(This article is an abridged verson of a more thorough history of Lebanon appearing in liberationschool.org, an educational site for activists and fighters–ed.)
Lebanon is an Arab country of 5.5 million in Southwest Asia bordering occupied Palestine. This tiny country has had its striving for self-determination, sovereignty and independence repeatedly stifled and betrayed, and its people divided, traumatized and tortured by Western imperialism and its agents, the main one being Israel.
How does it manage to fight back?
Again and again the people of Lebanon have risen up to demand freedom from western and Zionist domination; the replacement of a stifling caste-like government imposed by colonialism with a democratic one granting and enforcing equal rights for all; for union with the Arab world of which they are historically, culturally and economically a part; and for the national rights of the Palestinian people whose freedom is bound to the freedom of the Lebanese.
Located strategically in the world’s most oil-rich area, foreign governments have long sought to control Lebanon. Under the control of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years until the end of World War, many in the region aligned with the Allies because Britain and France and Russia (before the 1917 Russian Revolution) promised to support an independent Arab state if the population would rise up against the Ottomans. The Allies had no intention of supporting Arab independence. France and Britain divided the region between themselves as colonies in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty. In the Arab West Asia, they sliced out as separate countries Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, drawing borders to hinder local organizing and to facilitate western penetration and domination.
Then Britain issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, supporting a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine as part of a plan to secure British domination of the Middle East. The outraged Arab people saw the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Balfour Declaration as a double betrayal. They rose up to defend their sovereignty but were defeated by the new colonial masters.
‘Divide-and-conquer’ on steroids
Lebanon is the most religiously diverse Arab country, with 18 defined religious sects. Five are Muslim denominations (Shia, Sunni and Druze are the largest), and 12 are Christian, with the Maronites being the largest. France imposed a constitution on Lebanon in 1925 designed to promote sectarian strife. It locks the country into a caste-like political system where each person is defined for life by which of the 18 religious sects they were born into. One’s sect at birth determines every aspect of one’s life from education, to registering for a birth certificate or marriage license to garbage disposal. To run this fractured system France cultivated feudal family dynasties from the elite of each sect, the zuama, who controlled their fiefdoms through patronage.
This system locks the vast majority of Lebanese in poverty, with virtually no say in government. It has no mechanisms for implementing reforms, and no way to modernize the country as a centrally planned unit. It leaves Lebanon’s economy wide open to foreign penetration, as these tiny fiefdoms are easily controlled by outside powers, which grant favors to the zuama who are pro-western, especially those in the Christian sects, against the poor majority. It is divide-and-conquer on steroids.
The overwhelming majority of Lebanese of all sects favor sweeping away this stifling political system and replacing it with a democratic and representative one. Every struggle in Lebanon since 1942 has raised this demand.
Freedom from domination by the West and its proxies, especially Israel
The U.S. emerged as the main imperialist world power after World War II and was keen to establish its dominance in the oil rich Middle East. In 1958 some 15,000 U.S. Marines invaded Lebanon to put down an uprising and shore-up a pro-U.S. regime. The Pentagon sent in troops again in 1983. But most of the time Washington has armed and relied on Israel to be its regional Pentagon proxy.
The creation of Israel in Palestine’s place in 1948 on Lebanon’s border has had especially huge repercussions. It has subjected Lebanon to constant attack by Israel and binds the liberation of Palestine and Lebanon together. Today half a million Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon.
Israel has bombed Lebanon at will from land, sea and air. It conducted six major invasions of Lebanon since 1978, besieged its capital Beirut for 2 months, occupied Lebanon’s south for 18 years and created its own puppet army there, engineered massacres such as the 1982 atrocity in Sabra and Shatila, repeatedly destroyed Lebanon’s infrastructure, sent in commando teams to assassinate Palestinian and Lebanese leaders and intellectuals there, armed openly fascist Lebanese groups, repeatedly dropped anti-personnel cluster bombs and white phosphorus on civilians and regularly interfered in Lebanon’s political affairs.
In 1972, the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) was formed. It’s program called for the replacement of the confessional-based government with a secular democracy, equality of opportunity for all Lebanese, direct popular vote for the President without regard to religion, the right of the Palestinians to be based in Lebanon, independence from the West, and the realignment of Lebanon with the Arab world. The LNM aligns itself with the PLO, which was then based in Lebanon.
The Pentagon responded by arming rightwing Lebanese groups, especially the Kataeb, an openly fascist party that originally called itself the Phalange after the fascist party of Franco in Spain. Israel became their conduit for U.S. weapons.
1975-90 Civil War
Lebanon’s people paid a terrible for its 15-year Civil War that began in 1975. An estimated 150,000 were killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced and left destitute.
Most accounts of the war do not explain one of the most important factors, that the civil war was fed and prolonged by international forces to serve their own interests. For instance, U.S. battle ships bombed Lebanese villages, while Israel gave air support to the fascists. Despite this, by early 1976 the LNM-PLO controlled 80% of Lebanon’s territory, had the allegiance of 75% of its population. This coalition would have won decisively if it wasn’t for intervention from Syria, with the permission of the U.S.
1982 Israeli invasion, Sabra-Shatila massacre
In 1982, with the Civil War was still raging, Israel invaded, killed 20,000 mostly civilians, occupied half the country and besieged Beirut demanding that the PLO and its fighters leave Lebanon. The PLO agreed only after the U.S. promised that Israel would stop advancing and Palestinian refugee camps would be safe and free from reprisals. However as soon as the Palestinian fighers left, Israel occupied west Beirut and organized the Kataeb to enter the now-unprotected Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and massacre 3,500 Palestinians.
The Civil War ended in stalemate, restoring the confessional system but making some concessions to the resistance.
Hezbollah is formed, the people liberate the south
Hezbollah (Party of God) was formed in 1985 out of the Shia community mainly as a military organization to defend Lebanon from attack. Inspired by the Iranian revolution, it aligned with Iran and received assistance from it.
Israeli and its puppet Lebanese occupiers of south Lebanon were seen as torturers and murderers by the 180,000 Lebanese under their rule for 18 years. In a long war of attrition, people from every Lebanese sect and many organizations, women and men, resisted this occupation. Hezbollah became the strongest and the defining fighting force, finally driving Israel and its Lebanese puppets out in 2000. Israeli troops fled Lebanon hurriedly, leaving behind unused artillery, abandoned villas and deserted cars along the roadsides, their keys still in the ignition.
In 2006 Israel launched a full-scale assault on Lebanon by land, sea and air, carpet bombing the south and the Dahiya neighborhood in south Beirut. Hezbollah fighters, however, stopped the Israeli ground advance, captured IDF tanks and other vehicles, and forced the Israelis not only to retreat, but also to agree to a cessation of hostilities without having made any gains.
An Arab militia had twice defeated Israel when no regular Arab army could or would. Hezbollah’s fighters were celebrated as “the resistance” and as heroes in Lebanon and across the Arab world. Hezbollah’s strong military presence on the border with Israel acted as a deterrent, freeing Lebanon from Israeli bombing from 2006 to 2023. This was a first.
Hezbollah organized a political party
Within the confines of the limited position allotted to Shia in the confessional political system, Hezbollah ran for office, entered parliament and secured cabinet positions in 2005. It formed alliances and became a major political force. Hezbollah took on administration of Shia regions and developed for the first time a vast network of social services in areas long looked down upon by Lebanon’s elites as lower-class backwaters.
Economic collapse
For years, entrenched zuama adhered to an IMF plan charging the population ever-higher taxes to shore up an economy sucked dry by predatory western banks. At the same time, in a giant Ponzi scheme, Lebanon’s oligarchs borrowed money from international banks and then borrowed more to pay these loans. All the while these oligarchs looted billions in public funds to build personal fortunes, putting no money into infrastructure. By 2019 the government had become so dysfunctional that it could not even provide 24-hour electricity, tap water, or pick up the garbage.
When Lebanon’s rulers announced new tax increases it sparked a grassroots explosion of rage that engulfed the country and brought down the regime. Protests, unprecedented in size, targeted austerity, corruption, dysfunction and widening inequality, and charged Lebanon’s politicians, elite and bankers with embezzling funds from the people. Demonstrations united people from all 18 religious sects. On one day alone a quarter of the population took to the streets. Participants carried Lebanese flags, opposed sectarianism and chanted “One, one, one, we are one people!”
