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The Israeli Invasion of Lebanon: Echoes of 1982’s Tragic Past

Vicken Cheterian
Armenian Journalist and Writer
Lebanon
Published on 15.10.2024
Reading time: 4 minutes

No one in the Middle East ever believed in the so-called “end of history.” Instead, history repeats itself relentlessly, like a broken record. Israel is burning Lebanon once again, but it will achieve neither peace nor security.

It was a calm afternoon in that summer of 1982 when an explosion suddenly shook my apartment. I heard from neighbours who had come out to their balconies that a building was destroyed in an airstrike, near the Sanayeh gardens, a few hundred meters from our street. 

As a curious adolescent at the time, I went to see the site of the strike, only to find that the roof of what had once been a ten-story building had collapsed to the ground and was now resting on a heap of debris.

The crowd that had gathered was murmuring that Yasser Arafat had been visiting the building, which housed Palestinian refugee families, and that the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had left just fifteen minutes before the attack. Tragically, over a hundred residents of the building perished in the bombing.

In the summer of 1982, Israel launched an operation called “Operation Peace for Galilee” and invaded Lebanon with the goal of eliminating the PLO. The Israeli army occupied Beirut and drove Palestinian guerillas out of its southern suburbs. It was also the summer of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, when Israeli soldiers surrounded the two Palestinian refugee camps and allowed right-wing Lebanese Christian militias to enter. For three days, the militias brutally slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

We do not know for certain the number of people killed that summer, but it is possible that the death toll reached as high as twenty thousand.

In the summer of 1982, Hezbollah did not yet exist. At the time, Israel was primarily fighting secular, nationalist groups such as Fatah, and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), led by George Habash, a medical doctor turned guerilla leader.

Several hundred members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were sent to Lebanon to support Palestinian guerillas in their fight against the Israeli invasion. Although they did not engage in much direct combat, they established training camps in the Bekaa Valley, which later led to the formation of Hezbollah, or the “Party of God.”

A decade later, in 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat to sign the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement that promised self-rule for the Palestinians.

However, the Oslo Accords were never fully implemented. Two years after the signing, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, and the vision of peace under Oslo was gradually replaced by Israeli leaders prioritizing “security” exclusively for themselves, often at the expense of Palestinian security.

In the mid-1990s, Israel began large-scale colonization of Palestinian territories in the West Bank. In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers from the Gaza Strip but continued to exercise strict control over the region, effectively turning it into the world’s largest “open prison.” These developments were accompanied by widespread humiliation of Palestinians in their daily lives and frequent violence, both by the Israeli occupation army and by settlers.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged as the primary force of resistance against foreign occupation. They were responsible for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. soldiers, as well as an attack on a French paratrooper base that killed 58 soldiers. These attacks led to the withdrawal of American and French forces from Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s Monopoly on Resistance Against Israel

Hezbollah laid its roots within the sectarian fractures of Lebanon’s political landscape and deepened them further. Initially, it targeted its secular rivals, such as the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), assassinating its leaders, trade union activists, and intellectual figures like the philosopher Mahdi Amel. It also dismantled the National Resistance Front, which was led by the LCP, thereby monopolizing the anti-Israeli resistance. Hezbollah emerged as the main force representing and mobilizing the Lebanese Shiite population.

Hezbollah’s success in driving Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 2000 was a source of national pride for many Lebanese. The party had transformed one of the poorest communities in Lebanon into an effective fighting force. However, this came at a steep cost: Hezbollah became heavily dependent on external support, specifically from Iran, for funding, arms, and strategic direction. This dependency was clearly visible in the 2006 war, when Hezbollah’s actions provoked Israel, leading to 33 days of heavy Israeli bombardment, which devastated the Dahiyeh—the predominantly Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut.

The Hezbollah of 2006 is not the same Hezbollah of 2024. In the years between, the Shiite party intervened in the Syrian civil war to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime against a popular rebellion that evolved into a violent, Islamist, and sectarian conflict. Fighting in Syria, outside of its familiar territory, exposed Hezbollah to Israeli espionage through data mining and infiltrations. 

For years, Israel had been preparing to confront Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and in a series of targeted strikes, Israel succeeded in decimating Hezbollah’s leadership, including its long-term leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

However, if Israel believes it can secure its northern border by committing massacres in Lebanon and turning the Beirut suburbs into another Gaza, it’s simply a repetition of history. Forty-two years ago, Israel dismantled the secular PLO, only for a more radical and Islamist Hezbollah to rise from its ashes.

No one in the Middle East ever believed in the so-called “end of history.” Instead, history repeats itself relentlessly, like a broken record. Israel is burning Lebanon once again, but it will achieve neither peace nor security.