Word: southern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White House last week, Israeli Premier Menachem Begin slowly started massaging the pectoral muscles on the left side of his chest. It was a nervous habit that betrayed the anxiety of a former heart-attack victim enduring new stress. In the wake of Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon, Begin had gone to Washington to defend his belligerent policies, and he had found little support in the White House. At one point, in what Begin later called "difficult days," President Carter tried to summarize the state of disagreement in concrete terms. Begin protested gently that the President was "putting...
...primary reason for the invasion, Begin insisted, was to deny southern Lebanon to the guerrillas, though he added that real freedom from terrorist attacks could come only through a peace settlement. The motive was not revenge, he said, because "there cannot be any retaliation or retribution for the blood of innocent citizens." The newly named Chief of Staff, General Raphael Eitan, echoed the same theme when he quoted a line from Hebrew Poet Chaim Nachman Bialik: "Revenge for the killing of a small child has not yet been invented by Satan...
Indeed, in Jerusalem's rhetoric, the peril represented by the Palestinians in southern Lebanon seemed almost deliberately overblown, as if the Begin regime had figured that the very size of Operation Stone of Wisdom might raise doubts in Washington and other capitals about whether this trip was really necessary. Inevitably, there would be suspicion that at least one aim of the excursion was to dramatize Israel's concern about security at a time when the Begin regime is under U.S. pressure to pull out of the occupied territories elsewhere, especially in the West Bank. Israeli military men say that they...
...thing, until the latest raid, Palestinian terrorist activity inside Israel had not been particularly heavy in recent months. Moreover, since southern Lebanon became a base of Palestinian operations in the early 1970s, the Israelis have clearly had the better of the sporadic cross-border conflict in the area. Also, U.S. officials point out, no "security zone," however it is policed, can offer Israel much additional protection from determined attack by fanatic Palestinian guerrillas. In fact, the attackers who seized the bus on the highway to Tel Aviv struck not across the Lebanese border but from...
...complained an Israeli official, "but if we do that without some arrangement, the south will soon be back to where it was before this week." To meet these objections, the U.N., supporting the U.S. plan, appeared ready to vote to send a force to police southern Lebanon so that the Israelis would have no excuse for remaining. It was reported that this force would number 3,000 or 4,000 troops from Norway, Australia and other nations...