The 1982 Lebanon War

The next round came in 1982 and the dynamic giving rise to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, officially named Operation Peace for Galilee, was the increasing Israeli- Syrian struggle for hegemony in the Levant.

Israeli plans for the invasion of Lebanon were triggered by a two-week war of attrition between Palestinian guerrillas, who were firing rockets at northern Israel, and the IDF and SLA who were shelling Palestinian positions. An estimated 5,000 Israeli civilians fled the area, putting pressure on the Israeli government to act. This two-week war was followed by an American-mediated cease-fire in June 1981, which not only deprived the IDF of the opportunity to take punitive action, but also elevated the PLO's international standing. It was at this point that the decision to launch another ground operation was taken. All that was needed was an act of ‘clear provocation' to which Israel could respond. This was provided by the assassination attempt on 3 June 1982 on the Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov.

Plans which had already been co-ordinated between Sharon and Gemayel in January 1982 were put into motion on 6 June under the name of Operation Peace for Galilee. While the operation was ‘sold' to the Israeli cabinet and the public as a limited operation similar to Operation Litani, its actual aims were much broader: first, expelling the Palestinian presence from Lebanon; second, creating a new political order in Lebanon by establishing a Maronite government under Gemayel; third, the expulsion of Syrian troops; and fourth, the destruction of Palestinian nationalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sharon's ‘grand strategy', however, started to disintegrate quickly when Gemayel's Lebanese forces failed to link up with the advancing Israeli army and then refused to carry out their side of the bargain, namely to ‘clear out' the PLO from Muslim West Beirut so that Israel would not be seen as occupying an Arab capital. As a result Israel laid siege to the city on 1 July.

The death of Gemayel was also the death-knell for Sharon's Lebanon plans. No other Maronite leader combined the ability to govern Lebanon with a political orientation acceptable to Israel. Israel had lost its key ally and the ‘grand strategy' turned into a heated debate on how to extract Israeli troops from the ongoing civil war in Lebanon. American efforts at mediation eventually produced a Lebanese-Israeli agreement on 17 May 1983. However, this agreement fell far short of Israel's security needs and Lebanon's political requirements. The treaty terminated the war without installing peace; it was no more than a glorified armistice which Lebanon, under pressure from Syria, decided to abrogate on 5 March 1984. Without any tangible gains, Israel withdrew its troops to southern Lebanon where they remained until May 2000 to secure Israel's northern border.

The Palestinian armed struggle from the 1948 naqba to the 1987 intifada

What is interesting about the Arab-Israeli wars post-1948 is the comparative absence of the Palestinians. The establishment of the state of Israel and the declaration of war by the neighbouring Arab states had clearly transformed the conflict from a Zionist-Palestinian struggle into an inter-state Israeli-Arab one. While this change in dynamic put the Palestinians at a disadvantage in real power terms, which was further reinforced by their dispersion and dispossession, it did not make them any less important to either the conflict or its resolution. In fact, it is crucial to look at the evolution of Palestinian resistance during this period in order to understand the underlying dynamic of the Arab-Israeli wars, as well as the process of emancipation from over-reliance upon Arab leaders, which ultimately propelled the Palestinians back into the centre of the conflict.

The first decade after the loss of Palestine was characterized by high hopes that the Arab states would liberate it and that the refugees would soon return to the houses they had left behind. Yet as time went by, it became increasingly clear that Arab leaders such as Nasser, while verbally committed to the Palestinian cause, were doing little to engage Israel militarily. Moreover, with the exception of Jordan, they also had placed Palestinians living in refugee camps under severe restrictions, fearing that they would be a politically and economically destabilizing element. It was in this context that the Palestinian national liberation movement was born.

Fatah

Palestinian guerrilla organization founded in 1957 in Kuwait by, among others, Yasser Arafat. It became the core of the PLO.

fedayeen (Arabic: guerrillas; suicide squads)

Originally associated with the Ismaili ‘Assassins' in medieval history. After 1948 the term was used to describe Palestinian guerrilla groups.

The first stirrings of revolution occurred in the overcrowded camps of the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip and among Palestinian students and migrant workers in Kuwait. It was in the latter that in 1957 Fatah was formed and Palestinian resistance, which already existed in the form of guerrilla or fedayeen raids from Gaza and the West Bank, was organized by Yasser Arafat, Khalil Wazir and Salah Khalaf, who advocated a strategy of armed struggle. The increase in fedayeen activity met with a harsh Israeli response against the Arab host states which, in turn, were faced with the dilemma of how to support the Palestine cause without becoming the target of Israeli reprisals. Thus, in an attempt to control the fedayeen, Nasser established the PLO as an umbrella organization in January 1964 at an Arab summit meeting in Cairo.

