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Chapter 5 We Accept to Live with You in Permanent Peace In the summer of 1976, Americans celebrated two hundred years of independence, and in the fall they went to the polls to elect the nation’s thirty-ninth president. It was the final year of Gerald Ford’s presidency and Henry Kissinger’s dominance of U.S. foreign policy. The Ford administration could not claim any great foreign policy triumphs. The events that brought the former Representative from Michigan to Washington all but precluded that. Much of Ford’s presidency was consumed by crises whose origins could be traced to the misadventures of his predecessors . So, when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975, after a decent interval the Paris Accords afforded United States pride, it fell to Ford to order the humiliating evacuation of the few remaining Americans and some of the remnant of the defeated South Vietnamese allies. Ford might have suspended U.S. Middle East diplomacy in order to concentrate on political survival, but to his great credit he pressed ahead with the process Kissinger had set in motion. The Egyptians and Israelis concluded the Sinai II agreement during Ford’s watch. For that matter, Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly while Ford occupied the White House. There were opportunities in the Middle East— but also grave challenges. In 1976, after Lebanon descended into a fullscale civil war, Ford would be compelled to evacuate Americans from a foreign capital for the second time in his presidency. And like his predecessor , Ford would have to contend with the murder of U.S. diplomats by Palestinian radicals. In November of America’s bicentennial year, Americans chose Jimmy Carter president in the hope that this virtually unknown governor from Georgia would return virtue to Washington. Carter’s presidency appeared to mark the end of the Kissinger era of U.S. foreign policy. Carter’s faith in solutions to intractable problems produced a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that forever transformed the conflict in the Middle East, even if it did not end it. Palestinian groups opposed to the prospect of peace still resorted to terror to disrupt diplomacy. Wadi Haddad organized his final acts of piracy, We Accept to Live with You in Permanent Peace 93 and Abu Nidal initiated a campaign of assassinations. But as the first decade of Palestinian terror drew to a close, Palestinians turned on each other, or they turned to European mercenaries to commit their outrages . The most spectacular acts of terror, the hijackings in 1976 and 1977, ended with the death of the terrorists instead of their hostages. Wadi Haddad died the following year. One era of Middle Eastern terrorism ended with the Master’s death. Another began with a revolution. Lebanon’s Black June In January 1976, the sporadic violence in Lebanon exploded in a fullscale civil war when Maronite Christian militias, who a month earlier had wantonly murdered more than seventy Muslims in Beirut, laid siege to two Palestinian refugee camps, Tal al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha. The fighting would last until October, when Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait imposed a cease fire on the warring factions. By then, Syria had mounted an invasion of Lebanon to secure its own interests. For a time, Palestinians were too involved in a fight for their survival in Lebanon to fight for the destruction of Israel. Over the previous months, Arafat had tried to restrain PLO military action, but now he rushed frontline Palestinian units into the fight to relieve the Maronite siege of Tal al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha. Then, under pressure from the leftist PLO factions, Arafat led PLO formations into an open military alliance with Kamal Jumblatt’s Lebanese National Movement. The decision effectively negated Arafat’s diplomatic triumphs of 1974. By taking up arms in the sectarian conflict in Lebanon, the Palestinians deepened the suspicion that Palestinian militancy posed a mortal danger, not to Israel, but to any state that permitted the Palestinians to set up camp. In Lebanon, as in Jordan, the Palestinians’ determination to establish a militant state within the state had caused war. Now called the Joint Forces, the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslim and Druze militias possessed both the firepower and troop strength to take the battle to the Pierre Gemayel’s Phalange and other Christian militias. Both sides committed atrocities. On 14 January, Christian forces overwhelmed the defenders of the Dbayeh refugee camp and slaughtered its inhabitants. The Palestinians retaliated...

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