When And How It Began

It began when the Israelis wanted it to begin. The plan for the invasion had been ready for many months, and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had been chafing to implement it—but had been held back by Prime Minister Begin because the time was not right. For once, Mr. Begin wanted to accommodate the U.S. Administration, which saw Israeli evacuation from Sinai as the only positive development in the Middle East that the U.S. could take some credit for, and was extremely anxious for the Israelis not to do anything that could delay it. Once the evacuation was finished, Mr. Begin no longer felt constrained. At the same time, other developments—such as the growing divisions in the Arab world over what to do about Iran, the isolation of Syria and its preoccupation with internal unrest, and the relative calm that had returned to the occupied West Bank and Gaza—seemed to make the climate nearly ideal for the implementation of the invasion plan. All that was needed was an ostensible excuse to get it underway.

The excuse which would play best in Washington and other world capitals, the Israelis knew, would be provided by some heavy PLO shelling from South Lebanon into Israel. But the problem was that the PLO, for nearly 10 months of a U.S.-sponsored ceasefire, had not been carrying out any such attacks—except for one minor incident on May 9, in response to an Israeli air raid. The PLO leadership, in fact, had come under strong criticism from many of its own rank-and-file because it chose to abide by the ceasefire even when Israeli troops were killing unarmed Palestinian teenagers on the West Bank during the rioting there last March and April. Nor had the PLO responded to frequent Israeli goading, such as the carrying out of Israeli "training maneuvers" with tanks and live ammunition on Lebanese soil right near PLO position sanctions which UN observers in their official reports called "intensive, excessive and provocative."

To get the PLO to lose its cool, it was clear, an extreme provocation was necessary. Fortunately, from the Israelis' point of view, they had already dealt themselves the cards that would allow them to arrange one. According to their unilateral interpretation of the ceasefire, it covered every act of violence by a Palestinian against any Israeli anywhere in the world, whether or not the PLO could be positively linked to it. All the Israelis had to do was stand by for some such happening, carry out a particularly massive and disproportionate reprisal, and wait for what they assumed would be the inevitable reaction.

It worked out exactly that way. On June 4, the Israeli ambassador to London was shot and wounded by Palestinian gunmen. The Israelis immediately assumed PLO guilt, and by the time London police investigations revealed that the attack had been carried out by an anti-PLO group, Israel's reprisal was already under way. For two days almost non-stop, Israeli planes bombed refugee camps and other Palestinian-inhabited areas throughout Lebanon, dumping bombs on a former sports stadium in Beirut where refugees were living and hitting a teachers training institute across the way. Hundreds of people were killed or injured in Beirut alone. It was the heaviest and most sustained attack on Lebanon since the July, 1981 raids on Beirut which led to the ceasefire agreement, and the Israelis got the expected result: PLO gunners, driven by fury and frustration and unable to sit by calmly any longer while other Palestinians were being killed, began to shell and rocket towns in the Galilee area of Israel. According to Israeli accounts, only one person was killed by the bombardment. But that was quite enough: Israel now had its casus belli. The same Israeli officials who had earlier justified the air raids on the basis of the attempted assassination of the ambassador, were now arguing that PLO shelling across Israel's borders had reached "intolerable" limits, and that the guerrillas must be pushed back from the border, out of artillery range. The invasion was on.