OP 21 

Flipside of the COIN: 

Israel’s Lebanese 

Incursion Between 

1982 - 2000 

Daniel Isaac Helmer
 

The Long War Series 

Occasional Paper 21 

Combat Studies Institute Press 

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 
Flipside of the COIN: 

Israel’s Lebanese 

Incursion between

OP 21 

1982 - 2000
 

by
 

Daniel Isaac Helmer
 

Combat Studies Institute Press 

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Helmer, Daniel Isaac, 1981­

The Long War : flipside of the coin : Israel’s Lebanese Incursion between 

1982-2000 / By Daniel Isaac Helmer.

 p. cm. -- (Occasional paper ; 21)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 1. Lebanon--History--Israeli intervention, 1982-1984--Campaigns. 2. 

Lebanon--History--Israeli intervention, 1996--Campaigns. 3. Israel-­

Military policy. 4. Military planning. 5. Strategy. 6. Israel--Armed forces. 

I. Title. II. Series. 

DS87.53.H45 2007

 956.05’2--dc22

 2006038916 

CSI Press publications cover a variety of military history 

topics. The views expressed in this CSI Press publication 

are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the 

Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. A 

full list of CSI Press publications, many of them available 

for downloading, can be found at: http://www.cgsc.army.mil/ 

carl/resources/csi/csi.asp. 

The seal of the Combat Studies Institute authenticates this document as an 

official publication of the CSI. It is prohibited to use CSI’s official seal on any 

republication of this material without the expressed written permission of the 

Director of CSI. 

This is the Official U.S. Government edition of this 

publication and is herein identified to certify its authenticity. 

Use of the 0-16-0777629-5 ISBN prefix is for U.S. 

Government Printing Offi ce Official Editions only. The 

Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Printing Offi ce requests 

that any reprinted edition clearly be labeled as a copy of the authentic work with 

a new ISBN. 
Foreword 

In view of the adoption of the term “The Long War” by the United 

States Joint Chiefs of Staff to describe US operations against terrorism and 

state sponsored terrorism, we have decided to change the title of our long 

running series of studies on irregular warfare – from the Global War on 

Terrorism Occasional Papers to the Long War Occasional Papers. 

This CSI Occasional Paper is the first in the renamed series. The 

purpose of the series, however, remains unchanged. That is, to provide short 

historical monographs on topics of doctrinal and operational relevance to 

the US Army and military professionals for an Army at war. 

We are therefore pleased to offer Long War OP #21: Flipside of 

the COIN: Israel’s Lebanese Incursion Between 1982-2000, by Captain 

Daniel Helmer. Captain Helmer’s study, written while studying at Oxford 

University, addresses the Israeli view of the threat posed by various 

armed factions in southern Lebanon over an 18-year period. This was a 

period during which Israeli used air strikes, ground invasions, and border 

operations to contain or defeat the military threat to its national security. 

Among the key points the author makes in this study is the inability of 

Israel to use military force to secure a lasting political end state in Lebanon 

that was favorable to its security needs, despite some stunning battlefield 

victories. 

Helmer also notes that both Palestinian and Hezbollah leaders 

recognized they could not militarily defeat Israeli military forces, despite 

occasional tactical success, but that this was not their political objective. 

Rather, they needed only to survive and to maintain their forces in the field 

to achieve their long-term objectives. Weaker powers have often employed 

this strategy against their stronger opponents. He also notes the steady 

dwindling of political and public support in Israel for the occupation of 

Lebanon and the role this played in Israel’s decision to withdraw from 

Lebanon in 2000. 

As the recent 2006 Israeli attack into Lebanon against Hezbollah 

terrorists has shown, however, these strategic challenges and dilemmas 

remain unsolved. In the first decade of the 21st century, it is clear that 

these dilemmas are not unique to Israel and that the United States might 

draw some insights relevant to our own situation. 

iii 
The Combat Studies Institute also plans a future study on the 2006 

Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. We at CSI hope this Occasional Paper will 

contribute to the Army as it conducts operations in the Long War. CSI— 

The Past is Prologue! 

Timothy R. Reese 

Colonel, Armor 

Director, Combat Studies Institute 

iv 
Acknowledgements 

This paper could not have been completed without the tireless help, 

editing, and advice of James Piscatori. 

Particular thanks is also due to Mark Pickup for his proposals on appropriate statistical measures of terrorist attacks against Israel as well as to 

Andrew Waxman for reviewing my statistical work. 

I appreciate all of the time and access given to me by Zvi Shtauber, 

Shlomo Gazit, Baruch Spiegel, Ze’ev Schiff, Reuven Ehrlich, and Benny 

Michelsohn. Zvi Shtauber’s aid in securing additional interviews was invaluable. 

Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my army of editors, particularly 

Sol Stein, Edith Shapiro, Douglas DeMaio, George Gawrych, and my 

lovely wife, Karen Helmer. 

v 

Contents 

Foreword ........................................................................................................iii
 

Acknowledgements.........................................................................................v
 

Note on Citations and Spellings ................................................................viii
 

Introduction.....................................................................................................1
 

Chapter 1. Understanding Asymmetric Warfare..........................................9
 

Chapter 2. Strategic Planning, Strategic Choices......................................27
 

Chapter 2. Disaster Strikes..........................................................................41
 

Chapter 2. Strategic Failure ........................................................................69
 

Conclusion ....................................................................................................83
 

Appendix on Statistical Methods ...............................................................87
 

Bibliography ...............................................................................................105
 

About the Author ......................................................................................... 111
 

vii 
Note on Citations and Spellings 

Arabic and Hebrew words are spelled differently in different sources. 

In general, I have used the most common spellings in American English 

throughout the paper. 

An abbreviated citation method is used in the footnotes. Full citations 

are available in the bibliography. Additional bibliographic information is 

occasionally given in the footnotes for news articles so that the reader may 

know in which periodical the article appeared. 

viii 
Introduction 

This is a paper on war and violence. It seeks to explain why the 

modern state of Israel, which had won numerous wars, was unable to 

defeat militarily inferior foes during its involvement in Lebanon from 

1978 to 2000. 

Dominant Military Powers 

In general, modern states that are triumphant in conventional military 

engagements develop tendencies that make them vulnerable to weak 

powers. States that have been repeatedly successful in conventional war 

believe that it is possible to achieve dominance over other states through 

military action. This being the case, dominant states tend to believe that 

in conventional war, offensive action is ascendant. The consequence is an 

exacerbation of the security dilemma faced by the state. As Robert Jervis 

explains it: 

When there are incentives to strike first, a successful 

attack will usually so weaken the other side that victory 

will be relatively quick, bloodless, and decisive. It is in 

these periods when conquest is possible and attractive 

that states consolidate power internally—for instance, by 

destroying the feudal barons—and expand externally.1 

Repeated victories make war an easier choice because of the belief in 

the possibility of quick victory as well as the belief that failure to act will 

expose the state to unacceptable risk. 

For the powerful, conventional military victory is relatively “quick, 

bloodless, and decisive.” Their military doctrines are informed by the rosecolored lens of previous victories. Military doctrine, according to Larry 

Cable, is “the conceptual skeleton upon which are mounted the sinews of 

materiel, the muscles of battalions and brigades and the nervous system of 

planning and policy decision.”2

 Doctrine, according to Colin Gray: 

teaches what to think and what to do, rather than how 

to think and how to be prepared to do it. . .Military 

organizations have to develop and employ doctrine...if 

they are to train large numbers of people with equipment 

in sufficiently standard modes of behavior for them to be 

predictable instruments of the commander’s will.3 

1 
The doctrines of conventionally military dominant states, reflecting 

their perceptions of previous quick and decisive military victories, tend to 

be focused on maneuver, speed, intelligence, firepower, and low casualties. 

The quality of highly-mechanized weaponry and highly-trained soldiers 

tends is emphasized over quantity. As previous military victories are 

celebrated, a culture of victory emphasizes certainty in outcomes that 

belies the complicated sets of factors that allowed victory in previous 

engagements. Conventional military powers are prone to developing a 

static conception of war that does not allow for change on the part of 

enemies to exploit the weaknesses of the strong states. This conception is 

vital to keep in mind as we explore why these states may lose to inferior 

powers. 

Research Question, Method, and Organization 

I approach the study of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon through the 

perspective of strategic studies. The vital assumption will be an acceptance 

that war is not solely an “act of policy,” the master war theorist Carl Von 

Clausewitz’s most oft-cited phrase.4 Rather, it is composed, as Clausewitz 

understood, of passion, probability, and policy: 

As a total phenomenon, its dominant tendencies always 

make war a remarkable trinity—composed of primordial 

violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as 

a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability 

within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of 

its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, 

which makes it subject to reason alone.5 

Without a fundamental understanding of the effects of passion, 

probability, and policy within the bounds of a conflict, it is likely that the 

conflict itself has not been well understood. 

Strategies and tactics are also critical. I will use “strategy” to mean 

the planned use of elements of power to effectively coerce others to bend 

to your political will. The use of these elements of power, to be regarded 

as strategy, must be “systematic, integrated, and orchestrated....to achieve 

goals.”6

 “Tactics” refers to the means through which strategy is enacted 

and covers a broad array of military, diplomatic, and other actions. These 

actions can transform the perceived strategic situation in which strategy is 

formulated, but they are not strategy. A fundamental disconnect between 

strategic goals and tactical means is almost always disastrous. 

Using a basic understanding of how states with conventionally powerful 

militaries operate, I have chosen Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to explore 

2 
why these states may lose wars to seemingly inferior foes. The general 

research question I pose is: “Why are conventionally powerful states unable 

to achieve political goals through war against conventionally inferior foes 

given the asymmetry in military capability?” My general hypothesis is 

that asymmetric war poses a political challenge to conventional military 

powers that can rarely be resolved by the powerful actor’s resort to war. 

The specific research question I will explore in the case study presented in 

this paper is: “From 1978 to 2000, why was the conventionally powerful 

Israeli state unable to achieve its political goals through war in Lebanon 

against militarily inferior Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite foes?” My 

specific hypothesis is that Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite militants’ 

resort to asymmetric war conflated political goals and military means, 

thereby preventing Israel from imposing a political solution through resort 

to conventional war in Lebanon. 

In the following chapters, I seek first to address the fundamental logic of 

asymmetric war. What exactly does a resort to asymmetric warfare mean? 

How does it operate effectively given the inequalities of military power 

between opponents? I then seek to address these questions in relation to 

the Israeli case. What exactly was Israel trying to do in Lebanon? How did 

Israel fi ght in Lebanon? How did the Palestinian Liberation Organization 

(PLO) and Hezbollah fight in Lebanon? Did Israel lose in Lebanon? Did 

the PLO and Hezbollah win in Lebanon? Finally, why did Israel’s invasion 

of Lebanon end the way it did? In answering these questions, I will make 

use of elements of the historiography of the conflict in Lebanon: a number 

of journalistic accounts; the memoirs and other personal accounts of the 

participants in the conflict; the canon of strategic analysis of the war; 

publicly accessible statistical information on the conflict; and personal 

interviews with some of the participants.7 

The arrangement of the information is straightforward. Chapter 1 

deals with the theoretical case for the ability of modern asymmetric 

war to produce outcomes at variance with the anticipated results of a 

conflict given the distribution of conventional military power between 

the combatants. Chapter 2 assesses the strategic situation that Israel faced 

when it involved itself more heavily with Lebanon from 1978 onward, its 

decision to conduct a major invasion in June 1982, and the initial conduct 

of the war. Chapter 3 looks at the problems that Israel encountered after its 

initial expulsion of the PLO leadership from Beirut and the development 

of the Shiite resistance from 1982. Chapter 4 assesses the outcomes of 

Israel’s military involvement in Lebanon from 1978 to 2000. Finally, the 

conclusion assesses whether my understanding of asymmetric war can 

3 
account for the results described in Chapter 4 and assesses the implications 

of this study. 

The Case Study 

Why does Israel’s invasion of Lebanon provide vital insight into the 

broader question of outcomes in wars? The Israeli case is illuminating for 

a number of reasons. First, Israel’s continuous military involvement in 

Lebanon lasted twenty-two years. In that time, it was not able to fi nd the 

formula to end the conflict once and for all; even its pullout in 2000 left 

vital strategic problems unaddressed. Israel’s pullout, however, makes the 

case more enticing because there is a start point and an end point from 

which to consider Israeli military involvement in Lebanon. Also, although 

there is much English-language literature on various aspects of the conflict 

in Lebanon, much of it relates only to the period 1982-1985 (or even 

ends its real consideration of events with the PLO withdrawal in August 

1982). Much of it, likewise, was written in anger at the Sabra and Shatilla 

massacres and lacks the benefit of a broader strategic outlook that goes 

beyond moral outrage. 

An unfortunate divide exists within the English-language literature 

on the Lebanon war. Some of the literature can be regarded as using the 

epistemic lens of strategic studies. Some covers the entire period from 1978 

to 2000. No work, however, has provided a strategic account of Israel’s 

military involvement and covered the whole time period. For example, 

Avner Yaniv’s Dilemmas of Security is a strategic review of the decision to 

invade Lebanon that goes beyond the purported evil of Menachem Begin 

and Ariel Sharon. Yet, written in 1987, it lacks the totality of coverage of 

the conflict to provide continued insight into the outcomes of Israel’s fateful 

decision to go to war in Lebanon. Even Gil Merom’s problematic strategic 

review of the challenges democracies have in fighting asymmetric wars, 

How Democracies Lose Small Wars, published in 2003, effectively ends its 

consideration of Israel in Lebanon in 1985. Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: 

Lebanon at War, on the other hand, provides a ground level view of the 

everyday cruelty of the war from its start to its finish, but it neither aspires 

to offer, nor succeeds in providing, a broader strategic account of the war. 

The gap in the literature provides an episode more ripe for exploration 

than, for instance, the US war in Vietnam. Meanwhile, more recent wars in 

Iraq and Afghanistan or long-continuing wars such as the one in Colombia 

do not provide the advantages of both relative contemporaneousness and 

an endpoint that can be considered with the benefit of some hindsight. 

4 
Other elements also make study of Israel’s involvement in Lebanon 

compelling. Israel is a country that has sought out the sword as a solution 

to the permanent perceived threat from its neighbors. The belief in openended, continuous war expressed by Ben Gurion still remains prevalent 

among today’s Israeli policymakers: 

From our point of view, there can never be a fi nal battle. 

We can never assume we can deliver one final blow to the 

enemy that will be the last battle, after which there will 

never be the need for another clash or that the danger of 

war will be eliminated. The situation for our neighbours 

is the opposite. They can assume that a final battle will be 

the last one, that they may be able to deliver such a blow 

to Israel that the Arab-Israeli problem will be liquidated.8 

Regardless of its veracity, which is challenged by the “New Historians,” 

the idea that Israel remains a “minute island [in] a hostile sea threatening to 

engulf it” remains the consensus view among both Israeli and non-Israeli 

strategic thinkers.9 Ephraim Karsh speaks within this consensus when he 

concludes that “Israel cannot afford a single military defeat.”10 With major 

wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982-1985, and arguably from 2000 

to the present, Israel combines an acute sense of insecurity with regular 

involvement in warfare. 

Militarily victorious in its conflicts in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, 

Israel often neglected the other elements of international action such as 

diplomacy and economic integration engaged in by other states.11 Even 

when it did use diplomacy, it did so normally with the explicit military 

utility of its diplomatic efforts in mind.12 In many ways, this prevalence 

of military action was strategic nitroglycerin: highly unstable and not 

something you want to keep in your backyard. The reliance on military 

dominance as the stopgap measure to effect Israel’s continued existence 

ensured a lack of focus on political solutions to Israel’s strategic problems. 

Avner Yaniv captures the strategic problem facing Israel in the wake of its 

unprecedented military victory in 1967: 

As in 1948, the Israelis misread their neighbors’ minds, 

and having won such a decisive victory expected peace 

negotiations to follow. What they got instead was the 

War of Attrition along the Suez Canal, the advent of lowintensity PLO operations along the borders with Jordan 

and Lebanon, the rise of international terrorism against 

Israeli and Jewish targets and, to cap it all, a strategic 

surprise and devastating war in October 1973.13 

5 
Despite spectacular military victories, Israel was unable to effect 

serious political victories.14 This propagated a belief that military victory 

was an end in itself and confirmed a doctrine of military action that would 

aid in ensuring victory on the battlefield but, as the war would be neverending, not necessarily on the political front. 

Israel developed and maintained a doctrine that, while evolving slightly 

over the course of its existence, never matured into an understanding of 

war as an exercise addressing a fundamentally political problem. Israeli 

military doctrine as developed over the course of its early wars came to 

rely on “[s]peed, daring, and deep penetrations without regard to flank 

security....fire support was to be provided by ground attack aircraft to 

maintain the pace of advance.”15 Intelligence was viewed as vital to a rapid 

response and therefore made a coequal branch of the military.16 Flexibility 

and improvisation were heavily emphasized over the reliance on a plan, 

hence the absence of a written military doctrine.17 Suboptimal political 

outcomes, despite Israel’s military domination of its foes, resulted in a 

reaffirmation of its approach with minor changes rather than a fundamental 

rethinking of doctrine.18 

Israel is a compelling case study because it developed the doctrine 

of a state with a highly successful conventional military. The doctrine 

promised and regularly delivered military victory. It seemed to promise 

an escape from dealing with the fundamental political questions that were 

the cause of Israel’s security dilemma. As a solution for Israel’s lasting 

security dilemma, however, this doctrine was a chimera. Yet, the United 

States and other contemporary great powers have also been wooed by 

the charm of this chimera, as reflected in their doctrines. The similarities 

are striking.19 The study that follows should serve as a cautionary tale for 

all who might be tempted to win political fruits against weak opponents 

through the application of conventional military might. 

6 
Notes 

1. Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, January 1978, 189. 

2. Larry Cable, Conflict of Myths (London: New York University Press, 

1986). 

3. Colin Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 

4. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, indexed edition (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1984), 87. 

5. Ibid., 89. 

6. Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency & Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Virginia: Brassey, 1990) 31. 

7. Conspicuously absent from this list is serious archival research of 

Lebanese, PLO, Israeli, and other documents related to the war. For more on the 

specific problem of archival research related to the Lebanon War, see Robert 

Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 

8. Michael Handel, The Evolution of Israeli strategy: The Psychology of 

Insecurity and the Quest for Absolute Security in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 537. 

9. Israel Tal, National Security: the Israeli Experience (London: Praeger, 

2000), vii. Similar views are expressed rather universally within the realm of 

strategic studies. For example see Epharaim Karsh, Between War and Peace: 

Dilemmas of Israeli Security (London: Frank Cass Publishers), 3. 

10. Epharaim Karsh, Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security 

(London: Frank Cass Publishers), 3. 

11. Handel, 534. 

12. i.e., in an effort to ensure Israel is never in conflict without the support 

of powerful friends. See Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War 

(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 62. 

13. Avner Yaniv, “Introduction,” National Security & Democracy in Israel 

(London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993). 

14. George W. Gawrych, The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and 

Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars. (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000). 

15. Stephen Biddle, “Land Warfare: Theory and Practice,” Strategy in the 

Contemporary World: an Introduction to Strategic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 540-541. 

17. On flexibility and improvisation see Martin Van Creveld, Command in 

War (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985) 196. On the absence of a 

7 
written doctrine see Shimon Naveh, “The Cult of the Offensive Preemption and 

Future Challenges for Israeli Operational Thought” Between War and Peace: 

Dilemmas of Israeli Security (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1996), 169. 

18. Gawrych, 249. 

19. Ibid., 261. 

8 
Chapter 1 

Understanding Asymmetric Warfare 

Asymmetry is a constant of warfare. Some in the world have large, 

capable militaries and have consistently dominated others. We call these 

people, or states, or other entities, “the powerful.” History has been 

written mostly in their hand. And yet for every historical achievement 

of the powerful, there is a footnoted failure—a place the Romans could 

not take and hold, a limit to the conquests of Genghis Khan, a Spanish 

rebellion against Napoleon. Many, when faced with choice of defeat 

and servitude, or the large possibility of death with the outside chance 

of victory, choose to fight. And history shows that they are not always 

doomed. The powerful have weaknesses—the wise who would fi ght them 

exploit these vulnerabilities, wherever they can be found. It is the degree 

of asymmetry between combatants that dictates unconventional forms of 

war. This chapter seeks to outline the elements of asymmetric warfare, to 

explain its modern forms and evolution, to outline its strengths, and finally 

to outline the fundamental problems that powerful modern states have in 

dealing with irregular fighters.1 

The Spectrum of Asymmetric Operations 

Clausewitz proclaims in On War that “if the enemy is to be coerced 

you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the 

sacrifice you call on him to make.”2 This bit of commonsense is in fact 

the essence of warfare, and it is the strategic logic that ties irregular and 

regular warfare. Successful strategists of all forms of war seek to bend 

their opponent to their will. 

Revolutionary changes have occurred from time to time in warfare 

through the ages—the introduction of projectiles, the use of iron, 

the introduction of gunpowder. The regular use of these weapons in 

conventional, powerful militaries led to forms of unconventional war that 

exploited weaknesses endemic to new systems of war. More than two 

millennia ago, Sun-Tzu recognized this fundamental tension in warfare: 

In warfare, the strategic configurations of power (shih) do 

not exceed the unorthodox and orthodox, but the changes 

of the unorthodox and orthodox can never be completely 

exhausted. The unorthodox and orthodox mutually 

produce each other, just like an endless cycle.3 

9 
More recently, irregular fighters have recognized this constant dialogue 

between orthodox and unorthodox methods. For instance, Che Guevara 

declared: 

Guerrilla warfare is a fight of the masses, with the 

guerrilla band as the armed nucleus. The bands need not 

be considered inferior to the opposing army. Rather, the 

contrary is true: One resorts to guerrilla warfare when 

oppressed by superior numbers and arms.4 

In other words, in war, the choice to respond asymmetrically is inspired 

by the degree of asymmetry between the warring parties. 

Contemporary unconventional war provides the asymmetric strategist 

with a broad array of tactical options to achieve strategic effects. These 

options include civil disobedience, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, terrorism, 

and other forms of both nonviolent and violent resistance against a 

conventionally more powerful foe.5 The “blurriness of the definitional 

lines” between these different forms of resistance suggests a spectrum of 

unconventional conflict in which large gray areas exist between similar 

but distinct tactical arrangements.6 The unifying theme of these tactical 

expressions of irregular strategies is that “those undertaking irregular war 

or terrorism are trying to find a way to use their strengths, such as mobility, 

organization, anonymity, or stealth, against the weaknesses of their more 

powerful adversary.”7 

A number of contemporary authors in their rush to condemn terrorism 

conflate the tactics of asymmetric fighting with the strategy of asymmetric 

war. Martha Crenshaw, for instance, claims: 

...the choice of terrorism involves considerations of 

timing and of the popular contribution to revolt, as well as 

of the relationship between government and opponents. 

