The attempt to establish a centralized state bureaucracy, begun by Chehab and continued by Hélou, came to an end with the election of Suleiman Franjieh to the presidency in August 1970. Franjieh, a traditional Maronite clan leader from the Zghartā region of northern Lebanon, sought to weaken the state security apparatus built by Chehab and Hélou, which was viewed with suspicion and resentment by many for both its corruption and its impact on Lebanon’s traditional patronage networks. However, in so doing, he proved unable to shield the state from the conflicting forces lining up against it. The dramatic increase in social and political mobilization sparked by the growing presence of Palestinian guerrillas led to the emergence of various new social and political movements, including Musa al-Sadr’s Ḥarakat al-Maḥrūmīn (“Movement of the Deprived”), and to the rise of numerous sectarian-based militias. Unable to maintain a monopoly of force, the state security apparatus was powerless to stop the increase in violence that was gradually destroying the country’s fragile social and political fabric. On the eve of the civil war in the mid-1970s, the escalating violence had deepened the fault line between the Maronite Christian and Muslim communities, symbolized in turn by the increasing power of the Christian Phalangists, led by Pierre Gemayel (see Gemayel family), and the predominantly Muslim Lebanese National Movement (LNM), led by Kamal Jumblatt.

Although occasional communal violence was already occurring, many date the beginning of the war to April 13, 1975, when the Phalangists attacked a bus taking Palestinians to a refugee camp at Tell al-Zaatar. The attack escalated an intermittent cycle of violence into a more general battle between the Phalangists and the LNM. In the months that followed, the general destruction of the central market area of Beirut was marked by the emergence of a “green line” between Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut, which persisted until the end of the civil war in 1990, with each side under the control of its respective militias. Lebanon witnessed the disintegration of many of its administrative apparatuses, including the army, which splintered into its various sectarian components.

In the midst of this violence, Elias Sarkis was elected president in May 1976. Replacing the polarizing Franjieh, he called for an end to the war, and an increasingly involved Syria added pressure on the factions to negotiate a cease-fire. Sarkis’s mediation efforts, however, were thwarted by two principal factors that continued to plague negotiation efforts throughout the civil war: the increasing interference of external actors in the Lebanese conflict and the emergence of power struggles within the various sectarian communities that ultimately militated against stable negotiations.

The first major intervention by an external actor in the Lebanese civil war was carried out by Syria. Despite its earlier support for the PLO, Syria feared that an LNM-PLO victory would provoke Israeli intervention against the Palestinians and lead Syria into a confrontation with Israel, thereby complicating Syria’s own interests. As a result, in June 1976 it launched a large-scale intervention to redress the emerging imbalance of power in favor of the Christians. Syria’s intervention sparked a more active Israeli involvement in Lebanese affairs, in which Israel also intervened on behalf of the Christians, whom Israelis looked upon as their main ally in their fight against the PLO. Thus, Israel provided arms and finances to the Christians in the south of the country while the Palestinian forces (who by 1977 again enjoyed Syrian support) continued to conduct cross-border raids into Israel. In March 1978 Israel launched a major reprisal attack, sending troops into the south of Lebanon as far as the Litani River. The resulting conflict led to the establishment of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)—a peacekeeping force meant to secure Israeli withdrawal and support the return of Lebanese authority in the south—as well as to the creation of the South Lebanese Army (SLA)—a militia led by Saad Haddad and armed and financed by Israel to function as a proxy militia under Lebanese Christian command.

The most significant Israeli intervention during the course of the Lebanese civil war, however, was the invasion that began on June 6, 1982. Although the stated goal of Israel was only to secure the territory north of its border with Lebanon so as to stop PLO raids, Israeli forces quickly progressed as far as Beirut’s suburbs and laid siege to the capital, particularly to West Beirut. The invasion resulted in the eventual removal of PLO militia from Lebanon under the supervision of a multinational peacekeeping force, the transfer of the PLO headquarters to Tunis, Tunisia, and the temporary withdrawal of Syrian forces back to Bekaa. Galvanized by the Israeli invasion, a number of Shiʿi groups subsequently emerged, including Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia that led an insurgency campaign against Israeli troops.

In August 1982 Pierre Gemayel’s son Bashir, the young Phalangist leader who had managed to unify the Maronite militias into the Lebanese Forces (LF), was elected to the presidency. In mid-September, however, three weeks after his election, Gemayel was assassinated in a bombing at the Phalangist headquarters. Two days later Christian militiamen under the command of Elie Hobeika, permitted entry to the area by Israeli forces, retaliated by killing hundreds of people (estimates range from several hundred to several thousand) in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The election of Bashir’s brother, Amin Gemayel, to the presidency in late September 1982 failed to temper the mounting violence as battles between the Christians and the Druze broke out in the traditionally Druze territory of the Shūf Mountains, resulting in numerous Christian fatalities. The Western peacekeeping forces that had been dispatched to Lebanon in 1982 likewise suffered heavy casualties, among them the destruction of the U.S. embassy by a car bomb in April 1983 and the suicide attacks on the U.S. and French troops of the multinational force stationed in Lebanon in October 1983, which hastened their withdrawal from Lebanon early the following year (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombings). By mid-1985 most of the Israeli troops had also withdrawn, leaving in their wake the proxy SLA in control of a buffer zone north of the international border.

