Lebanon: The Invasion Riddle

A "non-expert" walked into our office the other day and began asking some questions, which we did our best to answer:

Q I'm rather confused about this Lebanon thing

A Join the club.

Q I mean, are the Israelis really going to invade South Lebanon, as everyone has been saying?

A Yes. An Israeli invasion seems inevitable, sooner or later.

Q Why do you say that?

A For two reasons: the PLO has military forces in South Lebanon, which it will never withdraw voluntarily; and the Israelis, on the other hand, have stated unequivocally that they regard these forces as a threat to Israel.

Q But isn't a cease-fire between these two sides now in force?

A Yes, a "cessation of hostilities," arranged by the U.S., has been in effect since last July. But neither the PLO nor Israel looked upon it as any more than a temporary arrangement with tactical value. For the Israelis, it was useful to have a cooling-off period for some of the tempers that flared up—in the West and in Israel itself—after he Israelis first bombed a nuclear reactor in Baghdad and then followed this with a raid on Beirut which killed more than 300 civilians. For le PLO, the cease-fire was an opportunity to itch its breath after a long series of Israeli raids, rid build up some international prestige by showing it was capable of restraint.

Q What makes the situation any different now?

A One thing that's different is that nine months have gone by. The PLO has nothing to gain by an indefinite cease-fire. You can't lose sight of the fact that the PLO's whole reason for existence is to try to get Palestinian land back. Even if it hopes to do it by diplomatic means, this will never work if Israel is not kept under some kind of military pressure that will make it more ready to deal. If the PLO does nothing, forever, the Israelis can stay on Palestinian land, forever.

Q Couldn't the PLO keep the cease-fire going for a lot longer though?

A It might—although there's a lot of resistance within the organization to the idea of armed men remaining passive while Palestinian teenagers are getting killed on the West Bank for throwing stones. In any case, the Israelis are likely to take the decision out of the PLO's hands.

Q Why is that?

A For sometime, a very strong feeling has been building up within the Israeli government that it should "finish off" the PLO once and for all. In the West Bank, it's now official Israeli policy to root out all support for the PLO, which it regards as the cause of all the trouble there. It's an easy step, from there, for them to argue that their West Bank policy cannot be successful unless the PLO is uprooted from Lebanon as well. In fact, on a couple of occasions during recent weeks the Israelis had actually planned an invasion, which was called off only because of U.S. urgings.

Q But could they justify an attack if the PLO didn't break the cease-fire?

A The Israelis have never shown themselves to be overly concerned by what they are accused of doing, if they can argue that it's for their "national survival." But in any event, by their own lights, they already have all the excuse they need. By their broad, unilateral interpretation of what constitutes a cease-fire violation, they have been able to charge the PLO with having broken the ceasefire numerous times. For example, the assassination of an Israeli diplomat far away in Paris was regarded as a violation of the Lebanon ceasefire-even though the PLO denied it had anything to do with it, and the Israelis did not put forward any evidence that it had.

Q Is that the reason the Israelis bombed all those Palestinian camps in Lebanon near the end of April?

A Israeli officials said the retaliation was for a whole string of PLO "cease-fire violations," including a grenade attack on a soldier in Gaza. But the immediate reason for the decision to retaliate, they said, was that an Israeli soldier was killed by a mine while he was travelling along a road in South Lebanon.

Q What was an Israeli soldier doing in South?

A A good question. Very few people ask it. The answer is that the Israeli army has been occupying a 140 square mile enclave in South Lebanon for more than four years.

Q Why haven't I heard about that?

A Also a good question. You probably have heard about the "independent" enclave in South Lebanon that was set up by Major Saad Haddad, a drop-out from the Lebanese army. Well, it is Major Haddad's enclave that has been used by the Israeli army for the past four years as though it were part of Israeli territory. The troops move in and out with their weapons and armed vehicles, carry out maneuvers in the area, man observation posts, and subsidize Major Haddad and his militia with money and supplies.

Q How did that happen?

A The seeds of it go back to March 11, 1978, when a number of Israelis were killed as the result of a raid on an Israeli civilian bus by Palestinians who had infiltrated from Lebanon. Three days later, Israel answered with a massive invasion of Lebanon, sending troops right up to the Litani River—an operation in which hundreds of of Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed. A U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution called on Israel to withdraw, and established a force of U.N. peacekeeping troops to replace the Israelis within a zone fronting Lebanon's border with Israel.

Q What happened then?

A The Israelis stalled for about two months, until finally setting June 13 as the date on which they would withdraw their troops and allow the U.N. troops to take over the border zone. Two days prior to their withdrawal, however, the Israelis handed over all their positions in the border zone—a strip running four to eight miles in depth to the militias operating under the command of Major Haddad, who had been an Israeli protege for some time. When June 13 arrived Major Haddad's militia blocked the U.N. forces from deploying in the area. With more than a little help from their Israeli friends, they have managed to keep the U.N. peacekeeping troops from entering the zone ever since.

Q So the Israelis, in effect, conned the United Nations into thinking that they had really agreed to withdraw—and then didn't do it?

A That's what it has always looked like.

Q Did the Carter Administration do anything about it?

A Not so as to make any difference on the ground.

Q Is there any chance that the Reagan Administration will be any tougher if the Israelis try to hold on to more of Lebanon the next time they go in?

A What makes you think the Israelis would want to do that?

Q I remember reading in a history course that when the borders of the proposed mandate for Palestine were being discussed by the allies after World War I, the Zionist delegations were proposing that Palestine's northern border be along the Litani River.

A If you're that smart, go ahead and make your own guesses.