1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon
The 1982 Lebanon War, also called the Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military, which had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. The Israeli military operation, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was launched after gunmen from the Abu Nidal Organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin blamed the PLO, using the incident as a "casus belli". It was the second invasion of Lebanon by Israel, following the 1978 South Lebanon conflict.
The Israelis sought to end Palestinian attacks from Lebanon, destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country, and install a pro-Israel Maronite Christian government. Israeli forces attacked and overran PLO positions in southern Lebanon and briefly clashed with the Syrian Army, who occupied most of the country's northeast. The Israeli military, together with the Christian Lebanese Forces and South Lebanon Army, seized control of the southern half of Lebanon and laid siege to the capital Beirut. Surrounded in West Beirut and subjected to heavy Israeli bombardment, the PLO and their allies negotiated a ceasefire with the aid of United States Special Envoy Philip Habib. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, were evacuated from Lebanon, overseen by a multinational peacekeeping force. By expelling the PLO, removing Syrian influence over Lebanon, and installing a pro-Israeli Christian government led by President Bachir Gemayel, the Israeli government hoped to sign a treaty that would give Israel "forty years of peace".
Following the assassination of Gemayel in September 1982, Israel's position in Beirut became untenable and the signing of a peace treaty became increasingly unlikely. There was outrage at the IDF's role in the Israeli-backed, Phalangist-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shias. This stoked Israeli public disillusionment with the war. The IDF withdrew from Beirut and ended its operation on 29 September 1982. The May 17 Agreement of 1983 ended the state of war between Israel and Lebanon, and provided for an Israeli withdrawal from the country. Amid rising casualties from guerrilla attacks, the IDF retreated south of the Awali river on 3 September 1983.
From February to April 1985, the Israeli military undertook a phased withdrawal to its "South Lebanon security zone" along the border. The Israeli occupation saw the emergence of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shia Islamist group. It waged a guerrilla war against the Israeli occupation until the IDF's final withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. In Israel, the 1982 invasion is also known as the First Lebanon War.
Background.
During the 1948 Palestine war, 730,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to leave by Zionist forces, of which 100,000 arrived in Lebanon. Most of the guerrillas would be recruited from Palestinian refugee camps. By 1969, this population had grown to 235,000 as a result of natural population growth and immigration, including Palestinians who fled or were expelled by Israel during the 1967 war. On the eve of the 1982 Israeli invasion, the Palestinian population in Lebanon was 375,000.
The 1967 Six-Day war stimulated the growth of the Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas). After 1967, the number of armed Palestinians increased from 200 to 2,000 and by 1968 it had reached 15,000.
PLO's objectives.
Palestinian guerrilla action intended to serve as a war of national liberation for Palestinians. In 1968, PLO's objective was to establish a single democratic state in all of historical Palestine with equal rights for Jews, Muslims in Christians. It was around this time that Palestinians began to conduct raids into Israel. By 1977, the objective had evolved to establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel.
Relocation of PLO from Jordan to South Lebanon.
In 1970, a large influx of Palestinians from Jordan went into Lebanon after the Black September conflict. This caused an additional demographic imbalance within Lebanese society, and affected its democratic institutions established earlier by the National Pact.
By 1975, the refugees numbered more than 300,000 and the PLO in effect created an unofficial state-within-a-state, particularly in Southern Lebanon, which then played an important role in the Lebanese Civil War. There had been continual violence near the Lebanon-Israel border between Israel and the PLO, starting from 1968; this increased following the relocation of PLO bases to Lebanon after the civil war in Jordan.
Lebanese Civil War.
Incidents 1975–1980.
The violence between Israel and the PLO peaked during Operation Litani in 1978, provoked by the Coastal Road Massacre which was carried out by Palestinian militants. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was created after the incursion, following the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 425 in March 1978 to confirm Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, restore international peace and security, and help the government of Lebanon restore its effective authority in the area.
As early as 1976, Israel had been assisting Lebanese Christian militias in their sporadic battles against the PLO. During Operation Litani in 1978, Israel established a security zone in southern Lebanon with mostly Christian inhabitants, in which they began to supply training and arms to Christian militias which would later form the South Lebanese Army. But Israel's main partner was to be the Maronite Phalange party, whose paramilitary was led by Bashir Gemayel, a rising figure in Lebanese politics. Gemayel's strategy during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War was to provoke the Syrians into retaliatory attacks on Christians, such that Israel could not ignore.
In 1978, Menachem Begin declared that Israel would not allow a genocide of Lebanese Christians, while refusing direct intervention. Hundreds of Lebanese militiamen began to train in Israel, at the IDF Staff and Command College. The relationship between Israel and the Maronites began to grow into a political-strategic alliance, and members of the Israeli government like Ariel Sharon began to conceive of a plan to install a pro-Israel Christian government in Lebanon, as it was known that Bashir wanted to remove the PLO and all Palestinian refugees in the country.
From June to December 1980 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded an increase in activities along the border zone. No attacks by Palestinian forces on Israel were recorded, while the IDF incursions across the armistice line into Lebanon increased markedly, with minefields being laid, gun posts established, and generally involving numerous violations of Lebanese air-space and territorial waters. This was formally protested by the Lebanese government to the UN Security Council and General Assembly in several communications as violations by Israel of United Nations Security Council Resolution 425. During the same period Israel protested numerous attacks by Palestinian forces, unrelated to the Lebanese border zone.