Exacerbated by various foreign interventions, the Lebanese civil war descended into a complicated synthesis of inter- and intracommunal conflict characterized by the increasing fragmentation of the militias associated with each of the sectarian communities. The Phalangist-dominated LF fractured into various contending parties that were in turn challenged by the militias of the Franjieh and Chamoun families in the north and south of the country, respectively. Meanwhile, the Sunni community’s militias were challenged by militias organized by Islamic fundamentalist groups, and the Shiʿi community experienced fierce divisions between the more clerical Hezbollah in the south and the more secular Amal (“Hope,” also an acronym for Afwāj al-Muqāwamah al-Lubnāniyyah [Lebanese Resistance Detachments]) movement led by Nabih Berri. The Palestinians in turn endured serious infighting between Fatah factions of the PLO that had begun to return to the country following the Israeli withdrawal.

Fueled by continuing foreign patronage, Lebanon between 1985 and 1989 descended into a “war society” as the various militias became increasingly involved in smuggling, extortion, and the arms and drug trades and began to lose their populist legitimacy. This period of disintegration was crystallized with the decline of many of the country’s remaining institutions, and in 1987 the collapse of the Lebanese pound—which had demonstrated a surprising resiliency throughout the first 10 years of the war—led to a period of profound economic hardship and inflation. Furthermore, when Gemayel’s term ended on September 22, 1988, parliament could not agree on the selection of a new president; as a result, Gemayel named Gen. Michel Aoun, a Maronite and the head of what was left of the Lebanese Army, as acting prime minister moments before his own term expired, despite the continuing claim to that office by the incumbent, Salim al-Hoss. Lebanon thus had no president but two prime ministers, and two separate governments emerged in competition for legitimacy. In late November 1988, General Aoun was dismissed as commander in chief of the armed forces; because of the continued loyalty of large portions of the military, however, Aoun was able to retain a de facto leadership. In February 1989 Aoun launched an offensive against the rival LF, and in March he declared a “war of liberation” in an attempt to expel the Syrian influence. In September 1989, following months of intense violence, Aoun accepted a cease-fire brokered by a tripartite committee made up of the leaders of Algeria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.

On October 22, 1989, most members of the Lebanese parliament (last elected in 1972) met in Ṭāʾif, Saudi Arabia, and accepted a constitutional reform package that restored consociational government in Lebanon in modified form. The power of the traditionally Maronite president was reduced in relation to those of the Sunni prime minister and the Shiʿi speaker of the National Assembly, and the division of parliamentary seats, cabinet posts, and senior administrative positions was adjusted to represent an equal ratio of Christian and Muslim officials. A commitment was made for the gradual elimination of confessionalism, and Lebanese independence was affirmed with a call for an end to foreign occupation in the south. The terms of the agreement also stipulated that Syrian forces were to remain in Lebanon for a period of up to two years, during which time they would assist the new government in establishing security arrangements. For his part, General Aoun was greatly opposed to the Ṭāʾif Accord, fearing it would provide a recipe for continued Syrian involvement in Lebanon.

Parliament subsequently convened on November 5, 1989, in Lebanon, where it ratified the Ṭāʾif Accord and elected René Moawad to the presidency. Moawad was assassinated on November 22, and Elias Hrawi was elected two days later; however, General Aoun denounced both presidential elections as invalid. Several days later it was announced that General Aoun had again been dismissed from his position as head of the armed forces, and Gen. Émile Lahoud was named in his place.

In January 1990 intense strife broke out in East Beirut between Aoun and Samir Geagea, who then headed the LF, which proved very costly for the Maronite community and, over several months, resulted in the deaths of numerous (mostly Christian) Lebanese. The final vestiges of the Lebanese civil war were at last extinguished on October 13, 1990, when Syrian troops launched a ground and air attack against Aoun and forced him into exile.

The newly unified government of President Hrawi then embarked upon the delicate and dangerous process of consolidating and extending the power of the Lebanese government. A new cabinet composed of many former militia leaders was appointed, and considerable effort was devoted to the demobilization of most of the wartime militias. The process of rebuilding the Lebanese army was begun under the auspices of General Lahoud, its new commander in chief. At tremendous cost, the more-than-15-year Lebanese civil war was ended, and the framework for Lebanon’s Second Republic had been established. Throughout the war’s duration, more than 100,000 people had been killed, nearly 1,000,000 displaced, and several billion dollars’ worth of damage to property and infrastructure sustained.