As Israeli troops began their ground offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon last week, analysts looked back to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to make sense of the current descent into chaos. The comparisons of Israel’s war to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s military wing in the 1980s and its current quest to crush Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups in the region offer some parallels. Nevertheless, it is the differences between the world of 1982 and today’s brutal realities that provide more useful indications of the Middle East’s geopolitical trajectory.
At first glance, there are superficial similarities between the current Israeli effort to completely obliterate Hezbollah and the massive offensive in 1982 that ended with Israel’s army surrounding Beirut to force the expulsion of the PLO and its then-leader, Yasser Arafat. In both cases, years of ongoing raids as well as rocket and artillery strikes between well-armed insurgents and the Israeli army generated a fraught atmosphere across southern Lebanon and northern Israel. During the 1970s as well as the early 2020s, these tensions became intertwined with wider conflict dynamics in the Middle East in ways that bolstered the position of hawks within the Israeli leadership who believed that Israel’s strategic dilemmas could only be resolved through military force.
In 1982, the Israeli figure whose hawkish instincts were central to bringing about the invasion of Lebanon was then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Working with like-minded generals within Israeli’s military and officials from his right-wing Likud Party, Sharon pieced together a plan to transform the balance of power in the Middle East. The attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat in London by a Palestinian faction in June 1982 provided him with the pretext he was looking for to put it into practice. After pushing aside Syrian troops in Lebanon and putting the PLO in Beirut under siege, Sharon used his position of strength to back Bachir Gemayel, a Christian Maronite leader hostile to Syria and the Palestinians, to become Lebanon’s president.