Israel’s Long War in Lebanon: From Sharon’s ‘Mailed Fist’ to Precision Strikes against Hezbollah

Israel’s tangled tryst with Lebanon has been one long, dark waltz in the violent ballroom of the Middle East. Once known as the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ before being consumed by the flames of a horrific civil war, Lebanon, for much of the mid-20th century, coexisted with Israel in a state of relative calm.

Unlike other Arab countries, cosmopolitan Lebanon had refrained from participating in the major wars against Israel that defined the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Despite the broader Arab-Israeli animosity, Lebanon - a mosaic of Christians,

Sunni and Shia Muslims, and Druze - kept its distance from open conflict with its southern Jewish neighbour.

However, by the 1970s, that fragile calm began to unravel, leading both nations into a tangled web of violence and proxy battles that persist to this day with Israel locked in mortal combat with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militant group.

Lebanon’s delicate political system, carefully crafted to balance its religious sects, had kept the country relatively stable during Israel’s early wars with its Arab neighbours. While Lebanon did not officially make peace with Israel, there was no active conflict between the two. Lebanese Christians from Maronite factions, had a pragmatic relationship with Israel, viewing it as a buffer against hostile forces like Syria and Palestinian militants.

By the 1960s, Lebanon's internal balance shifted dramatically with the influx of Palestinian refugees following the Six-Day War of 1967, during which Israel decisively defeated the Arab states. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, established bases in southern Lebanon - having previously set up strongholds there after being expelled from Jordan in 1970 - and began launching cross-border raids into Israel, which in turn provoked Israeli retaliation.

In his monumental and judicious 1,300-page masterwork ‘A History of Israel’, historian Howard Morley Sachar observes how the frustrated Palestinian refugees became “fair game for the PLO,” already entrenched in Lebanon. Arafat and his colleagues, says Sachar, had at their disposal some $400 million in annual subsidies from Saudi Arabia and Gulf Oil states, with which they organized labour welfare and generated employment for their kinsmen, becoming a semi-autonomous government in Lebanon.

In 1975, Lebanon’s social fabric ruptured into a brutal civil war. What began as sectarian clashes between the Maronite Christians and Muslim factions, snowballed into a full-blown proxy war, involving regional and global powers. Amid the chaos, the PLO gained strength, making southern Lebanon a launching pad for attacks into northern Israel.

In response, Israel cultivated relationships with Lebanese Christian militias, particularly the Maronites, who were fighting the PLO and its Muslim allies. One of the key figures in this alliance was Bashir Gemayel, a charismatic Maronite leader and head of the Lebanese Forces, the main Christian militia.

By the early 1980s, Israel had had enough. The situation in Lebanon, particularly the constant threat of PLO attacks, had become untenable. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hawkish defence minister at the time, saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: oust the PLO from Lebanon and install a friendly Christian government under Bashir Gemayel, creating a pro-Israel buffer state to the north.

What was Sharon’s Gamble?

In June 1982, Israel launched ‘Operation Peace for Galilee,’ sending its troops deep into Lebanon. The stated objective was to push the PLO back from Israel’s northern border, but Sharon’s ambitions went far beyond that. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reached Beirut within days, laying siege to the capital city and bombarding Palestinian positions, prompting Arafat to flee Lebanon.

Yet this invasion would become one of the most controversial chapters in Israeli military history. It was during this period that Israel’s Christian allies, under the leadership of Bashir Gemayel, found themselves in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

In September 1982, Gemayel was assassinated in a massive bomb attack just days after being elected president of Lebanon. His death, a devastating blow to Israel’s plans, triggered a horrific massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. In retaliation for Gemayel’s death, members of the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia (They drew inspiration from the Nazi and Italian Fascist movements, while also embracing the Catholic nationalism and imperialist nostalgia of the Spanish Falange), with the tacit approval of the Israeli military, stormed the camps, killing between 700 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians.

The world was outraged, and Israel’s moral standing suffered greatly. (The Kahan Commission, an Israeli government inquiry, found Sharon personally responsible for allowing the massacre, leading to his resignation as Defence Minister)

The operation saw Israeli forces occupy the southern half of Lebanon and eventually reach Beirut, where, in a controversial move, they laid siege to the city. While Israel succeeded in driving the PLO out of Lebanon, the occupation sowed the seeds of a far more dangerous foe: Hezbollah.

Initially founded as a small resistance movement to fight Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah would grow into a formidable paramilitary force. Bolstered by funding and arms from Iran, and taking advantage of Lebanon’s weak central government, Hezbollah emerged as both a military and political player. For Israel, the group’s emergence was a bitter unintended consequence of its military intervention. By the time Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation, Hezbollah had established itself as a potent guerrilla force and the dominant power in southern Lebanon.

The 2006 war, a 34-day conflict sparked by Hezbollah’s abduction of Israeli soldiers, revealed Hezbollah’s ability to strike deep into Israeli territory using rockets revealing the extent of its military capabilities. Though Israel claimed to have damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure, the group emerged as the epitome of ‘resistance’ against Israel in the Arab world.

Since then, the two adversaries have engaged in sporadic but lethal confrontations that has now metastasized into an Armageddon following Israel’s pounding of Gaza in retaliation to the October 7 attacks launched by Hamas and other Palestinian terror outfits.

As Israel today launches strike after strike to decapitate Hamas leadership, killing the once-elusive Hassan Nasrallah and his potential ‘heir apparent’ - senior Hezbollah leader Hashem Safieddine - the Lebanese government is nonplussed at the mounting casualties of its civilians.

While Sharon’s ‘mailed fist’ of the 1980s was all about overwhelming force against the PLO in Lebanon, Israel’s military claims that today its military operations are surgical, aimed at eliminating key Hezbollah figures and neutralizing the group’s rocket and missile stockpiles in the benighted country.

Today, it seems endgame for Hezbollah. But as Gaza and Hamas — once the focal points of conflict since October 7 last year — give way to Iran, Hezbollah’s primary backer, the question remains whether the IDF can eliminate the hydra-headed Lebanese militant outfit.

In a visceral scene in German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff's haunting Circle of Deceit (1981), the finest film on the Lebanese Civil War, a journalist, portrayed by Bruno Ganz, frantically runs toward the camera, chased by a carload of militiamen from one faction, only to stumble upon the lifeless bodies of another. Overwhelmed, he clutches his head in a moment of paralyzing despair. As the IDF continues to maul Lebanon, the scene serves as a chilling shorthand for the relentless cycles of bloodshed that continue to define the country today.

(Tomorrow, we explore the ‘special relationship’ between Israel and the United States. As the Left across the globe censures Israel and students in American campuses stridently condemn it, we look at the so-called ‘Jewish Lobby’, the forgotten history of left-wing support for Zionism and the future of the Israeli-American relationship in the context of the ongoing war in Gaza)