As the war rages in Lebanon and the Israeli occupation is reestablishing itself on about 25% of the Lebanese territory, and following the uncovering of “generations of committed Lebanese Christian Zionists” in Morgan Ortagus latest speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I found myself reading and researching early Zionist ties between Lebanon and Israel.

 

 Most of this article is based on “The Policy of the Zionist Movement and the State of Israel toward Lebanon (1919–1958) by Reuven Erlich, 1998 (PhD dissertation, Tel Aviv University). This is a document that I couldn’t find for reading so I found some information about it online and I compiled it to write the following, with personal views.

Reuven Erlich is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and researcher specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, particularly Lebanon and Israeli strategic thinking. His work often focuses on how Israeli and Zionist institutions interpreted regional political fragmentation and minority dynamics.

Erlich’s dissertation studied how the Zionist movement, and later the State of Israel, approached Lebanon between 1919 and 1958. A central idea that stands out is that early Zionist strategy did not view its neighbors as a unified Arab bloc, but rather as a fragmented region composed of distinct religious and ethnic communities. These views still stand today as the policy of divide and conquer is soaring in Palestine, in Syria with the Druze community and in Lebanon, focusing mainly on the Maronites, a Christian community that historically distanced itself from Arab nationalists identities and preferred aligning with Western ones, most probably for religious similarities.

Within the early Zionist movement, Lebanon was seen as a uniquely important case due to its sectarian diversity, the French Mandate political structure, the strong Maronite Christian political presence and the relative distance from immediate Arab nationalist centers at that time.

This led to an early strategic assumption: Lebanon might develop a political identity distinct from broader Arab nationalism, potentially opening space for pragmatic cooperation with Israel.

Israel built on that during the Lebanese war, by arming Christian militias against Palestinian liberation fighters and until this day, it upholds a narrative that it has intentions of protecting Christians and developing strong relations with their leaders. This narrative keeps deepening the schism in the Lebanese sense of identity, feeding the desires of separatism. Again, the policy of divide and conquer.

In early Zionist perception, the idea of engaging non-Muslim or non-Arab elites was part of a broader strategic logic of regional fragmentation.

In this view, Lebanon was important not because of ideological affinity, but because of its internal political composition and external alliances, particularly with France who has been historically supportive of the Zionist project on Arab land.

Erlich highlights that early Zionist engagement with Lebanon was informal, exploratory, and elite-driven, focusing primarily on Maronite Christian leadership circles like Emile Eddé, a leading pro-French Maronite political figure who represented a vision of Lebanon closely tied to Western protection. This is what the current presidential administration and government are working towards today by starting negotiations with Israel, as its military targets civilians and private property daily, claiming that the US and France will help Lebanon for the mere reason that they hold a special affection towards it. These were words spoken by the current foreign minister Youssef Rajji and also the leader of the Lebanese forces party Samir Geagea in response to the question : “what leverage does Lebanon have today in negotiating with Israel?”. In May 2026, Rajji again stated that his party “has no problem in considering a separate Christian state if this protected Lebanese Christian rights”. Again, this is the current foreign affairs minister.

Based on these answers, it becomes confirmed that Lebanon’s only leverage is compromising on its military ability to defend the land from outsider attacks, gas fields and land which would mean surrendering the resources and border, in exchange of stopping the assaults and assassinations. This is not peace of course. Peace means liberation, freedom, compensation and reconciliation. But as “peace talks” take place in Washington today, houses are being demolished in a buffer zone of roughly 70 villages that Israel claimed and flattened. Drones are deliberately targeting anti-Zionist journalists and para medics. Entire families are being wiped out. UNEASCO world heritage sites, older than Rome and empires are being bombes.

Pretending to sell hopes of Peace in the times of genocide is absolute nonsense.

