Israeli military planners have a remarkable talent to invent names for their military operations that push the onus of blame on those whom they attack. After Peace for Galilee in 1982 and Operation Accountability in 1993, Israel's most recent military venture into Lebanon took the more literary name of Grapes of Wrath. The operation began on April 11 when Israel bombed targets throughout southern Lebanon and in Beirut, and ended on April 27, when an understanding, known as the April understanding, began being implemented.
After the conflict of July 1993, when Israel bombed dozens of villages in southern Lebanon and the West Biqa` for several days, an informal agreement, called the July (or Damascus) understanding, was negotiated between Israel and Hizballah to arrive at new rules of engagement in the south. The July understanding implicitly permitted Hizballah to attack Israeli and South Lebanon Army (SLA) forces in the occupied `security zone.' More importantly, it sought to limit attacks against the civilian populations on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border. Israel and Hizballah agreed that they would refrain from bombing civilian targets, however if civilians were hit the other side was permitted to retaliate in kind. This effectively gave Hizballah the right to bomb northern Israel when Israel attacked civilians first. On several occasions when this occurred, the party retaliated by rocketing northern Israeli settlements without provoking a massive Israeli response. This was considered within the rules of the game; rules which, by and large, Hizballah followed closely.
By attacking Lebanon in April, the Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, sought to change the rules of the game in the south and nullify the July understanding. There were several reasons for this. Mr. Peres faced an election at the end of May among whose major themes was security. With the electorate giving Mr. Peres low marks on security, it was difficult for the prime minister to continue to acquiesce in an understanding that implicitly gave Hizballah the right to bomb northern Israel. Moreover, after the bus bombings in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Ashkelon, Mr. Peres needed to hit back at an easy target: Lebanon was the only realistic choice.
Perhaps a more important reason for Mr. Peres's initiation of Grapes of Wrath, however, was to change the balance of power with Syria in Israel's favor by putting an end to Hizballah attacks in the `security zone.' By neutralizing Syria's use of the Lebanese resistance, Israel could then be in a position to negotiate a regional settlement with Damascus from a position of strength after Mr. Peres's presumed victory in the Israeli elections.
A third reason for the Israeli operations was to force the Lebanese government to realize that it could not simultaneously rebuild Lebanon and support the resistance. This objective, which the Israelis underlined in the first days of Grapes of Wrath, gradually lost credence as Lebanese officials repeatedly hinted the obvious: namely that policy in the south was largely a Syrian concern, and that the government had little power to change this situation.
It was clear as early as April 11 that Grapes of Wrath was a qualitatively different operation than the one the Israelis mounted in 1993. In the first days of the attacks, Israeli warplanes and helicopters hit targets in Beirut's suburbs, particularly the southern suburbs, a Hizballah stronghold. Aircraft bombed two electrical transformation stations, one near Jamhour southeast of Beirut, the other in Bsalim, northeast of the capital. For several days afterward, power in and around Beirut was rationed down to four hours a day. Both attacks damaged the recently-renovated electricity network, but the speed with which electricity was restored suggested that the attacks were less serious than was initially thought and that Israel was primarily sending a warning to the Lebanese government.
Almost from the beginning, two diplomatic initiatives, one American, the other French, were floated to resolve the crisis. The first official who arrived in the region to mediate the conflict was the French foreign minister, Hervé de Charette. Upon setting out for the Middle East, Mr. de Charette played down expectations by suggesting that he was on an exploratory mission. Very quickly, however, he produced a diplomatic initiative that was almost immediately criticized by Israel and the U.S. This was predictable: Mr. de Charette's plan essentially outlined a return to the July 1993 understanding, with the difference that, this time, the agreement be written out and that a committee would be established to monitor its implementation.[3]
The Clinton administration was particularly angry because it had floated a plan of its own which was substantially different than the French initiative. The U.S. plan revealed the true intentions of Grapes of Wrath, and suggested that there had been coordination between the U.S. and Israeli positions prior to the attacks against Lebanon. This coordination appeared to have begun when Mr. Clinton attended an Israeli cabinet session following the Sharm al-Shaykh conference in March.
