A Troubled Alliance

Lebanon’s shocking week further strains U.S.-Israel ties

Friction between the U.S. and its Middle East ally Israel has been generating rhetorical sparks ever since President Reagan proposed his bold peace plan on Sept. 1. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s instant and fiery rejection prompted sharp criticism of the Begin government in official Washington and even among a number of American Jews. But all that was eclipsed last week as a series of shocking events in Lebanon set U.S. and Israeli policies on a potential collision course.

First, an assassin’s bomb killed Lebanon’s President-elect Bashir Gemayel only days before he was to have taken office. Israeli tanks thereupon rolled into West Beirut, presumably to keep the fratricidal factions in the long-suffering nation from one another’s throats. And then, with the Israelis supposedly in control, a ghastly massacre took place. A still undetermined number of Palestinian refugees, most of them unarmed civilians, including women and children, were found shot to death in two camps in Beirut at week’s end. Survivors claimed that the Christian militia, long allied with Israel, had slaughtered hundreds, perhaps more (see WORLD).

Ronald Reagan conferred with Secretary of State George Shultz at the White House on Saturday, then all but directly blamed Israel for the atrocity in the camps. “We strongly opposed Israel’s move into West Beirut,” he said in a written statement, “both because we believed it wrong in principle and for fear that it would provoke further fighting. Israel claimed that its moves would prevent the kind of tragedy which has now occurred.” The President was “horrified,” he said, and felt “outrage and revulsion over the murders.” He “demanded”—a word rarely, if ever, used by a U.S. President in addressing an Israeli government—that Israeli forces promptly withdraw from West Beirut.

At the same time, the U.S. held out the hope that the latest tragedy in Lebanon might be transformed into a push for peace. “Despite and because of the additional bloody trauma which adds to Lebanon’s agonies,” Reagan declared, “we urge the Lebanese to unite quickly in support of their government to work for the future they so richly deserve. We will be with them. This terrible tragedy underscores the desperate need for a true peace in the Middle East, one which takes full account of the needs of the Palestinian people.”

Reagan’s own plan envisions self-government by the Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and eventual federation of those areas with Jordan, in return for Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist behind secure borders. American diplomats remain optimistic that after long consultations among Arab capitals, and between them and Washington, some Arab states will offer to negotiate on the basis of these proposals, and that Israeli yearning for peace will make the offer one Begin cannot refuse. The events of last week, says one State Department official, “make it more complicated but do not change our goals.”

The complications raised by Gemayel’s murder, the Israeli occupation of West Beirut and the massacre, however, are nasty indeed. They strengthen doubts among the Arabs about the ability of the U.S. to get Israel to make any concession whatsoever, and thus redouble Arab hesitancy about bargaining. Says Foreign Minister Kamal Hassan Ah of Egypt, the only Arab state that has diplomatic relations with Israel: “You cannot start negotiations when the Israelis are occupying an Arab capital.” Still, the swift, outraged worldwide reaction to the massacre might pressure Israel into pulling out of Beirut sooner than it had wished to do.

Even if the U.S. can somehow get talks about the Palestinian issue started again, they could all too easily get entangled with what now looms as a long and difficult set of negotiations to remove Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon and put that shattered country back together. “We have got to try very hard to maintain separate tracks” for the two sets of talks, says one U.S. official. Adds another: “If we get boxed in by Lebanon, we won’t get to first base on a [general Middle East] peace settlement for a very, very long time.”

Before the weekend massacre, the new crisis in Lebanon seemed likely to preclude indefinitely any debate within Israel over Reagan’s proposals. Begin easily won approval from the Knesset for his stinging rejection of the plan, and aides made no secret of the fact that his strategy would be to kill it by silence. U.S. officials saw little they could do to refocus attention within Israel on the plan. Grumbled a senior White House adviser: “A cynical person might think that the Israelis went into West Beirut to provoke us into some land of sanction and thus to discredit our peace plan inside Israel. But of course we don’t believe that.” The slaughter in the Beirut camps could, however, thwart Begin’s stalling strategy and force him to pay more heed to the proposals.

In the American Jewish community too the bloodbath could have far-reaching effects. Reagan’s proposals initially won sympathy from a few leaders, but that soon seemed to wane. Some 300 wealthy contributors to Israel did give polite applause to Secretary of State George Shultz, the chief architect of the plan, when he addressed a meeting of the United Jewish Appeal last week in Manhattan. But the same audience two nights later gave a much warmer reception to an attack on the plan by Shultz’s predecessor.