Other Elite Maronite figures that Erlich mentions are Bechara El Khoury , the first president after independence and the co-architect of the National Pact that creates the sectarian system that we know today. Charles Malik, an intellectual and diplomat who embodied a strongly Western-oriented Lebanese political outlook and also Pierre Gemayel, the Founder of the Kataeb Party who advocated a Lebanese nationalist identity emphasizing cultural distinctiveness. This same party was a main player in the Lebanese war, representing Lebanese refusal for the PLO to engage military from Lebanese territory and this resulted in a direct collaboration with Israel that left thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and fighters dead, with a destroyed capital in 1982.  Israelis never practice restraint in wars. To the contrary, they go all the way raging on everything that lives and everything that stands. The Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 and 9 weeks of siege left 17000 dead, with hundreds of injured and traumatized and created a big wave of immigration and alos, the occupation of the southern area of Lebanon, until the year 2000. 

According to Elrich, some Lebanese elites, particularly within Maronite circles, were primarily concerned with preserving Lebanese autonomy, balancing Arab nationalist pressure and maintaining relationships with Western powers such as France. After a century of Zionism we know by now that Lebanon will not be granted any rights without compromises towards Israel and this is what is happening in the Washington talks today.

The early Zionist-Lebanese contacts were facilitated by the French Mandate channels or other informal diplomatic or intelligence contacts and they shared concerns about regional political dominance by larger Arab nationalist movements. Also today, France is still mediating talks between the Lebanese government officials and their counterparts in Israel, under the broader patronage of the empire of course.

In early Zionism and also today, Lebanon is imagined as a buffer state with a demilitarized barrier, located between two hostile powers to prevent direct conflict between the superpowers. But the contradiction here is that Lebanon’s territory is included in the expansionist view of the Zionist project of Israel which makes the idea of a neutral Lebanon absurd. Israel is an expansionist state that is not ready to announce final and official borders. This kind of ambition keeps fueling clashes in the region surrounding it, and feeding resistance movements as well.

How Israel approached “the Lebanese problem” since fall 2023 makes me think of Livia Rokach’s work and views on their logic of state power and security during their early and formative years. 

Livia Rokach’s work, particularly Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, is often read as a sharply critical interpretation of early Israeli state policy, especially in the 1950s. 

Based largely on her reading of Moshe Sharett’s diaries,  she revealed a deep internal divide between more cautious diplomatic approaches and more forceful security doctrines. She presents this as a strategy that sometimes extended beyond immediate defense into shaping the behavior of neighboring states through pressure and fear. This resonates perfectly with Israel’s retaliation response in July 2006 and March 2026 when it raged over Lebanon with countless pounding, targeting civilians and destroying entire villages while burning the land with illegal white phosphorus and glyphosate.

Rokach argues that Israeli decisions were often justified as existential necessities, which she describes as a form of “sacralizing” state security, turning it into something beyond normal political or ethical debate. From her perspective, this framing made it easier to justify actions that had severe regional consequences and from my perspective, this allowed a fascist belief in Israeli society that lesser people exist and that killing their babies is self defense. This also leads to the parroted justification we keep hearing in Western media on “Israel’s right to defend itself with all possible means”.

Today we witness a large propaganda campaign led by the US and Israel in Lebanon and beyond to gaslight the Lebanese people and their sympathizers into admitting that the only problem they face is Hezbollah. It is true that this organization is responsible for much suffering and crimes on Lebanese territory and beyond but it is far from being Lebanon’s main problem. The biggest terror for Lebanon was and still is Israel with their continuous ways to expand their powers by taking over the land and the resources and by applying racist policies within their borders and separatism strategies within neighboring countries, by using airforce superiority to force governments into submission and by committing war crimes and terrorist acts that are never properly and sufficiently condemned by the West, never leading to justice and punishment by applying international law.

However, with growing US pressure and support, the Lebanese Zionist lobby is growing stronger in Lebanon and in the diaspora and the Lebanese are holding their breath and bracing for normalizing ties that don’t seem to include any kind of justice, liberation and compensation.

Photo credit By Hossein Wahab – a view from Al Rihan Village in South Lebanon.