JET ENGINE NOISE

GUNFIRE

A year later, the region was plunged into conflict again when Israel pursued the PLO who'd set up base in Lebanon. The Israelis invaded, claiming they wanted to wipe out the Palestinian guerrillas who were attacking Israel.

EXPLOSIONS

Militant Palestinian terror organisations used this area in order to invade, in order to sabotage, in order to implement terrorism on the State of Israel. And therefore the invasion was… er… was a necessity. I thought and many Israelis thought that it was a necessity to go in, to destroy all the… all the infrastructure of terrorism and then to go back, to pull out our forces.

GUNFIRE

The government of the right-wing Menachem Begin at the time in 1982 feared above all - not the military threat posed by the PLO, because there'd been a ceasefire in fact on the border - but the political threat that the PLO was now becoming a respectable negotiating partner and he would have to sit down and negotiate and therefore give up the occupied territories and accept Palestinian statehood. And this he was unwilling to do. And that is why, fundamentally why, the Israeli government of that day invaded Lebanon and caused the deaths obviously of many thousand people and expelled the PLO.

Ariel Sharon said that there would be limits to this invasion: it would only go a few kilometres up the coast and stop. But as we now know from Sharon himself and others, the intention was to surround the PLO in Beirut and capture them and kill Arafat. Well, they did surround Beirut, they went all the way, and it turned into a catastrophe for everybody.

REFLECTIVE MUSIC

AMBULANCE SIREN

WOMAN WAILS

The catastrophe was the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut. The killers were Israel's Lebanese allies, the Christian Phalangists.

FISK: Ariel Sharon was fixated at the idea there were "terrorists" in the camp. And in fact, the Palestinians who were slaughtered they were all civilians. And this massacre stained the reputation of Israel for years to come. It led inevitably to an inquiry by the Israelis themselves, by a million Israelis protesting in the streets of Tel Aviv. That didn't take the shame away from the State of Israel but at least it showed the dignity of many Israelis who believed that their country should not be involved in such horrors.

OFF-SCREEN SHOUTING

An Israeli inquiry condemned Ariel Sharon. He was forced to resign as defence minister.