDF casualties mounted daily. At the village of Sil, just south of the capital, Syrian commando units took part in the battle alongside the PLO fighters. From Sil, part of the Israeli force veered east, toward the suburb of
Ba’abda on the southeastern edge of Beirut, where the Lebanese Ministry of Defense and the official presidential residence were situated.

On the morning of Thursday, the tenth, Sharon explained to the cabinet that IDF forces from the west and from the center would try to reach the road at
Aley and cut it there. It was hard going, Sharon stressed, not a picnic at all. The roads were steep and narrow and frequently mined. The advancing columns came under attack from close range.
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The troops would be close to Beirut, Sharon continued, but were
explicitly instructed not to advance into the city itself. Dealing with Beirut, as he put it, would be better left to the Lebanese government and the
Lebanese army. As to the IDF linking up with the Christian
Phalange forces, “We won’t initiate it, but if they approach us, we won’t reject them out of hand.”
¹⁵

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This last was blatantly disingenuous: a Phalange liaison officer was already stationed with the IDF forward command post at
Ba’abda.
Bashir Gemayel himself had visited Northern Command headquarters at
Safed on June 8, the third day of the war, and conferred there with Eitan.
¹⁶
But the Phalange forces’ involvement in the war thus far had been peripheral and ineffective. Their leader, carefully nursing his presidential ambitions, made it clear to the Israelis that he must avoid the perception of being in cahoots with their invasion of his country.

By this time, the Soviets’ concern for their Syrian client was producing anxious Soviet pressure on Washington. The situation was growing “extremely dangerous,”
Leonid Brezhnev wrote to
Ronald Reagan, and was rife with “seeds of escalation.” The United States itself was growing hourly more anxious over the fate of Lebanon and the repercussions of the widening war throughout the Arab world. Vice President George Bush and Defense Secretary Weinberger had urged tough measures from the outset to rein in Israel. But Secretary of State Haig, traveling in Europe with the president, had held, with Reagan, to a more sympathetic line. The U.S. special envoy Habib rushed back to the region at the outbreak of the war. He tried to convey Begin’s message of reassurance to
Hafez Assad in Damascus. Now he was urging stern U.S. diplomacy to procure a cease-fire.

“As for Begin,” Haig recalled, “he was not inclined toward a cease-fire until Israeli objectives had been achieved. But what were these objectives? Were they the ones we had heard earlier in the war or were they now the more ambitious goals of the Sharon plan?” In fact they were the latter, and always had been.
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Begin was entirely supportive as Sharon explained to the ministers that the army needed a little more time to take the road. He warded off direct demands from Reagan to put a
cease-fire in place on Thursday. Finally, with the
troops close to
Aley, although not there yet, he could resist no longer. He ordered the end of hostilities at midday on Friday.

H
ad the cease-fire held, Habib might have succeeded at this stage in peaceably negotiating the PLO’s withdrawal from Beirut. The United States supported this Israeli demand. The deal would presumably have entailed Israel’s withdrawal, too. “Habib was trying to work out an arrangement which would have the PLO evacuate Beirut and would have brought the conflict to an end,” Sam Lewis recalled.
¹⁷

But the cease-fire collapsed and, though reinstated, continued to collapse again and again as all the while IDF units pushed steadily forward until they reached the road and clamped tight their ring of steel around Beirut. Instead of peaceable negotiations, seventy days of siege ensued, amid incessant bombardment and hardship for the people of the city—and deepening opprobrium for Israel in the world—until a deal was finally struck and Yasser Arafat and his men were evacuated under the close protection of American, French, and Italian troops.

The casualties that the IDF sustained—some three hundred soldiers dead and more than fifteen hundred injured by the end of this period—and the enormous damage to the American relationship and to Israel’s international standing clearly outweighed any benefit obtained from driving the PLO from Beirut. All that was true, moreover,
before
the
massacre at Sabra and Shatila in September. But neither Begin nor Sharon had the statesmanship to break out of the vortex of their own swirling, arrogant ambitions. Together they were sucked down into the morass of murderous Lebanese strife.

On June 22, with Begin on a visit to Washington (and Ehrlich standing in as acting prime minister), the IDF launched a concerted attack eastward along the road, supported by artillery and airpower. Sharon was determined to broaden Israel’s grip on the road, making the siege of the city impermeable. The Syrians fought back hard with their antitank commando units, and it was only after sixty hours of battle that the stretch of road from
Bhamdoun to Aley was clear of them. The cost to Israel of that battle alone: another 28 soldiers killed and 168 wounded.
¹⁸

In the cabinet, ministers demanded of Ehrlich that he put a stop to the renewed fighting. Ehrlich admitted that he had had no prior knowledge of it. Again, Sharon and Eitan resorted to their soldiers-in-danger and enemy-violations arguments. But increasingly these were losing
their credibility. Ministers were being assailed by complaints from relatives and friends in the reserves who felt the war was dragging on needlessly, at mounting cost in life and limb. Some brought reports depicting Sharon, on the front lines, mocking his cabinet colleagues. “In the morning I fight the terrorists,” he was heard to say, “and in the evening I go back to Jerusalem to fight in cabinet.”

