Monday, Feb. 28, 1983
Weathering the Storm
By William E. Smith
Begin survives, Sharon sulks and Gemayel asserts his authority
For virtually the first time since Israeli forces invaded Lebanon last June, the focus of U.S. attention in the Middle East shifted away from Lebanon and Israel briefly last week to the waters of the eastern Mediterranean, where the U.S. dispatched air and naval units. The move, clouded in secrecy and confusion, was prompted by reports that Libya's strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was concentrating his military forces in the southeastern corner of his country, thereby appearing to threaten the neighboring states of Sudan and Chad and alarming the government of Egypt.
In spite of this unexpected distraction, Washington's main concern in the region was still the legacy of the fighting in Lebanon. In Israel, the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin survived three no-confidence motions in the Knesset, all of them aimed at expressing the opposition's displeasure over the way in which the government had dealt with the recommendations of the independent commission charged with investigating the Beirut massacre of last September. In Lebanon, the fragile government of President Amin Gemayel accomplished the symbolic feat of replacing Christian militiamen on duty in Christian East Beirut with government soldiers for the first time since the Lebanese civil war began eight years ago. In Algiers, meanwhile, the Palestine National Council, the de facto parliament of the Palestine Liberation Organization, met for the first time since the forced departure of P.L.O. commandos from Beirut last summer.
Prime Minister Begin appeared to have solved, for the moment at least, the political crisis precipitated by the report's findings. He removed Ariel Sharon, the government official most criticized by the commission, as Defense Minister, but immediately named him a Minister Without Portfolio, thereby minimizing the damage to himself and to Sharon. As predicted, Begin then appointed Moshe Arens, Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. for the past year, as Sharon's replacement at the Defense Ministry. The result, as Interior Minister Yosef Burg put it, was that Begin had made no concessions "to the Americans or to the Arab world" or otherwise changed his government's policies.
Left unanswered was a very important question: How much influence would Begin permit Sharon to retain as a discredited but still influential member of the Cabinet? Sharon's relations with Begin are known to have deteriorated since the report was released two weeks ago. According to a friend, Sharon was "very insulted and frustrated" that Begin, who received an advance copy of the report, did not call his Defense Minister to offer either details or consolation. Sharon still says that he is returning to his farm in central Israel but will attend Cabinet meetings and undertake any assignment that is given him.
As a sort of parting shot, Sharon left yet another controversy behind. He warned top Israeli officers that the commission's report, by exacerbating Israel's existing internal and external tensions, could have the effect of deterring an Israeli government from launching a preemptive strike that might be needed to stop a hypothetical attack by combined Arab armies. The Jerusalem Post, which generally supports the opposition Labor Party, called Sharon's statement "so outrageous, so pernicious, that in normal times that alone would have been bad enough to cast him out of the Cabinet." The danger, it added, was that a potential enemy of Israel "might make the mistake of believing Sharon, not realizing that this man stops at nothing, not even at the attempted weakening of Israel's most basic and sacred defense doctrines, to score cheap political points at home."
Though the opposition never had any hope of success, it went through the motions of trying to defeat the government in the Knesset. Labor Party Leader Shimon Peres recalled that when an independent commission criticized the Israeli military establishment for being unprepared to fight the 1973 war, Begin had declared that the responsibility fell on "the entire government" of Prime Minister Golda Meir. Begin replied last week that the situation had been entirely different in 1973, because at that time the existence of the state of Israel had been at stake. The Knesset rejected the three motions of no-confidence by a vote of 64 to 56.
Within the Cabinet, Sharon's critics, who include Deputy Prime Ministers Simcha Ehrlich and David Levy and Communications Minister Mordechai Zipori, will try to limit his influence. They were rarely successful while Sharon was Defense Minister; last summer he repeatedly made decisions concerning the war in Lebanon without consulting his Cabinet colleagues beforehand.
The appointment of Ambassador Arens to succeed Sharon was generally well received. Arens is a hard-liner who opposed the Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Egypt. In 1980 he refused a previous offer of the defense portfolio, in part because he did not want to preside over the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the Sinai. But he is more rational and disciplined than Sharon and, as a State Department official put it, more aware of "the necessity of the American link." The headline over a Jerusalem Post editorial, ARENS: A RELIEF, summed up the thinking of many Israelis. Even Davar, the trade union newspaper, which supports the Labor Party line, acknowledged that "Arens is more skilled in security matters than Begin and less dangerous than Sharon."
For a while last week, there were rumors that Begin was anxious to form a government of national unity, with several Labor Party leaders taking seats in the Cabinet. These reports were apparently part of a campaign by the Prime Minister to reassure, or perhaps confuse, those leaders of Begin's own Herut Party who saw themselves as future Prime Ministers and who feared that Arens, as Defense Minister, would become Begin's heir apparent.
