← History Uncensored
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In a region etched with dangerous borders, one stands apart. It has seen repeated Israeli invasions, years of occupation, notorious massacres and the rise of Hezbollah, one of the world's most heavily armed non state forces, which for a long time had more missiles than most standing armies. Of course I'm talking about the border between Israel and Lebanon. But this is not just the story of one violent frontier. It's the story of a country with a front, fragile internal balance repeatedly destabilised by forces beyond its control. So to understand that, we need to go back to before the State of Israel even existed, to see why Lebanon was so exposed, how the shocks of Palestinian displacement and armed struggle rippled through it, and how a country that tried to stay on the sidelines of the Arab Israeli conflict kept getting dragged towards its center. Before Israel existed, Lebanon was already conflicted about it. Lebanon had gained independence from France in 1943, just five years before Israel would declare statehood. And Lebanon was a very small, multi confessional country. According to a 1932 census, Christian Maronites were the slight majority, followed by Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze and others, bound together by by a delicate power sharing arrangement called the National Pact. This pact, which is unwritten so it is not a formal constitution, worked by reserving the Presidency for a Maronite, the Prime Ministership for a Sunni and the speaker of Parliament for a Shia. Modern estimates suggest that the demographics have shifted significantly now, with Shia Muslims likely the largest single community. But no new census has been taken, which is a political choice. The arrangement held imperfectly for 30 years while the country was relatively stable, but it was also fragile in ways that would become catastrophic later. Some Lebanese nationalists, particularly among the Christian right, believed in what historians describe as an alliance of minorities. And their logic was this. The Arab world was was hostile to both Christians and Jews. This is their thinking. A Christian Lebanon and a Jewish Israel could in theory be natural partners against the Arab world surrounding them. This was a minority position and Lebanon's founding fathers, particularly Sunni politician Riyad Al Sol, and Maronite President Bashara El Khoury, rejected this idea. They understood the political reality that Lebanon could not survive diplomatically or commercially if it was seen as allied with the Zionists against its Arab neighbours. Pan Arab sentiment was powerful and so Lebanon made a different choice, or more accurately, no clear choice at all. On 14 May 1948, David Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The next day, five Arab armies went to war. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon. Because Arab states had publicly committed to preventing a Jewish State by force. Lebanon had the smallest army of the five and its military role was very limited. The war was over quickly. From Lebanon's perspective, an armistice was signed with Israel on 23 March 1949. Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon and the border was restored to roughly its pre war position. But the the war's consequences for Lebanon were enormous. The Nakba, the catastrophic displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians from their homes during and after the 1948 war, sent roughly 100,000 refugees across the border into Lebanon. They settled in camps and by the end of 1948 Lebanon was hosting one of the largest Palestinian refugee populations in the world. The these were not temporary camps. They became permanent communities growing over decades, housing the displaced and their descendants. For Lebanon, a small country of then around 1.3 million people, this was a huge demographic change and a political shock. Crucially, the majority of the refugees were Sunni Muslims, which immediately threatened this demographic balance which the national PAC's majority power sharing with rested on. So to preserve that balance, these refugees and their descendants remained largely excluded from citizenship. Palestinians in Lebanon also faced major restrictions on work and property ownership and that exclusion created the conditions for armed resistance. And by the late 1960s the camps had become the bases for the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella body that came to represent the Palestinian national movement and self determination. This was was a new and highly combustible element in a complex sectarian equation. From 1949 until the late 1960s though, the border was quiet. In fact it was the calmest frontier between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. But that would not last. The Six Day War of June 1967 changed the middle east in ways that are still being felt. It followed a sharp regional escalation. Egypt moved troops troops into Sinai, expelled UN peacekeepers and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which Israel regarded as an act of war. In six days Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan, seizing the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West bank and Gaza. More Palestinians were displaced in what became known as the Naxa or setback. Lebanon's direct military involvement in the Six Day War was minimal, but the political consequences again were huge. Defeat radicalized Palestinian politics as they looked around and realized that they could not rely on Egypt, Jordan or Syria to win back their land. Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which was a Palestinian nationalist organization committed to armed struggle, had already been launching low level attacks against Israel. And in 1969 Arafat took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which then became the main umbrella body of of the Palestinian national movement. By 1969, under pressure, Lebanon formally recognised the PLO's right to use its territory. The secret Cairo accord allowed the PLO to essentially take control of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and launch attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory. So basically Lebanon had handed over a piece of Lebanese sovereignty and that would have consequences that neither side could fully foresee. One of the deeper problems was that Lebanon was divided. Many Lebanese Muslims, Arab nationalists and leftists supported the Palestinian cause. Much of the Maronite led nationalist right did not want to be dragged into a conflict that they believed was not Lebanon's to fight. And they also feared the growing political effect of a strengthened and armed Palestinian presence. So Lebanon never reached a stable consensus on the PLO's role. There was a state within a state essentially and Lebanon was too divided and too institutionally weak to bring it under control. Then came 1970. In Jordan, Palestinian Fedayeen fighters had become powerful enough to challenge King Hussein's authority. In September, the Jordanian army moved against the PLO in a brutal confrontation remembered as Black September. The Palestinian group that later carried out the 1972 Munich massacre took its name from those events. The PLO's main headquarters relocated from Jordan to Beirut in Lebanon. The capital and its military headquarters moved to south Lebanon. The border that had been relatively calm since 1949 was about to become a battlefield. Through the early 1970s, Palestinian groups launched repeated cross border raids into Israel from South Lebanon. Israel's retaliations extended well beyond the PLO positions, regularly hitting Lebanese villages and civilian infrastructure. In April 1973, Israeli special forces landed by speedboat on Lebanese beaches and assassinated three PLO leaders in Beirut in what Israel called Operation Wrath of God, demonstrating that Israel was willing to take the war deep into Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, Lebanon itself was fracturing. By 1975 the country descended into civil a conflict between its various religious and political factions that would last 15 years and kill over 100,000 people. And the causes were multifarious. The growing power and autonomy of the PLO seen by Christian militias as an existential threat to the state. Shia and Sunni Muslims feeling that the National Pact's Christian tilted power sharing was increasingly not fair. Foreign intervention from Syria and Israel also a factor, as well as economic inequality between different regions and sects. So in 1978 Israel launched its first major invasion of Lebanon. 20,000 troops crossed the border and advanced as far as the Litany river in a campaign that Israel said was in response to a Palestinian attack on a coastal road inside Israel that had killed 37 Israelis. The state of objective was to push the PLO forces away from the Israeli border and Israel occupied south of Lebanon. Below the litany expelled the PLO fighters from the region and established a proxy militia, the South Lebanese army, which it supported, made up of largely Lebanese Christians armed and financed by Israel. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 45 calling for immediate Israeli withdrawal and established the UN Interim Force in Lebanon which has monitored the border ever since. But Israel did not fully withdraw. It maintained a presence in the south through the South Lebanese army and that would last for another 22 years. June 1982. Israel launched what it called Operation Peace for Galilee, its most ambitious and destructive military campaign in Lebanon up to that point. The stated trigger was the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador to Britain by a Palestinian gunman. The Israeli Prime Minister Menachem begins blame the plo. Though the attack had actually been carried out by a rival Palestinian faction that was hostile to Arafat in charge of the plo, the real objectives were broader. Under Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel aimed to destroy the PLO's political and military infrastructure in Lebanon. They wanted a friendly Lebanese government and to reshape the strategic balance in its northern territory. Publicly, the operation was presented as not going beyond a 40 kilometer limit into Lebanon, but in practice, Israeli forces went far beyond that, advancing all the way to Beirut. And that created a serious rupture with the Reagan administration in