1983 by Taylor Downing

Author:Taylor Downing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

12

Truck Bomb

In the summer of 1982, Ronald Reagan had decided at last that the United States must intervene in the ongoing crisis in Lebanon. It had taken some time for him to be persuaded, and he would later bitterly regret his decision. Reagan saw the Middle East as ‘an adders’ nest of problems’, not just because of repeated conflicts between Arabs and Zionists but also because of an alarming rise in radical Islamic fundamentalism. This had already wrenched away a close American ally in the region, Iran, after the Revolution that brought about the departure of the Shah and the takeover of the state by the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. It also threatened Egypt after the assassination of Anwar Sadat because of his agreement to a peace treaty with Israel.1 During the early months of 1982 all these tensions seemed to bubble to the surface in Lebanon, a state with its own fragile balance between Arabs and Christians that had been shattered by civil war a decade earlier and was now further unbalanced by the existence of a militant Palestinian community in the south of the country.

There had been a large community of Palestinians in Lebanon since tens of thousands had fled there after their expulsion from the new state of Israel in 1948–an event memorialised in Palestinian culture as the Nakba, or ‘Catastrophe’. For two decades the Palestinian cause had supposedly been taken up by the leaders of the Arab states. But after the humiliating military defeat in the Six Day War in June 1967, the Palestinians felt betrayed by their Arab brothers. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) emerged as the radical Palestinian voice, led by the charismatic and media-conscious Yasser Arafat. Through a series of violent acts of terrorism culminating in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, the militant factions of the PLO put the Palestinian cause before the world. After being evicted from Jordan, the PLO shifted their base to Lebanon. Here, in the western half of the nation’s capital, Beirut, and across the southern part of the country, the PLO developed what amounted to a state within a state, organising schools, hospitals and social welfare. The Palestinians used their military bases in south Lebanon to fire across the border into Israel. The Israelis responded with several military incursions into south Lebanon, and a UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) had been placed along the Lebanese border. But when nothing seemed to stop the PLO militants, Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided enough was enough. Begin had been leader of the extreme Zionist group known as the Irgun at the end of the British Mandate and throughout his life had been prepared to use violence to achieve his ends.

On 6 June 1982, Begin and his highly aggressive Defence Minister Ariel Sharon ordered a full-scale invasion of the south of Lebanon. The UN peacekeepers could do no more than note the registration numbers of the Israeli tanks that poured across the border. Begin

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