At dawn, on June 6, 1982, 60,000 Israeli troops, accompanied by 800 tanks, stormed across Israel's

northern border into Lebanon. So began the fifth Arab-Israeli war, a war that the Israeli government

officially dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee, but the rest of the world called

the Lebanon War. An old adage holds that everyone knows how wars begin, but nobody knows how they

end. That was certainly true in Lebanon. The war's roots could be traced back to Israel's struggle

for independence in 1948, when more than 100,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon.

They were kept in refugee camps, which became hotbeds of radicalism. Then, with the Palestinians

defeat in the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, another 200,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon, along with

numerous terrorist groups.

Chief among these was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO under Yasser Arafat.

The massive influx of armed Palestinians tipped Lebanon's delicate balance between Christians,

Druze, and Muslims. It led, five years later, to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon and hundreds

of thousands of casualties. Syria exploited the conflict to occupy large parts of the country.

The terrorists, meanwhile, turned their sights on Israel, firing rockets into the galley

and attacking northern border communities. In March 1978, terrorists landed on a beach between

Tel Aviv and Haifa and attacked the nearby highway, killing 38 civilians, many of them children.

Israel responded by invading southern Lebanon, the Latani operation, was succeeded in pushing

the terrorists back from the border, but only temporarily. The PLO attacks continued,

not only from Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, but also against Jews and Israelis abroad.

Israel struck back, hitting PLO bases. In addition, it formed an alliance with Bashir Jemayel,

the leader of the Lebanese Christian militia. Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon believed that, together with the Christians,

Israel could drive the PLO and the Syrians out of Lebanon

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