Radicals choose terrorism when they want immediate 

action, think that only violence can build organizations and 

mobilize supporters, and accept the risks of challenging 

the government in [a] particularly provocative way... 

[Others] prefer methods such as rural guerrilla warfare, 

because terrorism can jeopardize painfully achieved gains 

or preclude eventual compromise with the government.8 

This suggestion that an either/or choice exists between terrorism 

and more protracted irregular warfare is not in line with the history 

of unconventional conflict. Both Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung 

acknowledged the importance of terror, sabotage, and other tactics in 

10 
addition to classical guerrilla tactics such as raids and ambushes.9

 Tactics 

are chosen in asymmetric warfare for one reason alone: the belief that those 

tactics will effect the wanted strategic outcome by attacking the weaknesses 

of a powerful opponent. The tactics are malleable, interchangeable, and 

often used simultaneously or in close proximity to one another. 

The moral force attached to the tactics is important in asymmetric 

warfare, however, because contemporary unconventional warfare remains 

a people’s war.10 Clausewitz believed that Napoleon’s levée en masse had 

fundamentally changed the nature of regular warfare as warfare between 

states now became warfare between peoples. A century after Clausewitz, 

T. E. Lawrence began to comprehend the power that people’s war held 

for the conventionally weak. Lawrence believed that the new shape of 

unconventional war was so different that it was “more of the nature of 

peace—a national strike perhaps.”11 Mao understood this elemental change 

in the nature of the practice of regular warfare and subsequently adopted 

irregular warfare to terrible effect first on the Japanese and then on the 

nationalists. According to John Nagl, Mao had unleashed a revolution in 

military affairs for the irregular fighter, one that took advantage of the 

primacy of the people in warfare and then combined it with an explosive 

mix of revolutionary ideology.12 

Because modern unconventional war is a war of the people, whether 

a person is successfully branded a terrorist or a freedom fighter by the 

people for which he is ostensibly fighting, regardless of whether the tactics 

employed are actually terrorist in nature, is vital to the outcome of the 

conflict. Both the irregular fighter and his foe are doing a Machiavellian 

martial dance in front of the people in which each tries the incredible 

balancing act of attempting to “make himself feared in such a way that, if 

he is not loved, at least he escapes being hated.”13 

This fight for the people is the dominant element of modern asymmetric 

war. If the dominant military power cannot win the people, it will not win 

the war. In Algeria, the French drove the Algerian population into the arms 

of the rebel Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) through its extensive use 

of torture and other brutal means to suppress the insurgency.14 In China, 

Japan’s brutal treatment of the population drove them into the arms of 

both nationalist and communist forces. Discussions of the participants in 

asymmetric operations as “criminals” or “terrorists” have less to do with 

the morality of their actions then with the desire to marginalize them. B. 

H. Liddell Hart proclaims that “guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by 

the few but dependent on the support of the many.”15 If the support of the 

many is not there, then asymmetric fighters stand no chance. 

11 
As a result, primacy is placed on the communication of the cause to 

the people. Mao recognized this and instructed his units thus: 

Propaganda materials are very important. Every large 

guerrilla unit should have a printing press and mimeograph 

stone. They must also have paper on which to print 

propaganda leaflets and notices. They must be supplied 

with chalk and large brushes. In guerrilla areas, there 

should be a printing press or a lead-type press.16 

Whenever irregular fighters engage the enemy, through whatever 

range of tactics they employ, they must ask themselves whether their 

action will alienate the population who is their daily bread. Miscalculation 

may mean the death of the movement. Though he may be morally wrong, 

a Hezbollah leader is strategically right when he says, “I believe that the 

term ‘terror’ cannot be applied to those who proceed from a position of 

fulfilling a mission and fighting for a cause. Otherwise we will have to 

categorize all the peoples that revolt for their freedom as terrorists.”17 So 

long as the target population agrees with the mission and the cause, the 

fighters will not be perceived as terrorists by the people who count, even if 

they are so perceived by much of the world. Maintaining that perception is 

vital for the asymmetric fighter, just as overcoming that perception is key 

for the conventionally powerful foe. 

Contemporary developed societies present more weaknesses for 

the asymmetric fighter to exploit than in the past while technological 

advances in knowledge transmission, media, weaponry, and transport 

have conferred upon him a toolkit more powerful than irregular fighters 

have ever possessed. Evolving tools of communication, from grounded 

telecommunications, to radio, to television, to the internet, allow for the 

nearly instantaneous transmission of propaganda, and with each new tool, 

it becomes more and more difficult for the powerful to foil the attempts 

of the asymmetric warrior to propagandize effectively. Advances in 

communications technology allow irregular fighters to broadcast instantly 

the effects of violence to audiences around the world. Using these images 

as propaganda, they fortify the will of their population by demonstrating 

the ability to kill a more powerful foe. Meanwhile they undermine the 

will of the enemy population by demonstrating that conventional military 

dominance will not translate into easy victory. 

Communication alone is not what has changed the balance of power 

in favor of the conventionally less powerful. It has, however, been the 

vital tool through which a number of highly appealing and contagious 

12 
ideologies including nationalism, anti-colonialism, communism, and 

religious fundamentalism have inspired the masses to ruin the strategic 

aspirations of the powerful.18 Nor is it vital that the propaganda which 

can reach so many (and with the internet can now be precisely targeted 

to highly specific audiences) inspires all to revolution. As James Eliot 

Cross argues, propaganda only needs to inspire a sufficient number of 

hardcore adherents while not raising the ire or interest of a majority of 

the population. Propaganda is the means to inspire the people without 

whom the three essentials of “insurrection” identified by Cross—supplies, 

recruits, and intelligence—cannot be had.19 

If these communications were used to spread propaganda and ideology 

alone, they would be challenging enough. New technology, however, has 

allowed the communication of new tactics. Master bomb makers such 

as Imad Mughniya have helped to spread awareness of techniques that 

take advantage of dual-use chemicals in products such as fertilizers and 

industrial cleaners. Pipe bombs and less advanced means used by anarchist 

groups in the nineteenth century have evolved over time into bombings 

that have the capability to produce tens, hundreds, and even thousands of 

casualties.20 

In addition, a century in which two world wars were fought, in which 

the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and United States later provided 

their allies with vast quantities of weapons, and in which many states 

developed their own weapon-making capacities has led to a worldwide 

arms trade. Those who want automatic rifles, projectile explosives (such 

as rocket-propelled grenades, small mortars, and recoilless rifl es), and 

stationary explosives (such as mines or jury-rigged projectile explosives) 

can often find them for free or for cheap. Further contributing to this 

global glut of weaponry was a propensity during the Cold War for each 

side to provide arms to unconventional warriors who would be a thorn in 

the side of the opposing power or its allies. Where nuclear weapons have 

seemed to prevent open resort to conflict against nuclear-armed enemies, 

the provision of arms to irregular fighters has become part and parcel of 

contemporary international politics. As such, unconventional fi ghters in 

Kashmir, Palestine, and all over the world have been well provided for by 

those who wish to stick it to and keep occupied the enemies they cannot 

otherwise fight.21 

Systemic and Sub-systemic Transformations 

The combination of inspirational ideologies, the ever-increasing 

power of communications technologies to reach wide audiences, and the 

13 
proliferation of small arms have been systemic changes in global power 

as the armies of nation-states no longer possess a monopoly on the means 

to effect widespread bloodshed. Meanwhile, disparities in military power 

between states have grown as conventional military capabilities have 

grown more expensive and as economic inequalities between states have 

increased. For the wealthy states, however, these extensive capabilities 

have come at the expense of incredible social, economic, and other 

vulnerabilities that cannot be defended easily from asymmetric attack (or 

can only be defended in such a way as to undermine the very prosperity 

upon which conventional military power was built). These disparities in 

conventional military might, combined with the very vulnerabilities with 

which they are bought, ensure a resort to asymmetric means by lesser 

powers to exploit the vulnerabilities of powerful enemies. 

In addition to the huge conventional imbalances of power between 

parties engaged in conflict, international forums such as the United Nations 

have given voice and legitimacy to those who challenge conventionally 

superior powers through irregular means. A large block of states in the 

UN General Assembly have themselves engaged in post-colonial struggles 

that often involved the application of various elements of the spectrum 

of irregular war. As many empathized with Robert Taber’s sentiment that 

irregular warfare was an “effective counter-strategy against the tyranny of 

wealth and tyranny of power,” greater international legitimacy was granted 

to acts of unconventional war.22 This was specifically manifested in the 

Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions of 1977, which gave far 

greater legal protections to irregular fighters in both international and instate conflict than had been originally provided in the Geneva Conventions 

of 1949.23 The ability to generate international sympathy for the causes of 

irregular warriors was already recognized by Mao almost half-a-century 

prior to the Additional Protocols when he thought that international 

sympathy would be a vital component in ending Japan’s occupation 

of China.24 Cross similarly believed that the sympathy brought by the 

perceived brutality on the part of the conventionally more powerful party 

to the conflict was “the meat for the rebels’ propaganda.”25 International 

empathy and sympathy translated into both material and normative support 

for unconventional fighters and is a systemic change vital to understanding 

the contemporary power of irregular warfare. 

Important changes have likewise occurred within the states that 

comprise the international system. Movements toward democracy in the 

West have left states more vulnerable to normative pressure on the part 

of irregular fighters. This is not to argue that democracies are inherently 

14 
unable to win asymmetric conflict. Gil Merom is wrong when he argues: 

. . . .[D]emocracies fail in small wars because they find 

it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence 

and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are 

restricted by their domestic structure, and in particular 

by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and 

the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such 

citizens...Furthermore, while democracies are inclined to 

fail in protracted small wars, they are not disposed to fail 

in other types of wars. In a nutshell, then, the profound 

answer to the puzzle involves the nature of the domestic 

structure of democracies and the ways by which it interacts 

with ground military conflict in insurgency situations.26 

Merom’s argument that the escalation of violence and brutality is 

necessary to secure victory is incorrect; because irregular warfare must 

focus on exploiting the will of the people to overcome the military might 

of the conventionally superior foe, the brutalization of target populations 

by the powerful often contributes to the success of the irregular fi ghter, 

not his downfall. Brutality confirms the negative image of the enemy 

propagated by the unconventional force. Reasons that authoritarian states 

lose unconventional conflicts are, in fact, similar to those for which 

democracies lose irregular wars—they involve variables which include 

the appeal of the insurgent cause, their ability to spread the word on the 

cause, the ability to exploit international knowledge and weapons markets 

to develop an unconventional military capability, the capacity to fight 

and win, and the ability of the conventionally militarily superior enemy 

to adapt to and fight on the asymmetric battlefield. Even were brutality a 

vital or effective component of victory, democracies have demonstrated a 

remarkable capacity to inflict it in war: the brutal deaths of thousands of 

enemy combatants as well as civilians through the highly lethal modern 

technology of war, the close-up meting out of death and destruction 

in, for instance, house-to-house sweeps, and brutal treatment of enemy 

combatants have not prevented democracies from engaging in long-term 

wars in Iraq, Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere (which is not to imply that 

the brutality of these campaigns effected victory). 

Democracies have disadvantages in fighting against unconventional 

enemies that do, however, from time to time manifest themselves. Because 

democratic governments are held accountable to their voting population, 

moral victories scored by asymmetric fighters in external wars have 

ramifications within domestic power structures. As William H. McNeill 

15 
correctly points out: 

The quite extraordinary power of a technically proficient 

society to exert overwhelming force on its enemies 

depends, after all, on prior agreement about the ends to 

which collective skill and effort ought to be directed. 

Maintaining such agreement is not automatic or 

assured.27 

The problem, however, is more specific than the diffi culty of 

maintaining consensus. The sub-systemic outlay of power can make 

democratic governments particularly vulnerable to the shocks of 

asymmetric warfare. The effect is pronounced in governments where 

a traditionally more hawkish party or coalition (usually referred to as 

“rightist”) is in power. When a more dovish party is in power and chooses 

to engage in war, it is virtually assured the support of the hawkish party; 

such has been the case in the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, 

and many other democracies. “Consensus” in these situations is relatively 

easy to maintain even as unconventional forces upset the conventionallycalculated predictions of swift victory. Though hawkish parties seem 

often, though not always, able to garner consensus in a decision to go to 

war, unanticipated hardships become an irresistible target of attack for the 

left within the constant democratic political power struggle.28 Asymmetric 

fighters can then use modern methods of media transmission to exploit 

this domestic political fissure through both violence aimed at vulnerable 

political weak points and appeals to the moral reasoning of those members 

of the left already opposed to or wavering about the decision to engage 

in war. Combined with the systemic challenges already discussed, this 

particular sub-systemic problem within the transition toward more 

democracies has contributed to weight the equation of war heavily in favor 

of the effective irregular warrior. 

The Fighting Advantages of Asymmetric Warriors 

Both systemic and sub-systemic changes have provided a new toolkit 

for insurgents. Yet, despite asymmetric warfare‘s revolutionary use of 

the ideology weapon through the medium of a sympathetic population, it 

remains warfare. Without fighting, without tactics, it cannot win. At some 

level, this begs the practical question, how can the asymmetric warrior 

direct violence against a conventionally militarily superior enemy? How 

does that violence cause an end to the conflict while the superior military 

is intact? 

16 
For Mao, the answer to this fundamental problem was to develop 

enough time through guerrilla warfare to mount a conventional military 

offensive. And while communist forces did eventually mount large 

strategic offensives with conventional forces in China, in other irregular 

fights, such as the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, no fi nal conventional 

phase of the war came about despite the loss of the more conventionally 

powerful side. There are four main elements in a competent irregular war 

that favor the irregular fighter and that allow him to win despite not being 

able to mount a conventional attack (and that can allow him to win if 

he eventually develops the conventional forces to mount such an attack): 

initiative, intelligence, mobility, and time.29 

In unconventional war, initiative almost always remains with the 

irregular fighter. As Taber puts it, “...it is [the guerrilla] whom begins the 

war and he who decides when and where to strike. His military opponent 

must wait, and while waiting, he must be on guard everywhere.”30 In the 

unconventional war, so long as the irregular fighter keeps the people on 

his side, the decision on when and where to attack will be his. The other 

side will lose the initiative. When this happens, according to Mao, the 

conventional force “loses its liberty; its role becomes passive; it faces the 

danger of defeat and destruction.”31 This is due to two of the other vital 

elements of irregular war: intelligence and mobility. 

Che Guevara understood that the balance of intelligence very much 

favors the asymmetric warrior so long as he keeps the people on his side: 

One of the most striking characteristics of guerrilla warfare 

is the difference between the information available to the 

enemy and that available to the guerrillas. The enemy 

crosses hostile zones and is met by the gloomy silence of 

the local population. The rebel forces can generally count 

on friends or relatives who travel between their zone and 

enemy territory.32 

Conventional forces have difficulty in determining when and where 

fighters will attack and also in determining who they are fighting and why. 

The converse cannot be said. The irregular fighter can place his agents out 

among the population to spy for him, and they will be indistinguishable 

from any other member of the populace. Nor is it always necessary to have 

agents, as a sympathetic population can often be counted on to report on 

the enemy. Also, irregular fighters are often tied to the population “through 

blood or marriage or long association” and will not be surrendered to the 

conventional forces even if there is sympathy, which often there is not, for 

17 
the other’s cause.33 Vitally, competent irregular forces are almost always 

local forces—even when they are not indigenous, they have certainly been 

in an area of operations longer than the conventional force they oppose. 

They possess knowledge of the land; they know where safe houses are; 

they know areas of the land where they will own the tactical advantage 

in a hasty ambush, a mine or bomb attack, or a sniper attack. And after 

they mount an attack, they know the place well enough that they can fully 

disperse and melt away, evading their enemy, and gather together again for 

the next attack. In addition, the proliferation of media on the contemporary 

battlefield has lent a new intelligence source to these fi ghters as they 

can understand the underlying implications of an otherwise benignseeming radio, television, or internet news report or gather evidence on 

the disposition and fighting tactics of their conventional foe at no risk to 

themselves. 

Mobility is both a product and progenitor of this intelligence 

dominance by the unconventional fighter. It is a product of the intelligence 

because intelligence allows the asymmetric warrior to evade the enemy 

and attack at unexpected places, melt into the landscape, and attack 

again many miles away. This same mobility simultaneously allows him 

to gather intelligence from wherever he may need it. Mobility is also 

possible because the irregular warrior can travel by foot, car, train or 

plane and be absolutely unidentifiable from any other person in a society. 

The increasing opportunities for worldwide travel have transformed the 

meaning of mobility. While asymmetric fighters have always retained the 

preponderance of mobility over their conventionally armed and organized 

foes, attacking when and wherever they could within the battlefield, only 

in the last century has that translated into an ability to carry the fi ght to 

the enemy’s soil—an ability that was demonstrated with an exclamation 

point on 11 Sept 2001. As Betts correctly indicates, these advances in the 

mobility of unconventional forces have left them with the ability to attack 

highly vulnerable societies in ways they simply cannot defend against due 

to the vast number of available targets.34 Mobility allows the retention 

of the initiative because the asymmetric fighter can attack not only the 

enemy armed forces but also the enemy’s civilian populace, land, and 

infrastructure wherever he sees an opportunity. 

This retention of both the strategic and tactical initiative brought 

about through a preponderance of intelligence and mobility is multiplied 

by the crucial advantage of time to confer significant advantage upon the 

asymmetric warrior. Modern irregular wars are normally long wars. This is 

because a) the irregular force cannot attain the mass necessary to force his 

18 
enemy to quit the battlefield and b) the conventional force cannot eradicate 

the irregular force due to the irregulars’ dispersal among the people and 

its composition of fighters who will not surrender. 35 Over the course of 

time, unable to gain intelligence on the unconventional forces, stricken 

repeatedly with surprise attacks on their forces, their home front, and often 

their extra-territorial interests, and unable to gain the initiative, the conflict 

appears intractable and un-winnable to the conventionally more powerful 

force. Meanwhile, as Mao explains it, the irregular fighters: 

...may be compared to innumerable gnats, which, by 

biting a giant both in front and in rear, ultimately exhaust 

him. They make themselves as unendurable as a group 

of cruel and hateful devils, and as they grow and attain 

gigantic proportions, they will find that their victim is not 

only exhausted but practically perishing.36 

The conventionally superior force finds itself unable to stop its enemy 

from attacking and embarrassing it while its actions to counter an enemy 

ensconced among the people further alienate them and drive them to 

support the political cause of the irregular force or even to join its ranks. 

Meanwhile systemic and sub-systemic pressures further undermine the 

staying power of the conventionally dominant force. Even impressive 

victories over the military forces of the unconventional fighter do little to 

ameliorate the prickly situation in which the conventionally powerful force 

finds itself. This is because, so long as the underlying political problem 

has not been addressed, the asymmetric force will eventually regroup, 

rearm, and begin its attacks anew with the added knowledge of how it was 

previously defeated. 

No Military Victory Without Political Victory 

The untenable military situation in which the conventionally militarily 

powerful force finds itself is described above. The situation will remain 

that way until the political problem that inspired war in the first place is 

resolved. For Clausewitz, war was a true “political instrument” through 

which political problems were solved through the application of force.37 

For the irregular fighter, this description is apt. Without the use of the 

spectrum of asymmetric operations, he would not be able to force a 

resolution of the underlying political problem that has moved him to war. 

The same cannot be said of the conventionally powerful force. Its use of 

violence can grievously injure the military power of the unconventional 

force, but the asymmetric force will eventually resurface like a hydra so 

long as it is supported by the people. Except through the gravest genocidal 

19 
acts, which are morally and physically difficult to perpetuate, militarily, 

the conventional force cannot win. As Taber describes it: 

In the end, the oppressive power relinquishes its grasp not 

because its armies have been defeated in battle (although, 

as we have seen, this may occur), but because the satellite, 

the rebellious colony, through terrorism and guerrilla 

warfare, becomes 1. too great a political embarrassment 

to be sustained domestically or on the world stage, 2. 

unprofitable, too expensive, or no longer prestigious.38 

This is because, as James D. Kiras explains, “insurgencies or terrorist 

campaigns are dialectical struggles between competing adversaries...”39 

Only the conventional military force’s resolution of the dialectic through 

political submission, the gaining of legitimacy within the target population, 

or the reshaping of the political debate to make the dialectic irrelevant can 

result in victory. In an environment where the enemy seeks to increase its 

“fighting capacity” through “political consciousness, political influence, 

setting in motion the broad popular masses, disintegrating the enemy 

army, and inducing the broad popular masses to accept our leadership,” 

attempting to answer the irregular fighter’s political program with force 

alone can only end in disaster.40 

Why then, with a rather large number of cases in which conventionally 

powerful countries have not had their way with weaker foes have the 

conventionally dominant powers not ceased making war with irregularly 

inclined opponents? One reason is that occasionally the political dialectic 

at stake is of enough importance to chance failure. Another reason seems 

to be the incorrect belief that the consistent political message expressed 

by the asymmetric warrior reflects a centralized conventional military 

structure that can be defeated in battle. A third reason seems to be a belief 

that this time the highly trained forces of the militarily powerful have 

somehow found the elusive recipe for military victory against the irregular 

foe without a political solution to the underlying political problem. Finally, 

the fog and friction inherent in warfare exacerbate the enemy not known. 

It is well known that the cogs of war rarely turn in the manner that was 

anticipated at the beginning of the war. In modern war, even in the rare 

event when the cogs turn closely as anticipated against the declared enemy 

at the outset of the war, the outcomes are rarely simple; new, murkier 

enemies seem to rise from the dust of the initial battle. In contemporary 

conflict, where the people are so vital, it is rare to understand what they 

want, what ideas are spreading among them, and what opportunities they 

will provide for other enemies to circumscribe a powerful international 

20 
foe through forcing him into a prolonged war. The outcome can rarely 

be good. As Sun-Tzu recognized two thousand years ago, “One who 

knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every 

engagement.”41 

Begin’s War 

Robert Fisk, in an effort to demonstrate the futility of Israel’s military 

effort in Lebanon, declared, “The Lebanese knew all about guerrilla 

warfare. The Israelis did not.”42 Were this true, understanding the Israeli 

involvement and eventual defeat in the Lebanese imbroglio would be 

easier. Yet Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who began Israel’s 

first serious incursion into Lebanon in 1978 and expanded this to an all 

out war in 1982, understood very well the power of asymmetric warfare. 

