Heckled Over 1982 Lebanon Move : Sharon Defends Invasion Role in Unusual Lecture

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon broke five years of public silence about the 1982 Lebanon War here Tuesday with an extraordinary, four-hour lecture seen by many in his elite audience as an attempt to clear his political record of its blackest stain.

The controversial, right-wing politician, who is viewed here as the architect of what is undoubtedly Israel’s most unpopular war, was periodically interrupted by hecklers as he mostly read his remarks from a prepared text.

At one point a woman shouting “How can you not be ashamed!” was dragged out of the lecture hall.

“I didn’t come here to rebut any of your accusations,” said Sharon, who had previously refused to give any comprehensive, public account of his role in the war. “I came here just to get out the facts.”

But he actually revealed few new details, either about the war or the decisions leading up to it, during what sometimes turned into an hour-by-hour, textbook-style account of the action. His primary message during a three-hour presentation and one hour of questions and answers appeared to be that he had acted with Cabinet approval and consulted his top military officers at each stage of Israel’s invasion. He said he was proud of his involvement.

Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, ostensibly to clear Palestinian guerrillas out of a 25-mile zone north of the international border from which they had been shelling Israeli settlements. But within days, and despite the protests of the United States, the Israelis were at the approaches to Beirut, trapping thousands of guerrillas there and laying siege to the city. The Palestinians were eventually evacuated under American supervision.

After the assassination of Lebanese Christian leader Bashir Gemayel in September, 1982, however, the Israelis became increasingly embroiled in the country’s civil war. Instead of Palestinians, Israeli troops were battling Lebanese Shia Muslims. As the death toll mounted, so did opposition to the war at home. And in early 1985, the Israeli Cabinet finally approved a phased withdrawal of most of its troops that was completed later that spring.

About 1,000 Israeli soldiers remain in a self-styled “security zone” extending six to 10 miles into Lebanon.

At least two authoritative Israeli books on the Lebanon conflict accuse Sharon of misleading then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the rest of the Cabinet about his war aims, dragging the country into a costly quagmire for the misguided purpose of installing a friendly, Christian regime in Beirut.

Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister in 1983, after a state commission of inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the September, 1982, massacre of at least 330 Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in the Lebanese capital. While the massacre was carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, the camps were under Israeli control at the time.

Sharon remained in the government, however, and after elections in 1984 was assigned the trade and industry portfolio in the current “national unity” coalition. He is considered a leading contender to succeed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as leader of the rightist Likud Bloc.

It is a measure of the continuing controversy surrounding both Sharon and the Lebanon war that his lecture and reactions to it were the top story on the national television news Tuesday night, consuming nearly half the broadcast.

Earlier, more than 500 invited guests and a full complement of Israeli and foreign newsmen crowded an auditorium at Tel Aviv University to hear what Sharon had billed in advance as the inside story of the war. He was the only lecturer on a special program arranged at his initiative by the university’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

A small group of protesters from the leftist Mapam and Citizens Rights parties demonstrated outside, carrying placards reminding the nation of the 650 Israeli soldiers killed in the war and charging: “Sharon is to Blame!” Among the invited guests were scores of present and former military officers including the immediate past army chief of staff, Gen. Moshe Levy, who left less than halfway through the program; at least three Knesset (Parliament) members; former Cabinet Secretary Arye Naor, and two key figures best known to Americans because of their involvement in the Reagan Administration’s Iran- contra arms deal, former Foreign Ministry Director General David Kimche and arms dealer Yaakov Nimrodi.

“I just want to hear how he explains it,” Kimche, a former Mossad, or secret service, agent, said before Sharon’s lecture. He refused to comment afterwards.

Others were not so reticent. Another former chief of staff and Knesset member from the centrist Labor Alignment, Mordechai Gur, told Israeli Television that Sharon’s account of decision-making leading to the siege of Beirut was full of “lies and half-truths.”

Knesset member Ran Cohen accused the portly Likud politician of trying to “escape his responsibility” for the war and the subsequent, costly three-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Former army Col. Eli Geva, who became famous by resigning his commission rather than follow Sharon’s orders to invade Beirut, denied the former defense minister’s claim that senior army officers were well briefed on the war plans, and said he had tried several times to persuade Sharon to give up the “foolish step” of entering the Lebanese capital.

Naor said in an interview that Sharon’s lecture was “a piece of propaganda” and “an example of the ‘newspeak’ of George Orwell.” He said Sharon intended his appearance as “the first shot in his campaign to take over Herut”--the largest faction in the Likud Bloc.

And retired Gen. Aharon Yaariv, a former head of military intelligence who is now director of the Jaffee Center, said the speaker’s aim was the “rehabilitation” of both Ariel Sharon and the Lebanon war. He rejected a suggestion that the former defense minister is now concerned mostly with the historical record.

“He’s a politician,” Yaariv remarked.

Sharon had been roundly criticized at an earlier Jaffee Center seminar in June, marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion. Yaariv said Sharon had been invited to attend that seminar, but not to lecture.

Angered at some of the criticism, the former defense minister pressed Yaariv for equal time, resulting in Tuesday’s program. Sharon pegged his lecture not to the anniversary of the invasion, but to the upcoming anniversary of the expulsion by Israeli forces of Palestine Liberation Organization troops from Beirut between Aug. 23 and Sept. 5, 1982.

Perspiring profusely in Tel Aviv’s muggy heat, Sharon insisted that the main goal of the invasion was to destroy the PLO’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon, not to effect a change of government in Beirut. And he claimed that a plan for invading Beirut had been drawn up three years previously by one of his predecessors, Ezer Weizman, now minister without portfolio from the rival Labor Alignment.

He related the death toll from what he charged were PLO terrorist attacks here and abroad in the months leading up to the Lebanese invasion, but he said that he had found the Reagan Administration still unconvinced just days before the war began that there had been sufficient provocation to justify Israeli action.

“How many Jews must be killed before it constitutes a clear provocation?” Sharon said he asked the Americans rhetorically.

“Six hundred and fifty!” shouted a heckler from the audience.