From very reliable sources inside the Lebanese Front, a coalition of resistance against the Syrian-Palestinian insurrection during the 1970s-1980s, we now learn why then-President Amine Gemayel failed to end the Lebanon War by signing a treaty that was offered to him on a silver platter.
The May 1983 Accord was negotiated between Lebanon and Israel, after the latter had invaded the former and chased Yasser Arafat's terrorists out of Lebanon. Arafat was trying at the time to take control of Lebanon in order to wage his "Palestine liberation" from the south of the country. Of all the coward Arab states, only Lebanon was forced to concede parts of its territory by the 22 member states of the Arab League to the Palestinian terrorists. Not Syria, not Jordan, not Egypt, nor any other Arab country wanted the Palestinians as a guerilla fighting Israel from their border. In fact, Jordan's King Hussein had massacred his own Palestinians in September 1970, forcing them to transfer their activities to Beirut. Kuwait, the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Arab barbarians were sending money and weapons to Arafat to wreak havoc and destroy the Lebanese State, which at the time represented the only Western-oriented, democratic and liberal Arab country. The Arabs hated Lebanon because it had a Christian at the helm.
In the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion, negotiations mediated by the US led to an agreement between Israel and Lebanon. That May 1983 Accord was voted unanimously by the Lebanese Parliament, including by MPs who had actually joined the insurrection against the Lebanese government of Amine Gemayel. It was that same Parliament, which repeatedly renewed its own mandate since 1972 because no elections could be held, that signed the infamous Taef Agreement in Saudi Arabia 6 years later in 1989.
Gemayel had the US, the West, his own Parliament and the entire Lebanese people behind him, urging him to sign the Accord that his own government had negotiated. But Hafez Assad, the brutal dictator of neighboring Syria, occupied large swaths of Lebanese territory and threatened Gemayel of dire consequences if he were to sign the Accord. Peace between Lebanon and Israel would have been a death blow to the Assad regime since it would have been forced to fight Israel from its own territory, rather than from Lebanon.
Indeed, Syria has always been a "hypothetical" enemy of Israel. For example, Syria's troops in Lebanon never fired a shot against the invading Israelis. Assad had built his aura as a ferocious enemy of Israel after the latter occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in the 1967 and 1973 wars. Yet, to this day, the Assad regime never really "directly" challenged any Israeli aggression against it; it does so only via proxy terrorist organizations (like Hezbollah, Hamas, and others), and then never from Syrian territory but always from Lebanese territory. On a daily basis, Israeli jets fly into Syria, bomb various sites suspected of manufacturing or forwarding weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, then return unharmed to Israel. Against these Israeli "aggressions", there are never any Syrian retaliatory responses against targets inside Israeli territory, although Syrian propaganda always issues fallacious statements to the effect that the "valiant Syrian army responded and downed Israeli jets or missiles". Neither is there ever a question for Syria to mount its own "liberation" of the occupied-and-annexed Golan Heights, just as the one the Syrian regime has coerced Lebanon into fighting. There is no Hezbollah fighting Israel from Syria proper to recover the Israeli-occupied - and now -annexed - Golan Heights. This has been the bravery of the cowards of the Syrian regime: To fight Israel only from Lebanon, not from Syria.
After he balked, hesitated and wavered, Gemayel finally gave in to the Syrian threats against him. He refused to sign, and the May 1983 Accord fell through. Syria would the very next year expand its occupation by entering Beirut, after Hezbollah waged a terror campaign against all Western targets - US and French peacekeeping forces were bombed in October 1983, academics, journalists, clergymen and others were kidnapped, US planes were hijacked.
Let us recall that prior to the May 1983 Accord, Hezbollah was not yet organized and was beginning to emerge out of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and posed no threat yet to either Lebanon, Israel or the West in general. The PLO of Yasser Arafat was banished to Tunis late 1982, and so the May 1983 Accord presented a golden opportunity for Lebanon to exit the role forced on it as a scapegoat between all the belligerents in the Middle East conflict.