Speaking without a prepared text, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig described Reagan’s call for a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as “a very serious mistake.” The final status of those territories is “a thing for the local nations to decide, not for the U.S. to dictate”—clearly implying that Reagan is trying to do just that. His audience rose to its feet and loudly cheered Haig’s concluding line: “When we are true to Israel, we are true to ourselves.”

Arab responses to Reagan’s initiative have been slightly more encouraging. True, Washington has had to comfort itself by noting what the 20 members of the Arab League did not say at their summit meeting in Fez two weeks ago, rather than what they did say. The Fez summiteers called again for an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital, a plan that is as unacceptable to the U.S. as it is to Israel. But they did not flatly reject Reagan’s plan, and phrases hi their proposal could be read as an implicit willingness to recognize Israel.

Egypt’s President Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein were more forthcoming last week. The Egyptian President, who was not invited to Fez, said the Arab plan “lacks a mechanism” for achieving its goals, and thus Reagan’s proposals are preferable. In an interview with the BBC, Hussein openly declared his willingness to establish “normal relations” with Israel eventually and said of Reagan’s plan: “I believe it to be a very constructive and a very positive move, and I would certainly like to see it continue and evolve.”

At the same time, however, the King pointed out one huge catch to his enthusiasm. Shultz has argued that Jordan and representatives of the West Bank Palestinians must enter the now suspended talks between Israel and Egypt on Palestinian autonomy if Reagan’s plan is to have any chance of success. That, said Hussein, Jordan cannot yet do because the Fez summit gave him no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. Indeed, it reaffirmed a declaration of the 1974 Rabat summit that the P.L.O. is the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

Though it was defeated in Lebanon and its guerrilla fighters are now dispersed throughout the Arab world, the P.L.O. has emerged with its political prestige still strong, as was illustrated last week by the Pope’s agreement to meet Arafat. Also the organization is bound to win considerable sympathy after the refugee slaughter.

The Pope-Arafat meeting infuriated Begin. He declared in a broadcast that “the church, which had stood by during the Holocaust and when Christians were being killed in Lebanon, is now prepared to meet the man who initiated the latter, and is trying to complete the Nazis’ mission.” The Vatican took the rare step of handing out a press communique branding the Israeli charges “an insult to the truth” and noting that John Paul, at Auschwitz hi 1979, had condemned Nazi genocide.

Concerned about gestures that might enhance the image and influence of the P.L.O., Washington quietly informed the Vatican that it considered the Pope’s meeting with Arafat unhelpful. Indeed, there were questions about why the spiritual leader of the world’s largest Christian body would meet openly with the commander of an organization that has in the past endorsed terrorism as a tactic. John Paul kept the 20-min. audience low key; according to the Vatican communiqué, he told Arafat of his “constant concern to favor the difficult process of peace in the Middle East.”

It is hard to see how the Pope’s reception of Arafat advances that concern. No Israeli government can be expected to negotiate with the P.L.O. as long as it will not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Equally, no Arab nation can be expected to join Egypt in the autonomy negotiations with Israel unless the P.L.O. gives at least tacit approval. U.S. officials believe that the P.L.O. may give that approval, eventually and grudgingly. One reason was offered last week by a member of the Palestine National Council, the quasi parliament that theoretically directs the P.L.O.: “With our military option no longer existing, we realize we must work politically, and the only way to do that is through Washington, since America is the only country that has any real influence on Israel.”

On the other hand, Syria and some elements in the P.L.O. reportedly want to draw the Soviet Union into Middle East negotiations.

Moscow, which has been frozen out of the Middle East by its failure to give any effective support to its Syrian, Iraqi and P.L.O. allies, would certainly jump at any invitation. At a Kremlin dinner last week for President Ali Nasser Mohammed of South Yemen, Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s plan as “basically vicious” and put forward one of his own that paralleled the Fez resolutions. Israelis, Arabs and Americans all appraised it, accurately, as containing little new.

The week’s bloody events in Beirut once again forced the U.S. to try to choose between short-term problems with Israel and long-term problems with the Arab states. The Israelis violated an understanding with Washington by moving into West Beirut. The massacre compounded the problem: it raised questions about the determination and the ability of the U.S. to see to it that Israel lives up to its commitments to guarantee the security of refugees in Lebanon and others in future arrangements for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The renewed bloodshed in Lebanon, as President Reagan noted last week, proves the urgent need for a broad agreement. Unless all parties quickly acknowledge that need, however, the week’s multiple tragedies could prove not merely a severe short-term setback to the tortuous search for peace in the Middle East but a long-term setback as well. —By George J. Church.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/Washington and Roberto Suro/Damascus