Israeli Cabinet Begins Debate of Pullout Plan

Israel’s four-month-old national unity Cabinet on Sunday opened perhaps its most crucial deliberations so far, debating for six hours a plan submitted by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin for a unilateral troop withdrawal from Lebanon.

The discussions were secret, but Cabinet sources said that under Rabin’s recommendation, the first phase of a three-stage pullout could begin as soon as three weeks from now.

Completion of the troop pullout would depend in part on developments after each stage, but the goal would reportedly be to bring home the vast majority of Israeli troops within nine months, ending this country’s longest and most divisive war.

No Agreement Possible A Cabinet source, alluding to Israel’s inability to conclude a pullout agreement with the Beirut government during months of negotiations, remarked after Sunday’s meeting, “It looks that even a bad agreement (with Lebanon), but (one) still reasonable for Israel, cannot be achieved.”

The ministers are to resume their debate this afternoon, and the Cabinet hopes to approve the unilateral Israeli phased-withdrawal plan by the end of the day. About half the Cabinet’s members spoke on the question Sunday, with a long list of speakers scheduled for today’s meeting, the sources said.

Support for the proposal reportedly cuts across party lines, and Israel radio reported Sunday night that despite the opposition of some ministers, a safe majority appears ready to vote for it.

The continuing debate means that Israel again today will not return to the stalemated talks with Lebanon at the southern Lebanese town of Naqoura. The Israelis previously stayed away from the session last Thursday. The discussions, which are being held under United Nations auspices, are aimed at achieving a bilateral accord on a system of security arrangements for southern Lebanon after an Israeli withdrawal.

The security arrangements would offer protection for northern Israeli settlements against any resumption of terrorist attacks and ensure against an outbreak of factional bloodshed among southern Lebanon’s Muslim, Druze and Christian populations in the vacuum that would be left by an Israeli pullout.

Israel proposed at Naqoura that a combination of U.N. troops and the South Lebanon Army--a largely Christian militia trained, armed and paid by Israel--take control of the region from which the Israelis will be pulling back. But Beirut insisted that the regular Lebanese army is capable of taking full control of the south.

When the Israelis, in effect, broke off the two-month-old Naqoura talks a week ago, they charged that the Lebanese were stalling rather than negotiating. The Israeli delegation is nevertheless expected to return at least once more to Naqoura to formally give the Lebanese the government’s decision on a unilateral pullback, the Cabinet sources said.

The sources said the government hopes to have made its decision before the expected arrival here Monday night of U.N. Undersecretary General Brian Urquhart, who is in the midst of an eleventh-hour effort to keep the Naqoura negotiations going.

Tacit Rejection That would mean a tacit Israeli rejection of an appeal Friday by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that Israel return to the talks.

“As the initiator of the Naqoura talks, the secretary general is anxious that they continue and that they don’t go off the rail,” an aide to Perez de Cuellar said in New York.

However, a Cabinet source said it is already known what proposals Urquhart is bringing from Beirut and that these are “worse than unsatisfactory.” The Lebanese government of President Amin Gemayel remains flatly opposed to any role for the South Lebanon Army and will agree to discuss a broader role for U.N. troops only after Israel commits itself to a firm withdrawal timetable, the source said.

Rabin’s proposal would leave “three, four weeks” before the first stage of the withdrawal began, sources stressed. So, there would still be time for the government to reverse its course if Urquhart were to come up with “an overall arrangement that will be satisfactory to us,” one source said.

Israel would give a general warning to both the United Nations and Lebanon before each stage of the pullout and would use the time between stages to evaluate new developments, the sources said.

New Israeli Position Rabin reportedly proposed that in the first phase, Israeli troops pull back from their current positions along the Awwali River, 27 miles north of the international border, to new positions between the Zahrani and Litani rivers, 13 miles north of the border.

The move would take Israeli forces out of the coastal city of Sidon, a Sunni Muslim stronghold that has been the site of several lethal attacks on Israeli occupation troops.

The goal of the first-stage withdrawal would be to reduce the exposure of Israeli troops to terrorist attacks--86 have died in such incidents since Israel withdrew from the Shouf Mountains above Beirut in September, 1983--while keeping any potential enemies out of Katyusha rocket range of Israeli settlements in the northern Galilee region.

The withdrawal plan includes the eastern sector of the occupation zone, where Israeli troops now face the Syrian army. Israeli military strategists are said to be confident that there will be no significant Syrian troop movement southward in the wake of a unilateral Israeli pullout.

“After all, they know that we will not tolerate it,” a Cabinet source said. “We will not announce it--there is no need to.”

The Rabin plan would reportedly leave a few Israeli troops in Lebanon as liaison with the South Lebanon Army. It also envisions large-scale forays into southern Lebanon as required to counter any terrorist activity against northern Israeli settlements.

Opponents of the plan, including Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, contend that it constitutes too large a risk. Both men are members of the Likud bloc, which was in power when Israel invaded Lebanon in June, 1982, with the declared purpose of neutralizing the Palestinian guerrillas and ensuring “peace for the Galilee.”

Rabin is thought to have argued at Sunday’s Cabinet meeting that there is no point in the army’s delaying a withdrawal any longer.

Syria, which is the key political power in Lebanon, has hardened its position in recent weeks against any Lebanese concessions to Israel, and there is little chance that continued Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon will lead to any negotiated agreement, the defense minister believes.

Without such an agreement, no additional occupation period would allow Israel to impose security arrangements throughout the area it now occupies, and further delays would only increase the hostility of the predominantly Shia Muslim local population, increasing enmity there in ways Israel does not need.

“There is no solution without risks,” a Cabinet source said. “Everything in Lebanon is not the best, but the lesser evil.”