In its defense of Israel’s founding as a state, the Zionist movement spun countless false tales: from “A land without a people for a people without a land,” to the claim that the Palestinians had sold their land and thereby left their country voluntarily in 1948. We know that the “New - Israeli - Historians,” who began their undertaking in the 1980s, did more to expose these lies than anyone else.
Such misrepresentations often reflect the desires or fears of those behind them, or what they seek to legitimize and present as the truth. Since the Jewish state is currently waging an overwhelmingly criminal war that many seek to justify, false tales are a commodity churned out on a weekly basis at the Israeli factory.
For its part, Hezbollah has also excelled in spinning false tales for political and ideological ends. Its greatest and most widespread lie is that Israel has constituted a danger to Lebanon since its establishment in 1948 and the 1949 armistice agreement that followed, showing relentless aggression. The function of this falsehood has been, and remains, to render the very idea of a political settlement impossible in principle, and to reduce thinking about this question politically to an act of gratuitous treason. It also renders the armed resistance that is supposedly needed to “protect Lebanon” into a pressing and vital need.
Israel, the enemy, does not change. It remains what it is regardless of whether or not it is subjected to operations by the Palestinian resistance or Hezbollah. It makes no difference when Israelis swing to the nationalist and religious right or to supporting the “peace camp.” Not a thing distinguished what it had been before October 7 and what it has been since, or before and after the wars of “support.” Its occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, during which it did not systematically destroy homes and turn the land into scorched earth, is identical to its current occupation, during which it has ripped out and erased all signs of life.
But was Israel always as hostile to Lebanon as it is today?
Of course, Lebanon and Israel were not dolling over one another after the Rhodes Armistice. Lebanon had taken part in the 1948 war, and it was natural for the two peoples not to feel warmly about one another, especially since the creation of the Jewish state was coupled with the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians. Those of them who sought refuge in Lebanon and neighboring countries recounted some of their painful experiences to the locals with whom they shared a lot.
Looking back at the archives, our shared border, with its limited military presence and more substantial international armistice observer presence, there were individual attempts at illegal crossings, some of them shepherds, some smugglers, and others Palestinian refugees seeking to return to their homeland. Such attempts occasionally led to scattered clashes that quickly subsided after shots were fired, and limited Israeli raids were conducted either in retaliation for border incidents or in pursuit of a larger share of water resources. Southern Lebanon contained, or bordered on, water sources feeding river systems that had been of considerable importance to Israel at the time.
We are therefore talking about the sort of problems familiar to many countries that share borders and a history of conflict. The claim that such incidents constitute “a war of existence not borders,” in which we must either kill or be killed, does withstand any serious scrutiny.
We also know that Israeli literature and political discourse, some of which expressed ambitions regarding the West Bank or advocated retaining the Syrian Golan Heights because of its strategic value, did not generate comparable scenarios regarding Lebanon. Accordingly, the notion of Israel’s “ambitions in Lebanon” was more a marginal and hysterical opinion than it was part of the mainstream of Israeli political life and its proposals.
More importantly, if we regard the disputes to be as grave as Hezbollah and its supporters insist they are, we arrive at a standard that cannot be applied to relations between any two neighboring countries. Indeed, we would then have to apply this same standard to Lebanese-Syrian relations during the same period, between the late 1940s to the late 1960s. For the very idea of Lebanon being an independent country and sovereign state was, in the eyes of Syrian nationalists, a heresy imposed by colonialism in order to fragment Syria.
Following Husni al-Za'im’s 1949 coup, Damascus encouraged the leader of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, Antoun Saadeh, to launch his own coup and overthrow Lebanon’s elected government. In 1957, Syrian intelligence assassinated the Syrian officer and SSNP partisan Ghassan Jadid in Beirut after he had sought refuge in Lebanon. In 1958, when Syria was part of the United Arab Republic, Interior Minister Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj flooded Lebanon with weapons that would be used against the legitimate government of Camille Chamoun. In 1965, the Baathist regime dispatched the officer Jalal Marhej to carry out bombings in the Chouf region to intimidate President Fuad Chehab, whose policies were more aligned with those of Cairo.
In this sense, the challenge posed by Syria during this period was far more existential than that of Israel, especially since it was rooted in the center of the country rather than its periphery. By the logic of the false tales propagated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese people should therefore resent Syrians and translate this hatred into a “war of existence not borders.”
But would such a conception be at all sensible? Or would it simply be a fast-track to reckless policies haunted by dark intentions that ultimately lead to self-destruction?
