History is repeating itself

Thursday night saw Israel ramp up the bombing of Beirut’s southern suburbs that initially began around 02.30 on Monday.  The attacks are, on paper at least, in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on Northern Israel that same night. It was a seismic miscalculation by the Party of God. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs no excuse to expand ground operations against Hezbollah and finish the job once and for all. Sunday gave him that chance.

Forty four years ago, in June 1982, another Israeli Prime Minister, also saw an opportunity not to be missed. Three days after Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, was shot and critically wounded outside the Dorchester Hotel in London by gunmen from the Abu Nidal group, Menachem Begin, ordered a three pronged invasion of South Lebanon to once and for all get rid of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which had been a thorn in Israel’s side since Lebanon, the PLO and Egypt signed the 1969 Cairo Accord. The agreement allowed the thousands of Palestinian guerillas, who had established a presence in the south (as well as its many refugee camps) after being expelled from Jordan during the 1971 Black September War, to freely operate against Israel. The fact that Abu Nidal was a sworn enemy of the PLO meant nothing.

Israel’s Lebanese ‘allies’ in what it called Operation Peace for Galilee were the Lebanese Forces, the then military wing of the Kataeb party, led by Bashir Gemayel. The Christians, the Maronites in particular, felt that their nation, a country born out of the historic Mount Lebanon enclave, was under threat from an increasingly belligerent PLO, which had the backing of the Sunni Arab states including the Gulf nations, who today stand firmly behind Israel.

As UNIFIL troops looked on, Israeli troops and armour advanced north, through Sidon, up to Beirut, which endured a 10 week siege between June 14 and August 21. When the fighting was over at the end of August over 17,000 Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians had died, of which over 8,000 were civilians. The PLO left Beirut in August and September in a flotilla of ships to Algeria, Tunis, which became the organization’s headquarters, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Yemen.

It didn’t quite end there. By September, cracks were appearing in the relationship between Begin and Gemayel. The Israeli prime minister demanded that Gemayel, who had put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency, sign a peace treaty with Israel as soon as he took office, threatening to stay in Lebanon until this was achieved.

It is widely agreed that Gemayel, whose militiamen didn’t engage the PLO during the Summer fighting (in order not to be seen overtly helping the Israelis) never intended to sign any peace deal unless it was with the agreement of the majority of the Lebanese people. He had been privately hoping instead that, once the last remaining Palestinian fighters had been mopped-up and the Syrians pushed out of the Bekaa, the international community would put pressure on the Israelis to leave Lebanon alone.

The drama reached its bloody denouement on September 14, when Gemayel, who had been President-elect for nine days, was blown-up at the Kataeb HQ in Achrafieh along with 27 other party officials. Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which had opposed what it saw as Gemayel’s unholy alliance with Israel, was arrested and imprisoned without trial two days later. The civil war would rage on for another eight years and the last Israeli soldier didn’t leave Lebanon till May 2000.

Fast forward to today. Hezbollah’s evolution as a rogue, non-state actor has parallels with the PLO’s less than auspicious contribution to its host country. In 1989, after 14 years of civil war and 20 years after the signing of the Cairo Accord, aging Lebanese parliamentarians gathered in the Saudi City of Taif to end the conflict. Part of the eventual agreement included a clause that deemed Hezbollah was the only militia allowed to retain its weapons so it could ‘resist’ the Israeli occupation in South Lebanon, which had begun in earnest in 1985 with the creation of a 1,200 square kilometre security zone.

Both Taif and Cairo Agreements allowed rogue groups to attack Israel, while the state had little or no say on the potential consequences. The Cairo Agreement is cited as one of the major causes of the 15 year civil war, while the Taif Accord set in motion an understanding that would see Hezbollah exceed its mandate.

For 20 years, like the PLO in the 70s and early 80s, Hezbollah rode roughshod over Lebanon, driven by a self-serving and bogus ‘resistance’ narrative. It controlled nearly all the levers of power, taking Lebanon into wars it didn’t want and influencing the political process with the veiled threat of violence. That era might now be drawing to a close but at what price remains to be seen.