388 • 19 THE REASSERTION OF ISLAMIC POWERexpansion in the Middle East, including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Ara¬
bia, and Pakistan. One means of building this consensus was to sell arms.
Just after Sadat's assassination, the US Senate—pressured by the White
House in competition against the American Israel Public Affairs Commit¬
tee (AIPAC)—voted by a narrow margin to approve the sale of four air¬
borne warning and control system (AWACS) planes to Saudi Arabia.
Washington's efforts to court pro-Western Arab governments were both a
result and a cause of Israel's ever more militant stance toward Arab gov¬
ernments and the PLO. Since its formation in 1977, Begin's government
had followed a harsh policy against Palestinians in the occupied areas. It
also backed a group of Jewish militants, Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faith¬
ful), in its plans to form new settlements and to raise the Jewish population
of those already set up on the West Bank. The Jewish settlers had guns and
might attack Palestinians at random; the Palestinians could be arrested for
carrying knives or throwing rocks at Israeli military vehicles.
Although Palestinians in the occupied territories and other countries
viewed the PLO as their representative, Israel regarded it as a terrorist
group with which it would never negotiate for peace. If Israel wished to
weaken the PLO, it had to attack Lebanon, its center of operations since
Black September 1970. Reluctantly at first, the PLO was drawn into the
Lebanese civil war in 1975, suffering a severe defeat when Syria intervened
on the Christian side and captured the fortified Palestinian "refugee camp"
(really a military base) of Tel Za'tar, near Beirut. Once the Syrians settled in
as an occupying army, they gradually shifted to the side of the Lebanese
Muslims and the PLO, which became dominant in various parts of
Lebanon, including west Beirut. Palestinian fidaiyin often would launch
dramatic raids against civilian targets inside Israel. Some of these were
in retaliation for Israeli attacks that killed many Palestinian civilians. In
March 1978 the Israeli Defense Force occupied the area up to the Litani
River. The UN Security Council condemned the invasion and set up a
4,000-man, multinational buffer force to replace the IDF and restore peace
to southern Lebanon. Under US pressure, Israel's cabinet agreed to with¬
draw the IDF, provided that the PLO be kept out of the buffer zone. The
Israelis had no faith in any UN peacekeeping force; instead, they trusted the
Christian militia of Sa'd Haddad, a renegade Lebanese colonel who in 1979
set up his "Republic of Free Lebanon" in the south. Israel absorbed the
southern Lebanese Christians into its economy, thus gaining an added in¬
terest in Lebanon.
Israel went on making intermittent air raids against PLO strongholds in
Lebanon, ignoring the UN presence there. These raids were sometimes
reprisals for Palestinian attacks, and at other times were intended to pro-