the us. For weeks, Israeli forces besieged West Beirut, cutting off electricity, water and food for hundreds of thousands of civilians. Constant bombardment. Eventually, under American mediation, the PLO agreed to withdraw from Beirut. Palestinian fighters Left in late August 1982, their weapons in hand under the supervision of a multinational peacekeeping force that had guaranteed the safety of Palestinian civilians who remained in the refugee camps. Then on September 14, Lebanon's President elect Bashir Jamail was assassinated by a member of a Syrian linked party. Jamail was an Israeli ally and a leader of the Christian Falangist camp. The Phalangists were a predominantly Maronite Christian political and paramilitary force aligned with Israel against the PLO and other mutual enemies. Sharon used this assassination as a pretext to move Israeli forces into West Beirut and on the evening of September 16th they allowed Lebanese Forces militiamen drawn mainly from the Christian Falangist movement aligned with Israel, to enter the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila refugee camp inhabited almost entirely by Palestinian civilians. For 48 hours, militiamen moved through the narrow alleys killing men, women, children. The Israeli military which surrounded the camps, lit flares overhead through the night to illuminate the operation. When journalists entered the camps on September 18, they found horrific scenes. The death toll remains disputed, but estimates from Israel and Lebanon range from hundreds to several thousand. The most commonly cited ones fall between 1300 and 3500 people. The international outcry was immediate. Even In Israel, around 400,000 people, one of the largest protests in Israeli history, took to the streets of Tel Aviv, demanding accountability. Israel established a commission to investigate, and its findings were damning. The commission concluded that Israel bore indirect responsibility for the massacre and that Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility for knowing the danger of bloodshed and failing to take steps to prevent it. Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister. He later became prime minister of Israel. Sabara and Shatila became one of the defining moments of atrocity in the modern Middle east. And the 1982 invasion, far from stabilizing Lebanon helped to create the conditions for what came next. The rise of Hezbollah Hezbollah, Arabic for the Party of God, was founded in the aftermath of Israel's 1982 invasion. By occupying south Lebanon and enabling the massacre that followed in Beirut, Israel had enraged Lebanon's Shia Muslim community. Hezbollah was founded with three core to resist the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon through armed struggle and also expel Western influence to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon modelled on Iran's Islamic Republic in the longer term and to support the Palestinian cause and oppose Zionism. Over time, the third objective remained prominent, while the second one was de emphasized. Hezbollah was backed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Iran, which had undergone its own Islamic Revolution in 1979, saw in Lebanon's Shia community an opportunity to project revolutionary ideology and strategic influence westward. And it claimed the Palestinian cause at a moment when Arab states had largely abandoned it. Hezbollah was not simply a militia, it was a hybrid force. So from the beginning, it was also a social and political movement, providing schools, hospitals, welfare services and aid in communities that the Lebanese state had neglected. The combination of armed resistance and social services made it something more durable than a conventional armed group. Israel remained in occupation of south Lebanon for 18 more years, arguing that the south of Lebanon had to be kept as a buffer zone to prevent rocket and artillery attacks on northern Israeli towns and communities. During that time, Hezbollah fought a sustained guerrilla campaign roadside bombs, sniper attacks, ambushes that gradually made the occupation politically unsustainable for Israel. Discontent grew. A helicopter crash in 1997 killed 73 Israeli soldiers en route to Lebanon, intensifying the already extant domestic pressure to withdraw. Before the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon came two more brutal episodes. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin launched Operation Accountability against Hezbollah in south Lebanon, killing approximately 118 Lebanese civilians and destroying thousands of buildings. In 1996 came Operation Grapes of Wrath. Israeli shells and air raids bombarded Lebanon. On April 18, Israeli artillery struck a UN compound at Kana in south Lebanon, which is the place said to be where Jesus turned water into wine. So biblically, around 800 Lebanese civilians were sheltering in that place. More than 100 were killed, including at least 37 children. A UN investigation concluded that Israel had most likely shelled the compound deliberately. No one was held accountable, so for Lebanese people these names accumulated. Sabra, Shatila, Kana. Places that have become symbols of violence. Finally, on 24 May 2008, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon