Lebanon: the Good, the Bad, the Misleading

...The news of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr.'s resignation only accentuated this feeling...

...because as a result of the Holocaust Israeli adults tend to be more sensitive to the war sufferings of others, and because there is widespread dislike and suspicion of Sharon...

...As a result, the PLO and other Arab outlets had a field day spreading distortions...

...The intermediate aim was to bring about the withdrawal of all foreign troops, Syrian as well as Palestinian, from the whole of Lebanon, and to restore to the Beirut government the ability to exercise its full sovereignty...

...They fear that an explicit treaty with "the Zionist entity" would keep away the oil sheikhs and their petrodollars...

...filtration and the shelling of Israeli villages from the area...

...And there was agreement that the PLO was amassing materiel to implement this goal, and therefore the weapons had to be destroyed before the cost of doing so became exorbitant...

...Another reality forgotten in the anti-Israel chorus is that this extensive buildup can in retrospect be seen as the PLO's undoing...

...No PLO members (or weapons) would be allowed within the demilitarized zone, and preferably an international force should be set up to guarantee that...

...In fact, the initial Israeli relief data revealed that those who fled totaled about 70,000, and many of them were able to return to fully intact buildings...

...It looked more and more as if Sharon were implementing his "grand plan" for Lebanon, which the Cabinet had clearly rejected...

...Most of the hundreds of foreign correspondents and broadcasters on hand were completely indifferent to (or their editors chose to ignore) the enormous arsenals of Soviet, French, Czech, British, Chinese, Polish, Romanian and even American arms (from Jordan...

...Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, long considered by the doves to be the nation's evil genius, dispatched the Air Force to destroy the Soviet made missiles...

...Very few journalists and no foreign government noted the open, vocal and genuine enthusiasm with which the Christian and parts of the Moslem Lebanese population greeted the Israelis...

...Foreign correspondents seldom photographed the hundreds of undamaged villages and towns or the unharmed major sections of cities, nor did they seem very interested in interviews with the majority who welcomed the Israelis...

...The PLO reported "10,000" dead in Beirut and elsewhere during the first week of fighting, yet several days later a Beirut police spokesman gave the estimated number as 700...

...not out of affection for them, but because they hoped to be rid of the hated PLO and Syrian occupation...

...The ordnance was far beyond what could be used by the PLO units in Lebanon...

...Until the PLO took over major parts of its territory, Lebanon prided itself on being "the Switzerland of the Middle East," the business, banking, vacation, and entertainment center for the rich from the eastern half of the Arab world...

...As long as it restricted itself to sabotage, assassination, mine-laying, hostage-taking, airplane hijacking, and similar "classical" acts of terror??as it did through the late '70s??the PLO could function with makeshift bases, small weapons stockpiles and a generally dispersed, easily camouflaged infrastructure...

...Such a new leaf presupposes a truly independent Lebanon, and a Palestinian self-determination plan not ruled by an international terrorist organization determined to do away with the State of Israel...

...Questioned by reporters on television at the close of the third week of the war, Sharon outlined three objectives for the campaign: The minimum was to establish a 40 kilometer-wide cordon sanitaire inside Lebanon, along Israel's northern frontier, to insure against inEliahu Salpeter, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...Some papers??for example, the ordinarily respectable British Guardian??stooped to frontpaging an anti-Semitic cartoon implying that Prime Minister Begin was obeying some rabbinical commandment in crushing Lebanese villages under the wheels of his tank...

...they would have found out that the entire area being cited had approximately half a million people, 100,000 less than the alleged number uprooted...

...There was also a foreboding that Israel, goaded and hoodwinked by the Defense Minister, was biting off a bigger chunk than the world would permit...

...The phenomenon is disturbing on another level, too: It is likely to reinforce the elements in Israel who maintain that the hostility of the outside world toward the Jewish State is a direct consequence of centuries-old anti-Semitism, that Israeli efforts to be more humane and tolerant toward the Arabs in the occupied territories is not only dangerous but useless...

...Finally, the noncombatant casualties and damage, serious as they have been, have also been recklessly or maliciously exaggerated...

...In this context, Israelis worry that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Company's eclipse of Alexander Haig may tilt Washington's hand in that fatal direction...

...The patent bias of most of the Western media is a depressing example of what can happen to a supposedly impartial, free and honest press...

...More questionable yet was the assumption that any Lebanese regime would in the foreseeable future be strong enough militarily and politically to keep the PLO out...

...What every Lebanese dreams of is the return of those prosperous times...

...The terrorists then organized themselves into large military formations, in the process losing much of their ability to blend in with the civilian population and with the refugees in the camps...

...The majority here??including the government's severest critics for going too far??now hopes that the entirely new situation created by the war can be utilized for a fresh start in Lebanon and in the entire Middle East...

...Some of the weapons were in crates marked "agricultural machinery" and "medical equipment...

...Once they started to use their new heavy equipment to attack Israeli towns and villages from inside Lebanon, Israel was obliged to strike back at the source of the fire and, ultimately, to move across the border...

