Editorials

...protest under both Carter and Reagan has lacked all credibility...

...economic conditions in general, fifty-nine percent disapproval to thirty-one percent approval...

...unemployment, sixty-six percent disapproval to twenty-three percent approval...

...In the long-term, we doubt whether either leader has gained much for the cause of Israel's security in the region...

...In the Middle East-and at our State Department lately-the nomenclature shifts depending on whose side you favor, e.g., Assembly President D'Aubisson in El Salvador, whom Gemayel resembles too closely for our taste...

...But sooner or later Israel is going to have to sit down with the PLO, the de facto representative of Palestinians in the occupied territories...

...On the contrary, they have concentrated world attention on the Palestinian plight and all but wrecked the process of the Camp David accords...

...More, if Begin wanted to reinforce Moslem fundamentalists who would gladly depose Mubarak and return Egypt to the hostile Arab camp, he could hardly have plotted it better...

...On the eve of the June 6 incursion, Egyptian foreign minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali was asserting in the pages of Foreign Affairs that "The success of the Camp David accords is bound to have a 'snowball' effect and give the peace process more strength, more dynamism, and more credibility in Arab eyes...

...Reagan's presidency may be changing...

...The details were no more cheering for Reagan supporters...

...Menachem Begin has found a "dear friend" in the newly elected Lebanese president, the Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel-albeit it's a friendship that all but discredits Gemayel for most Lebanese Moslems and is bound to heighten tension with most of the surrounding Arab governments...

...Arafat is not dumb...

...The augurs are not promising...

...We were able to reassure Arab countries that you could sit around a table and talk with the Israelis, that there was hope...

...If the original Jewish settlers could not be stopped by sheer might, what reason was there to think the Palestinians can be...

...West Beirut alone had one hundred and twenty publishing houses, dozens of weeklies and dailies, four great universities...

...inflation, despite recent declines in the rate, fifty-eight percent disapproval to thirty-three percent approval...

...But first, we think they have to persuade the public that they could do better, and that will take some doing...

...If only he means that...

...Is there to be no end to this cycle of an eye for an eye...

...This might make it seem like everything is coming up roses for the Democrats...

...I am not a candidate for the partitioning of my fatherland," he said shortly before the election...

...And for the time being, Israel's client, Bashir Gemayel, sits uneasy in Lebanon's presidential chair...

...Begin's rule argue persuasively that in carrying through on the return of Sinai to Egypt he has demonstrated his willingness to sacrifice in the interest of making peace with Arab neighbors...

...For the moment, high Egyptian officials report President Hosni Mubarak is standing firm against pressure to abrogate the Israeli treaty...

...There are no heroes of this piece, so far as we can see, except Philip Habib, whose tireless labors as a tough and fair-minded mediator are sure to be needed again, forthwith...

...Forty-one percent of those polled approved "of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as president...

...this too is now at its lowest point ever, with only thirty-six percent of those polled approving his handling of foreign policy, down from forty-five percent...

...Reagan's policies predominates in these domestic issues: environmental issues, forty-one percent disapproval to thirty-four percent approval...

...The adventure destroyed five years of work," said a Cairo official recently...

...Begin is no monster, and more accommodating than the rejectionist Arab states...

...it's a "point of honor...

...Reagan's foreign policy has dropped nine points since June...

...Does the Lebanon venture secure Israel's Egyptian flank...

...the true provocation did not lie in Lebanon but within Israel's occupied territories, i.e., what Mr...

...Make that later-much later...

...According to the latest Gallup Poll, public support for President Reagan's performance in office has reached its lowest point ever...

...It is said that in those last days of the siege the Begin cabinet's sessions were stormy-and the implication was that some were having doubts about "Sharon's War" to secure the forty kilometers south of the Litani river...

...Up until now his forte has been that of godfather gangster who liquidates troublesome opponents, even among the right wing, with lightning efficiency...

