numbers of Israelis, and ultimately the government, had ensured a truly

numbers of Israelis, and ultimately the government, had ensured a truly independent probe would now go ahead. But other ways in which the war had gone wrong were already glaringly apparent. Some were operational. It is true we ended up overcoming Palestinian and Syrian resistance. Given the numerical balance of forces, that was a foregone conclusion. But with all the attention paid to the political aims of the invasion, we’d never sufficiently planned for operating against a wholly different kind of enemy than in our previous wars, and on a wholly different kind of terrain. Huge columns of Israeli armor had found themselves stuck on the winding roads of central Lebanon, running low on gasoline, vulnerable to relatively small ambush squads. In some instances, a dozen Palestinian fighters or Syrian commandos had halted the best-armed, best-trained, tank forces in the Middle East for hours on end. Overall, the pattern of past wars had been broken. Even in 1973, once the surprise attacks had been turned back, Israeli forces had advanced, attacked and broken enemy resistance. That hadn’t happened here. There was a deeper problem as well. At the start of the conflict, Begin had declared, boastfully almost, that this was Israel’s first “war of choice.” That wasn’t true. Both 1956 and 1967 were wars of choice. Yet those preemptive attacks, especially in the Six-Day War, were in response to a sense of strategic threat that was commonly understood by almost all Israelis. There was a sense not just of consensus, but national unity. This war was different. It had been launched in pursuit of a specific political vision: a marriage of Begin’s political credo and Arik’s determination to use overwhelming force to bulldoze a new political reality in Lebanon. The findings of the inquiry commission were published in February 1983. They were all the more powerful for the forensic language used. The inquiry did concede Begin’s point: it was Gemayel’s men who had actually done the killing. But it said that the Israel1 commanders’ decision to allow the Phalangists into the refugee camps “was taken without consideration of the danger — which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to foresee as probable — that the Phalangists would commit massacres.” The commission added that “when the reports began to arrive about the actions of the Phalangists in the camps, no proper heed was taken. The correct conclusions were not drawn. No energetic and immediate action was taken to restrain the Phalangists and put a stop to their actions.” Arik bore personal responsibility for this, the report said. So did Raful, and the head of military intelligence, Yehoshua Saguy. The commission 208 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011679