Begin, after the Second World War, had become the leader of the Irgun 

group that violently opposed British overlordship of Mandatory Palestine 

and sought the creation of a Jewish State in “Eretz Israel.”43 According 

to Taber, the violent revolt promulgated by Begin’s Irgun “was vital: it 

was to create an open struggle without which there could have been no 

resolution of the issues, without which the British withdrawal might have 

been postponed indefi nitely.”44 

Begin’s book The Revolt provides a well-articulated understanding 

of the components of irregular war. He clearly understood the primacy 

of politics in this type of war. According to Begin, “To be more precise 

[about the impending war], the fight would be a political one pursued by 

military means. Consequently political explanation, clear and persistent 

would have to accompany the military operation.”45 He further understood 

the stark choice between accepting defeat from a strong adversary and 

deciding to fight him asymmetrically. Again, in Begin’s own words, “The 

world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight.”46 

Begin understood the role of perception, and while acknowledging 

numerous terrorist acts on the part of the Irgun, claims, “And yet, we 

were not terrorists.”47 The future Israeli prime minister also understood 

the role of both local and international media in broadcasting the failures 

of the British to quell the Jewish revolt and in generating sympathy for 

the Zionist cause.48 Finally, Begin understood the roles of initiative, 

intelligence, mobility, and, to some extent, time, in favoring the irregular 

force over a conventional one.49 

Despite this, when Arafat warned Begin to stay out of Lebanon or face 

defeat, he paid no heed. Arafat counseled his enemy in a note, “You of 

all people must understand that it is not necessary to face me only on the 

21 
battlefield. Do not send a military force against me. Do not try to break 

me in Lebanon. You will not succeed.”50 Begin forgot the lessons he had 

learned on the other side of the force equation more than 30 years before. 

Begin sent the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) into Lebanon, and it crushed 

the Palestinian Liberation Organization momentarily, mostly driving it 

from Lebanon by the end of August 1982. More than two decades later, 

Israel still fi ghts the Palestinians on a daily basis. Worse, a highly trained 

and capable irregular force, Hezbollah, not only ignominiously forced 

Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 but also continues to attack Israel from the 

Lebanese border where the PLO once attacked Israel. Israel’s prestige, as 

well as its moral standing in the world, was undermined severely. With 

Begin as its political leader, Israel should have known better. 

22 
Notes 

1. I will use the terms “asymmetric,” “irregular,” and “unconventional” 

interchangeably throughout the thesis, though I find none of them to be perfect. 

Rarely are wars conducted between foes whose conventional power is exactly 

the same, so in some sense, all wars are “asymmetric.” “Irregular” and “unconventional” suggest that such types of war are uncommon—yet, I will argue that 

they are common. I use these terms to refer to the conduct of warfare in a way 

that challenges the known strengths of longstanding, powerful, highly organized 

and specialized military forces. 

2. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, Indexed Edition, ed. and trans. Michael 

Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 77. 

3. Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (New York: MetroBooks, 1994), 187. 

4. Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, (London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 

1969), 112-113. 

5. I think that moral judgments on these tactics have their place, but it is 

not the purpose of this thesis to explore them. 

6. Paul Pillar, “The Dimensions of Terrorism and Counterterrorism” in 

Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment, 

Reading & Interpretations, (Connecticut: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2002), 

27. Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: a Study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory & 

Practice (London: Paladin, 1970) suggests this spectrum of operations as well 

when he says, “Here is yet another illustration of the nature of the war of the 

flea, of which guerrilla tactics is one aspect and terrorism (urban guerrilla-ism) 

is another.” Ackerman and Duvall’s work A Force More Powerful: a Century of 

Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2005) suggests the power which nonviolent means of resistance have in effecting grand asymmetric strategic results. 

7. James Kiras, Terrorism and Irregular Warfare in Strategy in the Contemporary World: an Introduction to Strategic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 

8. Martha Crenshaw The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a 

Product of Strategic Choice in Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment, Reading & Interpretations (Connecticut: 

McGraw-Hill Companies, 2002), 60. 

9. Guevara, 118. For instance Guevara writes, “Sabotage is an important 

revolutionary means, but it should be differentiated from terrorism. Indiscriminate terrorism against groups of ordinary people is inefficient and can provoke 

massive retaliation. However, terrorism to repay the cruelty of a key individual 

in the oppressor hierarchy is justifiable.” 

10. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency 

23 
Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 

25. “Far from Communist insurgency’s being a new kind of war, it is in fact 

merely an adaptation of Clausewitz’s ‘remarkable trinity.’ Changes in weaponry 

(including the media) and especially in the increased role of the people as the 

logistical support; recruiting base; providers of intelligence, cover, and concealment; and the armory of the army meant that enemy forces could no longer be 

defeated by mere defeat of the enemy army...Now defeating the army required 

that the people be defeated as well—or at least persuaded not to fight on behalf 

of, nor even support, the insurgents.” 

11. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: a Triumph (London: Penguin 

Books, 2000), 149. 

12. Nagl, 23. 

13. Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull, (London: Penguin 

Books, 1999) 71. 

14. Bruce Hoffman, “A Nasty Business,” Terrorism and Counterterrorism: 

Understanding the New Security Environment, Reading & Interpretations, 2000. 

15. B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., Mao Tse-Tung On Guerrilla Warfare, (London: 

Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1969), xv. 

16. Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, (London: Cassell & Company, 

Ltd., 1969), 61. 

17. “Shi’ite Leader on Hijacking, Other Issues,” PM051001 Beirut al-Nahar al-Arabi Wa al-Duwali in Arabic, FBIS Middle East and North Africa Section, 1983-1988, 5 July 1985. 

18. Nagl, 16. See also Brent Ellis, Countering Complexity: An Analytical Framework to Guide Counter-Terrorism Policy-Making in Terrorism and 

Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment, Reading & 

Interpretations (Connecticut: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2002), 109. 

19. James Eliot Cross, Conflict in the Shadows: the Nature and Politics of 

Guerrilla War (London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1964), 35. 

20. Pillar, 39. Pillar describes the bombs used to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City as having been “accomplished with two men, a 

truck, and homemade fertilizer-based explosives.” 

21. Cross, 6-7. 

22. Taber, 13. 

23. http://www.genevaconventions.org 

24. Mao Tse-tung, 71. 

25. Cross, 50. 

26. Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and 

the, Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in 

24 
Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. 

27. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, 

and Society since A.D. 1000 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 375. 

28. This is not to be cynical about the motives of leftist parties in challenging the prosecution of a war they supported. Rightist minority parties may, of 

course, invoke this same line of attack but these lines of attack might be questioned given the normally hawkish reputations of rightist parties. 

29. Many elements of an irregular attack may seem conventional; after all, 

shooting rifles, exploding bombs, etc. are something conventional opponents do 

as well. However, contemporary conventional attacks include both firepower 

and “mass.” So long as an irregular force remains dispersed throughout a population, we cannot say that it is acting conventionally. 

30. Taber, 25. 

31. Mao Tse-tung, 71. Mao was, of course, referring to only guerrilla warfare, but Carlos Marighela refers to the importance of initiative across the entire 

spectrum of asymmetric operations when he says, “Revolutionary terrorism’s 

great weapon is initiative, which guarantees its survival and continued activity. 

The more committed terrorists and revolutionaries devoted to anti-dictatorship 

terrorism and sabotage there are, the more military power will be worn down, 

the more time it will lose following false trails, and the more fear and tension it 

will suffer through not knowing where the next attack will be launched and what 

the next target will be.” Quoted in Crenshaw, 61. 

32. Guevara, 135. 

33. Nagl, xiii. 

34. Richard K. Betts, The Soft Underbelly of American Primacy: Tactical 

Advantages of Terror.” Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the 

New Security Environment, Reading & Interpretations (Connecticut: McGrawHill Companies, 2002), 383. 

35. The irregular fighter does not retain the superior mechanized arms, the 

knowledge of their employment, or the requisite level of professionalism to win 

the conventional fight. 

36. Mao Tse-tung, 40. 

37. Clausewitz, 87. 

38. Taber, 91. 

39. Kiras, 21. 

40. Mao Tse-tung, Basic Tactics (London: Pall Mall Press, 1967), 130. 

41. Sun Tzu, 179. 

42. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 551. 

25 
43. This term refers to the presumed territory of Biblical Israel as opposed 

to the borders of the current state. 

44. Taber, 99. 

45. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (London: Futura Publications Limited, 

1980), 82. 

46 Ibid., 73. 

47 Ibid., 100. 

48 Ibid., 24, 96, 128-130. “Public enlightenment was an inseparable part 

of our struggle. One of our most important means was our radio station.” 128. 

49 Ibid., 125 and 144. 

50 As quoted in Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 95. 

26 
Chapter 2 

Strategic Planning, Strategic Choices
 

Israeli Strategic Decision-Making in Lebanon 

Why did Israel go to war in Lebanon? In this chapter, I argue that Israel’s 

decision to invade Lebanon suggests a rational conception of the strategic 

situation by Israeli policymakers and exhibits a great deal of continuity with 

the policies enacted under previous, Labor-led governments. In addition, 

the strategic plan to invade Lebanon came about within the framework of 

a long experience of asymmetric warfare: specifically more-than-decadelong Palestinian campaign of international terrorism directed against 

Israeli and Jewish targets. Finally, the plan for the war and the fi rst days 

of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon reflected a continued adherence to the 

guiding precepts of long-standing Israeli conventional military doctrine. 

A Sustained Encounter with Asymmetric War 

Israel in 1978 was remarkable among regional and world powerhouses 

not for its lack of experience in asymmetric warfare but rather for its 

continuous experience of irregular conflict. Not only was it fighting 

a campaign against Palestinian terrorism from 1967 onward but it also 

had engaged in small cross-border raids and counter-raids against Egypt, 

Jordan, and Syria from 1948 through the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In fact, 

Ariel Sharon, viewed as the strategic architect of the 1982 invasion of 

Lebanon, gained much of his military reputation through his participation 

in numerous cross-border raids, some of which demonstrated a rather 

remarkable capacity for brutality. As the Palestinian Liberation Organization 

propagated acts of Palestinian terrorism in light of the demonstrated 

inability of the Arab states to force a solution to their plight, Israel began 

to understand the ability that these acts possessed to direct attention to 

the Palestinian cause and gain legitimacy for the Palestinian identity that 

Israeli leaders denied.1

 Rather than derailing the Palestinian cause, terrorist 

acts such as the Black September raid on the Israeli team at the 1972 

Olympics did not lead to international support of Israel nor widespread 

condemnation of Palestinian terror. Rather, Palestinians and specifically 

the PLO came to expect widespread support for their cause particularly 

within the framework of the UN. UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 

of 1975 equating Zionism with racism and the appointment of a permanent 

PLO representative to the UN are just two examples of this support.2 

27 
Through the eyes of Israeli policymakers, Palestinian terrorism 

reflected the desire to “wear down Israel as much as possible” and to “bring 

about an open and direct all-Arab war. . .[to] enable the establishment of 

a Palestinian state in place of the Jewish entity.”3 As early as 1968, Israel 

had begun to react to Palestinian terrorism. In response to the inability of 

Lebanon to control Palestinian militants from within its territory, Israel 

attacked the Beirut Airport and destroyed over a dozen airplanes.4

 Due to 

Palestinian tactics, which combined terrorist and guerrilla attacks with a 

push for international recognition, Israel began by the late 1970s to feel 

that sustained engagements with the Palestinians had resulted in a situation 

in which Palestinian terrorists could commit grievous and provocative 

acts with relative impunity.In some ways, this sustained encounter with 

asymmetric warfare caused Israel to more seriously consider its world 

image in a quest for greater legitimacy in responding to Palestinian military 

provocations. For instance, Yitzhak Rabin attempted to gain widespread 

international coverage of Israel’s opening of its northern border to Christian 

and Muslim refugees from Lebanese Civil War.5

 Israel’s sudden concern 

for refugees was, unsurprisingly, viewed somewhat skeptically by much of 

the international community, though it was front page news in the Israeli 

papers. From 1973 onward, Israel felt itself to be involved in its “war 

against the terrorists,” marked in 1976 by its spectacular Entebbe raid to 

free Israelis held hostage by the PLO.6 It was within this context of a long, 

active, asymmetric propaganda and military war with the Palestinians that 

Israel made its decision to initiate its more permanent military involvement 

with Lebanon. 

The Strategic Issues at Stake in Lebanon 

Joseph Nye has proposed that the state’s perception of a threat is 

intimately linked with the proximity of that threat.7

 In Israel’s case, 

though the strength of PLO conventional forces remained inferior to 

that of the Israeli Defense Forces , the proximity of a Palestinian base 

of operations in South Lebanon was of major concern. Through Israeli 

eyes, the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in 1970 and 1971 removed 

the somewhat moderating force of King Hussein. The heretofore mostly 

pliant Palestinian population of Lebanon was, almost overnight, infused 

with over 23,000 Palestinian militants.8 The subsequent alignment of PLO 

forces and leadership with subversive leftist parties within Lebanon led to 

sectarian civil war in 1975. The ensuing breakdown in central Lebanese 

authority presented Israel with the unsavory possibility that its erstwhile 

unimportant neighbor would be transformed into a permanent enemy base, 

through either the dominating military presence of Syria or the PLO or 

28 
both.9

 Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon is presented by Ehud Ya’ari and 

Ze’ev Schiff as the irresponsible work of an almost irrational Ariel Sharon. 

According to them, “Born of the ambition of one willful, reckless man, 

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was anchored in delusion, propelled by 

deceit, and bound to end in calamity.”10 

Yet the historical record provides a much more complex picture. 

Despite Defense Minister Sharon’s flaws in execution, veracity, and 

morality, the decisions in Lebanon of the Likud government from 1977 

until its fall in 1984 reflected a realistic appraisal of the strategic situation. 

The assessment was in line with the perceptions of both minority leaders 

and a majority of Jewish Israelis; it suggests a continuation rather than a 

departure from previous policies. 

Israeli military action had taken place against Lebanese targets as early 

as 1968 under Labor governments. Subsequent to the attack against the 

Beirut Airport, an attack specifically directed at Fatah (the dominant party, 

led by Arafat, within the PLO) was undertaken on 30 Oct 1968: Israeli 

units crossed the Lebanese border and attacked a training camp—almost a 

decade before Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin were anywhere near the 

reigns of power.11 From 1974 to 1977, the Labor government of Yitzhak 

Rabin regarded the PLO in Lebanon to be so dangerous that Israel invested 

approximately $150 million in supporting Maronite parties and militias 

in hopes of undermining the Lebanese leftist coalition and preventing the 

emergence of a militarily strong PLO on Israel’s northern border.12 

Israel tacitly agreed in 1976 under Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak 

Rabin to allow Syria into Lebanon subject to a series of conditions. Likud’s 

decision to attack Syrian forces in 1982 is often said to demonstrate 

Likud’s radical departure from Labor policies. Labor’s decision to allow 

Syria into Lebanon, however, demonstrated how any Israeli government 

would regard PLO entrenchment in Lebanon to be an existential challenge 

to the Israeli state that warranted desperate measures. Rabin, fi nding that 

only the fox was willing and able to enter and restore order, presciently felt 

like a farmer locked out of the chicken coop where the hens had run amok. 

Believing he faced a choice between a long-term fight with Syria over 

control in Lebanon or a short-term threat from the PLO on its northern 

border with Lebanon, Rabin chose the long-term threat from Syria.82 

That his Defense Minister, Shimon Peres, regarded the likely outcome of 

Syrian intervention to be permanent Syrian occupation of the country or 

its transformation into an Islamic state reveals the high risks the Labor 

Party was willing to take in regards to the PLO presence in Lebanon.14 

29 
A sustained terrorist campaign propagated by the PLO since its 

inception in 1965 demonstrated to Israelis across the political spectrum 

a supposedly indefatigable enemy. The Palestinian air-piracy campaign 

of the 1970s reflected a new reality: a Palestinian cause once constrained 

by the desire of Arab host governments to avoid conventional wars with 

Israel, now had an independent base in Lebanon through which it could 

operate relatively independently. Moreover, PLO action had gained for 

the organization a great deal of legitimacy within the Palestinian refugee 

population throughout the Middle East, thus undermining Israel’s ability to 

negotiate individual settlements with different segments of the Palestinian 

population.15 International recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate 

representative of Palestinian national aspirations further exacerbated a 

crisis of confidence for Israel. 

The election of a Likud Knesset (the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem) 

in 1977 was partly a recognition of Israeli angst over Israel’s strategic 

standing in light of the Yom Kippur War and continued Palestinian attacks. 

But it was also the more simple result of stagnation that would accompany 

almost any political party that had enjoyed, as Labor had, nearly 30 years 

of continuous rule. Though Likud professed a desire to hold every inch of 

territories gained through conquest in the Six-Day War, such irredentist 

claims were pushed aside in Begin’s peace-making with Egypt that resulted 

in the 1979 peace treaty (the trading of the Sinai, considered part of the 

Biblical Jewish birthright, for peace). Begin’s entry into the Levantine 

quagmire was the result of incremental steps, in and of themselves a 

reflection of a desire to resolve the fundamentally unchanged Palestinian 

problem, that made resort to large-scale conventional war, with all of its 

terrible uncertainties, virtually inevitable. 

Begin’s Likud government had inherited an unenviable strategic 

problem. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, though ending with Israel in a 

remarkably powerful military position, had ended, as had all previous 

Israeli wars, without lasting peace with Israel’s neighbors. The fighting 

had resulted in the deaths of 2,522 Israeli soldiers, more than the number 

that had died in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.16 Egyptian and Syrian forces, 

while not approaching qualitative parity, had eroded the technological gap 

between the IDF and its enemies; Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat in particular 

had demonstrated his ability to use Egypt’s armed forces, even without 

military success, to effect political goals.17 

With restive governments, dissatisfied with the status quo, on his 

northern and southern borders, Begin was now confronted with the 

results of Yitzhak Rabin’s policy of containing the PLO through the tacit 

30 
agreement to allow Syria into Lebanon. Because of the Maronites’ rejection 

of a permanent Syrian presence in Lebanon, by 1978, Syria had made its 

peace with the leftist alliance that it had come into Lebanon to crush.18 

Syria’s deployment of force down to the Litani River did not violate 

the terms of Syria’s unwritten agreement with Israel but, while limiting 

to some degree the freedom of the PLO to conduct operations against 

the Israelis, it really meant that Israel was now limited in its capacity to 

respond to Palestinian attacks from within Lebanon because of a line of 

Syrian protection. When a Fatah commando team seized an Israeli tourist 

bus on 11 Mar 1978, resulting in 35 civilian deaths, Begin was faced with a 

situation in which failure to act would be construed by Israel’s enemies as 

further demonstration of Israel’s military limitations. About to enter peace 

negotiations with Egypt and early on in the rule of a government elected to 

ensure Israeli security, this was not something Begin could afford. 

Begin authorized Operation Litani in response to the attack of 11 

Mar 1978. Litani was construed as a lightning strike to eliminate the 

PLO presence from the south of Lebanon adjacent to Israel’s northern 

border, up to the Litani River. Though the 14 Mar 1978 operation was 

quick and only 20 Israeli soldiers would die in the incursion, it was met 

virtually immediately with international condemnation. The passing of 

UN Resolutions 425 and 426 on 19 Mar 1978 resulted in the deployment 

of UN blue helmets in Lebanon and international demand for Israeli 

withdrawal.19 It was the beginning of Israel’s nearly continuous twentytwo-year military involvement with Lebanon. 

The deployment of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon exacerbated Israel’s 

security dilemma. The resolution undermined the legitimacy of Israeli 

reprisals against the PLO within Lebanon. Furthermore, though PLO 

operatives had been pushed past the Litani River, the deployment of the 

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the south limited the 

freedom of action enjoyed by Israel in response to the Security Council’s 

demand for its immediate withdrawal from Lebanon.20 Meanwhile, PLO 

forces redeployed in the south to the areas evacuated by the IDF within the 

effective, if unintended, umbrella of UNIFIL protection.21 UNIFIL patrols 

within the south were “reduced to the ineffectual role of recording ceasefi re violations.”22 

It was with this strategic understanding in mind that Israel revamped 

and upgraded its efforts to support the Maronite Phalange Party within 

Lebanon. The attitude of the Israeli government was one of “accumulating 

frustration” as the IDF had been unable to pursue the PLO to “conclusive 

31 
results.”23 In this sense, the empowerment of Major Saad Haddad’s South 

Lebanon Army (SLA) and the increase of support for the Gemayel Phalange, 

the policy adopted by Begin and Sharon from the Litani Operation through 

Operation Peace for Galilee, was not the result of some ill-conceived 

notion of a friendly, neighboring, Christian state. Certainly the Israeli 

government had dreams of such a result, but the policy reflected a lastditch effort to control PLO political aspirations and military engagements 

without a resort to all-out war.24 Even the severest Israeli critics of Israel’s 

policy toward the Phalange admit, despite their distaste, that it was an 

instrumental rather than an ideological decision.25 

The empowerment of the Phalange, which could be viewed as an effort 

to limit direct Israeli involvement in Lebanon, in fact set Israel on a crash 

course with Syria. In April 1981, Israel’s shooting down of two Syrian 

helicopters being used to suppress the Phalange (a violation of the 1976 

agreement’s ban on the use of Syrian airpower within Lebanon) brought 

matters to a head. It led almost immediately to the deployment of Syrian 

surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) in the Bekaa Valley in further contravention 

of the 1976 agreement in an effort to retain Syria’s freedom vis-à-vis its 

political opponents in Lebanon.26 This deployment further complicated 

Israel’s strategic calculus. The PLO now operated with relative impunity 

provided not only by the presence of UNIFIL but also by the presence of 

Syrian air defenses. 

Without movement toward a political solution with the PLO, Israel’s 

military options became much more limited in response to Palestinian 

attacks, except in the unlikely event of Syrian acquiescence in Israeli 

intervention in Lebanon (made even less likely with Israel’s 1981 de facto 

annexation of the Golan Heights). 

If Israel wished to use its military against the PLO in Lebanon, it now 

had either to engage in very limited resort to swift raids across the border, 

which had already been demonstrated to be ineffective in diminishing the 

PLO’s military capacity, or to resort to a full-scale war. Some have argued 

that Israel had more military choices, that a military course was available 

that was in between the choice of all-out war and short, limited raids or 

artillery barrages. Yet, in the end, almost all Israeli policymakers believed, 

after initial objections and careful consideration, that the only sustainable 

military intervention in Lebanon was an all-out war.27 

With the deployment of the Syrian SAMs in the Bekaa, the PLO took 

advantage of the situation to increase the frequency of indirect fi re attacks 

against Israeli targets in northern Galilee. From 14 to 21 July 1981, heavy 

32 
Palestinian artillery attacks resulted in widespread panic among Israeli 

civilians, causing the politically unacceptable spectacle of Israeli civilians 

fleeing their homes in a mass exodus.28 The ceasefire agreement of 24 July 

1981, negotiated by the United States, did little to resolve the situation. 

