Israel and Lebanon: Once almost-allies, now at war ... again
Pre-1948, prominent Lebanese welcomed a Jewish presence to the south – and in their own mountain resorts. What went wrong?
Minds boggled up and down the Eastern Med this month at reports that Israel and Lebanon would hold talks to not just end the hostilities that began March 2 but see Beirut recognize the Jewish state for the first time in modern history.
While Israel has peace agreements with two of its neighbors (Egypt and Jordan) and understandings (however battered) with the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon holds out with its neighbor Syria in criminalizing any contact with the Zionist enemy. Often it looks as if Lebanon will be the last Arab state to forge ties with Israel – indeed, following the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Beirut’s then-prime minister vowed exactly that.
It may come as a surprise, then, that prior to 1948, the very opposite scenario seemed likely. After World War I, as the new polity of Greater Lebanon emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, its Maronite-Catholic and French planners envisioned it as a “Christian national home” reminiscent of the Jewish one promised by the Balfour Declaration.
One prominent Maronite delegate to the postwar peace talks in Paris, Émile Eddé, used the term explicitly and apparently deliberately: Lebanon, he wrote, was a “foyer chrétien” – a “home” for the oppressed Christians of the Near East. When in 1936 he became the country’s president, he toasted Britain’s proposal of a Jewish state, asking that it sign its first treaty of bon voisinage – good neighborliness – with its northern counterpart.
To quote the late great Middle East historian Bernard Lewis: What went wrong?
Lebanon’s borders have remained unchanged since September 1, 1920. That day, in a ceremony on the terrace of the neo-Moorish Palace of the Pines, General Henri Gouraud declared the creation of the French Mandate of Greater Lebanon (recast a few years later as the Lebanese Republic), flanked by Christian and Muslim religious leaders.
Its borders were significantly more encompassing than those of its predecessor, the predominantly-Christian Ottoman mutasarrifate (governorate) of Mount Lebanon (in dashed line below). In fact, the French authorities worried that the Maronites — Lebanon’s largest Christian denomination — were overreaching territorially by absorbing so much land inhabited by Sunni and Shia Muslims.
But just a few years earlier, during the Great War, the Maronites had suffered through the hideous, now mostly-forgotten Great Famine of Mount Lebanon. The causes were complicated – the Allied blockade of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, the Turks’ malign incompetence, a plague of locusts – but the result was blood simple: the death by starvation of some 200,000 people, mostly Christian.
After the armistice the traumatized Maronites were desperate for agricultural land, and insisted – despite French reservations – on the inclusion within the emerging Lebanon of the mostly-Sunni Akkar area north of Tripoli and the heavily-Shia Beqaa Valley along the eastern border with Syria.
But in 1920, Shia in the southern village of Bint Jbeil massacred some 50 people in a neighboring Christian hamlet. The bloodletting convinced Maronite leaders they needed southern Lebanon — known as Jabal Amil — as well.1
“Maronite opinion hardened in favor of including the area in Greater Lebanon,” writes William W. Harris in Lebanon: A History, 600-2011. In any case, Harris writes, “No one, apart from the French, paid much heed to the Shia of Jabal Amil.”
The Shias’ marginal importance is made plain by images of the 1920 ceremony. The religious figures flanking Gouraud were the Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek, and the Sunni Muslim mufti of Beirut. The Shia – some 20 percent of the population – were not even invited to the party.
The first decade and a half of the Mandate period – Britain’s in Palestine and France’s in Lebanon – was the golden age for Maronite-Jewish relations. Trains left Haifa for Beirut daily, and thousands of Jews from Mandate Palestine would vacation annually in the land of the cedars, especially in summer.2
“An old joke held that Eretz Israel was the perfect place to live: one could winter in Egypt and summer in Lebanon,” writes Laura Zittrain Eisenberg in My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination.
Jewish newspapers in Palestine regularly carried ads for resorts in the Lebanese mountains – some with kosher kitchens – and in 1935 Lebanon’s government published a tour guide in Hebrew.
The year 1936 saw the outbreak of the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine. The year after that, the notorious Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini fled Jerusalem, wanted by the British for his role fomenting and perpetuating the violence. He made it as far as Lebanese waters when he was picked up by authorities there.
As I write in my book, the French “were not particularly keen on his presence, but he was a political refugee and the other Arab states would not accept him. The prospect of irritating Britain was likewise tempting.” They agreed he could stay under police protection, and he moved into a villa north of Beirut.
Hajj Amin’s Beirut headquarters soon became an obligatory stop for relatively wealthy Arabs fleeing the fighting in Palestine – but also for armed rebels.
And the Zionist press was not having it. The Palestine Post (later, Jerusalem Post) warned that it was unlikely that the “Jews, who have been in the past an important element among the summer tourists in the Lebanon, will visit that country while it harbors Hajj Amin.”
Haaretz warned that “our neighbors in Syria and Lebanon do not understand that they cannot make war against us and profit from us at the same time.”
Émile Eddé agreed. For decades, Harris writes, he had been clearest among Maronite leaders “in wanting a proper Christian Lebanon rather than a multicommunal mélange.” In 1932 he even begged Paris to lop off the Sunni-majority area around Tripoli and, crucially, the Shia-majority south.
“This Christian majority is much too weak to defend against the attraction exerted on it by Syria,” he wrote in a memo in French, as revealed by Meir Zamir, a leading Israeli historian of Lebanon. “There would also be reason to make the entire region of South Lebanon, which is composed in its great majority of Shia Muslims, an autonomous state.”
In January 1936 Eddé was elected Lebanon’s president. Within months, France buckled to mounting Arab-nationalist pressure and granted Syria qualified independence (ultimately postponed until after World War II). That treaty subsumed the previously autonomous Druze and Alawite statelets into a central state ruled from Damascus, but – thanks to Eddé and some like-minded partners in Paris – the French kept Lebanon apart.
