Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [117]
Although the PLO had suffered a major defeat in the first Israeli invasion of the Lebanon, it was not a calamity. For, among the fiefdoms into which Lebanon was divided, there was one for the loser too. Arafat was able to have his state within a state, based in the Farqhani district of west Beirut and stretching southwards to the Litani river on Israel’s northern border. This emboldened Arafat to transform his guerrilla fighters into a pastiche regular army, including sixty defunct Soviet T-34 tanks and an arsenal of anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers. Apparently oblivious to the geostrategic changes ushered in by Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, which effectively freed the newly elected Likud government of Menachem Begin to concentrate on its northern border, Arafat sanctioned a pointless Fatah seaborne terror raid north of Haifa, which resulted in the hijacking of a bus and the deaths of thirty-four Israelis and all but two of the raiders. Israeli public pressure for retaliation was massive. On 14 March 1978 some twenty-eight thousand Israeli troops in huge armoured columns rumbled across the border, flattening Lebanese villages and killing two hundred PLO fighters. Sadat condemned the guerrilla raid and Israel’s retaliation; Syrian troops prudently kept out of the way until this juggernaut had turned homewards. Before they left, the Israelis installed a friendly Maronite Christian militia to provide an added line of defence in addition to the UN interim force in the buffer zone along their northern border. A pattern of violence that continues over thirty years later involved relatively under-reported Palestinian cross-border attacks, to which the Israelis regularly responded with either air strikes or expeditions using their prodigious armour, a spectacle that enabled the Palestinians to posture as David versus Goliath to an international media that always found the response more newsworthy than whatever had provoked it, not being interested either, it seems, in who ordered the guerrilla fighters on the border to attack Israel.
Violence flared up again in the summer of 1981 when, following Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon, the PLO embarked on a sustained two-week campaign of launching Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, causing thousands of Israelis to flee southwards, increasing demands on the government to do something to stop it. The Israeli air force was despatched to bomb west Beirut, where it killed three hundred and injured a further seven hundred, in yet another display of raw firepower that was starting to alienate much uninvolved opinion, for the Israelis were neither parsimonious in their use of expensive ordnance nor too scrupulous about where they used it. Arafat derived some consolation from an American-brokered ceasefire which implicitly meant that the Israelis had recognised the PLO terrorists. Although Arafat was by this time involved in back-channel negotiations designed to win US recognition of the PLO, the new Israeli defence minister, Ariel Sharon, was effectively conducting Israel’s foreign policy, and held discussions with a US interlocutor, Alexander Haig, whose mind seems to have been distracted by the prospect of higher office. Sharon came away from meetings with Haig in May 1982 convinced he had the green light for major operations in Lebanon, although Haig had in fact given him a vaguely qualified red. Sharon discreetly flew into Lebanon to establish a Christian-Jewish partnership designed to recast the Lebanon after a successful Israeli invasion. Israel stepped up pressure by annexing the Golan Heights, to test Syria’s non-existent resolve, and by ousting pro-PLO mayors in the occupied territories. On 3 June 1982 Sharon got his pretext for war when Abu Nidal’s men shot the Israeli ambassador to Britain as he left a function at London’s Dorchester Hotel. When told that this renegade Palestinian terrorist was responsible, the Israeli army commander Raphael Eitan remarked: ‘Abu Nidal,