In fact, Israel was retaliating against Islamic fighters who have been stepping up ambushes in the “security zone” Israel still holds in Lebanon and launching Katyusha rockets into Israel itself. But this time Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin picked a punishingly hardhearted new strategy. His fighters, jets, helicopters, ships and artillery turned Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim heartland into a free-fire zone, deliberately pushing hundreds of thousands of people north toward Beirut. As many as 5,500 shells a day hammered 70 villages in the hilly, impoverished farming region; Israel announced lulls to permit residents to leave, but at least 130 people died. Over the short term, Israel succeeded in dealing Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Party of God, a body blow, but in the long term, embittered refugees may join the radicals to create an even bigger headache for Rabin the next time around.
The guns pounded for a full week before U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher arranged a cease-fire Saturday; Christopher will visit the Mideast this week in an effort to restart the flagging peace talks. The Israeli attack served notice on Syria that negotiations over the occupied Golan Heights won’t handcuff Rabin militarily. It has also proved that his Labor government has the stomach for such an action and thereby may have freed his hand at the talks. Hizbullah was simply growing too bold–and getting too effective–for the Israeli public. This time Rabin vowed: “Only if the attacks against our communities in the north are stopped will you return to your homes in the south.” The radicals merely echoed the threat. “Israel wants security,” Hizbullah Deputy Secretary General Naim Kassem told NEWSWEEK in Beirut. “If our citizens are to be disturbed, Israel must be disturbed, too.”
The refugees’ job, suggested Rabin, was to pressure Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri into clamping down on the radicals. The official line was that the villagers would turn against Hizbullah after they saw how much more intimidating Israel can be. “We have shifted the balance of horror,” says Ephraim Sneh, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Prime Minister Hariri then would ask Syrian President Hafez Assad to stop the flow of arms to the Shiite fighters.
An Israeli newspaper poll showed 93 percent public approval of the operation. The Israeli public, and especially Rabin’s right-wing opposition, have been demanding revenge. Hizbullah had hit Israel with more than 60 Katyusha rockets this year, as many as in all of 1992, and the radicals killed seven Israeli soldiers in the “security zone” last month. Even children believe that the shooting is necessary. “They want our country,” said 10-year-old Yaacov Asraf, who was waiting in a Qiryat Shemona community center for a ride south to a government-sponsored summer camp. The child also understood what was happening across the border. Lebanese children, he said, are going “to another city.” “They have no vacations,” he explained. “They’re not like us.”
But the Israeli left–including some members of Rabin’s coalition–bitterly objected to the tactics of Operation Accountability. Peace Now activist Avishai Margalit calls this a “hydraulic war”–an operation hurting civilians to pressure government. “That’s evil,” he said. Washington offered only polite criticism of the attacks on civilians. President Clinton praised the “commendable restraint” of Syria, which lost several soldiers in an attack in the Bekaa Valley. One top Clinton aide passed the episode off as “a distraction.” Arab diplomats in Damascus likewise deplored Israel’s incursion, but they treated it as a tactical move on the way to serious bargaining on a Golan Heights settlement and interim self-government in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no other game in town. And Hizbullah, which vows to wreck the peace process, doesn’t have many friends in the region. “Rabin and Assad shared one thing,” said a U.S. official. “Neither has an interest in letting this thing get out of control.”
Israel said Saturday that Hizbullah had agreed to stop firing rockets across the border. Israeli troops shut down their batteries, but officials made it plain any new attacks would bring tough reprisals. If the cease-fire holds, Christopher plans to push for a breakthrough in talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators. The mess in Lebanon, however tragic, may not derail that process completely. But by giving its neighbors to the north a bitter new grievance to nurse, Israel has only made an already difficult task even more tortuous.