Begin appeared to emerge from the White House more or less unscathed, despite a deepening distrust and animosity toward him and Sharon among many senior U.S. officials. “Reagan Backs Israel” was
The Washington Post
headline the next morning. “Reagan and Begin Appear in Accord,”
The New York Times
reported. But the newspapers were reading it wrong, as was Begin himself. “The President’s anger with Begin, fed by the greater anger of Weinberger (who was reportedly exploring ways to cut off military deliveries to Israel) and others, seemed to grow by the day,”
Alexander Haig wrote. And with Haig himself about to leave office, Israel’s war aims would lose their only advocate in the Reagan administration.

Haig believed with Begin and Sharon that sustained, relentless Israeli pressure
in Lebanon would bring about the PLO’s departure. The secretary designate, George Shultz, was not convinced.

Begin, however, relished the moment. Addressing the Knesset on June 29, he insisted that the IDF was “near Beirut … at the gates of Beirut” but absolutely not
in
Beirut. “I’ve said all along that we don’t want to enter Beirut, neither
west Beirut nor
east Beirut. We totally didn’t want to. And we still don’t want to today. But, for God’s sake, you are all experienced people; I appeal to you as a friend to friends, as a Jew to other Jews.… [A]s a result of developments … we are deployed today alongside Beirut, and the terrorists are trapped within.… Mr. Speaker, happy and fortunate is the nation that has such an army; happy and fortunate is the army that has such a general as Raful as its commander; and happy and fortunate is the state that has Ariel Sharon as its defense minister. With all my heart I say this.”
¹⁹

Habib was working on a package that was to include a U.S. Marine presence in Beirut to ensure—and also protect—the PLO’s departure. Sharon inveighed against this on the grounds that even after the evacuation some PLO men would be left behind and would need to be flushed out. But the marine presence would prevent or impair that necessary activity.
²⁰

The PLO for its part, gradually acquiescing in the eventual likelihood of its being forced out, demanded Israel’s withdrawal, too, and the deployment of a multinational force in Beirut to defend the Palestinian
communities living in the sprawling refugee camps in the south of the city after the fighters had left.
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A cabinet communiqué at the end of July proclaimed that “Israel is willing to accept a cease-fire in Lebanon, with the explicit condition that it be absolute and mutual.” With breathtaking chutzpah, it went on to announce that “the Government of Israel is of the view that measures should begin, through the Lebanese government, to provide accommodation for refugees in Lebanon, in preparation for the winter months,” and that “the cabinet decided to establish a ministerial committee … to elaborate principles, ways and means for a solution of the refugee problem in the Middle East through their resettlement. The committee will be aided by experts and will submit its recommendations to the cabinet.”

By the first week of August, Israel was facing the full fury of an American president who felt his friendship had been betrayed. On August 2, in the Oval Office, a somber foreign minister Shamir listened while Reagan railed over
television footage from Beirut “of babies with their arms blown off.” The previous day, Israel had bombed the southern
suburbs of Beirut for ten straight hours. “ ‘If you invade West Beirut, it would have the most grave, most grievous, consequences for our relationship,’ the president told Shamir and added, ‘Should these Israeli practices continue, it will become increasingly difficult to defend the proposition that Israeli use of U.S. arms is for defensive purposes.’ ”
²¹

The crisis escalated further that same night when Habib called the State Department, as Shultz recalled,

Sam Lewis picks up the story. “Shultz’s U.S. Marine Corps background kicked in at that point; his face turned almost purple as he told Shamir just what Habib was personally watching; he also told him to set the Prime Minister straight and see to it that the bombardment ceased forthwith.” Reagan wrote to Begin warning that the relationship between their two nations hung in the balance.

Begin’s gushing reply, comparing Arafat holed up in West Beirut to Hitler in his bunker in 1945, left Reagan cold. Begin for his part was heard to mutter in regard to the American president, “
Jews bend the knee only before God.”
²³

IDF troops were dispatched to
Jounieh on August 8 deliberately to harass and disrupt the landing of the first units of the multinational force (MNF), which was to comprise American, French, and Italian troops. American helicopters tried to ferry the French troops ashore, but Israeli jeeps raced around the designated landing pad to prevent them from doing so. Presumably, this was Sharon’s way of underscoring his continued objection to the MNF deploying in Beirut before the PLO had left.

Habib had managed to find safe havens for the PLO men in
Tunisia and several other Arab countries. On August 10, Israel received a draft of Habib’s proposed “package deal” for finally ending the war. In a compromise between Israeli demands and Palestinian fears, it provided for the evacuation by sea of part of the PLO a few days before the deployment of the MNF. After that, the remainder of the PLO and the Syrian troops in Beirut would be evacuated from Lebanon under MNF supervision. The PLO was to be allowed to carry its small arms, but heavy weapons would be handed over to the
Lebanese army. The MNF would remain in Beirut for one month.

Sharon was unhappy with the timetable and wanted assurances that if the evacuation stopped, the MNF would be withdrawn. The cabinet decided to accept the package “in principle.” But in defiance of the cabinet’s decision in principle, the air force was ordered to prepare another massive bombardment of Beirut. In addition, large forces of long- and medium-range artillery were deployed around Beirut. They were instructed to prepare to lay down a “rolling screen of fire” on the Palestinian southern suburbs, a bombardment more concentrated and
devastating than even the air force could deliver. On August 12, this vast firepower began to rain down on the city. The IAF flew more than a hundred bombing sorties. Civilian casualties mounted by the hour.