Editing Israeli–Palestinian conflict (section)

=== 1982 Lebanon War ===
{{Main|1982 Lebanon War}}

During the [[Lebanese Civil War]], Palestinian militants continued to launch attacks against Israel while also battling opponents within Lebanon. In 1978, the [[Coastal Road massacre]] led to the Israeli full-scale invasion known as [[Operation Litani]]. This operation sought to dislodge the {{abbr|PLO|Palestine Liberation Organization}} from Lebanon while expanding the area under the control of the Israeli allied Christian militias in southern Lebanon. The operation succeeded in leaving a large portion of the south in control of the Israeli proxy which would eventually form the [[South Lebanon Army]]. Under United States pressure, Israeli forces would eventually withdraw from Lebanon.<ref>{{harvnb|Morris|1999|loc=The Lebanon War}}: "The aim of "Operation Litani" was to kill as many guerrillas as possible and to destroy the military infrastructure—camps, munitions dumps, artillery pieces. A secondary aim was to expand, and create continuity between, the existing Christian-held enclaves on the Lebanese side of the border. By March 21, the IDF had taken all of the area south of the Litani (except for Tyre and its environs).</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Baruch |last=Kimmerling |title=Politicide |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TE8oCW2J2F4C&pg=PA |year=2003 |publisher=[[Verso Books]] |isbn= 978-1-85984-517-2|quote=The collaboration was solidified and made public during Begin's first term. Begin was impressed by the pleas and the aristocratic manner of the Maronite leaders and several times declared "Israel will not allow genocide [of the Maronites] in Lebanon." In March 1978, Israeli forces temporarily occupied southern Lebanon, in an attempt to neutralize Palestinian guerilla groups and enlarge the territory controlled by Major Haddad, in an undertaking called Operation Litani (the river that more or less marked the boundary of the Israeli influence).}}</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Khalidi|2020|loc=The Third Declaration of War}}: "Nevertheless, after all this and despite an Israeli incursion in 1978—the Litani Operation—which left a swath of south Lebanon under the control of its proxy, the South Lebanese Army, the PLO was still standing. Indeed, it remained the strongest force in large parts of Lebanon, those that were not in the hands of foreign armies or their proxies, including West Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, the Shouf Mountains, and much of the south. It would take one more military campaign to dislodge the PLO, and in 1982, American Secretary of State General Alexander Haig agreed to Ariel Sharon's plans for Israel to finish off the organization and with it Palestinian nationalism."</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Cleveland|Bunton|2010}}: "This was that belt the Israeli government wished to destroy. Its first concerted effort to do so occurred in 1978, when 25,000 Israeli troops invaded Lebanon as far north as the Litani River. The operation failed to dislodge the PLO from its strongholds, although it did cause large-scale demographic disruptions in southern Lebanon as thousands of villagers, mainly Shi'as, fled their homelands for the area of Beirut. Pressure from the United States and the UN eventually compelled Israel to withdraw its troops."</ref>

