Global Policy Forum

By Henry Laurens

South Lebanon's Border Wars

In April the UN Security Council welcomed Israel's decision to withdraw from south Lebanon. It stressed however - at Syria's insistence - the need to achieve a full, fair and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338. Much remains unclear. How far will the Israeli troops withdraw? How will Hizbollah respond? What about its demands for the release of its men held in Israel and the return of seven villages in the disputed border territory? The danger of escalation cannot be ruled out.

The Arab states' genuine solidarity with the Palestinians and their resolve to adopt a strong position on Arab nationalism are not the only reasons for their active interest in the Palestine question. From the 1930s, they felt threatened by Zionist territorial claims on Transjordan (now the East Bank), the Golan Heights and south Lebanon. Undone by their manifest unpreparedness in the 1948-49 war, the Arab governments were ready in the subsequent negotiations to agree on a compromise: land for peace, in which Israel would give up the land it had won and return to the UN 1947 partition line. But David Ben Gurion's government wanted peace for peace. The future of the programme of Zionist expansion remained open.

The situation after the 1949 armistice, neither war nor peace, rapidly became untenable. The arrangements had been thought of as temporary measures of a purely military nature, creating no political or territorial rights. The forced decision to extend them beyond the initial period was to give rise to a new type of conflict - border wars.

Initially, these wars comprised two distinct phases. First, action by regular troops on both sides over land whose status had not been decided under the terms of the armistice, with the paradoxical result that the various demilitarised zones' became prime targets for confrontation between Israeli and Arab forces. Then, infiltration by Palestinian refugees seeking to return home, recover their property, or simply get to the West Bank from the Gaza Strip across the lines laid down in the armistice. The Israeli army had been charged with maintaining the de facto situation created in 1948-49 and preventing any refugees from returning. Its response was to fire indiscriminately on those who tried to get in and execute any that were taken prisoner. By 1950-51 the attempts to get in had become military operations by improvised commando units, the first fedayin who attacked the Israeli civilian population.

The Lebanese border was quiet at the time - smuggling was the only source of trouble there. The border with Syria was a real hot spot, though the fighting only involved regular army units. The border with the West Bank saw both types of action, Palestinian infiltration and head-on clashes between regular army units. In the Gaza Strip and along the border with Egypt, refugee activities were more frequent than military operations.

In these border wars, the Arab states had no control over the activities of the first fedayin. Their hold over the people was still too weak and they were forced to adopt a more or less passive attitude, especially as it was politically and ideologically difficult for them to oppose the actions of the commando units (1). Their national efforts were concentrated on defending the lines laid down in the armistice against Israeli encroachment (2).

On the Israeli side, two considerations prevailed. Arab resistance was regarded as a determination not to accept the existence of Israel and as a permanent threat to the security of the state and its people. At the same time, the Zionist territorial programme had not been completed and the Israeli government took advantage of the lack of clarity in the terms of the armistice to impose a de facto situation on the ground.

In 1952-53, the border wars hotted up and the Israeli army, which had dug in, was at a disadvantage. David Ben Gurion and his men, including Moshe Dayan who was appointed chief of staff in 1953, adopted a new strategy under which priority was given to shock troops, especially highly mobile parachute units. Their targets would now be civil rather than military: instead of attacking Arab forces or supposed fedayin bases, they would hit the economic infrastructure and the people, so as to force the Arab states to move against the fedayin, rather than the Israelis. Retaliation and deterrence were their watchwords.

Getting Rid of the Fedayin

In Egypt, this strategy had mixed results. The murderous raid on Gaza in February 1955 let to the arrest of the fedayin by the Egyptian army and an increase in the bloody operations of the Palestinian commando units, which advanced to the gates of Tel Aviv itself. At the same time, Israeli reprisals led directly to Egyptian rearmament. In September 1955 Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that Egypt was to buy arms from Czechoslovakia, ushering in the era of the Soviet Union and its allies' involvement in the Middle East.

Only after Suez and the Israeli invasion in 1956 were the necessary deterrents introduced. UN forces were stationed along the border in 1957. After the June 1967 war and the conquest of the Sinai peninsula, the new cease-fire line on the Suez canal was the scene of an exhausting war of attrition that lasted until August 1970. It proved impossible to hold that line and in October 1973, the Egyptian army launched a surprise attack and crossed the canal.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Jordanian army on the West Bank was caught between the Israeli forces and the commando operations, as the waves of Arab revolt threatened to engulf the young King Hussein's fragile regime. Whenever the monarchy summoned up its strength and cracked down on the fedayin operations, its credibility among the Arab nationalists suffered and it lost ground with the Palestinians. Whenever the state relaxed its grip because of changes in the balance of power between government and nationalist revolutionary forces within the country, the fedayin returned to the attack. The effects of the Israeli actions were double-edged. Beyond a certain point, the monarchy had not the political strength to oppose the people's desire for revenge. After the war of June 1967 events took the same course in the area previously known as Trans-Jordan. Peace was only restored along the whole border with Israel in September 1970 - Black September - when the fedayin were finally crushed and driven out.

The trouble in Syria was with regular troops, not fedayin, and there were frequent confrontations up to 1967, particularly over control of the demilitarised zones, which would eventually be divided between the two countries (3). After Israel occupied the Golan Heights in June 1967, the clashes were more sporadic (4) and peace was completely restored in the border area after the 1974 disengagement agreement, negotiated under the aegis of the United States and scrupulously respected by Damascus ever since.

