Nearly 12 years ago, I sat in a building along the Cola circle, a block from my own apartment, to interview a leader of the General Union of Palestinian Women in Lebanon about her movement work between 1970 and 1982 when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was headquartered in Lebanon. Just weeks ago, Zionists bombed that very building in the center of Beirut in an attempt to assassinate Palestinian political leaders in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This bombing was one in a larger assassination attack that targeted Palestinian political leaders from the PFLP and Fatah in Lebanon on September 30, and for which four leaders were murdered. These attacks coalesced with what has been one of the most expansive and widespread bombing campaigns, desecrating areas in Beirut, and especially al-Dahiyeh, following the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of Hezballah; southern and eastern Lebanon; and Palestinian refugee camps throughout the country. As these campaigns continue and intensify, over one million people out of Lebanon’s population of roughly five million have been displaced.
After over a year of televised genocide in Gaza and escalations across Palestine, we are now witnessing simultaneous bombardment in Lebanon – unsure of where to turn our attention, if we’re chronicling every aggression in real time, and if we’re pressuring the right parties in the search for any kind of reprieve. To be sure, the escalations in Lebanon are part of a larger Zionist expansionist policy that, for decades, seemed to be unpursued on this broad material scale. Yet, this expansionist aim is what Palestinian and Lebanese movement workers have identified, documented, and resisted for as long as Zionism has existed on our lands, noting that the Zionist expansionist project spans from the Nile to the Euphrates. In fact, it consistently emerged as a theme in conversations I had during my oral history research on the PLO and their coalitional efforts with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) for a liberated Palestine and Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. This expansionism is both land-based as well as a Zionist hegemonic expansionism that plays on and drives further divisions through sectarianism in the Lebanese national context.
The research I am invoking centers my oral history collection, illuminating popular narrations of the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon and revealing the coalitional formation between Palestinians and Lebanese during the Lebanese Civil War. Through examining the PLO and LNM together as allied umbrella forces of progressive nationalist (both Arab and Palestinian) and leftist organizations, I analyze their revolutionary praxis, successes and pitfalls, especially during their overlap in the first seven years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-82). This past year of ongoing, accelerated genocide in Palestine, and these past weeks of escalations in Lebanon and beyond, have weighed heavily on our people who are paying the ultimate price for liberation. The escalations in Lebanon bring to the fore the necessity of expanding the analysis of Zionism’s impact in the region and especially on Lebanon and other bordering nations. The Cola bombing, for me, surfaced the stark reality of unfinished revolution.
More than five decades ago the Cola/Tareeq Jdeedeh area served as a stronghold for PLO leaders, members, and feda’iyeen (guerilla fighters). While living in this neighborhood, shop owners and service workers recalled this period in everyday conversations, pointing to buildings where Palestinian leaders, including Arafat, Abu Jehad and al-Hakim, lived and moved from apartment to apartment in hiding, in both Palestinian and Lebanese homes, to avoid assassination attempts by the Zionists or their Lebanese allies, namely al-Kata’eb (the Phalangists) and the Lebanese Front. I recovered stories of the wives (politically engaged in their own right, including in leadership roles) and children of high level political leaders, who lived the constant violence of not knowing where their husband or father was or if he was even alive during conditions of protracted war and siege in Lebanon and against the PLO. In that neighborhood, over the course of the twelve years the PLO was headquartered in Lebanon, and especially from 1975-82, targeted strikes were imminent. Today, you can still see the remnants of the attempts to obliterate on buildings, some still functioning, others destroyed – as is the case in most of Lebanon.