In 1982, Israel, having secured its southern border with Egypt, sought to resolve the Palestinian issue by attempting to dismantle the military and political power of the PLO in Lebanon.<ref>{{cite book |first=Albert Habib |last=Hourani |title=A history of the Arab peoples |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=egbOb0mewz4C&pg=PA |year=2002 |publisher=Belknap Press of [[Harvard University Press]] |isbn=978-0-674-05819-4 |quote=In 1982 the situation acquired a more dangerous dimension. The nationalist government in Israel, having secured its southern frontier by the peace treaty with Egypt, now tried to impose its own solution of the problem of the Palestinians. This involved an attempt to destroy both the military and the political power of the PLO in Lebanon, to install a friendly regime there, and then, freed from effective Palestinian resistance, to pursue its policy of settlement and annexation of occupied Palestine. With some degree of acquiescence from the USA, Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982. The invasion culminated in a long siege of the western part of Beirut, mainly inhabited by Muslims and dominated by the PLO. The siege ended with an agreement, negotiated through the US government, by which the PLO would evacuate west Beirut, with guarantees for the safety of Palestinian civilians given by the Lebanese and US governments. At the same time, a presidential election resulted in the military head of the Kata'ib, Bashir Jumayyil, becoming president; he was assassinated soon afterwards and his brother Amin was then elected. The assassination was taken by Israel as an opportunity to occupy west Beirut, and this allowed the Kata'ib to carry out a massacre of Palestinians on a large scale in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.}}</ref> The goal was to establish a friendly regime in Lebanon and continue its policy of settlement and annexation in occupied Palestine.<ref>{{cite book |first=Shlomo |last=Ben-Ami |title=Scars of War, Wounds of Peace |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=O-uMJuYdDxwC&pg=PA |year=2006 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-518158-6 |quote=Destroying the PLO's infrastructure in Lebanon as well as dismantling the last remaining Palestinian springboard in an Arab country for the military struggle against Israel, was the immediate operational objective of the war. But the architects of the invasion had far wider ambitions. They believed that the defeat of the Palestinians in Lebanon would trigger a mass exodus of Palestinians to the East Bank of the River Jordan, which in turn would bring about the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty and the Palestinisation of the kingdom in a way that would allow Israel a free hand to assert her rule in Judaea and Samaria. Israel also believed that her victory in Lebanon would create a new political order in that country with an undisputed Christian hegemony.}}</ref><ref name="Shalim 2015 Lebanese Quagmire">{{harvnb|Shlaim|2015|loc=The Lebanese Quagmire 1981 –1984}}: "The real driving force behind Israel's invasion of Lebanon, however, was Ariel Sharon, whose aims were much more ambitious and far-reaching. From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces from Lebanon or at least to weaken seriously the Syrian presence there. In Sharon's big plan, the war in Lebanon was intended to transform the situation not only in Lebanon but in the whole Middle East. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon and the West Bank into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. Begin was not privy to all aspects of Sharon's ambitious geopolitical scenario, but the two men were united by their desire to act against the PLO in Lebanon."</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Morris|1999}}: "On September 1 an IDF helicopter flew Gemayel to Nahariya, in northern Israel, where he met Begin, who had just been informed of the "Reagan Plan," the new American initiative for Israeli withdrawal from most of the occupied territories in exchange for Arab recognition and peace. By invading Lebanon, Begin had hoped to neutralize Palestinian nationalism and facilitate Israeli annexation, at least de facto, of the West Bank. But the invasion had brought home to the Americans the plight of the Palestinians and the imperative of resolving their problem, with Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank among the necessary preconditions. The Reagan initiative ruled out a final settlement that would involve either Israeli annexation of the territories or full-fledged Palestinian statehood."</ref> The PLO had observed the latest ceasefire with Israel and shown a preference for negotiations over military operations. As a result, Israel sought to remove the PLO as a potential negotiating partner.<ref>{{cite book |first=Noam |last=Chomsky |author-link=Noam Chomsky |title=Fateful Triangle |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aHphMCIkhK0C&pg=PA |year=1999 |publisher=[[Pluto Press]] |isbn=978-0-89608-601-2 |quote=was that "Operation Peace for Galilee"—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—was undertaken to protect the civilian population from Palestinian gunners, and that "the rocket and shelling attacks on Israel's northern border" were ended by the operation, though "If rockets again rain down on Israel's northern border after all that has been expended on Lebanon, the Israeli public will be outraged.19 This cannot be correct, given the history which is not challenged (even if unreported, for the most part). When it came to be recognized that the rockets still "rain down," the story was modified: "Israel's two military forays into Lebanon [1978, 1982] were military disasters that failed to provide long-term security for Israel's northern border."20 Security had indeed been at risk, as a result of Israel's unprovoked attacks from 1981, and to a large extent before. The phrase "military disaster" does not refer to the killing of some 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in 1982, overwhelmingly civilians, the destruction of much of southern Lebanon and the capital city of Beirut, or the terrible atrocities carried out by Israeli troops through the mid-1980s; rather, to Israel's failure to impose the "new order" it had proclaimed for Lebanon and its inability to maintain its occupation in full because of the casualties caused by unanticipated resistance ("terror"), forcing it back to its "security zone." The actual reasons for the 1982 invasion have never been concealed in Israel, though they are rated "X" here.21 A few weeks after the invasion began, Israel's leading academic specialist on the Palestinians, Yehoshua Porath, pointed out that the decision to invade "flowed from the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed" by the PLO, a "veritable catastrophe" for the Israeli government because it endangered the policy of evading a political settlement. The PLO was gaining respectability thanks to its preference for negotiations over terror. The Israeli government's hope, therefore, was to compel "the stricken PLO" to "return to its earlier terrorism," thus "undercutting the danger" of negotiations. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir later stated, Israel went to war because there was "a terrible danger... Not so much a military one as a political one." The invasion was intended to "undermine the position of the moderates within [the PLO] ranks" and thus to block "the PLO 'peace offensive"' and "to halt [the PLO's] rise to political respectability" (strategic analyst Avner Yaniv); it should be called "the war to safeguard the occupation of the West Bank," having been motivated by Begin's "fear of the momentum of the peace process," according to Israeli Arabist and former head of military intelligence General Yehoshaphat Harkabi. U.S. backing for Israel's aggression, including the vetoing of Security Council efforts to stop the slaughter, was presumably based on the same reasoning. After its failure to impose the intended "New Order" in Lebanon in 1982, Israel attempted to hold on to as much of Lebanon as possible, though it was forced to withdraw to its "security zone" as resistance caused too many Israeli casualties. Meanwhile Israel conducted violent terror operations, notably the "iron fist" operations of 1985 under the direction of Prime Minister Shimon Peres. These went on through the 1980s.2}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=John B. |last=Quigley |title=The Case for Palestine |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VaUvqHNd6m0C&pg=PA |year=2005 |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |isbn=978-0-8223-3539-9 |quote=As a result, the PLO did not attack Israel from mid-I98r to mid-I982.16 But in June 1982 Israel again invaded Lebanon, and it used aerial bombardment to destroy entire camps of Palestine Arab refugees.17 By these means Israel killed 20,000 persons, mostly civilians,18 and while it occupied southern Lebanon it incarcerated 15,000 persons, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The IDF continued north to Beirut, where it forced the PLO out of Lebanon. Israel claimed self-defense for its invasion, but the lack of PLO attacks into Israel during the previous year made that claim dubious. By invading Lebanon, Israel evidently sought to destroy the extensive Palestinian military and administrative infrastructure in Lebanon19 and, by removing the PLO, to convince the Arabs of the Gaza Strip and West Bank that they would get no help from the PLO.20 In the United States Harold Saunders, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, said that Israel aimed,}}</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Slater|2020|p=354}}: "For just that reason, though, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon worried that the growing PLO moderation would increase the pressure on Israel to accept the creation of a Palestinian state. To prevent that, in 1982 they seized upon a pretext to again invade Lebanon and attack the PLO, this time on a far larger scale than in previous conflicts. The attacks resulted in tens of thousands of Lebanese civilian casualties; however, the PLO forces in southern Lebanon, still led by Arafat, who escaped Israeli efforts to kill him, were soon reconstituted."</ref> Most Palestinian militants were defeated within several weeks, Beirut was captured, and the PLO headquarters were evacuated to Tunisia in June by Yasser Arafat's decision.<ref name="HistoryPBS" />