Why do Lebanese leaders keep courting Israel?

Since Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam assumed office in early 2025, mere weeks after the November 2024 ceasefire between the Lebanese resistance and the genocidal state of Israel, the new leadership, under strong US and Saudi advice, moved urgently to offer friendship and full cooperation to Israel.

Not only did they fail to protest the more than 10,000 ceasefire violations that Israel committed over the 15 months leading up to the US-Israeli aggression on Iran in late February 2026 - including thousands of air strikes, drone attacks and ground incursions that killed more than 500 people, most of them civilians - but they went as far as offering, even pleading, for direct negotiations to achieve permanent peace with the Jewish settler-colony.

Rather than blaming Israel for its ongoing crimes against the Lebanese people, the two leaders blamed Hezbollah, as if Israeli attacks were a response to the resistance, when in fact the resistance has been retaliating against unceasing Israeli aggression and occupation of Lebanese land.

Such magnanimous offers were last made by the Phalangist president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, who collaborated with Israeli invaders of his country in 1982, and his brother Amin, but they were scrapped afterwards due to much opposition.

The Israeli government initially rebuffed these recent overtures, which Salam repeatedly extended until it finally agreed last week. Facing pressure from the Trump administration, Israel has met with Lebanese officials in Washington this week for their first direct talks in more than 30 years, even as it continues to bomb Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut, killing upwards of 2,000 people in the past six weeks alone.

Israel has justified its multiple invasions and incursions into Lebanon since the late 1960s, which have killed tens of thousands of civilians, as efforts to defeat Palestinian resistance fighters who moved there after 1969, and who were forced to withdraw in 1982. It has since invoked the same justification to confront post-1982 Lebanese resistance to its illegal occupation of Lebanese territory, especially Hezbollah.

Yet present claims that resistance movements provoke Israeli aggression, and that Lebanese leaders must therefore normalise relations with Israel to achieve stability, obscure the historical record: Israeli relations with Lebanese political and religious figures eager to offer it friendship and cooperation date back to the 1920s, long before the settler-colony was even established, let alone the arrival of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon or the emergence of Hezbollah.

Indeed, Aoun and Salam are part of a long chain of Lebanese politicians eager to please Israel.

Sectarian myths

In Lebanon, a common claim is that right-wing sectarian Maronite leaders only sought to befriend Israel after 1948, in response to the arrival of more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees expelled during the 1948 Zionist conquest of Palestine by Jewish colonists - the majority of them Muslim - and the resulting demographic shift.

This, however, proves to be a fabrication. Sectarian Maronite hostility towards Lebanese Muslims precedes the arrival of the Palestinians by nearly three decades.

In March 1920, Jewish Agency representative Yehoshua Hankin and Lebanese Maronite representatives signed a treaty of cooperation that also included "prominent Muslim families", many of whom were absentee landlords who sold land in Palestine to Zionist settlers.

In March 1920, Jewish Agency representative Yehoshua Hankin and Lebanese Maronite representatives signed a treaty of cooperation that also included 'prominent Muslim families'

Contacts between Lebanese Maronite leader Emile Edde and Zionist representatives began in the early 1930s. During this period, Edde expressed his support for establishing friendly relations with Jewish colonists and "even of a Zionist-Maronite alliance".

Edde was elected president of Lebanon in 1936 and remained in contact with the Jewish Agency for the next two years.

Edde's prime minister, Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab, the first Sunni Muslim to hold the position in Lebanon's history, offered his country's guarantees of order and security to the Jewish colonial-settlements along the Lebanese border. After leaving office and seeking to regain power, Edde resumed his contacts with the Israelis in 1948 while vacationing in France.

This was followed by the signing of the infamous political treaty between the Jewish Agency and the Maronite Patriarch Antoine Arida, on behalf of the Maronite Church, on 30 May 1946.

The treaty established guidelines for close ties between the Maronites and the Jewish colonists, based on mutual recognition of rights and nationalist aspirations, including the Jewish Agency's recognition of Lebanon's "Christian character" and its assurance that the Jewish colonists had no territorial ambitions in Lebanon.

In return, the Maronite Church supported Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Deepening collaboration

Edde, al-Ahdab, and the Maronite Church were not the only parties in Lebanon offering love and friendship to Israel. The Phalangists were next. Israel established relations with them at the end of 1948 in the United States, through the mediation of the Maronite priest Yusuf 'Awad, who had contacts with representatives of the US Zionist Federation.

The main Phalangist contact was Elias Rababi, who, along with other Phalangists, held several meetings with the Zionist representatives in Europe.

Rababi informed the Israelis that if the Phalangists took over the government, they would establish diplomatic relations with Israel. In exchange, he requested funding to support Phalangist political activity and procure weapons.

While the Israelis were unconvinced of the movement's strength, the foreign ministry nevertheless paid him $2,000.

In February 1949, three envoys of the Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, Ignatius Mubarak, arrived in Israel and met with a foreign ministry official. The three claimed that Mubarak "wished to know the position of the Israeli Government on plans for a coup in Lebanon" against President Bechara Khoury due to the latter's support of integrating Lebanon in the Arab world.