Only attacks from within Lebanon by the PLO were covered by the 

agreement. Also, the PLO retained the ability to rearm within its border 

enclave, nicknamed Fatahland due to the PLO’s overwhelming presence 

in the area.29 Though full-blown war was still a year away, Israel’s strategic 

problems that would lead it further down the disastrous path were now 

well-established. 

The PLO retained operational flexibility and the opportunity to attack 

Israel as it pleased. It was rearming within Lebanon and could use, in 

accordance with the 24 July 1981 agreement, spectacular attacks from 

without to bring more attention to its cause. It had demonstrated its ability 

with the artillery attacks of July 1981 to use its military forces, particularly 

artillery and rocket fire, to inflict politically unacceptable damage in Israel. 

Nor had this artillery threat to Galilee been removed by the ceasefire 

agreement. Additionally, U.N. Resolutions 425 and 426, without ever 

mentioning the PLO, effectively guarded in international eyes the ability 

of the PLO to operate within Lebanon and made Israeli attacks look like 

acts of aggression. 

The presence of UNIFIL troops complicated Israeli actions against the 

PLO. Furthermore, the empowerment of the SLA and Phalange, as a check 

on PLO influence in Lebanon, ensured Israel’s continued involvement 

in Lebanon and conflict with the Syrians. Finally, the deployment of 

Syrian SAMs “gave Syrian forces the ability to intervene against our 

[Israeli] retaliatory air strikes on PLO positions, and they inhibited 

the reconnaissance flights over Lebanese territory that we considered 

essential.”30 

On 3 June 1982, Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain, 

was grievously wounded in an assassination attempt in London by the 

Abu Nidal group, a Palestinian terror group outside the PLO. Much has 

subsequently been made in critical accounts of the war that the Israeli 

public was duped into a war with the PLO in Lebanon because of an Abu 

Nidal attack in London. Assertions by later critics of the war that the attack 

on the Israeli ambassador served only as a pretext for an already planned 

attack are relatively undisputed.31 Sharon admits as much when he writes: 

But the Argov shooting was merely the match that ignited 

the fuse. The real casus belli was the chain of terrorist 

33 
attacks (290 of them now, of which this was merely the 

most recent) and the continuing buildup of long-range 

artillery in southern Lebanon—all of which had taken 

place during the eleven-month-long supposed ceasefire.32 

Yet the grouping of Abu Nidal’s attack with all other Palestinian attacks 

did not reveal deceit by the Likud government. It reflected a fundamental 

belief by most Israelis that the London attack was a continuation of the 

existential struggle against their Palestinian enemy.33 In the decision to use 

military action, the Likud government was in line with the strategy against 

the PLO employed by the Israeli state under the previous stewardship 

of the Labor Party. This is particularly evidenced by Yitzhak Rabin’s 

championing of the invasion. The decision to launch Operation Peace for 

Galilee in July 1982 was born of a shared belief “that military power and 

swift action could solve any problem.”34 

But as much as the march to war was a continuation of previous policy, 

the Israelis could have chosen otherwise. Begin said so himself: “As for 

Operation Peace for Galilee...it does not really belong to the category of 

wars of no alternative.”35 Israelis across the political spectrum believed, 

incorrectly, that the PLO somehow masked a more pliant Palestinian 

population willing to accept permanent Israeli rule. Israelis believed, or 

perhaps only hoped, that the destruction of the PLO in Lebanon would 

affect a solution to the Palestinian problem, that it would end Palestinian 

national aspirations and cause them to accept their lot. 

At the inception of the war, most Israelis would agree with Sharon 

that the war “gave the Arabs of Samaria, Judea, and Gaza a chance to 

move toward a negotiated solution with us—free at last from the sinister 

effect of the PLO with its assassinations and pervasive threats.”36 In truth, 

the terrorist campaign against Israel and Israeli targets led by the PLO 

from 1965 to 1982, which had, according to Sharon, killed nearly 1,400 

people, had demonstrated to Palestinians that there was for them a choice 

as well—they could, in fact, fight. It was a sentiment that Begin of all 

people should have understood. It was he who once said: 

In Eretz Israel, the Jews sang of our ancient hope to be free 

in our own country. A free people. . .in our own country. 

Such a people cannot be ruled by aliens. It must liberate 

itself from their yoke; and the effort at liberation can only 

be a matter of time.37 

Arafat taught the Palestinians a similar tune, and infected with it, no 

34 
military solution short of annihilation would have removed the Palestinian 

aspiration to Palestine. Israel’s decision to go to war in July 1982 was a 

decision to ignore not only the difficult decisions and sacrifices that might 

affect a political solution, but also its own history. 38 

A Conventional Plan 

The Israeli plan that would launch the war into Lebanon would, in 

most ways, be a rehash of what had worked for Israel in the four major 

conventional wars it had fought prior to Operation Peace for Galilee. The 

type of war it would encounter, though, would provide a challenge that 

Israel’s offensive doctrine had not anticipated. Larry E. Cable remarks of 

the US Army in the Vietnam war: 

[it] was the incorrect instrument for fighting the confl ict. . 

.It was a force configured, equipped and trained according 

to doctrine suitable for conventional warfare. . .The 

mechanical techniques of mobility, heavy fi repower and 

sophisticated communications did not automatically 

endow the Army with the necessary capabilities to 

successfully counter insurgent forces.39 

It is a description that is as apt as any for the IDF’s move into 

Lebanon.40 

The general plan that Israel employed in Lebanon sought to drive the 

PLO immediately out of artillery range of Israeli territory in the south of 

Lebanon. Israel would cut off the lines of retreat of PLO fighters to Beirut 

by virtually encircling southern Lebanon and would destroy as much as 

possible of the Palestinian fighting force. To do this, Israel would need air 

support and reconnaissance, thus requiring the destruction of the Syrian 

SAM sites in the Bekaa valley (except in the unlikely scenario that the 

Syrians removed the SAMs on their own and gave Israel a free pass). 

Israel would then use the Phalange to pursue and destroy PLO remnants in 

Beirut. To ensure the PLO would be kept out for good, Israel would install 

Bashir Gemayel of the Phalange as President of Lebanon. To do this, Israel 

would have to cut off Syrian forces on the Beirut-Damascus highway so 

that Syria would not be able to take advantage of the chaos inspired by the 

invasion to install its own puppet.41 

The Israeli doctrine as developed over four decades was very much 

employed in the attack. The IDF currently lists its operational doctrine 

as “Multi-arm coordination; Transferring the battle to [the] enemy’s 

territory quickly; Quick attainment of war objectives.”42 It can be said to 

have applied this doctrine in Lebanon. Armored brigades comprising three 

35 
Israeli divisions rapidly encircled Palestinian positions and cut them off 

from the Syrian forces in the Bekaa valley. Though artillery support was 

used more than in previous engagements, air support was at least as vital. 

As in previous conflicts, higher headquarters performed their doctrinal 

mission to “exercise ‘constant pressure’ for greater speed.”43 On the fourth 

day of the invasion, Israeli forces used a well-rehearsed attack to decimate 

Syrian air defenses with no losses—a move so surprising that it sent the 

Soviet Union scrambling to address inadequacies in what it thought was a 

virtually impregnable air defense system (and had the US begging Israel 

for operational details). 

In the south of Lebanon, Israeli forces were often greeted warmly; 

many of the Shiites and Christians of the south were happy to be rid of the 

PLO. Hard fi ghting occurred in places and not everything went perfectly, 

but within a week, and with about the same number of casualties as Israel’s 

lightning war in 1956, Israel unilaterally declared a ceasefire and prepared 

its negotiating position. The PLO did not have the bargaining chip of being 

able to fire on the Galilee. The plan seemed to have gone well. 

Then the real war, the asymmetric war, began. . . 

36 
Notes 

1. For instance, in 1969, Gold Meir, a Laborite, famously told The Sunday 

Times of London that the Palestinians did not exist. Quoted by Thomas L. Friedman in From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 142. Ariel 

Sharon refers to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as “the Arabs of 

Samaria, Judea, and Gaza.” Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior: An Autobiography (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 494. 

2. Resolution 3369 (XXX), 10 Nov 1975, http://www.un.org/documents. 

3. Shlomo Gazit, “Israel” in Combating Terrorism: Strategies of Ten 

Countries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 228. 

4. Robert G. Rabil, Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel, and Lebanon 

(London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 47. 

5. A. J. Abraham, The Lebanon War (London: Praeger Publishers, 1996), 

36. 

6. Benny Michelsohn, “Born in Battle: Part 8: War Against Terrorism,” 

http://www1.IDF.mil. 

7. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (England: Longman, 2000), 60-61. 

8. Abraham, 48. 

9. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (London: George 

Allen & Unwin, 1984), 14. 

10. Ibid., 301. 

11. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the Israeli 

Experience in Lebanon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43. 

12. Schiff and Ya’ari, 18. 

13. Abraham, 54-55. 

14. Ibid., 60-61. 

15. Yaniv, 39. 

16. Statistics on war casualties come from a number of sources including The Jewish Agency for Israel at http://www.jafi.org.il, www.knesset.gov.il, 

www2.IDF.il, news reports in the Lexis-Nexis database, and communications 

with Benny Michelsohn, a former chief historian of the IDF. 

17. George W. Gawrych, The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy 

Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars (Connecticut: 

Greenwood Press, 2000), 240-261. 

18. Abraham, 1-125. 

19. Avalon Project, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm. 

37 
20. UNIFIL stands for United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. 

21. Abraham, 111. 

22. Ibid., 125. 

23. Yaniv, 129. 

24. Sharon and Chanoff, 494. 

25. Schiff and Ya’ari, 43. 

26. Rabil, 52 and 64. 

27. Yaniv, 111. 

28. Sharon and Chanoff, 430-431. 

29. Schiff and Ya’ari, 37. 

30. Sharon and Chanoff, 429. 

31. Schiff and Ya’ari, 97-98. 

32. Sharon and Chanoff, 455. 

33. Friedman, 130. Friedman goes on to demonstrate just the extent to 

which Labor cheered the invasion. As Friedman puts it, “Today, nine out of ten 

Israelis will tell you that they opposed the Lebanon invasion from the start; this 

is sheer nonsense.” 

34. Michael I. Handel, The Evolution of Israeli strategy: The Psychology of 

Insecurity and the Quest for Absolute Security in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 559-560. 

35. “Begin Says Lebanon War Could Have Been Avoided.” United Press 

International, 20 Aug 1982, Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexisnexis.com/universe. 

36. Sharon and Chanoff, 494. Rabin felt similarly. See Friedman, 545-549. 

37. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (London: Futura Publications Limited, 

1980), 76. 

38. On the contrary, fear that the PLO would “go political” explicitly contributed to the drive to war. Yaniv, 90. 

39. Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths: the Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (London: New York University 

Press, 1986), 282. 

40. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

1999), 145-146. Colin Gray’s depiction could just as easily refer to Israel in 

Lebanon: “American politicians and American soldiers were punished by American society because they waged an American-preferred way of war in conditions 

where they could not deliver victory. . .” 

38 
41. Variously described in Sharon and Chanoff, 449-469, Schiff and Ya’ari, 

42-43, and Rabil, 66. 

42. “Doctrine”, Israel Defense Forces: the Official Website; available from 

http://www1.idf.il. 

43. Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 198-199. 

39 

Chapter 3
 

Disaster Strikes
 

Things Begin to Fall Apart 

In the last chapter, I described the lightning war that took place from 

6 June 1982 through the declared ceasefire on 11 June 1982.1

 It was a 

blitzkrieg of the sort that the Israeli Defense Forces had planned on 

fighting. Conventional forces moved quickly into Lebanon and decimated 

Syrian and Palestinian Liberation Organization forces throughout the 

country. According to a former chief of IDF military history, the main 

theme of this part of the early war was the dominance of the IDF over its 

enemies. Tactical lessons derived from the Yom Kippur war, such as the 

simultaneous use of combined arms, were employed to devastating effect.2 

By the end of the first week, the Golani Brigade had, in following quickly 

withdrawing PLO forces, taken up positions at the Beirut Airport. Baruch 

Spiegel, a battalion commander at the time who led the Golani Brigade’s 

charge into the Beirut Airport, describes the fighting against the PLO in 

the first week of the war: 

They were the tactics of non-organized groups...when they 

[the PLO] saw they are not effective anymore and [are] 

endangering their life, they just ran away until the second 

[defensive] line...In Sidon, we had some tactical problems 

because it was a built-up area, and the terrorists...some of 

them with uniforms and some of them without uniforms, 

integrated with the...innocent population ...So we had 

some problems because of this asymmetry; we couldn’t 

use all the methods,...not air force and not heavy artillery 

bombardment, etc. because many innocent people could 

be killed...you had to find the volume of somehow low 

intensive warfare... in addition to the use, the traditional 

use, of force and fire and maneuvers, etc.3 

Ominously we can see in this description some of the problems that 

would plague the IDF through its subsequent occupation of Lebanon. 

The problems grew worse with the beginning of the siege of Beirut. 

Not until 24 June 1982 was the tenuous hold on the Beirut-Damascus 

highway near Ba’abde converted into incontrovertible control of a twelvemile swath of this vital artery.4 This meant that to some degree both PLO 

41 
and Syrian forces could reinforce positions in and around Beirut from 

6 June 1982 and even after the ceasefire of 11 June 1982. “The PLO 

emphatically did not dissolve into helpless chaos” despite the incredible 

Israeli onslaught.5 

By 11 June 1982, however, Sharon could and did brag that all of the 

Galilee had been removed from the range of PLO artillery and rockets.6 

Of course, as Ian Black and others would point out again and again, until a 

minor attack that took place during Israel’s invasion, no rockets or artillery 

had fallen in northern Israel for a year prior to the initiation of the conflict.7 

Thousands of armed members of the PLO were now mixed in with the 

innocent population of western Beirut, and suddenly, Israel’s Phalange 

allies realized that it made little sense to counter their PLO rivals and earn 

the permanent enmity of the Arab world when Israel seemed poised to do 

the work for them. Vastly outnumbered, the PLO proclaimed it would stay 

and fight. Knowing after its experience in the Palestinian refugee camps 

that urban warfare was a “dirty, dirty arena” and facing international 

condemnation, the IDF sat outside the city as they contemplated what it 

would mean for the IDF to occupy an Arab capital for the first time in its 

history.8 

As the television cameras rolled, Begin, of all people, should well 

have understood the shift of focus from Israel’s astonishing conventional 

military victories against the Syrians and elements of the PLO in the first 

week of the war to the PLO’s life-or-death struggle against the IDF; he had 

once written, “The operations of a regular army, even if it achieves great 

victories, are less spectacular than the daring attacks of a handful of rebels 

against a mighty government and army.”9 

A Bitter Pill 

Military sieges seek both to attrite an enemy force and to exhaust a 

population through violence and eventually cause them to withhold support 

from the combatants inside a city. There is a common perception that those 

forces engaged in the act of besieging are the aggressors. Militarily, the 

siege of Beirut was virtually uncontested. During the 72-day siege of 

western Beirut, the PLO could do little with its weapons while the IDF 

fired at will into the heavily populated refugee slums of Sabra, Shatilla, 

and other areas where the PLO had positioned its fighters, weapons, and 

offices.10 From its June beginning through 15 Aug 1982, the siege resulted 

in thousands of innocent civilian deaths with relatively little loss of life 

among IDF soldiers.11 And each scene of horror, whether or not Israel had 

a legitimate military target in mind when its bombs exploded in a crowded 

42 
apartment building or errantly hit a car carrying women and children, 

could be broadcast live to a world who now viewed Israel as aggressors. 

“War Creates New Orphans” was a typical headline of the period.12 

For the IDF military commanders on the ground, the siege of Beirut 

marked something they really were not trained for. Senior leaders, who 

had fought in Israel’s previous wars, were among the best-trained in 

the world on the application of force. They had participated in previous 

lighting victories over their opponents in 1967 and (eventually) in 1973. 

They were brave; they took initiative; they were trusted by their soldiers. 

By entering Beirut, all of the training they had received and put to 

spectacular effect could not prepare them for the damaging scenes that 

would emerge due to their siege of Beirut. As Baruch Spiegel describes it, 

tactical considerations for the battalion commander, in which he could be 

concerned only with the immediate fight during the drive to Beirut, gave 

way to strategic considerations as an “immediate antenna” was created by 

the presence of the international media that could potentially broadcast the 

moves (and mistakes) of his soldiers. 

This “immediate antenna” was not something Israeli doctrine had 

anticipated. To deal with it, nearly daily meetings were called by IDF 

Northern Command to discuss the minutiae of the tactical fi ght. Initiative, 

which had been the hallmark for lower-level officers according to IDF 

doctrine, was fatally undermined as battalion commanders participated 

in meetings to scrutinize their every move. As the IDF remained in the 

environs of Beirut with the television cameras rolling, in addition to the 

rest of the world, portions of the Israeli people grew more concerned, 

and, given the numbers of reserves that had been mobilized, this began to 

impact on the IDF itself. Spectacularly, IDF Colonel Eli Geva, the youngest 

Brigade Commander in the army and considered one of the star officers 

of the IDF, resigned his command rather than take part in any move into 

Beirut. Commanders at all levels found themselves forced to attempt to 

maintain unit cohesion with some reservists openly questioning what was 

happening in Beirut.13 For many IDF soldiers, the siege meant that “the 

line between firing at the enemy in the form of armed terrorists who fired 

back and shelling innocent civilians seemed to have vanished...”14 

Without a miracle for the Palestinians or the absolute leveling of 

Palestinian areas of Beirut in order to effect complete destruction of the 

PLO leadership, Arafat’s decision to vacate west Beirut with the PLO 

leadership and many fighters on 15 Aug 1982 was all but a foregone 

conclusion. Yet, in many ways, it demonstrates the effectiveness of 

asymmetric warfare that Arafat could turn military defeat into a political 

43 
victory. It is undoubtedly true that if he had the capabilities, Arafat would 

have liked to have thrown back the IDF into the Galilee; however, Arafat’s 

yearlong respect of the 1981 ceasefire vis-à-vis northern Israel evidences 

an understanding that this was not possible. 

As shocking as the speed of the Israeli rollup of Palestinian defenses 

must have been, and as much as the failure to stand up to the IDF created 

internal difficulties for Arafat within the PLO, he and other PLO officials 

understood that the harsh downgrading of Israel’s international image, 

especially in the West, paved the way for future gain. Julie Flint reported 

on 15 Aug 1982 what can only be regarded in hindsight as a particularly 

prescient view among senior PLO officials that “the defeat can...be 

turned into a political victory that will hasten the creation of a Palestinian 

state in all or part of the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip.”15 The IDF, 

conversely, had been unable to destroy the PLO even as it had expelled it 

from Beirut. Arafat could make a somewhat plausible case, as he did, that 

the PLO would not have left Beirut, or at least would not have left as early 

as it did, “had it not been for Beirut’s children and our love for them, and 

had it not been for Beirut’s citizens of whom we are proud...This was a 

decision to rescue the city from the total destruction that was announced 

by the enemy...”16 

Much worse was to come. On 14 Sept 1982, Bashir Gemayel, the leader 

of the Phalange and newly declared President of Lebanon, was assassinated 

by a Syrian agent. IDF forces subsequently surrounded the Palestinian 

refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in West Beirut and allowed Phalange 

forces to enter the camps.17 Arafat’s suggestion that the IDF intended 

“total destruction” of the inhabitants seemed much more plausible, a week 

after his speech, as the world became aware of the terrible massacres of 

hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians by the Phalange militia after 

their Israeli-sanctioned entry into the camps. Outraged at the massacre, 

President Reagan initiated the move of the Multinational Force (MNF), 

which had originally been deployed to implement the ceasefi re between 

the PLO and Israel but had returned to its ships, back into Beirut. Deserved 

or undeserved, Israel had gone from besieging aggressor to murderous 

tyrant in the eyes of much of the world. Arafat was clearly pained and 

outraged by the massacre, but, in truth, he could never even have dreamed 

up such a scheme for confirming the justice of the Palestinian cause as the 

deployment of international peacekeepers to protect Palestinian civilians 

from the IDF. As Baruch Spiegel puts it, “What [do] you remember of this 

war, the international community? Sabra and Shatilla.”18 

44 
From this point forward, Israel stood to gain nothing vis-à-vis the 

Palestinians through the war. Many have asked why the Israeli political 

elite chose to keep a military presence in Beirut despite the negative 

coverage and the assassination of their lackey, Bashir Gemayel. Though I 

will deal with this in greater detail in the two final chapters of this thesis, a 

key factor in Israel’s decision to remain in the Lebanese imbroglio requires 

exploration now. The IDF’s former chief military historian has insisted to 

me that we must “...look at the goals of Peace for Galilee War. The goals 

were achieved completely. In those three years, not one Katyusha rocket 

was shot against the northern border of Israel.”19 

If those had been the only goals, then they had been achieved for a 

year before the war with PLO adherence to the ceasefire; Israel would 

neither have had to invade, nor would it have had any reason to stay. In 

reality though, the strategic situation at the war’s inception had been the 

presence of the PLO in south Lebanon, not the actual firing of rockets, 

and the fact of the matter was that Israel had not destroyed the PLO, not 

as a force on the world stage and not even in Lebanon. Shlomo Gazit, 

former administrator of the Occupied Territories and head of IDF Military 

Intelligence, describes the problem thus: 

...we didn’t remove the PLO threat from southern 

Lebanon. We removed the PLO from Beirut...If it would 

have been a problem of removing the PLO from south 

Lebanon, it would have been a totally [different] kind of 

story, and we had no means of doing it because in order 

to do it, we had to remove 250,000 Palestinians—I don’t 

know where to.20 

Israel had ostensibly gone into Lebanon to remove the threat to 

Northern Galilee, and despite the withdrawal of the PLO leadership from 

Beirut, it had not done this. 

Benny Michelsohn insists that the withdrawal of PLO forces from 

Beirut ends Operation Peace for Galilee, a conventional war won by the 

IDF, and begins an irregular war that the IDF lost politically even while it 

dominated tactically.21 In hindsight and in terms of tactical operations, this 

may be somewhat true, even though the IDF had been fi ghting irregular 

and mixed forces from the inception of the war, but it is, at best, an artificial 

distinction that is unhelpful in garnering a full understanding of the war. 

