In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in a devastating operation dubbed Operation Litani, after a Lebanese river, and meant as retaliation for a PLO raid on Tel Aviv. (Read the details of that raid.) Some 1,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed in the assault and 150,000 civilians forced to flee their homes in South Lebanon.
The invasion took place just four months after Egypt's Anwar el Sadat had gone to Jerusalem with an offer for peace in exchangte for Israel's return of the Sinai.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin answered Sadat without concessions of his own. The invasion of Lebanon prompted many Israelis to question Begin's inflexibility.

As New York Times columnist James Reston wrote from Jerusalem on March 22, 1978, "influential Israelis who think Mr. Begin is too rigid and the invasion of Lebanon too extreme, are saying very little in public, but in private they are obviously troubled and feel trapped between their loyalty to the government and doubts about Mr. Begin's policies."

That doubt took its clearest expression in a letter signed by 348 Israeli soldiers and reservists of the Israel Defense Forces. The open letter became the founding document of the Peace Now movement and organization by the same name, which grew over the years into Israel's largest human rights organization.

The full text of that seminal Open Letter to Prime Minister Menahem Begin follows (it is reproduced as it appears on the Peace Now web site, without corrections).

To Prime Minister Menachem Begin

Dear Sir,

Citizens that also serve as soldiers and officers in the reserve forces are sending this letter to you. The following words are not written with a light heart. However at this time when new horizons of peace and cooperation are for the first time being proposed to the State of Israel, we feel obliged to call upon you to prevent taking any steps that could cause endless problems to our people and our state.

We are writing this with deep anxiety, as a government that prefers the existence of the State of Israel within the borders of “Greater Israel” to its existence in peace with good neighborliness, will be difficult for us to accept. A government that prefers existence of settlements beyond the Green Line to elimination of this historic conflict with creation of normalization of relationships in our region will evoke questions regarding the path we are taking. A government policy that will cause a continuation of control over million Arabs will hurt the Jewish-democratic character of the state, and will make it difficult for us to identify with the path of the State of Israel.

We are aware of the security needs of the State of Israel and the difficulties facing the path to peace. But we know that true security will only be reached with the arrival of peace. The power of the IDF is in the identification of its soldiers with the path of the State of Israel.

348 signatures
March, 1978