The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

Summary, part 5

Chapter 4

The Fourth Declaration of War, 1982

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to target the PLO. During this time, Khalidi was at a meeting of the admissions committee at the American University of Beirut, where he had been teaching for 6 years. There, they heard sounds of “what must have been multiple two-thousand-pound bombs exploding in the distance” (p. 139). This marked the beginning of Israel’s invasion – something everyone had been expecting and dreading.

Khalidi and his wife had two daughters – Lmaya, who was a little over five, and Dima, who was three. They were in kindergarten and nursery school, respectively, and Mona, who was four months pregnant, was at work in WAFA, which was the PLO’s Palestine News Agency. Their daughters, and later their son, were born in Beirut “in the midst of war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government” (p. 140). Their son would be “extremely sensitive to loud sounds” for a very long time (p. 141).

The offensive culminated in a 7-week siege of Beirut with a ceasefire on August 12. This offensive constituted the most serious attack by a regular army on an Arab capital since World War II. The invasion was a watershed moment in the conflict since it was the first major war since May 15, 1948, to “involve the Palestinians rather than the armies of the Arab states” (p. 142). 

The invasion was “of an entirely different order in terms of its aims, scale, and duration, the heavy losses involved, and its long-range impact” (p. 142). Israel had multiple objectives, but its distinguishing factor was its focus on the Palestinians and “its larger goal of changing the situation inside Palestine” (p. 142). Israel wanted to destroy the PLO militarily, eliminate its power in Lebanon, and stop nationalism in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

In 10 weeks of fighting from early June through mid-August in 1982, Lebanese officials reported that more than 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese – mostly civilians – were killed, with more than 30,000 wounded. Refugee camps were largely destroyed, and people were cut off from water, electricity, food, and fuel. 

Khalidi’s family was, for the most part, safe in West Beirut, but his mom and his brother moved in with them because they weren’t safe further south. Khalidi acted as an off-the-record source for Western journalists, providing his own frank assessment of events, while Mona would continue to edit for the WAFA.

The Israeli invasion began on June 4, 1982, and by June 13, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian combatants were eventually overwhelmed. The PLO was alone in fighting with its allies in the Lebanese National Movement with “no prospect of relief or meaningful support” from anyone (p. 147). Many buildings that were targeted had “no plausible military utility,” Israeli bombardment had been “indiscriminate,” and “not one of the PLO’s several functioning underground command and control posts or its multiple communications centers was ever hit … although many civilians died when the Israeli air force missed its targets” (p. 147). The war continued until the “PLO was forced to agree to evacuate Beirut, under intense pressure from Israel, the United States, and their Lebanese allies, and in the absence of meaningful support from any Arab government” (p. 149).

The US remained committed to helping Israel achieve its war aims: “the defeat of the PLO and its expulsion from Beirut” (p. 149). The US endorsed Israel’s demand that the PLO withdraw from Beirut and provided “indispensable material support to its ally, to the tune of $1.4 billion in military aid annually in both 1981 and 1982” (p. 150). The US also got Arab states that had previously proclaimed their support for the Palestinian cause to do nothing but issue “pro forma objections” (p. 150). It is worth noting that while Arab governments caved to US pressure, Arab public opinion was filled with “great shock and anger” (p. 151).

During this time, the PLO didn’t do itself many favors. The PLO knew it couldn’t expect support from Arab regimes, but it was expecting sympathy from the Lebanese people. The PLO did not get this sympathy because it often acted heavy-handedly or arrogantly in the years preceding the conflict. For example, in a typical incident, the guards of a senior PLO leader shot and killed a young Lebanese couple when they were stopped at a checkpoint and failed to stop. This went undisciplined and was inexcusable, but unfortunately common.

The PLO led assaults in Israel, often targeting civilians and not advancing the Palestinian national cause. The PLO lacked support from three key groups: the Syrian-aligned Amal movement, the Druze fiefdom, and the urban populations of Beirut, Tripoli, and Sidon. Khalidi writes that although “it was understood by all that Israel was intentionally punishing civilians to alienate them from the Palestinians … there was nevertheless much bitterness against the PLO as a result” (p. 153). For these key groups, defiance of Israel was “all well and good, but not at the cost of the avoidable destruction of their homes and property” (p. 153-154).

Eventually, the PLO presented its Eleven-Point Plan for the withdrawal of its forces from Beirut. In it, they also called for buffer zones, limited withdrawal of the Israeli army, lasting deployment of international forces, and international safeguards for Palestinians and Lebanese since they would have no defenses with the departure of the PLO. This convinced Lebanese leaders that the PLO was sincere in its willingness to leave to save the city. The US, under pressure from Israel, rejected the Eleven-Point Plan. Instead, the US assured the safety of the camps in memos transmitted to the PLO without letterhead, signatures, or identification, but were taken by the PLO as constituting a binding commitment from the US. The PLO left to the emotional celebration of those in West Beirut and scattered by land and sea over half a dozen Arab countries. But after the PLO was done being evacuated and international forces supporting them left, the civilian population was now left unprotected.

On September 14, 1982, President-elect Bashir Gemayel, commander of Lebanese Forces and leader of the Phalangists, was assassinated in an explosion that destroyed a Phalangist headquarters. Israel immediately re-entered Beirut and occupied the western part of the city “despite promises to the United States that it would not do so” (p. 157). Between September 16 and September 18, the LF militiamen, who were trained by Israel, “murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children” (p. 159). 

A commission of inquiry set up to investigate established the “direct and indirect responsibility” of senior Israeli military commanders for the massacres, including Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon. Many of those named “lost their posts as a result of both the inquiry and the general revulsion in Israel over the massacres” (p. 159). Later, more damning evidence revealed those individuals named were more culpable than originally thought and showed how American diplomats were “browbeaten by their Israeli interlocutors and failed to stop the slaughter that the US government had promised to prevent” (p. 159). Khalid writes that “as with the war itself, these deaths were also the direct responsibility of the US government” (p. 161). After all, there was continued American support after both the bombardment of Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. In fact, Sharon explicitly warned US officials of their plans, saying, “We were going to see American-made munitions being dropped from American-made aircraft over Lebanon, and civilians were going to be killed” (p. 162). Because of this, Khalidi writes that “the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor” (p. 162).

After learning of the Sabra and Shantila massacres, Khalidi knew they were no longer safe in Beirut, so they were evacuated with the help of their journalist friends and US political officers. They went to Cairo, where Mona and Khalidi had family, and realized how badly the war affected their daughters. They were able to go back to Beirut after the Israelis withdrew. After a suicide bombing of the US embassy in the spring of 1983, they left Beirut for what was supposed to only be a year but turned out to be forever since the Lebanese civil war erupted once again.

The political impact of the 1982 conflict cannot be understated. It brought the rise of Hizballah – a deadly foe to the US and Israel – and the intensification and prolongation of the Lebanese civil war, which flared up into a regional conflict. Notably, this conflict procured the first sustained and significant negative American and European perceptions of Israel since 1948 – no amount of Israeli propaganda could cover up what they had done in Lebanon. As a result, Palestinians garnered international sympathy, but they failed to obtain sufficient material support from anyone.