At the same time the PLO was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Lebanese parliament was scheduled to meet on August 23 to elect a new president. Due to the civil war, there had not been a parliamentary election since 1972. The parliamentarians? numbers had been reduced by mortality from 99 to 92, of which only 45 were actually in Lebanon. Only one candidate had declared his intention to run for office: Israel?s ally Bashir Gemayel of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party. To this Lebanon?s vaunted democracy had been reduced. Yet for the war-weary and pragmatic Lebanese, Gemayel was a consensus candidate. His connections to Israel and the West might just win the Lebanese some much-needed peace. There was genuine celebration across Lebanon when Gemayel?s election was confirmed. Bashir Gemayel’s presidency proved short lived—as did Lebanon’s peace. On September 14, a bomb destroyed the Phalangist Party headquarters in East Beirut, killing Gemayel. There is no evidence of any Palestinian involvement in the assassination; in fact, a young Maronite named Habib Shartouni, a member of the pro-Damascus Syrian Socialist National Party, was arrested two days later and confessed to the crime, denouncing Gemayel as a traitor for his dealings with Israel. Yet the Phalangist militiamen harbored such deep hatred for the Palestinians, cultivated over seven years of civil war, that they sought revenge for the assassination of their leader in the Palestinian camps. Had the American, French, and Italian troops of the multinational force seen out their full thirty-day mandate, they might have been able to provide the necessary protection for the unarmed Palestinian refugees. Instead, the Palestinian camps had come under the protection of the Israeli army, which reoccupied Beirut immediately after Gemayel’s assassination was announced. On the night of September 16, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and chief of staff Raphael Eitan authorized the deployment of Phalangist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps. What followed was a massacre of innocent, unarmed civilians—a crime against humanity. Though the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were conducted by Maronite militiamen, they were given full access to the camps by the Israeli forces, which had secured all points of entry to the area. The Israelis knew their Maronite allies well enough to know the danger they posed to the Palestinians. Any doubts about Maronite intentions were dispelled when Israeli officers overheard the radio exchanges between the Phalangists shortly after they entered the Palestinian camps. One Israeli lieutenant followed an exchange between a Phalangist militiaman and Maronite commander Elie Hobeika. Hobeika had lost his fiancйe and many family members in the Palestinian siege of the Christian stronghold of Damour in January 1976—his hatred of Palestinians was legendary. The militiaman reported to Hobeika in Arabic that he had found fifty women and children and asked what he should do with them. Hobeika’s reply over the radio, the Israeli lieutenant recounted, was: “This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do.” Raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist militiamen following the radio exchange. The Israeli lieutenant confirmed he “understood that what was involved was the murder of the women and children.?²⁵ Because of their complicity in the massacre, the Israeli armed forces—and General Ariel Sharon in particular—were stained by the Maronite crimes against the Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila. Over a thirty-six-hour period, the Phalangists systematically murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Maronite militiamen made their way through the fetid alleys of the camps, killing every man, woman, and child they found. Jamal, a twenty-eight-year-old member of Arafat’s Fatah movement, had remained in Beirut after the PLO’s withdrawal and was an eyewitness to the massacres. “On Thursday the flares over the camp began at 5.30 P.M. . . . There were aircraft dropping light bombs too. The night was like day. The next few hours were terrible. I saw people running in panic to the small mosque, Chatila Mosque. They were taking shelter there because apart from being a sanctuary it was also built with a strong steel structure. Inside were 26 women and children—some of them had horrible injuries.” These may well have been the refugees that Hobeika had condemned over the radio. While the killing was going on, the Phalangists set to work leveling the refugee camp with bulldozers, often killing the people sheltering inside. “They killed everyone they found, but the point is the way they killed them,” Jamal recounted. The old were cut down, the young were raped and murdered, family members were forced to witness the murder of their loved ones. The Israelis estimated 800 were killed, but the Palestinian Red Cross reported that over 2,000 died. “They must have been crazed to do things like that,” Jamal concluded. He spoke of these events with some detachment and saw the massacre as part of a bigger plan. “Psychologically it is clear what they were trying to do to us. We were trapped like animals in that camp, and that is how they have always tried to show us to the world. They wanted us to believe it ourselves.”