If government and opposition leaders agreed on anything, it was in their revulsion over the rise of political violence that had led to the death of a Peace Now demonstrator, Emil Greenzweig, 33, in a hand-grenade explosion outside the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem two weeks ago. Begin called the killing a "loathsome murder," while Deputy Foreign Minister Yehuda Ben-Meir of the National Religious Party told the Knesset how shocked he was when he saw TV reporting of "rabble" throwing stones at Peace Now demonstrators and then entering a hospital in an effort to prevent the injured from receiving medical care. Said Ben-Meir: "It is this that constitutes the real danger in Israel, not [P.L.O. Chairman Yasser] Arafat. Arafat we shall overcome."
Despite such expressions of grief on all sides, the government and opposition were unable to agree on a joint statement condemning the killing. The ruling Likud coalition passed a resolution calling on the public to "act in the spirit of the Jewish tradition of 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' " The opposition resolution declared that Greenzweig had been "murdered as the result of a criminal attempt to attack freedom of speech and the foundations of democratic life." After the vote, Interior Minister Burg, whose son had been injured in the grenade attack, said that the Knesset's failure to produce a joint statement was "a discredit to us all."
In the meantime, while the Israeli government was preoccupied with its internal political problems, the Lebanese government was sending some 4,500 army troops into East Beirut. Ever since September, when the Lebanese army occupied Muslim West Beirut, Christian militiamen had remained in control of the predominantly Christian section of the city. Last week, after negotiations with the government of President Gemayel, the militia agreed to make way for the army. The agreement also called for the government to take over the "Fifth Basin," an illegal port where the militiamen have long collected import duties. In fact, even after the army takes over the Fifth Basin, the militia may continue to collect revenues there. The militiamen may have agreed to cooperate with the government, but they were not yet ready to put themselves out of business.
The curious relationship between Amin Gemayel and the Christian troops explains the delay in reaching an agreement. The Phalangist Party was founded by Amin's father Pierre, and its militia is the dominant group in the Lebanese Forces, the combined Christian militia. Amin's brother Bashir, who was assassinated last September a few days before he was due to be inaugurated as Lebanon's President, was head of the Lebanese Forces. But Amin Gemayel, who became President in his brother's place, was never as close to the militia as either Pierre or Bashir, and as President of Lebanon, Amin has been determined to assert the power of the central government over the whole of Lebanon. He cannot do much outside Beirut as long as the Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian forces occupy so much of his country, but last week he succeeded at least in unifying his capital city under a single command for the first time since 1975.
The militia commanders yielded to Amin's authority after suffering a series of setbacks. On Feb. 6, Druze fighters in the hills southeast of Beirut drove the militiamen from the town of Aley, for which they have been battling since October.
What made the defeat particularly bitter for the commanders was that the Druze had succeeded because the Israelis had prevented Christian reinforcements from reaching Aley. The Christians' relations with the Israelis have been in decline for some time, particularly as the result of Ariel Sharon's heavyhanded treatment of Phalangist elders, including Party Chief Pierre Gemayel, during a meeting last month. For their part, the Israelis are angry with Amin Gemayel for refusing to sign a peace treaty with them, and are trying to show him that he needs their support. But Gemayel is convinced that to sign such a treaty now would jeopardize Lebanon's relations with the rest of the Arab world.
When the Israelis first learned of Amin's determination to send his army into East Beirut last week, they objected to delaying the move, saying that it must be coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces. Lebanon's Foreign Minister, Elie Salem, a Christian, replied that the Lebanese army had "instructions to shoot and not to negotiate with outlaws." The Israelis did not press the argument, but on the day after the Lebanese army deployment, an Israeli tank patrol drove straight through a Lebanese army barricade in East Beirut, despite protests from the Lebanese soldiers on duty. Two days later, Israeli troops tried to disarm a French military convoy serving with the United Nations peace-keeping force in Lebanon.
As the Israeli-Lebanese troop-withdrawal negotiations remained stalled, there were signs that the Israelis and their surrogates were busy achieving one of their negotiating goals by force of arms. The Israelis have said that they want a 28-mile-wide zone along the Lebanese border with Israel to be set aside as a special security area, and that they expect it to be run either by Israeli military commanders or by Major Saad Haddad, a renegade Lebanese army officer who has controlled an area of southern Lebanon since 1979 with Israeli backing. Last week the Israelis transported Haddad and many of his 1,000 or so militiamen, together with their old Sherman tanks and aging American-made armored personnel carriers, in flatbed trucks all the way to the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, some 20 miles north of the area Haddad normally controls. Boldly announcing that his "Free Lebanon" had been expanded to cover the boundaries of the 28-mile zone demanded by the Israelis, Haddad declared: "There is no need to proclaim our new state. This was one a long time ago." Haddad's assertion demonstrated how far Lebanon remains from the goal, proclaimed by both the Israelis and the Gemayel government, of once again becoming an independent, sovereign state. -- By William E. Smith. Reported by Harry Kelly/Jerusalem and Roberto Suro/Beirut
With reporting by Harry Kelly/Jerusalem, Roberto Suro/Beirut
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