The Inescapable Price of Lebanese Errors

A thick cord binds together all the Lebanese errors whose price will inevitably be paid in 2026 — those errors that ultimately led to the return of the Israeli occupation. What we are witnessing today is the natural consequence of an accumulation that began even before the Cairo Agreement of November 1969, that ill-fated pact concluded between Lebanon and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The agreement consecrated the collapse of the Lebanese state by leading it to abdicate its sovereignty over a portion of its territory.

Whoever abandons part of his land abandons, in practice, sovereignty over the whole of it. No Lebanese politician spoke at the time about the catastrophe that the Cairo Agreement represented, with the sole exception of the Amid Raymond Eddé, who grasped the danger of the event and its full implications.

Before the signing of the Cairo Agreement, Lebanon had treated lightly the events shaking the region, including Israel’s destruction of the Middle East Airlines fleet at Beirut airport in the final days of 1968, in retaliation for Palestinian groups’ use of the Lebanese capital’s airport to launch hijackings of aircraft bound for Israel — among them a flight between Athens and Tel Aviv.

Lebanon failed to grasp what the destruction of the MEA aircraft meant. Rather than understanding the lesson, it moved toward signing the Cairo Agreement, with all that this implied in terms of opening Lebanon’s borders to Palestinian groups to launch attacks against Israel.

Lebanon went still further in its accumulation of errors. Parliament elected Sleiman Frangieh, the grandfather, as President of the Republic in 1970. He was a patriotic man, but one whose political culture was very limited, particularly at the regional level. How could Sleiman Frangieh have absorbed the significance of the extremely grave events unfolding across the region — the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the rise of Anwar Sadat, Hafez al-Assad’s accession to power in Syria, the expulsion of Palestinian fedayeen from Jordan and their passage into Lebanon through Syrian territory?

All these historic events occurred in 1970 in the absence of any Lebanese authority attuned to what was taking place in the region. Sleiman Frangieh moved from an attempt to eliminate the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon in May 1973, to addressing the United Nations in 1974 to speak in the name of the Arabs on the question of Palestine. There was no Lebanese awareness of the significance of the consequences of the October 1973 war, nor of the divorce it produced between Egypt and Syria. Anwar Sadat was moving toward a settlement with Israel, while Hafez al-Assad was working to seize control of Lebanon and of the Palestinian decision-making process, which resided in Beirut where Yasser Arafat had made his home. Assad the father regarded an independent Palestinian decision as “heresy” and considered Lebanon nothing more than a theater of operations compensating for Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights. For the late Syrian president, control over Lebanon was far more important than recovering the Golan.

Lebanon entered the civil war in 1975 without the Christians realizing they were falling into the trap that Hafez al-Assad had set for them. In 1976, Assad obtained American and Israeli authorization to lay his hands on Lebanon — and particularly on “the bases of armed Palestinians affiliated with the PLO,” in the words of American officials of the time, foremost among them Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who believed that military intervention in Lebanon would prevent a regional confrontation that the armed Palestinian presence in a zone capable of threatening northern Israel might otherwise provoke.

Lebanon has no choice but to revisit this period of its history if it wishes to preserve itself. It is more necessary than ever to learn from missed opportunities and, before that, from the errors that led to an underestimation of what Israel is capable of doing — an Israel that cannot withdraw from southern Lebanon without a price.

What Lebanon is being asked to pay today is not only the cost of the last two wars — the war of support for Gaza and the war of support for Iran — which Hezbollah entered on Iranian instructions, but also the accumulated debt of decades of compounded errors. These errors span more than fifty-seven years, the age of the ill-omened Cairo Agreement and the events that preceded and paved the way for it, on Lebanese soil and in the surrounding region.

The pivotal notion today is the capacity to absorb regional and international developments — a capacity that Hafez al-Assad mastered throughout his long years of rule. He mastered it to the point of transforming his military entry into Lebanon into a service rendered to the Americans and the Israelis, who once again authorized him to lay hands on the country in 1990. At that time, the Syrian army entered Baabda Palace and the Ministry of Defence at Yarze, thanks to the stupidity of Michel Aoun — a stupidity that reflects the foolishness and opportunism of a considerable portion of Lebanon’s Christians. In October 1990, Michel Aoun believed that Saddam Hussein, bogged down in the sands of Kuwait, would come to his rescue and keep him in Baabda Palace!

No one in Lebanon held Michel Aoun accountable for this crime. On the contrary, Hezbollah deemed that he deserved a reward — and that reward was his elevation to the presidency of the Lebanese Republic in 2016.

Much will depend, for Lebanon, on how the negotiations with Israel are conducted. These negotiations are now a reality. Israel wants a price. How can Lebanon pay it while obtaining in return the restitution of its occupied territories and the return of the displaced to their villages and towns, even if those lie in ruins?

One cannot spend all these years accumulating errors and then escape the reckoning. Errors carry a price that cannot be evaded. But what matters more than the price is the lesson to be drawn from it. Has Lebanon, in 2026, learned enough from the mistakes of the past to understand that its very survival now resembles a miracle more than anything else?