²⁶ The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps provoked widespread condemnation across the world—not least in Israel, where opposition to the Lebanon War had grown increasingly vocal over the course of the summer. On September 25, some 300,000 Israelis, representing 10 percent of the total population of the country, gathered in a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv to protest Israel’s role in the atrocity. In response, the Likud government was forced to convene an official commission of inquiry—the Kahan Commission—that in 1983 would charge the most powerful Israeli officials involved—Prime Minister Begin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Chief of Staff General Eitan—with responsibility for the massacre. The commission also called for the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. More immediately, the international outcry led to the return of the multinational forces and American engagement in resolving the crisis in Lebanon. U.S. Marines, French paratroopers, and Italian soldiers returned to Beirut on September 29, too late to provide the security they had promised the families of the deported PLO fighters. If at first they had been deployed to see out the Palestinian fighters, the multinational forces were now sent in as a buffer for the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut. The Israelis, for their part, did not want to move until they had concluded a political agreement with Lebanon. First a replacement president had to be elected. On September 23, the day Bashir Gemayel had been due to take up office, Lebanon?s parliament reconvened to elect his older brother Amin as president. Whereas Bashir had worked closely with the Israelis, Amin Gemayel had better relations with Damascus and showed none of his brother?s enthusiasm for close cooperation with Tel Aviv. However, with nearly half his country under Israeli occupation, the new President Gemayel had no choice but to enter into negotiations with Begin?s government. Talks opened on December 28, 1982, and shifted between Khalde, in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, and the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona. Thirty-five rounds of intense negotiations were conducted over the next five months, facilitated by American officials. U.S. secretary of state George Schultz spent ten days in shuttle diplomacy to help conclude the Israeli-Lebanese agreement on May 17, 1983. The May 17 Agreement was condemned across the Arab world as a travesty of justice, in which the American superpower forced the powerless Lebanese to reward its Israeli ally for invading and destroying their country. Less than the full peace treaty the Israelis initially hoped for, the agreement nevertheless represented more normalization with the Israeli occupier than most Lebanese could accept. It terminated the state of war between Lebanon and Israel and placed the Lebanese government in the difficult position of ensuring the security of Israel’s northern border from the Jewish state’s many enemies. Lebanon’s army was to be deployed in the south to create a “security region” covering approximately one-third the territory of Lebanon, extending from the town of Sidon south to the Israeli border. The Lebanese government also agreed to integrate the South Lebanon army, an Israeli-funded Christian militia that had gained notoriety as collaborators, into the Lebanese army. It was, in the words of one Shiite official, a “humiliating accord” concluded “under the Israeli bayonet.”²⁷ The Syrian government was particularly aggrieved by the terms of the May 17 Agreement, which would only isolate Syria and alter the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. In the course of the negotiations, the United States had deliberately bypassed Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, knowing he would obstruct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon. Nor did the May 17 Agreement include any concessions for the Syrians. Article 6 of the agreement would have required the withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon as a precondition for Israel’s withdrawal. Syria had invested too much political capital in Lebanon in the six years since it first intervened in the civil war to permit the country to pass into Israel’s sphere of influence under U.S. auspices. Syria quickly mobilized its allies in Lebanon to reject the May 17 Agreement. Fighting resumed as the opposition forces began to shell Christian areas of Beirut, underlining the weakness of the Gemayel government. They also fired on the American troops of the multinational forces, whose role as disinterested peacekeepers had been fatally compromised by the regional politics of the United States. When American forces returned fire?often very heavy fire from the massive guns of U.S. warships?they went from being intermediaries above the fray to participants mired in the Lebanon conflict. Though a superpower, the United States was at a disadvantage in Lebanon. Its local allies, the isolated government of Amin Gemayel and the Israeli occupation forces, were more vulnerable than its enemies: Soviet-backed Syria, Iran, and the Shiite Islamic resistance movements. Like the Israelis, the Americans believed they could achieve their objectives in Lebanon through use of overwhelming force. They were soon to discover how the deployment of their military to Lebanon left the superpower exposed and vulnerable to its many regional enemies.