by David Landau
totally overshadowed [Israel’s] achievements in the war, which had ended with the PLO and the Syrians ousted from Beirut. If the government of Israel had had the good sense to leave Beirut after the evacuation of the terrorists was completed Israel would have avoided sinking into the mire of Lebanese politics, it would not have entered west Beirut and it would thus not have become involved in any way with the massacre of Palestinians by the Phalange. The IDF’s remaining in Beirut after the [PLO’s] evacuation proves the validity of the ancient rabbinic adage: “Grab too much—and you grab nothing at all.”33
A wholly different view of the war thus far, predominant by now in opposition circles but also troubling some of the ministers, was that the drawn-out hostilities had been, on balance, a disaster for Israel—in terms both of casualties and of the international (including American) opprobrium. Ousting the PLO in no way counterbalanced those setbacks. As for the Syrians, while they had been forced out of the Lebanese capital, they were still firmly entrenched in the northern Beqáa. The hope, moreover, of a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon had been roughly crushed at the Begin-Gemayel meeting in Nahariya.
From that—negative—assessment of the war, too, the sensible thing for Begin and Sharon to do once the PLO had left was to cut Israel’s losses and get the IDF out, too. But Begin and Sharon were not ready to leave. “Even after the [Begin] meeting with Gemayel,” writes Begin’s biographer,
Sharon had no intention of giving up his aim—clearing out West Beirut, in other words destroying the arms stores hidden there and removing the Palestinian militants who had remained there, particularly in the refugee camps. Because of the heavy price in blood that Israel had already paid in this war, Sharon wanted the Phalange to finish this job, and he sent senior IDF officers and Mossad operatives to coordinate with them. Begin backed him … Sharon did not deviate from the guidelines that Begin laid down. When Begin read intelligence reports, after the PLO’s evacuation, which said that thousands of terrorists had remained in the city, he told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel still intended to drive out the “hostile elements” that had remained in West Beirut. Once again, Sharon acted to execute the policy goal that Begin determined.34
The intention, then, was for the IDF to stay put while the Lebanese—the Phalange forces, perhaps with the national army, too—cleansed West Beirut of remaining PLO men. But was that the true and full extent of the Israelis’—and Gemayel’s—intention? Or did they envisage, condone, and essentially encourage a much broader ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Lebanon to be perpetrated, by the Lebanese Christians, by violent means?
The IDF chief of intelligence, Yehoshua Saguy, redoubled his warnings that the Phalange was likely to commit acts of revenge against the Palestinians and its other domestic enemies now that the Syrians and most of the PLO were gone from the capital. For this reason, he urged, the IDF would do well to distance itself from the scene.
On September 14, that option was finally, fatefully rejected. “I was driving toward Tel Aviv,” Sharon writes, “when I received word on the car radio to telephone the defense ministry as soon as possible. Stopping at an army base along the way, I phoned in and was told that an explosion had taken place in an East Beirut building. Our information was that Bashir Gemayel had been inside.” Eight hours later, with the death of the president-elect now confirmed, Begin, Sharon, and Eitan decided that the IDF must take over West Beirut forthwith.