1981 events and cease-fire.
In his report for the period of 12 December 1980 to 12 June 1981 on UNIFIL activities, the Security Council Secretary General noted that infiltrations into the border zone by Palestinian armed forces had decreased relative to the previous six months. Indeed, the PLO had recognized their vulnerable position, and avoided overtly provoking Israel. In contrast the IDF had launched various attacks on Lebanese territory often in support of the Lebanese Christian militia. In doing so Israel had violated UN Security Council resolution 425 on hundreds of occasions [paragraph 58]. Where the initiator(s) of attacks could be identified in the report, in 15 cases Palestinian militants were to blame while on 23 occasions the Militia and/or the IDF were the instigators, the latter also being responsible for the most violent confrontation of the period on 27 April [paragraph 52].
From 16 June to 10 December 1981, a relative quiet was reported continuing from 29 May 1981 until 10 July. This was broken when "Israeli aircraft resumed strikes against targets in southern Lebanon north of the UNIFIL area. (The Israeli strikes) led to exchanges of heavy firing between armed elements (Palestinians), on the one hand, and IDF and the de facto forces (Christian Militia) on the other. On 13 and 14 July, widespread Israeli air-strikes continued. Armed elements (Palestinians) fired into the enclave and northern Israel." Israeli-initiated attacks had led to rocket and artillery fire on northern Israel. This pattern continued in the coming days.
Israel renewed its air strikes in an attempt to trigger a war that would allow it to drive out the PLO and restore peace to the region. On 17 July, the Israel Air Force launched a massive attack on PLO buildings in downtown Beirut. "Perhaps as many as three hundred died, and eight hundred were wounded, the great majority of them civilians." The Israeli army also heavily targeted PLO positions in south Lebanon without success in suppressing Palestinian rocket launchers and guns.
As a result, thousands of Israeli citizens who lived near the Lebanese border headed south. There patterns of Israeli-initiated airstrikes and Palestinian retaliations with attacks on northern Israel are in contrast with the official Israeli version "A ceasefire declared in July 1981 was broken: the terrorists continued to carry out attacks against Israeli targets in Israel and abroad, and the threat to the northern settlements became unbearable."
On 24 July 1981, United States Undersecretary of State Philip Habib brokered a ceasefire badly needed by both parties, the best achievable result from negotiations via intermediaries, aimed at complying with the decisions of UN Security Council resolution 490. The process was complicated, requiring
shuttle diplomacy between Damascus, Jerusalem, and Beirut, United States. Philip Habib concluded a ceasefire across the Lebanon border between Israel and the PLO. Habib could not talk to the PLO directly because of Kissinger's directive, so he used a Saudi member of the royal family as mediator. The agreement was oral – nothing could be written down since Israel and the PLO did not recognize each other and refused to negotiate with each other – but they came up with a truce. ... Thus the border between Lebanon and Israel suddenly stabilized after over a decade of routine bombing.
Between July 1981 and June 1982, as a result of the Habib ceasefire, the Lebanese-Israeli border "enjoyed a state of calm unprecedented since 1968." But the 'calm' was tense. US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig filed a report with US President Ronald Reagan on Saturday 30 January 1982 that revealed Secretary Haig's fear that Israel might, at the slightest provocation, start a war against Lebanon.
The 'calm' lasted nine months. Then, on 21 April 1982, after a landmine killed an Israeli officer while he was visiting a South Lebanese Army gun emplacement in Taibe, Lebanon, the Israeli Air Force attacked the Palestinian-controlled coastal town of Damour, killing 23 people. Fisk reports further on this incident: "The Israelis did not say what the soldier was doing ... I discovered that he was visiting one of Haddad's artillery positions (Christian militia) and that the mine could have been lain [sic] as long ago as 1978, perhaps even by the Israelis themselves".
On 9 May 1982, Israeli aircraft again attacked targets in Lebanon. Later that same day, UNIFIL observed the firing of rockets from Palestinian positions in the Tyre region into northern Israel, but none of the projectiles hit Israeli towns – the gunners had been ordered to miss. Major-General Erskine (Ghana), Chief of Staff of UNTSO reported to the Secretary-General and the Security Council (S/14789, S/15194) that from August 1981 to May 1982, inclusive, there were 2096 violations of Lebanese airspace and 652 violations of Lebanese territorial waters. The freedom of movement of UNIFIL personnel and UNTSO observers within the enclave remained restricted due to the actions of Amal and the South Lebanon Army under Major Saad Haddad's leadership with the backing of Israeli military forces.
Prior to establishing ceasefire in July 1981, U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim noted: "After several weeks of relative quiet in the area, a new cycle of violence has begun and has, in the past week, steadily intensified." He further stated: "There have been heavy civilian casualties in Lebanon; there have been civilian casualties in Israel as well. I deeply deplore the extensive human suffering caused by these developments." The President of the U.N. Security Council, Ide Oumarou of Niger, expressed "deep concern at the extent of the loss of life and the scale of the destruction caused by the deplorable events that have been taking place for several days in Lebanon".
Immediate causes.
From the ceasefire, established in July 1981, until the start of the war, the Israeli