Emile Edde and Pierre Gemayel were said to be parties to the plan. The Israelis responded by welcoming any attempt on the part of Lebanon's Christians to "liberate themselves from the yoke of pan-Arab leaders", but requested a detailed plan of how the coup would be staged, what forces they had backing them and the level of assistance required from Israel. The plan ultimately came to naught.

But the plan to install a pro-Israel government in Lebanon through a coup was an idea Zionists had entertained since the 1920s.

In response to former prime minister David Ben-Gurion's 1954 proposal that Israel encourage a military coup in Lebanon to establish a Christian regime allied with Israel, then prime minister Moshe Sharett dismissed it as "nonsense", writing in his diaries that no movement was strong enough to establish an exclusively Maronite state.

Given the proposal's unfeasibility, Moshe Dayan, who was the army chief of staff at the time, proposed in 1955 that Israel annex Lebanon south of the Litani River.

Before resistance

Just as there is a long history of Lebanese politicians offering a loving friendship to Israel, Israeli atrocities against the Lebanese people between 1948 and 1969 were also the order of the day, long before the existence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or Hezbollah.

During the 1948 war, even though the Lebanese army did not engage in battle with the Israelis, Zionist forces conquered southern Lebanon in what they dubbed "Operation Hiram", occupying 15 Lebanese villages as far as the Litani River.

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Zionist commander General Mordechai Makleff asked Ben-Gurion for permission to occupy Beirut, which he said could be done in 12 hours, but the latter refused, fearing international condemnation given Lebanon's neutrality.

During their occupation of southern Lebanon, Zionist forces committed one of the worst massacres of the 1948 war in the Lebanese village of al-Hula, where they slaughtered 85 civilians on 31 October. When the Israelis invaded it again in 2024, soldiers defaced the monument to the massacre, listing the names of those killed.

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In early 1949, Lebanese and Israeli officials began formal armistice negotiations at Ras al-Naqura, which proceeded "more smoothly" than with all other Arab states. Rather than express horror at Israeli atrocities committed against Lebanese civilians a few weeks earlier, Lebanese delegates privately informed the Israelis that they "were not really Arabs". They also discussed the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Israelis withdrew from Lebanese territory in March 1949.

This week's meeting in Washington DC was a repeat performance by the Lebanese ambassador to the US, who did not condemn Israel's recent massacres of Lebanese civilians but reportedly shook hands with the Israelis in a two-hour private meeting away from the cameras.

None of this will halt continued Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, any more than the extra-friendly 1949 talks halted subsequent aggression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, long before the PLO guerrillas arrived in Lebanon, Israel attacked the country close to 200 times - including raids and shootings, stealing Lebanese cattle, burning crops in border villages and towns, destroying homes and property and kidnapping Lebanese civilians - resulting in at least 23 killed, 39 injured and 81 abducted.

In 1965, Israel bombed a dam under construction intended to divert the Banyas, Hasbani and Litani rivers in Lebanon and Syria, in response to Israeli theft of water belonging to Arab states, which it sought to divert to the Naqab desert in violation of international law. It destroyed the project.

Atrocities continue

Perhaps Israel's most daring crime during this period was the machine-gunning of a Lebanese civilian plane in July 1950 by one of its air force fighters inside Lebanese airspace.

The attack on the plane, en route from East Jerusalem's Qalandya airport to Beirut, killed two people and injured seven Jordanian passengers, including a five-year-old girl whose leg had to be amputated. Among those killed were Lebanese radio operator Antoine Wazir and Arab Jewish student Musa Fuad Dweik, whose head was blown off by one of the bullets.

In 1967, Israel occupied the Shib'a Farms, even though Lebanon was not a party to the war. It continues to occupy them today.

The following year, in December 1968, two days after two Palestinian refugees from Lebanon machine-gunned an Israeli passenger plane parked at Athens airport, killing a marine engineer, Israel bombed Beirut International Airport, destroying 13 civilian passenger planes worth almost $44m at the time, as well as hangars and other airport installations.

The Lebanese government is offering Israel extensive support to neutralise Hezbollah, including criminalising the only Lebanese resistance movement that ever liberated Lebanese territory from occupation

All these atrocities were committed before Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon began to launch resistance operations against the settler-colony. Likewise, Lebanese politicians who offered cooperation with Israel did so long before these developments were later invoked to justify Israeli aggression.

Neither Aoun nor Salam is proposing anything new to the Israelis that previous Lebanese allies had not offered.

The Lebanese government is offering Israel extensive support to neutralise Hezbollah, including criminalising the only Lebanese resistance movement that ever liberated Lebanese territory from occupation and disseminating anti-Iranian propaganda.

Lebanese Justice Minister Adel Nassar posted on X this week the complete fabrication that Iran abandoned its condition for a comprehensive ceasefire that includes Lebanon in return for the Americans releasing its funds in western banks.

Yet despite all this help, nothing will sway Israel from committing more atrocities in Lebanon, and no one - not the Americans, the Saudis or the Israel-friendly Lebanese government - will be able to stop the Lebanese resistance from fighting back against this genocidal, predatory state.

Ultimately, Israel did not need to orchestrate a coup in Lebanon to secure a regime allied with it. The United States and Saudi Arabia did the job on its behalf and then some - as Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, who participated in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, affirmed when he emerged from this week's talks declaring: "We are on the same side."

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.