HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011668.jpg

emergency cabinet meeting the next day. His adviser on terrorism, Gideon Machanaimi, was someone I knew well. When the cabinet convened, he pointed out to the ministers that the London terrorists were from a fringe Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal. Far from being an ally of Arafat, he had been sentenced to death by Fatah. According to Gideon, Begin wasn’t interested in the distinction. Even less so were the two leading military figures in attendance: Arik and Raful. They said all Palestinian terror was the responsibility of Arafat, and that now was the time to hit back hard. The cabinet was informed that our initial response would be limited: aerial and artillery bombardment of PLO targets throughout Lebanon. Yet Raful told the cabinet that the Palestinians would almost certainly respond with shell and rocket fire into Israel. Then, he said, we could strike more forcefully. In other words, the invasion would begin. It did. Dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee” to convey the aim of protecting northern Israel from shell and rocket fire, it got underway at around 11 a.m. on Sunday June 6. The publicly declared aim was Little Pines: the establishment of our 40-kilometer security zone. Both Israelis and the Americans were led to believe it would be a relatively short operation aimed at destroying the PLO’s military capacity in the border area. We also said that we wouldn’t attack Syrian forces as long as they didn’t attack us. That last public pledge had particular relevance to my role on the ground. I was deputy commander of the largest of Israel’s three invasion forces, under Yanoush Ben-Gal, head of the northern command until shortly before the war. We had 30,000 troops and 600 tanks and were responsible for the “eastern sector’ — from the edge of the Golan Heights, north through the Bekaa Valley along Lebanon’s border with Syria. At first, we deliberately stopped short of Syrian forces. We deployed our main reserve division just 10 kilometers across the border, below the first Syrian positions at the bottom of the Bekaa. But despite the public assurances we were in Lebanon to establish our security zone, we had no orders to halt at the 40-kilometer line. From day one, our part of the invasion force began a pincer movement around the area of eastern Lebanon where large numbers of Syrian soldiers were based. My former Sinai division, the 252™, came down from the Golan and started making its way up alongside the Syrian border. Our other units, further inland, also began pushing northward. For the first couple of days, we did avoid a confrontation with the Syrians. Yet on June 8, day three of the war, the morphing of Little Pines into Big Pines began. 197 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011668