30B
Friday, September 28, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
YE A IR 1 R EV 1
LEAN0 1\1
BY GARY ROSENBLATT
Editor
THE WAR MAY BE OVER but the fighting drags on in Lebanon, where Israel's soldiers
remain caught in the political and actual crossfire. Hardly a week goes by that Is6e1 does
not suffer a casualty.
THE U.S. MARINE PULLOUT from Beirut was brought on by American public criticism in
the wake of the bomb attack on the marine base. Brought in to protect the Lebanese, in
the end the marines could not protect themselves.
The bomb blast that killed 263 U.S. Marines
in Beirut last October shattered any illusions of
the peace-keeping force there living up to its
name. Once again U.S. policy in the Mideast was
proven to be fatally naive: the Marines sent
overseas to protect the Lebanese could not, in
the end, protect themselves. It was just a mat-
ter of time until Washington pulled out all of her
troops, leaving northern Lebanon prey to Syria's
President Assad.
The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last
week, resulting in more death and destruction,
only underscored the endless cycle of violence
there spurred on by world terrorism.
Israeli soldiers, though subject to one major
bomb attack in which 60 soldiers and civilians
were killed in Tyre, and frequent casualties, re-
mained entrenched in southern Lebanon, unwill-
ing and unable to let go.
What had begun as Operation Gallilee in 1982,
had turned into a war of nerves in Lebanon more
than two years later.
The new Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres,
vowed on his first day in office this month to
remove all Israeli soldiers from Lebanon "within
the next several months." But it was not foreign
policy proposals that brought Peres to the helm
of the government after seven years as opposi-
tion leader and two bitter defeats. It was not
even the Labor leader's pledge to help save the
runaway economy that brought him to power.
It was, more than anything else, a vague unrest
with the status quo as symbolized by Yitzhak
Shamir who had himself succeeded Menachem
Begin this past year.
The Israeli elections in July ended in a
stalemate of sorts, reflecting the deep divide
among Israelis, with the favored Labor unable
to gain a large enough majority to form a gov-
ernment of its own. Instead it had to include
Likud in a unity government that may indeed
prove to be "a government of disunity," as Peres
himself remarked.
Still the agonizingly laborious process of
creating a workable government proved the
democracy and resiliency of the Jewish state.
Where else could a Talmudic compromise be ar-
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