Once again, troops were on the move in the Middle East—and this time, right in the middle of peace negotiations. All one night and through the next day last week, tanks, artillery and ammo carriers rumbled into position along Israel's mountainous border with Lebanon, a jagged 62-mile line that runs from the Mediterranean to the foothills of Mount Herman. Within 48 hours the Israeli forces, some 10,000 in all, were ready to move, and missile boats were poised to strike at Lebanese ports. Then, after a 24-hour delay caused by rain and heavy clouds, the biggest antiterrorist raid ever mounted by Israel began.
The operation that the Israelis chose to code-name Stone of Wisdom appeared to have been carried out with their characteristic precision. Within 18 hours the Israelis had achieved their primary military goal, which was to smash the Palestinian guerrilla strongholds near the border in southern Lebanon and establish a buffer zone, most of it four to six miles wide, along the entire Israeli-Lebanese frontier. But what remained far from clear at week's end, as Israeli forces kept pushing deeper into
Lebanon, was how far they would go. An even more important question, as Israel's Premier Menachem Begin prepared for his latest round of talks with President Carter in Washington this week, was whether the attack that Begin had launched to "sever the arm of iniquity" had also hopelessly complicated the already imperiled peace process in the Middle East. The outraged Arab states demanded immediate Israeli withdrawal, and the U.N. Security Council debated a U.S. proposal for an international peacekeeping force to be sent into Lebanon.
Almost overnight, the Israeli attack —and the Palestinian terrorist slaughter that had triggered it—changed the diplomatic outlook for the Middle East. Ever since Anwar Sadat undertook his "sacred mission" to Jerusalem last November, the focus had been on the pursuit of peace and the chance that, despite all the subsequent setbacks, the Egyptian President's initiative could somehow propel the protagonists toward an unraveling of their ancient grievances. Now, suddenly, the talk of peace was replaced by grave concern about a renewal of the old Middle East "cycle of violence," as U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance called it.
Sadat expressed his fears in almost identical terms. After the Palestinian raid on Israel, in which 34 Israelis were killed and 78 injured as a hijacked bus careened wildly southward along the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv, Sadat denounced the episode as "tragic and irresponsible," and added sadly. "Let us break this vicious circle of action and reaction, because it will lead to nothing."
On the Israeli side, the Tel Aviv attack and the assault into south Lebanon have once again stirred both anger and militant pride in the Israelis, quieting critics of the government's grudging handling of the peace negotiations and strengthening the positions of Begin and his hardline Likud coalition colleagues. One result: the prognosis for the talks between Begin and Carter in Washington, never promising, seemed even more bleak.