would be a “Palestinian state” in Jordan, which would free Israel to retain open

would be a “Palestinian state” in Jordan, which would free Israel to retain open- ended, unchallenged, control of the West Bank. Even the Labor party, fifteen years into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, was still speaking about a “Jordanian option” for an eventual political settlement with the Palestinians who lived there — though this meant a kind of confederation with Jordan under Hussein’s rule. Very few Israelis began seriously to engage with the Palestinians own separate identity or national aspirations until later in the 1980s — when I, too, would do so, amid the widespread Palestinian unrest known as the intifada. But even without a fully thought-out view on these issues, I was taken aback by Arik’s almost godlike supposition that he could use fire and brimstone, or the modern military equivalent, to remake the Middle East as he and Begin wished to see it. If only because of the tacit assumption that the outside world, and especially the Americans, would sit by and let the whole drama play out as scripted, it struck me as an exercise in self-delusion. There was also the matter of Arik’s vision of a “new” Lebanon under Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists. Unlike the other generals in the kirya, I’d never actually met any of our “Lebanese Christian allies”. Yet a few weeks after taking up my new post, I was invited to a lunchtime discussion with a group of Phalangist officers on a training course in Israel. I emerged both unsettled and underwhelmed. They were obviously politically astute. They bandied around military vocabulary proficiently enough. But they were a bit like teenagers playing with guns: full of macho, and too much after-shave. Hardly the kind of “army” I could see as a lynchpin in Arik’s plan to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East. By June 1982, Arik’s invasion was a war simply waiting for a credible trigger. On the evening of June 3, Palestinian terrorists shot and critically wounded Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. Appalling though the attack was, as a catalyst for a full-scale invasion, it seemed unlikely to be enough for the Reagan Administration. Habib’s cease-fire terms did not include terror attacks like the one in London. It was meant to keep the PLO from firing across our northern border. Even to some Israelis, the attack on Ambassador Argov seemed more a rationale than a reason for war. But Begin summoned an 196 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028044