F
or nearly half a century, Israel has waged a series of military campaigns against Lebanon, claiming each time to be ensuring the security of its northern border. It was in the name of fighting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that the Israeli army invaded Lebanon for the first time in March 1978. But the US administration under President Jimmy Carter forced Prime Minister Menachem Begin's government to withdraw its troops. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), established to resolve the crisis, was nevertheless unable to deploy in the "security zone" that Israel continued to control along its northern border through Lebanese auxiliaries.
Subscribers only
UN peacekeepers have been bogged down in Lebanon since 1978
The Israeli invasion of June 1982 was on an entirely different scale, as Begin was determined to eliminate the PLO not only from southern Lebanon but also from Beirut, where Yasser Arafat was under siege for two and a half months along with thousands of his supporters. After UNIFIL was humiliated by the Israeli invaders, who even killed a Norwegian peacekeeper, a multinational force made up of the United States, France and Italy supervised the evacuation of Arafat and the Palestinian fighters from the Lebanese capital.
