brokered a cease-fire to halt Palestinian Katyusha rocket fire into Israel. It was

brokered a cease-fire to halt Palestinian Katyusha rocket fire into Israel. It was generally holding. But fundamentally, Arik’s war plan was not a response to the Katyushas. It was a way of using military force to achieve Prime Minister Begin’s political aim: stopping the Camp David peace process in its tracks, and ensuring it did not go beyond the peace treaty with Egypt. And even that message was not principally intended for the Palestinians, I suspect, but for the Americans. Israel’s Labor-led governments had always calculated that we needed at least some measure of support from foreign allies, especially the US. Under Begin, we'd already bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor without telling the Americans beforehand. Shortly after I returned to the kirya, he provoked further anger in Washington by announcing the de facto annexation of the Golan — in effect “balancing” our Sinai withdrawal with a dramatic reassertion of Israeli control over other land captured in the 1967 war. Part of Arik’s plan in Lebanon was to deliver an even more forceful riposte to any suggestion that we would give up control of the West Bank and Gaza. Yet these political aims, which I was gradually beginning to grasp in their full form through my discussions with Arik, were only part of the reason I was deeply uneasy about the plans for our Lebanon invasion. Having now spent nearly two decades in the military, I recognized that the security challenge north of the border was real. I did not believe it was inherently wrong for Begin’s government to order a pre-emptive military operation with the aim of ending it. My view, as an army officer, was that the decision on how, when and whether to go to war was for our elected government. But for that principle to work, I also believed that government ministers had to know what they were deciding. The more we geared up for an invasion, the less certain I became that Begin’s cabinet understood what we were planning to do. Arik’s original plan was codenamed Oranim: Hebrew for “pine trees”. It involved pushing deep into Lebanon, all the way up to the strategically critical road that ran between Beirut and Damascus. We would link up in Beirut with the main Maronite Christian force, the Phalangists, whom we had been supporting and training for several years. When that plan was presented to Begin’s cabinet at the end of 1981, however, most ministers opposed it. Thus was born Arik’s Plan B, so-called “Little Pines”. Its stated aim was a lot more modest. We would create a “security zone” — a 40-kilometer, or 25-mile, strip running north of the border with Lebanon. 194 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028042