Class Interest Above Country: The History of Lebanese Elite Collaboration with Zionism

For decades, mainstream narratives around Middle Eastern politics have sought to reduce the struggle over Palestine and the Levant to an ancient, intractable religious feud. Yet, a materialist analysis of Lebanese history reveals a starkly different reality: the governing logic of the ruling class has long been defined by capital, class survival, and imperialist preservation.

While the Lebanese working class, peasantry, and impoverished masses have repeatedly spilled blood to resist Western imperialism and Zionist expansionism, Lebanon's comprador bourgeoisie—spanning every major religious sect—has consistently prioritized its narrow economic and political interests. From the pre-1948 Mandate era through the brutal violence of the 1982 invasion, and into today's modern push for normalization amidst economic devastation, the history of the Lebanese ruling elite is a masterclass in collaboration. When class privileges are threatened, national sovereignty and anti-colonial solidarity are the first commodities thrown onto the trading block.

Foundations of the Comprador State: Land, Water, and Mandate Pacts

The material foundations of Zionist settlement in Palestine were laid not merely through European colonial funding, but through the active economic participation of Levant landowning elites. Long before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement recognized that breaking its regional isolation required building deep economic and political relationships with the Lebanese ruling class.

As historian Hicham Safieddine documents in his detailed analysis for Middle East Eye, Zionist agents and pre-state institutions systematically cultivated relationships with Lebanese landowning families, commercial oligarchs, and political powerbrokers. Crucially, this economic collaboration transcended sectarian divisions:

• Cross-Sectarian Land Sales: Feudal landowning families sold massive tracts of agricultural land directly to Zionist purchasing funds like the Jewish National Fund. These sales included the Greek Orthodox Sursock family (whose vast estates in the Marj Ibn Amer / Jezreel Valley were liquidated, displacing thousands of Palestinian tenant farmers), the Sunni Salam and Beyhum families, and the Shia As'ad notables. For these oligarchs, cash flow and capital accumulation far outweighed the existential threat posed to Palestinian peasants.

• Resource and Infrastructure Exploitation: Zionist figures like Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion sought to secure vital freshwater assets in southern Lebanon, including the Litani River and the tributaries of Mount Hermon. Lebanese capitalists and intellectuals—such as Alfred Naccache, founder of the right-wing "Young Phoenicians" movement—actively investigated joint hydroelectric and commercial ventures with Zionist planners.

• The "Alliance of Minorities" Myth: Politically, the Zionist movement exploited the reactionary framework of an "alliance of minorities" to groom Maronite elites. Figures like Mandate-era President Émile Eddé expressed willingness to settle 100,000 European Jewish refugees in southern Lebanon to shift regional demographics. In 1946, the pre-state Jewish Agency signed a secret pact with the Maronite Church under Patriarch Antoine Arida, formally acknowledging the right to Jewish settlement and statehood in Palestine in exchange for guarantees of Maronite political dominance in Lebanon.

When the 1948 Nakba occurred, these elite networks did not vanish; they went underground, waiting for the next geopolitical opening to reassert their shared class imperatives.

The Lebanese Civil War and the May 17 Capitulation

The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 exposed the extent to which the Lebanese right wing was prepared to ally with foreign imperialists to suppress revolutionary and anti-colonial movements. Facing a powerful coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters, Lebanese leftists, communists, and progressive trade unions, the right-wing Christian oligarchy—led by the Phalangist (Kataeb) Party and the Lebanese Forces—turned directly to Tel Aviv for heavy weaponry, funding, and tactical intelligence.

This collusion reached its horrific apex during Israel’s full-scale 1982 invasion of Lebanon. As Israeli tanks rolled into Beirut, right-wing Christian militias acted as proxy infantry, culminating in the horrific massacres of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Following the siege of Beirut, the Lebanese ruling elite sought to codify their submission to imperial power. On May 17, 1983, the Lebanese Parliament voted almost unanimously to approve a bilateral peace agreement with Israel. Driven by a desire to restore capitalist "business as usual" and secure US backing, the Lebanese political establishment effectively attempted to turn the country into an Israeli satellite state.

It was only through a heroic, armed popular uprising led by leftist, secular, and nationalist resistance organizations—coupled with military strikes against occupying forces—that the May 17 Accord was torn to pieces before it could be implemented. The popular forces proved that while the political class was ready to surrender, the working class would not accept occupation.

