THE JUNE 1982 invasion – "Peace in Galilee" – was the plan of the
then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon, the ‘Butcher Of Sabra And
Chatila’, (Sharon was later to become prime
minister) and prime minister Menachem Begin. The main aim of the
invasion was to destroy the PLO bases in Lebanon and its political
influence, to better intimidate the Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza.
But the brutality of the Israeli invasion created widespread anger
and resistance. Around 18,000 people were killed and 30,000 injured and
between 500,000-800,000 made homeless in the first three months.
Then came the horror of the massacres at the Chabra and Shatila
Palestinian refugee camps where 3,000 men, women and children were
slaughtered by the right-wing Christian Phalange militia under the gaze
of Ariel Sharon’s troops. It was "the worst single act of terrorism in
modern Middle East history" as Robert Fisk, renown journalist,
called it (The Independent, UK 2-6-01.) Sharon’s "name is synonymous
with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead
babies, with rape and pillage and murder… "
In the south, the occupying Israelis set up a militia force which
extorted money from Shia villages. At the same time, they began
arresting, torturing and imprisoning Shias in jails like the notorious
Khiam prison, under the direction of Israel’s Shin Bet security force.
This propelled the Iranian Iman Mousa Sadr’s ‘Movement of the
Deprived’ to the heart of the Shia resistance and gave rise to the
Hizbollah guerrilla movement and the tactic of suicide bombing, (which
it since abandoned.)
One of the first targets was the Israeli army command building in
Tyre. This served to show that the Israeli defence force was not
impregnable and further attacks led to a growing death toll amongst the
Israeli troops.
Also, the attempt to establish a regime in Lebanon friendly to Israel
through Bashir Gemayel (head of the Phalange militia) failed after he
was killed by a bomb.
Forced out
US, FRENCH and Italian troops sent to counterbalance the USSR-backed
Syrian troops in Lebanon were eventually forced out. One factor was the
suicide bomb attacks on the US and French bases in 1983, where over 300
troops were killed and the suicide attack on the US embassy which killed
63.
The deaths of Israeli troops and the horror, in particular, at the
massacre at Chabra and Shatila, led to unprecedented mass protests in
Israel against the war. At one point 90% of the population opposed the
war. One peace demo in Tel Aviv numbered 400,000, including protesting
soldiers.
This pressure, both from attacks by Hizbollah and the growing
anti-war movement within Israel, not only forced the resignation of
Begin and the removal of Sharon as defence minister but also led to the
removal of Israeli forces from all but a southern Lebanon buffer zone.
Eventually Israeli troops left in 2000, some 18 years after the
invasion.
