Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The PLO clearly needed to present a new face to the international community if the organization were to gain recognition as a government in exile. In 1973 Arafat named Said Hammami as the PLO’s representative to London. A native of the coastal city of Jaffa, Hammami had been driven out of Palestine with his family in 1948 and grew up in Syria, earning a degree in English literature at Damascus University. Hammami was both a committed Palestinian nationalist and a political moderate who quickly established good relations with journalists and policymakers in London. In November 1973, Hammami published an article in the Times of London calling for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Many Palestinians,” he wrote, “believe that a Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . . . is a necessary part of any peace package.” He was the first PLO representative ever to make such a proposal. “It is no small thing for a people who have been wronged as we have to take the first step towards reconciliation for the sake of a just peace that should satisfy all parties”—which, by implication, included Israel. The editor of the paper added a note to the article stressing that Hammami was “known to be very close to the PLO chairman, Mr. Yasser Arafat,” and that Hammami’s decision to state such views publicly was thus “of considerable significance.”²⁷ Through his London representative, Arafat had succeeded in opening a channel not only to the West but also to Israel itself. An Israeli journalist and peace activist named Uri Avnery was electrified by what he had read in Hammami’s article. Avnery had immigrated to Palestine during the mandate and joined the Irgun in the late 1930s, when still just a teenager. He would later silence those who criticized him for speaking with Palestinian “terrorists,” saying, “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist.” Avnery was wounded in the 1948 war and went on to serve three terms in the Knesset as an independent. Though a committed Zionist, Avnery had always advocated a two-state solution, long before anyone in the Arab world would support the idea. Menachem Begin used to deride him in Knesset debates, asking, “Where are the Arab Avnerys?”²⁸ In reading Hammami’s articles, Uri Avnery immediately recognized he had found his Palestinian counterpart. In December 1973, Hammami penned a second column for the Times, this time calling for mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians. “The Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs should recognize one another as peoples, with all the rights to which a people is entitled. This recognition should be followed by the realization of . . . a Palestinian state, an independent, fully-fledged member state of the United Nations.”²⁹ With this second article, Avnery recognized that Hammami’s views must have reflected a conscious change of policy within the PLO. A diplomat might make one indiscretion and keep his job, but a repeat offender would certainly get the sack. Hammami could only suggest such things as mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians with the support of Yasser Arafat. Avnery was determined to make contact with Said Hammami. While attending the Geneva peace conference in December 1973, Avnery met a journalist with the Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the PLO representative. The meeting carried great risks for both men. In the climate of terrorist violence of the early 1970s, both the hard-line Palestinian factions and the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, were actively assassinating their enemies. Hammami and Avnery were willing to take the risk of meeting, for both men were convinced that a two-state solution held the only prospect for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They had their first meeting in Avnery’s London hotel room on January 27, 1974, during which Hammami set out his views. Avnery summarized them as follows:The two peoples, the Palestinian and the Israeli, exist. He did not like the way the new Israeli nation in Palestine came into being. He rejected Zionism. But he accepted the fact that the Israeli nation does exist. Since the Israeli nation exists it has the right to national self-determination, much as the Palestinians have this right. At present, the only realistic solution is to allow each of the two peoples to have a state of its own. He did not like Itzhak Rabin and understood that the Israelis did not have to like Yassir Arafat. Each people must accept the leaders chosen by the other side. We must make peace without the intervention of either of the superpowers. Peace must come from the peoples in the region itself.³⁰

Avnery stressed to Hammami that Israel was a democracy of its Jewish citizens, and that in order to change Israeli government policy, they would have to change Israeli public opinion. “One does not change public opinion by words, statements, diplomatic formulas,” he later recalled telling Hammami. “One changes public opinion with the impact of dramatic events, which speak directly to the heart of everyone, events which a person can see with his own eyes on television, hear on the radio, read in the headlines of his paper.”³¹ For the moment, neither Arafat nor Hammami could go further to win over Israeli public opinion than to argue for the two-state solution in the Western press. In the climate of the times, this represented a more radical shift in policy than the PLO leadership dared to express more openly. While the meetings between Avnery and the PLO’s London representative continued to be kept in strictest secrecy, Hammami’s moderate message no doubt played a part in Arafat’s invitation to address the United Nations. Through his articles in the Times, Hammami showed the Western world that the PLO was ready to engage in a negotiated settlement with the Israelis. Arafat?s speech would provide the opportunity for the sort of ?dramatic event? Avnery believed necessary to force a shift in Israeli policy.