Situating Lebanon and the Palestinian Revolution
In an attempt to do the impossible in one paragraph, I will situate Lebanon within its own political context. Lebanon gained independence in 1943 from the French Mandate, which was established in 1920. The distribution of governmental power was organized based on religious affiliation using the 1932 census, Lebanon’s last comprehensive census when the Christian to Muslim ratio was 6:5. This governmental organization is a backdrop for disorder as religious line-drawing has fostered sectarian division and opposing interests and conceptions of the nation. These divisions, while often proudly assumed by different sects of Lebanese society, continue to serve the agendas of global and regional powers by design, taking advantage of sectarian discord in Lebanon. Following the Nakba in 1948, over 100,000 Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon and were ultimately spread across 15 refugee camps (now 12) unless they could otherwise survive outside of the UN Refugee Works Agency’s offerings. A first Lebanese civil war ensued in the 1950s, ultimately leading to US military intervention. Following the 1967 war more Palestinian refugees are displaced to Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance movement begins to consolidate and strengthen. As the PLO gets exiled from Jordan and moves to Lebanon in 1970, the socio-political landscape shifts through the 1969 Cairo agreement and the PLO’s presence. The PLO arrived at a time where class-based divide in Lebanon was escalating quickly as Lebanese wealth and various political forces begin to consolidate power - the Lebanese right spearheaded by the Kataeb (Phalangists) and the Lebanese Front and the Arab nationalist and left forces aligning under the umbrella of what would become the Lebanese National Movement. The right aligned with Western imperialist powers, the left aligned with the PLO, and a hot war ensues in Lebanon, known as the Lebanese Civil War, starting in 1975 and persisting for 15 years. Many unassuming relations ensue across sects, nation state militias, and local and Arab nationalisms during this war - too many to dissect in this piece. In the second half of the Civil War, after the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Hezballah emerges as a shi’a resistance formation changing the nature and source of armed and popular resistance operations in Lebanon and shifting the power dynamics of opposition in Lebanon. The war’s conclusion reinforced sectarian infrastructure and Hezballah as an important player in the Lebanese political arena, reformulating the confessionalist system to a 50:50 ratio through the Taif agreement.
To understand the deeply entrenched relationship between Palestinians and Lebanese today, and their conjoined path to liberation, one must look to the past. Today’s escalations are not isolated, but are a continuation of regional Zionist and imperialist modes of power. There are many histories within which we can situate this current moment and indeed all of them are connected. As a scholar of the Palestinian revolution, and particularly of the PLO’s time in Lebanon and in alliance with the LNM during the Lebanese Civil War, I come to read the conjoined context of Palestine and Lebanon through this lens. As a region colonized by Europe and largely “achieving” independent nation-states in the mid-1900s, many of the governing bodies in the region were determined by or built relations with imperial powers. These states took shape through these relations, namely with the so-called United States (US), while also having built cultures that limit political and economic freedoms through authoritarian modes. Much of the intention of imperialist relations in the region is to secure governments that are amenable to the presence of Zionism in the region. There are many economic factors that come into play here, including maintaining a western stronghold in extracting the region’s natural resources and the development of the war economy. Furthermore, in Lebanon, the added dimension of sectarian relations that determines its socio-political fabric is a prevalent one.
I note this not because I believe we should read Lebanon through a sectarian lens, but because this rhetoric and institutionalization has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the one hand the religious minority narrative has been mobilized, especially by Lebanese Maronite leaders and bolstered by western nations and Zionists, to position Lebanese Christians with other Christian nations (read – the West) and other regional religious minority powers – namely the Zionist state. This sectarian socio-political landscape predates Israeli state moves for hegemony in the region and has cultivated broad Lebanese allegiance to their sects, which also organizes Lebanese attitudes and perceptions toward the Palestine question. Within this landscape is the reality that the Muslim-majority Palestinian refugee population further strengthens the Sunni Muslim sect in Lebanon. This would pose a problem for the Lebanese status quo of a majority Christian nation. And on the other hand, this mobilization of minoritized politics and allegiance building with imperialist interest and religious allegiance does not neatly fit across a Christian-Muslim
divide. This gets muddied, for example, in areas of southern Lebanon where Christian villages supported Palestinian cross-border resistance or in economic relations where the Sunni merchant class at times came to align with right-wing Christian imperialist relations, setting precedents for economic normalization even as political normalization has largely not been initiated. In fact, the landscape of Lebanese political affairs established around a quota system for each sect has brought a false sense of affinity based on religious identity, which is often reinforced through the language of sectarianism across the board. This sectarian fixation is perpetuated socially and within knowledge production, literary texts, and the collective reading of Civil War and its unresolved aftermath through this framework.
