Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings

Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings. It was not so much a statement of what should or shouldn’t have happened, but a show of genuine puzzlement. “How can it be,” he asked, “when there is a real fight, an operation in which our soldiers are shooting, that terrorists come out alive?” The answer, to me, was simple: Sayeret Matkal. From our earliest days, there was an understanding that you used whatever force necessary in order to make an operation successful. Yet once the aim had been achieved — in this case, eliminating the danger to the passengers — it was over. I am convinced, by the way, that Misha didn’t actually order the sayeret, or anyone else, to kill all the terrorists. I’m equally convinced there was a tacit assumption on the ground that Misha’s view, and Shamir’s as well, was that this would be no bad thing. Yet by the summer of 1984, Shamir and Arens appeared in danger of losing their jobs. Israel’s next election, the first since the Lebanon war, was due in July. Just as the trauma of the 1973 war had helped Begin end Likud’s three decades in opposition, the polls and the pundits were now suggesting that Shimon Peres might bring Labor back to power. There was no prospect he’d win an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset. No one had ever done that, not even Ben-Gurion in his political heyday. From 1948, Israel’s political landscape had been populated by at least a dozen-or-so parties, mostly a reflection of the various Zionist and religious groups before the state was established. The dominant party always needed to make deals with some of the smaller ones to get the required 60-vote parliamentary majority and form a government. The Likud looked vulnerable. Domestic concerns, alone, were eroding its support. Under Begin’s turbo-charged version of Milton Freedman economics, an economic boom had given way to runaway inflation and a stock market crash. Lebanon, however, was the main issue, and it remained a running political sore. The assassinated Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin Gemayel, had become president. But Israel still had large numbers of troops there. And while most of the PLO fighters had gone, we faced a new and potentially even more intractable enemy in the south of the country. When our invasion began, the area’s historically disadvantaged Shi’ite Muslim majority had been the one group besides the Christians with the prospect of benefiting. The PLO rocket and artillery bases had disrupted their lives and, worse, placed them in the line 215 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011686