Tunisia. Arafat himself left on August 30

Tunisia. Arafat himself left on August 30. Still, as the evacuation proceeded, another one of Arik’s central aims in Big Pines was also achieved. On August 23, the Lebanese parliament elected Bashir Gemayel as the country’s new president. During the several weeks that followed, there was a confident feeling among Arik and his inner circle in the Airya. To the extent that Arik and Raful saw any cloud on the horizon, it was their concern about “several thousand” Palestinian fighters who they were certain had stayed on in Beirut despite the evacuation. True, Bashir Gemayel hadn’t been formally inaugurated as president. There had been reports that he was privately assuring Lebanese Muslim leaders that he would be conciliatory once he took office, and that he was not about to consider a formal peace with Israel. He had also been resisting Israeli efforts to make an early, public show of friendship, such as an official visit to meet Prime Minister Begin. But there was an undisguised hope that this was just a brief political hiatus, for appearance’s sake, and that before too long Lebanon would become the second Arab country to make peace with Israel. Not just peace, but something more nearly like an alliance. Though I still looked through the eyes of an army officer, not a politician and certainly not an experienced diplomat, I had serious doubts this would happen. Simple logic seemed to suggest that, since Gemayel knew we had no realistic option of turning our back on him, his political interests were best served by keeping his distance and trying to build bridges at home. But on the early evening of September 14, nine days before his scheduled inauguration, not just that question but the whole new political edifice Arik had envisaged in launching the invasion, became suddenly, irretrievably, irrelevant. I was at my desk on the third floor of the kirya, getting ready to go home, when the news broke: a huge bomb had exploded at the Phalangist Party headquarters in east Beirut as Gemayel was beginning to address hundreds of supporters. For a while, the reports from Beirut suggested that Gemayel had survived the blast, but shortly before eleven at night the confirmation came: the president-elect was dead. 204 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011675