May 1973: Before the War

The Lebanese Civil War began on April 13, 1975. But the conditions that produced it were visible — and documented — years earlier. This cable, filed at 8:08 in the morning on May 8, 1973, is a window into one of those earlier moments: a night when Palestinian factions opened fire on Lebanese Army positions, the army responded with aircraft and tanks, a prime minister resigned before dawn, and the U.S. Embassy sent a Night Action cable to Washington.

The fighting of May 7, 1973

The fighting began around 7:00 PM on May 7. This cable describes it as a "deliberate attempt" by specific Palestinian factions to torpedo ongoing negotiations between the PLO and the Lebanese government — not a spontaneous escalation, not a response to Lebanese Army provocation. The factions the Embassy's Army sources identified as responsible were the PDFLP and the PFLP/GC, with possible PFLP and Sa'iqa involvement. All were on the harder-line end of the Palestinian spectrum. Two of them — the PFLP/GC and Sa'iqa — operated with close ties to Syrian intelligence.

The method was systematic: rockets and mortars at military installations and the airport, followed by armed vehicles driving through the city firing at police. The stated design, in the cable's words, was "to create panic and touch off a major army-fedayeen confrontation."

The Lebanese Army's response

It succeeded in touching off a confrontation, though perhaps not the one intended. The Lebanese Army responded with aircraft and tanks. By 7:00 AM on May 8, when the Embassy filed this cable, the army had already deployed this firepower against targets in and around three Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut's southeastern suburbs: Sabra/Chatila, Bir Hassan, and Borj el Brajne.

This is a fact that does not appear in the standard account of pre-war Lebanon. The Lebanese Army used aviation and armor against Palestinian camp areas in Beirut in May 1973. The conflict was contained. A ceasefire was arranged. An agreement — the Melkart Protocol — was reached nine days later. And the episode was largely absorbed into Lebanon's managed history of crises that somehow didn't become wars.

Two years later, they did.

Arafat in the negotiations

The cable's paragraph 4 contains a detail that mirrors the pattern documented in the April 30, 1973 cable from this archive: Yasser Arafat was in diplomatic meetings — with Lebanese politicians including Saeb Salam and Raymond Edde, and with Egyptian and Syrian representatives — when the fighting started. As the U.S. Embassy had assessed nine days earlier, hardliners within or adjacent to the Palestinian movement were acting in ways Arafat had not authorized and may have been unable to prevent.

By 8:00 AM on May 8, the Embassy's contact at the Lebanese Army confirmed: Arafat was trying to calm his forces.

The Syrian dimension

The cable documents something that rarely appears in standard historical accounts of May 1973: explicit U.S. Embassy awareness of Syrian manipulation. Paragraph 4 notes that Lebanon's government suspected a "Syrian hand working behind the scene" — and gives specific reasons. The Syrian Foreign Minister, Abdul Halim Khaddam, had publicly announced terms in Damascus far more favorable to the Palestinians than what had actually been agreed in Beirut negotiations. Meanwhile, the factions the Embassy identified as having initiated the fighting — PFLP/GC and Sa'iqa — were precisely those with the closest ties to Damascus.

Syria's interest in preventing a stable Lebanese-Palestinian accommodation was clear: such an accommodation would reduce Syrian leverage over both the PLO and Lebanon. The May 1973 crisis, in this cable's documentation, was not simply a Palestinian-Lebanese confrontation. It was a confrontation in which Syrian-aligned factions were working to prevent the outcome that Arafat and the Lebanese government were moving toward.

The pattern

The crisis ended the way Lebanese crises ended in those years: a ceasefire, a political adjustment, a formal agreement. Prime Minister Hafez withdrew his resignation. The Melkart Protocol of May 17, 1973 was signed — another paper framework governing Palestinian armed activity on Lebanese soil, like the Cairo Agreement before it.

But this cable documents the pattern that the Melkart Protocol did not resolve: Palestinian hardliners willing to use military force to prevent political accommodation; Syrian manipulation of events through proxy factions; a Lebanese state deploying its army against camps and then negotiating as though the army had not just used aircraft and tanks in a residential area of its own capital; a Lebanese political class managing the crisis rather than resolving its causes.

The pattern held for two more years. On April 13, 1975, it stopped holding.