Lebanon: harmed from outside and from within
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Most conflicts get told as a story with an outside aggressor. Lebanon does not fit that shape, and trying to force it into one produces a false account.
From outside
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, again in 1982, again in 2006, and fought a war there from 2023 until the ceasefire announced on 3 June 2026. Under that agreement the Lebanese army has begun a phased disarmament process, and Israel continues to hold Lebanese territory. Lebanon has remained one of the most active conflict zones in the region even after the ceasefire, with continued exchanges of fire.
Syria occupied Lebanon militarily from 1976 until 2005, leaving only after the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri produced mass protests.
From within
Lebanon’s confessional power-sharing system distributes state offices between religious communities. In practice it has functioned for three decades as an arrangement among a small number of families and factions who treat the state as a shared inheritance.
Two events make the cost of that concrete.
In 2019 the Lebanese pound lost the overwhelming majority of its value and the banks simply closed to ordinary depositors. People with savings watched them evaporate while those with political connections moved money out. It was not a natural disaster; it was the end point of a financial arrangement that had been visibly unsustainable for years.
In August 2020, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at the port of Beirut detonated, killing more than 200 people, injuring thousands and destroying a large part of the city. Officials had been warned about the material for six years. No senior figure has been convicted. The investigation has been obstructed repeatedly by the political class it would implicate.
The response
In October 2019, before the explosion and during the currency collapse, Lebanon produced one of the most striking protest movements of the past decade — the thawra.
What made it remarkable was what it refused to do. It was cross-sectarian in a country whose entire political architecture is built on sectarian division. It was largely leaderless, which made it difficult to co-opt. And it did not target one faction while sparing others. Its slogan was kellon yaani kellon — all of them means all of them.
It did not succeed in replacing the system. Very few such movements do. But it demonstrated something that any account focused only on foreign aggression would miss entirely: that a large part of the Lebanese population had identified their own governing class as a primary source of the harm, and said so in the street, at scale, for months.
Why both halves have to be said
Because leaving out either one produces a lie.
An account of Lebanon that mentions only Israeli and Syrian intervention erases the corruption that hollowed out the state. An account that mentions only domestic corruption erases four invasions. Both are true simultaneously, and the people living there have had to deal with both simultaneously.
That is the standard this site tries to hold to across all six cases: name whoever is responsible, including when the answer is inconvenient for the slogan.