Beirut Goes Up in Flames

By William E. Smith

With bombs and rockets, the Israelis tighten the noose on the P.L.O.

... Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.

All across West Beirut, hour after hour, came the shattering detonations in crowded city streets, the crump, crump, crump of exploding bombs and shells, and then, after the brilliant flashes of red, the rising clouds of destruction.

The Israeli government insisted that it was not "the real thing"--the long-threatened Israeli invasion of the battered enclave of the capital by the sea. But to the 500,000 residents of West Beirut, as well as to the 6,000 Palestinian fighters hidden among them, it was as close to total onslaught as anyone could imagine. Twice last week the Israelis staged attacks on the besieged western areas of Beirut that in sheer destructive power, though not in casualties, wreaked devastation that stirred memories of the punishment inflicted on European cities during World War II and recalled the fate of Jericho, the enemy city that the ancient Israelites had laid waste. One observer, studying the wreckage, cited the sardonic words of a soldier quoted by the Roman historian Tacitus: "They made a desert and called it peace."

Lebanese authorities announced that the Israeli attacks on West Beirut, where only one in about 80 people is a Palestinian guerrilla, had killed 400 to 500 civilians and wounded 1,000 more, the heaviest casualty toll since the invasion began on June 6. After a brief ceasefire, some 10,000 Lebanese streamed out of the target area, wending their way through streets filled with debris and smoldering ruins, and found refuge in East Beirut or outside the city. The Israeli attacks, which aroused wide opposition around the world, came just as U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib reportedly was on the verge of working out an agreement for the Palestine Liberation Organization to evacuate Lebanon. The assaults also angered Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and thus jeopardized any resumption of the Camp David talks with Israel in search of a long-term settlement of the Palestinian issue.

In a sense, the clash between the Israelis and the P.L.O. seemed inevitable, given the implacable hatred and deep suspicion between the two old enemies and the nature of the stalemate in West Beirut. The Israelis, who had hoped for a quick victory over the redoubts of the P.L.O. in Lebanon, were impatient and angry. They did not believe that the P.L.O. leadership had yet accepted the fact it must leave Lebanon. They were furious at U.S. insistence that they must ease up on West Beirut at precisely the time when they thought sustained pressure on the P.L.O. was most needed. The P.L.O., more desperate than ever before, was negotiating the terms of its withdrawal from Lebanon. But the organization was also hoping that international condemnation of Israeli actions in Lebanon would give it a little breathing room.

By week's end the Israeli forces had strengthened their grip on the southern sector of West Beirut, where most of the P.L.O. guerrillas are believed to be based. Some authorities, noting the intensity of last week's military action, thought the Israelis had abandoned the idea of an all-out onslaught on West Beirut in favor of a series of limited attacks aimed at defeating the P.L.O. guerrillas step by step. In the Habib negotiations, many details concerning the P.L.O. withdrawal from Lebanon remained to be settled, but at midweek the P.L.O. sent Habib a new set of proposals that seemed promising. President Reagan asked Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to withdraw Israeli forces to the positions they had held the previous week and to maintain a ceasefire long enough to allow Habib to work out an agreement. But the Israelis refused to pull back, either because they doubted the good faith of the P.L.O. in the negotiations or because they were determined to score further gains against the P.L.O. before world pressure obliged them to accept some sort of settlement.

The week of action began on Sunday with a large-scale Israeli attack. For 14 hours Israeli forces bombarded West Beirut with the fiercest shelling since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon began. Israeli artillery, warplanes and gunboats struck at wide sections of West Beirut, including many districts that contained few guerrillas and indeed hardly any Palestinians.

After the ferocity of the Sunday attack and the worldwide condemnation that it produced, many diplomats in Lebanon expected a few days of respite. They were wrong. On Tuesday, reports reached West Beirut that the Israelis were massing tanks and armored personnel carriers at various points near the port and along the Green Line separating Muslim West Beirut and predominantly Christian East Beirut. The attack began at midnight Tuesday with exchanges of artillery and tank fire, and increased in intensity. By 2 a.m. the entire city rocked to the sound of the big guns.

In the Wednesday attack, the Israelis made four separate thrusts. One jabbed at the site of the Lebanese National Museum. As tanks rumbled up, ominously gunning their engines, the Israelis used loudspeakers to urge civilians to flee for their lives. The tanks surged on to attack the Hippodrome, a race track in a once elegant park, dominated by pine trees. Israeli M48 Patton tanks lined up on the border of the park, and troops seized nearby high-rise buildings. The assault blocked the P.L.O.'s access to ammunition depots and nearby bunkers, and gave the Israelis a staging area for future operations.

