Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan: US-Israeli Relations in the 1982 Lebanon War

The article analyzes how relations between Israel and the United States occurred during the 1982 Lebanon War, during the governments of Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin. Palestinian professor Walid Khalidi attributes Washington's Middle East policy to the dominance of domestic and global concerns. In his opinion, national and geopolitical strategies have been allowed to play primordial roles, at the expense of the regional variable. This is why the US policy toward the Palestinian Question and the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1940s has been consistently erratic. The Lebanon War of 1982 is an emblematic episode of this relationship, still within the spectrum of the Cold War, as it is considered controversial in Israeli society in the military and political aspects, leading to direct interference by the USA and by the United Nations (UN) and changed the course of Lebanon and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Still in 1982, during the conflict in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan launched the "Reagan Peace Plan for the Middle East" to extend the Lebanon project to the rest of the region. However, the previous conclusions of the article are that the Plan supported Israel more than the other countries and the PLO. Reagan's plan reaffirmed the Palestinian Question, but at the same time offered little support for their rights and self-determination to be exercised. This article develops research classified as qualitative, due to the methods used to carry it out that differ from those used in quantitative research. The information was collected mostly from secondary sources (books, articles), but also primary sources (surveys on public opinion in Israel from different sources). Therefore, research in its essence of the type of indirect observation.