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Intel - History
Lebanon Massacre

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• Israeli raids in Lebanon drive out approximately 200,000 Palestinians from southern Lebanon

US Secretary of State Haig

• But Israel lacked a pretext to invade its defenseless northern neighbor. Haig told Sharon Israel needed "a major, internationally recognized provocation" before it attacked Lebanon. (Gun for Hire, p. 223)

Israeli troops tried to provoke a crisis
in Lebanon five times, 1981-1982

• For months, Begin and Sharon tried to provoke the Palestinians into an armed action to justify a large-scale Israeli attack. Five times between July 1981 and June 1982, Israel massed troops on the frontier - and five times called them back because the Palestinians refused to fight: In those eleven months, not a single shot was fired by Palestinians across Israel's northern border. It was the same with the Syrians. (Gun for Hire, p. 223)

Ambassador Shlomo Argov

• On June 3, 1982, three men, Hussein Ghassan Said, Marwan al-Banna, and Nawaf al-Rosan approached Argov as he got into his car after a banquet at the Dorchester Hotel, in Park Lane, London.
• Said shot Argov in the head. Though not killed, he remained in a coma for three months.
• The events left him permanently paralysed and in need of constant medical assistance, which he received at the Hadassah Hospital, in Jerusalem.The attempted assassins were members of Abu Nidal's organization.

• A group of Palestinian terrorists shot and grievely wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel. The gunmen belonged to the breakaway group led by Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna), Yasser Arafat's sworn enemy. (The Iron Wall, p. 403)
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• In "retaliation" for the attempt to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador, Israel carried out heavy bombardment of Palestinian and Lebanese targets in Lebanon (where the Abu Nidal group does not even have an office). (The Fateful Triangle, p. 197)

• The pretext for war was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London. This act fell well short of Haig's criterion, insofar as it had nothing to do with the situation along the Israeli-Lebanese border and was not ordered by Yasser Arafat or Fatah but by a disident Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal. As Shlomo ben-Ami observes, "Haig should have known that Israeli politicians are not especially sensitive to nuances and understatements when he used unnecessarily ambiguous language in his conversation with Sharon." (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, p. 369)

Woodward: Israel bombed
Lebanon for bogus reasons

• Israeli intelligence, the CIA and soon the British knew that this stated reason was bogus. The Israeli ambassador's assailants were part of the Abu Nidal faction that had split off from the mainline PLO, harbored in Lebanon. The Israelis were striking the wrong Palestinians, but in Sharon's view that made little difference. Within days, his Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was on the outskirts of Beirut. (Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, p. 237)

Menache Begin did not care that Abu
Nidal was the enemy of the PLO

• Begin was not interested in the details of who had shot Argov and why. An emergency meeting of the cabinet was summoned for the morning of 4 June...Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."

• Two terrorist targets in Beirut bombed by Israel
• PLO Ammunition Depot in a municipal stadium
• Terrorist combat training base also bombed

• On June 4 and 5, Israeli aircraft bombed West Beirut, while long-range artillery and naval guns pounded Palestinian refugee camps, causing hundreds of casualties. (Gun for Hire, p. 224)

• The five ships of Mediterranean Amphibious Ready Group (MARG) 2-82 arrived off the coast of Rota, Spain, on June 6, 1982.
• On board were 1,800 Marines comprising the 32nd MAU, commanded by Colonel Jim Mead.

• BLT 2/8, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Johnston, was embarked as the landing force.
• There were also air, artillery and logistics support units aboard.

• IDF penetrated Lebanon
• IDF advanced along coastal routes
• Terrorist bases and camps destroyed
• Artillery batteries and posted, as well as armored vehicles destroyed

• Nineteen Syrian Surface-to-Air Missile sites completely destroyed in the Bekaa Valley, with three more badly damaged
• 85 of Syria's Soviet (mostly MIG 23s), jets destroyed
• IDF did not lose a single jet

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• President Reagan agrees “in principle” to send a small number of Marines to Lebanon as a peacekeeping force to keep a modicum of order in the ongoing civil war.

• Letters appeared in the press from the generation of Holocaust survivors expressing fear and concern over what they felt was happening. One, Dr. Shlomo Shmelzman, was forbidden by the directors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center to conduct a hunger strike there — his son was serving with the paratroopers in Lebanon. He wrote a letter to the press announcing his hunger strike in protest against the Lebanon war. (The Fateful Triangle, pp. 257-258)

• In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw ghetto, through labor camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns, and refugee camps. I cannot accept the technocratic cruelty of the bombing, destroying and killing of human beings. I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear “dirty Arabs” and I remember “dirty Jews.” I hear about “closed areas” and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear “two-legged beasts” and I remember “Untermenschen.” I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder ... Too many things in Israel remind me of too many other things from my childhood. (The Fateful Triangle, pp. 257-258)

• The Marines will arrive in Lebanon on August 25, and will find themselves in the middle of bloody factional fighting between several Lebanese groups as well as Israeli invasion forces.

Bombing of Marines Barracks

• On April 18, 1983, the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, is bombed by a suicide truck attack, killing 63 people.
• The 2,000 pounds of explosives was delivered by a pickup truck.

• ...the liberal community inside Israel threw its weight behind organisations like Peace Now, which rejected Likud's advocacy of brute force and sought negotiations with the Palestinians over the future of the occupied territories. (Absence of Peace, p. 13)

• In October 1983, 241 Marines will die when a suicide bomber attacks their barracks.
• On October 23, 1983, a Marine barracks in Beirut is bombed by another suicide truck attack, killing 241 Marines.

• Thus, at 6:22 a.m. on October 23, 1983, the Marine mission in Beirut took a disastrous turn. A terrorist truck bomb carrying dynamite wrapped around gas cylinders exploded inside the BLT barracks, killing 241 and injuring more than 100 while they slept. FBI investigators would later determine that it was the largest non-nuclear blast they had ever studied.

• In February 1984, the US military will depart Lebanon.

• Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's defense minister at the time and later prime minister, reflected, "I believe that among the many surprises, and most of them not for the good, that came out of the war in Lebanon, the most dangerous is that the war let the Shiites out of the bottle. No one predicted it; I couldn't find it in any intelligence report...If as a result of the war in Lebanon, we replace PLO terrorism in southern Lebanon with Shiite terrorism, we have done the worst [thing] in our struggle against terrorism. In twenty years of PLO terrorism, no one PLO terrorist made himself a live bomb...In my opinion, the Shiites have the potential for a kind of terrorism that we have not yet experienced. [source: Dreams and Shadows, p. 169-170]