Word: habib
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seeking to head off a bloody showdown in Beirut, U.S. officials scrambled to restore the short-lived Israeli-P.L.O. cease-fire that had broken down on June 13. U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib, studiously keeping out of the public eye, worked tirelessly all week in Beirut. He met with Lebanese President Elias Sarkis and other members of the proposed National Salvation Committee in the hope of devising a coalition government representing all major Lebanese factions. Habib's goal: to encourage a united stand for negotiating an Israeli withdrawal and dealing with the P.L.O. and the Syrians...
...Habib's request, Secretary of State Alexander Haig telephoned Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Moshe Arens on Wednesday to ask for a strict 48-hour truce. Habib needed the time to persuade the P.L.O. to submit to Lebanese government authority. Arens made no formal reply, but Israeli guns finally fell silent 24 hours later than Haig had requested. However, an aide traveling with Begin in the U.S. last week told TIME that Israel would not commit itself to a formal cease-fire but would consider arrangements to allow the P.L.O. to depart from the capital peacefully. Said the aide...
...premise of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the refusal to talk to the P.L.O. directly until the organization recognizes Israel's right to exist. Instead, the Administration was using an elaborate chain of intermediaries to contact the P.L.O. Begin would talk to Haig, who would talk to Habib, who would talk to the Lebanese, who, finally, would talk to the P.L.O. The responses of the P.L.O. would work their way back to Begin and Haig through the same elaborate route. Said one top U.S. official: "It is just too early to predict the outcome?or even to judge which...
...Begin's departure for the U.S. last week, his seven-member Cabinet committee presented Habib with a communiqué titled "A Basic Proposal Regarding the Arrangements for the Future." Among other things, it called for an Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty, an end to the use of Lebanon as a terrorist base, Lebanese government responsibility for demilitarization and related agreements, the removal of all foreign forces from Lebanese soil, and a 25-mile-wide buffer zone on Israel's northern border to be policed by some form of international peacekeeping force...
...regional turmoil. This time, the invading Israelis had simply swept aside one of Washington's most valiant efforts at Middle East peace keeping to date: the fragile, unwritten cease-fire between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, crafted just eleven months earlier by U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib. Its collapse confronted Washington with one of the more awkward dilemmas it has faced in the explosive Middle East...