However, this reading dislocates the class dimension of Lebanese struggle that is directly tied to the colonial present. And it is precisely within this context that Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary aspirations coalesce and are co-constitutive. In many ways, Lebanon and its people have been in waiting for this moment. After living through a 15-year Civil War (1975-90), one that ultimately concluded without radical transformation, the feeling of impending war reverberates through the social landscape across space, time, and place. What is often not discussed in recollections of the Civil War is the revolutionary possibility revealed through alliance building across Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary forces. In fact, this forged alliance, the Joint Forces, while not perfect and ultimately unsustained for various political and economic reasons, offers an alternative landscape in which to think Lebanon – and specifically to think Lebanon and Palestine together.
Palestinian Revolution Embedded in Lebanese Struggle
In conversation with a leader of the Organization for Communist Action regarding the PLO-LNM relationship, he posited, “what became common among [us] was the fact that those who were against Lebanese political and social reforms,” meaning against the dismantling of the sectarian system and capitalist economic organization, also aimed to undermine “Palestinian armed resistance in Lebanon.” Speaking with a Lebanese woman from southern Lebanon who joined the Fatah movement, she shared that the PLO had already gained a lot of support among Lebanese by the 1970s. She rooted this sentiment in the victory of the battle of Karama (1968), as a point of regained dignity for the Arab peoples after the loss of 1967. In contrast, a Lebanese medical doctor who, instead of joining a party, did social service and medical aid work, also noted 1968 as significant. In October 1968, the Israelis attacked the Beirut airport, “destroying 15 planes” and, according to his narrative, “the Lebanese army did nothing to defend our land.” And it was in that moment that he determined his choice to work with the Palestinian movement as a defender of land and dignity. These narratives explicate that the Palestinian liberation movement and Palestinian resistance in the Lebanese psyche represented a redemption of dignity among the Arab populus that Arab leaders lost. In Lebanon, for the Lebanese who aspire to shift the nature of the state and social relations, the Palestine question is a question of Lebanese dignity and has been long before the current axis of resistance came into formation.
In 1970, following Black September, and after the early years of Palestinian movement becoming organized into parties, unions, militant wings, and the PLO broadly, the PLO was exiled from Jordan and reestablished headquarters in Lebanon, where Palestinian feda’i (guerilla) organizations had already begun to operate in the South. The arrival was preceded by the Cairo agreement of 1969, brokered by Egypt, to allow the PLO the ability to operate in Lebanon and particularly southern Lebanon, in coordination with the Lebanese military and to allow the PLO jurisdiction over the Palestinian refugee camps in place of the Lebanese military. The agreement set other terms, but it was ultimately utilized to legitimize the PLO’s presence and ability to carry out revolutionary resistance praxis in Lebanon. The already established presence of feda’i organizations in the south and the signing of the Cairo agreement set the stage for the PLO to transfer its headquarters to Lebanon. In addition to these established pretexts, Lebanon’s land border with Palestine and its general lack of consolidated or authoritarian power due to its confessionalist government system allowed the space and freedom required by the Palestinian revolution to function in popular and cross-border armed resistance. Lebanon provided needed flexibility and a shift in power relations following the repression and ultimate expulsion of the PLO by the Jordanian kingdom. At that time, the Syrian regime ultimately chose to retreat instead of defending the feda’i organizations’ right to operate in Jordan – a defense that was perceived to be coming.
The PLO’s arrival to Lebanon was mixed among Lebanese, and while political, sectarian lines are often the source of those mixed sentiments, this fixation limits the terms of analysis on Lebanon. The economic wealth and imperialist affinities blur some of the lines that seem more fixed. For example, while many of the Christian Maronite parties, leaders, and militias opposed the PLO’s presence and the Sunni Muslim factions generally welcomed it, those very leaders or the wealthy across the sects, both Christian and Muslim, had economic alliances with one another, which reproduced capitalist and imperialist relations of power in Lebanon set up by Sykes-Picot and post-independence. And whereas some powerful Christian factions shared Zionist interests, compelled by arguments that pushed for unity of religious minorities in the region, some Muslim factions, organizations, and militaries found themselves collaborating with right-wing Christian groups at different points during the Civil War. I offer these general examples not in absolute terms, but rather to show how fissures always emerge in exclusively sectarian analyses of Lebanon and the Civil War. Sectarian analysis tends to obscure how colonialism ensured the dominance of capital and endured as an organizing logic; how even after the end of European mandates it served to obscure class-based struggle.
