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The Israeli air force returned to bomb west Beirut, killing sixty people, and prompting the PLO to fire rockets over the southern border. On the morning of 6 June Israeli armoured formations, with forty thousand troops, crossed into Lebanon, while navy units landed near the PLO stronghold of Sidon. Although the Israeli cabinet had earlier vetoed Sharon’s most expansive war plans, the headstrong commander immediately set about implementing them, escalating the war from a limited campaign to secure Israel’s northern border from Fatah attacks to a radical attempt to reorganise the politics of Israel’s northerly neighbour. Any prospect of Syrian intervention disappeared when the Israeli air force destroyed a quarter of Syria’s air force in a brief series of engagements. Israel did not entirely have things its way, however, since the Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel, son of Pierre, proved highly resistant to being used as Sharon’s cat’s-paw, thus removing one of the lynchpins of the general’s battle plans. That left Sharon and Arafat to slog it out personally. Arafat was also subjected to mounting pressure from a newly formed Lebanese Council of National Salvation, consisting of his Sunni Muslim allies, to get out of Lebanon before the Israelis blew it apart. Although Arafat felt pricks of conscience about the disaster he had brought upon his friendly hosts, he also spoke darkly of Beirut becoming a Palestinian Stalingrad. Libya’s madcap ruler Ghaddafi helpfully suggested that the PLO commit collective suicide in Beirut rather than leave. Arafat sourly remarked that he would have fought to the last if Ghaddafi had not failed to provide weapons. This was possibly overly melodramatic because as they negotiated their evacuation with Ronald Reagan’s envoy, Philip Habib, the PLO team were insistent on the shipment of their fleets of BMWs and Mercedes, and other manifestations of the good life in their Beirut strongholds.

Although Israel was under considerable pressure to conclude a ceasefire, Begin and Sharon unleashed a final eight-day assault on west Beirut itself, hoping to kill Arafat as a tangible sign of victory. He switched from bunker to bunker as the Israelis attempted assassination by F-15. They failed to notice the shocking effect of sustained aerial bombing and shelling on wider international opinion, one of the major flaws in their future responses to cross-border terrorism. This prompted a tense telephone exchange between Reagan and Begin. ‘Menachem, this is a holocaust,’ the president remarked. ‘Mr President, I’m aware of what a holocaust is,’ the Israeli leader replied. The bombing ceased and the PLO prepared to embark on its third exodus, having brought nothing but chaos and violence to Lebanon. Nearly eleven thousand Palestinian fighters were shipped out on vessels chartered by the US. Arafat himself left for Greece on the Atlantis, his final destination being Tunis, as remote from Palestine as it is possible to be in the Arab world. He left a city in ruins with nineteen thousand dead and another thirty thousand wounded. Four hundred Israelis had also died.

The killing was not quite over. On 14 September the long hand of Syria’s Assad reached out to Bashir Gemayel, the president elect of Lebanon, who was killed by a bomb that destroyed his east Beirut headquarters. Israeli troops took the opportunity to comb west Beirut to hunt down any remaining Palestinian fighters. They also enabled Phalangist militiamen to enter Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Chatila on the same pretext, where they butchered anywhere between seven hundred and fifteen hundred people, depending on whose figures are deemed most reliable. This massacre appalled international opinion and many Israelis including such patriots as Abba Eban, the former foreign minister, while the monomaniacal former terrorist Menachem Begin merely commented: ‘Goyim are killing goyim, and the world is trying to hang the Jews for the crime.’ Israel was starting to pay in hard-won moral capital, along with the IDF its most precious asset.

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