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 Yasararafat.

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 Littani 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.

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