RFS_Br
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In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the stated mission of eliminating the PLO leadership from Lebanon. The invasion culminated with the massacre of thousands of civilians -- mostly Palestinian, but also some Lebanese and Syrians -- at the hands of Israel-allied Christian Phalangists. The massacre went on for three days -- from September 16th to 18th.
CONTEXT
The PLO had been using Lebanon as a basis for operations against Israel since the early 70s. What might have led to the invasion, however, was not that -- as Israel had no problem countering the PLO's offensives, often by killing off hundreds of Lebanese civilians in air raids -- but the PLO support for the demands of the Muslim and Druze communities of Lebanon to reform the country's sectarian constitution. The Lebanese constituition did, and still does, have a confessionalist character: seats in parliament were, and still are, distributed in accordance with quotas taking into account the size of each community in the country. Despite informal census estimates that Muslims (including the Druzes) had by the mid-70s become a majority in Lebanon, the constitution still alloted more seats to the country's Christians and determined the political ascendency of the Maronite Catholic community, the largest Christian sect of the country. Prior to the resolution of the civil war, Christian seats outnumbered Muslim ones in a 6:5 ratio. Moreover, the power of the prime-minister (a Sunni post) and that of the speaker of parliament (a Shia post) were reduced in comparison to that of the president (a Catholic post). The Shia-majority south was impoverished, neglected by the government concerning the provision of public services and ignored by the army, which never intervened to protect the Shias when Palestinians and Israelis went about their skirmishes in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
In any case, the PLO support for Muslim reformists seriously altered the balance of forces between Muslims and Christians. That's perhaps why Israel chose to intervene -- not because its security was imperiled by events unfolding in Lebanon (Israel's PM, Menachem Begin, was on record calling the invasion a war, not of necessity, but of "choice") but because it wanted to prevent its Maronite Catholic allies from losing control over Lebanon, which, Israel hoped, would become the second Arab state after Egypt to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In case it failed to guard the Maronites' political supremacy, it is believed that Israel would attempt to carve out a Maronite state in Lebanon's heartland.
ISRAEL's INVASION
Israel intended to finish the war by storming the western, Muslim-majority neighborhoods of Beirut and quickly decimate the PLO, which was headquartered there.
The invasion is often presented in the western press as an Israeli victory. But some -- like David Hirst, on his book about Lebanese history -- dispute that. According to Hirst, the PLO managed to halt Israel's advances against West Beirut for several weeks, resisting the IDF for longer than any Arab force had until then. In the first three weeks of the siege of Beirut, Israel lost about 300 troops in battles with the PLO. Its initial hopes -- that little Lebanon would afford no resistance, that this would be Israel's easiest war, that it would achieve victory by storming West Beirut as soon as it reached the city -- were completely dashed. As Hirst wrote, "From the very outset of the seven-week siege an unaccostumed Israeli confusion and uncertainty reigned".
The problem is that the war was producing a very high number of casualties among Lebanese civilians. Frustrated at its inability to beat the PLO, the IDF, then under Ariel Sharon, responded by taking it all on Lebanon's civilians, pounding them with air and tank artillery. Even the pro-Israeli commentarist and anti-Arab neocon Thomas Friedman, then working in Lebanon as a correspondent for the New York Times, described Israel's shelling campaign against Beirut as "indiscriminate". Israeli troops were also resorting to petty thuggery as a means of pressuring the Lebanese population to turn against the PLO -- for instance, they looted homes and stores, and stole cars. They also had a very charming quirk: Everywhere they went -- homes, mosques, churches, hospitals -- Israeli troops left, as a special mark, their excrements. It's known that even the Reagan administration, the most pro-Israel government the US had seen until then, was outraged at Israel's war conduct.
According to Hirst, it was Israel's attacks on Beirut's civilians which ultimately convinced Arafat, not without dissatisfaction among the ranks of Palestinian militias, to leave Lebanon. After all, Palestinians were but guests in Lebanon, and they had no right to make the Lebanese pass through such an ordeal only because of issues with the Israelis with which the majority of the Lebanese had nothing to do.
A deal between the PLO, the Lebanese state and Israel was achieved, and UN "peacekeeping" forces, consisting of US, French and Italian troops, were formed to oversee the peaceful evacuation of Palestinian militants. Under Reagan's request, they were then moved to Tunisia. Other -- Israeli and Syrian -- foreign troops were also supposed to leave under a broader peace plan, though that wound up not happening in the many years to come.
THE MASSACRE
The Palestinian militias left behind the refugee community, which was residing in Lebanon ever since the 1948 war. Without the militias they were defenseless, but that was a price that should be paid so the flames of the civil war that broke out in 1975, pitting Muslims, Druzes and some left-wing Christians against the Maronite establishment, could be finally put off.
What seems to have re-ignited the conflict was the murder of the newly-elected Maronite president, Bashir Gemayel. Suspicions over the murder immediately fell upon Palestinians. As it turned out, the killer was a pro-Syria activist called Habib Tanious Shartouni -- a Lebanese Catholic. But it sufficed as an excuse to launch attacks on the defenseless Palestinian community in Lebanon. After all, the Palestinian presence in Lebanon constituted to the Catholics not only a political but also a demographic challenge. By attacking the refugee community, the Christian Phalangists hoped to provoke their exodus and shift the balance of power within Lebanon back in their favour.
As for Israel, Begin justified its military presence in Lebanon as a means of guaranteeing peace and to prevent that pogroms take place. But as it turned out, the Israelis had an instrumental role in enabling the anti-Palestinian pogroms that were about to come.
The UN "peacekeeping" forces had removed many of the mines and barricades that were protecting Beirut's Muslim neighborhoods. It was thus very easy for the Israelis to advance over west Beirut now. With their tanks, they completely encircled the Sabra and Shatila camps, set up in the 40s by the UN to shelter Palestinian refugees and which had previously been a focus of resistence against both Israel and the Phalangists. Using as an excuse the necessity to eliminate "remaining" Palestinian militants, the Israelis, fully understanding the risk this presented to the refugees, sent in the Phalangists to the camps.
At 6 clock of the morning of 16 September 1982, the Phalangists entered the camps. A massacre ensued and went on, without interruption, for three days. Whenever it was night, the Israelis, obliging to the Phalangists request, fired flares over the area from mortars and planes to illuminate the area.
A US journalist described the aftermath thusly:
This was how Hirst described it:
The UN's General Assembly voted to condemn the massacre as a genocide. According to an Israeli report on the events, the Phalangists were directly responsible for the massacre, while the IDF was only so indirectly. A UN comission, with which the Israeli government refused to collaborate, held both Israel and the Phalangists was directly responsible for the genocide.
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