The next major breakthrough for Arafat in 1974 came in the inter-Arab arena. At the Rabat Summit of Arab leaders, Arafat defeated his old rival King Hussein of Jordan in securing Arab recognition for the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. On October 29, 1974, the meeting of Arab heads of state gave its unanimous support to the PLO and affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to establish a “national authority” on “any liberated Palestinian land” under PLO leadership. The resolution dealt a terrible blow to King Hussein’s claims to represent the Palestinians and to Jordan’s sovereignty over the West Bank. Arafat left Rabat with the PLO’s claims as a government-in-exile greatly strengthened. Fifteen days after his triumph in Rabat, Arafat landed at the United Nations to secure international support for Palestinian self-determination. Lina Tabbara, a Lebanese diplomat who was half Palestinian, was in his entourage to assist with the translation of his speech into English and French. Tabbara was overwhelmed by the drama of the moment. “I entered through the main door of the glass building right behind Yasser Arafat, who received the reception accorded to a head of state except for a few details of protocol,” Tabbara recalled. “It was the climax of the [Palestinian] resistance movement, a moment of triumph for the disinherited, and one of the most beautiful days of my life.” Seeing Arafat take to the rostrum and receive a standing ovation from the General Assembly awakened her “feelings of pride at having Palestinian blood.”³² Arafat gave a long speech—101 minutes in all. “It was a real committee job,” Khalid al-Hasan later recalled. “Drafts, drafts and more drafts. When we thought we’d got it about right, we asked one of our most celebrated poets to put the finishing touch to it.”³³ It was a rousing speech, a call for justice, but ultimately a speech targeting a Palestinian audience, and those who supported the Palestinian revolutionary struggle. It was not a speech intended to sway the Israeli public and force a change in Israeli government policy. Arafat did not enjoy enough support within his own movement to suggest any accommodation with Israel. And the Israelis weren’t listening: the Israeli delegation boycotted Arafat’s speech in protest against the PLO chairman’s appearance. Instead of reinforcing Hammami’s appeal for a two-state solution, Arafat reverted to his long-standing “revolutionary dream” of “one democratic State where Christian, Jew and Moslem live in justice, equality, fraternity and progress” in the whole of Palestine. To the Israelis, and their American supporters, this still sounded like the familiar old call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even worse, instead of using the UN podium to extend his hand to the Israelis, Arafat famously ended with a rhetorical threat. ?Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter?s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.?³⁴ Arafat departed the hall to another standing ovation. The PLO chairman’s call for justice and statehood for the Palestinian people enjoyed widespread support in the international community. Arafat had more need for supporters than for bold gestures. When Lina Tabbara next saw Arafat, the PLO chairman would be fighting for his political survival in Civil War Lebanon, just two years later. So much had been achieved by the Palestinian movement in 1974. Khalid al-Hasan, chairman of the PNC Foreign Relations Committee, declared 1974 “such an important year,” when the PLO leadership was “committed to an accommodation with Israel.” But no further progress was made on Palestinian-Israeli negotiations after Arafat’s UN speech. Hammami and Avnery continued to meet in secret in London, with Hammami briefing Arafat and Avnery periodically meeting with Itzhak Rabin to update their respective leaders on their conversations. “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Said Hammami’s work,” Khalid al-Hasan insisted. “If the Israeli Government of Yitzhak Rabin had responded to the signals we were sending through Hammami, we could have had a just peace in a very few years.”³⁵ But Arafat did not dare make any concessions to Israel, and Rabin did not want to do anything that might encourage the creation of a Palestinian state, to which he was adamantly opposed. With both the Palestinians and the Israelis hardening their positions after 1974, both Hammami and Avnery faced growing danger from extremists within their own societies. In December 1975, a mad Israeli attacked Avnery with a knife and severely wounded him near his Tel Aviv home. And in January 1978 Hammami was gunned down in his London office, executed by the Palestinian rejectionist Abu Nidal Group for his meetings with Israelis. The gunman fired a single shot to Hammami’s head, spat on him, and called him a traitor before slipping away through the streets of London with impunity.³⁶ The window of opportunity for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians was now closed. On April 13, 1975, Christian militiamen ambushed a busload of Palestinians in the Beirut suburb of Ain Rummaneh, killing all twenty-eight on board. It was the start of a civil war that over the next fifteen years would lay waste to Lebanon and drive the Palestinian movement to the brink of extermination.