Nasser's success in temporarily harnessing Palestinian revolutionary activity only increased the already existing regional rivalry between Egypt, Iraq and Syria, to which the PLO quickly became hostage until the 1967 war.

The Palestinian struggle entered a new phase in 1970—71 when it was dealt a severe blow with the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. Jordan had provided the fedayeen with access to the longest Israeli border as well as a considerable degree of autonomy, popular support and governmental goodwill. However, this relationship was ruptured in 1970, after the PLO began to establish a ‘state within a state' on the East Bank and engaged in a spate of plane hijackings to Jordanian airfields, which led Jordan to become a regular target of Israeli retaliation and international condemnation. The last straw came when the more left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attempted to assassinate King Hussein. As a result of these actions, on 17 September 1970, in what came to be known as Black September or the Jordanian civil war, the Jordanian army moved against Palestinian positions. When the fighting ended ten days later, the Palestinians had suffered an estimated 1,500 dead and Palestinian-Arab relations had soured, leaving a bitter aftertaste of betrayal. Over the next year the PLO was ousted from Jordan and moved to Lebanon.

Black September

The confrontation between the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan in September 1970, as a result of which the PLO was expelled from Jordan and relocated its headquarters to Beirut, Lebanon.

The expulsion and subsequent move to Lebanon triggered two new strategic developments. The first was the decision to take the armed struggle to the West in order to place the Palestinian question back on to the international political agenda. This highly controversial, and some would argue counter-productive, campaign included the attack on the Israeli athletic team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The second was the unification of all PLO factions under one command in Lebanon, accompanied by institution-building and the acquisition of medium and heavy arms. Once again the PLO was establishing a ‘state within a state', but this time it was building up a semi-regular army as well.

As Palestinian attacks on Israel increased and Israeli reprisals pounded Lebanon in an attempt to get the Lebanese army to react like the Jordanian one, Lebanon's multi-religious society collapsed into civil war in April 1975. For the PLO this meant greater freedom of movement for operations against Israel. For Lebanon's neighbours Israel and Syria, it provided the opportunity to intervene with the aim of attaining hegemony over the Levant and resolving regional problems at Lebanon's expense. Accordingly, Syria intervened in 1976 and Israel in March 1978 and again in June 1982.

Israel's 1982 invasion is of particular interest with respect to the Palestinian national movement, for one of the aims was the removal of the Palestinians from

Shi'a Islam

Muslim sect which emerged out of the struggle over the succession following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from Shi'a Ali (the Party of Ali) or those who supported the Prophet's son­in-law Ali's accession to the Caliphate. An estimated 15 per cent of Muslims are Shi'a. They are concentrated in the areas of Iran, Iraq and southern Lebanon, with smaller communities scattered throughout the Muslim world.

intifada (Arabic: shaking off) Name given to the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation which began on 9 December 1987 and lasted until the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel.

see Chapter 20

Lebanon and the destruction of the emerging Palestinian nationalism in the Israeli-occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While the operation succeeded in forcing the evacuation of the PLO, it failed to quell nationalist sentiments. In fact, the massacres of the Palestinian and Shi’a refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla camps in September 1982, following the assassination of Gemayel, served to fuel Palestinian steadfastness and, in the long run, contributed to the anger which triggered the intifada uprising in December 1987. Moreover, the banishment of the PLO to the far-away shores of Tunisia strengthened the diplomatic option over the military one, raising the PLO's international stand­ing and with it the pressure upon Israel finally to address the Palestinian question. Thus, while Israel may have achieved a short-term victory over the Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982, it ultimately lost the Lebanon War and its quest to exclude the Palestinians from the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With the intifada the Palestinians were back on the international agenda, not as terrorists but as women and children who were intent on shaking off the occupation by throwing stones.

This almost four-year-long popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip centred on civil disobedience in the form of strikes, demonstrations, the boycott of Israeli products and non-payment of taxes. While it did not achieve the liberation of the occupied territories, it restored the green line (the armistice frontiers in 1949), erased the belief held by many that the Palestinians did not really mind Israeli rule, questioned the notion that the territories constituted a buffer zone, and raised questions about whether the continued occupation was compatible with the Jewish state's commitment to democracy. Also the images of Israel's response to the intifada, the so-called ‘iron-fist' policy which resulted in well-trained and fully armed soldiers beating unarmed children, shifted inter­national opinion. Israel was no longer ‘David', as in 1948, but had become ‘Goliath'. Israel realized that it could not fully control the West Bank and Gaza Strip and that occupation came at a price. The international community realized that maintaining the status quo, which had been the preferred option throughout the Cold War, was no longer the best option. This, along with the 1990-91 Gulf War, paved the way for the Middle East peace conference and, for the first time, a Palestinian presence at the negotiating table.