Nor does the distinction mesh well with Israel’s own understanding of the 

war at the time. In November 1982, two months after its supposed end, 

Yitzhak Shamir declared that the operation had not ended but that “we are 

45 
approaching” its end.22 In June 1985, when Israeli forces would withdraw 

into a small security zone in the south of Lebanon, the Israeli government 

had still not declared an official end to Operation Peace for Galilee.23 

In 1982, the achievements of the IDF were, as Schiff and Ya’ari 

argue, “the destruction of the PLO’s ‘state within-a-state’ in Lebanon, 

the elimination of the centers of command and supply for the network 

of international terrorism, and, of course, the removal of the PLO’s guns 

from [the] range of Galilee.”24 But Israel had done this militarily—it had 

destroyed the state-within-a-state in Lebanon but failed to provide an 

alternative for the functions that that state had provided for those within 

south Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese were 

now living under Israeli military occupation, and Israel could not leave; 

as soon as it did, it would be faced again with a threat to northern Israel 

as the Syrians would support Israeli enemies to fill the power vacuum. 

The abortive attempt to install a Phalange puppet under Amin Gemayel 

and the imposition of a peace treaty, later abrogated by the Lebanese 

Parliament, was a reflection of this reality.25 Israel remained in Lebanon 

because the invasion had not solved the strategic reality wrought by the 

militant Palestinian presence in Lebanon. It was a strategic reality that 

would spawn a Shiite resistance that would undermine the entire rationale 

for the war: maximizing Israeli security. 

A Very Hot Pepper26 

Israel could not leave Lebanon; new strategic developments ensured it 

could not stay—it was a paradox borne out by Israel’s decision to invade 

Lebanon. We must start at the beginning of the invasion momentarily, and 

as do many stories with horrific endings, this one begins beautifully. The 

PLO had not treated the Shiites of southern Lebanon particularly well, and 

as a result, it had earned their enmity. Baruch Spiegel, who saw it himself, 

starts the story of the eventual development of Shiite hostilities from the 

beginning of the invasion when the Israelis were greeted as liberators— 

”at the beginning [of] all of this [Shiite] groups and the [Shiite] people... 

welcome[d] us with rice and with flowers...”27 Flowers and rice are a long 

way from what was to come. General opposition from the Shiite group 

Amal was followed by increasing levels of sophisticated irregular attacks, 

to eventual joint attacks that included both Hezbollah and Amal as well as 

Palestinian fighters.28 

Historical writing has forced me, as it has forced major writers on 

the war, to write separately about the emerging Shiite threat from the war 

against the PLO. Yet this necessary thematic separateness obfuscates an 

46 
important reality that I wish to emphasize: the Shiite threat to Israel was 

emerging simultaneously to the war with the PLO, not just subsequent 

to the PLO withdrawal from Beirut. It was a product not just of Israel’s 

staying in Lebanon but of the invasion itself. 

Though Ariel Sharon “never considered the [Shiites] as long-term 

enemies of Israel...” the truth was that conditions before the war suggested 

that the Shiites were unlikely allies.29 Musa al-Sadr, until his permanent 

“disappearance” at the probable hands of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi , had 

led the Shiite Amal movement in Lebanon; Sadr’s niece was married to the 

son of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, who had decried Israel as its enemy. 

Prior to the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini’s minions found shelter from 

the Shah in southern Lebanon.30 If this alignment of interest between Amal 

and Iran would not have ensured a problematic occupation in and of itself, 

Israel’s actions in the south at the invasion’s inception virtually ensured 

a permanent schism between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite population. 

Avner Yaniv argues that Israel had no plan for administering the power 

vacuum that it created in the south through the destruction of the PLO 

mini-state. Ad hoc improvisation, which had always been a component 

of Israel’s conventional, offensively minded doctrine, led to “a series of 

reflexive fits drawing on Israel’s previous experience with comparable 

problems in the Sunni, Christian West Bank and Gaza Strip.”31 

This had an almost instant deleterious effect on Israel’s relationship 

with the Shiites. In the early days of the war, while the siege of the PLO 

in Beirut was still ongoing, the Higher Shiite Council, led by Amal’s 

Shams al-Din, Sadr’s successor, urged the Shiites of Lebanon to reject as 

illegitimate Israeli interference in southern Lebanon and the imposition of 

Israeli-backed administrations in Shiite towns and villages. Shiites were 

urged “to reject the occupation and not to cooperate in any way with the 

Israeli-imposed local administration.”32 When I asked Baruch Spiegel if 

the IDF had done anything initially to win “the hearts and minds” of the 

Lebanese Shiite population, his answer was simple. “Not immediately. 

It took time until we modified. It took time.”33 If there was ever a real 

window of opportunity to win over the Shiite population, it was shut by 

the time the IDF “modified” its practices. 

Shlomo Gazit in his book Trapped Fools describes the process through 

which Israel’s occupation of the West Bank turned sour to even the least 

politicized and most tolerant of Palestinian Arabs: 

...there was no way to prevent two natural processes typical 

of imposed regimes, especially when the occupying party 

47 
is ethnically and culturally different from the occupied 

party...Israeli dehumanization of Palestinian Arabs... 

[and] The members of the administrative mechanism 

quickly became addicted to their feelings of power in the 

face of the helplessness of the local residents who needed 

their services.34 

The same process would occur in occupied Lebanon that had occurred 

in the occupied Palestinian territories. The development of a Lebanese 

Shiite hatred for the Israeli occupiers of their land, who had occupied it for 

fear of Palestinian attacks on Israel, was virtually inevitable. 

On 16 Oct 1983, during Ashura celebrations in Nabatiya, an Israeli 

convoy drove through the town as part of a routine operation. Either ignorant 

of or not caring about what is the holiest holiday for Shiite Muslims, a 

holiday infused with passion in ancient memory of the martyrdom of 

Hussein as plays recall his deeds and men whip themselves in agony, the 

Israelis attempted to drive through a procession of mourning Shiites. It 

was the kind of thoughtless indignity endemic to prolonged occupations 

by invaders. The Shiites were outraged at this violation of the sanctity of 

their holiday, and while the Israelis beeped their horns and tried to push 

people out of their way, the Shiites began to riot against them. Eventually, 

feeling in mortal peril as the crowd moved in and destroyed vehicles, the 

soldiers fired into the crowd, killing and wounding several Shiites. The 

fuse was lit; the bomb exploded. 

Much has been made of this incident in every authoritative account 

of the war. However, many of the writers are journalists: Thomas L. 

Friedman, Robert Fisk, Ze’ev Schiff, and Ehud Ya’ari, for instance. They 

generally overemphasize, as the daily cycle of their profession forces them 

to, the single event at the expense of the situation that allowed the event to 

transform into full-scale Shiite resistance to Israel; many others have fallen 

victim to the same trap. Typical of this type of overemphasis on the event 

is Fouad Ajami’s declaration that as a result of the shootings, “The die was 

cast in the south.”35 The die had already been cast. As Reuven Ehrlich puts 

it, “The moment the IDF stayed in southern Lebanon and stayed not for 

months and not for one year, it was inevitable that such incidents [would] 

happen. If not Ashura, it would happen in another incident.”36 

While the event was a catalyst, speeding along a reaction that was 

bound to happen anyway, the results proved startling. The resort to 

asymmetric warfare on the part of the Shiite population was almost fullscale—the acts of passive and active resistance that would come about 

48 
in the next few days would demonstrate in spectacular fashion the full 

spectrum of asymmetric operations. Within hours of the attack, Amal 

leader Shams al-Din had transformed his suggestion of non-cooperation 

with Israeli administrations in southern Lebanon to an order for wholesale 

civil disobedience among the Lebanese Shiites. He put out the following 

tenets in a declaration: 

1. Dealing in any form with Israel is prohibited. 

2. Those who deal with Israel shall be repudiated 

religiously and nationally. 

3. The sons of the south in general and the Muslims in 

particular must cling to the land and not leave it whatever 

the dangers. No one should sell any land to any Israeli 

party. 

4. The unity of Lebanese land, people, and institutions must 

be adhered to, and all forms of division and displacement 

must be resisted. 

5. Amity and solidarity must prevail among the sons of 

the south and the sons of Iqlim al-Kharrub. The fanning of 

sectarian prejudices and seditions must be confronted. 

6. The legitimate institutions must be adhered to and 

the government must give these instructions maximum 

attention.37 

While Shams al-Din advocated civil resistance, he acknowledged it 

would take time. “In fact, we might need years before we achieve our final 

objective.”38 The long war had begun. However, many Shiites, especially 

young men, whatever the merits of passive resistance, were unwilling to 

pacifically resist the continued humiliations of Israeli occupation for the 

duration of the long war. This feeling had already manifested itself violently 

in scattered attacks on Israelis by some members of the Shiite population 

prior to Nabatiya, contributing to the 490 Israeli soldiers killed in the first 

year of the war, as well as the bombing of the American Embassy early 

in 1983.39 Amal, by itself, had been in a position to expose the Israelis 

internationally as unjust occupiers. Hezbollah, a group dedicated to violent 

opposition of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, was about to unleash a 

violent new irregular weapon to upset all the calculations that Israel had 

made about the costs of security for northern Israel. This group, which 

would eventually drive Israel out of Lebanon after a long struggle, was “a 

creation of the war.”40 

49 
Martyrdom Operations Forced the Enemy to Leave Our Land41 

On 23 Oct 1983, under the name of Islamic Jihad, the group that 

would come to be known as Hezbollah launched a multiple suicide truck 

bombing against MNF centers in Beirut; it was the terrible and spectacular 

unleashing of a new tactic that would force the MNF, who were now 

viewed by most Lebanese as tools of the Israelis and Phalange, out of 

Lebanon and marked the beginning of the long, violent war against the 

Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon. Just over a week later, on 4 

Nov 1983, the same group would use a suicide bomber to blow up an 

Israeli intelligence center in Tyre, this just weeks after Israel’s withdrawal 

out of the Shouf Mountains, adjacent to Beirut, which Israel had hoped 

would calm down resistance in the country. Hezbollah rejected Shams alDin’s calls for civil disobedience. Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of 

the group, would write a year after the attacks: 

Civilization does not mean that you face a rocket with 

a stick or a jet-fighter with a kite, or a warship with a 

sailboat. . . .One must face force with equal or superior 

force. If it is legitimate to defend self and land and destiny, 

then all means of self-defense are legitimate.42 

The effect of Hezbollah’s rejection of Shams al-Din’s calls for civil 

disobedience was immense. Because their call resonated throughout the 

Shiite population, because it seemed to be a call to action while Amal 

was offering only words, because of the seeming altruism demonstrated 

by Hezbollah’s suicide bombers’ commitment to the cause, Amal was in 

turn forced to adopt violent resistance in hopes of retaining support among 

the Shiite populace in Lebanon.43 However, Amal were but poseurs of an 

irregular force compared to the burgeoning Hezbollah. 

Israel’s response to the bombings further alienated Lebanese Shiites 

and drove them out of the arms of Amal and into those of Hezbollah. Avner 

Yaniv describes how a heavy-handed policy of blowing up the houses of 

Amal supporters and shooting those who resisted arrest was employed by 

the IDF in the wake of Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers.44 By 1984, 

former Amal men, tired of the continuing status quo, were becoming fast 

adherents of the violent ideology espoused by Hezbollah.45 And though 

that ideology was spread through the mosque, it was avowedly political. 

“The conflict in Lebanon is not a religious conflict but a political conflict” 

was, in one way or other, the repeated, emphatic declaration of Hezbollah’s 

leaders. 46 They wanted Israel out of Lebanon; Major General Yossi Peled 

once said in response to attacks by Hezbollah that “The reason for all the 

50 
terrorist activities is the fact that Israel exists.”47 On the contrary, the reason 

for most of Hezbollah’s activities was Israel’s presence in Lebanon. 

Despite the first suicide attacks of autumn, 1983, this caused enormous 

casualties, Hezbollah initially fought relatively poorly. Michelsohn 

describes how his division killed over 600 “terrorists” in a three-month 

period in 1984 because attempted infiltrators had not adapted to the IDF’s 

use of night vision goggles.48 Yet, already at the end of 1983, Hezbollah 

was showing evidence of increasing sophistication of the sort that would 

eventually make them Israel’s most formidable enemy. A radio report from 

December of 1983 relates one of their attacks in which they ambushed 

Israeli soldiers with grenades and automatic weapons and then used a 

remote controlled roadside bomb to attack those who came to their aid.49 

By 1984, sermons in Shiite mosques were embedded with innocuoussounding code words, the secret meanings of which were kept hidden 

even from the Imams, which served as a signal to anonymous Hezbollah 

men in the audience.50 Suicide assaults on IDF positions gave way to 

sophisticated, coordinated, and timed attacks as Hezbollah became more 

and more effective.51 

Of course, Israel’s enemies took advantage of this situation. Syria had 

allowed Iran to establish 2,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in southern 

Lebanon.52 Iran supported the new Hezbollah guerrillas out of both an 

ideological and a political hatred of Israel; after all, Israel had been a close 

ally of the Shah and helped him in his fight against Khomeini. The Islamic 

Revolution had taken hold only four years before, and Iran was considered 

by much of the world to be a pariah state—it would take its friends where 

it could get them, particularly in a large Shiite community in Lebanon. 

And while Hezbollah became the focus of Israeli ire, Iran could deal with 

its other pressing threats within the Middle East, namely Iraq.53 

Syria, although it would vacillate at times in its support between Amal 

and Hezbollah based on its own interests in Lebanon, saw Hezbollah as a 

way to drive out Israel from Lebanon without involving itself in another 

conventional battle against Israel, the results of which in the past had 

always been devastating. Certainly, the support of Iran and Syria was vital 

to Hezbollah’s speedy emergence in 1983, but this was not a chickenbefore-the-egg scenario. As Rabil argues, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah had 

“no neat overlap of their interests.”54 Hezbollah was not about to kick a 

Syrian or Iranian gift-horse in the mouth, but neither was it the lackey of its 

sponsors. In 1983 and 1984, however, it was able to use training provided 

by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and small arms provided by Syria to 

devastating effect. By the middle of 1984, groups that would merge into 

51 
Hezbollah as well as the nascent Hezbollah itself were conducting over 

100 attacks a month on Israeli positions within Lebanon.55 

For Israel, the situation became untenable. A war meant to drive out the 

PLO from Lebanon had not done that. Israeli soldiers were being killed by 

a virulent enemy who had not existed at the onset of hostilities. This new 

enemy was so dedicated that members were willing to blow themselves 

up in an effort to effect some harm upon Israelis. From 1979 onward, 

Israel had supported Saad Haddad’s declaration of an autonomous “Free 

Lebanon” and his direction of a renegade military force therein in hopes 

of preventing Palestinian infiltration into Israel. That arrangement, with all 

its shortcomings, began to seem much more enticing than the status quo 

by the end of 1984. In the words of Ian Black, “The wheel has turned full 

circle.”56 

But things were not the same as they had been in 1982. By the time 

Israel withdrew to the security zone, 654 of its soldiers had been killed, 

164 of them since the first anniversary of the war, well after the PLO 

had been kicked out of Beirut.57 In February 1985, as Israel began its first 

partial withdrawal from Sidon, it got a taste of what was to come. Shiite 

militants, rather than letting up in the wake of the withdrawal, mounted 

more attacks and more lethal attacks in the month that followed. As the 

partial withdrawal was completed in June to an area of 3 to 15 kilometers 

from the Israeli border, a newly empowered Hezbollah was not ready to 

accept partial victory. 

Most accounts of the Lebanon War talk about the “1982-1985” war as 

though somehow Israel’s decision to pull out of most of Lebanon ended 

the conflict. Hezbollah’s unconventional war against Israel was sparked 

by the realities of occupation that resulted from Israel’s decision to invade. 

And that war would continue until Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanon 

18 years later. The next section of this chapter will deal with the second 

half of that war, which would take the lives of approximately the same 

number of Israeli soldiers who died in the 1982-1985 portion of the antiIsrael asymmetric campaign. 

The Best Fortress58 

In July 1985, within days of the withdrawal into the security zone, 

the Hezbollah-allied Syrian Nationalist Party (SNP) sent suicide bombers 

into the security zone to attack Israeli targets.59 It was the beginning of a 

sustained campaign against Israel and the South Lebanese Army (SLA) 

in its security zone. Though others, such as the SNP and the Palestinian 

groups discussed initially in this chapter, were involved in this campaign, 

52 
no other group displayed the single-minded tenacity of Hezbollah to drive 

Israel out of Lebanon. In reality, by 1992, Hezbollah would be the only 

show in town in Lebanon’s southern border area.60 And when Israel would 

finally withdraw in 2000, it was explicitly because of Hezbollah. 

From 1985 to 2000, Hezbollah showed increasing sophistication as 

an irregular force, and its success confounded Israeli leaders’ various 

strategies to combat them. For Israel, its previous sustained encounter 

with asymmetric warfare had been against the PLO. Yet as Yezid Sayigh 

describes the Palestinian struggle, “...their military effort never exceeded 

a certain level in terms of scale and impact, and certainly failed to approach 

the models offered by the frequently cited Chinese and Vietnamese 

experiences of guerrilla war and people’s war.”61 Within Lebanon, the 

PLO had never been able to act as a truly united front, nor had it been able 

to secure the support of the population of Lebanon outside of the refugee 

camps.62 Hezbollah was cut from different cloth. 

In Lebanon’s south, it conducted a total war in which it enlisted the 

support of the population and coordinated this support through effective 

military and political action against Israel. It mounted a glittery, effective 

media campaign, best demonstrated by the sustained broadcasting of AlManar Television in South Lebanon and north Israel from 1991 onward.63 

Over time, Hezbollah developed an unconventional military capability 

that was not only Lebanese but also global in reach. 

Hezbollah’s sophistication as an asymmetric force is demonstrated by 

its gradual development of 13 principles of warfare: 

1. Avoid the strong, attack the weak - attack and 

withdraw! 

2. Protecting our fighters is more important than causing 

enemy casualties! 

3. Strike only when success is assured! 

4. Surprise is essential to success. If you are spotted, 

you’ve failed! 

5. Don’t get into a set-piece battle. Slip away like smoke, 

before the enemy can drive home his advantage! 

6. Attaining the goal demands patience, in order to 

discover the enemy’s weak points! 

7. Keep moving, avoid formation of a front line! 

8. Keep the enemy on constant alert, at the front and in 

the rear! 

53 
9. The road to the great victory passes through thousands 

of small victories! 

10. Keep up the morale of the fighters, avoid notions of 

the enemy’s superiority! 

11. The media has innumerable guns, whose hits are like 

bullets. Use them in the battle! 

12. The population is a treasure - nurture it! 

13. Hurt the enemy, and then stop before he abandons 

restraint!64 

The principles demonstrate a full knowledge of all of the elements vital 

to success in victory in an irregular struggle. The fighters are prepared for a 

long war. They are told to focus on propaganda and on keeping the people 

on their side. They are told not to lose soldiers whenever possible. They 

are told to make the enemy afraid to leave his bases. Hezbollah, led by 

pious men, who did not enrich themselves at the expense of the people for 

whom they claimed to fight, was able to position itself not only to develop 

this sophisticated asymmetric doctrine but also to enact it over time. 

From the beginning, Hezbollah began to position itself as the protectors 

of the Lebanese (not just Shiite) population of southern Lebanon from the 

vicissitudes of Israeli occupation. Some 200,000 or so Lebanese continued 

to live under constant Israeli and SLA occupation, and Hezbollah made 

every effort to win over the population in the areas adjacent to the 

security zone and within it.65 Serious precautions were taken to ensure 

that Hezbollah attacks did not result in unnecessary Lebanese civilian 

casualties.66 Meanwhile, Hezbollah soldiers were indistinguishable from 

the remainder of the population, causing Israel to conduct mass nontargeted sweeps that resulted in the arrests of multiple innocents. Attacks 

conducted by Hezbollah fighters from civilian areas were answered with 

Israeli military responses that often killed innocent civilians rather than 

the fighters themselves. To Lebanese Shiites, this cycle, because of an 

effective political message by Hezbollah, evidenced Israel’s evil for killing 

civilians rather than Hezbollah’s evil for fighting among them. After all, 

in many cases, the fighters were sons and brothers of the families attacked 

by Israel. 

Demonstrating the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s campaign for 

the hearts and minds of the Lebanese, in February 1986, when Israel 

conducted a massive search in South Lebanon to find soldiers captured 

by Hezbollah, it encountered no help and stiff resistance among the 

54 
population and was eventually forced to call off the search. Importantly, 

Hezbollah fired a number of rockets into Galilee, thereby proving that 

Israel’s war in Lebanon had not ended the possibility of attacks against 

northern Israel from southern Lebanon.67 In this episode, the violence was 

relatively restrained: 2 Israeli soldiers and as many as 10 Lebanese were 

killed in the sweep. Yet Hezbollah had arrived at a modus operandi that it 

would put to spectacular use in the coming years; it was a validation of its 

doctrine. Israeli incursions into South Lebanon would meet selective, lowrisk resistance that would force them to respond. Israeli fi ghters would 

invariably harm civilians because of the trouble distinguishing them from 

the population at large as well as out of a desire to terrorize civilians into 

not allowing their homes to be used by the fighters. Hezbollah would 

decry the harming of civilians and would broadcast this harm to the world. 

It would then respond to the incursion by launching Katyusha rockets into 

northern Israel and forcing the population of northern Israel into shelters. 

The negative press from both Israel’s killing of civilians and the hostagestate of Israel’s northern towns would force Israel to end the incursion. 

By 1988, Israelis in Galilee were beginning to doubt that they would ever 

have permanent security in their homes from Katyusha rockets.68 

Numerous violent attempts by Israel and the SLA to overcome 

Hezbollah’s resistance to the continued occupation did not result in any 

change of the strategic situation. If anything, they only steeled Hezbollah’s 

resolve while allowing it to position itself as the protectors of the Lebanese 

population. In 1992, Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s SecretaryGeneral Abbas Mussawi, which killed not only him but also his wife and 

children, resulted in the wholesale rocketing of northern Galilee, sending 

the entire Israeli population into bunkers.69 Hezbollah’s effective rocketing 

of the Galilee forced Israel to pull back its troops, but having done this, it 

continued to rocket Galilee at varying volumes of fire throughout 1992. 

By July 1993, the cycle of effective rocket attacks and ineffective Israeli 

responses led Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to decide to eradicate the 

Hezbollah threat once and for all by launching Operation Accountability: 

The IDF’s successful foiling of terrorist infi ltrations into 

Israel within and north of the security zone meant a defeat 

for Hezbollah in its fight for the security zone. That being 

the case, Hezbollah reverted to opening fire on Israeli 

territory. Following the effective actions of IDF and [SLA] 

troops against Hezbollah’s terrorists, they began firing 

Katyusha rockets at our northern settlements. Ma’alot 

and Shelomi, Qiryat Shemona and Nahariyya, Margaliyot 

55 
and Avivim became hostage to Hezbollah’s Katyushas. 