...Transparently, the idea is to make life so unlivable that they'll go away-to topple King Hussein's Jordan, which official Israeli policy claims is the proper "homeland" for dissident Palestinians . The pre-1967 borders of Israel may be a folly to think of returning to...

...Sooner or later," he wrote, "Arab governments are bound to join the peace process...

...But the bitterness, the sense of betrayal, is palpable...

...With blind faith like that displayed over and over again, it's no wonder that Mr...

...GOING DOWN With the national unemployment rate pushing ten percent, it's a familiar sight on television news programs: an unemployed auto worker or steel worker or what have you, his unemployment benefits exhausted, his savings rapidly disappearing, his mortgage payments overdue, unable to get food stamps, and praying that he does not have to go on welfare...

...No, Israel's militarism may have secured its northern border for the time being, but the gain there is offset by the loss of a budding confidence elsewhere-in the surrounding Arab world, and here in the U.S...

...Begin prefers to call Judea and Samaria-and which he clearly intends to annex...

...For the moment, likewise, the PLO guerrilla organization stands in disarray, its military effectiveness staunched...

...For the moment, Israel has secured "peace for Galilee...

...A fragile Arab trust of Jesse's shoot was broken...

...For otherwise the Syrian and Israeli armies are likely to encamp on a partitioned Lebanon for some while, with East Beirut serving as no more than the capital of a rump state in which a few local dons preside over a flourishing hashish and heroin trade-till now a major source of Gemayel's ample funds for Israeli arms...

...energy, forty-nine percent disapproval to thirty-three percent approval...

...In short, more and more people may still think Ronald Reagan is a very nice man, but they're no longer gung ho for most of his policies, at home or abroad, at least for now...

...Gemayel's stature as a national leader is untested...

...We can also well believe that Israeli commanders often put their troops at risk in seeking to preserve the lives of civilians...

...If anyone blamed Ronald Reagan for his plight, you'd think he'd surely be that man...

...And for whatever reason, whether out of moral revulsion at the inveitably high civilian casualties and material destruction entailed, or a fear of domestic reaction to the lives of Israeli soldiers to be lost, we can be grateful General Raphael Eitan's forces did not sweep in to annihilate the PLO leadership in its bunkers and thus reduce the city to ashes...

...Begin-or some of his cabinet-realized that the deaths of Yasir Arafat and other PLO staff would not eradicate the Palestinian problem so much as sow bitter martyrs' blood to be reaped even more virulently by succeeding generations of Israeli children...

...Now, however, there are at least some signs that the public attitude toward Mr...

...After months of secret negotiations with European governments, announced PLO moderate Issam Sartawi in Paris on July 13, Arafat was ready on the eve of the Lebanese invasion to recognize Israel's right to exist provided Israel reciprocated...

...Gains if you will-but the losses, the bitterness sown in Arab hearts, the cost in international repute, the havoc wreaked on the Israeli economy itself, are hard at this point to measure...

...The population was cosmopolitan, informed, tolerant, eminently resourceful...

...The tradition is there to remember...

...It's hard not to draw the lesson: this was Mr...

...Menachem Begin's Revisonist Zionist way of dealing with the Palestinian problem at home, a way his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, had been itching to execute...

...Assuring Lebanon's integrity free of occupying Israeli and Syrian armies and getting down to solving the Palestinian question-left hanging as much by U. S. inaction as by either Israeli or PLO belligerency-will be no mean feat...

...If the often-promised pledge is ever delivered, an Israeli Sadat might build on that...

...brute power is the way...

...Both the spirit and the letter of the Camp David accords have been violated here, and unfortunately-for Israel itself no less than for the Palestinians-U.S...

...Forty-seven percent disapproved, while twelve percent had no opinion...

...Disapproval of Mr...

...we think they are...

...In a similar poll in June, forty-five percent approved and forty-five percent disapproved, with ten percent having no opinion...

...By mid-July there were signs too that Israeli public opinion, significantly including some Oriental Jewish supporters of a "strong state," had begun to rouse itself from the moral paralysis generated by years of defensive isolation...

