In and out of a nightmare

How the security zone was created and how Israel's involvement in it increased between 1975 and 2000

Yossi Melman, Ha’aretz, 25.5.00

Paradoxically, the security zone may reach its full potential according to the desires of the Israel Defense Forces precisely with the IDF's withdrawal from South Lebanon. This will be carried out with the aid of its tens of thousands of mostly Shi'ite inhabitants, who are returning to their villages in the south - villages that they abandoned or were driven out of over the years by instruction of the South Lebanon Army or as a result of IDF military action.The returning refugees will seek to work their lands, to raise their children and to live a tranquil life. They know a clear and simple truth: if their farmer neighbors on the Israeli side of the border are unable to work in their own fields and to lead a normal life, their lives and those of the majority of the Lebanese will turn into hell.

The blows that the IDF would launch from the air would turn Lebanon into a backward country, without electricity, water, bridges and roads; without industry or agriculture. Thus the widespread assumption is that the Shi'ites who are returning home will not permit Hezbollah to attack nor the short-lived Palestinian organizations, which Syria may be grooming to attack. They are thus likely to unwittingly turn into what the IDF has called a "human shield."

This concept is firmly entrenched in the Israeli concept of security with regard to South Lebanon. This concept has undergone various incarnations and adaptations since the beginning of Israeli intervention in Lebanon nearly a quarter of a century ago, but its essential goal has remained unchanged: to establish a buffer zone, whose size has changed from time to time, whose purpose is to permit the peaceful inhabitants of the Galilee to have normal lives.

To get a better understanding of the concepts and definitions guiding Israel's strategy and tactics in Lebanon, one must return to the Jordan of 1970. The events of Black September in Jordan and the expulsion of the Palestinian organizations from the Hashemite kingdom undermined the internal balance within Lebanon. The Palestine Liberation Organization, including all of its organizations and branches, turned Lebanon into its base of operations for attacks against Israel.

Israel responded with retaliatory air attacks and with territorial incursions into South Lebanon. At the same time, the PLO allied itself with the Lebanese left and with Muslims in their struggle against the right and the Christians.

In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon. The leaders of the Christians - the Gemayel and Chamoun families - asked Israel for military aid. At the same time, refugees from South Lebanon began to reach the border with Israel. They also asked for aid, but of a humanitarian nature.

The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin responded to both these requests. For Israel, it was a good opportunity to advance its periphery strategy, which since the 1950s had shaped its approach to the conflict with the Arabs: to establish ties with non-Arab states or with non-Arab minorities and organizations in the Middle East and its periphery, on the assumption that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Israel also hoped to achieve an intelligence aim: to receive, by means of the relationship with the Christians, information that would help its fight against the Palestinian organizations.

By means of the Mossad, Israel began to provide weapons aid to Pierre Gemayel's Phalange. In January 1976, a border crossing was opened near the village of Klai'a. This gave birth to the idea of the Good Fence - a concept coined by Shimon Peres, then the minister of defense. The aim was to enable residents of South Lebanon to receive basic emergency services: food, water, medicines.

"It was a turning point in relations with Lebanon," stresses Dr. David Tal, a military historian at Tel Aviv University. Tal wrote a comprehensive study for the IDF's history department that has been distributed to senior officers and is still awaiting their comments, so its contents are currently classified. "But Rabin's policy was clear," Tal adds. "He adopted the attitude of 'we must help the Christians help themselves'." Or in other words: Israel will help the Christians in their fight against the coalition of the PLO, the left and the Muslims, but will not fight in their stead or on their behalf.

The same month that the Good Fence was opened, Brigadier General Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was appointed commander of the South Lebanon Area. One of his first tasks was a secret, and dangerous, mission to Beirut. "The goal I was sent to accomplish," Ben-Eliezer, now minister of communications, related to Ha'aretz, "was to assess from up close the military abilities of the Christians in the civil war. I also brought Major Sa'ad Haddad to South Lebanon at that time." But Haddad, an officer in the Lebanese Army, was not an Israeli invention. He was sent by order of the Lebanese chief of staff to take command of the army's units in the south of the country.

Haddad was considered close to the Chamoun family, and was therefore unacceptable to its rival for leadership over the Christians, the Gemayel family. In late 1977, the Gemayel family sent Major Sami Chidiaq to the south on its behalf. The two majors set up militias with the encouragement of the head of the South Lebanon command. But it quickly became clear to Israel, Ben-Eliezer relates, that Chidiaq "was a catastrophe. He couldn't control his units and they fell apart."

Ben-Eliezer, the IDF and the Israeli government pinned their hopes on Sa'ad Haddad, who established his headquarters in the city of Marjayoun, near Metula. Israel's bond with him grew. In 1977-78 Haddad devoted most of his efforts toward strengthening the control of the Christians in the area, in opposition to the Palestinians.