Hezbollah tried to shift the fighting from Lebanon to 

the nurseries in our northern settlements. At some point, 

we exercised restraint. We had hoped and expected that 

the influential powers in Lebanon and outside it would 

curb Hezbollah’s activities and would prevent them from 

attacking the northern settlements, even if they did that 

because they believed that when Israel ceased its restraint 

its response would be painful and harsh.70 

Israel, aware of the public relations nightmare that its accidental killings 

of civilians provoked, decided to order the evacuation of civilians from 

South Lebanon so that it could bomb Hezbollah refuges with impunity. The 

images of thousands of Lebanese civilians, most of whom had nothing to do 

with Hezbollah, fleeing their homes did not exactly lead to glowing press 

coverage.71 As one Israeli sarcastically put it, Operation Accountability 

“seemed specially designed for Israel bashers. What could be better fodder 

than pictures of thousands of civilians abandoning their homes to the sound 

of Israeli cannons?”72 At the end of the month, under mounting pressure 

from the international community and continued Katyusha rocket attacks, 

Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in which both sides agreed 

not to attack civilians. Israel believed it had achieved its goals through 

force...the northern Galilee would now be safe.73 

In reality, the operation was a strategic error. Through its negotiation 

of the ceasefire, Hezbollah had elevated itself to the status of protector of 

the Lebanese people in the eyes of many Lebanese who had not before 

been supporters. As soon as Israel ceased shelling, Hezbollah returned into 

the areas and began rebuilding the homes that Israel had destroyed—only 

Hezbollah enabled the people to reconstruct their lives. A Lebanese villager 

told a reporter, “‘Hezbollah is only fighting for their country...They just 

want to get Israel out of here.’”74 It was a sentiment shared after Operation 

Accountability by most Lebanese. Hezbollah was their protector from, 

rather than the instigator of, Israeli attacks. 

Moreover, Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli attacks with rocket 

fire was undiminished; this it would prove time-and-again in response 

to Israeli attacks throughout 1994 (using accidental civilian casualties in 

Israeli attacks on legitimate targets as justification for these violations of the 

ceasefire). After all, as the UNIFIL spokesman pointed out, for a Katyusha 

attack, “all you need is one donkey and two rounds.”75 Such a capability 

was virtually impossible to neutralize through an aerial bombardment. 

56 
In July 1994, Hezbollah added a potent new weapon to its campaign 

of irregular warfare: international terrorism against Israeli targets. Using 

truck bombs against Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires and 

London, Hezbollah demonstrated that it could carry the fight against Israeli 

occupation of the security zone outside of Lebanon and around the world. 

This new reality had a chilling effect on Israel’s ability to fi ght Hezbollah. 

When an Israeli General demanded that Israel retaliate due to continued 

Hezbollah attacks, Rabin responded that he was hamstrung by Hezbollah’s 

capabilities to move the fight outside of Israel.76 

Such candor, however, did not result in an Israeli decision to pull out 

from the security zone. Trapped in the Catch-22 that its presence ensured 

rocket fire against the northern settlements and the continued deaths of 

Israeli soldiers but that its absence would not necessarily prevent these 

attacks, Israel continued a policy of limited, ineffective military responses 

to Hezbollah. In April of 1995, after Israel’s assassination of a senior 

Hezbollah fighter, Hezbollah used the civilian casualties of that attack to 

justify declaring Israel in breach of the July 1993 ceasefire.77 Over the 

course of the next year, Hezbollah’s continued rocket attacks on Galilee 

would put the lie to one Israeli General’s July 1995 boast that Hezbollah 

fighters were on the run.78 

By 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who had taken over after 

Rabin’s 1995 assassination, believed that, once again, drastic measures 

needed to be taken. This feeling was surely compounded by the fact that 

the Likud Party was attacking him and Labor as “soft” on security and 

terrorism but also was the result of the pleas of the population of northern 

Galilee to do something about the recurring attacks. In April 1996, Israel 

demanded that Lebanese civilians evacuate southern Lebanon and then 

began a massive bombardment of the area entitled Operation Grapes of 

Wrath. Israel’s artillery and aerial onslaught, coupled with limited ground 

incursions, seemed to the world to be done in absolute disregard of the 

civilian presence in the area, despite Israeli protestations to the contrary. 

In the first 5 days of the fighting, 34 Lebanese civilians were killed and 

only 1 Hezbollah fighter compounded this international outrage.79 Onetenth of Lebanon’s entire population was fleeing northward as a result 

of the Israeli attack.80 And when, by 15 April 1996, international outrage 

turned to international action with the deployment of additional UN 

Peacekeepers to protect Lebanese civilians from Israel, negative headlines 

such as “Israel Continues Shelling Despite U.N. Operations” were sent 

around the world.81 

57 
On 17 April 1996, Israel fired a shell at a position near where Hezbollah 

fi ghters had fired a rocket, hitting not a single fighter but killing over 100 

refugees under UN protection in Qana. Few were willing to accept Israel’s 

explanation that this was a terrible result of a map-reading error. Israel’s 

display of wanton disregard for the welfare of Lebanese civilians, the 

result in and of itself of the long irregular war in Lebanon, made the truth 

that this was a “tragic mistake” a hard sell.82 Given the type of attack Israel 

had undertaken, such mistakes were inevitable. 

Meanwhile, during the entirety of the operation, no more than 24 

Hezbollah fighters were killed. Hezbollah, using a technique in which 

it could aim and fire Katyushas in under a minute, launched over 470 

Katyusha rockets into Galilee and occupied Lebanon.83 By the time of the 

US-imposed ceasefire, Israel had not only failed to make gains against 

Hezbollah, but it had confirmed to much of the world its status as the 

aggressor in Lebanon. 

Over the next four years, Hezbollah continued its attacks against 

Galilee and Israel’s security zone in south Lebanon. In the occupation 

zone, Hezbollah mounted a sustained intimidation and assassination 

campaign against the SLA and combined this with an amnesty to 

soldiers who defected or became spies. By 1999, the effectiveness of 

this campaign had led to a deficit of trust between Israel and its allies. In 

1997, Hezbollah demonstrated its new intelligence capabilities when it 

ambushed an Israeli commando raid, killing all 11 elite soldiers. In 1999, 

Hezbollah demonstrated that it too could carry out targeted killings with 

the assassination within a week of two top Israeli officers.84 Hezbollah 

was proving that as long as Israel remained in Lebanon, its soldiers would 

continue to die, it would continue to face international condemnation over 

its attacks in Lebanon, and there would be no peace for Galilee. 

The Home-Front 

Many scholars have claimed that the Israeli war violated Israel’s 

“consensus” on security affairs through the Likud government’s dishonesty 

about the aims of the war—this is in fact the argument of Schiff and Ya’ari’s 

seminal work The Lebanon War. In reality, despite duplicity on the part 

of Sharon, Labor supported the war, including going to Beirut; they did 

not want to appear soft on Palestinian terror. Even Ze’ev Schiff, while 

dismissing the idea that a Labor government would have acted similarly 

in Lebanon, concedes that the former Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 

not only visited Beirut during the siege but also offered advice on how best 

to conduct the military operation inside the city.85 

58 
At the beginning of the 1982 war, polls suggested that 7 out of 8 

Israelis supported the war. By the end of 1982, despite the terrible press 

resulting from Sabra and Shatilla, the war’s supporters accounted for 

more than 60 percent of the Israeli public. By the end of 1983, about half 

still supported Israel’s efforts, even with the emergence of the new Shiite 

threat.198 It is remarkable in any democratic society to achieve consensus, 

but despite all that went wrong and despite evidence that their government 

had lied to them, despite Sharon’s ignominious dismissal/resignation as 

Defense Minister in light of the Kahan Commission’s investigation of the 

massacres at Sabra and Shatilla, despite a Peace Now rally that attracted 

approximately one tenth of the Israeli population in 1983 to demand 

accountability for the atrocities, the Likud government seemed to have 

achieved a good deal of consensus. 

Yet, it is undoubtedly true that a segment of the Israeli population 

was tiring of a war that was not achieving the promised results. The 

1982 resignation of Colonel Eli Geva and the formation of offi cer protest 

groups, such as Yesh Gevul who decried the war and refused to serve in 

Lebanon, demonstrated a growing constituency for opponents of the war.87 

That the voices of those against the war began to find a home in the Labor 

Party was not a reflection of bald political opportunism but of a difficult 

fight between two wings of the Labor Party, a somewhat dovish wing led 

by Shimon Peres and a more hawkish wing led by Yitzhak Rabin. Labor 

could, and did, as Likud could not, and did not, serve as the party of the 

anti-war constituency. 

As William H. McNeill argues, the resort to war in modern societies, 

where the daily effects of that war will be seen by the public, requires 

“prior agreement about the ends to which collective skill and effort ought 

to be directed. Maintaining such agreement is not automatic or assured.”88 

Cracks in the national mood were already surfacing in 1982. In 1983, 

Shlomo Argov, whose shooting had been used as justification for the war, 

wrote an article in Ha’aretz from his hospital bed repudiating the war. 

By 1985, when Israel pulled out to its Lebanese security zone, it was no 

longer clear to what ends the war had been directed or what means would 

be used to direct it now—three quarters of Israelis thought the war had 

been a disaster.89 

It is undoubtedly true, as Avner Yaniv argues, that had Labor initiated 

Operation Peace for Galilee, it could have counted on the support of Likud.90 

However, it is patently false that Labor’s opposition did not “allow the 

IDF to operate according to strategic desiderata.”91 The left’s developing 

opposition to the war reflected the shifting mood in the population; it did 

59 
not cause it. That mood-swing was an effect of the irregular war prosecuted 

by Israel’s enemies in Lebanon, not a cause of their inability to win that 

war. More and more Israelis were growing uncomfortable with what Zvi 

Shtauber describes as “the big basic contrast between the way you view 

yourself and the necessary means that you need in order to impose your 

occupation.”92 

That Labor governments were no more able to solve the strategic 

puzzle in 1985 that prevented Israel from leaving Lebanon altogether is a 

reflection of just how difficult that puzzle was to solve. By 1993, an OpEd piece in The Jerusalem Post entitled simply, “Bring Our Boys Home,” 

reflected the mood of the population.93 

Eventually, after years of accusing Labor of losing the war through its 

skepticism, Likud too would say enough. In February 1997, two helicopters 

carrying soldiers bound for Lebanon collided in mid-air, killing 73 soldiers. 

According to Benny Michelsohn, this incident created “an internal Israeli 

problem” that “hadn’t any connection to Lebanon.” In his narrative, the 

group Arba Imaot, “Four Mothers,” formed by mothers whose sons had 

died in the crash, pressured the Israeli government to withdraw even 

though it did not want to. Then, Ehud Barak, who had agreed to withdraw, 

was elected, and he had to fulfill his campaign promise.94 

This story obfuscates a number of important points. First, a week 

after the crash, Gideon Ezra, a Likud Member of the Knesset, was the 

first to suggest reviewing the strategic necessity for a continued presence 

in Lebanon.95 By the end of the year, Ariel Sharon, who had essentially 

called Shimon Peres two-faced for contemplating the domestic political 

ramifications of the war, began to advocate for a withdrawal.96 

Again, the wheel had turned full circle, with neither Labor nor Likud 

able to end the war. Both sides declared their plans to withdraw—Labor 

no longer had a monopoly on political opportunism to reach opponents 

of Israel’s continued presence in Lebanon. In 1999, both the Labor and 

Likud candidate for Prime Minister promised to withdraw from Lebanon 

within a year if elected.97 Given the length of the irregular confl ict against 

Hezbollah, an accident such as the helicopter crash was inevitable. The 

accident did not cause the Israeli candidates to promise a pullout; rather, 

that was the result of Hezbollah’s prolonged war against Israel. 

60 
Notes 

1. Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior: an Autobiography (New 

York: Touchstone, 2001), 474-475. 

2. Benny Michelsohn, interview by author, 23 March 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. Michelsohn served as the chief of military history for the IDF from 1987 to 

1993. The main lessons that can be learned from this part of the war, according 

to Michelsohn, are related to logistical problems that prevented crucial supplies 

from reaching the front lines and an over-reliance on armored vehicles that prevented advanced scouting. 

3. Baruch Spiegel, interview by author, 22 March 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

4. Sharon and Chanoff, 476-478. 

5. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (London: George 

Allen & Unwin, 1984), 305. 

6. Sharon and Chanoff, 470. 

7. Ian Black “The Defeat that Came with Victory for Israel / Israel’s Involvement with the Lebanon,” The Guardian (London), 16 Jan1985. 

8. Spiegel interview. 

9. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (London: Futura Publications Limited, 

1980), 96. 

10. Syria, conversely, retained some ability to respond and maintained a 

low level of violence but chose to allow Israel to fall on its own sword while 

preparing its eventual political victory against Israel within Lebanon. Except as 

it relates to the asymmetric war that Israel fought in Lebanon, the intricacies of 

Syrian involvement in Lebanon are outside the scope of this thesis. 

11. Or, for that matter among the PLO or Syrian forces. Reliable statistics 

on the exact number of civilians killed are, as in all wars, difficult to come by. 

Yezid Sayigh gives numbers of total casualties of approximately 6,000 in Beirut 

through August 15 to nearly 18,000 over the course of that period in all of Lebanon while admitting the problems in the sources. Of course the perception of 

thousands of civilian casualties is as important as whether the true number was 

2,000 or 10,000 in its effect on the war. See Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and 

the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1999), 540. 

12. Julie Flint, “War Creates New Orphans,” United Press International, 19 

July 1982. 

13. Spiegel interview 

14. Schiff and Ya’ari, 188. 

15. Julie Flint, “PLO—Masters of Survival,” United Press International, 

15 Aug 1982. 

61 
16. Yasser Arafat, “Arafat’s Address to the Fez Summit Meeting,” BBC 

Summary of World Broadcasts, 11 Sept 1982. 

17. Whatever the various positions on who bore responsibility and at what 

level, no one from Sharon to his staunchest critics doubts that, as he puts it, “the 

situation dealt a horrible blow to Israel.” Sharon and Chanoff, 516. 

18. Spiegel interview. 

19. Michelsohn interview. 

20. Shlomo Gazit, interview by author, 22 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

21. Michelsohn interview. 

22. Shamir, who would become Prime Minister a year later, goes on to 

reveal in this discussion, even while declaring achievement of the major objective of the war, that the strategic threat to northern Israel had not changed, i.e., 

that the major objective had not, in reality, been achieved. “...[I]t is clear that, 

because we attained the main objective of the Peace for Galilee campaign—we 

destroyed the PLO infrastructure, we drove it away from the Israeli border, we 

gave Galilee security, after all—today we have no interest in continuing this war. 

And if we are still in Lebanon to this day—we said it more than once—it is in 

order to guarantee that after we leave Lebanon the terrorists will not return to the 

border and they will not attack the State of Israel from Lebanese soil.” This was 

something the IDF was never able to guarantee. “Yitzhaq Shamir’s Television 

Interview on 9th November,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 11 Nov 1983. 

23. Edward Walsh, “Israel’s 3-Year War in Lebanon Ends, But Some 

Troops Remain Behind; 75 Percent of Israelis Now Say Effort Was a Failure,” 

The Washington Post, 7 June 1985. 

24. Schiff and Ya’ari, 306. The extent to which the second of these accomplishments held or holds true is definitely disputable. The book was written before the worldwide extent of Hezbollah’s operations was known by the 

Israelis, and in my interview with him, Ze’ev Schiff never mentioned this as an 

accomplishment of Operation Peace for Galilee. 

25. It is true that Israel might have chosen allies beside the Phalange. After 

all Schiff and Ya’ari report that a Phalange census showed that only 30 percent 

of the population were Christian (245). However, it is unclear who other than the 

Phalange would have been as malleable to Israel’s bidding. 

26. Ze’ev Schiff, interview by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. “And 

when we started to speak about withdrawal, I could understand that we [would] 

want a certain security zone for a while, but the debate was even not to leave 

Sidon; and this was a mistake. We wanted to swallow too much, but we swallowed...something else, a very hot pepper.” 

27. Spiegel interview. 

28. Ibid. 

62 
29. Sharon and Chanoff, 442. 

30. Robert G Rabil, Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel, and Lebanon 

(London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 57. 

31. Avner Yaniv, “Introduction” in National Security & Democracy in 

Israel (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993). 

32. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 541. 

33. Spiegel interview. 

34. Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 334-5. 

35. Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 202. 

36. Reuven Ehrlich, interview by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

37. “Shi’ite Leader Declares Resistance to Israel,” Beirut Domestic Service 

in Arabic, 18 Oct 1983. 

38. “Shi’ite Leader Views Situation; Raps U.S., Israel,” London AL-HAWADITH in Arabic, 23 Dec 1983. 

39. Jeffery Heller, “Israeli deaths reported,” United Press International, 

5 June 1983. There is insufficient room in this thesis to explore the Multinational Force’s (MNF) move from neutral party to supporter of a status quo that 

they didn’t full comprehend. It is sufficient to say that the Italian, French, and 

American members of the MNF were perceived by 1983 as allowing the Israelis 

to maintain control of their Phalange puppets through MNF presence in Beirut 

and support of the Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty. 

40. Ze’ev Schiff, interviewed by author, 23 March 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

41. “Interviews with Suicide Bombers Detailed,” Damascus Television Service in Arabic, 11 July 1985. Taken from a testimonial by Harb as he was about 

to proceed on a suicide mission after Israel’s withdrawal to the security zone. 

42. Ajami, 217. Begin, 85. It was a sentiment that should have resonated 

with the resigning Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin. In The Revolt he 

rejected pacific resistance, “If you are attacked by a wolf in the forest, do you try 

to persuade him that it is not fair to tear you to pieces, or that he is not a wolf at 

all but an innocent lamb? Do you send him a ‘memorandum’? No, there was not 

other way. If we did not fight we should be destroyed. To fight was the only way 

to salvation.” 

43. Fisk, 571, “If Amal allowed the Hezbollah to lead the struggle in the 

south, then Amal would lose Tyre and the surrounding villages to their Shia 

rivals when the Israelis left.” 

44. Yaniv, 281. 

63 
45. Fisk, 578. 

46. “Hezbollah Leader Fadlallah Interviewed” Vienna Television Service in 

German, 3 July 1985. 

47. Quoted in Rudge and Burston. “IDF Blasts Terror Bases After Five 

Soldiers Killed,” The Jerusalem Post, 28 Nov 1990. 

48. Michelsohn interview. “Terrorists” is the term he uses to refer to all 

militants in Lebanon, though they were not universally involved in acts of terror 

against Israeli civilians...most in this early period were, in fact, trying to kill 

Israeli soldiers. 

49. “VOAL Reports Four ‘Heroic Operations’ in South” (Clandestine) 

Voice of Arab Lebanon in Arabic, 21 Dec 1983. 

50. Fisk, 89. 

51. According to Timur Goksel as reported by Anthony Shadid, Legacy 

of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (Westview: 

Boulder, 2001), 136. 

52. Rabil, 76. 

53. On the initial support of Iran for Islamic Amal, which would become 

Hezbollah, see Judith Palmer Harik, Hezbollah: the Changing Face of Terrorism 

(London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 40. 

54. Ibid., 77. 

55. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: a History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 556. 

56. Ian Black. “The Defeat that Came with Victory for Israel/ Israel’s 

Involvement with the Lebanon,” The Guardian (London), 16 Jan 1985, LexisNexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

57. “Israel’s 3-Year War in Lebanon Ends, But Some Troops Remain 

Behind; 75 Percent of Israelis Now Say Effort Was a Failure,” The Washington 

Post, 7 June 1985, Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis. 

com/universe. 

58. Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince, George Bull, trans. (London: Penguin 

Books, 1999), 93. “So the best fortress that exists is to avoid being hated by the 

people. If you have fortresses and yet the people hate you they will not save you; 

once the people have taken up arms against you they will never lack outside 

help.” 

59. Morris, 557. 

60. Ian Black, “Arabs and Jews Enact Victory Rituals in Land of Losers,” 

The Guardian (London), 22 Feb 1992, Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http:// 

www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

61. Sayigh, 664, 

64 
62. A. J. Abraham, The Lebanon War (London: Praeger Publishers, 1996). 

63. Al-Manar Television, http://www.almanar.com.lb. 

64. Ehud Ya’ari, “Hizballah: 13 Principles of Warfare,” The Jerusalem 

Report, 21 Mar 1996, Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis. 

com/universe. Reported by Ya’ari based on a translation of the doctrines transmitted by “Haj Hallil,” Hezbollah’s 1996 director of operations. 

65. “Katyusha Rockets Fall in the North; SLA Retaliates,” The Jerusalem 

Post, 28 Feb 1993, Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis. 

com/universe. The figure of 200,000 is an estimate based on various news reports. The figure is cited for example in News Agencies. 

66. “Hizballah’s Fadlallah, Amal’s Birri Interviewed” LD062324 Budapest 

Television Service in Hungarian, FBIS Middle East and North Africa Section, 

1983-1988, October 8, 1985. In 1985, the avoidance of civilian casualties was 

already a serious concern of the organization. Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in 

an interview says this, “[Suicide bombings] must be worked out at a high level 

so that innocent people will not fall victim to them...” 

67. Mary Curtius, “Israel Halts Effort to Find Soldiers in Face of Shiite Resistance,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 Feb 1986, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

68. Karin Laub, “Settlers [sic] Say Anti-Guerrilla Operation Gives Only 

Temporary Relief,” Associated Press, 4 May 1988, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

69. Nick B. Williams, Jr. and Daniel Williams, “Israelis Kill Leader of 

Hezbollah; Mideast: Ten Others Die in Air Strikes in Lebanon Motivated by the 

Slayings of Three Soldiers. Shiite Chieftains Vow to Take Revenge.” Los Angeles Times, 17 Feb 1992, and “Israeli Border Hit by Revenge Rocket Attacks,” 

Evening Standard (London), 18 Feb 1992. 

70. Yitzhak Rabin, “Lebanon: Rabin Says Only if Katyusha Attacks Stop 

Will Lebanese Be Allowed to Return,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 30 

July 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexisnexis.com/universe. 

71. “Tens of Thousands Flee Israeli Raids in Lebanon,” Agence France 

Presse—English, 26 July 1993. 

72. David Bar-Illan, “Lebanon Scenes—a Field Day for Israel Bashers,” 

The Jerusalem Post, 6 Aug 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

73. Jonathan Ferziger, “Israelis Declare Lebanon Operation a Success,” 

United Press International, 1 Aug 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic 

Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

74. David Hoffman and Nora Boustany, “Lebanese Find Homes in Ruins; 

65 
Villagers Criticize Israel, Hezbollah,” The Washington Post, 2 Aug 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

75. Robert Mahoney, “Hizbollah Strikes Back as Israeli Troops Pull Out,” 

The Herald (Glasgow), 22 Feb 1992, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic 

Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. Israel often accused UNIFIL 

of being sympathetic to its enemies and of allowing them to conduct operations 

from within its zone with impunity. Such comments on the part of Goksel, the 

spokesman, reflected the perception of the UNIFIL force that it was neither their 

job, nor was it possible given the mobility of these fighters, to prevent the attacks. 

