Comment

Announcing

Mercury Fbr Men

— a collection of

Operation Peace
And The Hezbollah

TED LAPKIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

m

IEWELRY • ANTIQUES • FURNISHINGS

le

osSORIE5

1'1°5

0 ACCOUTREMENTS
MENTS FOR THE MOTORCYCL

AN

CIGAR

A

ps,

'ur/VE
GiF
-,s/AST TS

BRING THIS AD FOR

$10 OFF TOWARDS ANY

PURCHASE OF MORE

29260

s the armored personnel
carrier in which I was rid-
ing nosed its way across
the border from Israel into
Lebanon, I remember thinking;
"Well, this should be simple
enough." The date was June 6,
1982, and it was the commence-
ment of the Israeli incursion into
Lebanon that came to be known
as "Operation Peace in Galilee."
I was a supremely self-confi-
dent young combat intelligence
officer with the rank of first lieu-
tenant. The Israeli army, I was
convinced, was the finest military
force in the world, and my outfit
was one of the IDF's elite recon-
naissance units.

FRANKLIN ROAD

THAN $50.

NEXT TO PRESENCE II AT THE CLAYMOOR • SOUTHFIELD

GOOD THROUGH SEPTEMBER

30, 1996.

ter my first battle dawned, how-
ever, the sight of so many friends
lying dead made me realize that
our involvement in Lebanon
would be a much more compli-
cated and costly enterprise than
I had originally thought.
While the semi-autonomous
PLO enclave in southern
Lebanon that caused Israel so
much grief is now a thing of the
past, it has been replaced by a
threat that, in many ways, is
even more serious. Where the
Katyusha rocket launchers and
training bases of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Pales-
tine were once situated, we now
find the installations of Hezbol-

AP/MOHAMED DHASH I

LIMIT ONE CERTIFICATE PER CUSTOMER.

NOT APPLICABLE TO SALE MERCHANDISE.

MONDAY-SATURDAY • 10 AM-5 PM OR BY APPOINTMENT

1

xttoi

4. Summer Session

Joly1111h

ietil

&he

s Schoo/ or

Cr r -3(

Katyusha rocket damage to a refugee camp.

HIM, Jazz, lap, Ballroom

T HE DE TR O

Beginner - Advanced • Children & Adults
Pre-ballet, Pre-jazz, Kinder tap: 4-6 yrs.
Professional, Adult Faculty
3080 Orchard Lake Road, Keego Harbor

120

(810) 681-5376

Get Results...
Advertise in our new Entertainment Section!

1.v/•%.., .4 It NG '4" M O
Call Rosin Maghess (810) 354-7123 'Ext. 209

THE JEWISH NEWS

That very night, however, the
cold hard reality of war would
shatter most of my more cocksure
assumptions. The initial objec-
tive of my unit was to capture the
Beaufort, a 12th century crusad-
er castle perched on a mountain
cliff overlooking northern Israel
that had been converted by the
PLO into a heavily fortified for-
ward observation post for its ar-
tillery. We captured the castle,
but only after a bitter, close-quar-
ters fight that began at dusk and
lasted until after midnight. Of
the 80 young Israeli infantrymen
who climbed the Beaufort ridge
that evening, 6 were killed and
13 were wounded.
I never came to question the
basic justice of the war, which
was predicated upon the funda-
mental moral and legal right of
Israel to defend herself from ter-
rorists who operated freely from
a neighboring country. Nor did I
ever lose confidence in the out-
standing fighting abilities of the
Israeli soldier. As the morning af-

lah, the Muslim extremist ter-
rorist organization that receives
ideological guidance, weapons
and funding from the Islamic
regime in Iran.
Like its sister Islamic radical
terror movement, Hamas,
Hezbollah is dedicated to the
proposition that Israel is an ille-
gitimate entity that must be com-
pletely and utterly destroyed in
order to make way for the estab-
lishment of a Muslim Arab site
of Palestine. Today, the Lebanese
government is no more able to
impose its authority in southern
Lebanon than it was 14 years
ago. The Syrian army occupies
80 percent of Lebanese territo-
ry and Lebanese Prime Minister
Ralik Henri is, in reality, a pup-
pet who receives his orders di-
rectly from Damascus. Under the
nose of Syrian occupation forces,
Hezbollah maintains a base in
the Lebanese Beka'a Valley and
freely conducts attacks against

OPERATION PEACE page 122