Why did Amnie Gemayel fail to seize that opportunity? Sources tell us that Gemayel was afraid that the 22 member States of the Arab League would boycott Lebanon. The Arabs at the time were virtually ALL anti-Israel, so Lebanon would be seen as aiding the Israeli enemy if it were to make peace with Israel. Even treacherous Egypt, which had itself signed a peace accord with Israel in 1979, was ambiguous about the May 1983 Accord between Lebanon and Israel.
Gemayel kept repeating that by signing the Accord, he would, and I quote, "open one door [i.e. Israel] and close 22 doors [i.e. the Arab countries]" [Direct quote from Etienne Sacre, a.k.a. Abu Arz, a founding member of the Lebanese Front representing the Lebanese resistance against the Syrian-Iranian-Palestinian occupation]. In other words, Gemayel feared for the economic repercussions on Lebanon since the Lebanese economy depends on trade with the Arab hinterland. But most importantly, he feared for his life, because his own brother Bashir, who was elected to the presidency in 1982, was assassinated by the Syrians.
Fast forward to our time. Those Arab countries whom Gemayel feared would boycott Lebanon have today made peace with Israel, normalized their relations with it, and are engaged in massive economic and technological cooperation, while Lebanon has regressed into a failed state that is begging the Arabs for help and is forbidden from normalizing with Israel. I am not surprised at the lack of vision and courage that Gemayel exhibited. After all, he is the child of a feudal family that continues to this day to oppress its local herd of Maronite peasants into a client-boss relationship. Had he signed the Accord in May 1983, he would be seen today as a courageous and visionary pioneer. Lebanon would have been, like Egypt after its 1979 agreement with Israel, a prosperous and strong country, free of Hezbollah and the Iranian occupation, free of all the Syrian agents like Aoun and Bassil in power today. The failure of Amine Gemayel smacks of treason.
Amine Gemayel became a member of parliament after the death of his uncle Maurice Gemayel. He became a leader of his party, the Kataeb, after his father Pierre's death. And he became President of Lebanon after his brother Bashir, the elect-President of Lebanon, was killed by the Syrians in a bomb in Beirut in 1982. As you can see, Amine was never a smart, let alone a courageous, politician to make it on his own, always inheriting - never earning - his positions of power from dead members of his political feudal family farm. I happen to have met him in the US in the early 2000s when he was hiding his mediocrity as a visiting fellow at a prestigious university in the US. Harvard University has a knack for inviting former warlords and dictators as visiting fellows. As I asked him a question on the future of the Lebanese political system, Gemayel fumbled an incoherent answer in very poor English before an audience of Harvard University academics and researchers who expected more of a former president of a country at war. Amine Gemayel is the prototype of how the feudal inheritance of political power, with its accessories of cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and clientelism, leads to failed states. Lebanon is rife with primitive, sectarian-based, modes of governance.
Unlike Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his courageous stance against the Russian invasion, Lebanon's leaders are fundamentally cowards, full of bravado but devoid of guts and brains. Amine Gemayel is an old man today, but he is alive. He saved his skin, but delivered Lebanon to Syria and Iran. After him, Michel Aoun bombed his own Christian East Beirut and fought his own allies, but when the Syrians were about to complete their takeover of the entire country, he fled like a coward to the basement of the French Embassy, leaving hundreds of his soldiers to die defending him. Aoun is an old man, but he too is alive. Like Gemayel, he saved his skin, but delivered Lebanon to Syria and Iran.
Gemayel's children today want to be in Parliament, pretending to be reformers, but they hail from a putrid family farm of feudal lords. I urge the Lebanese to vote, at the very least, for unknown faces and unknown names, and to break the vicious cycle of giving tribal feudal corrupt idiots like Aoun and Gemayel the reins of the country. They have run Lebanon to the ground and pretend today to want to lift it out of the cesspool in which they themselves have plunged it.
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