76. Uri Dan and Dennis Eisenberg, “Sunk Deep in the Mud,” The Jerusalem Post, 15 Dec 1994, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, 

http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

77. “Hezbollah Ends Deal With Israel Amid Renewed Fighting,” The 

Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario), 1 Apr 1995, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

78. Martin Cohn, “Israel Changing Strategy in Lebanon Commander Says 

His Troops Have Hezbollah Guerrillas on the Run,” The Toronto Star, 5 July 

1995, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis. 

com/universe. 

80. Greenaway, “Hezbollah Vows More Attacks,” The Gazette (Montreal, 

Quebec), 16 Apr 1996. 

81. Sadler. 

82. Ehrlich. 

83. Ehud Ya’ari, “Back in the Lebanese Quagmire,” The Jerusalem Report, 

16 May 1996, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www. 

lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

84. Patrick Cockburn, “Israeli Blitz on Lebanon After General is Killed,” 

The Independent (London), 1 Mar 1999, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic 

Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

85. Schiff interview. 

86. Poll numbers cited in “Israel’s 3-Year War in Lebanon Ends, But Some 

Troops Remain Behind; 75 Percent of Israelis Now Say Effort Was a Failure,” 

The Washington Post, 7 June 1985, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

87. Gvul Yesh, http://www.yeshgvul.org.il/english. Over 100 Israeli soldiers, many of them combat veterans, would be jailed, sometimes repeatedly, for 

refusing to serve in Lebanon. 

66 
88. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, 

and Society since A.D. 1000 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 375. 

89. “Israel’s 3-Year War in Lebanon Ends, But Some Troops Remain 

Behind; 75 Percent of Israelis Now Say Effort Was a Failure,” The Washington 

Post, 7 June 1985, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www. 

lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

90. Yaniv, 24. 

91. Ibid., 127. 

92. Zvi Shtauber, interview by author, 22 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

93. David J. Forman, “Bring Our Boys Home,” The Jerusalem Post, 15 

July 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexisnexis.com/universe. 

94. Michelsohn interview. 

95. Jack Katzenell, “Angry Debate in Israel over Withdrawal from Lebanon,” Associated Press, 11 Feb 1997, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic 

Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

96. Sharon and Chanoff, 483, and John Donnelly, “Israeli Leaders Call for 

Withdrawal from Lebanon,” The Miami Herald, 8 Sept 1997, available from 

Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

97. Dafna Linzer, “Candidates Vow End to Lebanon Occupation Amid 

Israeli Frustration,” Associated Press, 2 Mar 1999, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

67 

Chapter 4 

Strategic Failure 

Losing Three Wars 

In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon up to the Litani River to rid South 

Lebanon of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The raid’s brutality 

and its possible degenerative effect on Israel’s peace negotiations with 

Egypt led to widespread international condemnation; Israel’s chief ally, the 

United States, agreed to support UN Security Council Resolutions 425 and 

426, which called on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. Twenty-two years 

later, on 18 June 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan certifi ed that 

the Israelis had withdrawn from Lebanon, and the UN Security Council 

endorsed his findings.1

 In that 22-year span, Israel lost over 900 of its 

soldiers, more than had died in Israel’s 1956 or 1967 wars, more than had 

died on the Syrian front in the 1973 war. It was a war that most Israelis had 

supported at its outset. It was Israel’s first war in which the Israeli Defense 

Forces achieved numerical superiority at all points and at all times. It was 

a war in which the IDF demonstrated its definitive technological edge.2 

And in the end, it was a war that would leave Israel profoundly weakened, 

its international image besmirched, and its armed forces strained. 

Israel’s 1978 Operation Litani had a limited effect at best on the PLO 

in Lebanon. By 1981, the PLO launched a heavy barrage on northern 

Israel that forced thousands of Israeli civilians to evacuate the area. A USnegotiated ceasefire ended the bombardment; however, from that point 

forward, Israel sought a pretext to be rid of the threat once-and-for-all 

despite Palestinian adherence to the terms of the agreement. In the June 

1982 Abu Nidal assassination attempt on Shlomo Argov, they found their 

reason to launch the war. Israel went to war to end Israel’s security threat 

from “the terrorists.” 

Instead, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon failed to solve the strategic threat 

presented by the Palestinian nationalist movement and spawned an effective, 

military resistance among the occupied Shiite population of Lebanon who 

had heretofore been relatively indifferent to Israel. Furthermore, Israel’s 

presence in Lebanon, as well as its failure to offer the Palestinians a 

real political solution, served to increase the hopelessness that leads to 

terrorism: terrorism against Israel actually increased. In a sense, Israel lost 

three wars in its defeat in Lebanon: the war against Hezbollah, the war 

against the Palestinians, and the war against terrorism. This chapter seeks 

to explain all three of these defeats. 

69 
The War Against Hezbollah 

When Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, the war against 

Hezbollah was the proximate cause of their withdraw. After almost two 

decades of war with the Lebanese Shiite group, Israel had simply become 

exhausted. As Haim Ramon, an Israeli cabinet minister, put it, “the cost of 

staying in Lebanon outweighs the reasons for being there...There was no 

more political or military logic for staying.”3 In 1985, Hezbollah’s attacks 

had forced Israel to withdraw to its self-proclaimed security zone in the 

south. Hezbollah at that time demanded total withdrawal. It would not 

suffer the IDF’s continued presence on its land; the Lebanese Shiites were 

in no mood to live under occupation after the efficacy of violence had been 

demonstrated already by Israel’s partial pull-out. 

By the 1990s, Hezbollah had arrived at a highly effective strategy, 

one described in the previous chapter as using rockets to inspire Israeli 

retaliation. This retaliation would always disproportionately harm Lebanese 

civilians, so Hezbollah used the Israeli response as propaganda to justify 

their long struggle against Israel. The chaos also allowed Hezbollah to 

be the sole provider for reconstruction and other services in southern 

Lebanon. Eventually this strategy would be combined with sophisticated 

use of international terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets to limit 

Israel’s ability to respond to Hezbollah’s provocations. 

Though Hezbollah’s rocket-fire caused relatively few civilian 

casualties, the fear that they inspired undermined the initial justification 

of the war (to protect Israel’s northern border from indirect fi re attacks). 

Whether objectively true or not, by the 1990s, those in the northern Galilee 

perceived the situation to be as bad as it had been with the PLO in southern 

Lebanon.4 The government had to provide strong financial incentives to 

keep civilians in the northern settlements from jumping ship. 

Hezbollah’s continued attacks despite repeated Israeli incursions, 

bombings, and targeted killings eventually led to a new consensus within 

most of Israel’s political establishment: the efforts that Israel was willing 

to put into its Lebanon war could not possibly negate the threat to IDF 

forces posed by Hezbollah within the occupied security zone. This feeling 

of armed futility was the result of Hezbollah’s successful strategy of 

exhaustion against Israel. Israel’s need to enact a hasty middle-of-the-night 

evacuation of the security zone on 23 May 2000 reflected the continued 

virulence of Hezbollah despite the many-year struggle.5

 Scenes reminiscent 

of the US withdrawal from Saigon in 1975 were broadcast around the 

world as Israel’s abandoned allies tried desperately to cross into Israel 

70 
before Hezbollah had completely taken over the area. The South Lebanon 

Army, always a house of cards, had collapsed immediately. 

A number of members of Israel’s political and military elite have 

argued to me that Israel could have defeated Hezbollah. Ze’ev Schiff 

argues that to win against the still active Hezbollah, “we have to destroy 

half of Lebanon if not more. You have to punish the Lebanese society. 

You can destroy all the bridges, all the power plants in Lebanon; and you 

can do it.” He goes on to say that Israel will not do it because of the type 

of society it is.6 Yet, in Operation Grapes of Wrath and other incursions, 

Israel unleashed incredible fury in Lebanon. Its inability to do more was 

the result of constraints placed on it by the very real threat of ostracism 

by the international community; in fact it is striking that Israel was able 

to go so far as it did in its occasional wanton disregard for the welfare of 

civilians on the battlefield. Benny Michelsohn argued to me that tactically 

the IDF was unbeatable in Lebanon and that Israel’s defeat in Lebanon 

was but a construct of the Arab world and elements of the international 

community who looked only at the withdrawal and not at the reality of 

Israel’s military dominance against the terrorists.7

 Besides the fact that 

Israel’s Shiite enemy was demonstrating ever greater tactical brilliance 

throughout the occupation, this alleged construct was in fact a strategic 

reality. 

The argument that Israel could have done more if it would have been 

willing to do more underestimates the constraints on Israel’s ability to 

act. That societal, domestic political, international political, and military 

constraints did not allow Israel to enact the wholesale occupation of 

South Lebanon or even the slaughter of Lebanese civilians who supported 

Hezbollah, reflected the strategic realities presented by Hezbollah’s 

challenge to Israeli occupation. As Reuven Ehrlich poignantly puts it, for 

Hezbollah, there is “no doubt that the Israeli withdrawal was a victory, a 

demonstration of the effectiveness of the use of the terror weapon.”8 Israel, 

victor in four major conventional wars against coalitions of Arab states 

who were supported at times by the Soviet superpower, had lost its longest 

war, one in which it had been at all times the dominant military force in 

the region. 

The most important strategic ramification of Israel’s continued 

humiliation and eventual defeat at the hands of Hezbollah was the 

decreasing effectiveness of Israel’s military deterrent. According to 

Michelsohn, Israel’s partial withdrawal in 1985 gave the Palestinians hope 

that struggle against Israel could result in strategic gains, contributing to 

the breakout of the first Intifada (uprising).9

 By the early 1990s, Palestinian 

71 
groups within Lebanon were emboldened by Hezbollah’s success against 

Israel and regularly coordinated actions against Israel with the Hezbollah 

leadership, leading to a measure of solidarity between the previously 

antagonistic Shiite and Palestinian communities in Lebanon.10 By 1995, 

Palestinian fighters were eager “to fight alongside their [Hezbollah] 

heroes, particularly as they [felt] safe with Israeli soldiers pinned down in 

their defensive fortifications.”11 

With the full withdrawal in 2000, the Arab world looked in wonder 

at Israel’s defeat by Hezbollah. Ze’ev Schiff describes a conversation 

he had with 11 Jordanian editors who wanted to know, after all the wars 

lost by Arabs with conventional military forces, if Hezbollah had finally 

found the way to defeat Israel through prolonged “guerrilla warfare.”12 

The defeat encouraged Israel’s enemies who had supported Hezbollah, 

particularly Iran and Syria, to remain recalcitrant in their positions toward 

the Zionist state. And while Judith Harik’s claim that the defeat cast doubt 

on Israel’s staying power within the Middle East is overblown, Gilles 

Kepel’s argument that Hezbollah’s strategic resort to irregular war and 

the tactics it employed were embraced by Palestinian militants in the alAqsa Intifada is a more accurate assessment.13 In this sense, the war with 

Hezbollah in Lebanon contributed to Israel’s second loss in Lebanon, its 

war against the Palestinians. 

The War Against the Palestinians 

In the last chapter, I described the ignominious expulsion of the PLO 

from Beirut and, despite the expulsion, the PLO leadership’s continued 

belief in their ability to effect eventual victory. I have already mentioned 

the continued presence of large numbers of Palestinian refugees as well 

as Palestinian militants in Lebanon. In 1989, Palestinian groups were still 

making attempts to infiltrate Israel from its northern border with Lebanon.14 

In 1990, Palestinian militants were still killing Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.15 

At varying levels of intensity, fights with Palestinian militants would 

continue for the duration of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. However, it is 

possible to overstate the case: vitally, at least for a time, the PLO, if not all 

Palestinian militants, was more-or-less eviscerated in Lebanon. Certainly 

its leadership, excepting Arafat’s brief return before re-expulsion by the 

Syrians and Syrian-affiliated PLO splinter groups in 1983, would never 

again run the show from within Lebanon. Undoubtedly, the absence of the 

PLO leadership from any of Israel’s borders made its job more difficult. 

Despite the achievement of a “political and moral victory” in Beirut, 

if not a military one, the PLO had real strategic problems to address: 

“[how to] conduct armed struggle in the occupied territories, preserve 

72 
the guerrilla forces still deployed in east and north Lebanon, and ease the 

dislocation suffered by hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese 

civilians.”16 

Yet Mao had argued half-a-century before the PLO’s expulsion from 

Beirut that “guerrilla operations alone cannot produce fi nal victory.” 

Precedence had to be given “to conquering the enemy in both political and 

military affairs.”17 Arafat’s faith in the ability of Palestinians to continue to 

fi ght was not the product of an irrational refusal to recognize failure. The 

asymmetric war against Israel would require a constant dialogue between 

political and military action, and in the failure of military action, additional 

political action would be required. Anyway, as Ian Black once pointed out, 

Arafat “was not exactly on the verge of final victory when Mr. Sharon gave 

the army its marching orders.”18 Even if continued Palestinian military 

inferiority made their plight impossible, it was unlikely that the fi ght was 

over. The fight would continue no matter what due to “impracticable faith” 

in the nobleness of their cause. It is something that Begin should have 

understood; after all, he had written, “Yet faith is perhaps stronger than 

reality; faith itself creates reality.”19 

The reality that Palestinian faith had created was one that made 

the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut profoundly unlikely to address the 

fundamental underlying political realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 

That reality is one in which two peoples have imagined a historical narrative 

that gives them sole claim to legitimate statehood within the modern-day 

state of Israel. For the Jews, this claim was laid out in Theodore Herzl’s 

development of Zionism. For the Palestinians displaced by the Jewish 

dream of a homeland, “The heroic imagery and language of armed struggle 

gave new substance to the imagined community of the Palestinians. They 

now portrayed themselves as a revolutionary people waging an active 

struggle to determine their fate...”20 

As Shlomo Gazit, Israel’s first administrator of the occupied territories, 

describes it, there are only two solutions to that underlying political reality. 

Either one claimant wipes out the other, or they reach a political compromise 

based to some degree on reciprocal recognition of each others’ claims. 

Since neither side has the means to wipe out the other, they will eventually 

have to reach an agreement or continue to fight. The problem was never 

one between Israel and the PLO. Destruction of the PLO, even were it 

possible, would not have ended the conflict. “[The] PLO can disappear, 

and there will be, in 10 years, a new Palestinian freedom movement.”21 

73 
In 1982, the Israelis simply were not ready for the sort of political 

compromise that could end the conflict. Sharon argued that “We had 

not fought this war against the Palestinian people; and with the PLO 

crushed, the possibility of a rational dialogue between ourselves and [the] 

Palestinians...would be greatly enhanced.”22 Yet Begin’s insistence that 

negotiations could only happen within the framework of limited Palestinian 

autonomy ensured that the national aspirations of the Palestinian people 

could never be part of Israel’s proposed political solution - no Palestinian, 

in the territories or elsewhere, infused with belief in the righteousness 

of her cause could ever accept this as the basis of negotiations.23 Such a 

proposal was no more than an affirmation of the status quo. 

Moreover, the Israeli government’s decision to go to war refl ected a 

widespread belief that the PLO was limiting military action against Israel 

in 1981 out of a desire to move toward a long-term political solution. The 

decision to go to war refl ected an Israeli refusal to compromise.24 The 

war had not destroyed the PLO, and the fundamental political problem 

of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not any closer to resolution. As 

Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari eloquently put it, “...the war in Lebanon 

has in no way tempered the virulence of the Palestinian problem, which 

is hardly surprising, inasmuch as the roots of that problem do not lie in 

Lebanon.”25 

For the Palestinians then, even in the face of the military defeat in 

Beirut, there was certainly cause for hope. Already before the war, in 1981, 

well over a 100 countries had recognized the PLO, some treating it as a 

state with full diplomatic courtesies and protections; they would continue 

to do so after Beirut.26 Within the UN, continued condemnation of Israel 

and support for the Palestinians, even if it had little effect on the Israelis 

other than to cause them to ignore the institution, led to Palestinians seeing 

a clear line of international political progress against which they believed 

it would be impossible for the Israelis to hold out forever.27 Rather than 

the Palestinians in the occupied territories seeking accommodation with 

the Israelis in the wake of the 1982 expulsion from Beirut, the brutality 

of the Israeli siege and, in their eyes, the heroic resistance of the PLO 

caused an entrenching of negative feelings about Israel.28 Capitulation 

to autonomy within Israel was simply not on the agenda. Despite many 

disagreements among the Palestinian groups, none would have disagreed 

with PLO spokesman Abu Maizar’s 1983 declaration that the Palestinians 

would continue to fight “although the war has been one of the longest in 

human history...”29 

74 
Israel’s failure to address the underlying political problem despite its 

initial victory over the PLO in Lebanon fueled the political fire in the 

occupied territories that ignited the first Intifada in December 1987. For the 

Palestinians in the territories, the impotence of the PLO’s military struggle 

in Lebanon, proved by Israel’s expulsion of the PLO, led to a determination 

to take matters into their own hands, even without the PLO leadership in 

place. A young cadre of leaders who had grown up under Israeli occupation 

began a coordinated series of both violent and nonviolent demonstrations. 

And although Sayigh, Friedman, Gazit, and others describe the PLO, and 

Arafat in particular, as being anemic in response to these demonstrations, 

the reality is that Arafat played his cards quite well despite errors. While 

Arafat’s abortive support of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War 

was a strategic mistake and though Israel did, through sophisticated use of 

military force, severely reduce the violence of the Intifada, Arafat was not 

“about to sink like a stone,” when Yitzhak Rabin decided to negotiate the 

Oslo Accords.30 

In fact, Rabin had little choice but to turn to Arafat. As Ze’ev Schiff puts 

it, “ironically, we created a situation where Arafat, who was expelled from 

Lebanon, came in the end back to Israel.”31 The frustration borne by the 

continued Israeli refusal to offer a political compromise to the Palestinians 

had manifested itself in the war of the knives in which Palestinians began 

to stab Israeli civilians on a near daily basis beginning in March 1993.32 

Israelis were tiring not only of the war against Hezbollah but also of 

the new and now constant fear of being attacked by the Palestinians who 

had served as their menial labor force while being treated as second class 

citizens. Clearly, the Lebanon War had not ended their passion for a state. 

The rise of Islamist parties, particularly Hamas, in the occupied territories 

made the PLO’s brand of secular nationalism all the more palatable. And 

the fact that Arafat was willing to accept autonomy despite repeatedly 

rejecting it in the past seemed to reflect a moderation of his stance. 

The headlines of the day marked this as a Palestinian capitulation. 

Arafat had backed the wrong horse in Iraq. The Intifada had failed. The 

Palestinians were accepting autonomy. Yet Arafat turned this autonomy 

with its various security apparatuses into a de facto state under Israeli 

occupation. Eventually, he was able to make Palestinian statehood an 

internationally accepted norm. When it became clear that the Israelis 

were not willing to offer the kind of painful compromise that would be 

acceptable to the Palestinians (for instance, by dealing with the settler 

problem and Palestinian aspirations to have Jerusalem as their capital), 

they had the both conventional and unconventional military tools at their 

75 
disposal with which to fight Israel. They were armed additionally by 

the international legitimacy their aspirations had gained—their right to 

statehood is virtually accepted today by all of the world. 

I agree heartily with Zvi Shtauber’s assessment that, simply put, 

“...Arafat and the Palestinians are the most successful national liberation 

movement, probably with the exception of Zionism...”33 Taking the long 

view, the Lebanon war was undoubtedly a setback for the Palestinian 

nationalist movement. Yet their inability to present a serious conventional 

military threat to Israel, in the end, has not deterred their long-term goal 

of their own state. Believing that this goal could be undermined simply 

by invading Lebanon was a strategic misconception. The Palestinians 

suffered a “total catastrophic defeat in 1948.” For them, that is the point of 

departure for any discussion of progress in their long war against Israel.34 

While the effort has not succeeded yet, the Palestinians have demonstrated 

remarkable resilience in their effort to achieve their aspirations. Their 

combination of irregular military means aimed at exhausting Israel, 

which are admittedly of dubious morality, with political means aimed at 

gaining international recognition of their right to a state has ensured their 

continued movement toward permanent statehood. Throwing the PLO 

out of Lebanon without presenting a political solution could never have 

derailed Palestinian attempts to achieve that dream. 

The War Against the Terrorists 

For the Likud Party that led Israel into the Lebanon disaster, the war 

was not just one against the PLO. All those who attacked Israeli targets, 

regardless of the cause or methods, were terrorists. Just prior to the Israeli 

cabinet’s meeting to begin the war against the PLO in Lebanon, Raphael 

Eitan dismissively sneered, “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” when told by 

intelligence officers that the assassination attack on Shlomo Argov had 

not been committed by the PLO but by the Abu Nidal enemies of the 

PLO.35 The details were not really important: they were all terrorists. As 

Michelsohn puts it, “Look, a criminal is a criminal. [It] doesn’t matter if 

he’s a [Shiite] or is a PLO or something else.”36 Israel was fighting a war 

against “the terrorists” of all stripes and colors. As with its war against 

the Palestinians and Lebanon’s Shiites, it could not claim victory in this 

endeavor either. 

Table 5.1 lists terrorist attacks against Israel and Israeli targets from 

January 1974 (after the October 1973 War was more-or-less settled) to 

December 2000 (the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada). These were 

compiled using the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of 

76 
Terrorism’s extensive Terrorism Knowledge Base to evaluate on a monthly 

basis: the number of terrorist attacks against Israeli targets; the number 

of casualties, both killed and wounded in these attacks; the number of 

casualties per attack; and finally the lethality of the attacks in terms of the 

number of people killed over the total number of casualties in casualtycausing attacks.37 

Table 5.1 : Terrorist Attacks Against Israel and Casualties, 1974 - 2000 

Terrorist Attacks Average Attacks / Month 

January 1974 through May 1982 

June 1982 through June 1985 

July 1984 through December 2000 

1.04 

0.84 

2.77 

Casualties (Wounded) Average Wounded / Month 

January 1974 through May 1982 

June 1982 through June 1985 

July 1984 through December 2000 

11.14 

3.95 

10.79 

Casualties (Killed) Average Killed / Month 

January 1974 through May 1982 

June 1982 through June 1985 

July 1984 through December 2000 

2.76 

0.35 

2.08 

Casualties / Attack Monthly Average Casualties Caused per Attack 

January 1974 through May 1982 

June 1982 through June 1985 

July 1984 through December 2000 

14.7652 

9.2623 

8.8919 

Attack Lethality Average Monthly Percentage of Total Casualties Killed 

January 1974 through May 1982 

June 1982 through June 1985 

July 1984 through December 2000 

15.67 % 

20. 72 % 

30.84% 

Statistics compiled from MIPT.ORG 

Statistical analysis of the entire data set using an analysis of variance 

(ANOVA) test to compare the three time periods shows that the differences 

in average (mean) terrorist attacks and attack lethality between the time 

before the June 1982 full invasion, the major operations between 1982 

and 1985, and the period after the 1985 partial withdrawal are statistically 

significant.38 Both the number of terror attacks and their lethality actually 

increased from the period before the major invasion to the period after 

the partial withdrawal; a statistical t-test (hypothesis) confirms that the 

difference in averages between these two time periods is statistically 

77 
significant. Furthermore, under closer scrutiny (again using a t-test), the 

minor drop in attacks from 1982 to 1985 can not be said to be statistically 

significant, i.e., the lower number of terror attacks could be the product 

of chance alone. Additionally, the reduction in casualties per attack 

across all time periods and between them (using individual t-tests and the 

ANOVA test) can not be shown to be anything other than the product of 

chance. Finally, a t-test reveals that the increase in the monthly number of 

casualties, both killed and wounded, is statistically significant between the 

period of the major invasion and the period after the partial withdrawal. 