Banking Elites, Media Empires, and the Modern Normalization Drive

Four decades later, the structural crisis of Lebanese capitalism has brought the question of collaboration back into the open. Following the catastrophic 2019 collapse of Lebanon’s Ponzi-scheme banking system—which wiped out the life savings of millions of working-class households—the political and financial elite found themselves backed into a corner. To shield themselves from prosecution for grand corruption and money laundering, key figures among the oligarchy have once again offered their services as agents of Western-Zionist normalization.

A primary example of this modern comprador network is Antoun Sehnaoui, chairman of Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL) and a major media investor. As detailed by Middle East Monitor, investigative reports have exposed Sehnaoui as a central figure financing media outlets—such as This Is Beirut, Ici Beyrouth, and Hunna Lubnan—that actively disseminate anti-resistance propaganda and advocate for diplomatic alignment with Israel.

The brazen nature of this collaboration was laid bare during an event at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where former US Middle East envoy Morgan Ortagus publicly praised Sehnaoui. As reported by Al Jazeera, Ortagus openly celebrated Sehnaoui’s family as "committed Lebanese Christian Zionists" and commended his funding of pro-Israel cultural initiatives—acts that are explicitly illegal under Lebanese law prohibiting direct contact with the Zionist entity. This public praise occurred precisely while Israeli forces were actively launching devastating air strikes across southern Lebanon and Beirut, killing hundreds of civilians and displacing over a million people.

Sehnaoui’s family lineage mirrors the historical pattern: his father, Nabil Sehnaoui, was a primary financier of right-wing civil war militias that colluded with the 1982 invasion. Today, the younger Sehnaoui uses the capital extracted from the looted savings of ordinary Lebanese citizens to purchase diplomatic immunity in Washington, dining with war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu while funding media outfits affiliated with neoconservative Washington think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Disarmament as Capitulation

The push for normalization is not merely an individual effort by rogue bankers; it is a coordinated, state-level imperialist strategy aimed at stripping Lebanon of its defensive capacity. Facing catastrophic economic collapse, the Lebanese political establishment—represented by figures like President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam—has capitulated to US-brokered frameworks that tie financial reconstruction aid directly to the disarming of anti-Zionist resistance forces.

A rigorous Marxist analysis by the World Socialist Web Site demonstrates how the US–Israeli diplomatic strategy operates. The Trilateral Framework Agreements signed in Washington demand the verifiable disarmament of Hezbollah and non-state armed groups, effectively redefining national sovereignty as the military suppression of internal resistance rather than freedom from foreign occupation.

This agreement imposes zero enforcement mechanisms on Israel to halt its military aggression, release political prisoners, or cease its illegal occupation of strategic southern posts like the Beaufort Castle ridge. By adopting the Zionist narrative that armed resistance—rather than decades of Israeli aggression and land annexation—is the root cause of instability, the Lebanese bourgeoisie is serving as the administrative caretaker of a US–Israeli protectorate.

This systematic surrender of national independence is framed by socialist observers as a complete capitulation to imperialist diktats. In a critical assessment of regional diplomacy, International Viewpoint underscores that the framework agreement represents a structural submission to multiple threats: economic strangulation by the IMF and Gulf petro-monarchies, military intimidation by the IDF, and political betrayal by a comprador class that views anti-Zionist resistance as a threat to its domestic hegemony.

The Task of Anti-Imperialist Resistance

The history of Lebanese elite collusion with Zionism confirms a fundamental law of Marxist theory: the national bourgeoisie in the Global South, bound by its global financial ties and fear of domestic social revolution, cannot be trusted to lead a national liberation struggle.

From selling ancestral lands to pre-state Zionist funds in the 1930s, to signing the May 17 Accord under foreign occupation in 1983, to modern bankers funding pro-Israel think tanks while the working class starves, the Lebanese ruling elite has repeatedly chosen class interest over country. They understand that a genuine victory over Zionist settler-colonialism and Western imperialism would inevitably usher in a social transformation that dismantles their corrupt, sectarian-capitalist regime.

For anti-imperialists, socialists, and anti-Zionists worldwide, the path forward requires clarity. Liberation cannot be achieved by appealing to comprador state institutions or capitalist politicians. The defeat of Zionist expansionism and imperialist domination in the Levant depends entirely on the international solidarity and organized power of the working class, uniting across sectarian borders to dismantle both the foreign occupier and the domestic elite who serve them.