The U.S. document called for an end to Hizballah attacks against Israeli territory and the `security zone.' It also spoke of ceasing Israeli attacks against villages north of the `security zone,' but at the same time made these villages off limits to Hizballah. Israel was given the right to retaliate against Hizballah if the party targeted northern Israel, but no reciprocal arrangement was made in case of Israeli attacks north of the `security zone.' Hizballah was further prevented from mounting operations against Israeli forces "in south Lebanon," which left the resistance with no reason to exist. An international mechanism was established to control and guarantee implementation of the agreement.[4] As a sop to the Lebanese side, the Israelis committed themselves to negotiate a withdrawal from southern Lebanon, but only after nine months of calm on the Israeli-Lebanese border.
The central, and surreptitious, objective of the seven-point U.S. proposal was to give Syria responsibility for its implementation. Although Syria is not mentioned once in the document, news reports at the beginning of Grapes of Wrath revealed that U.S. officials had had contacts with Syrian and Israeli diplomats in Washington to discuss Syria's taking over security in the south. Predictably, the Syrians saw the proposal as a trap. Not only would it have made their army the guarantor of Israel's security, it would have brought it into conflict with Hizballah. What made the proposal even more unworkable was the fact that Syria got nothing in exchange that it did not already have: namely influence over southern Lebanese affairs.
Mr. de Charette's plan was just what the Syrians needed to avoid accepting the U.S. proposal. Syria and Lebanon quickly announced that they accepted the French document, providing it with a dynamism of its own that the Israelis could not prevent. Moreover, the U.S. took no diplomatic initiative to back its plan: the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, and even the coordinator for the Middle East negotiations, Dennis Ross, did not visit the region until after the massacre at Qana on April 18. Whatever the cause for this miscalculation, and a diplomatic arrogance could well have played a part, by the time Mr. Christopher finally arrived in the Middle East after Qana, the U.S. initiative was all but dead.
Despite fighting afterwards, Qana virtually brought a halt to Grapes of Wrath. Israel's bombing of a base belonging to the Fijian battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), killed 103 civilians. A subsequent U.N. investigation by Major-General Franklin van Kappen, the military advisor to the U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Ghali, concluded that "it [was] unlikely that gross technical and/or procedural errors led to the shelling of the United Nations compound. However it cannot be ruled out completely." By most accounts, the last sentence was forced on General van Kappen under strong U.S. and Israeli pressure. However the thrust of the general's argument was intact: it was virtually certain that Israel, for whatever reason, had intentionally targeted civilians at the U.N. base.
The international uproar created by the incident convinced U.S. (and undoubtedly Israeli) policy-makers that Grapes of Wrath had to be brought to an end before it developed into an even greater fiasco. Warren Christopher hurried to the region, but found that, with Syrian and Lebanese intransigence mounting, the only document he could realistically negotiate was the French one. His subsequent shuttle mission between Syria, Israel, and Lebanon, was interspersed with a dose of diplomatic drama. President Asad showed his displeasure with the U.S. secretary of state by refusing to receive him on one of his numerous visits to Damascus, an incident which infuriated Mr. Christopher and which the Syrian leader may well come to regret in the future.[5] After much negotiation, a cease-fire was announced at two simultaneous press conferences on April 26, one held by Mr. Christopher and Mr. Peres in Jerusalem, the other by Mr. de Charette and the Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, in Beirut.
The outlines of an agreement to redefine military relations between Israel and the resistance in south Lebanon - what would become known as the April understanding - were announced at the Beirut and Jerusalem press conferences. The understanding specified that:
* armed groups in Lebanon are not allowed to launch attacks against Israeli territory, whether using katyusha rockets or other weapons;
* Israel and its allies are not allowed to bombard civilians or civilian targets in Lebanon using any weapons whatsoever;
* more generally, the two parties [Israel and the resistance] commit themselves to avoid launching attacks against civilians and areas inhabited by civilians; and both sides agree to refrain from launching attacks from civilian areas and from areas in which there are industrial and electrical installations;
* without violating the understanding, no provision of the agreement prevents the parties from exercising their right to self-defense;
* a monitoring group, including the US, France, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel will be established to supervise implementation of the agreement and to receive complaints of violations;
* a consultative group will be established, including the US, France, the EU, Russia, and other interested parties to help Lebanon in its reconstruction efforts.
