When I see Israeli troops and tanks in southern Lebanon, I get a sense of déja vu.

I crossed the border into Lebanon twice during my six-year-long military service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The first time was during Israel’s 1978 Litani Campaign, when we rolled into Lebanon to inflict a blow on Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), following its terrorist attack on 11 March 1978, just north of Tel Aviv, in which 38 Israelis were killed. The second time was in 1982, during ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’, which subsequently became ‘The First Lebanon War’.

Of ‘Operation Litani’, I remember little; just cherry trees, as our artillery unit was deployed inside a cherry orchard, and mud, too, a lot of mud. The Lebanon War, however, turned out to be a totally different experience, which is still engraved on my memory.

As a deputy battalion commander in the months leading up to the Lebanon War, my artillery unit would rush from our base near Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, up to the Lebanese border whenever tensions would spike with the PLO, which was deployed in southern Lebanon and the capital Beirut. When Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon on 6 June 1982, I was no longer in this job, and, fearing that I’d miss the war, I urged my superiors, who buckled under my pressure, to allow me to join Israeli forces in Lebanon. When I now hear of young Israeli troops, even those injured in Gaza or Lebanon, insisting on returning to their military units or even running away from hospitals to join their friends at the front, I fully understand how they feel. They don’t want to miss this unique experience and be away from their friends.

When we say ‘war’, the first thing that comes to mind is a lot of fire and blood. In real life, things are different, and you often find yourself sitting and doing nothing for days or doing errands linked to the war without combat. When I crossed into and arrived at the town of Bhamdoun, in central Lebanon, my first mission was not so much to shoot but to bury dead Syrian soldiers.

A couple of days before my arrival, a battle raged there between Israeli and Syrian forces. The retreating Syrians left the dead behind, and there were bodies strewn all over the hill overlooking our little base. The smell was unbearable. It was June, or perhaps July, and the sun was blazing. Flies covered the Syrian bodies like black blankets. I got to a nearby village, found a bulldozer, and we moved from body to body, covering them with soil. I sketched a little map with instructions, such as ‘ten steps north of a tree a body is buried’, so that, one day, the bodies could be found and retrieved. For days afterwards, I could still smell the stench of death in my nostrils.

Soon, I learnt that when things do happen in war, they happen very quickly, and military training turns you into an automatic machine that operates almost independently of your brain.

I realised this when I was ordered to travel to Alei and down to Beirut to take up a new job as a forward position artillery officer. We drove at night, and, as we approached a curve in the winding road, we slowed down, and it was then that we were attacked from an ambush. The military car, just in front of me, was hit by an RPG, and I could see the soldiers sitting inside this car, flying into the air and landing on the road and inside a ditch that ran parallel to it. It was a beautiful night, a full moon, and the terrifying moment is still clear in my mind. We returned fire, evacuated the injured, rescued the car and returned to Alei. My fingers were sticky, covered with the blood of the injured soldiers. I was so happy to be alive – a great feeling.

War in Beirut was a different story altogether, as we besieged the city in an attempt to force Yasser Arafat to leave. Beirut, at the time, after years of civil war, and hit by our fire, too, was an injured city and often ablaze. It was all burning there, all the time. When, in recent years, I came across pictures of Beirut and saw how beautifully it has rebuilt itself, I was taken aback. Now, as I’m writing these lines, seeing Lebanon on the TV screen, I can see how the tragedy of Lebanon and its capital, Beirut, keeps repeating itself.

What I found out about Lebanon in my weeks in Beirut is that its beauty masks deep problems, divisions and old enmities. Our 91st Division’s headquarters was located in a Christian school called, as far as I remember, Al Jamous; it was empty at the time, perhaps because it was the summer break. On the ground floor stayed the Phalange, the Maronites, led by their charismatic leader Bashir Gemayel; he would come and go, and I would see him from the window of our artillery room upstairs. At the time, Israel wanted to help Bashir to be elected President of Lebanon, and, in return, he would sign a peace treaty with Israel.

Therefore, it was unsurprising that, on 23 August, he was elected President of Lebanon. To celebrate his election victory, he took us all, the officers of the first floor, to Casino du Liban in Juniah, just north of Beirut. Bashir gave a speech in French (he was French-educated), thanking us for our help and saying how he looked forward to working with us when he entered the Presidential Palace in a few weeks. This was not to be –  two weeks later, he was dead – assassinated by the Syrians, who did not like his close relations with Israel.

Subsequently, his people, the Phalange, with an Israeli nod, entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatillah and shot everything that was moving, people and animals. The Palestinians paid the price for the killing of Bashir, which the Syrians did. That’s Lebanon for me: full of intrigues and old rivalries.

‘Operation Peace for Galilee’  – ‘The Lebanon War’ – was due to last between 48 and 72 hours; Israeli forces were stuck there for 18 years. I often joke that when I joined Israeli forces inside Lebanon in 1982, my head was covered with curly hair; by the time Israel left in 2000, little was left of my curls.

The individual who goes through this harrowing experience of war will always carry with him the pictures of it. For me, as I watch on TV how Israeli forces operate in Lebanon, it brings back the memories of the First Lebanon War. I still remember all these villages in which I see Israeli troops: Bint Jbeil, Maroun El Ras, Ayta Ash Shab. History seems to repeat itself.

But here is a crucial question: did Netanyahu and the people around him learn the lessons of the past, I mean the lessons of the First Lebanon War? Do they remember how tricky Lebanon is? That its beauty masks complex problems, turning it into a quagmire for occupiers? Do they remember that it is easier to get into Lebanon than to extract oneself from there? Do they remember that there are no easy victories in beautiful Lebanon?