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.
It remains unclear how aware then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was of the full extent of Sharon’s scheme. But the involvement of Israeli generals and intelligence officials in meetings near Beirut with Gemayel and other Maronite leaders meant that most Israeli leaders knew that a grand plan to “remake” the Middle East was taking shape. Though several senior Israeli officers expressed concerns over Sharon’s plan even before his miscalculations turned early military victories into an intractable quagmire, their determination to wipe out the PLO as a military force and contain Syrian ambitions in Lebanon caused them to fall into line once the invasion started.
As the war unfolded, doubts among Israeli officials about the plan’s merits—as well as fears among U.S. officials that Sharon had brazenly lied to them about his goals—were quickly confirmed. After Arafat and the PLO left Lebanon for Tunisia in August 1982, Israel’s position quickly unraveled. Gemayel was assassinated in September, and the Maronite leaders who succeeded him proved unreliable. The involvement of Iran in the conflict and the anger of Lebanese Shiites over a war that had devastated their communities added new and unexpected challenges. And the ultimate success of this Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite insurgency in forcing Western peacekeeping troops to leave Lebanon in 1983 and trapping the Israeli military into a bloody quagmire until 2000 became the foundation of Hezbollah’s dominance in Lebanon that Israel is now trying to uproot.
However, these historical links between Sharon’s plan in 1982 and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent aspiration to similarly reorder the Middle East today have overshadowed equally significant differences between the two conflicts. Even though Netanyahu has initiated military operations that contain eerie echoes of 1982, the current campaign against Hezbollah is the result of pressures quite distinct from those that dominated Israeli strategy in the early 1980s. And while Israel is as internally divided in 2024 as it was by the end of 1982, the underlying structures of Israeli politics have changed dramatically over the past 40 years.
In its focus on destroying Iran’s network of partners and proxies, Israel has offered no clear strategy for handling relations with Gaza and Lebanon after achieving military success.
To begin with, the manner in which both conflicts started is crucial to understanding why, despite some parallels between them, they won’t necessarily lead to similar outcomes. While the PLO’s position in Lebanon absorbed the entire focus of Israel’s leadership in the early 1980s, the current descent into war was triggered by attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza against communities in southern Israel. Moreover, the role played by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its partners among militias in Iraq and the Houthi movement in Yemen mean that Israel is fighting on a much wider regional scale today than in 1982.
In the early 1980s, moreover, the Syrian army in Lebanon represented a formidable but conventional military adversary. By contrast, today Syria has fragmented into several quasi-states, with the IRGC and Iranian-backed militias operating on government-controlled territory. As a result, the threat from Syria is more multilayered today, making it the target of Israeli special forces raids and airstrikes far afield of Lebanon. With Israeli ground forces also committed in Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli air and missile forces engaging in retaliatory strikes against targets in Yemen as well as Iran itself, an end to fighting against one adversary will not automatically lead to a halt of hostilities in other areas. However disastrous the quagmire in Lebanon became for Sharon, his direct successors under Netanyahu face a far more complex set of military challenges.
Exacerbating the multifront nature of this conflict is the extent to which the Israeli focus on military operations has sidelined efforts that had borne fruit over the past few years to develop a viable political strategy for Israel’s relations with its wider region. The relentlessness of Israeli efforts to dismantle Hamas look increasingly like a campaign of vengeance against the wider Palestinian population in Gaza. With longstanding grudges against Hezbollah among senior Israeli officers going back to the wars of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the more recent border conflict in 2006, the forced depopulation of entire districts of southern Lebanon in a bid to isolate Hezbollah fighters indicates that the Netanyahu government is willing to wreak the same kind of devastation there, and in Hezbollah-controlled areas of Beirut, that Palestinians have experienced in Gaza.
But in its focus on destroying Iran’s network of partners and proxies, Israel has offered no clear strategy for handling relations with Gaza and Lebanon after achieving military success. While the ability of the Israeli military and intelligence services to dismantle Hamas and Hezbollah should not be underestimated, if such tactical victories are not followed up with diplomatic efforts to enable a restoration of stability, then the Israelis will face the emergence of new threats from the chaos created by their response to the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
By contrast, though Sharon’s madcap plan for the region in 1982 completely misread Lebanese society, it at least reflected a vague awareness within the Israeli elite back then that military operations needed to flow out of political strategies to foster a stable regional order. Once the disastrous failure of Sharon’s maximalist gambits became impossible to deny, Israeli leaders with a more nuanced understanding of Arab societies engaged in a process of diplomatic outreach that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993, which for a brief period generated hopes for lasting peace in the Middle East.
Yet in a post-Oct. 7 environment in which all that unites a deeply divided Israeli society is the belief that Hezbollah and Hamas must be destroyed, it is difficult to see how political strategies to develop stable relations with the Arab world could emerge from within the Israeli state. Israel’s inability to formulate a coherent political strategy has led to intractable contradictions in its goals, on display in its demands that the Lebanese state step in to bring Hezbollah under control even as its military effort to destroy Hezbollah is further weakening that same already fragile Lebanese state. With the U.S. and European Union unwilling to exert pressure that would force Israel’s leadership to reconsider its current course, an Israeli political system dominated by right-wing parties more radical than their predecessors 40 years ago could find itself locked into a permanent state of war against insurgencies and failed states whose instability would make any kind of peace settlement impossible to sustain.
As a clear historical reference point for current conflicts, the invasion of Lebanon that was launched by Ariel Sharon in 1982 is frequently held up as an example of how Israel’s current military campaigns could go terribly wrong. Yet when examined more closely, the differences between the strategic dilemmas Israel faced in the early 1980s and the multifront conflict Israeli society seems unable to escape today are a stark indication of how much further the geopolitical environment in the Middle East has deteriorated in the past 40 years. If there is a crucial lesson to be taken from the contrasts between Sharon’s invasion back then and Netanyahu’s forever wars today, it is that even in the midst of a worst-case scenario, things can always get even worse.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.