Sharon’s purpose in ordering the IDF into West Beirut—and he confirmed this in his testimony to the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut (the Kahan Commission)—was to ensure that the remaining PLO men were cleared out in the days ahead by the Lebanese Forces (the Phalange) as had been agreed before the assassination.35 In his conversation with Begin, though, on the night of the assassination, the stress was on the need for the IDF to prevent chaos in the city. Begin said to Eitan, too, on the phone that Muslims must be protected from the Phalange.36
Later that night, Eitan went to the Phalange headquarters at Karantina, where he explained to the stunned and grieving commanders that their leader’s assassination—which everyone attributed to Syrian agents—“had the potential of sparking a new round of violence” and that it could signal a Syrian-PLO effort to reverse the results of the war and get back into Beirut. “I asked them if their forces would be prepared to assist us, and, to my surprise, received an immediate affirmative answer. I asked … that they prepare to capture the Palestinian camps Sabra, Shatila and Fakahani.”37
Was the IDF’s entry, then, designed to ensure the “cleansing” of the Palestinians or to ensure their protection? An official announcement the following day reflected this ambivalence: “IDF forces entered West Beirut to prevent possible grave occurrences and to ensure quiet.”38
At dawn on the fifteenth, IDF troops took over key buildings, road arteries, and intersections in West Beirut, encountering scattered opposition. Sharon flew up later in the morning and met with Eitan and the other senior IDF commanders at a forward command post on a rooftop overlooking Sabra and Shatila. He discussed the plans to send in the Phalange “under the IDF’s supervision.” Then he, too, went to Karantina to talk to the Phalange officers and on to Bikfaya to offer his condolences to the bereaved father, Pierre Gemayel, and to his younger son, Amin.
The next day, Thursday, September 16, CO of Northern Command Amir Drori personally briefed the Phalange officers due to lead the assault on the Palestinian camps. “They were instructed to be careful in their identification of the PLO terrorists,” Sharon recalled. “The mission was only against them. Civilian residents, they were specifically instructed, were not to be harmed.” Brigadier Amos Yaron, the divisional commander, made the same point to Elie Hobeika, the Phalange intelligence chief, who came up to his rooftop command post for final coordination.39
In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Morris Draper, Habib’s deputy, and Sam Lewis were remonstrating vigorously but vainly with Sharon and Eitan over Israel’s cavalier violation of its solemn commitment not to enter West Beirut. Israel had undermined its own credibility, Draper said. Sharon replied there were between two and three thousand Palestinian terrorists left in the Beirut camps—“we’ve even got their names”—and the IDF had taken the western city in order to get them out. The day before, Draper had been treated to the other tack in Israel’s ambivalent—in fact, contradictory—explanation of its decision to enter West Beirut. Israeli forces had been ordered to make some minor positional adjustments—“limited and precautionary,” Begin told him, according to Secretary Shultz’s account. “This was in the interest of security in the city … Specifically, the Israelis said they wanted to prevent the Phalange militia from raiding the Palestinian refugee camps south of the city to avenge Gemayel’s death.”40
By the time the cabinet convened, at seven o’clock on Thursday evening, the Phalange units had entered Sabra and Shatila. “While I was speaking,” Sharon recalled, “a note came in that the Phalangists were now fighting inside the neighborhoods, and as I described this development, there was no negative reaction from any one of the assembled people.”41
This was a remarkably silly lie, given that almost every child in Israel knew by the time it was written, following the Kahan Commission Report, that Minister of Housing David Levy had voiced his grave concern. “When I hear that the Phalangists are already entering a certain neighborhood,” Levy said, “I know what the meaning of revenge is for them, what kind of slaughter. Then no one will believe we went in to create order there, and we will bear the blame.”42h
Levy’s warning went unheeded. The ministers—including the skeptical ones, not just the nodding heads—were more concerned about why the army had been sent into West Beirut without the cabinet’s knowledge, let alone approval, than about David Levy’s pontifications about oriental vendetta lore. The cabinet communiqué, drafted by Begin, rehearsed the ambiguous Israeli line: “In the wake of the assassination of the Preside
nt-elect Bashir Gemayel, the IDF has seized positions in West Beirut in order to forestall the danger of violence, bloodshed and chaos, as some 2,000 terrorists, equipped with modern and heavy weapons, have remained in Beirut, in flagrant violation of the evacuation agreement.”
