Though no one claimed responsibility, there was no shortage of suspects

Though no one claimed responsibility, there was no shortage of suspects. During and since the civil war, Gemayel had at various times been at odds with a whole array of enemies or rivals: Muslim militias, the PLO, other Maronite factions and, of course, the Syrians. But I think for all of us, even Arik, the issue of who was behind the bombing was hardly the most urgent concern. The immediate danger was a revival of the kind of rampant bloodletting Lebanon had endured in the civil war. The day after the assassination, I joined a half- dozen other members of the general staff and helicoptered up to the Lebanese capital. Arik, ignoring weeks of US pressure not to do so, had already ordered Israeli troops into west Beirut — not to fight, but to take control of key junctions and vantage points and keep basic order. But the question obviously on everyone’s mind was how to make sure the situation remained under control. It was early afternoon when we reached an Israeli command post in the largely Palestinian southwest part of the city. It was set up by Amos Yaron, the former paratroop commander whose division had landed by sea at the start of the invasion and was part of the push north to the capital. At his side was Amir Drori, the head of the northern command. They had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a couple of hundred yards closer to us, Shatila. Raful was with us as well. So was Moshe Levy, the deputy chief-of-staff, and Uri Saguy, the head of the operations branch in the kirya. I listened rather than spoke. All I could gather from the other generals’ conversation was that they were trying to figure out how to handle the Palestinian camps. No one explicitly mentioned the idea of Israeli troops going in, presumably because they realized that, far from helping ensure order, that might well inflame things further. Even Raful, at least in my earshot, made no reference to the “several thousand” PLO fighters that he and Arik still wanted out of Beirut. The only note that struck me as odd was a general agreement that the Phalangists had not been carrying their load of the fighting during the war. One comment in particular stuck with me, though I didn’t take it as referring to the Palestinian camps in particular. I can’t remember which general said it, only that everyone seemed to agree: “Why the hell do we have to do their fighting for them?” It was not until the next morning, back in Tel Aviv, that the alarm bells rang for me, and by then it turned out to be too late. It was Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Yet in the wake of Gemayel’s assassination, the kirya was 205 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028053