A statistical analysis of this sort does not prove that Israel’s invasion of 

Lebanon caused an increase in the number of terrorist attacks against it. It 

does show, however, that hopes of ending the terrorist threat to Israel and 

Israelis through the invasion of Lebanon did not materialize; in fact, the 

terror situation faced by Israel after the most intensive part of the fighting 

was worse in many cases than it had been prior to the war. Israel’s actions 

in Lebanon simply did not win its “war against the terrorists.” It was, 

as shown in this chapter, the third strategic hope dashed in the wake of 

Israel’s disastrous 22-year military involvement in Lebanon. 

78 
Notes 

1. Christopher S. Wren, “An Obstacle on Lebanon is Overcome in the 

U.N.” New York Times [online]; available from http://www.nytimes.com; Internet accessed 19 June 2000. 

2. Benny Michelsohn, interviewed by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, 

Israel. 

3. Tanya Willmer, “Israel Says Human Cost of Lebanon Occupation Too 

High,” Agence France Presse—English, 5 Mar 2000, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

4. Eileen Powell, “On the Israeli-Lebanese Frontier: Smoke, Artillery, 

Fear and Flight,” Associated Press, 20 Feb 1992, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

5. News Services, “Israel Ends S. Lebanon Occupation; Muslim Guerrillas Swiftly Fill Void,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), 24 May 2000, available 

from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

6. Ze’ve Schiff, interviewed by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

7. Michelsohn interview. 

8. Reuven Ehrlich, interviewed by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

9. Michelsohn interview. 

10. “Israel Launches Most Furious Operation in Lebanon Since 1985,” 

Agence France Presse—English, 25 July 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

11. Uri Dan and Dennis Eisenberg, “Sunk Deep in the Mud,” The Jerusalem Post, 15 Dec 1994, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, 

http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

12. Schiff interview. 

13. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam (Massachusetts: The 

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 333. 

14. Ann Peters, “More Palestinian Guerrillas Deployed Near Israeli Border.” United Press International, 28 Mar 1989, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

15. David Rudge and Bradley Burston, “IDF Blasts Terror Bases After Five 

Soldiers Killed,” The Jerusalem Post, 28 Nov 1990, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

16. Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 

542. 

79 
17. Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare (London: Cassell & Company, 

Ltd., 1969), 45-46. Emphasis added. 

18. Ian Black, “The Defeat that Came with Victory for Israel/ Israel’s 

Involvement with the Lebanon,” The Guardian (London), 16 Jan1985, available 

from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

19. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (London: Futura Publications Limited, 

1980), 41. 

20. Sayigh, 668. 

21. Shlomo Gazit, interviewed by author, 22 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

22. Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior, an Autobiography (New 

York: Touchstone, 2001), 496. 

23. Marcus Eliason, “Says No Need for New Peace Initiative,” Associated 

Press, 18 Oct 1982, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http:// 

www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

24. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the Israeli 

Experience in Lebanon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 

25. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (London: George 

Allen & Unwin, 1984), 306. 

26. Seán MacBride et al, Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by 

Israel During its Invasion of the Lebanon (London: Ithaca Press, 1983). 

27. Gazit interview. 

28. Edward Walsh, “Bitter Pride: West Bank Arabs Angry at US, Feel PLO 

Remains Unbowed,” The Washington Post, 10 Oct 1982, available from LexisNexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

29. “PLO to Continue Fighting, Declares Abu Maizar,” The Xinhua General Overseas News Service, 8 Mar 1983, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic 

Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

30. Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Anchor 

Books, 1995), 532. 

31. Schiff interview. 

32. Ethan Bronner and Lisa Talesnick, “Wave of Violence Sparks Fear and 

Rage in Israel,” The Boston Globe, 23 Mar 1993, available from Lexis-Nexis® 

Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

33. Zvi Shtauber, interviewed by author, 22 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

34. Gazit interview. 

35. Schiff and Ya’ari claim that this phrase was uttered by Eitan, 98. However Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: a History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 

80 
1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 514, written more than a decade 

later, attributes it to Begin himself, while citing Schiff and Ya’ari’s quotation of 

Eitan as the source. This has led to much confusion, with Begin often cited as 

having uttered the phrase (it often came up in Arafat’s obituaries, for instance). 

36. Michelsohn interview. 

37. MIPT uses a very broad definition of terrorism to which Israelis could 

not object. “Terrorism is violence, or the threat of violence, calculated to create 

an atmosphere of fear and alarm...” See http://www.mipt.org for the full definition. 

38. All judgments are based on a 95 percent Confidence Interval. For information on the values for the ANOVA test and t-tests as well as a short explanation on the use of these tests, please see the Appendix on Statistical Methods. 

81 

Conclusion 

We Are Only Seeking Security1 

In this paper, I explored the specific research question, “From 1978 to 

2000, why was the conventionally powerful Israeli state unable to achieve 

its political goals through war in Lebanon against militarily inferior 

Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite foes?” I hypothesized that Palestinian and 

Lebanese Shiite militants’ resort to asymmetric war conflated political goals 

and military means, thereby preventing Israel from imposing a political 

solution through resort to conventional war in Lebanon. I developed an 

understanding of asymmetric warfare that sought to demonstrate the 

possibility for modern irregular fighters to win despite conventional 

military inferiority. 

Israel’s strategic problem in Lebanon was the reasoning behind its 

1982 decision to invade and the very early success of that invasion. The 

conduct of the war, after the lightning conventional attack, brought the 

Israeli Defense Forces to the outskirts of Beirut, which brought about the 

initial expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership 

from Beirut and the development of a Shiite resistance against Israel’s 

continued occupation of Lebanon. This has led to evaluating the failures 

of Israel’s 22-year military involvement in Lebanon in light of 3 Israeli 

strategic goals: ending the possibility of Palestinian statehood, maintaining 

a continued occupation zone in Lebanon in an effort to provide absolute 

security for northern Galilee, and ending anti-Israel terrorism. 

Israel, a country that had achieved four spectacular military victories 

in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, invaded Lebanon out of its belief in the 

singular efficacy of military force, a belief borne of its previous experiences 

with war. However, Israel’s strategic concept behind the Lebanese debacle 

was wrong-headed. Israel believed that in the Palestinians and later in the 

Shiite resistance, it faced a military problem that could be resolved through 

resort to conventional war. It did not understand, as its opponents did, that 

the strategic problems it sought to address could not be resolved without 

settling the fundamental underlying political issues that had caused war in 

the first place. Neither Palestinians nor Shiite militants ever tried seriously 

to mount a conventional military attack against Israeli forces; they never 

had the capability even if they had desired to take such action. Both groups 

acted to preserve their military forces to the greatest extent possible, 

eschewing high-risk attacks to ensure that Israel could never destroy all of 

83 
their fighters. And because they were supported, fed, and nurtured by their 

peoples, the Palestinian and Shiite fighters created an impossible situation 

for Israel. 

The resort by Palestinian and Shiite militants within these societies 

to asymmetric war meant that neither the military nor the political means 

could be disaggregated from the political ends sought. Israel’s only 

response in the end could be, and was, to attack the people, and this, in 

turn, only affirmed Palestinian and Shiite aspirations. Meanwhile, unlike 

its conventional wars where many Israeli deaths happened over the course 

of a relatively short period, causing the period of national mourning to 

be compressed, the persistent low-intensity fighting ensured that each 

death after the initial invasion would be a national event, with images of 

distraught mothers, fathers, and wives broadcast into every Israeli living 

room. In the end, after 22 years of seeing the same scenes, Israelis were 

exhausted. Whatever the rationale had once been, Israelis wanted out of 

Lebanon, their political leaders promised them an exit, and Israel withdrew 

without achieving its strategic goals. The specific hypothesis of this thesis 

is thus sustained. 

The general hypothesis, however, that asymmetric war poses a political 

challenge to conventional military powers that can rarely be resolved by the 

powerful actor’s resort to war cannot be resolved through exploration of a 

single case. Perhaps as Benny Michelsohn argued, it is overwrought: the 

little guy is not winning everywhere.2

 Certainly some asymmetric military 

attempts to cast out a dominant power were unsuccessful: the oft-cited 

example is the successful British counter-insurgency effort in Malaya.3 Yet 

the idea that the British had found a panacea for fi ghting unconventional 

war is challenged by its experience elsewhere: the outcomes were far 

different in Yemen and Iraq, where Britain was unable to maintain its 

presence under the pressure of asymmetric conflict.4 Often, a difficulty in 

these wars is that they go on for so long, at such low levels of violence 

that, for the rest of the world, stuck in the headlines and searching for a 

proximate cause, the victory of “the little guy” seems to have come out of 

nowhere. 

More investigation is vital to determine whether the outlined 

understanding of asymmetric warfare holds up under the particulars of 

different historical cases; and more explanation is necessary in cases 

where fighters have adopted asymmetric means and failed. Perhaps this 

exploration will reveal that “worthwhile wars” by the powerful are not, as 

Shlomo Argov argued from his hospital bed, “the business of charlatans” 

when encountering an unconventional foe.5 At the very least, however, 

84 
Israel’s 22-year military experience in Lebanon should inform the United 

States’s and its allies’ understandings of options for fighting the Global 

War on Terrorism. 

What is undoubtedly true is that Israel’s victories in its previous wars 

had left it haughty and sure of itself. In its eyes, no power in the Middle 

East could win a war against it; the return of the Sinai and the placement 

of international peacekeepers in the area where it had previously faced its 

most serious challenge contributed to this sense of power. The change was 

perhaps most evident in Israel’s prime minister in 1982, Menachem Begin. 

For Begin, the fight for a Jewish state began not with the war against the 

British but with the beginning of Zionism in the nineteenth century. He 

had once understood the concept of the long, asymmetric war. It was he 

who had said: 

The very existence of an underground, which oppression, 

hangings, torture and deportations fail to crush or to 

weaken, must, in the end, undermine the prestige of a 

colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence. 

Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow at its 

standing. Even if the attack does not succeed, it makes 

a dent in that prestige, and that dent widens into a crack 

which is extended with every succeeding attack.6 

In 1982, Begin, Sharon, Rabin, and most of Israel believed in the 

legend of the IDF’s omnipotence. That haughtiness came with a price: 

Israel’s longest war, the loss of more than 900 Israeli soldiers, the 

significant withering of Israel’s military deterrent, and the deterioration of 

its international image. The price was paid in the currency of defeat. 

85 
Notes 

1. Rabin quoted in “Israeli Defence Minister Discusses Withdrawal from 

Lebanon,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, source: Israel Television, 26 Oct 

1984, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http://www.lexis-nexis. 

com/universe. 

2. Benny Michelsohn, interviewed by author, 23 Mar 2006, Tel Aviv, 

Israel. 

3. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency 

Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 

4. Joel Rayburn, “How the British Quit Mesopotamia,” Foreign Affairs, 

(March-April 2006), and Joseph Kostiner, South Yemen’s Revolutionary Strategy, 1970-1985 (Oxford: Westview Press, 1990). 

5. “Wounded Envoy Says Lebanon War Hurt Israel,” United Press International, 8 July 1983, available from Lexis-Nexis® Academic Universe, http:// 

www.lexis-nexis.com/universe. 

6. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (London: Futura Publications Limited, 

1980) 92. 

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104 
Appendix on Statistical Methods 

Data were collected by viewing monthly terrorist attack statistics on 

The Terrorism Knowledge Base at http://www.mipt.org. Individual attacks 

were evaluated to ascertain that the targets had been Israelis or Jews in the 

listed attack because the Knowledge Base does not discriminate between 

Jewish terrorist attacks on Arabs and vice-versa. The number of attacks, 

the number killed and the number wounded were recorded on a monthly 

basis. The number of casualties caused per attack as well as the percentage 

killed of those casualties was then calculated (obviously the percentage 

relates only to casualty-causing attacks, not those that were foiled or 

missed their target). 

The data were then split up into three sets, from January 1974 to May 

1982 (“Before OPG [Operation Peace for Galilee]”), from June 1982 to 

June 1985 (“During OPG”) and from July 1985 to December 2000 (“After 

OPG”. An ANOVA test was then used to determine whether these time 

distinctions were statistically meaningful. T-tests were used between the 

three time periods, compared one to the other, to confirm whether the 

distinctions held between the time periods in addition to through all three 

time periods. 

The results from the ANOVA test and three t-tests that were interpreted 

in the section entitled “The War Against the Terrorists” in Chapter 4 are 

presented below. 

105 
Table 1. Terrorist Attacks 

N Mean 

Std. 

Deviation 

Std. 

Error 

95% Confidence 

Interval for Mean 

Lower 

Bound 

Upper 

Bound Min Max 

Terrorist 

Attacks 

Before 

OPG 101 1.04 1.232 0.123 0.8 1.28 0 6 

During 

OPG 37 0.86 1.735 0.285 0.29 1.44 0 8 

After 

OPG 186 2.77 7.818 0.573 1.64 3.91 0 90 

Total 324 2.02 6.049 0.336 1.35 2.68 0 90 

Wounded in 

Terrorist 

Attacks 

Before 

OPG 101 11.14 20.187 2.009 7.15 15.12 0 76 

During 

OPG 37 3.95 10.929 1.797 0.3 7.59 0 48 

After 

OPG 186 10.79 28.043 2.056 6.73 14.85 0 200 

Total 324 10.12 24.389 1.355 7.45 12.78 0 200 

Killed in 

Terrorist 

Attacks 

Before 

OPG 100 2.76 10.417 1.042 0.69 4.83 0 88 

During 

OPG 37 0.35 1.136 0.187 -0.03 0.73 0 6 

After 

OPG 186 2.08 4.83 0.354 1.38 2.78 0 34 

Total 323 2.09 6.884 0.383 1.34 2.85 0 88 

Casualties/ 

Attack 

Before 

OPG 57 14.765 23.770 3.148 8.458 21.072 0 115 

During 

OPG 16 9.262 16.478 4.120 0.482 18.043 0 49 

After 

OPG 142 8.892 22.816 1.915 5.107 12.677 0 207 

Total 215 10.477 22.728 1.550 7.421 13.532 0 207 

Ratio Killed/ 

Total 

Casualties 

Before 

OPG 47 0.157 0.259 0.038 0.081 0.233 0 1 

During 

OPG 10 0.207 0.323 0.102 -0.024 0.438 0 1 

After 

OPG 124 0.308 0.356 0.032 0.245 0.372 0 1 

Total 181 0.264 0.337 0.025 0.214 0.313 0 1 

106 
Table 2. Hypothesis Test A. 

T-Test Measuring Before OPG v. 

During OPG 

Equal 

variance Levene’s Test 

t-test for Equality of 

Means 

F Sig. t df 

Sig. (2-

tailed) 

Terrorist Attacks Assumed 0.078 0.780 0.657 136.000 0.512 

Not assumed 0.563 49.926 0.576 

Wounded in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 13.432 0.000 2.057 136.000 0.042 

Not assumed 2.669 116.634 0.009 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 5.328 0.023 1.400 135.000 0.164 

Not assumed 2.276 105.165 0.025 

Casualties/Attack Assumed 0.324 0.571 0.867 71.000 0.389 

Not assumed 1.061 34.488 0.296 

Ratio Killed/Total Casualties Assumed 0.540 0.465 -0.536 55.000 0.594 

Not assumed -0.464 11.590 0.651 

T-Test Measuring Before OPG v. 

During OPG 

Equal 

variance 

t-test for Equality of 

Means

 Mean Difference 

Std. Error 

Difference 

95% Confidence 

Interval

 Lower Upper 

Terrorist Attacks Assumed 0.175 0.266 -0.351 0.700 

Not assumed 0.175 0.310 -0.449 0.798 

Wounded in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 7.193 3.497 0.276 14.109 

Not assumed 7.193 2.695 1.855 12.530 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 2.409 1.720 -0.993 5.811 

Not assumed 2.409 1.058 0.310 4.507 

Casualties/Attack Assumed 5.503 6.345 -7.149 18.155 

Not assumed 5.503 5.185 -5.029 16.034 

Ratio Killed/Total Casualties Assumed -0.051 0.094 -0.239 0.138 

Not assumed -0.051 0.109 -0.289 0.188 

T-Test Measuring Before OPG v. 

After OPG 

Equal 

variance Levene’s Test 

t-test for Equality of 

Means 

F Sig. t df 

Sig. (2-

tailed) 

Terrorist Attacks Assumed 5.212 0.023 -2.213 285.000 0.028 

Not assumed -2.959 201.536 0.003 

Wounded in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 0.021 0.886 0.110 285.000 0.912 

Not assumed 0.121 263.179 0.904 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks Assumed 4.001 0.046 0.752 284.000 0.452 

Not assumed 0.617 122.335 0.538 

Casualties/Attack Assumed 1.215 0.272 1.622 197.000 0.106 

Not assumed 1.594 99.667 0.114 

Ratio Killed/Total Casualties Assumed 13.822 0.000 -2.663 169.000 0.008 

Not assumed -3.065 113.781 0.003 

107 
Table 3. Hypothesis Test After. 

T-Test Measuring Before OPG v. After OPG 

Equal 

variance t-test for Equality of Means 

Mean 

Difference 

Std. Error 

Difference 

95% Confi dence Interval

 Lower Upper 

Terrorist Attacks 

Assumed -1.735 0.784 -3.277 -0.192 

Not assumed -1.735 0.586 -2.890 -0.579 

Wounded in Terrorist 

Attacks 

Assumed 0.348 3.160 -5.871 6.567 

Not assumed 0.348 2.874 -5.312 6.008 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks 

Assumed 0.679 0.903 -1.098 2.457 

Not assumed 0.679 1.100 -1.499 2.857 

Casualties/Attack 

Assumed 5.873 3.621 -1.267 13.014 

Not assumed 5.873 3.685 -1.438 13.184 

Ratio Killed/Total 

Casualties 

Assumed -0.152 0.057 -0.264 -0.039 

Not assumed -0.152 0.050 -0.250 -0.054 

T-Test Measuring During OPG v. After OPG 

Terrorist Attacks 

Wounded in Terrorist 

Attacks 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks 

Casualties/Attack 

Ratio Killed/Total 

Casualties 

Equal 

variance 

Assumed 

Not assumed 

Assumed 

Not assumed 

Assumed 

Not assumed 

Assumed 

Not assumed 

Assumed 

Not assumed 

Levene’s Test 

F 

1.784 

4.400 

8.984 

0.013 

1.284 

Sig. 

0.183 

0.037 

0.003 

0.908 

0.259 

t-test for Equality of Means 

t 

-1.476 

-2.982 

-1.460 

-2.507 

-2.162 

-4.319 

0.063 

0.082 

-0.870 

-0.946 

Sig. (2-

df tailed) 

221.000 0.141 

218.976 0.003 

221.000 0.146 

143.991 0.013 

221.000 0.032 

216.273 0.000 

156.000 0.950 

22.071 0.936 

132.000 0.386 

10.847 0.365 

T-Test Measuring During OPG v. After OPG 

Equal 

variance t-test for Equality of Means 

Mean 

Difference 

Std. Error 

Difference 

95% Confi dence Interval

 Lower Upper 

Terrorist Attacks 

Assumed -1.909 1.294 -4.459 0.640 

Not assumed -1.909 0.640 -3.171 -0.648 

Wounded in Terrorist 

Attacks 

Assumed -6.844 4.686 -16.080 2.391 

Not assumed -6.844 2.731 -12.242 -1.447 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks 

Assumed -1.729 0.800 -3.305 -0.153 

Not assumed -1.729 0.400 -2.518 -0.940 

Casualties/Attack 

Assumed 0.370 5.877 -11.238 11.979 

Not assumed 0.370 4.543 -9.049 9.790 

Ratio Killed/Total 

Casualties 

Assumed -0.101 0.116 -0.331 0.129 

Not assumed -0.101 0.107 -0.337 0.135 

108 
Table 4. Analysis of Variance 

ANOVA 

Sum of 

Squares df 

Mean 

Square F Sig. 

Terrorist Attacks 

Between 

Groups 252.241 2 126.12 3.5 0.031 

Within Groups 11566.682 321 36.033 

Total 11818.923 323 

Wounded in Terrorist 

Attacks 

Between 

Groups 1598.769 2 799.385 1.347 0.262 

Within Groups 190536.774 321 593.573 

Total 192135.543 323 

Killed in Terrorist Attacks 

Between 

Groups 156.751 2 78.375 1.66 0.192 

Within Groups 15104.463 320 47.201 

Total 15261.214 322 

Casualties/Attack 

Between 

Groups 1428.559 2 714.28 1.388 0.252 

Within Groups 109112.428 212 514.681 

Total 110540.987 214 

Ratio Killed/Total 

Casualties 

Between 

Groups 0.818 2 0.409 3.708 0.026 

Within Groups 19.631 178 0.11 

Total 20.449 180 

109 

About the Author 

Dan Helmer is a native of New Jersey and is a 2003 graduate of the 

United States Military Academy at West Point. At West Point, in addition 

to being a letter man in gymnastics, he earned degrees in Military History 

and Arabic. His senior thesis on Hezbollah’s employment of suicide 

bombing later earned the 2005 William E. Depuy award for military writing 

from Military Review. After attending the Armor Officer’s Basic Course, 

Helmer served a short tour in Iraq with 1-68 Armor. After redeploying to 

the US, he undertook a Master’s in International Relations at the University 

of Oxford under the auspices of a Rhodes Scholarship. “The Other Side 

of the COIN” was his master’s thesis and won a mark of distinction from 

the University of Oxford. Helmer is currently serving as the Armor Team 

Chief for an embedded training team in Afghanistan. 

111 

Military History / Middle East 

The Long War Series
 

Occasional Paper 21
 

Combat Studies Institute Press
 

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas