The equilibrium of March 5

To understand what happened on March 6, 1975, it is necessary to understand what the Embassy believed was happening on March 5. Cable 03028’s opening paragraph describes a situation that had, after nine days of escalation, begun to stabilize.

The country-wide demonstrations in support of the Army and government on March 5 had gone off without serious violence. Christian political parties — principally the Kataeb and the NLP — had mobilized their street constituencies in defense of the state. The cabinet meeting that evening had produced the decision that the Solh government would continue in office. Malik Salam’s resignation had been absorbed; the first cabinet-level casualty of the crisis had not brought down the government. An agreement had been reached to refer Sunni-leftist demands for army-command reform to a cabinet study committee, to satisfy the Sidon fishermen economically, and to transfer the army’s southern district commander to “other posts” — a formula that addressed the Sunni complaint without conceding the structural issue of army command.

The Embassy’s characterization is precise: “thanks to a typically Lebanese solution in which no problems were really solved but were merely to be brushed under the rug for the time being.” The crisis had been managed, not resolved. The arrangement depended on nothing external disturbing it.

Two external disturbances arrived within fourteen hours.

The Savoy Hotel attack

On the night of March 5, 1975, eight Fatah fighters from the Black September Organization — operating under Fatah’s internal designation Force 17 — landed by rubber dinghy on the Tel Aviv seafront. They were led by Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar’s deputy and were briefed, according to Israeli reconstruction, to take as many civilian hostages as possible and exchange them for imprisoned Palestinian fighters.

They came ashore at the Savoy Hotel on HaYarkon Street, a beachfront tourist hotel in central Tel Aviv, and stormed the building. Eleven guests were taken hostage. Over the next ten hours, Israeli special forces from Sayeret Matkal assaulted the hotel; all but one of the attackers were killed, along with eight Israeli civilians and three Israeli soldiers. The attack was among the deadliest inside Israel in the history of the Palestinian armed struggle to that point.

The political problem the attack created for Lebanon was not the attack itself but the geography of its origins. The fighters had launched from Lebanese territory — standard practice by this point — and the probability that Israel would retaliate against Lebanon was approximately certain. The Lebanese state could calculate, as it had calculated after every Palestinian attack from Lebanese soil since 1968, that an Israeli reprisal would come; the question was scale and target. At a moment when the Sidon crisis had been contained but not resolved, an Israeli reprisal that required the Lebanese Army to respond would convert the containment into a regional war.

Saad’s death

At mid-day on March 6, 1975, Maarouf Saad died at American University Hospital in Beirut, eight days after he had been shot by Lebanese Army fire in the fishermen’s demonstration. The Embassy’s prediction of February 27 was validated.

The cable is precise in its wording: “News at mid-day March 6 of the death in AUB Hospital of ex-deputy Maarouf Saad (who had been wounded in Feb 26 clashes in Sidon).” The death is placed on a specific cable and a specific paragraph, connected to the Feb 26 cause by a direct reference. The cable does not need to editorialize: the connection between cause and effect is in the diplomatic record across the nine days.

The immediate operational response was swift. PLO offices in Beirut — the Fatah headquarters in Fakhani, the PFLP offices in Hamra, the DFLP offices, the Sa’iqa offices — were evacuated. Personnel and materials were moved from known political addresses into the refugee camps and distributed safe houses. This was the standard PLO response to an expected Israeli air or commando operation. Fedayeen went on full alert at the fifteen refugee camps. The country was posturing for an Israeli attack that it believed was coming within hours.

The cascade that the February 27 cable had predicted — mass demonstrations, general strike, paralysis of urban life — began within hours of the death being announced. Leftist and Sunni Muslim sympathizers, accompanied in many places by fedayeen, blocked roads, burned tires, fired weapons in the air. The barricades that had been dismantled in Sidon after the March 2 truce reappeared. In Beirut, the army’s internal security forces found themselves attempting to clear crowds from arteries they had never expected to be blocked — including the road to the airport.

Fire on the Lebanese planes

In the cascade of events on the morning of March 6, one small incident stands out as a miniature portrait of the crisis. Palestinian fighters at refugee camps north of Tripoli — the Beddawi and Nahr al-Bared camps, though the cable does not specify — opened fire on aircraft overflying their positions. The aircraft were in fact Lebanese Air Force, on routine operations. The fedayeen had assumed they were Israeli.

The incident reveals the posture of expectation. Palestinian fighters were operating, hours after Saad’s death and the news of the Savoy attack, in a state of readiness for immediate Israeli assault. The confusion of nationality — Lebanese aircraft assumed to be Israeli — is a symptom of the conditions under which people take cover first and identify later. It is also a signal of how far the operational coordination between the Lebanese state and the armed groups it nominally hosted had broken down. Lebanese Air Force aircraft could not fly over Lebanese territory without being mistaken for enemy aircraft by armed groups on that territory.

What the incident would have looked like if the fedayeen had been equipped with the SAM-7s reported in Sidon’s citadel is an exercise the reader may perform. No Lebanese pilot was hit; no Lebanese aircraft went down. But the underlying fact — that Palestinian fighters in Lebanese territory had the armament and the disposition to shoot down aircraft without identifying them — was one the Lebanese state could not ignore.