...But giving way on Sinai is frequently converted into an apology for Begin's intransigence on the West Bank issue-and typically justifies a further blind eye toward the increasing brutality of Israeli occupation policy: mass arrests, deportations of mayors, destruction of homes, expropriation of Arab property, collective punishments, and the active sponsorship of Gush Emunim settlements...

...Or a Philip Habib might...

...Mind you, this was long before the Palestinians were driven out of Jordan (1970) to upset Lebanon's delicate political balance between Moslem and Christian...

...On the other hand it should not be overlooked that before the Palestinians fled to Lebanon, that country stood as a singular example of a modernizing Arab society living in relative harmony with indigenous Jew and Christian...

...Arguably, it is the very severity of occupation policy, never wise but worsened under Menachem Milson's "civilian" regime lately, that has driven indigenous Palestinians, especially the young and educated, into the arms of the PLO...

...This," wrote Sharett, "will be a crazy adventure," and he refused to countenance it...

...If Arab rejectionist fiber needed hardening, Sharon's War provided it...

...But building on such overtures, incomplete as they are, will be more difficult now precisely because of the militaristic example Israel has just set for the region...

...It was Israel's first aggressive, not defensive, war...

...Well, the thing didn't exactly happen that way, but it's close enough, crazy enough, to be unnerving...

...Reagan's economic critics in and out of Congress sometimes despair of ever getting their message through to the people...

...It will take another year or two before we feel the benefits of Reagan's policies...

...We hope Gemayel rises to his position-and changes his color and mode of action...

...Given the fact that PLO emissaries were scurrying about Europe seeking official recognition, we remain skeptical...

...It's been vacillating and paper-thin...

...Let us hope the last decade's violence has not effaced it...

...The war began on the flimsiest of pretexts-an attack on the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, carried out, as we now know, by the Abu Nidal group that despises Yasir Arafat...

...Defenders of Mr...

...Reagan's performance outweighs disapproval in only two areas: natonal defense, by forty-eight to thirty-seven percent, and relations with the USSR, by forty-four percent to thirty-four percent...

...At just the time when Arab governments, if not the PLO itself, were feeling the pressure of the Egyptian lead in finding diplomatic rather than violent resolutions to outstanding conflicts, the Lebanese invasion reverted to the old script...

...Such questions, never absent from an argumentative Israel, indeed they are her glory, are being asked now by many who previously seemed willing to let the army keep the peace...

...Indeed, public approval of Mr...

...Till late in the siege the gallows joke among Lebanese as they continued about their lives in West Beirut was that they could rely on the superb skill of Israeli pilots at pin-point bombing of what an equally competent Israeli intelligence knew as PLO bastions...

...Is it also too much to hope that Mr...

...Patriot or terrorist...

...If such sentiments, at this point little more than the cracking of inflexible chauvinism, are to marshal the original Israeli majority that acclaimed the Camp David accords-and thus wanted justice for the Palestinians-it will require the emergence of a kind of leadership that up till now neither the Labor party's Shimon Peres nor Yitzhak Rabin has provided...

...We're assured that the invasion was conducted with a sense of restraint and proportion-proportion to an all-out Russian-sponsored PLO attack that the great caches of arms suggest might have been in the planning...

...Even in these two areas support has slipped significantly since June...

...As to restraint, doubtless there was-some...

...the Arab image of a grasping Zionism confirmed...

...But up till now at least, the chances are high that our poor out-of-work character will tell the TV audience: "But we've got to give President Reagan's economic program a chance...

...MEANWHILE, IN BEIRUT Back in 1954 and 1955, Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett was recording in his diary conversations with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Day an regarding the former's proposal to buy a puppet Lebanese colonel-or even a major-who would declare himself the savior of a separatist Maronite state and invite the Israeli army into the territory south of the Litani river-which would eventually be annexed to Israel...

...Approval of Mr...

...The point is well made...