The next day, Friday, was Rosh Hashanah eve, the saddest day of the year for Sharon. With Lily and the boys, his mother, and a few friends, he held his annual graveside memorial ceremony for his dead son, Gur. Then he drove to Jerusalem and, together with Shamir, met again with Draper. “I pressed Draper to use his influence to get [the Lebanese government] to order the Lebanese army into the Palestinian neighborhoods.”43
In the Palestinian neighborhoods, meanwhile, unarmed people were being butchered. No IDF personnel had accompanied the Phalangists into the camps, and there was no direct line of vision from the forward command rooftop into the warren of streets and alleys below. But the Phalange operation had proceeded through the night by the light of illumination shells thrown up by an IDF mortar unit, at the request of the Phalange liaison officer.44
And IDF intelligence was not entirely in the dark. One intelligence officer, according to the Kahan Commission, “received a report that the Phalangists’ liaison officer had heard via radio from one of the Phalangists inside the camps that he was holding 45 people. That person asked what he should do with the people, and the liaison officer replied, ‘Do the will of God,’ or words to that effect.”45 Another officer, Lieutenant Elul, “heard a Phalangist officer from the force that had entered the camps tell Elie Hobeika (in Arabic) that there were 50 women and children, and what should he do. Elie Hobeika’s reply over the radio was: ‘This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do’; and then raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist personnel on the roof.”46
Despite these early indications, it took the whole night and half of the day of unhurried paper pushing between Beirut, Northern Command, and Tel Aviv before the senior IDF officers finally decided that, in General Yaron’s words to the commission, “something smelled fishy.” Drori phoned Eitan at noon to say he would end the Phalange operation. “He informed me that they were mopping up houses without removing the civilians,” Eitan writes in his memoirs, “and were shooting at people randomly. I immediately notified the minister of defensei and left my home for Northern Command. I was extremely upset.”
But not upset enough to ensure the operation was shut down at once. “I reached the Phalange headquarters at 3:30 … When I asked for an update on their progress in the camps I was told that all was well and that they had completed the capture of Sabra and Shatila. They told me they had suffered several wounded and killed and requested that we provide them with tractors, so they would be able to destroy the tunnels and trenches they had discovered.”47
Sharon went back to his ranch to celebrate the festival-eve meal quietly with his family. “At 9 p.m. I received a call from Raful Eitan. He had just returned from Beirut, he told me, and there had been problems. During the operation the Phalangist units had caused civilian deaths. ‘They went too far,’ he said.”
Sharon went to bed early, but at 11:30 an Israeli television journalist (and colonel in the reserves), Ron Ben-Yishai, phoned him with a fuller account of what had been going on. As initial rumors of the carnage filtered out, journalists stationed in Beirut began filtering into the camps. Soon, their reports, television footage, and still photographs started flooding the airwaves. The world’s media were swamped with coverage and with commentary, almost all of it unreservedly condemnatory of Israel. All the criticism—of the initial invasion of Lebanon, of the killing of civilians and destruction of property in the coastal towns, of the months-long siege and bombardment of Beirut, of the blatant manipulation of Lebanese domestic politics, and, beneath all this, of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and denial of Palestinian rights—fed a great wave of fury and revulsion against Israel, against Begin, and most especially against Sharon.
President Reagan voiced horror, too, and demanded that Israeli forces withdraw from West Beirut immediately. “We also expect Israel thereafter to commence serious negotiations which will, first, lead to the earliest possible disengagement of Israeli forces from Beirut and, second, to an agreed framework for the early withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon.”
Begin’s initial, instinctive reaction was the usual mix of forensic polemics and defiant self-righteousness. “A blood libel was plotted against the Jewish state and its government, as well as against the IDF, on Rosh Hashanah,” the cabinet pronounced after an emergency meeting on the night of September 19. “In a place distant from an IDF position, a Lebanese unit entered a refugee camp where terrorists took shelter, in order to arrest them. That unit attacked the civilian population, resulting in many losses of lives … All the accusations—direct or hinted—claiming that the IDF has any responsibility whatsoever for the tragedy in the Shatila camp are groundless. The Cabinet rejects them with disgust … No one will preach to us values of morality and respect for human life.”