Another milestone occurred in January 1978. About half a year earlier, a Likud government headed by Menachem Begin was established. In January 1978, 25 Israelis and a tourist were killed in an attack on the coastal road in Israel, between Ma'agan Michael and the Pi Glilot intersection, north of Tel Aviv. In response, Begin and his defense minister, Ezer Weizman, decided to launch Operation Litani: a broad retaliatory action against PLO bases in South Lebanon. IDF units reached as far as the Litani river, withdrawing to the Israeli border a few weeks later. After the completion of the campaign, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 425, which is the basis of the current arrangement.

Haddad sought to expand his control in South Lebanon, and the IDF helped him. Haddad unified three Christian enclaves - Marjayoun in the east, Rmaich in the central region and Nakoura in the west - and established a militia with Israeli assistance. "That is how the initial concept of the buffer zone was created," notes Tal. "Years before, Israel sought to establish a security zone in South Lebanon, but it had to wait until Sa'ad Haddad came along in order to make it a reality."

An additional development took place under the Begin government, the height of which was the start of "Operation Peace for Galilee" - the Lebanon War - in June 1982. "Unlike Rabin, Menachem Begin was willing to give the Christians direct Israeli aid," Tal says. "He didn't stop at weapons and ammunition aid and sent the IDF deep into Lebanese territory in order to help the Christians in their struggle" - first with an aerial confrontation with the Syrians, and afterward by going to war.

The Lebanon War engendered two processes. First, it nullified - at least temporarily - the concept of a "buffer zone," since the IDF moved into not only all of South Lebanon from which the Palestinian organizations were expelled, but also into Beirut and the Chouf mountains. Afterward, when the IDF began withdrawing in 1983-84, there was a renewed need to re-establish the buffer zone. This was when "security zone" became part of the Israeli lexicon.

Tal does not know who was the first to use the expression, but it began to be used frequently during deliberations at army headquarters. It may be a linguistic import from South Africa, whose army established zones that were under its control in the neighboring states of Angola and Mozambique in order to facilitate its war against Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. In any event, the concept led to bitter disagreement in the upper echelon of the IDF and in the diplomatic echelon over the extent of the zone: was it to be a well-defined zone with rigid borders, or a zone whose boundaries would change according to needs and circumstances?

In 1985, in the wake of the decision by the national unity government headed by Shimon Peres to withdraw from Lebanon, those who supported a rigid and defined security zone won out. The IDF decided to established permanent outposts in South Lebanon, in complete opposition to the concept supported by Major Haddad.

Unlike the posts (the Bar-Lev Line) that the IDF established on the Suez Canal after the Six Day War in 1967, the outposts in South Lebanon were not intended as a holding line. They were part of a defense concept which held that the IDF's presence in South Lebanon would be restricted. In all the years that have passed since, there were never more than 2,000 IDF soldiers at a time there. This includes the Lebanon liaison unit, the civil branch of the IDF, whose task was to provide services and humanitarian aid to the civilian population, as well as the intelligence coordinators of the Shin Bet, which operated agents.

In 1996 the Peres government launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, which was intended to create a balance of terror on both sides of the border: in the absence of tranquillity on the Israeli side, the inhabitants of South Lebanon would also not enjoy calm. Israel's massive bombings led to the flight of tens of thousands of Lebanese. But the campaign was ended at its peak without having achieved its goals, when IDF cannons unintentionally caused the death of 100 Lebanese civilians.

Israel reached indirect understandings with the Hezbollah against its will: both parties would avoid firing on civilians and stationing weapons in populated areas. Hezbollah did not live up to its commitment to the latter condition, but demanded that the other part of the agreement be held up. Each time civilians in Lebanon were hurt, the organization retaliated by firing Katyusha rockets at cities in northern Israel. The Grapes of Wrath understandings accelerated the recognition within Israel of the pointlessness of the security zone and the need to withdraw from it.

The IDF presence in South Lebanon was always intended to achieve limited and specific goals: intelligence, observation, artillery assistance and psychological aid. Most of the routine security measures fell on Haddad's soldiers. But after Haddad became sick and was replaced by General Antoine Lahad, the militia was expanded into the "South Lebanon Army." At its peak, with six battalions, it had 2,500 soldiers - the equivalent of an army brigade.

The SLA received widespread support from the IDF. The aim was to create a well-organized fighting force. Its soldiers and officers underwent basic training, platoon and company training according to the IDF's training theories, and were equipped with armored personnel carriers, tanks and cannons - mostly Soviet war booty. But in essence, the SLA remained what it always was: a local militia whose purpose was to protect its villages.

This is the background for the hidden confrontation between the SLA and the IDF, which never reached the level of public debate. The IDF viewed the SLA and the security zone as a "human shield," whose purpose was to protect northern Israel and serve as a cushion to absorb Hezbollah attacks. The SLA did not like the conceptual world of the Israeli defense orientation. The SLA believed that defending its villages, the security zone and Israel's border must be carried out north of the zone itself. Israel generally won this argument: The SLA and the area that it controlled became a defense zone intended to provide security to residents of the Galilee. But this concept collapsed because Hezbollah turned the Katyusha launchers into a weapon that bypassed the security zone, thus bringing about the Israeli government's decision to withdraw from Lebanon