Israel’s invasion of Lebanon must be seen in light of the Cairo Agreement
This often overlooked 1969 accord established the principles under which the armed resistance against Israel could be carried out from Lebanese soil.
It will be a year come Monday that Hamas fighters in droves crossed the border between Gaza and Israel since when the violence has been relentless. Not as such related to my being Jewish, I have only enjoyed one truly close friendship with a Muslim, a former colleague from the City. Since October 7, 2023, that friendship has been in suspended animation. I am not an Israeli and he is not of Palestinian blood, but we find ourselves interpreting events of the past year from different sides. We no longer communicate, and I miss him.
Three weeks after the initial attacks on Israel, I wrote a reflective note to a friend in America – on “Being a Jewish Briton” – which I then shared with my own readership and which the editorial team at Reaction found to be worth publishing. Not that I thought about it at the time, but had I done, I would not have expected the armed exchanges to be going on a year later. Somewhat by coincidence today, October 2 or 29 Elul 5784 in the Jewish calendar, is also the day on which the Jewish new year festival, Rosh Hashanah, begins. Along with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement which follows next week, it is one of the two highest holidays in the faith. Speaking to a reader in Israel yesterday, she somewhat jokingly observed that in the West people have fireworks to celebrate the New Year. In Israel, they get Iranian rockets.
This has been a very painful year for all of us and a war is being fought which need not have been. I shall desist from going back to the old argument as to whether the UN Resolution 181 of November 9 1947 which recommended, repeat recommended, the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab sections actually created the State of Israel – legally it did not – but on May 11 1949, the General Assembly of the UN voted in Resolution 273 by 37 to 12 with 9 abstentions to admit Israel to full membership. It remains a full sovereign member even though there seems to be little to no restriction to its destruction being called for, whether explicitly or by inference, within the halls of the UN.
Much has been written about the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza strip and its being handed over to a Palestinian authority and how the IDF was engaged in forcibly evicting Jewish settlers who refused to accept the terms of the disengagement agreement struck between Israel and the Palestinians. That Israel was this time last year not an occupying force in Gaza appears to have escaped many of the keffiyeh-touting protesters in London, New York and across countless university campuses around the world. But that is an old story which consistently runs up against that well-worn principle of “Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up….”
After a year in the epicentre of news generation, focus has moved to the North of Israel which borders on the South of Lebanon. Since October 8 last year, Hezbollah, the Iran-financed and armed organisation – in pursuit of equanimity I shall not refer to its members as terrorists – began launching rockets into Israel. It has been doing so since time immemorial for I myself was caught in a Katyusha attack on Kiryat Shmona, a small town close to the border, in August of 1969. Since October 8, Kiryat Shmona has been targeted by some 4,000 rockets, most of which have however been intercepted before they struck, but the population has fled and there remains maybe no more than 2,000 of the original 25,000 residents. The rockets that do get through the Iron Dome and that hit and destroy Israeli schools and hospitals barely ever warrant a mention. Maybe that is because Israeli authorities try to make sure that, when under attack, they are rapidly evacuated and the occupant moved to shelters.
The Lebanon situation is complex, far more so than most commentators are prepared to admit. It might have been forgotten that Lebanon, then still a prosperous nation widely referred to as the Switzerland of the Middle East, was not a combatant in the 1967 Six Day War. Israel has no gripe with Lebanon and although home to a large number of Palestinian refugees, assumed to have been around 100,000 after the 1948 war, Lebanon had no direct gripe with Israel. Again there are many references to UN Resolution 1701 which effectively ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and in which the UN committed itself to preventing a future stockpiling of weapons in Southern Lebanon which could be turned on Israel. The fact that it is estimated that by October 8, Hezbollah had amassed up to 160,000 missiles, way beyond anything at the disposal of Hamas, should not be forgotten.
Yet it is not Resolution 1701 that has caught my imagination but the Cairo Agreement of 1969. When speaking to my Israeli friend who was, by the way, in the process of digesting the latest security advice issued by the government in Jerusalem in light of the developing missile assault from Iran, I mentioned that agreement and it was something of which she had never heard.
As far back as the first piece I had ever had published in the English language – I was educated in Switzerland and although we spoke English at home and I largely read books in English, all my written schoolwork and my early submissions to the local paper had been in German – which was a letter to The Mancunian, the student newspaper at the University of Manchester, in which I argued that opinions are never either right or wrong as they are opinions but that facts are inalienable. The Cairo Agreement is not an opinion, it is a fact.
Although its wording was never actually published, it was an accord between Yassir Arafat, leader of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the commander of the Lebanese armed forces Emile Bustani, brokered by Egypt’s President Gamel Abdel Nasser, which established the principles under which the armed resistance against Israel could be carried out from Lebanese soil.
Under the agreement, the 16 official UNRWA camps in Lebanon, home to by now 300,000 Palestinian refugees, were removed from the stern jurisdiction of the Lebanese army’s Deuxième Bureau and placed under the authority of the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command. Although the camps remained under Lebanese sovereignty, the new arrangements meant that after 1969, they became a key popular base for the guerrilla movement. It also ceded administrative control of the refugee camps – now in reality no longer camps but fully fledged quarters of Lebanese towns and cities – to Palestinian authorities thus effectively creating a state within a state. Instead of Palestine being partitioned, it was Lebanon that was.
