Bombs, Passions and Farewells

By William E. Smith

Israel returns the Sinai to Egypt, and hits the P.L.O. in Lebanon

After months of second thoughts and soul searching, the Israelis withdrew from the last third of the Sinai Peninsula last week and restored it to Egyptian control, thereby ending 15 years of Israeli occupation. The withdrawal effectively concluded the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, whose undisputed accomplishment had been to end the state of hostilities between Israel and Egypt.

Yet even as Israeli soldiers were bulldozing the remains of Jewish settlements in the Sinai and removing the last defiant occupants, Israel sent its warplanes northward to bomb and strafe some strongholds of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon. That air assault breached a cease-fire along the Israeli-Lebanese border that had been in effect since last July. The Israelis' immediate explanation for the bombings: retaliation for a series of Palestinian truce violations, including the death last week, in a landmine explosion, of an Israeli soldier who had himself been on patrol in Lebanese territory.

For a variety of reasons, the week was filled with tension and uncertainty. The Israeli bombing raid, on various targets in central Lebanon, killed at least 30 people and injured 70. Still, it was a far less serious attack than if the Israelis had launched a ground assault. Such a move, which could involve as many as 36,000 Israeli soldiers massed in northern Israel, has long been expected by both sides.

Despite widespread fears that the P.L.O. would automatically retaliate for any kind of Israeli attack, the Palestinians said in the days after the Israeli bombing that they would continue to observe the ceasefire. This was an indication that P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat still believes that his organization has more to gain by avoiding open fighting and by putting the Israelis in the position of appearing tc be the aggressors.

For more than a week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel had been shuttling back and forth between Jerusalem and Cairo, anxious to see that no last-minute hitches would prevent the Sinai withdrawal from taking place on schedule. The event was a momentous one, poignant for the Egyptians, frightening for the Israelis. The Sinai, captured from Egypt in the Six-Day War, had given the Israelis a buffer against a traditional enemy and had provided a new frontier for adventurous young settlers. Under the terms of Camp David, the Israelis had agreed to surrender the Sinai in three stages in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. It was a good bargain for both sides. But in the weeks before the final withdrawal, the Israelis worried about the strength of their new ties with Egypt. They wondered whether the treaty signed with such enthusiasm by the late Anwar Sadat would mean as much to his successor Hosni Mubarak.

At midweek, however, the Israeli Cabinet voted to proceed with the Sinai withdrawal on schedule. Soon after that, Israeli soldiers began to remove by force the first of the 2,500 Israeli protesters who had remained in the Sinai settlement of Yamit, a once pleasant town on the Mediterranean coast. In an exceedingly well-planned and carefully executed operation by the Israeli armed forces, the holdouts were removed without any deaths or serious injuries. Bulldozers continued to dismantle most of the last signs of the Israeli occupation--the buildings, streets, even the palm trees and vegetable gardens that the Israelis had planted in the desert. Two days later, on Sunday, April 25, the white and blue flag bearing the Star of David was lowered at Sharm el Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai, bringing the Israeli occupation to an end.

That end did not come gently. Yamit, the largest (pop. 2,400 in 1977) and most prosperous of the Sinai settlements, became the focus of a furious battle over the withdrawal. Of the Jewish protesters left in the town early last week, only a few were settlers who had actually lived there. A larger contingent, organized by the fanatical Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, included settlers from the West Bank who had come to Yamit to protest the Sinai withdrawal. A third group was made up of members of Rabbi Meir Kahane's extremist right-wing Kach movement. Kahane's followers, many of them American-born, were threatening suicide if they were forced by Israeli authorities to leave the Sinai. As the army moved in, Israel's Defense Minister Ariel Sharon (see box) ordered journalists barred from the entire area. Eli Nissan, head of the Israeli Journalists' Association, called the news blackout "an unprecedented act in Israel."

Prime Minister Menachem Begin defended the blackout, saying that it was part of an effort to "prevent bloodshed." He argued that the presence of television cameras and crews in Yamit could lead to "demonstrative tragedies." Unconvinced, Israel's major newspapers left blank spaces on their front pages last week in a gesture of protest against the censorship.

By last Tuesday the agricultural settlements of the northern Sinai had been evacuated. Settlement after settlement had been bulldozed to the ground, the trees uprooted or covered with sand. Even the security fences were removed.

