Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 2005) 45
IT WOULD SURELY BE THE SECOND: LEBANON, ISRAEL,
AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR OF 1967
By Sean Foley
1
*
This essay will discuss how three factors shattered this seemingly permanent settlement. First, the
military balance following the Six-Day War ended the role of Syria and Egypt as bases for attacks
on Israel and, eventually, the intention that these states would deliver a victory over Israel for the
Palestinians. Second, Israel's total victory over Arab armies empowered the Palestinians to take
direct command of their struggle to eradicate Israel, and to use Lebanon, which already housed
110,000 Palestinian refugees from the Galilee, as a base for direct attack of Israeli territory.
Third, the Palestinians' use of Lebanese territory to attack Israel, combined with Israel's retalia-
tion, strained Lebanon's already fragile political institutions to the point of collapse and postponed
any hope of a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon for years.
In the four decades between the advent of the
Six-Day War in 1967 and 2003, there have
been few places which have witnessed more
violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict than
Lebanon and the lands adjacent to its border
with Israel. Throughout that period, the peo-
ples of these areas suffered invasion, shelling,
attacks, and occupation. By contrast, Israel's
borders with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria have
remained largely quiet, particularly since the
end of the October 1973 war.
In this context it is easy to forget that Is-
rael's border with Lebanon was the quietest in
the region in the years between 1949 and
1967, and that Lebanon, along with Jordan,
was seen as one of the Arab states most
"likely" to reach a permanent agreement with
Israel.
2
The Israeli-Lebanese border wit-
nessed less violence than marked Israel's bor-
ders with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the
1950s and 1960s. Of the armistice agree-
ments that Israel reached with its four
neighbors in 1949, the only agreement fully
operative by the time the Six-Day War broke
out was with Lebanon.
3
From the perspective
of the Maronite-dominated and Western-
leaning government of Lebanon, it was as
though the partition of Palestine in 1947 and
the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-1949 had per-
manently settled the Palestinian que stion.
4