Political stability in Lebanon was placed under growing pressure as the demographic balance of the country changed. The French had carved the biggest possible country out of the Syrian mandate so as to create a state in which their Christian prot?g?s would represent a majority. However, the Muslim communities of Lebanon (which included the Druzes along with the Sunnis and Shiites) experienced a higher rate of population growth and by the 1950s began to overtake the Christians (which included the dominant Maronites, along with Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Protestants, and a number of smaller sects) in sheer numbers. The 1932 census, which showed the Christians with a small majority over the Muslims, was to prove the last formal head count: to this day, there still are no accurate figures for the population breakdown of Lebanon. By the time Lebanon achieved independence in 1943 the Muslims population was willing to concede political predominance to the Christians in exchange for a Christian commitment to integrate Lebanon in the Arab world and to distance themselves from their former colonial power and protector, France. The power-sharing formula they struck in the 1943 National Pact was a “confessional” or sectarian system, in which the top government posts were apportioned to Lebanon’s communities—e.g., a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shiite speaker of parliament. Seats in the parliament were distributed among Christians and Muslims by a ratio that marginally favored the Christians 6:5. This power-sharing agreement was first challenged in the 1958 civil war. U.S. military intervention and the election of a reformist president, Fuad Chehab, in September 1958 restored the status quo in Lebanon and preserved the confessional system for another decade. The advent of the Palestinian revolution on Lebanese soil in the late 1960s catalyzed the next assault on the confessional system. The Palestinians disrupted the political and demographic balance in Lebanon in specific ways. The number of registered Palestinian refugees had grown from 127,600 in 1950 to 197,000 by 1975, though the true Palestinian presence was closer to 350,000 by 1975.³⁷ The Palestinian refugees were overwhelmingly Muslim. Though they were never integrated into the Lebanese population or given citizenship, their presence on Lebanese soil meant a major increase in the country’s Muslim population. They had been politically quiescent until 1969, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had negotiated terms with the Lebanese government for Palestinian guerrillas to operate from Lebanese soil against northern Israel. Lebanon became the operational headquarters of the PLO after the expulsion of Palestinian militias from Jordan following Black September. The Palestinian refugee camps became increasingly militarized and politically militant. They challenged the sovereignty of the Lebanese government in ways that led some to accuse the Palestinian revolution of constituting a state within a state in Lebanon.

There were many in Lebanon who placed the blame for the 1975 civil war squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. To former president Camille Chamoun, still one of the most influential Maronite leaders in the mid-1970s, the conflict was never a civil war: ?It began and continued to be a war between Lebanese and Palestinians? that, he argued, was harnessed by Lebanese Muslims to help them ?seize the supreme authority over the whole of the country.?³⁸ Chamoun was being economical with the truth. Differences between the Lebanese had grown so profound that the Palestinians were no more than a catalyst in a conflict to redefine politics in Lebanon. In the early 1970s, Muslims, Druzes, Pan-Arabs, and Leftist organizations, including some Christians, forged a political coalition called the National Movement. Their goal was to overturn Lebanon’s outdated sectarian system and replace it with a secular democracy of one citizen, one vote. The head of this coalition was Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. Born in 1917 in his family’s stronghold in the village of Moukhtara, Jumblatt studied law and philosophy in Paris and at the Jesuit University in Beirut before entering the Lebanese parliament in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine. “Only a secular, progressive Lebanon freed of confessionalism,” he maintained, “could ever hope to survive.”³⁹ To his critics, Jumblatt’s call for a secular Lebanon was nothing less than a bid for Muslim majority rule—by the mid-1970s, Lebanese Muslims were estimated to outnumber Christians by a ratio of 55:45—and the end of Lebanon’s identity as a Christian state in the Middle East. The Palestinians, in Jumblatt’s view, were but a contributing factor in a war that was fundamentally between the Lebanese. “If the Lebanese had not been ready for an explosion,” he reasoned, “there would have been no explosion.” The differences between Chamoun’s and Jumblatt’s views of Lebanon could not be more profound. The Maronite leader Chamoun was wedded to preserving the National Pact distribution of power—and through it the privileged position of Christians in Lebanon. Jumblatt and the National Movement called for a new order based on equal rights of citizenship that would advantage Lebanon’s Muslim majority. At root it was a power struggle over who would rule Lebanon, with both sides claiming the moral high ground. One contemporary described Chamoun and Jumblatt as “paragons to their supporters and monsters to their opponents” who “detest and cold shoulder one another, both entrenched in their palaces and in their certainties.”