It was, reported TIME's David Halevy, "a land of sand, wind and camels once more." The Israelis left standing the Red Sea resorts of Neviot, Di-Zahav and Sharm el Sheikh. Otherwise, they were remarkably thorough in obliterating the last traces of human habitation in the settlements before they left.

Why such destructiveness? For one thing, the Israelis were fearful that diehard settlers might somehow find their way back and reoccupy their old homes. For another, Israeli defense authorities were apparently reluctant to encourage a large Egyptian population center so close to the Israeli border.

Even though part of Yamit had already been demolished by bulldozers, Israeli authorities kept a grocery store in operation, maintained water and electrical service and allowed a school to remain open. By midweek, the protesters were concentrated in a few places: a concrete air-raid shelter, a 93-ft. tower memorializing Israeli soldiers who died in the 1967 war and three or four rooftops. From a wall, one group draped a biblical quotation: "Is it time for you, O Ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses and this house lie waste?"

The army's assault had been expected at dawn Wednesday, but was delayed by the Israeli Cabinet meeting and by Prime Minister Begin's decision to wait until Rabbi Kahane had returned from the U.S. On hand were some 7,000 Israeli troops, fleets of buses for the evacuees and trucks. The army had even prepared hundreds of strands of plastic cord to be used for tying the hands of violent resisters. In the minds of both soldiers and settlers was the fearful memory of Masada, where 960 beleaguered Jews had chosen death over surrender to the Romans in A.D. 73. Nobody, including Rabbi Kahane, as it turned out, wanted Yamit to turn into a miniature Masada.

Shouting through a ventilation shaft to his followers inside the bunker, Kahane urged them to remain calm and to reject any thought of suicide. When they seemed to be disagreeing with him, he shouted, 'Do you have a rabbi or do you not?" When they replied with a reluctant yes, he told them: "Then I have a student and a son." Later he joined his followers inside the bunker. Tension began to ease, but flared again when the group learned from a radio report that the forced evacuation of the rest of Yamit had .already begun.

Just before 3 p.m., bands of unarmed soldiers started to force their way into apartment buildings and toward the roofs. Amid grappling and pushing, some resisters threw bottles and stones and poured buckets of sand. "We are Jews here," some shouted. "Why are you taking us away from our homes? Shame on you!" As the soldiers crashed axes and crowbars against doors, young protesters threw themselves against the intruders. A woman carrying a year-old baby screamed hysterically at the soldiers. On one roof, a bearded young man in a baseball hat shouted a stream of abuse. When Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Levy, who is called "Moshe Vachetsi" (Moshe-and-a-Half) because he is 6 ft. 4 in. tall, came to the site and pleaded for calm and cooperation, the squatters shouted back, "Go away, Moshe Vachetsi!" The soldiers reacted with extraordinary forbearance, urging protesters to leave peacefully. Only once did they use force: they brought in giant cages, hoisted by cranes, to remove militant holdouts from a rooftop. Cried one angry observer: "This is the first time since Herod that cages have been used against Jews!"

Slowly the protest lost its fire. After they were sprayed with streams of white foam, the last resisters on the rooftop were subdued by soldiers who climbed ladders to reach them. The squatters were taken away in buses to army camps or to Beersheba, the nearest Israeli town, don't like what we have to do," remarked young army captain, "but I think the people are wrong to stay here when the government has made the decision to withdraw from Sinai."

Toward week's end soldiers finally broke into Kahane's bunker and dragged away the rabbi and ten screaming disciples. The troops talked 20 students who lad barricaded themselves atop the war memorial into coming down without a fight. Demolition teams blew up the memorial and the remaining air-raid shelters. Helicopters scoured the surrounding area in search of protesters who might try to return and camp on the sand dunes. At noon on Sunday the remaining soldiers left Yamit for the last time.

A period of tense diplomacy had preceded the final withdrawal from the Sinai. For weeks the Israelis had been complaining about the Egyptians: that they were engaging in anti-Israeli propaganda; that they were keeping more troops in the Sinai than they were allowed under the terms of the peace treaty; that they were permitting Bedouin smugglers to bring weapons for the P.L.O into the Gaza Strip. The Egyptians discussed all these matters with Israeli Defense Minister Sharon when he visited Cairo two weeks ago, and to some extent managed to assuage the Israelis' feelings. In addition, there were 15 border points that remained in dispute, including a spot on the Gulf of Aqaba where an Israeli businessman is building a luxury hotel. But these matters were not considered serious enough to delay the withdrawal.