Israeli tanks also spearheaded the attack against the Beirut port region in the north of the city, but the real drive came from the south. Pushing north from International Airport, which they had seized three days earlier, the Israelis went on to take the P.L.O. military stronghold inside the Ouzai area and surround the Burj al Barajneh refugee camp. "From here the road is open to the main P.L.O. stronghold at Fakhani," said a paratrooper colonel. The area contains most of the P.L.O.'s main headquarters, including that of Chairman Yasser Arafat. The fourth thrust moved from East Beirut through Taiuni toward the important refugee camp of Shatila. The overall Israeli strategy appeared to be a pincer movement, driving west and north.

The extent of the Israeli attack seemed to stun some units of the P.L.O., although others fought back valiantly. Noting that P.L.O. counterfire was becoming sporadic, an Israeli general told TIME Correspondent David Halevy, "I hope they are running out of ammunition, I hope they are close to the breaking point."

Until last week, most of the Israeli attacks had been concentrated on Fakhani, the Palestinian refugee camps and the southern suburbs. But now Israeli artillery and gunboats sent round after round crashing into Hamra, the downtown section of West Beirut, where the P.L.O. has no military positions except for mobile rockets and artillery pieces in the streets. As buildings sagged and crumbled, fires raged out of control. There was no water to help quench the flames; the Israelis had shut off the flow.

The Israelis claimed that they were making every effort to avoid civilian casualties. According to one senior Israeli officer, his orders were to search and destroy the enemy but to avoid civilian casualties by any means. Nonetheless, the Wednesday assault was seemingly designed to intimidate the civilian population. Shells fell everywhere. People fled by the thousands to basement shelters. A few were bombed out twice in one day, first from their own homes and then from the homes of friends. The below-ground coffee shop of the elegant Bristol Hotel was filled with refugees until the hotel was shelled and fire broke out on the upper floors. Patients from some parts of the American University Hospital had to be carried to the basement because the building was being hit. Later the hospital, its wards overflowing with the wounded, sent out appeals for gasoline to run its generators.

Countless buildings in the Hamra area were badly damaged, including the Information Ministry and the headquarters of An Nahar, the newspaper of record for the entire Arab world. Last week, on its 50th anniversary, it was unable to pub lish for the first time. Inside the An Nahar building, the offices of several American news organizations, including United Press International, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, were damaged or destroyed by phosphorus bombs. In late afternoon, Israeli artillery fire hit the Commodore Hotel, where many foreign correspondents were staying.

Living conditions in the besieged city were worse than ever. There has been no electricity since the Israelis switched it off on July 26, cutting the water supply at the same time. The water was briefly turned on again, though this did not help apartment dwellers; the electrically powered pumps would not work. New wells were being dug all over the city, and trucks carrying water toured every district. Much of the water was unclean and carried with it a risk of typhoid and cholera, according to U.N. health officials. People had little choice but to drink it anyway. Fresh fruit and vegetables were no longer available, flour was in short supply, and lines formed at dawn outside shops that were lucky enough to have any bread to sell. The siege came at the height of the torrid Mediterranean summer, increasing the general distress. When available at all, a $3 case of bottled water was selling for $10. The Palestinian guerrillas were less affected by the food shortage than the general population because they had built up their own supplies.

The Israeli cutoff of food and water was presumably aimed at heightening the tension between the local populace and the commandos. Instead, for the moment at least, the attack seemed merely to make the civilians angrier at the Israelis. A Lebanese woman, Mrs. Ihsan al Sirhi, stood in the shattered lobby of what had been her apartment house. The day before, her husband and one daughter had been killed in an Israeli raid. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she told a foreign journalist, "My daughter, my husband, blown up, dead. Thirty years of work wiped out. But God help me, they will pay for it. They took Palestine and now they have taken Lebanon. Where is there any justice?"

On Boustany Street in the Arab University area, Usama Zein sat in front of his small grocery store. The street was a litter of debris; power lines were down, apartments lay open to the sun, and the street was filled with rubble. Usama Zein said that about a quarter of the people in the neighborhood were still there, tucked away somewhere in the destroyed buildings, trying to survive. "Where else can we go?" he asked. "At first, some of us went to the schools for shelter, but then the schools were hit. So we thought, well, if we have to die, we should die at home."

Out of hundreds of shops along the much bombed Corniche Mazraa, only the Idriss grocery store was open for business.

