Black September and The Lebanon War
During the Black September clashes in Jordan, al-Wazir supplied the encircled Palestinian forces in Jerash and Ajlun with arms and aid, but the conflict was decided in Jordan's favor. After Arafat and thousands of Fatah fighters retreated to Lebanon, al-Wazir negotiated an agreement between King Hussein and the PLO's leading organizer, calling for better Palestinian conduct in Jordan. Then, along with the other PLO leaders, he relocated to Beirut.
Al-Wazir did not play a major role in the Lebanese Civil War; he confined himself primarily to strengthening the Lebanese National Movement, the PLO's main ally in the conflict. During the fall of the Tel al-Zaatar camp to the Lebanese Front, al-Wazir blamed himself for not organizing a rescue effort.
During his time in Lebanon, al-Wazir was responsible for coordinating high-profile operations. He allegedly planned the Savoy Operation in 1975, in which eight Fatah militants raided and took hostages in the Savoy hotel in Tel Aviv, killing eight of them, as well as three Israeli soldiers. The Coastal Road massacre, in March 1978, was also planned by al-Wazir. In this attack, six Fatah members hijacked a bus and killed 35 Israeli civilians.
When Israel besieged Beirut in 1982, al-Wazir, disagreed with the PLO's leftist members and Salah Khalaf; he proposed that the PLO pull out of Beirut. Nevertheless, al-Wazir and his aide Abu al-Walid planned Beirut's defense and helped direct PLO forces against the IDF. PLO forces were eventually defeated and then expelled from Lebanon, with most of the leadership relocating to Tunis, although al-Wazir and 264 other PLO members were received by King Hussein of Jordan.
Read more about this topic: Khalil Al-Wazir
Famous quotes containing the words black, september and/or war:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)