So tragedy is piled upon tragedy in hapless Lebanon. The assassination of its President-elect, Mr. Bashir Gemayel, plunges the country in a new crisis even before it has had an opportunity to try to overcome an existing one arising out of the Israeli invasion and the presence of Israeli and Syrian forces on its soil. No one can say whether Mr, Gemayel could have coped with the multifaceted challenge facing Lebanon and, indeed, whether he could have won the trust of his Muslim countrymen without which he would have lacked the necessary legitimacy and authority. The second task was as difficult as the first in view of his role in the civil war in 1975-76 as leader of the Phalange militia, Israel’s strong preference for him before the presidential election last month, and the circumstances in which he was finally elected. But he could at least have tried. In fact, he was beginning to. In order to secure the confidence of the Muslim community, he had begun to distance himself from Israel and discreetly made it known that he would not sign a treaty of peace and friendship on which Tel Aviv has been insisting as a minimum essential precondition for the withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon. His assassination makes it impossible to say what will happen in that unfortunate land. All that can be said with certainty is that the Israelis and the Syrians will find in this development a new pretext for hanging on.
But the new crisis in Lebanon should, if anything, persuade the Americans to step up their efforts to persuade the Israelis and the Syrians to leave Lebanon to its own devices. They have no longer any business to be there, if they ever had one. The Syrians moved into Lebanon in 1976 on the plea that they could help end the civil war and have stayed on since. To begin with, they sided with the Christians against the stronger Lebanese Muslim-PLO combination. And then they reversed their policy to make common cause with the Muslim-PLO side against the Christian militias which had by then come to be openly supported by the Israelis. The result has been not communal peace in Lebanon but the Israeli invasion and the expulsion of the PLO not only from southern Lebanon but also from Beirut. They may regard their continued presence in the Bekaa valley as being necessary for the security of their own country. But as is evident from repeated Israeli bombing and destruction of Syrian missile sites and batteries, Tel Aviv is not going to allow them to strengthen their position in the valley. If the Syrians can now “achieve” anything, it is that they can “legitimize” Israel’s virtual annexation of southern Lebanon. Having pushed out the PLO from southern Lebanon and thereby having protected their own cities and towns from being shelled, the Israelis, too, have no convincing excuse, except the rival Syrian presence, to hang on. But they are in a much stronger position than the Syrians and may feel compelled to teach them a lesson. It would be wrong to anticipate the Soviet reaction to such an eventuality and predict direct Soviet intervention. But an Israel-Syria war, even confined to the Bekaa valley, is bound to further complicate the overall situation in West Asia. Washington alone is in a position to try to prevent such a deterioration and it should not spare any effort to do so.