The manager, Ahmed Lebdi, explained that on days when there was no shelling he tried to stay open for several hours. "Most of what we sell now is canned because there is no refrigeration," he said. "We have no milk, no bottled water. I don't know what we'll do. But I'll stay open."

At Zaidanieh, in the heart of the Sunni section of West Beirut, the atmosphere was one of defiance. A resident declared angrily, "Let Israel come. We know the Israelis are stronger, but we will win." He then took a visitor to his nearby home and showed him 15 rocket-propelled grenades that were lined up on a spare bed.

To people who have known Beirut in the past, the devastated city is an appalling sight. There is practically no vehicular traffic because there is no gasoline; the price of a five-gallon can reached $80 some weeks ago, and then the gas ran out. In Fakhani, almost every large building has suffered some damage. The sports stadium is smashed and the airport badly damaged; burned-out skeletons of jetliners sprawl on the tarmac.

The fighting jeopardized anew the negotiations led by U.S. Special Envoy Habib to get the P.L.O. peacefully out of the country. Clouding the diplomatic proceedings from the beginning has been the basic mistrust between the Israeli and the P.L.O. leaders, a wariness that has made the talks difficult and sporadic fighting all but a certainty. P.L.O. fears have been reinforced by the fact that there have been at least four attempts on Arafat's life within the past six weeks. Two operations centers were bombed shortly after Arafat visited them. Last Friday an Israeli jet attacked an eight-story apartment building in the Sanayeh district of West Beirut, killing or injuring 250 people. Contrary to reports, the building had not been used as an Arafat headquarters, although it did house the family of Arafat's chief personal bodyguard. A short while later, a car bomb exploded near by. P.L.O. leaders were convinced that the Israelis were closely following Arafat's movements and trying to kill him before the crisis in Lebanon had been resolved.

In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion, Israeli policy about Lebanon was two-pronged. First, Jerusalem would cooperate, to a degree, with the Habib negotiations, especially since the Reagan Administration was so committed to the talks. Second, Prime Minister Begin's government would periodically apply heavy military pressure on P.L.O. positions in West Beirut in order to remind the Palestinian leaders that their only choice was to leave Lebanon. Israeli officials declared that these "salami-style" maneuvers of slicing away at the Palestinian redoubt in West Beirut would be conducted only in response to P.L.O. ceasefire violations. But there were bound to be violations, as the Israelis well knew, because the P.L.O. is made up of so many factions, often at odds with one another. Further, the Israelis flatly admitted that, as always, they reserved the right to make a hugely disproportionate response to P.L.O. attacks.

Even so, the Israelis were concerned last week that the U.S. would feel that their attack on West Beirut was a punishment that did not fit whatever crime the P.L.O. may have committed. Major General Menachem Meron, Israel's senior military attache in Washington, called in reporters to try to claim that the Wednesday assault on West Beirut was aimed only at rooting out P.L.O. gunners who were firing on Israeli troops. But Meron had told the same reporters two months earlier that Israeli forces would go no deeper than 25 miles into Lebanon. When bluntly asked why reporters should believe him this time, the general replied, "That is a political question, and I will not answer political questions."

Joining the effort to down-play the assault on West Beirut, Defense Minisrter Ariel Sharon, architect of the Lebanese invasion, complained to the U.S. Government about Habib's reports to Washington that Israel was firing 1,000 shells into West Beirut for every shell fired by the Palestinians. Sharon denounced such accounts as "mendacious" and said that they were based on observations from afar.

As it happened, Sharon had special reason to be sensitive to criticism. According to reports from Jerusalem, the Begin government failed to consult or inform either the Israeli Cabinet or the ministerial defense committee of the plan for the Wednesday assault on West Beirut. At a Thursday-night Cabinet meeting, some ministers asked who had approved the operation and when this had been done. Prime Minister Begin, regarding the inquiries as a personal attack, angrily attempted to justify the military action. He also admitted that the decision had been made by Sharon and himself at a private meeting. Said Begin: "Even David Ben-Gurion had to make decisions of the same nature on his own." The explanation caused speculation among some Israelis that Begin and Sharon, fearing a defeat of the assault plan at the Cabinet level, had simply decided to proceed on their own. It also strengthened the view that Sharon enjoys too much power within the Begin government. Remarked a senior U.S. diplomat: "We are beginning to wonder if the political leadership in Jerusalem is being manipulated by the military." Said an Israeli Labor Party leader of the ambitious Sharon: "He has discovered completely the potentials of power, but he has not yet discovered its limitations."