The Higher Islamic Council

On March 6, the Higher Islamic Council of the Lebanese Republic — the supreme body of the Sunni religious-political establishment, headed by the Grand Mufti — issued a public declaration demanding that the Solh cabinet resign. The declaration named three men as responsible for “the current state of affairs”: President Frangieh, the Army leadership, and Prime Minister Rashid Solh himself.

In Lebanese confessional politics, the Prime Minister’s office is reserved for a Sunni Muslim. Any Sunni Prime Minister governs with the consent — or at least the non-opposition — of the Sunni religious establishment. For the Higher Islamic Council to publicly demand the resignation of a sitting Sunni Prime Minister, and to name him by name, was an act of confessional abandonment. It meant that Solh’s own religious community had formally withdrawn its political confidence from him. No Sunni Prime Minister could govern without the Council behind him. The Council had moved.

Solh survived in office for another ten weeks. But his May 15 resignation was not a new event when it arrived; it was the formal acknowledgment of a political reality that had already taken shape on March 6. The Council’s declaration was the turning point at which the confessional framing of the Sidon crisis became institutional. From this point forward, the crisis was not about a fishing concession or an army operation; it was about the balance of confessional power in the Lebanese state.

March 7: a city under general strike

Cable 03064 is the Embassy’s late-morning report from March 7, filed from a city under general strike. “Right now Beirut is generally quiet as the result of a general strike,” the cable opens — but the sentence ends in its own qualification: “groups of men (some of them armed) can be observed at roadblocks scattered throughout the city.”

The strike was effective in the Sunni and mixed commercial districts. It was not observed in Christian commercial districts. The resulting geography was itself politically eloquent: the districts that closed and the districts that stayed open constituted, in real time, a map of the political coalition forming in response to Saad’s death. What the cable describes as “Beirut generally quiet” is a city in which half of commercial life has stopped and the other half has not, with the line between the two corresponding to the confessional fault lines of the country.

In the Corniche Mazraa area — adjacent to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and to the Fakhani PLO headquarters district — “armed fedayeen from nearby camps much in evidence.” This was not a discrete political demonstration; it was the practical deployment of fedayeen forces to hold a major Beirut artery against Lebanese state authority. The road to the airport was blocked by “milling demonstrators.” The road from the U.S. Embassy in Ain el-Mreisseh to the main hotel district in Ras Beirut was blocked. The Lebanese security authorities publicly urged all foreigners to stay off the streets — a measure that concedes, in the language of public-order announcements, that the authorities could not guarantee the safety of foreigners on the streets of the capital.

The Israeli sonic booms

The cable notes, in passing, that “several loud explosions (apparently sonic booms caused by overflying Israeli aircraft) were heard during the late morning hours.” In the spectrum of Israeli pressure signals, the sonic boom is a deliberate low-end demonstration: the aircraft are there, they are visible and audible, but they are not striking. The boom is political, not military.

The timing of the overflights was precise. They coincided with the morning of the Saad funeral and the general strike. They were Israeli signaling to the Lebanese government and to the Palestinian leadership simultaneously: Israel was watching, Israel had strike capability in the airspace, a decision could be taken at any moment. Together with the fedayeen firing on Lebanese planes the previous day in the mistaken belief that they were Israeli, the overflights produced a saturated airspace in which every party was calibrating to the same imminent possibility.

No Israeli attack on Lebanon came in those 24 hours. When Israeli retaliation for the Savoy Hotel attack finally materialized — in the form of Operation Marvad / the Mount Moussa raid on December 2, 1975 — it was nine months later, the civil war had been under way for six months, and the Lebanese state had already lost the capacity to respond that the Embassy feared would be forced on it. But on March 7, 1975, the possibility of immediate Israeli reprisal was part of the air over Beirut.

The Embassy closes

The final paragraph of cable 03064 is short and operationally specific. At 1030 local on March 7, the U.S. Embassy sent its non-essential American employees home with instructions to remain there for the remainder of the day. The British Embassy did the same. In diplomatic practice, a daytime protective drawdown of this kind is initiated only when the Chief of Mission judges the streets unsafe for routine Embassy circulation.

The measure was not an evacuation. It was not an emergency action. It was a calibrated protective response: keep the people we do not need out of the streets until the event (the Saad funeral and its aftermath) has passed. But the fact that the measure was judged necessary, and the fact that it was taken in coordination with the British, is the cleanest indicator in these cables of the Embassy’s actual real-time assessment of the threat level on the streets of Beirut on March 7, 1975.

The cable closes with the Embassy’s acknowledgment that the confessional turn had set in: “Events over the past nine days have tended increasingly to assume confessional overtones, with Sunni Muslims displaying growing and open dissatisfaction over what they regard as Christian monopolization of power within the GOL and the country at large.” And: “Christians, in return, have tended more and more to react hostilely to these pressures, attributing them to leftist and Palestinian ‘subversion’ and manipulation of the Sunni population.”

The framing was now in place. The civil war would begin five weeks and one day later, on April 13, 1975, when Phalange gunmen attacked a bus of Palestinian workers on their way home to the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Ain al-Rummaneh. The fuse lit on February 26 in Sidon, confirmed by Saad’s death on March 6, institutionalized by the Higher Islamic Council’s declaration of the same day, and deployed on the streets of Beirut on March 7, had five weeks and one day left to burn.