On the flipside, there were a number of Lebanese Leftist, Arab nationalist, communist, socialist, and other factions, in some instances based on sectarian membership, that welcomed the PLO, allied with the Palestinian struggle, and built, through alliance, a collaborative vision of liberation. These factions unified under the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), which had a strong progressive platform for radical transformation of the recently independent Lebanese state. These transformations remained within the state paradigm, but some of the main principles of the LNM’s program were to dismantle the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics and the confessionalist system and replace it with a democratic, non-sectarian political system, to move toward a socialist economy, and to free Lebanon from the chains of imperialism. In their principles, they also made space for the Palestinian anticolonial liberation movement to operate and succeed. Palestinian anti-colonial struggle was thus and continues to be embedded in Lebanese anti-imperialist struggle.
The LNM ultimately made up the main opposition front in the first half of the Lebanese Civil War and it shared with the PLO a conviction in anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist struggle as necessary for a liberated region. In this sense, the Palestinian-Lebanese revolutionary alliance offered, through praxis, not only an articulation of the threat of Zionism beyond Palestine's historic lands, but an understanding that the Lebanon question is the Palestine question. As one Lebanese scholar, a member of the PFLP at that time, pointed out, the issue in Lebanon and the region is Zionism. He saw Zionism as the American bully in the region, with the weapons, the aircraft, and ability to enforce. So, if Zionism enters Lebanon through imperialist relations, then the anti-imperialist Lebanese struggle requires a confrontation with Zionism.
But notably, he explained that you cannot address Zionism from the Lebanese vantage point – Zionism instead must be addressed through the Palestine issue. In essence, you cannot comprehensively address Zionism and its impact beyond Palestine, without persisting in the path to the liberation of Palestine, land and people. There are layers to this for Lebanon because of both Zionist expansionist policy in Lebanon as well as Lebanon serving as a host for Palestinian refugees. But any anti-imperialist, non-sectarian, economically just resolve internally within Lebanon cannot be actualized without Palestinian liberation from Zionism. As such, those in Lebanese opposition movements and the innumerable Lebanese individuals who joined Palestinian movements, saw their work as Lebanese as working to dismantle Zionism. As he relayed to me, the opposition forces’ resistance during the Civil War was “directed either at Zionists or at their proxies within Lebanon.” And the LNM factions and the Lebanese did wage war against Zionism during the Civil War and as part of their power-building platform in Lebanon, which, at a certain point early in the war, in 1976, had gained majority power, control and popular support in Lebanon.
The Lebanese Civil War ended without resolve, neither on the Lebanese political front nor on the question of Palestine. And this lack of resolve, in conjunction with Zionist hegemonic expansionist policy in Lebanon that is being clearly implemented now, has created a Lebanon that is perpetually destabilized and on the brink of war. And while both Palestinian and Lebanese resistance efforts and armed groups have been reconfigured over the past 40 years broadly and the last 10 years specifically, the reality is that Zionism continues to poison efforts to move the region toward actualized liberation, independent from the colonial and imperialist fist. And in the case of Lebanon specifically, Zionism serves to uphold sectarian norms, political discord, and economic instability. Whereas Egypt and Jordan normalized economic relations with the Zionist state as early as the 1970s through the Camp David Accords, Lebanon has resisted normalization. Its lack of normalization alongside its political pluralism has created a particular space for Zionism to simultaneously embed its hegemony in Lebanon while also propagating against Lebanon. This double-edged destabilization serves to reinforce the Zionist presence in the region through various propaganda campaigns that include forging minority unity, demonizing resistance organizations, and undermining Iranian regional hegemony. However, what has become clear again now, is that no one in Lebanon will be spared of Zionism's brute force and, as such, the liberation of Palestine is a prerequisite for a liberated Lebanon.