On Saturday, April 13, 2024, Lebanon marks 49 years since the outbreak of the armed Lebanese civil wars, officially dated to the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident—the so-called “straw that broke the camel’s back.”
However, many Lebanese believe that these wars began long before this historically adopted date.
What Lebanon is experiencing today reminds those who lived through the civil wars that such conflicts could erupt again, especially if the decisive external factor emerges—the one capable of reigniting an armed internal conflict.
State institutions are disintegrating, and the Lebanese people are retreating into isolation and sectarian enclaves. Security conditions are deteriorating, and every major sectarian faction is fiercely maneuvering to secure dominance within the sectarian quota-based system.
The Taif Agreement may have ended the armed conflict, but it failed to resolve Lebanon’s structural crisis or pave the way for a truly democratic state.
Instead, it established a new power-sharing arrangement, sidelining one faction from the top of the system in favor of building a troika-style governance model—which quickly turned into a new arena of conflict, reflecting shifting sectarian power balances.
Nearly a century after the creation of Greater Lebanon, it has become clear that the country is sliding into deeper fragility. State institutions continue to decay, and the only surviving force remains the sectarian system itself, whose power brokers are now seeking a new formula that mirrors the current balance of power.
Since 1976, debates have continued on whether the civil war was an unavoidable passage or if it could have been prevented altogether.
The question remains: Were internal Lebanese divisions alone sufficient to ignite armed conflict, or was an external catalyst necessary—one driven by regional and international agendas?
Reaching an understanding on the decisive factor that pushes Lebanon’s “communities” toward taking up arms could play a crucial role in preventing history from repeating itself.
The creation of the Lebanese state was not the result of a popular independence movement striving to break free from the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
Rather, it was the product of colonial inheritance—a division of Ottoman territories between Britain and France.
The new state merged Mount Lebanon, historically defined by a unique Druze–Maronite demographic, with four additional districts containing diverse religious, ethnic, and cultural groups.
This produced a fragile entity where each community carried its own history, traditions, myths, and perceptions of “the other.”
Each group retained its own political leadership and behaved as subjects of local sectarian or regional leaders, rather than citizens sharing equal rights and obligations within a unified state.
The civil war erupted in 1975, initially aimed at ending the Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon—a presence defended by some Lebanese factions and opposed by others.
This intra-Lebanese divide around the Palestinian question became one of the central triggers of the conflict.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were attempts to build a popular movement advocating political and social change.
However, the movement’s leadership approached the Lebanese people as though society were a cohesive, integrated whole, assuming that its internal divisions were merely horizontal, class-based lines of interest and dismissing sectarianism as a curable “illness” that could eventually be overcome to achieve reform.
The movement succeeded in building limited common ground across certain sectors, fostering joint interests among different social groups.
Yet, it failed to pull people away from their sectarian affiliations and prevent them from falling back under the influence of traditional leaders.
Workers, for example, would protest and mobilize for their economic rights but ultimately return to electing their sectarian leaders in parliamentary elections.
This popular movement viewed the problem primarily as one of Maronite political dominance, while underestimating the broader role of the sectarian system itself—which was, in fact, led by Maronite political power.
Moreover, the movement never sought violence as a tool for change, a stance reflected in its non-violent responses to the state’s brutal killings of Ghandour factory workers in Beirut and tobacco farmers in Nabatieh.
Despite the depth of internal division, these actors still avoided resorting to armed conflict at that stage.
The external factor in Lebanon’s civil wars cannot be understood without revisiting the aftermath of the June 1967 war, which exposed the inability of Arab regimes to confront Israel.
In its wake, the Palestinian armed struggle was launched with the aim of liberating Palestine, and military operations against the Israeli occupation began from Jordan and Syria.
On March 21, 1968, the Battle of Karameh took place, during which Israel suffered significant losses. This prompted Israel and its U.S. ally to adopt a new strategy: exploiting sectarian and communal divisions within neighboring states surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories, with the ultimate goal of dismantling the Palestinian armed presence.
In Lebanon—and here lies the crux of the matter—the Christian community was mobilized, under the pretext that the Palestinian armed presence sought to establish an alternative homeland in Lebanon, posing an existential threat to the Christian presence.
Christian political and military forces were therefore urged to “defend Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence.”
This position gained traction due to Palestinian factional excesses, growing domestic chaos, and external influence encouraging Lebanese parties to amplify the narrative that the Palestinian armed presence represented the primary threat to Lebanon.
Attempts by official Lebanese armed forces in 1973 to confront this presence failed, leaving the external actors with no option but to deepen Lebanon’s vertical sectarian divides.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese left and other sectarian groups believed it was their duty to defend the Palestinians “by all means,” assuming that Palestinian forces would be their partners in achieving the desired social and political change—all while underestimating Lebanon’s complex sectarian fabric.
As a result, Lebanon’s internal arena became trapped between two opposing visions:
– One camp believed that protecting Lebanon required ending the Palestinian armed presence.
– The other saw Lebanon as a geographical base to be used by Palestinians in their armed struggle, even if this meant civil war could become the gateway to systemic change.
Thus, the armed Lebanese civil war began in 1975, with its primary objective being to eliminate the Palestinian armed presence—a goal pursued by Lebanese factions on both sides of the conflict.
In other words, the external actors’ strategy would not have succeeded without leveraging Lebanon’s internal sectarian divides and drawing the Lebanese left into the civil war, which aligned itself with political Islam in an attempt to replace Maronite political dominance with Islamic political influence.
Yet, despite years of internal armed conflict, the Palestinian armed presence remained until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The invasion succeeded in removing the Palestinian armed forces from Lebanon, thus eliminating what Israel perceived as an “external threat.”
However, Israel’s intervention amounted to a surgical operation on Lebanon’s body politic, one that deepened vertical divisions and entrenched sectarian fragmentation.
Today, instead of pursuing national solutions that could rebuild state institutions across political, social, and economic sectors, Lebanon’s sectarian elites remain focused solely on expanding their share of power, influence, and resources—with no regard for the principles of true citizenship.
Lebanon now finds itself at a dead end.
All ruling factions are looking outward, awaiting an external settlement that will safeguard their interests—once again using Lebanon’s territory and people as pawns, even though the Lebanese have learned little from their previous civil wars.
This brief reading of the causes behind Lebanon’s civil wars inevitably leads to revisiting the post-1982 era, when the Maronite political order was replaced by a power-sharing arrangement that preserved the core of the sectarian system.
This system continues to generate periodic conflicts and recurrent civil wars, serving external agendas at the expense of Lebanon’s sovereignty and stability.
History, it seems, is repeating itself. Yesterday’s Lebanon looks hauntingly like today’s.