As evidence of his nervousness, Begin insisted on written assurances from both President Reagan and Egypt's President Mubarak that the two leaders remained committed to the Camp David agreement. The problem, as an American official described it, was "how to reassure the Israelis without calling into question the honor of the Egyptians." But the letters were duly written, and Begin was reassured.

In the meantime, the Israelis staged their aerial attack on P.L.O. positions in southern Lebanon, sending some 60 aircraft--including American-made F-15s and F-16s--to bomb three P.L.O. bases. Even the Israeli public was caught by surprise. In the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, there were reports Wednesday afternoon that one of the P.L.O.'s Katyusha rockets had exploded somewhere to the north. It soon became clear, however that what the people of Nahariya had heard was the sonic boom of an Israeli jet fighter returning from the raid into Lebanon.

TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis was spending the afternoon in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. As he passed through Syrian lines, he noticed that the troops seemed to be on alert, with their antiaircraft guns manned and their SAM poised. At one point, as a gleaming white ambulance came to a stop near him, the crew jumped out and threw camouflage netting over it. Reported Brelis: "In the village of Chtaura I ordered toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and cold beer. A long day's thinking of what would prevail in this land so obsessed with torment seemed at last to be reaching a happy end. Suddenly, there was the tremor of something pounding heaven apart. Louder than thunder, more contemptuous than the sonic boom of a warplane. Looking out the trembling window, and surprised that it hadn't shattered, I could see droves of people fleeing by foot in one direction and, in the other, cars crazily speeding as if the last day on earth had arrived. There was no use staying inside. If bombs were about to fall, it was safer outdoors.

"Someone shouted, 'Israelis, Israelis!' Staring upward, I could see two parachutes with men who looked as tiny as marionettes, drifting downward--one toward the Christian sector, the other toward us. There were shots of celebration, at the prospect of having an Israeli pilot falling right into their hands. The two parachutes turned out, however, to have borne the pilots of two Syrian MiGs that were lost in aerial dogfights with the Israelis." The other Syrian pilot was later delivered with great ceremony to the Lebanese presidential palace by Bashir Gemayel, commander of the Christian Phalange forces.

Why did the Israelis stage their aerial attack on Lebanon last week? The P.L.O. regarded it as a subtle ruse, designed to provoke a P.L.O. artillery bombardment of northern Israeli settlements. That would give the Israelis a solid excuse to make their long-awaited ground attack. In a series of meetings with his guerrilla chieftains, Arafat insisted: "We must not do what the Israelis want us to do." Hard-line Palestinian factions and several of the Lebanese militias aligned with the P.L.O. favored immediate retaliation. Arafat insisted on caution and moderation. Once more, for the moment at least, he held the radicals in check.

The nine-month cease-fire along the border has changed the strategies of both the Israelis and the P.L.O. Until last year, each side could launch an occasional raid without worrying too much about serious retaliation, but that is no longer so, especially for the P.L.O. Says a Western diplomat in Beirut: "Under the old system of a little fighting every once in a while, Arafat could pursue diplomatic and political respectability for the P.L.O. and still keep his revolution alive. The cease-fire has taken the fire out of the revolution, and total war with Israel could destroy it completely. Arafat would no doubt like something in between." So, for the moment, he is counseling his comrades to be patient, even though some sort of P.L.O. counteraction is doubtless inevitable.

What lies ahead? The signers of the Camp David accords--Egypt, Israel and the U.S.--have been focusing on the final Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai for so long that they have rarely tried to look much beyond it. The region's most daunting problem is as obvious as ever: the need for a political settlement involving the 1.3 million Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The question is how to achieve it.

Robert Neumann, a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, argues that the long-stalled autonomy talks have a "zero probability of success" because the Egyptian and Israeli views on Palestinian autonomy are irreconcilable. That may be true. The Reagan Administration, which apparently still feels that the autonomy talks are the best vehicle at hand, has been slow to address itself to the problem of the Palestinians. With the Sinai finally returned, an objective that was once also considered to have little chance of success, the most critical remaining obstacle to peace in the region may finally receive the attention it deserves.

--By William E. Smith. Reported by David Aikman/ Jerusalem and Roberto Suro/ Beirut

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, Roberto Suro

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.