Altogether, on three borders - with Syria, Egypt and Jordan - the Israeli government had got what it wanted, namely to make the Arab states guarantee its security and force them to put a stop to the activities of the commando units. The people in the countries concerned paid a heavy price. On the pretext of reasons of state, these countries now became fully militarised states, heavily dependent on their security services, with dictatorial governments seeking military parity with Israel to shore up their own positions and committed to a debilitating arms race. The strategy of deterrence by means of reprisals against civilian targets also led to regular Arab troops being stationed on Israel's borders, putting the country's own security at risk.

The surprise military attack of October 1973 was to have a deeply traumatic effect on Israel. Hence its strategy of seeking to establish demilitarised zones - or zones in which the Arab military presence was minimal - along all its borders. In the case of Egypt, it achieved this objective after the Camp David accords of 1978. Much of the border with Jordan consisted of natural barriers and the October 1994 peace treaty included provisions for permanent cooperation in security matters. To consolidate these gains, Israel needs to agree security arrangements with Damascus and this is a key issue in the current negotiations.

Until 1968 Lebanon was largely spared in the border wars and its low level of militarisation enabled it to maintain a liberal regime and an open society. President Fouad Chehab (1958-64) attempted to strengthen the state and the army in the aftermath of the 1958 civil war, but the political establishment put a stop to it. Lebanon was only drawn into the conflict after the Arab defeat in June 1967. The Palestinian resistance gained a foothold in the south of the country just as the Lebanese National Movement was being formed, with its own agenda. The reputation of the Palestinian resistance was then at its height and the LNM was a natural ally.

Israel fell back on its twin principles of retaliation and deterrence. It hoped to get the fedayin brought to heel, even at the cost of a having a strong Lebanese state to contend with, but all the Lebanese army's attempts failed and instead the state collapsed in a wave of interdenominational violence, which turned to civil war in 1975. The moment of truth came in 1976 when the Syrian army took action against the Palestinians and their allies in the LNM. It looked as though it might occupy southern Lebanon, a move that would alter the strategic position and upset the balance of power. Israel responded by setting strict limits on the advance of Syrian troops and forbidding them to enter southern Lebanon. In so doing, it saved the PLO from destruction. It also paved the way for a resumption of the civil war and prevented the establishment of a Syrian-Lebanese power base. That crucial decision meant that the border wars would continue.

Hizbollah Gains

Israel itself was to pay an increasingly heavy price. First came its military intervention as far as the Litani river in spring 1978, followed by the establishment of a security zone that solved none of the problems. Then, the 1982 war with Lebanon, a considerable extension of guerrilla activities, and the ignominious withdrawal of the Israeli army, with its trail of interdenominational massacres. As a result of Israel's continuing involvement in Lebanon, the Palestinians were marginalised and the Shia community began to play an increasing part in the armed resistance. Israel failed to gain recognition as a legitimate player, while Syria went from strength to strength.

With the conclusion of the Ta'if accords in 1989 and the rebuilding of the Lebanese state under Syrian supervision, Israel was faced with a new dilemma: to allow Lebanon to regain sovereignty over the south, recognising Syria's victory with nothing in return, or to maintain the lines it had forbidden the Syrian and Lebanese armies to cross. Israel took the second course, opening the way for Hizbollah to survive as the only effective Lebanese militia. The border wars went on. Also, as the PLO had done in 1981-82, Hizbollah now took a leaf out of the Israeli book in the retaliation and deterrence department. Whenever Israel attacked Lebanese civilians, Hizbollah retaliated in kind, forcing the Israelis into purely military engagements in which the occupying troops naturally came off worst in any encounter with guerrillas (5). Successive Israeli governments endeavoured to get out of this situation by terrorising the civilian population in Lebanon with Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, but these large-scale military operations had the opposite effect. The agreement reached in the spring of 1996 legitimised Hizbollah resistance against the occupying forces.

Ehud Barak's government has now announced that it intends to withdraw from south Lebanon by July, even if no agreement is reached. There are, however, still two matters outstanding. Will the Israeli forces be less exposed to Hizbollah attacks after they have withdrawn to the international border and, if so, will they mount even more devastating operations against Lebanese installations and the civilian population in that country? If agreement is not reached, will Israel maintain the lines it has laid down and refuse to allow the Lebanese and Syrian armies to take up positions close to the international border? In that case, is there not a contradiction in Israel's demanding the disarmament of Hizbollah and the demilitarisation of south Lebanon at one and the same time? However that may be, south Lebanon - even if the troops withdraw - will continue to be an important issue in the negotiations between Israel and Syria and any future security arrangements. For Damascus, this is a trump card in an otherwise very weak hand.

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* Lecturer at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco), Paris, and author of La Question de Palestine Vol.1: L'invention de la Terre Sainte (1799-1922), Fayard, Paris, 1999.

(1) It is typical that, on the Egyptian side, the fedayin had close links at the time with the Muslim Brotherhood, a political force at odds with the government authorities.

(2) A striking feature of UN observers' reports from the 1950s is how often the Israelis were held responsible for incidents, usually to do with land.

(3) See maps showing changes in borders and demilitarised zones in Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2000.

(4) The Syrians played little part in the war of attrition conducted by the Egyptians under Nasser.

(5) See Marina Da Silva and Walid Charara, "South Lebanon resistance fights on", Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 1999.

Translated by Barbara Wilson