Ironically, the attacks on West Beirut came just as Habib thought that his peacemaking mission was on the brink of success. Early last week a Habib aide placed what State Department officials termed a "euphoric" call to Washington. Habib, who had been repeatedly in touch with the P.L.O. through his Lebanese intermediaries, sent home a cable that was a bit more cautious, indicating considerable optimism but noting that there were still t's to be crossed and i's to be dotted." Even so, declared one top State Department official, "we had 95% and only needed a couple of more days to get 100%."

But the Israelis belittled Habib's overtures. To members of Begin's Cabinet, the envoy's letter was couched in precisely the same vague diplomatese that has come to infuriate the Israelis in their dealings with the American. Habib's letter was peppered with such phrases as "I have reason to believe" and "We can assume," according to an Israeli official familiar with its contents. Begin even quoted some of the phrases in his letter to President Reagan to show his skepticism about the Habib mission. With all its hedges, Habib's proposal seemingly reinforced the growing Israeli conviction that diplomacy was becoming useless in coping with the P.L.O.

Jerusalem was also hostile to U.N. efforts. Israeli troops simply turned back a convoy of U.N. observers who had arrived at the outskirts of Beirut in an effort to carry out a Security Council resolution instructing them to take up positions in the Lebanese capital.

The next day Begin said that U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar would not be welcome to visit Jerusalem if he went through with a plan to meet with P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat. Still later in the week, when the Security Council debated a resolution to condemn Israel for defying previous U.N. demands on Lebanon, Israeli Ambassador Yehuda Blum got into an angry argument with Soviet Ambassador Richard Ovinnikov. The Soviet diplomat told the council that his government favored "severe action" against Israel because it was "imperative that Beirut not join the list of cities such as Warsaw and Coventry that were destroyed by Hitler's Fascist troops." In a fury, Blum lashed out at Ovinnikov, terming his statement "obscene" and taunting him for the Soviet Union's use of "humanitarian tanks" in subjugating the peoples of Afghanistan, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

To the Israelis, it seemed that their tough policy in Lebanon had been altogether effective. Soon after the Sunday attack, they noted, the P.L.O. made two important concessions. First, the leaders dropped their demand that an international force be in place in West Beirut be fore their organization moved out. The P.L.O. does not want to depart through a cordon of Israeli forces. Said one U.S. expert: "If the choice is between martyrdom and walking out through Israeli lines they [the P.L.O.] will stay and fight." Second, the guerrillas said they would no longer insist that Israel complete a minimal withdrawal of its own forces before the evacuation begins.

On Thursday, the P.L.O. forwarded a new set of proposals, including a timetable for leaving Beirut, to Lebanese Prime Minister Chafik Wazzan. Despite the effects of the Israeli bombardment, Wazzan managed to deliver the proposals to Habib, who in turn passed them on to Jerusalem. The working plan reportedly involved a 14-day period for the withdrawal. On the first day, the 6,000 guerrillas in West Beirut would pull back to refugee camps and be replaced by an international peace-keeping force, including troops from the U.S. and other countries. In the next three days, Palestinians bound for Jordan and Iraq would travel by bus or truck to the Bekaa Valley. From there they would proceed by road to Amman or by air to Baghdad. After that, the Palestinians heading for Egypt and perhaps other Arab countries would depart by air or sea. During the second week, the last of the guerrillas in West Beirut would leave by road for Damascus. The P.L.O. leaders would stay until the end to oversee the withdrawal. An alternate plan calls for the first group of Palestinians to be evacuated from Beirut aboard a French ship to the Egyptian port of Alexandria and the Jordanian port of Aqaba.

All told, the withdrawal would affect not only the 6,000 P.L.O. fighters in West Beirut but most of the other 20,000 elsewhere in Lebanon. Jordan has reportedly agreed to take some 5,000 members of the P.L.O. who currently hold Jordanian passports. Egypt is said to be ready to take about 3,000, including the P.L.O. leadership, but is asking the U.S. to convene a conference on Palestinian rights as part of the deal. Cairo would presumably be the best headquarters for the P.L.O., since it has traditionally served as a base for Arab liberation movements. Besides, the Egyptian capital has more than 100 diplomatic missions with which the P.L.O. could keep in contact. Other P.L.O. guerrilla contingents may be sent to Syria, Iraq and Sudan, and a small group is likely to be left behind in Lebanon.

By week's end there were reports from both Beirut and Cairo that an agreement was in sight, and that the evacuation of the P.L.O. from Lebanon might begin within a few days. Possibly so, but a great deal still depended on how the Israeli government viewed the latest proposals, and how determined the U.S. was to press them on the Israelis.

