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Chapter 1: What was Lebanon like before the 1982 invasion?
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You were a kid, weren't you? Five years old in 1982 and your family lived on the front line. Kim, people have this image of Lebanon back then as being some kind of war zone, some kind of sort of flattened landscape, just shell pockmarked. What was it like? I mean, you know, you were there, you knew it. What was it like? Describe what Lebanon was in 1982.
So sometimes I think that the Lebanon that we imagine from the 60s and the 70s is a myth. Sometimes I think it is real, but it was definitely before the civil war erupted. And it's known as the civil war. I don't call it that. And I'll explain in a moment. I call it the Lebanese war in my next book, which is coming out later this year.
In the 60s and 70s and late 50s, you know, Lebanon was this cosmopolitan place. The culture of the Levant exemplified at its best in Lebanon. You know, there was trade and a casino and the International Festival of Baalbek with international singers and performers and musicians and dancers, you know, ballet and, you know, others all coming to there.
Best food in the Middle East. That is still true of Lebanon. Best wine in the Middle East, best Arak in the Middle East, place of many pleasures.
Yes, absolutely. But it was always a place of trouble in a way, the way it was created. And the first signs of trouble were... came in 1969 when Lebanon was press-ganged into signing something called the Cairo Accords, which would give Palestinian refugees and Palestinian militants, rather, armed guerrillas who were in Lebanon, refugees since 1948 and the creation of Israel, and then subsequently
you know, after 1970, a more influx of Palestinian militants into Lebanon. 1969 was the first sign that something might really go wrong in Lebanon because you had the rise of armed militancy by Palestinians attacking Israel from Lebanon.
Particularly after Black September, which we talked about in an earlier episode when they were kicked out of Jordan.
Correct. So they were kicked out of Jordan, which crushed them because the king didn't want a Palestinian state within a state, didn't want his territory used as a launching pad for a war against Israel. He'd already lost one before. And they were pushed into Lebanon and Syria put an embargo. Syria, which borders Lebanon, put an embargo on Lebanon.
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Chapter 2: How did the Cairo Accords influence the Lebanese conflict?
So the Jemayel family is a well-established family in Lebanon, Christian family. And Pierre Jemayel, the founder of the Falangist party, was inspired by the Hitler youths and the Falangs in Italy. And he was impressed by the discipline and all of that. And that party, if my memory serves me right, was founded in the late 30s. And then it becomes eventually a military party, a militia.
during the civil war.
They have this saying, don't they, uniting the Christian rifle. There's very much a, you know, sort of religion at the point of a gun. That's how we're going to make it prevail.
So what they were trying to do when the civil war started, and certainly Bashir Jumayil wanted to do is unite the Christian rifle so that there would be one Christian faction fighting the others rather than lots of different Christian factions trying to do their own thing. So that idea of uniting the Christian rifle in Arabic is something that Bashir Jumail
begins to do as the the the war unfolds and he feels that he needs to bring everybody under one one umbrella and it's a very bloody this is where you have civil war that comes into play because he starts confronting his own people, killing his own rivals within the Christian parties.
But to go back to the Christians courting Syria and Israel, some of the first conversations that happen, happen off the coast of Lebanon in a boat between Pierre Jmeil, Bashir Jmeil, Amin Jmeil on the one hand, but also Israeli officials like Yitzhak Rabin from Labour. And it's a very interesting conversation
Because Pierre Jmeil is quoted as saying, in a way, and I'm paraphrasing, I bow my head in shame that I'm coming to ask you, because I am an Arab and I don't want Israel's help, but that's the only option that we have. And so that is an interesting nuance that is sometimes also lost, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes, yeah, it's just how history gets retold.
It was a controversial move, even within the phalange, but it is one that they embraced.
So this boat diplomacy, Kim, that you've described, is this the beginning of the relationship between, I mean, you mentioned sort of Pierre Jamel, who we should remind people is Bashir Jamel's father, but Bashir and Ariel Sharon are going to get particularly close. What is the trajectory of that friendship?
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Chapter 3: What role did Ariel Sharon play in the 1982 invasion?
And Ronald Reagan calls Begin and he says, Mr. Prime Minister, I have a Holocaust on my screen. And that does not go down well with Begin, who is, and his family, a survivor of the Holocaust. And he gets very, very angry. But there is then a ceasefire declared mid-August. And it is at the beginning of the negotiations for the PLO's exit and Yasser Arafat's exit from Lebanon.
Because Yasser Arafat, with all his shortcomings and all the fury and sympathy he elicited in Lebanon, had... the, I would say, foresight or decency to listen to even some of his Lebanese allies who said, we can't take this anymore and we need to save Lebanon. So he agrees on the exit and the negotiations around that are very complicated.
So let's talk about those complex negotiations because the one man who's chosen, you know, as the Reagan pressure, you know, if it comes right from the top, the pressure is huge.
To sort this out or to have some kind of exit strategy or release of a valve is this American envoy, Philip Habib, who is actually of Lebanese extraction, Lebanese Mennonite Christian, served during World War II, joined the Foreign Service in 1949, was a key advisor in Vietnam. He's got the pedigree and he's got the chops to do this. A Brooklyn-born and also a bulldozer.
So how does Habib go about this and what does he accomplish?
So it's quite complicated to negotiate this exit because the Israelis are adamant that Americans and Palestinians will not sit in the same room, that there can be no direct contact between the Palestinians and the Americans. So all of the back channels that I described in the past are still secret.
And during the middle of a war, when you're trying to negotiate something, it really helps to be face-to-face with the people you're trying to negotiate this with. There was a time when Ambassador Dillon could just call a number and get a Palestinian official on the other line, including sometimes Arafat himself, something that the Israelis, I'm sure, found out about and were furious about doing.
as well. But in this particular situation, they did not want the Americans and the Palestinians to sit in the same room. And actually, practically, it wasn't possible because by then the Americans had vacated their embassy in West Beirut. They were sitting all working in the residence of the American ambassador outside of Beirut, overlooking the city.
It was too dangerous to go in and out of a city that was being bombed by the Israelis. The American officials in Beirut were sending signals back to Washington to say, you know, you've got to stop this. Ambassador Dillon himself told me about how he was trying to plead again with his capital. American-made bombs are killing Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. This has got to stop.
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