The government won a vote of confidence in the Knesset. But the confidence was a splintering facade. Inside the coalition itself there was a growing realization that the opposition’s demands were inescapable: a judicial inquiry would have to be established, and Sharon would have to go. The alternative, political pundits wrote, was that the government itself would implode. One minister, Yitzhak Berman, didn’t wait. He voted in the Knesset in favor of the opposition motion and announced his resignation the same day.
On Saturday night, September 25, Kings of Israel Square in downtown Tel Aviv was thronged with protesters in what the organizers—Peace Now and other groups—claimed was the largest demonstration ever held in Israel: 400,000 people. There had been earlier, smaller protests against the war in the same square during the summer. Naturally, those were seen as associated with the opposition. This one, despite its provenance, was simply too big for such comfortable categorization.
Sharon tried, nevertheless. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” he fulminated on television the following night. “Nothing! Let everything be investigated! Let everyone be investigated! We didn’t want to harm the civilian population. We don’t fight civilians. We weren’t involved.” Israelis needed to understand that behind the calls for an inquiry were “far-reaching political aims. Certainly there is anti-Semitism involved. And there are certain plans that people are trying to impose on us. They’re not after Sharon’s head or Begin’s head. What they’re after is Jerusalem! They’re after Hebron! They’re after Beit-El, they’re after Elon Moreh! And I say this without any intention whatsoever of covering up or minimizing the ghastly outrages that were perpetrated. But we have to understand: We’re up against the whole world.”48
It was a desperate attempt to depict the crisis in political hues and thereby rally the Right. But when the president of the state, Yitzhak Navon, hinted that he would resign if the government did not set up a commission of inquiry, Begin realized the fight was lost. He tried one last wriggle, sending the justice minister, Nissim, to the president of the Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan, with a proposal that Kahan personally investigate the massacre rather than appoint a full-fledged commission of inquiry with statutory powers to subpoena witnesses and order discovery of documents. Kahan dismissed that gambit out of hand.49
Begin was able to convince the commission that he did not know in advance that the Phalange forces were being sent into the camps. This proved the key to his exoneration by the commission, which presented its report on February 8, 1983.
The tasks of the Prime Minister are many and diverse, and he was entitled to rely on the optimistic and calming report of the Defense Minister that the entire operation was proceeding without any hitches and in the most satisfactory manner.
As for David Levy’s warning at cabinet,
According to the Prime Minister’s testimony, “no one conceived that atrocities would be committed … simply, none of us
, no minister, none of the other participants supposed such a thing …” The Prime Minister attached no importance to Minister Levy’s remarks because the latter did not ask for a discussion or a vote on this subject. When Minister Levy made his remarks, the Prime Minister was busy formulating the concluding resolution of the meeting, and for this reason as well, he did not pay heed to Minister Levy’s remarks.
The commission rejected Begin’s claim that he was “absolutely unaware” of the danger inherent in sending the Phalangists in. After all, Begin himself had explained that the decision to send the IDF into West Beirut was “in order to protect the Moslems from the vengeance of the Phalangists.”
The Prime Minister’s lack of involvement in the entire matter casts on him a certain degree of responsibility … It is sufficient to determine responsibility and there is no need for any further recommendations.
In effect—an acquittal, albeit Begin said when he first read the report that he felt he ought to resign. But he was quickly talked out of that idea by Minister of Justice Nissim and the cabinet secretary, Dan Meridor. The two of them focused Begin on the real political hot potato that emerged unequivocally from the report: the need to fire Sharon.50
The Minister of Defense bears personal responsibility. In our opinion, it is fitting that the Minister of Defense draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office—and if necessary, that the Prime Minister consider whether he should exercise his authority under Section 21-A(a) of the Basic Law: The Government, according to which “the Prime Minister may, after informing the Cabinet of his intention to do so, remove a minister from office.”
Sharon’s guilt was that he should have known.