...But some of the bad PR was self-inflicted...

...Hundreds of pages were published about the destruction in Tyre, Sidon and Damur, without containing a single sentence noting that the PLO and other terrorist organizations systematically used schools, mosques and public buildings for gun placements and training bases, as well as cellars of clinics, shopping centers and apartment buildings for command posts and ammunition dumps...

...Many suspected that a PLO-free Lebanon, especially with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees remaining in the country, could be assured only by a huge Israeli military presence??something that, presumably, not even Sharon would cherish...

...Domestic reaction to these events was probably in excess of what people in any other country would display...

...When their tanks rolled into south Lebanon last June 6, even the most dovish Israelis shared the conviction that no country could leave tens of thousands of its citizens hostage to the heavy artillery of an enemy whose avowed aim is the physical destruction of the Jewish State...

...Israeli experts speculated that the stores were either positioned for ArabforcesplanningtojointhePLOin an invasion of Israel from the north, or constituted a distribution center for arms to be supplied to "liberation" groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America...

...At the same time, echoes of the Western voices condemning the civilian casualties in Tyre and Sidon reached the Israeli public...

...The ire stems, rather, from a strong sense of the prejudice evident in the suddenly rediscovered Western conscience and humanitarianism...

...The remarkable consensus began to evaporate in less than a week, as the IDF came face-to-face with the Syrian soldiers encamped in southeastern Lebanon . Damascus reacted by sending in more men and additional sam antiaircraft missile batteries...

...Obviously, Israel's image suffered from the fact that a bombed building or a dead child was much more dramatic television material than dozens of unscathed villages where not one inhabitant was hurt...

...VIEWS FROM ISRAEL Lebanon: the Good, the Bad, the Misleading by eliahj sNma TelAvtv As the war in Lebanon moved toward a climax, Israelis had the sense that they were getting a bum rap from their own leaders, foreign governments and the world press...

...It took Israeli and foreign journalists the better part of the first week of fighting to come up with substitutes for the frequent, frank briefings that were standard Israeli procedure in the past...

...would evacuate the Bekaa Valley in east Lebanon that they have occupied in recent years and turned into part of their own defense perimeter, less than 50 miles from their capital...

...The national unanimity was shattered completely when Israeli troops, having sealed off PLO-controlled west Beirut, began heavy air and artillery bombardment of the city...

...Nobody found fault with the first goal, nor would many Israelis object in theory to the second and third...

...The same newspapers and TV stations that barely mentioned the 100,000-plus casualties in the Lebanese civil war and Syrian occupation??or the 30,000 victims of the Damascus government in the suppression of Syria's Hama uprising??now eagerly repeat every fantastic figure put out by PLO and other "objective" Arab sources...

...Few thought to point out the PLO's exploiting the civilian population as hostage-shields at best, or for anti-Israel publicity if they were hit...

...Israeli teams have been turning up dozens of caches daily, so far including more than 500 Soviet T-62 tanks and about 5,000 tons of shells and bullets...

...Similarly, the Palestine Red Crescent successfully spread the story that "about 600,000" were made homeless in the same period . Nobody in the Western press took the trouble to check the statistics...

...Thus when Israelis take umbrage at'Western press coverage of the events in Lebanon, they do not do so out of self-righteous blindness to the devastation and suffering wrought by Israeli firepower...

...If Israelis become convinced that "the whole world is against us," ultra-nationalists will have a free hand in pushing their intransigent policies on Palestinian autonomy...

...Ever since Sharon became Defense Minister and commenced his iron-grip policy to stifle unrest in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, he has dealt with criticism by keeping the press in the dark as long as possible...

...The impression gained that the Cabinet was impotent to stop Sharon, or was being duped by him into approving moves whose implications it did not fully appreciate...

...As for the maximum aim, Arab affairs experts in Israel doubt that even Israel's friends and allies among the Christian Lebanese leadership would really want to have such a formal normalization of the relationship between the two countries...

...Among the sins of omission and commission cited are the following: ? The crocodile tears in the free world (and, of course, also Communist) chanceries and media over "Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty" were notably absent for years while the PLO and Syria usurped two-thirds of Lebanon...

...Anything less, it is felt, will leave Yasir Arafat and the PLO in the driver's seat (particularly since the "moderate" Arabs fear the terrorists), and sow the seeds of the next Middle East war...

...At the turn of the present decade, however, the Soviets and the Libyans began to ship in tanks, antiaircraft missiles and heavy artillery...

...In no previous Israeli war had correspondents been so mishandled...

...The most ambitious objective, as stated by Sharon, was to establish a free, independent Lebanese government that would sign a peace treaty with Israel...

...With the advancement of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the first three days of fighting, it was discovered that the number of terrorists and the size of their armaments exceeded the most pessimistic estimates, further persuading everyone here that action against the PLO bases was overdue...

...from Saudi Arabia...

...found in hundreds of depots, dumps, cellars, and rented apartments all over southern Lebanon...

...The same was true at the outset in Lebanon...

...But there was grave doubt whether the Syrians??short of being routed by force...