Under Siege Read online

  What do we know now that we did not know when this book was originally published in 1986? Relatively little has since emerged from Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and other Arab sources about the respective roles of the different Arab actors in the events of the 1982 war, albeit for different reasons in each case.

  For the Palestinians, the reverses of 1982 were just the beginning of a series of traumatic events that diverted much attention from what had happened that year. Indeed, this episode seems to have receded from the memories of many Palestinians. Defeat is always an orphan, of course, and what happened to the PLO in Lebanon in 1982 was most certainly a decisive defeat, however much some of its leaders thereafter tried to uphold a narrative of “victory in defeat.”11 Moreover, starting with the intifada of 1987, the focus of Palestinian politics—and of much scholarship about Palestine—has shifted away from the Palestinian diaspora to the occupied homeland, especially after the bulk of the leadership and cadres of the PLO returned to Palestine with the creation of the PA in the mid-1990s. Since then, events in Beirut during the summer of 1982 and what has happened more generally in the diaspora, where the resurgence of Palestinian nationalism after 1948 had primarily taken place, has lost its salience for many Palestinians and most outside observers.12 Finally, Palestinians are no nearer today to having a state than they were in 1982; this absence of a state, among many other things, has meant that there is no Palestinian national archive or repository of historical materials, which naturally makes research more difficult. Israel’s repeated assaults on Palestinian research centers and archives have also exacerbated this problem.13

  For the Lebanese, the 1982 invasion was only one ugly episode in the fifteen-year trauma of the war that tore their country apart, and it is one many are perfectly happy to forget, for a variety of reasons. To this day, the entire war remains a largely unspoken topic in Lebanese public life, although it has been treated sensitively in cinema and the arts, and it has been addressed by scholars in Lebanon and elsewhere.14 For Syrians, the role played by their army, although it fought creditably against heavy odds in the Biqa’ valley and in the Lebanese mountains, was best forgotten. This was because Syria accepted a ceasefire on June 26, 1982, after less than three weeks of fighting. Its forces were thus no longer involved in combat for the war’s remaining seven weeks, during which time the PLO and its Lebanese allies fought alone in defense of Beirut.15 As for the rest of the Arab world, whose governments had stood idly by while an Arab capital city was subjected to a lengthy siege and repeated bombardments, there is every incentive to overlook the embarrassments of the 1982 war. It was rapidly forgotten as attention shifted to domestic concerns and to dramatic regional developments such as the series of wars in the Persian Gulf, starting with the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, and the Afghanistan conflict.

  On the American side, while several participants have written memoirs, there was not a great deal of scholarly work done on the Lebanese adventure of the early 1980s in the years immediately afterwards. In view of its embarrassing end, this is not entirely surprising. Still, given the large number of casualties in the embassy and marine barracks bombings, as well as the heavy blow to American prestige that ensued after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, one might have expected more attention to it, notwithstanding the absence of declassified documents in the public domain until very recently. Even the published accounts by participants that do touch upon this episode are not always candid or enlightening. Alexander Haig’s memoir, referred to in the original edition of this book, is a prime example of this tendency. The account of his successor, George Shultz, is more forthcoming about some aspects of the war, as are those of President Reagan and his deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver.16

  It will soon be possible to write a much fuller and more comprehensive history of Israel’s part in Lebanon war, and the American role in it. The recent declassification of documents in both the American and Israeli archives for that period is already yielding major revelations that significantly amplify our knowledge about crucial aspects of these nations’ actions during the war and especially in its immediate aftermath.17 Among the most striking of these revelations were newly-released documents from the Israel State Archives discovered by a young researcher, three of which were published in full in connection with an op-ed article he published in the New York Times.18 Verbatim records of meetings between Israeli and American officials that took place in Washington and Jerusalem at the height of the Sabra and Shatila massacres on September 16, 17, and 18, 1982, and which were posted online by the Times, constitute a chilling addendum to the conclusions of this book.19

  These transcripts reveal the willful, arrogant duplicity of Israeli government leaders in dealing with their American counterparts. This is most notably the case with Ariel Sharon who, in keeping with his reputation, was by turns bullying, insulting, and dismissive in his demeanor during meetings with U.S. diplomats. Other Israeli officials were nearly as brazen. The first of these documents is a transcript of the meeting which took place after U.S. Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called in Israeli Ambassador Moshe Arens on September 16, 1982, at the instruction of the president and the secretary of state.20 Eagleburger harshly berated Arens for Israel’s invasion of West Beirut, which he described as “directly counter to a series of assurances made in the course of the summer” by Begin and Sharon, creating the appearance “of a deliberate deception by Israel” of its American ally. He stated that “the occupation by Israel of an Arab capital is a grave political mistake with far-reaching symbolic and concrete implications of the most dangerous sort,” and, in keeping with his instructions, demanded an immediate Israeli military withdrawal from West Beirut.