In a subsequent letter from the U.S. secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to the Israeli government, the Israelis won a reaffirmation of their right to self-defense. Ironically, this made the April understanding only more similar to the July 1993 understanding, which the Israeli government had attempted to undermine in initiating Grapes of Wrath.
It was clear that, even before his election loss, Mr. Peres had failed to achieve his stated objectives in Lebanon. In this sense, Grapes of Wrath was a failure. However, the operation did not represent a military defeat for Israel, and, for a time, Mr. Peres attempted to play Syria's participation in the monitoring group as a political victory: for the first time, Damascus appeared willing to engage in confidence-building measure wit Israel. The Syrians, reading the situation differently, responded by bogging down negotiations in Washington on the formation of the group. By the middle of June, the group had yet to be formed.
Syria gained a tactical victory during Grapes of Wrath by imposing a return to the July 1993 understanding. However, it moved no closer to achieving a long-term settlement with Israel. The Syrian regime remains reluctant to engage in a "warm peace" with Israel, fearing that this may so change Syria's political system that the regime could collapse. Syrian ambiguity towards the peace negotiations was highlighted by the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher, on several occasions after Grapes of Wrath. This could well lead to a U.S. justification to isolate Syria further in the future, particularly in an election year. The relatively close personal contact between Mr. Asad and Mr. Christopher was also destroyed when the Syrian leader refused to receive the secretary of state in Damascus. Mr. Asad apparently failed to calculate that in so doing, he effectively alienated the most senior U.S. official who had systematically backed a dialogue with Damascus.
Lebanon and the Lebanese government lost the most from Grapes of Wrath. The credibility of Prime Minister Hariri's reconstruction efforts was put into doubt, and the cost to the Lebanese state lost was estimated at some $500m. The one achievement that the Lebanese could point to, namely Lebanon's inclusion in the monitoring group, was initially undermined by Syrian efforts to neutralize the group's activities. This almost undermined the one Lebanese achievement in Grapes of Wrath, namely a short-lived revival of Lebanese diplomacy. Mr. Hariri, after being given a Syrian `green light,' made a successful round of visits to Arab and European states at the height of the conflict to garner international support for the Lebanese position.[6] This culminated in a speech by President Elias Hrawi before the U.N. General Assembly and his subsequent visit to Washington where he met with President Clinton.
For Hizballah, Grapes of Wrath was a success. The April understanding gave the party a new lease on life, which was reinforced by the likely delay in progress on the Syrian-Israeli track. However, Hizballah's growing strength may, in the long run, increase tension between the party and Syria. In the midst of Grapes of Wrath, Hizballah, and particularly its militants in the south, appeared to take its military initiatives independently. This suggested that Syrian control over Hizballah's operations was limited for a time. Iran's central role in the negotiations throughout Grapes of Wrath, and the strengthened relations between Damascus and Tehran, will also probably expand Hizballah's margin of maneuver somewhat. The party's renewed vitality was evident in May and June, when its militants mounted several deadly attacks against Israeli and South Lebanon Army forces in the `security zone.'
3. For a copy of the plan, see L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut), April 18, 1996.
4. For a French-language translation of the U.S. proposal see ibid. Revealingly, the proposal was leaked to the press by Israeli sources.
5. Mr. Christopher made his displeasure known in leading U.S. newspapers and television programs in early May. See, for example, his interview with Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times (International Herald Tribune, May 4-5, 1996), or the editorial by Stephen S. Rosenfeld in the Washington Post (International Herald Tribune, May 6, 1996). In most cases, the secretary of state sought to underline that, although Syria had a vested interest in peace, it no longer appeared certain that the Syrian leadership would carry through on a peace settlement. Mr. Christopher also noted that the U.S. would have no difficulty dealing with Benjamin Netanyahu in the event he won election as Israeli prime minister.
6. Some observers remarked that the Syrian `green light' was a sign that Damascus needed Mr. Hariri's credibility internationally to gain the diplomatic initiative over Israel.