⁴⁰ Conflict between defenders of the status quo and proponents of social revolution came to a head in the spring of 1975. That March, Muslim fishermen in the southern city of Sidon went on strike to protest a new fishing monopoly they feared would destroy their livelihood. The consortium was run by Camille Chamoun and a number of other Maronites, making a sectarian issue of what was at heart industrial action. The fishermen mounted demonstrations, which the Maronite-commanded Lebanese army was dispatched to quell. The National Movement condemned the military intervention as a Maronite army defending Maronite big business. The army fired on protesters and killed Ma‘ruf Sa’d, a Sunni Muslim leader of a left-wing Nasserist party, on March 6. Sa?d?s death sparked a popular uprising in Sidon in which Palestinian commandos joined forces with Leftist Lebanese militiamen in pitched battles against the Lebanese army. The conflict spread from Sidon to Beirut when a carload of gunmen made an unprovoked attack on Maronite leader Pierre Gemayel as he was leaving church on Sunday, April 13. Gemayel was the founder of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party, the single largest militia in Lebanon, with an estimated 15,000 armed members. The gunmen killed three people, including one of Gemayel’s bodyguards. Bent on revenge, the outraged Phalangists ambushed a busload of Palestinians that same day as they drove through the Christian suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh, killing all twenty-eight people on board. As news of the massacre spread, the Lebanese populace knew immediately that the sudden escalation of violence spelled war. The following day, no one went to work, schools closed, and the streets were empty as the people of Beirut followed events anxiously from their homes, reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and relaying local news by telephone against the staccato background of gunfire. Lina Tabbara was working in Beirut when the civil war began. After completing her tour of duty at the United Nations, where she had assisted Yasser Arafat with his 1974 speech, Tabbara had returned to Lebanon to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In many ways she typified the affluent, cosmopolitan Lebanese: well-educated; fluent in English, French, and Arabic; married to an architect; and living in one of the most elegant neighborhoods of downtown Beirut. She was thirty-four years old with two young daughters, ages two and four, at the outbreak of the war. With her auburn hair and blue eyes, Tabarra could pass for a Christian, though she was in fact a Muslim of mixed Palestinian and Lebanese parentage. She wore her mixed identities with pride, and in the opening months of the war she refused to take sides, even as she watched society around her divide into two deeply entrenched camps. It was not an easy position to maintain. From its opening moments, the Lebanese civil war was marked by sectarian murder and the brutal reciprocity of revenge killings. On May 31, after seven weeks of fighting between militias, Beirut witnessed the first sectarian massacres in which unarmed civilians were killed simply on the grounds of their religion. A friend called Lina Tabbara to warn her that Muslims were rounding up Christians in the Bashoura quarter of West Beirut. “There’s a barricade and an identity checkpoint,” Tabbara’s friend exclaimed. “The Christians have to get down. They are dragged off to the cemetery.” Ten Christians were executed in Beirut that day. The newspapers called it Black Friday. Much worse was to follow.⁴¹

Throughout the summer of 1975, life in Beirut took on an unnatural normalcy as the city’s residents adapted to the constraints imposed by the war. One of the most popular radio programs provided listeners with periodic updates on safe routes and no-go zones. ?Dear listeners,? the reassuring presenter would announce, ?we advise you to avoid this area and to take that route instead.? As the conflict deepened over the summer and into the autumn of 1975, his tone grew increasingly urgent. ?Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Today, Sunday, 20th October, you?ve all had a good time, haven?t you? Now you must go back home very quickly, very quickly!?