The Cairo Agreement predates Black September which marked the forcible expulsion in September 1970 of the PLO from Jordan after it had failed in its attempt to overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and dispose of King Hussein. The headquarters of the PLO were first moved to Damascus although it was not long before the regime of President Hafez al-Assad, father to the current President Bashar al-Assad, also found himself necessitated to rein in the activities of the PLO. The complexities that follow – which led to the Lebanese civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 and which pitched Lebanese Sunni Muslims against Lebanese Maronite Christians against Lebanese Druze against Palestinians – are as easy to understand as the Gordian knot is to unravel, but suffice to say that by the end, the formerly prosperous sovereign nation of Lebanon was a political, military and administrative shambles in which the Palestinian armed forces could and did move and act with impunity. To this day, rival armed groups within the refugee camps are still shooting and killing one another.
The IDF has repeatedly invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Palestinian armed groups, be that the PLO, the PFLP, Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, the most notorious of which ended with the massacre of over a thousand Palestinians and Shia Muslims in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, perpetrated by Maronite Christian militias although under the watchful eyes of the IDF. The MacBride Commission later condemned Israel of being culpable of participating in genocide since when the argument has raged as to what actually constitutes genocide. William Shabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland – Seán MacBride was himself Irish – stated that “….there was little discussion of the scope of the term genocide, which had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision”. That debate rages on with Israelis wondering why the wanton October 7 massacres have not been rated as genocide while the IDF’s strike back on Gaza has.
Events surrounding the exploding pagers and walkie talkies and the accuracy with which Israel has found and killed – I remain uncertain why media refer to these as assassinations – the leadership of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah included, not only points to how leaky the organisation’s internal security has been but confirms that Mossad and the IDF must have been preparing for this event for a very long time.
In the days, weeks and months following the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, many tens of thousands of innocent French civilians perished as the Allies strove to expel German occupational forces from French soil. This was not done intentionally, and the loss of life and destruction of property wrought by the Allies is in military terms seen as collateral damage. Israel launched its assaults on Gaza and on Lebanon, in its mind, in strict pursuit of protecting its own citizens. Of Hamas and Hezbollah, the same cannot be said. Of the hundreds of kilometres of tunnels under Gaza and in South Lebanon to my knowledge not a single meter has been used to shelter civilians from the ravages of aerial attacks. Whether or not the civilian population, especially that of Gaza, have been used as so called human shields is a matter for interpretation although it is indisputable that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah have made any meaningful efforts to draw IDF fire away from noncombatants.
Much wiser observers than myself have noted that wars are not settled at the negotiation table but end when one side can fight no more. A year ago I did not think that there would now still be a fully-fledged armed conflict ongoing in and around Israel. But then again, did we ever think that two and a half years after Putin invaded Ukraine there would still be a shooting war going on?
In Jerusalem, there stands the Dome of the Rock and next to it the Al-Aqsa mosque which together behind Mecca and Medina marks the third most holy site in Islam, not that that seems to appeal to Iran as it lobs missiles on the ancient holy city. They both stand on what the Jews call the Temple Mount, site of the destroyed temple in which was kept the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holy sites to Jews. Every Jew wishes one day to pray at the one remaining wall of the ancient temple, known colloquially as the Wailing Wall, and even I, as non-practicing as I generally am, have done so. It was a deeply emotional experience.
At the end of Yom Kippur and after 24 hours of total fasting, Jews have for centuries wished one another “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim“, next year in Jerusalem. Zionists, not all Jews, believe that they waited in exile for nearly two thousand years to return to their ancestral homeland and that they have a historical right to have done so. Palestinians have been variably waiting since 1948 and 1967. I myself am English although, until “variably” the promulgation of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 and the annexation of Silesia by Poland in 1945, my family too lost its ancestral home. That is the ebb and flow of history, of the migration of peoples and of the rise and fall of cultures. We have accepted that Silesia will remain Polish, that our claims to have our homes and our business restored to us will never be acknowledged and that gone is gone. At least my father’s family, though not my mother’s, escaped with their lives.
The media seems uncertain whether to refer to Hezbollah’s fighters as Lebanese or Palestinian. Israel’s bombing of sites in Lebanon and now its incursion into the south of its northern neighbour must first and foremost be seen in light of the Cairo Accord. The Palestinians in Lebanon are not Lebanese. Hezbollah is not funded by the Lebanese government and does not see its purpose as protecting either the people or the borders of Lebanon. It has for all intents and purposes become an occupational force. As recently as yesterday, and in advance of the IDF’s incursion, a spokesman for Israel affirmed that his country has no issue with Lebanon and regrets having to violate its borders in pursuit of its enemies. And you know what? I actually believe him.
Meanwhile, please permit me to wish all my Jewish readers “Shana Tova”, happy New Year.
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