was not that of a self-respecting free people.
Inevitably a younger, better-educated generation
of Palestinians was radicalised. The prospect of a
Palestinian–Israeli reconciliation was thrown
away, and the Israelis and Palestinians have been
paying the bitter price ever since.
How much better it would have been to have
followed Sadat’s advice. He secured the return of
the Sinai but was ostracised and condemned by
the rest of the Arab world. US financial help and
the resources of the Sinai did not fully compensate
Egypt for the loss of aid from the oil-rich Arab
states. Its economic problems, with a rapidly
increasing population, prevented a quick improve-
ment in living standards for the mass of the poor.
But no more young Egyptian lives would be lost
in war. Instead, the courageous and far-seeing
president paid for peace with his own life. At a
military parade on 6 October 1981 a small group
of Egyptians recruited by Muslim fundamentalists
assassinated Sadat as he took the salute. The vice-
president, Hosni Mubarak, miraculously survived
the hail of bullets to become Egypt’s new head of
state. The peace prevailed, but the sincerity and
warmth of feeling, the desire for genuine reconcil-
iation between Egyptian and Israeli, were interred
with Sadat’s remains.
Begin’s first government from 1977 to 1981 had
seemed to promise a new peaceful beginning with
the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian peace
treaty. The soldiers in his Cabinet were cautious
men unwilling to be drawn into new confronta-
tions. Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Assad’s Syrian
regime, too, were aware of their own vulnerabil-
ity and were observing truce agreements. But
inside the Lebanon the factional struggles sucked
in the Syrians in support of the Christian
Maronites, who then also made constant appeals
to the Israelis. Meanwhile the PLO was strong
enough to dominate the southern Lebanon with
increasing effectiveness. Begin’s ministers contin-
ued to urge caution in dealing with the mess in
the Lebanon; but they were split on whether a
preventive air strike against Iraq was advisable,
some arguing that there could be no justification
in international law for such an attack at a time
of peace. But Begin won out.
On 7 June 1981 eight Israeli F-16 jet fighters
took off and, together with an escort of six F-15s,
with surgical precision destroyed the Iraqi Osiraq
nuclear reactor. All the Israeli planes returned to
the bases safely. The reactor, built with French
help, was not yet capable of producing atomic
bombs, but given time the Iraqis would undoubt-
edly have succeeded in acquiring all that was
necessary to make the weapons. There was inter-
national condemnation of Israel, but at home the
Israelis rallied to Begin, which did his coalition no
harm in the general election that June. Despite the
economic setbacks, Likud strengthened its posi-
tion, but the new coalition Begin led depended
for its tiny majority on the religious parties. His
views had always been hard line on the Palestinian
and West Bank issues. Now instead of being mod-
erated by the exigencies of coalition government,
they were reinforced by the extremist religious
groups. The most aggressive of the hawks, Ariel
Sharon, the daring military commander who had
turned the tide for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, became minister of defence. The new govern-
ment’s external policies came to be overshadowed
by Sharon’s ‘grand design’, which turned out
disastrously for Begin personally and for Israel.
On the occupied West Bank new Israeli settle-
ments had sprung up, and more were planned.
They clearly indicated Israel’s intention of staying.
Sharon wanted to go further – a knock-out blow
against the Palestinians and Syrians that would
once and for all settle the issue of what should con-
stitute the secure land of Israel. Begin’s Cabinet
was persuaded to back what was innocuously called
Operation Peace for the Galilee. In alliance with
the Christian Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel,
Sharon planned an invasion of the Lebanon as far
as Beirut to clear out the Syrians, the PLO and
their allies. A Maronite-led Lebanon would then
become a friendly non-Arab neighbour. Israel’s
hold over the West Bank and its denial of
Palestinian rights would then be unchallengeable.
The decision to launch the attack came as a con-
sequence of a murderous attack on an Israeli diplo-
mat far away from the Middle East. As Ambassador
Shlomo Argov was leaving the Dorchester Hotel
in London on the evening of 3 June 1982, a
renegade Palestinian group bitterly hostile to
908 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY