The fishermen and the concession

The spark of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War has many candidates in the secondary literature. The Ain al-Rummaneh bus attack of April 13. The Kaslik Conference. The 1969 Cairo Agreement. The entire trajectory of confessional politics since 1943. These U.S. diplomatic cables from late February 1975 suggest a more precise answer: it began on the morning of February 26, in the old port city of Sidon, when fishermen surrounded city hall to protest a fishing concession.

The concession had been granted to a company called Protéine, a modern industrial trawler operation. The company was partly owned by Camille Chamoun, former President of Lebanon and a central figure on the Maronite Christian right. Small-boat fishermen in Sidon — men whose grandfathers had fished the same waters — argued, correctly, that industrial trawlers would rapidly deplete the inshore fish stocks that sustained their livelihoods. The economic injury was real. But the concession carried a meaning that went far beyond fish.

Sidon in 1975 was a Sunni Muslim city in a country whose commercial and political power was concentrated in Christian hands. Its economy was marginal; its young men were migrating to the Gulf or to the Palestinian resistance. When the Solh government awarded a fishing concession that would drive the Sidon fishermen out of business, and when the concession went to a company controlled by one of the most visible Maronite political figures of the era, the grievance was not about fish. The grievance was about a system.

On the morning of February 26, 1975, Maarouf Saad — Sunni Nasserist ex-deputy, founder of the Popular Nasserist Organization, longstanding patron of Sidon’s poor — came out at the head of the fishermen to make the grievance visible. By the end of the morning he had been shot by Lebanese Army fire, the old quarter of Sidon was a battlefield, and the Lebanese state had begun the slow collapse that would produce fifteen years of war.

What happened at city hall

Cable 1975BEIRUT02611, filed at 16:49 GMT on February 26, captures the first day in a form so immediate it reads almost like a news wire. At approximately 0930 local time, demonstrators besieged city hall. Shooting erupted. The Lebanese Army units stationed nearby were ordered to intervene. The melee that followed lasted more than an hour — a running firefight between Army troops, demonstrators, and “armed elements” firing from rooftops in Sidon’s medieval quarter.

The phrase “armed elements” is a diplomatic euphemism the Embassy uses throughout this crisis. It means fedayeen — Palestinian fighters — but the Embassy cannot quite say so directly, because the Lebanese government is publicly committed to the position that the 1969 Cairo Agreement regulates the fedayeen presence and therefore that fedayeen do not fire on the Lebanese Army in Lebanese cities. The cable’s Comment paragraph makes clear what “armed elements” actually are: “fedayeen elements with whom the leftists have a close working relationship.”

At some point during that first hour of melee, Maarouf Saad was shot. The cable reports the fact directly: “Maarouf Saad apparently was cut down by Army fire.” No ambiguity, no alternative attribution. The Army shot him. He was in critical condition in hospital by afternoon. A jeepload of Lebanese soldiers was caught in the subsequent crossfire. Three Lebanese personnel died that morning. Twenty to twenty-five civilians were wounded.

By 1600 local, the Army had sealed Sidon. Roadblocks on every artery into town. Telephone lines cut. UN observers forced to detour and reporting armed fedayeen in the streets and continuing gunfire from the town center. An Embassy officer was clearly still trying to piece the story together when the cable went out less than an hour later.

The “ruse” hypothesis

The Comment paragraph of cable 02611 is one of the most consequential passages in the entire Sidon file. It presents two competing explanations for what had happened. The first is that the Army’s intervention against demonstrators “touched sensitive leftist-fedayeen nerves, with the result that matters got quickly out of hand.” The second, which the Embassy acknowledges as “unconfirmed,” is more disturbing:

“We have picked up an unconfirmed report that the fisherman’s demonstration was only a ruse mounted by ‘rejectionist’ fedayeen elements and their Sidonian leftist allies to draw the Lebanese Army into conflict with fedayeen units in Sidon and elsewhere, and thereby embarrass PLO leadership in its relations with the GOL. One factor which tends to support this theory is evidence that ‘armed elements’ on Sidon’s rooftops may have been positioned there prior to this morning’s demonstration.”

If this is correct — and the corroborating detail about pre-positioned gunmen is not trivial — then the Sidon uprising was not a spontaneous miscarriage of police action. It was deliberate political engineering by Palestinian rejectionist factions (probably PFLP, PFLP-GC, and dissident Sa’iqa elements) seeking to force a confrontation between the Lebanese Army and the broader fedayeen movement. Their objective: embarrass Arafat, break the restraint the PLO mainstream had maintained under the Cairo Agreement framework, and produce the kind of generalized crisis that could collapse the existing Lebanese-Palestinian arrangement.

The cable does not endorse this hypothesis. But it does not dismiss it. It records it as a live possibility on day one, before the historical record had been overwritten by the cascade of events that followed.

SAM-7s in the citadel

The same Comment paragraph contains a parenthetical that should not be read past:

“Fedayeen probably have enough munitions — including SAM-7s at last report — stored in the city’s crumbling Crusader citadel to blow it sky high.”

The Strela-2, NATO designation SA-7 Grail, was a Soviet-made shoulder-fired heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile. It had been introduced to Arab armies in the early 1970s and had shot down Israeli and Egyptian aircraft in the October 1973 war. It was, by 1975, a strategic-level weapons system. And the Embassy is reporting that fedayeen in Sidon have some, stored in a medieval fortress at the center of a Lebanese city.

The 1974BEIRUT11970 cable in this archive also documents SAM-7s in fedayeen possession in Lebanon. Taken together, the reporting establishes that by early 1975 the Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon had moved beyond small arms and rocket-propelled grenades to include man-portable anti-aircraft missiles capable of threatening Israeli or Lebanese military aviation. This is not a detail. It is a structural fact about the balance of force, and it constrained every subsequent Lebanese and Israeli decision about how to handle Sidon.

The Army withdraws

Cable 1975BEIRUT02682, filed at 16:22 GMT on February 27, documents the second day. It opens with a sentence that — read in retrospect — is one of the decisive passages of Lebanese political history.

“Sidon remained isolated from the rest of Lebanon Feb 27, as GOL — in return for what we understand (but cannot confirm) were PLO assurances that it would act to restore public order in town and bring under control ‘armed elements’ who were involved in yesterday’s shooting incidents — withdrew Lebanese Army units to town’s outskirts.”

The Lebanese state had, in the space of twenty-four hours, gone from sealing Sidon with roadblocks to ceding control of the town’s interior to the PLO. The condition of the withdrawal was a PLO promise to restore order; the Embassy notes it cannot confirm the promise was even made. The practical result was that heavily armed fedayeen moved through the streets of a Lebanese city “unmolested.” Shops were closed. Burning tires were everywhere. Sporadic gunfire continued.

This was a sovereignty-transfer event. Not in law — the Lebanese state retained formal authority over its territory — but in fact. The Army would not re-enter Sidon without PLO consent. When the Army tried to reopen the coastal road on March 1, the fedayeen ambushed them and forced a second withdrawal (see cable 1975BEIRUT02837). When the settlement was finally negotiated on March 12–14, the Lebanese government’s ability to police South Lebanon had been visibly broken (see cables 1975BEIRUT03203 and 03256).

The decision to withdraw was rational in isolation. The alternative was a direct Army assault on the fedayeen-held old quarter, a fight the Army could only win at the cost of massive casualties and the destruction of large parts of a historic Lebanese city. No Lebanese government could survive ordering that fight. The problem is that this calculus was structural, not situational. It meant that every comparable crisis — and there would be many — would end with the same accommodation. Each accommodation left the armed groups stronger and the state weaker. The cumulative effect, over years, was the construction of parallel security structures inside Lebanon that no one now had the power to dismantle.

Solh’s public denial

Prime Minister Rashid Solh responded to the crisis with a public statement declaring that fedayeen “were not involved in any way” in the February 26 shooting. The Embassy’s comment on this statement is drily contemptuous:

“Report contained para 1 above, combined with reports that Solh spent most of last night reasoning with PLO leaders and various leftist figures, would appear to belie this claim.”

