For nearly half a century, Israel has waged a series of military campaigns against Lebanon, claiming each time to be ensuring the security of its northern border. It was in the name of fighting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that the Israeli army invaded Lebanon for the first time in March 1978. But the US administration under President Jimmy Carter forced Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government to withdraw its troops. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), established to resolve the crisis, was nevertheless unable to deploy in the “security zone” that Israel continued to control along its northern border through Lebanese auxiliaries.
The Israeli invasion of June 1982 was on an entirely different scale, as Begin was determined to eliminate the PLO not only from southern Lebanon but also from Beirut, where Yasser Arafat was under siege for two and a half months along with thousands of his supporters. After UNIFIL was humiliated by the Israeli invaders, who even killed a Norwegian peacekeeper, a multinational force made up of the United States, France and Italy supervised the evacuation of Arafat and the Palestinian fighters from the Lebanese capital.
High-pressure negotiations
US President Ronald Reagan was convinced he was waging a “new Cold War” against the Soviet “evil empire.” In this logic, he actively supported the Israeli offensive against what were considered mere proxies of Moscow: the PLO and Syria. France, under President François Mitterrand, on the other hand, sought to defend a kind of “third way” that would restore Lebanon’s sovereignty in the face of both Syria and Israel.
Begin was convinced that after the peace treaty with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1979, Lebanon under Bachir Gemayel would become the second Arab state to normalize relations with Israel, now that the PLO had been expelled from Beirut. But in September 1982, the newly elected Lebanese president was assassinated in an attack orchestrated from Damascus. Militias loyal to him then carried out massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The shock of such carnage forced the United States, France and Italy to redeploy the multinational force to Lebanon, where Amine Gemayel succeeded his brother as president.
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