Israel’s tough solution to Lebanon crisis

Press, 18 June 1982, Page 12

Israel’s tough solution to Lebanon crisis

By

DAVID HIRST

in “The Guardian,” London

It was Damascus radio, in Syria, which recently warned the Lebanese Government against signing "a treaty of capitulation" with Israel. For the Lebanese, the hypocrisy of that advice, though breathtaking. can have come as no surprise at all. It epitomises the attitude of an Arab world which, as has been clear for some time now, is ready to abandon the Lebanese—and the Palestinians—to the fate which Israel has so obviously had in store for them.

It is true that President Assad, of Syria, has sent up a few aircraft to oppose the marauders, and that his ground forces have replied, perhaps a little more than symbolically, in those places where they have come under Israeli attack.

But Assad, self-proclaimed protector of Lebanon and the Palestinian resistence movement. has. like all other Arab leaders. confined himself essentially to verbal support.

According to all the rhetoric, the Israeli invasion should have precipitated the fifth ArabIsraeli war; instead it has signified the ultimate abasement of an Arab world, which, racked by all manner of conflicts. permits Israel to do as it pleases. Israel’s pleasure is clear enough. It goes way beyond Mr Begin’s officially proclaimed war aim—by driving the Palestinian guerrillas out of artillery range of . northern Israel.

An Israeli spokesman put it clearly enough in Washington last week. It was not just, he said, a matter of driving the terrorists out of the south: it was a question of destroying the Palestinian mini-states in Lebanon. After that, he said, Israel would be happy to sign a peace treaty with Lebanon.

This can be taken as the Israelis real, ultimate ambition, since they have been talking about it among themselves so insistently in the last two years. The Palestinian mini-state was the fruit of Black September 1970, when King Hussein, in 10 day's of fratricidal strife, drove

Arafat s guerrillas out of their earlier and mere naturalbacause already half Pales-tinian—state-within-a-state of Jordan.

It is not yet a mortal blow which the Israelis have administered. But it is the most devastating yet—in what looks like becoming another Black September in slower motion. Partly through their own fault, partly as an inevitable consequence of their very existence as a liberation movement. operating from another people’s soil, the Palestinians have discredited themselved in the eyes of many Lebanese, including those who believe that Israel is the real villain, the real source of everyone's woes—Palestinian, Lebanese, and Arab. Even the sincerest sunporters of the Palestinians have been made to pay too high a price for an ideal which the P.L.O. embodies—the settlement of the Lebanese problem via a just settlement of the Palestinian problem—but which seems to have no chance of fulfilment.

So it is not altogether unrealistic for the Israelis to urge the Lebanese to finish off their work for them. "Chateau Beaufort is yours,” Prime Minister Begin told Major Saad Haddad, their protegy in the southern border enclave. And over Israeli radio an unidentified Christian from the south broadcast an appeal to "our brothers in east and west Beirut.” They should, he said, "co-operate with Major Haddad to liberate our country from the foreigner—Syrians and Palestinians.” They should “strike them everywhere. Thye are now very weak."

The Israeli invasion coincides with the most crucial phase in Lebanon's internal affairs, one that, all of a sudden, has been recognised as such by the United States. “The life of the State itself is at stake,” said Secretary of State Alexander Haig in a recent speech.

Before the invasion President Reagan had been planning to dispatch his special envoy Mr Philip Habib to the area, with a much broader mandate than usual. He'was to get there

merely to consolidate the still existing south Lebanese ceasefire. but to seek a radical solution to the everlasting Lebanese crisis. President Sarkis’s six year term expires in September. There is no obvious candidate to replace him in Lebanon, if only because it is realised on all sides that the election of the wrong person would bring about the final, formal disintegration of the Lebanese State.

Bashir Gemayel, the military leader of the Right-wing Christian Phalangists, recently warned his Muslim compatriots that unless they co-oper-ated in choosing the right president, the Christians might unilaterally proclaim one of their own (presumably himself)

in the 2000 sq kilometres where his absolute writ runs.

An Israeli official pointed out last week that the change brought about in Lebanon's internal balance of power by the invasion—and perhaps the indefinite ocupation of a large swathe of the south—would be much to Bashir Gemayei's advantage. A Left-wing Beirut newspaper, echoing those sentiments from its very different standpoint, warned that the invasion heralded the election of a Lebanese President “capable of signing the Lebanese Camp David.”

The emasculation or destruction of the P.L.O. in its last. Lebanese sanctury, would also serve a much deeper Israeli purpose. For in Israeli eyes,

the P.L.O. is a primary cause of West Bank and Gaza resistance to the “autonomy” whichit is seeking to impose on the occupied territories. Egypt, the United States and Europe, are all. in various degrees, opposed to Israel’s version of autonomy. But the United States is still wedded to the Camp David formula which spawned it, and there have been signs of late that Europe takes a more indulgent view of Camp David.

Pro-Western Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, may denounce the "civilised world" for failing to stop the "criminal barbarous Zionist aggression" being carried out “before - its eyes and ears.” But Saudi Arabia is no more ready, these days, to risk the use of the oil

weapon than President Assad is to go to war. America's refusal to condemn the invasion is seen in Beirut not merely as another flagrant example of its proIsraeli bias, but as evidence that, if it did not actually give the green light to the Israelis, it is ready io swallow a drastic fait accompli which it had long foreseen.

Since, it is argued, there is so little danger of concerted Arab retaliation against the Western backers of Israel, the United States can permit its unruly protege to get away with more than ever before. It. can abdicate the search for Pax Americana, and acquiesce in pax Israelica instead. And there is no place at all for the P.L.O. in that.