⁴² The radio alert marked the start of a new battle in central Beirut in which rival militias fought over the tallest buildings as platforms from which to observe and bombard their enemies. The incomplete shell of a skyscraper called the Murr Tower, overlooking the commercial center of Beirut, became a stronghold of the Sunni Leftist Murabitun militia. The high-rise Holiday Inn, in the heart of the Beirut hotel district, was seized by the Maronite Phalangist militia. Missiles and artillery shells were exchanged between the two towers in all-night battles, causing massive destruction to surrounding areas. National Movement forces—Tabbara called them the “Islamo-Progressives”—laid siege to the hotel district and trapped the Maronite forces in October 1975. The Christian militiamen were rescued by Camille Chamoun, who, as minister of the interior, had the authority to deploy 2,000 soldiers from the Lebanese army around the hotel district as a buffer between the combatants. Another cease-fire followed in November, but no one had any illusions that the fighting was over. In December, the barricades were back in place and the mindless killing of innocents resumed. Four Phalangists were kidnapped and later found dead. Maronite militiamen retaliated by killing 300–400 civilians whose identity cards betrayed them as Muslims. Muslim militiamen responded in kind, killing hundreds of Christians. The day came to be known as Black Saturday. For Lina Tabbara, it was the day she finally took sides. “It’s no longer possible to ignore the yawning gulf separating Christians and Moslems; things have gone too far with this Black Saturday.” Henceforth, Lina identified with the Muslim cause. “I feel the seeds of hatred and the desire for revenge taking root in my very depths. At this moment I want the Mourabitouns or anybody else to give the Phalangists back twice as good as we got.”⁴³ By the beginning of 1976 outside powers began to play an active role in the war between the Lebanese. The months of intense fighting consumed a great deal of guns and ammunition, jeeps and uniforms, and rockets and artillery, all of which were enormously costly. Lebanese militias sought arms from neighboring countries that were awash in weapons. One of the consequences of the oil boom was the rapid expansion of arms sales to the Middle East, and Lebanon’s neighbors seized on the deepening civil war to exercise influence over the country through arming its militias. The Soviets and the Americans had long provided weapons systems to their allies in the region. Other states were quick to enter the lucrative market, with European producers competing with the Americans for sales of heavy weapons to West-leaning ?moderate? Arab states. Saudi defense spending, for instance, increased from $171 million in 1968 to over $13 billion by 1978.⁴⁴ Surplus weapons began to make their way to supply the warring Lebanese militias, as regional powers sought to influence developments in Lebanon. Lina Tabbara reported rumors of Saudi support for Christian militias “as the regime in Riyadh prefers to support the opponents of Islam for fear of a hypothetical takeover by the Communists.”⁴⁵ The Maronites also received arms and ammunition from the Israelis, to assist in their fight against Palestinian militias. The Left-leaning National Movement secured arms from the Soviet Union and through Soviet client states like Iraq and Libya. The internal conflict between Lebanese was getting dragged into the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the struggle between revolutionary and conservative regimes in the Arab world. The Lebanese war dissolved into an exterminationist conflict in the course of 1976, in which massacre begat retaliatory massacre. Christian forces overran the Muslim shantytown of the Karantina in January 1976, killing hundreds and using bulldozers to obliterate the slum quarter from the map. The National Movement and Palestinian forces retaliated by laying siege to Camille Chamoun’s stronghold at Damour, a major Christian town on the coast to the south of Beirut. Five hundred Maronites were killed when Damour fell to the Palestinians and Muslim militias on January 20. Five months later, Maronite forces laid siege to the isolated Palestinian refugee camp at Tal al-Za‘tar, set in the midst of Christian neighborhoods. The camp’s 30,000 inhabitants suffered a fifty-three-day campaign of relentless violence before surrendering, after weeks without medical relief, fresh water, and dwindling food supplies. No reliable casualty figures were available for the siege, though an estimated 3,000 died in Tal al-Za’tar.⁴⁶ In all, some 30,000 people were killed and nearly 70,000 wounded between the outbreak of the war in April 1975 and the cessation of general hostilities in October 1976—an enormous toll in a population of 3.25 million.⁴⁷ The end of the first stage of the Lebanese civil war, in October 1976, came as a result of a political crisis. In March 1976 the Lebanese parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the president of the republic, Suleiman Franjieh, and asked for his resignation. When Franjieh refused, Kamal Jumblatt threatened all-out war, and dissident army units began to shell the Presidential Palace in the Beirut suburbs. The Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, sent his troops into Lebanon to protect Franjieh and to secure a cease-fire. The Lebanese parliament met again under Syrian protection and agreed to hold early elections to resolve the political deadlock. The Lebanese president was, and still is, elected by the members of parliament, who assembled in May 1976 to cast their votes for a new leader. There were two candidates—Elias Sarkis, who was supported by conservative Christians and the