because it was just proving too costly militarily in Israeli soldier deaths over the years and also growing more and more unpopular inside Israel. After Israel drew back, the United nations mapped what became known as the Blue Line, not a final international border, but a line used to verify that Israeli forces had fully pulled back from Lebanese territory. The decision effectively ended 22 years of occupation. As Israeli forces left the south Lebanese army, their proxy collapsed. Thousands of members fled alongside them. In Lebanon, May 25 is celebrated as a liberation day, a national holiday for one of the few times in the Arab Israeli conflict. An Arab force had compelled an Israeli withdrawal through armed resistance without negotiation or concession. Six years of relative calm followed. Then, on July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters crossed into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others. The fatality figures are contested. They demanded the release of Lebanese prisoners in exchange. What followed was a 34 day war. Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut's international airport, roads, bridges and the southern suburbs of Beirut, Hezbollah's stronghold. Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel, reaching as far south as Haifa. Israel launched ground operations in southern Lebanon. But the war ended without achieving its military objectives of recovering the captured soldiers, halting Hezbollah's rocket attacks and crushing Hezbollah's military capacity in the south. Over the 34 days, about 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, the majority of them civilians. Israel reported over 160 deaths, most of them soldiers. And Israel's own inquiry, the Vinograd Commission, was deeply critical of the decision making at the top on this. It found serious failings in the political and military leadership and said that the decision to respond with an immediate intensive military strike had not been based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorised plan. But the war had a longer consequence. Israel was mapping Hezbollah's capabilities and failures. And over the following years, it built up a penetrating intelligence picture of Hezbollah, one which would eventually allow it to strike with unprecedented precision. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a devastating attack from Gaza into Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. The following day, Hezbollah entered the conflict from Lebanon, launching missiles at northern Israel in what it said was solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. For almost a year, the conflict on the Lebanese Israeli front simmered as skirmishes continued. Then, in September 2024, it exploded. On September 17, thousands of pager devices used by Hezbollah members simultaneously exploded across Lebanon. The devices had been booby trapped, an unprecedented covert operation. It was followed the next day by exploding walkie talkies. According to Reuters, 39 people were killed and 3,400 injured, including civilians. The attacks were called a terrifying violation of international law by independent human rights experts. Israel ramped up airstrikes dramatically in scale and reach, targeting Hezbollah leadership, weapons, infrastructure and positions, including in south Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs. On September 23, described as the deadliest single day in Lebanon's modern history, nearly 600 people were killed. More than a million Lebanese were displaced. Hezbollah's leadership was systematically targeted, and Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who for 32 years had led Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs. On October 1, 2024, Israel launched a ground invasion, the sixth Israeli invasion of Lebanon. By the time a ceasefire mediated by France and the United States took effect on November 27, Lebanese authorities said around 3,000 people had been killed, the vast majority civilians, and $8.5 billion had been caused in damage. According to the World bank, entire villages in south Lebanon had been razed to the ground, and precious cultural sites like Roman ruins, centuries old churches and ancient towns had been destroyed. The history of Israel and Lebanon is much more than a story of attack and retaliation. It's the story of a small state that never fully resolved what relationship it could afford to have with its neighbor Israel and paid heavily. It's also about Palestinian displacement rippling across borders and generations, and a pattern that hardened over decades. Occupation and attacks breeding resistance, resistance provoking retaliation, radical retaliation, widening the war again. Hezbollah did not appear from nowhere. It emerged from the 1982 invasion. The invasion grew out of the PLO's entrenchment in South Lebanon, and that grew out of the displacement of Palestinians after 1948 and 1967. Lebanon was too divided to respond to that pressure as a unified state, while outside powers used its territory as a battleground. Iran projected power through Hezbollah, Syria intervened directly, America backed Israel and Lebanese people lived again and again with the consequences.