  Arens was nonplussed by this scathing denunciation. He immediately went on the offensive, baldly asserting: “I’m not sure you guys know what you’re doing. Yesterday when I talked to the Secretary, you raised this business of Israeli deception. I don’t know where it is coming from, but some people are trying to build this up.” The Begin government had engaged in persistent, systematic deception aplenty—before, during, and after the Lebanon war—of the U.S. government, as is amply demonstrated in the best Israeli account of the war, written by the respected and extraordinarily well-connected journalists Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari.21 The three documents posted online by the New York Times provide further examples of such deception. But Ambassador Arens (a Likud Party grandee who became Israel’s minister of defense a few months later, a post he would hold three times) was having none of these well-founded accusations. He went on to dispute them vigorously, countering one sally dismissively with the words, “We should avoid this openly confrontational mode. If you think this will scare us, you’re wrong.” Arens was not only forceful in his rejection of charges that his government had deceived the United States during this acrimonious meeting. He was also inflexible in his rejection of the plan President Reagan had put forward earlier in September for dealing with the Palestine issue, or as Arens termed it, “the future of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.”22 Irrespective of whether Israel had deceived the U.S. government about the entry of its army into West Beirut, however, no one in Washington on September 16 was yet aware of the slaughter that was just beginning to take place in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.

  The second document reveals the complete failure of the United States to do what it might have done while there was still time to prevent these horrific massacres from happening, thereby honoring its pledge to the PLO that no harm would come to the Palestinian civilian population left behind in Beirut. Specifically, the United States failed to restrain the Israeli military from employing Lebanese surrogates to do just what the PLO leadership had feared, which was to “clean the area” of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut’s southern suburbs. This was the chilling phrase repeatedly employed by Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir in their meeting with the special U.S. envoy, Morris Draper, on September 17, 1982, the second day of the massacre.23


  The use of the sinister term “clean” (together with others such as “neutralize”) must be taken in conjunction with the persistent refrain of Sharon and other Israeli officials present during this meeting that there were two thousand “terrorists” still hiding in Beirut, whom the Israeli defense minister repeatedly stated had to be captured or killed. The Israeli officials constantly reiterated this untruth, which had been enshrined in an Israeli cabinet resolution the day before that referred to “about 2,000 terrorists equipped with modern weapons” who had supposedly remained in West Beirut. The Israeli officials used the term “terrorist” 42 times, 39 coming from Sharon alone. This patent falsehood was repeated in spite of the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut of more than 15,000 of its combatants and other personnel just weeks before. Incidentally, the spuriousness of this pretext, which was utilized to justify Israel’s entry into West Beirut and the sending of the Phalangist militia into the Palestinian camps, was among many crucial issues that were never examined by the Kahan Commission, the official commission of inquiry appointed by the Israeli government to look into the massacres.24

  Under the impact of what can only be described as constant browbeating by the formidable Sharon, the U.S. envoy did not protest this outrageous mischaracterization of the Palestinian civilian population in Beirut and its refugee camps as “terrorists” for most of the meeting. Indeed, eventually Draper came to use the term five times himself. Sharon insisted at one point that there would be no impact if Israeli delayed its withdrawal from West Beirut, stating, “Nothing will happen. Maybe some more terrorists will be killed. That will be to the benefit of all of us, for the benefit of all of us…. For every peace loving man in the world, just to reduce a little bit this threat of these international syndicated terrorists.” In fact, as the Americans knew (as undoubtedly also did most of the Israeli officials present at the meeting), after the evacuation of over 15,000 PLO personnel, including all the full-time regular combatants, from Beirut at the end of August only largely defenseless Palestinian civilians were left in the refugee camps. This was the case, although members of armed Lebanese left-wing militias who were present elsewhere in West Beirut were also sometimes mentioned during this meeting. As I note in this book’s conclusion, the PLO’s regular combatants had held a large part of the Israeli army at bay at the gates of Beirut for several weeks. Needless to say, had even a couple of hundred of those battle-hardened fighters been present (let alone 2,000 of them), they would have easily dealt with the Phalangist gunmen deployed by their Israeli allies to “clean” the camps. Sharon and most of his colleagues at this meeting must have known this perfectly well.

  Draper had great difficulty holding his own under Sharon’s incessant bullying. At one point he interjected plaintively, “It is going to be very hard to carry on a conversation if you think that when I say ‘cooperative’ it is a pejorative word. It is a positive word. It is a very positive word. If I can get more than three sentences in.” It is therefore not surprising that it was not until about three-quarters of the way through the stormy September 17 meeting that Draper finally disputed the deceitful way that Sharon and his colleagues were depicting the situation in Beirut. The American envoy insisted that “the fact is that the [PLO] evacuees out of Beirut were greater in number than we thought when we started,” and noted that thousands more Palestinian fighters were evacuated than his original estimate and that of Ambassador Philip Habib, the principal U.S. special envoy who negotiated the evacuation. He went on to describe what Sharon and his colleagues were doing as playing “with the numbers game of 2,000 and so forth and so on.”