Instead, in a bid to dampen Lebanese-Muslim support for unification with Syria, Eddé agreed to name a Sunni Muslim – Khaireddin Ahdab – as prime minister for the first time. In so doing, he set the template of “confessionalism” that would be codified in the 1943 National Pact and remain in force ever since: Lebanon would have a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shia parliamentary speaker.
Ahdab, despite being a Sunni Muslim like Hajj Amin, feared the ill effects of the mufti’s continued presence in Lebanon, grumbling that he was transforming the country into a den of pan-Arab agitation and terrorism. He asked the Zionist leader Moshe Shertok (later, as Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister) for money and for help in founding an anti-mufti newspaper. Above all, he wanted the man out of his country.
When Shertok informed Ahdab that the Jews planned to settle a ridge near the Lebanon border – what would become Kibbutz Hanita – Lebanon’s premier said it would do its utmost, fostering the very “best neighborly relations” in a spirit of “parfaite considération.”
The letter to “Monsieur Shertok” arrived in an envelope marked “REPUBLIQUE LIBANAISE.”
When in 1937 Britain’s Royal Commission for Palestine – known to history as the Peel Commission – recommended partitioning the Holy Land, many in the Christian community celebrated.
“The Christian element welcome [partition],” wrote a British diplomat in Beirut at the time, in an archival document I found in the National Archives in London. “They feel that a Jewish State on their southern frontier would break the hostile ring of Moslem Arabs which Syria and an independent [Arab] Palestine would form.”
Maronite Patriarch Antoine Arida – who had previously, privately hailed the “brave Israelites” south of the border – sent congratulations to Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organization. He warned, however, that his community would suffer a “massacre” if those sentiments were to become known.
Eddé, unsurprisingly, was euphoric. As I write in my book, he:
feared Muslim domination of his own statelet and hoped a Jewish ally to its south would help safeguard its sovereignty. The day the report was released he was in Paris, where he met Weizmann and asked that the new state’s first treaty of bon voisinage be with its northern neighbor.
“Now that the Peel report is an official document,” he gushed, raising a toast, “I have the honor of congratulating the first president of the future Jewish state!”
The Holy Land’s partition would have to wait a decade, until the British finally left Palestine (it’s a long story – see my book!). As to Lebanon, it declared independence from France in 1943, with the last French troops leaving three years later.
When, following Israel’s May 14, 1948 declaration of independence, the surrounding Arab states invaded, Lebanon all but sat it out. According to the Israeli historian Yoav Gelber, David Ben-Gurion had reached an agreement with Maronite leaders a year prior that for a few thousand pounds, they would watch from the sidelines.
When war came, a mere few hundred Lebanese troops crossed into northern Galilee, captured a single village (the site of today’s Kibbutz Malkiya) and withdrew within 24 hours. Lebanon’s contribution to the Arab forces in the 1948 war was so meager that some historians describe it as not having fought at all.
Eddé died shortly after, in September 1949. Over the following decades, all of his worst fears came to pass: Lebanon soon became a sectarian battleground within its borders and a plaything for neighbors beyond them. In 1975, confrontations between Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and Palestinians, nationalists and communists exploded into a bloodstained, 15-year civil war.
Syria soon invaded and wouldn’t leave for three decades. In June 1982 Israel also invaded – to roll back the hostile Syrians and Palestinian militants terrorizing the Galilee. A second goal was to install a 34-year-old Maronite militia chief whom Israel believed was keen to make a deal: Bachir Gemayel. Three months after Israel’s invasion, Gemayel was assassinated by Syrian agents. Peace would have to wait.
Israel’s presence in south Lebanon would ultimately last 18 years, until 2000. That occupation brought the attention of Iran, having recently come under the thumb of a Shia supremacist cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. Tehran in turn created a south-Lebanese version of its Revolutionary Guard Corps and called it Hezbollah, the Party of God.
A bloody war in 2006 – Israel’s Second Lebanon War – ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire calling on Hezbollah to disarm. Instead, the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 onslaught, the Lebanese group began shelling Israel. A year of hostilities ended the following November through U.S. and French mediation.
That ceasefire, in turn, lasted a little over a year, until Hezbollah’s Iranian patron came under withering U.S.-Israeli bombardment on February 28 and the group responded, after a few days’ delay, with rockets on northern Israel. Israel, for its part, hit back with devastating force, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and more than a million displaced, per Lebanese government figures.
It’s enough to make even the most jaded Mideast-watchers sigh.
But near my home in north Tel Aviv, where the Yarkon River meets the sea, is a remnant of another era – a reminder of what was and what could be again. Among the cafes and boutiques at Tel Aviv Port stands a semicircular Bauhaus structure bearing a relief of ancient Baalbek. The city in the Beqaa Valley, home to some of the region’s most glorious Roman ruins, is now a Hezbollah stronghold and target of intensive Israeli strikes.
The structure is all that remains of the Lebanese Pavilion from the 1936 edition of the Levant Fair, a biennial trade fair that drew hundreds of thousands – Jews, Arabs, Britons and Europeans – to Tel Aviv during the Mandate.
Lebanon’s participation was, naturellement, the work of the indefatigable Émile Eddé.
“From times long past Israel and Lebanon looked kindly on each other,” he had written the Tel Aviv fair-goers from up the coast in Beirut.
“Lebanon will not miss any opportunity and will make every effort to foster our traditional friendship and to embrace productive reciprocal relations between our two neighbors.”
In 1944, my grandparents fled Nazi-allied Romania, reaching Istanbul by boat and there taking a train to Palestine — through the border crossing with Lebanon. I wrote about it in a previous Substack post.
How interesting. Thanks, Oren!