Israelis Happy to Leave ‘Anarchy’ of Lebanon

A downpour had turned the street into a river of mud, and the temperature was dropping rapidly. The Israeli reservists packed into open-sided trucks were soaked and had reason to be miserable.

Instead, they were jubilant. They laughed and passed around a bottle of Scotch whisky and sang “Havenu Shalom Aleichem” (“We Have Brought You Peace”), a rousing folk tune often sung at homecomings.

A homecoming was precisely what it was, because these citizen-soldiers were returning to Israel after serving a month of reserve duty with the occupation forces in southern Lebanon.

In the previous two weeks, their assignment had been perhaps the most dangerous in the Israeli army--escorting convoys of trucks headed south from Sidon and the Awwali River as part of the first stage of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. Now they were leaving, and they hoped that they would not be coming back.

‘Exactly Like Vietnam’

“This country is anarchy,” one reservist told a reporter, waving his hand at Lebanon in a gesture of dismissal.

“It’s exactly like Vietnam,” said another Israeli. “As I remember, your people all wanted out of there.”

The Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon have been costly. According to official figures, 610 Israelis have been killed and almost 3,700 injured since Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, to drive PLO forces away from Israel’s northern border. The economic cost has been put at $3 billion.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres, speaking to a group of high school students recently in Jerusalem, said, “There is no longer any point” to the occupation.

Probably no one agrees with him more thoroughly than the soldiers who have taken part in the occupation. An Israeli lieutenant at the bridge over the Awwali east of Sidon commented: “Who in his right mind wouldn’t want to be out of this hornets’ nest?”

‘Thrilled’ to Leave

Another officer, a major in charge of dismantling a motor pool on the Zaharani River, said: “Something has changed here. The soldiers are working real hard and with real motivation because they are thrilled to be going home.”

The Israelis are so happy about it all that by the last weekend in January they had removed almost all the nonessential equipment from what has been the front line in Lebanon since mid-September, 1983. That put them 10 days ahead of schedule.

“It was unbelievable,” one officer said. “A whole army camp was dismantled in three days.”

Last week, army engineers began blowing up or plowing under whatever could not be carried away. They destroyed dozens of bunkers, tunnels and caves that before the Israeli invasion had been used by the Palestine Liberation Organization to store weapons and vehicles.

On a hillside near the Christian village of Aarab Salim, about five miles northeast of here, an Israeli colonel whose men were preparing to dynamite a deep cave said the PLO “used this kind of cave to hide when they shelled Nahariya and Kiryat Shemona”--villages in northern Israel.

Cave Opening Disappears

Minutes later, a violent blast shook the ground and sent smoke hundreds of feet in the air. The opening to the cave disappeared under tons of rock.

Before the invasion, the Israeli air force had tried without much success to bomb some of these hiding places.

Israel has called for United Nations troops to take over in areas from which its forces will withdraw in southern Lebanon. However, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has made it clear that whether or not the United Nations moves in, the first phase of the Israeli withdrawal is to be completed by Feb. 18.

In this first phase, the army will give up about 20% of the Lebanese territory it holds, according to official information. More important, the pullback will reduce by almost 50% the number of increasingly hostile Lebanese people under Israeli army control.

The timing of subsequent stages of the withdrawal--Phase 2 will take place in eastern Lebanon, near Syrian army lines, and Phase 3 will take the Israelis back to their border--must still be decided by the Cabinet, which approved the withdrawal in principle on Jan. 15. Peres and Rabin have said the goal is to complete the operation by summer.

The greater part of the Israeli troops in Lebanon--estimated at 10,000 to 15,000--are in the eastern sector. So, the first stage of the withdrawal, from the area around the western port of Sidon, is not expected to reduce greatly the number of Israeli soldiers in the country.

Guerrilla Attacks Increase

It was thought that by evacuating the most heavily populated area, the army might at least reduce casualties from attacks by Lebanese guerrillas. However, the number of attacks against the Israelis and their Lebanese ally, a militia force known as the South Lebanon Army, has increased since the withdrawal started.

Last month, the number of attacks hit a record level of roughly four a day. According to Israeli military sources, various Lebanese factions are trying to show that it is they who are forcing the Israelis to leave.

Also, retreating troops are more vulnerable than troops dug in along a stationary line. One officer referred to the southbound convoys as “our soft underbelly.”

Escort jeeps with machine guns mounted front and rear accompany every convoy. Barbed wire seals key intersections. Foot patrols in flak jackets and helmets move along the roadside looking for mines and other explosives.

One Israeli soldier lost both his legs below the knee a few days ago when he stepped on a roadside mine. A reservist, he had only two more days to serve before returning home.

Weapons Are Ready

Troops being transported in the open-sided trucks sit back to back on benches, facing the roadside and with their weapons at the ready.

A sergeant with one convoy said: “Entering Lebanon today means wearing flak jackets, wearing helmets, wearing goggles to protect your eyes from shrapnel, loading your gun and being on full alert, making sure your insurance is paid up.

“There isn’t any real fear, because we are experienced soldiers, but the stomach is tight. You are very tense, and you can’t sit tense like that for hours, but you fear that if you relax . . . that’s when you might get it.”

As the reservists celebrated their departure for what they hoped would be the last time, others were moving in for another tour. One soldier in a group waiting to cross over from a staging area outside Metulla, an Israeli village on the border north of Kiryat Shemona, said this would be his fourth 30-day tour in Lebanon.

“Aren’t you scared to go?” he asked a reporter headed north with the army. “I don’t have any choice about it, and I’m scared.”