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The fighting jeopardized anew the negotiations led by U.S. Special Envoy Habib to get the P.L.O. peacefully out of the country. Clouding the diplomatic proceedings from the beginning has been the basic mistrust between the Israeli and the P.L.O. leaders, a wariness that has made the talks difficult and sporadic fighting all but a certainty. P.L.O. fears have been reinforced by the fact that there have been at least four attempts on Arafat's life within the past six weeks. Two operations centers were bombed shortly after Arafat visited them. Last Friday an Israeli jet attacked an eight-story apartment building in the Sanayeh district of West Beirut, killing or injuring 250 people. Contrary to reports, the building had not been used as an Arafat headquarters, although it did house the family of Arafat's chief personal bodyguard. A short while later, a car bomb exploded near by. P.L.O. leaders were convinced that the Israelis were closely following Arafat's movements and trying to kill him before the crisis in Lebanon had been resolved.
In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion, Israeli policy about Lebanon was two-pronged. First, Jerusalem would cooperate, to a degree, with the Habib negotiations, especially since the Reagan Administration was so committed to the talks. Second, Prime Minister Begin's government would periodically apply heavy military pressure on P.L.O. positions in West Beirut in order to remind the Palestinian leaders that their only choice was to leave Lebanon. Israeli officials declared that these "salami-style" maneuvers of slicing away at the Palestinian redoubt in West Beirut would be conducted only in response to P.L.O. ceasefire violations. But there were bound to be violations, as the Israelis well knew, because the P.L.O. is made up of so many factions, often at odds with one another. Further, the Israelis flatly admitted that, as always, they reserved the right to make a hugely disproportionate response to P.L.O. attacks.
Even so, the Israelis were concerned last week that the U.S. would feel that their attack on West Beirut was a punishment that did not fit whatever crime the P.L.O. may have committed. Major General Menachem Meron, Israel's senior military attaché in Washington, called in reporters to try to claim that the Wednesday assault on West Beirut was aimed only at rooting out P.L.O. gunners who were firing on Israeli troops. But Meron had told the same reporters two months earlier that Israeli forces would go no deeper than 25 miles into Lebanon. When bluntly asked why reporters should believe him this time, the general replied, "That is a political question, and I will not answer political questions."
Joining the effort to down-play the assault on West Beirut, Defense Minisrter Ariel Sharon, architect of the Lebanese invasion, complained to the U.S. Government about Habib's reports to Washington that Israel was firing 1,000 shells into West Beirut for every shell fired by the Palestinians. Sharon denounced such accounts as "mendacious" and said that they were based on observations from afar.