problems for Israeli occupiers More than a month since they launched their Blitzkrieg, rulers are still getting nowhere militarily in Lebanon and are losing ground poli-
The increase in Israeli bombing and shelling over the last week of July seems to reflect increasing frustration. It will not change the situation in the Israelis' favor. In fact, on the political level, such attacks seem to be becoming increasingly counterproductive, both in their effect on those sections of Lebanese that had been vacillating or hostile to the Palestinians and on international public opinion.
The most important events in the Lebanon war in the third week of July seem to be resumption of Palestinian commando attacks on Israeli forces both in the Beirut area and in southern Lebanon as well as the continued erosion of collaborationism among Christians and other sectors of the Lebanese population
A Le Monde correspondent, Lucien George, wrote in the July 23 issue of the
6
"Two ambushes carried out by the Fedayin against Israeli patrols have monstrated the vitality of the resistance. They occurred in the southern part the Bekaa valley and in Tyre, deep inside the Israeli occupied area."
The same day, another Paris daily Liberation reported:
"Rocket fire hit upper Galilea (northern Israel) July "This fire,' the Palestinians say, *shows that the emptiness of the Israeli claims that their army has established a security belt extending forty kilometers north of their border.' "
Actually, for an entire period before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon the PLO had ceased shelling positions in Gali-
On July 25, Le Monde reported that the massive repression carried out by the Israelis in the areas they occupy forced even the Greek Catholic archbiship of Tyre, Monsignor Haddad, to voice a sharp protest and a warning:
"The arbitrary arrests are a barrier to the establishment of the just peace the
Israelis say that they want...At the start of the invasion, Mr. Meridor, Israeli economic charge d'affaires, visited us and was came back today, everyone would turn their backs on him. People here have been embittered by the behavior of the Israelis."
At the same time, tensions have begun escalating sharply between the Phalangist Christian allies of the Israelis and the large Druze community, which has wavered between the Palestinians and the
A July 26 Agence France-Presse dispatch quoted Druze leader of the village of Mukhtara, thirty kilometers south of Beirut, as saying:
"The Israelis have created conditions for a civil war here."
At the Eid Al-Fitr feast ending the fast of Ramadan, the main Muslim leader in Beirut, according to Le Monde of July 23, said: "Any tendency to collaborate with the enemy is a danger to the integrity of Lebanon, its people, and its insti-