Back Across Lebanon's Border

But this time, a bloody raid gets a bloodless Israeli response

Israeli army units last week moved into southern Lebanon, by now familiar territory to them, in response to a terrorist attack on one of their border settlements. An Israeli assault force probed several miles into the war-torn country with armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and more than 300 troops. The armor quickly fanned out into the six-mile-wide border enclave controlled by Israel's Lebanese Christian Militia allies. Other Israeli units, mostly infantry, moved farther north, along areas patrolled by the 6,000-man United Nations peace-keeping force that has been deployed in southern Lebanon for the past two years.

The Israelis' declared intent was to protect their northern settlements from Palestinian guerrilla raids that both the U.N. and the Christian Militia forces seemed powerless to stop. Unlike their previous search-and-destroy missions into Lebanon last May and September, however, the Israelis' foray this time was bloodless. Then, by week's end--in a surprisingly cooperative response to U.N. entreaties and some arm twisting from Washington--they began to withdraw.

The incursion had been provoked by a raid early last week on the northern kibbutz of Misgav-Am on the Lebanese border. Seizing six hostages in the kibbutz nursery, they demanded the release of several Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Following an abortive predawn rescue attempt, Israeli troops stormed the concrete dormitory. They killed all five terrorists and saved all but one of the hostages: a two-year-old boy who had apparently been killed in the original raid. One Israeli soldier and the kibbutz secretary also died in the attack.

The kibbutz raid was the work of the Arab Liberation Front, an Iraqi-based organization affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The timing could hardly have been worse for the Palestinian cause, which has lately been gaining support on the diplomatic front while downplaying its terrorist image. P.L.O. officials in Beirut indicated that they had not even been forewarned of the attack.

The incident nonetheless nourished the claims of Israeli Premier Menachem Begin and his hard-lining supporters, who contend that full-fledged self-determination on the West Bank would lead to a P.L.O. state and a permanent threat to Israeli security. To dramatize that message, at the funerals for the slain kibbutz members, Begin declared: "We are no longer defenseless. Permit me to say we have a really magnificent army--you saw it yesterday." Within 48 hours of the kibbutz rescue operation, the Israeli army had rolled across the Lebanese border.

In a stiff protest against the incursion, Lebanon's U.N. Ambassador Ghassan Tueni accused Israel of an "insolent violation" of Lebanese territory. But U.N. officials postponed action while Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim wrote Begin a personal letter of intercession. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, sternly reminded Israel that its action was in conflict with American policy in support of Lebanese sovereignty. These combined pressures evidently proved effective: on Friday an Israeli army spokesman announced that the government had "begun to withdraw from southern Lebanon those of its forces that have completed their missions." The State Department was assured that the pullout would be completed within days. And with that, when Begin flies into Washington for talks with President Carter this week, at least one source of dissension will have been removed.

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