  Growing exasperated at the refusal of the Israeli officials to accede to the American demand for a withdrawal of their forces from West Beirut (although he was unaware of the slaughter then taking place in Sabra and Shatila under the noses of Israeli troops surrounding the camps), Draper finally could not restrain himself, beginning the following exchange with Sharon:

  Draper: The hostile people will say, sure the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is going to stay in West Beirut and they will let the Lebanese go and kill the Palestinians in the camps.

  Sharon: So we’ll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism [sic].

  Draper: We are not interested in saving any of these people.

  Sharon: If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.

  Draper: Let me reflect my government’s position on this exactly.

  Apparently shaken by where Sharon’s deceptive aggressiveness had taken the exchange, Draper finally expressed himself with undiplomatic bluntness about Israel’s invasion of West Beirut:

  If you have to stay out here for 600 years while the Lebanese neutralize this, we want you to stay out. Let the Lebanese do it. That’s our position. We spent three months trying to get as many of the terrorists out as possible—safely. That was the political arrangement. So it wouldn’t be necessary for you to come in. I have to reflect the views of Washington on this…. It still goes back to the fundamental position which I was using lightly: we didn’t think you should come in. You should have stayed out.

  Sharon’s response to this frankness was insultingly blunt: “You did not think or you did think. When it comes to our security, we have never asked. We will never ask. When it comes to existence and security, it is our own responsibility and we will never give it to anybody to decide for us.” The transcript indicates that this outburst was followed by “(Consultations in Hebrew),” details of which are not recorded in this Israeli government record. The meeting ended soon afterwards when Sharon reiterated that Draper should tell Washington that the response to American demands for an Israeli withdrawal from West Beirut was the Begin government’s uncompromising cabinet resolution of the previous day, and that arrangements would be worked out. Draper’s acerbic reply “You suggest it is easier to convince Washington than it is to convince you?” was met by the disingenuous words “You managed to convince us,” from Sharon, to which Draper reposted, “Who convinced whom? (laughter).” While the participants in the meeting laughed in false bonhomie, hundreds of people were dying in Sabra and Shatila at the hands of the Phalangists, just meters away from Israeli troops surrounding the camps.

  It is important to understand that, by this point, Sharon and many of the Israelis present during this riveting exchange had a good sense of what was happening in the Palestinian refugee camps. Yitzhak Shamir had reportedly been informed that very morning that a “slaughter” was taking place in the camps.25 David Kimche was the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, an agency which had extensive sources in Lebanon, had worked for years with the Phalangists, and could be presumed to be knowledgeable about their intentions regarding the Palestinians and what they were doing in Sabra and Shatila. We can only guess precisely how much Sharon knew about the actions of the Phalangist militiamen he had ordered into the camps. He had long pressed the Phalangists to send their forces into the Palestinian camps in Beirut to complete the job of “cleaning” them. Given the behavior of these militias at Palestinian camps they had previously overrun, like Tal al-Za’tar in 1976, this could mean only a massacre. According to an authoritative Israeli account of the war, Sharon indeed had come to an agreement on just such a “cleaning operation” with Phalangist military commander and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel only two days before the latter’s assassination.26 So it is not hard to surmise that Sharon knew what was happening, and indeed what he intended to happen, when he sent his Phalangist protégés into the camps. Whether or not this was his aim, Sharon’s obstinate stonewalling of the American envoy during the September 17 meeting prolonged the ongoing slaughter that these militias had begun the preceding evening.

  Draper’s unease likely originated from his own sense that things were going horribly wrong—both during this painfully difficult meeting and on the ground in West Beirut. On the preceding day, September 16, Dr
aper had apparently been shocked when told by Yehoshua Saguy, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, that Phalangist gunmen would be sent in to the camps.27 This meant that the worst fears of the Palestinians were likely to be realized. It also constituted a violation of the assurances the Americans understood they had received from the Israeli government, as Under Secretary Eagleburger had bluntly told a not particularly forthcoming Ambassador Arens that very day.28 As far as we know, neither Eagleburger on September 16 nor Draper on the following day had yet learned from American diplomats on the spot or from any other intelligence sources what was actually happening in the camps. Indeed, it was only on September 18—the day after Draper’s meeting with Sharon, Shamir, and other Israeli officials—that American journalists took a U.S. diplomat into the camps and he was able to inform his superiors of the horrors that had transpired there.29