The gap between what the Lebanese government said in public and what its senior figures did in private was not new in 1975. It was a structural feature of Lebanese politics — the mechanism by which confessional compromise was sustained. The Cairo Agreement had to be presented as a voluntary arrangement between friendly parties; the fedayeen had to be presented as guests; the Army had to be presented as an impartial national institution; the cabinet had to be presented as acting in confessional balance. Everyone understood these were fictions. The fictions were load-bearing.

What made the Sidon crisis different was that the fictions could no longer be maintained in parallel. Solh could not at the same time deny fedayeen involvement in public and negotiate with the PLO in private about fedayeen behavior. Once the contradiction became visible, the Sunni political street demanded that the government act on the public statement, while the fedayeen presence in Sidon made that impossible. The Prime Minister was trapped between two incompatible realities. He would try to navigate the trap for another ten weeks before resigning on May 15.

Jumblatt’s impossible position

The cable’s most psychologically precise observation concerns Kamal Jumblatt. Jumblatt was, by February 1975, the paramount Druze chief, the leader of Lebanon’s largest leftist political party, the principal interlocutor between the Lebanese left and the Palestinian armed movement, and a minister in a cabinet presided over by a Maronite president whose approach to fedayeen-Army relations he had spent years opposing. The Embassy diagnoses his position in three words:

“Jumblatt finds himself in somewhat ticklish position, sympathizing as he does with leftist-fedayeen positions but being obliged — out of loyalty to Frangie — to defend Army’s Feb 26 intervention and subsequent actions in Sidon.”

The “ticklish position” was not sustainable. Jumblatt could hold it as long as no confrontation forced him to choose. The Sidon crisis was that confrontation. Within weeks he would be publicly leading the Lebanese National Movement — the leftist-Palestinian alliance — against the Frangieh government. Within two years he would be dead on a mountain road in the Chouf, almost certainly killed by Syrian agents after he broke with Damascus over a Syrian-backed partition plan. The entire arc from his “ticklish position” of February 27 to his assassination in March 1977 took twenty-five months.

The prediction

The single most historically specific sentence in the two cables is tucked into a parenthetical Comment in paragraph 2 of 02682:

“If Saad should actually die, these manifestations could assume serious proportions.”

Saad died on March 6, 1975, eight days after this cable was filed. The manifestations the Embassy predicted — nationwide general strike, mosque-centered demonstrations, the paralysis of Beirut — arrived on schedule and are documented in the 1975BEIRUT03028 and 1975BEIRUT03064 cables in this archive. The Embassy’s prediction was validated precisely and catastrophically.

The prediction is in the record in U.S. Embassy cable traffic on February 27, 1975. No U.S. or Lebanese policy decision was taken on the basis of it. No diplomatic initiative was launched, no mediation proposed, no de-escalation offered to the Sunni political community before Saad died. The Embassy saw the crisis coming eight days in advance, filed the analysis, and then watched it unfold.

What the cables do not say

Two of the most important facts about the Sidon crisis do not appear in these first two cables. First: Saad’s shooting was not an accident of a crowd-control operation gone wrong. The Army was ordered to intervene against a demonstration in which an ex-parliamentarian was leading fishermen against a government-granted concession. Whatever the proximate mechanism of the shooting — crossfire, targeted fire, confused close-quarters action — the underlying fact is that the Lebanese state used lethal military force against a political protest, and the protest leader was killed. That this was sustainable within the existing political system, that no senior official resigned over it, that the Prime Minister was still in office ten weeks later, is itself a diagnosis of the system’s capacity.

Second: the crisis was not a Sunni-Maronite crisis in February 1975. It was not yet a confessional war. The protest was about a fishing concession; the violence was about the Army’s response; the political argument that followed was about army reform and the rights of the Sunni commercial class. The confessional framing would emerge over the next two weeks and is documented in the 1975BEIRUT03203 cable’s SECRET/LIMDIS analysis. What these first cables show is a state apparatus discovering, in real time, that it did not command a monopoly of legitimate force within its own borders — and that this was about to become a political fact visible to its entire population.

On February 27, 1975, the Embassy predicted that if Maarouf Saad died the manifestations would assume serious proportions. On March 6 he died. The next cables in this archive document what happened next.