of our retaliatory fire. Some of the Shi’ite villages in the south even greeted our

of our retaliatory fire. Some of the Shi’ite villages in the south even greeted our invading units with their traditional welcome, showering them with rice. But for anew Shiite militia calling itself Hizbollah — formed after the invasion and inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran — our continuing military presence was anathema. In November 1983, Hizbollah signalled its intentions when a truck bomber drove into a building being used as our military headquarters in the south Lebanese city of Tyre, killing more than 60 people. Yet the election ended up as a near-tie. Peres did lead Labor back into top spot for the first time since Begin’s victory in 1977. But he got only 44 seats, to the Likud’s 41. After weeks of horse-trading with smaller parties, he could not form a government. Neither could Shamir. The result, for the first time in peacetime, was a national-unity coalition, including both main parties. Peres would be Prime Minister for the first two years, and Shamir the final two. But the stipulation of most relevance to me was that one man would be the Defence Minister throughout the four years: Yitzhak Rabin. My relationship with Rabin went back much further than with Misha. I'd first met him when I was a sayeret soldier. I’d interacted with him more as sayeret commander, and of course during Entebbe. Now, we began to work even more closely, and the main challenge in his early months as Defense Minister was what to do about our troops in Lebanon. We had gradually been pulling back. We were more or less on the 40-kilometer line which Sharon had claimed was the point of the invasion. But even this was costing us lives, with no obvious benefit from controlling a large slab of territory on which nearly half-a-million Lebanese lived. A decision was now reached to shrink our “security zone” further, pulling back to the Litani River. It meandered about 25 kilometers north of the border, and in some areas was even closer to Israel. I argued strongly in favor of getting out altogether. I accepted that the “Litani line” might help impede cross-border raids. But especially since the remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas, with a range of up to 20 kilometers, they could fire rockets over the security zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with between 1,000 and 1,500 Israeli troops in open alliance with a local Maronite Christian militia, called the South Lebanon Army. This would rule out any hope of working out security arrangements with the non-Christian majority in the south. I tried to persuade Rabin we should withdraw all the Israeli soldiers and coordinate security arrangements with the equivalent of a local civil-defense guard. I suggested four separate militias drawn from the local population — 216 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011687