The financial and economic collapse sunk half of the population into poverty and left millions jobless. Many were reduced to stealing food to feed their children and borrowing from banks to pay the rent. Lebanon today has a $33 billion debt, the worst debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, and 80% of the population lives in poverty.
Opening a second front in solidarity with Gaza
In neighboring Palestine, the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip had been under Israeli siege for 16 years, with Israel restricting food and regularly bombing the population there. On Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Gaza launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” seizing Israelis to exchange for Palestinian prisoners and demanding that Israel lift the siege.
On Oct. 8 Hezbollah opened a second military front against Israel in solidarity with Gaza, daily launching rockets from Lebanon at military targets in northern occupied Palestine for more than a year. The aim was to drain the Israeli army’s resources and thereby limit its capacity to wage war on Gaza.
Hezbollah’s solidarity with Gaza took place in a regional context of solidarity by Ansar Allah (the Houthi) in Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, by Iran, and Syria, the “Axis of Resistance.” The resistance received a major blow on Dec. 8, 2024 when the Syrian government of Bashir Assad fell to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group with roots in Isis and al Qaeda, reactionary Islamic groups funded by the U.S., its Gulf allies and Turkey.
On September 18, 2024, Israel expanded its war to Lebanon, and used its U.S.-supplied weapons to repeat the genocidal tactics it used in Gaza, displacing 1.2 million people, a fifth of Lebanon’s population, killing 3,700 Lebanese, flattened 32 southern villages and assassinated the leadership of Hezbollah.
Despite these blows, when Israel launched a ground assault, Hezbollah fighters stood firm, protecting their south Lebanon hometowns where their families have lived for millennia. They repeatedly rebuffed a heavily armed Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, leading Israel to call for a ceasefire without making military gains.
Terms of the ceasefire agreement
Brokered by the U.S. and France, a Nov. 27, 2024 ceasefire agreement called for Hezbollah fighters to withdraw about 18 miles from the Israel border to the Litani River, for IDF invading troops to be replaced by the Lebanese Army and UN forces on the border, and for a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon within 60 days. It remains to be seen whether the ceasefire with Israel will hold, as Israel violated it hundreds of times just in the first month, bombing villages in Shia areas in the north as well as in the south without consequence.
Meanwhile, Washington did not broker the accord as a neutral party. U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller explained, “What we want to see come out of this situation, ultimately, is Lebanon able to break the grip that Hezbollah has had on the country.”
The ceasefire calls for the Lebanese Army to replace Hezbollah on the border with Israel. The Pentagon is the main funder of the Lebanese Army, but supplies it with weapons that are three generations behind, with many being obsolete, and provides no air defense. This purposely hobbles it so this Army could never mount a significant confrontation against Israel, which receives the latest and best spyware and armaments.
This is why, when Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, the Lebanese Army stood down, withdrew its soldiers from the south and moved north out of the range of fire. It was only the young Hezbollah militia members, who successfully and heroically repelled the Israeli advance on their hometowns. In fact, the Lebanese Army has never defended Lebanese sovereignty.
It is precisely because the imperialists keep Lebanon weak, defenseless and entirely vulnerable to the massacres regularly inflicted by Israeli attacks that local militias like Hezbollah arose. If Hezbollah did not exist, another grassroots group would arise to fill this urgent need to defend the population.
Lebanese grandmothers face off against Israeli tanks
Today the people of south Lebanon, even though they have sacrificed much, remain strong and proud. The U.S. may think that Hezbollah has been defeated, but the people of the south see that for the third time their sons have pushed out Israeli ground forces armed and backed by every imperialist government in the world. This is being celebrated as a sign of strength and a victory in their protracted struggle.
Like the people of Gaza after the January 17, 2025 ceasefire there, thousands of the 1.4 million Lebanese people displaced by Israeli bombings are streaming home in long lines to their villages, even though Israel reduced scores of them to rubble. They are defying the Israeli military which still has tanks and troops on the ground. Social media videos of grandmothers have gone viral. These women stand alone, unafraid, their arms raised, facing off against Israeli tanks and snipers. They are going home.