Maronite militias; and Raymond Eddй, the preferred choice of the reformists and the National Movement. Much to the surprise of the Muslim forces in Lebanon, Asad of Syria put his full support behind Elias Sarkis and ensured his victory over Edd?. It was a critical turning point, as Syria began to intervene directly in Lebanese politics and to secure its influence over the country by deploying its troops in strategic points in Beirut and across Lebanon. In giving their support to Elias Sarkis, the Syrians were in effect taking sides against Jumblatt’s National Movement and the Palestinians. It was an astonishing reversal of positions, for the Syrians had always stood for Pan-Arabism and the Palestinian cause. Yet here they were coming to the defense of the West-leaning, anti-Arabist Maronites. For Lina Tabbara, the reality of the situation was brought home when she watched Syrian forces in the Beirut Airport “using Soviet-made Grad ground-to-ground missiles bought with Soviet aid to shell Palestinian refugee camps and the Beiruti areas held by the [Muslim] Progressives.”⁴⁸ Lina quickly recognized that the Syrians were not supporting the Maronites in their own right so much as using the Maronites as a means to extend their own domination over Lebanon. Syria’s intervention in Lebanon provoked concern among the other Arab states, which did not wish to see Damascus take advantage of the Lebanon conflict to absorb its once prosperous neighbor. King Khalid of Saudi Arabia (r. 1975–1982) convened a minisummit of Arab leaders in Riyadh attended by Lebanese president Sarkis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, and representatives of Kuwait, Egypt, and Syria. The Arab leaders announced their plans for Lebanon on October 18, 1976, with a call for total disengagement by all armed elements and a permanent cease-fire to take effect in ten days’ time. The Arab states were to create a 30,000-man peacekeeping force to be placed under the command of the president of Lebanon. The Arab peacekeepers would have the authority to disarm combatants and to confiscate weapons from all who violated the cease-fire. The Riyadh summit called on the PLO to respect Lebanese sovereignty and to withdraw to the areas allotted the Palestinian fighters in the 1969 Cairo Agreement. The summit resolution concluded with a call for political dialogue between all the parties in Lebanon to achieve national reconciliation. Despite their concerns for Syria’s intentions, the Riyadh resolutions had done little to lessen Damascus’s grasp over Lebanon. With other Arab states unwilling to commit significant numbers of troops to Lebanon, the Syrian army dominated the Arab multinational force: of the 30,000 Arab troops sent to keep the peace in Lebanon, some 26,500 were Syrian. The token contingents from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Libya did not stay in Lebanon for long before delegating the task wholly to the Syrians. In mid-November, some 6,000 Syrian troops occupied Beirut, reinforced by 200 tanks. The Riyadh summit resolutions thus proved little more than a formula to legitimize the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Though President Sarkis called on the Lebanese to greet the Syrians “in love and brotherhood,” Muslim and Progressive parties had grave doubts. Kamal Jumblatt recorded one of his conversations with Hafez al-Asad in his memoirs: “I beg you to withdraw the troops you have sent into Lebanon. Carry on with your political intervention, your mediation, your arbitration.... But I must advise you against military means. We do not want to be a satellite state.?⁴⁹ Lina Tabbara was appalled to see the Syrian army spread all over Beirut, but what annoyed her most was that “nearly everybody is apparently satisfied with this state of affairs.” In the wake of the Riyadh summit, the fifty-sixth cease-fire since the start of the war took effect. If the Lebanese people had hoped that the Syrian occupation would bring them peace after nearly two years of war, they were soon disappointed. Shortly after the Syrians entered Beirut, Tabbara witnessed one of the first car bombs that were to become a hallmark of the violence in Lebanon. “Loud cries and screams can be heard off-stage,” she wrote, describing the carnage before her eyes. “Look out, it’s a booby-trapped car, there may be another, someone exclaims. This kind of attack has increased during the past few days, but no one knows who is behind them. Many badly wounded people are lying on the road.” Tabbara reflected grim satisfaction on seeing “the triumphant placidity of the Lebanese under the Syrian peace shattered.” ⁵⁰ She and her family had witnessed enough blood and destruction. They left Beirut to the Syrians and joined the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese in foreign exile. Yet as far as the international community was concerned, the conflict in Lebanon had been resolved—at least for the moment. The focus of the global media had shifted from war-torn Lebanon to Jerusalem, where, on Sunday, November 20, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was about to address the Knesset, the parliament of the state of Israel, to propose an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.