It was a calm afternoon in that summer of 1982 when suddenly an explosion 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, few hundred meters from our street. A curious adolescent back then, I went to see the place of bombing to see the roof floor of what once a ten-story building was had come down to the ground and now was sitting on a heap of debris. The crowd that had gathered there were murmuring that Yaser Arafat was visiting the building that was full of Palestinian refugee families, and that the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had left the building only fifteen minutes before the attack. The residents of the building, over a hundred people, perished in the bombing.In the summer of 1982 Israel launched what it called “Operation Peace for Galilee” and invaded Lebanon. Its aim was to liquidate the PLO. The Israeli army occupied Beirut and chased away the Palestinian guerillas from its southern suburbs. It was the summer of Sabra and Shatila massacres, when Israeli soldiers surrounded the two Palestinian camps, brought in Right-wing Lebanese Christians militias who for three days butchered hundreds of Palestinian civilians. How many died that summer we do not know for sure, but it could be as high as twenty thousand. In the summer of 1982 Hezbollah did not even exist.
In the summer of 1982 Israel launched what it called “Operation Peace for Galilee” and invaded Lebanon. Its aim was to liquidate the PLO. The Israeli army occupied Beirut and chased away the Palestinian guerillas from its southern suburbs. It was the summer of Sabra and Shatila massacres, when Israeli soldiers surrounded the two Palestinian camps, brought in Right-wing Lebanese Christians militias who for three days butchered hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
How many died that summer we do not know for sure, but it could be as high as twenty thousand.
In the summer of 1982 Hezbollah did not even exist. Israel was fighting largely secular, nationalist Fatah, and Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) led by none other than George Habash, a medical doctor turned guerilla leader.
Several hundred Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran were sent to Lebanon to support the Palestinian guerillas fight the invasion. They themselves did not do much fighting but instead setup training camps in the Bekaa Valley and formed militants, which later became known as the Party of God, of Hizballah.
A decade later, in 1993 Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin will shake hands with Yaser Arafat and sign the Oslo Accord, a peace agreement that promised self-rule to the Palestinians.
But the Oslo Accord was never implemented; two years after the accord was signed, a Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin, and the killer eventually won: instead of Oslo peace, now Israeli leaders wanted “security” and only for themselves, at the cost of Palestinian security. In the mid-1990’s massive colonization of Palestinian territories in the West Bank started. In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza Strip but kept it under its strict control, making the region the biggest “open prison” in the world. All this accompanied with humiliation of Palestinians in their daily life, and a high dose of daily violence exercised by the army of occupation or by settlers.
Back in Lebanon, Hizballah emerged as the main force of resistant against foreign occupation. They were behind the bombing of the 1983 Marines barracks bombing that killed 241 US soldiers, and 58 French paratroopers in Beirut, forcing them to depart from Lebanon.
Hizballah laid its roots within the sectarian cracks of Lebanese body politics and deepened it. First, it attacked its secular rivals such as the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), assassinated its leaders, trade-union activists, and intellectual figures – such as the philosopher Mahdi Amel. It also eliminated the LCP led National Resistance Front, therefore monopolizing anti-Israeli resistance. Hezballah became the main forces mobilizing and representing Lebanese Shiite population.
Hizballah’s success in driving the Israeli occupation out of Lebanon in the year 2000 was a source of pride for the Lebanese. The party had transformed the poorest of the Lebanese communities into an efficient fighting force. Yet, this came at a high price: the “Party of God” was totally dependent on external – Iranian – funding, arms, and therefore orders. This was evident in the 2006 war when Hizballah provoked Israel, and in the following 33-days Israeli massive bombardment devastated the Dahiyé – the Shiite inhabited southern suburbs of Beirut.
Hezbollah in 2006 is not the same as in 2024. In between, the Shiite party went to war in Syria, to save the regime of Bashar Asad from a popular rebellion that had become violent, Islamist, and sectarian. By fighting in Syria, in an environment that was not its own, the party exposed itself to Israeli espionage, both by data mining and by infiltrations. For years Israel was preparing itself to fight Hezbollah as well as Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and in a series of dramatic strikes decapitation of Hezbollah leadership, including its long-term leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
But if Israel thinks that it can achieve “security” on its northern border by committing massacres in Lebanon, by turning Beirut suburbs into another Gaza, it’s déjà vu: forty-two years ago, Israel destroyed a secular PLO but, in its ashes, a more radical, Islamist Hizballah was created.
No one in the Middle East believed in the “end of history”. Rather, history continuously repeats itself, like a broken record. Israel is burning down Lebanon yet again. But it will neither achieve peace, nor security.