The Palestinians and Lebanon, 1974–87
Rabat 1974 — A Diplomatic Coronation
In October 1974, twenty Arab heads of state met at Rabat and declared the Palestine Liberation Organisation, led by Yasser Arafat, the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. The Rabat resolution mattered because it stripped King Hussein of Jordan of his long-standing claim to speak for the Palestinians of the West Bank, lost to Israel in 1967. From now on, any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would have to be negotiated with the PLO. A month later, on 13 November 1974, Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, his pistol holster prominent on his belt. ‘Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun’, he said. ‘Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ The assembly granted the PLO permanent observer status. For one year, the Palestinian cause looked diplomatically unstoppable.
At Rabat in October 1974 the Arab League declared the PLO the ‘sole legitimate representative’ of the Palestinians, ending King Hussein’s claim. On 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly with the ‘gun and olive branch’ speech, and the PLO was granted permanent observer status.
The PLO Mini-State in Lebanon
After King Hussein expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970–71, the leadership relocated to Lebanon, taking advantage of the 1969 Cairo Agreement that allowed armed Palestinian operations from Lebanese soil. By the mid-1970s the PLO ran what observers called ‘Fatahland’ in southern Lebanon — armed checkpoints, social services, courts, schools. In April 1975 a sectarian massacre on a Palestinian bus in Beirut helped touch off the Lebanese civil war. The Palestinians, mostly Sunni, fought alongside Lebanese leftist and Druze militias against the Maronite Christian Phalange. Syria intervened in 1976 with around 20,000 troops, switching sides as the conflict shifted. Lebanon ceased to function as a state, and the PLO acquired the freedom of action it had lost in Jordan.
Reprisals, the Litani Operation and UNIFIL
PLO rocket and cross-border raids drew Israeli reprisals throughout the 1970s. After a Fatah coastal raid killed thirty-eight Israelis on the Tel Aviv road in March 1978, Prime Minister Begin sent the IDF into southern Lebanon. The operation pushed PLO forces north of the Litani river and left a Christian-led Israeli proxy force, the ‘South Lebanon Army’, in control of a six-mile buffer zone. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 425 calling for Israeli withdrawal and authorised UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force still on the border today. The Israeli army withdrew — partially — but reprisals and rockets continued.
It is tempting to treat ‘the PLO’ and ‘the Palestinians’ as one block, but the spec rewards students who keep them distinct. The PLO was an umbrella body led by Arafat’s Fatah, but it also contained the Marxist-Leninist PFLP and other smaller factions, each with its own line. After Rabat 1974 the PLO was the diplomatic representative of the Palestinians, but it was an Arab-state-funded leadership living in Lebanon, not a government chosen by Palestinians on the West Bank or in Gaza. By 1987, when the Intifada broke out spontaneously among occupied Palestinians, the PLO leadership in Tunis was caught off guard. The collapse of the PLO’s Lebanese position in 1982, the topic of this lesson, set up that disconnect directly.
Operation Peace for Galilee, June 1982
On 3 June 1982 Palestinian gunmen of the Abu Nidal faction shot the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov. Begin’s cabinet, with Defence Minister Ariel Sharon driving the planning, used the attack as the trigger for an invasion that had been prepared for months. Operation Peace for Galilee began on 6 June 1982. Sharon promised the cabinet a forty-kilometre advance to remove PLO artillery from northern Israel; in practice the IDF drove on to Beirut and besieged the western half of the city for ten weeks. An estimated 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and combatants were killed during the 1982 invasion and siege. US envoy Philip Habib brokered an evacuation deal in August 1982: PLO fighters and headquarters staff would leave Lebanon under multinational supervision and disperse to eight Arab countries. About 14,000 PLO personnel left by ship; Arafat and his Fatah staff went to Tunis, more than 1,500 miles from any Palestinian territory.
Sabra and Shatila, September 1982
On 14 September 1982 the Christian Phalange leader and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated. The IDF moved into West Beirut and let Phalange militias enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to flush out remaining PLO fighters. Between the night of 16 September and the morning of 18 September the militiamen massacred between 700 and 3,500 unarmed Palestinian civilians. The IDF, which had ringed the camps with flares to light the area for the killers, did not intervene. The Israeli government’s own Kahan Commission reported in February 1983 that Israel bore ‘indirect responsibility’; Sharon was forced to resign as Defence Minister, though he remained in cabinet. About 400,000 Israelis — one in ten of the population — demonstrated against the war in Tel Aviv on 25 September 1982, the largest protest in Israel’s history.
Operation Peace for Galilee began on 6 June 1982. After a ten-week siege of Beirut the PLO leadership was evacuated to Tunis in August 1982. The Kahan Commission reported in February 1983 that Israel bore ‘indirect responsibility’ for the Sabra and Shatila massacre; Sharon resigned as Defence Minister.
Hezbollah and the New Map of Resistance
The 1982 invasion did not end Israel’s problem in Lebanon — it changed it. Iran sent Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to organise Lebanon’s long-marginalised Shia community. The new movement, Hezbollah, used suicide truck bombs against the IDF, the multinational force and the US embassy. The October 1983 bombings of the US Marine and French paratrooper barracks killed 241 American and 58 French troops in a single morning. The multinational force withdrew. Israel pulled back to the south Lebanon ‘security zone’ in 1985 but stayed there until 2000. The PLO had been displaced as the symbol of armed resistance to Israel by a Shia movement Israel had not anticipated.
A common shorthand is that Israel won militarily in 1982 but lost politically. An importance answer needs more granularity than that. The PLO had its mini-state, headquarters and roughly 14,000 fighters removed from a country bordering Israel. Arafat, in distant Tunis, was harder to reach but also harder to lead from. The vacuum was filled by Hezbollah and, on the West Bank itself by 1987, by Hamas, both of which rejected the PLO’s eventual two-state turn. Sabra and Shatila, the protests in Tel Aviv and the Kahan Commission marked the first sustained Israeli internal challenge to a war policy. The PLO was militarily defeated, diplomatically isolated in Tunis, and yet politically more central than ever — because no replacement representative existed. That contradiction set up the next two years.
The PLO Reset
From 1983 to 1987 the PLO leadership in Tunis tried to reach the Palestinians it could no longer touch directly. Arafat survived a Syrian-backed Fatah mutiny in 1983 and an Israeli air strike on his Tunis headquarters in October 1985. The Palestinian National Council in Algiers in 1987 began drafting language that would lead, in November 1988, to the formal renunciation of terrorism — the topic of the next lesson. By the time the Intifada began in December 1987, the PLO leadership was a distant authority that the children of Gaza throwing stones recognised only as a flag and a name. Lebanon had given the PLO a base; it had also stripped it down to the point where it would have to make compromises a stronger PLO would never have considered.