DAVID TWERSKY
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Rabin, Chaim Bar Lev, and Motta Gur, advised the government to
stick to the cease-fire as long as the PLO did.
As the weeks went by, and as the government widened the aims
of the war, confusion spread. Shimon Peres and the Labor opposi–
tion kept trying, in meetings with Begin, to force him to limit the
war to the original aim of clearing the forty-kilometer strip-a kind
of expanded Operation Litani, the similar but more limited action
four years ago when Israeli troops invaded a narrow strip of southern
Lebanon in retaliation for the "Country Club" terrorist attack on
Israel's coastal highway.
But Anthony Lewis's comments in the
Times,
that Peres
"allowed himself to be drawn in by General Sharon to a share of
responsibility for the war," and was therefore" in a poor position
to
object when Mr. Sharon went on to bloodier objectives," are unfair.
It was extremely difficult, even politically suicidal, to attack the
principle that Israel's citizens in the north should be free of the
sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. The originally limited
aims of the war, once the operation was already under way and no
longer a theoretical question, were difficult to oppose. Moderation
as politics has won out among the intellectuals but not among the
"masses," who remain skeptical that there are any Palestinian
Arabs "to talk to. "
Indeed, the PLO is an enemy that is very hard to like; the more
we saw of their works within Lebanon, the harder it became. The
children of the Shi'ite Moslem village of Chema, where I spent the
first few days of the war, explained to me why they called the PLO–
along with the entire Lebanese population, as I later found out–
" meharbin,
})
from the root common to Hebrew and Arabic, meaning
"destroyers." "They destroyed my country," we heard over and
over again. The Christian Lebanese are even more militant in their
opposition to the PLO and are quite adamant about insisting that
Israel eliminate all Palestinian strongholds in Beirut no matter what
the cost-to Moslems in Beirut or to Israelis, that is. Even given the
natural tendency of a people occupied by foreign armies to smile,
wave, and mask their true feelings as you drive by, the documented
evidence of PLO barbarism is too great to ignore. Their role in the
great slaughterhouse that was Lebanon in 1975-1976 is fully docu–
mented. Perhaps this makes liberals uncomfortable, especially
people who think that Edward Said and Walid Khalidi
are
the PLO.
There are Israelis, too, whose illusions die hard, and Pete