All week long, world opinion had called upon the Israelis to ease up on West Beirut, with little practical effect. "We see the same pictures on television that you are seeing," a British government official told an American in London, "and we feel the same as you. Something must be done to stop it." In Rome, the Italian government complained of the "serious violations of the ceasefire" committed by the Israelis and firmly condemned "the repeated recourse to force." In Paris, a Quai d'Orsay spokesman suggested that France might support economic and diplomatic sanctions against Israel for refusing to comply with the U.N. resolutions calling for a stop to the fighting.

In Bonn, the West German government condemned Israel's march into Lebanon as a "flagrant violation of international law." After the assault on West Beirut, a government spokesman deplored "the heavy burdens and perils of the Lebanese people, whose sufferings cannot leave anyone unconcerned." Theo Sommer, co-publisher of Die Zeit, reflected on whether Germans, with their Nazi past, had a right to speak out against "the horrors of the Begin present." He concluded, "Even Germans can bluntly say, 'Begin's Lebanon war is unnecessary, it is inhuman, and ultimately it will bring about the exact opposite of what was originally intended."

In the face of such outspoken criticism, the majority of Israelis still supported their government's policies. Nonetheless, the small but articulate domestic opposition to the war, led by the Peace Now movement, staged a highly visible protest last week while Begin was holding a special Cabinet meeting. Some 2,000 demonstrators paraded outside Begin's office building Thursday evening, chanting, "Peace yes! Sharon no!" Among the demonstrators were the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and the former chief education officer of the Israeli Defense Forces, Mordechai Bar-On.

Other well-respected Israelis have also strongly opposed the Beirut siege. Abba Eban, the former Foreign Minister and onetime Ambassador to the U.S., declared in the Jerusalem Post: "This war is already on the way to becoming the most traumatic of all the Israeli experiences ... These weeks have been a dark age in the moral history of the Jewish people."

In the meantime, the political bureau of the opposition Labor Party passed a resolution "unequivocally opposing any military entry into Beirut as well as any military action geared to facilitating such an entry." The resolution reflected a decision by Labor to oppose the war openly, after several weeks of vacillation. Writing in the New York Times, Labor Party Leader Shimon Peres lamented "the erosion of the image of Israel as a result of artillery fire filmed by the world's television networks." He questioned whether the military gains were worth the price they had cost his country in lost prestige.

Terrible as it has been, the devastation of West Beirut seems to be a prelude to political settlement. The P.L.O. is committed to withdrawal; it has no choice. From its new headquarters, in Cairo or elsewhere, the organization will have reduced military power, but it will still receive support from the Saudis and the other gulf states, which have long backed Arafat and his Al-Fatah organization. In time, the P.L.O.'s political and diplomatic influence may well increase.

What is equally obvious is that, whatever the fate of the P.L.O., the problem of the Palestinians will not disappear. It has been present since the founding of Israel in 1948 and has been growing in intensity since Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War of 1967. The Camp David accords promised "autonomy" to the Palestinians, though Begin and Sharon often seem more imbued with the idea of annexation. To many Israelis, the thought of incorporating 1.3 million Arabs is a demographic nightmare for a country whose current population already includes 640,000 Israeli Arabs along with 3.3 million Jews. Largely for this reason, Opposition Leader Peres advocates negotiations among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians (but not the P.L.O.) that would lead to the establishment of a Jordanian-Palestinian state. This he believes would not only resolve the Palestinian problem but assure the survival of Israel as "a Jewish, democratic state that does not aspire to rule another people."

The great irony of the invasion of Lebanon, and of the assault on West Beirut last week, is that the military victories may ultimately make Israeli security more uncertain. No Arab nation, or combination of Arab nations, can stand up to Israel on the battlefield. The popular frustration bred by this fact undermines governments and encourages the growth of radical groups that are implacably opposed to Israel's existence. Every time Israel tries to impose its will on the Arabs, its actions serve to unsettle the entire region. Many Arab governments may feel that the P.L.O. is a disruptive force that could harm them, but Palestine itself remains close to the heart of the Arab nations.

In its efforts to help bring stability to the Middle East, the U.S. must find a solution to the Palestinian issue on terms acceptable not merely to Israel but to the bulk of the Arab world as well. Israel's security can be maintained without thwarting the Palestinian drive for self-determination. The Israelis tend to equate this drive with "terrorism." But terrorism is only the ugly and dangerous symptom of the underlying issue of Palestinian autonomy that the West has faced up to only rarely in the past 34 years.

With reporting by David Aikman/Jerusalem, William Stewart/Beirut

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