Strong suppor for Israel’s actions in Lebanon was expressed here today by MK Greville Janner, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who spent yesterday in east Beirut as guest of the Israeli army.
“I was astonished to see the people there waving victory signs at us and the extraordinary warmth of their welcome for the Israelis,” Janner told a press conference in the House of Commons.
“I spoke to dozens of people, Moslems as well as Christians, who said they wanted the Palestine Liberation Organization to be removed from Lebanon. They criticized Israel not for coming in but for taking so long to do so.”
Claiming to have encountered no hostility in east Beirut, Janner quoted a Lebanese Moslem as complaining that Israel had not yet removed the PLO. “It should have done the job with the same thoroughness that the Jordanians had used against the PLO in Amman in Black September in 1971,” the Moslem had told him.
Janner, who was flown to Beirut by Israeli army helicopter, sold that internal Israeli opposition to the Lebanese operation had been exaggerated by Western press reports. The removal of PLO leader Yasir Arafat from Beirut “will have the backing of the vast majority of Israelis,” he said.
Janner’s impressions of Lebanon were in sharp contrast with the harrowing reports which have recently flooded the British press. British press coverage of events in Lebanon he said, was “disgraceful, unfair, unworthy and an unbalanced portrayal of Israel’s first-class case.”
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