Remembering the Murder of Lebanon's Christians by the PLO and Hezbollah

An Eyewitness Account

One of the most infuriating things about the Middle East is the global amnesia about what happened in Lebanon.

The world has largely ignored Lebanon’s Christian communities, which have been a victim of Palestinian and Hezbollah violence.

Beirut, its capital, was once called “Paris on the Mediterranean.” No more. Since the 1970’s, it’s been a killing ground of Christians by Palestinian armed militias and by Iran’s Hezbollah.

In a few moments, I want to introduce you to Rhonda, a courageous and fearless Lebanese woman who is Christian.  She and her mother fled Beirut in 1975 with only the clothes on their backs as Palestinian mortar rounds slammed into their apartment building.

Armed Palestinians bombed her neighborhood, shot at her as she tried to go to college and kidnapped her fiancé.  He was never seen or heard from again. She eventually returned to her country and operates charities there. 

She also says she is echoing her fellow Christians by telling me that the killing of Hezbollah leader by Israelis is “joyous news.”

“It’s unbelievable news,” she told me. “So many people suffered at the hands of Nasrallah. So many. We became victims of Hezbollah.  You don’t know how much we suffered in Lebanon from Hezbollah.  They were just monsters on the block.”

Her comments to me also are gruesome about what it means to be a Lebanese Christian and to face Palestinian – and later Hezbollah - violence.  She gives us a taste of what terror means on the street level, day-after-day.

The war waged by Palestinians and Hezbollah was mischaracterized as a “civil war.”   In reality, Palestinians and later Hezbollah waged a cruel war of extermination against the Lebanese Christian population.

When we hear that 20 Lebanese residents were accidentally killed by Israelis as it tries to destroy Hezbollah ammunition dumps and command headquarters located in densely populated Beirut, please also remember that 150,000 Lebanese were killed during that “civil war” and 100,000 wounded.  Most of the victims were Christians.

Let’s look at some history that’s been ignored by most of the West.  If you wish to skip the history, you can scroll down to hear “Rhonda’s Story” a Lebanese Christian.  In some ways, these Christians became the country’s “Jews” as they faced sickening atrocities at the hands of Palestinian armed groups and Iran’s Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s Brutal History Waged By Palestinian militias and Hezbollah

Christianity has had its roots in Lebanon.  As the Catholic News Agency notes, “Christianity in Lebanon traces its roots to the dawn of Christianity itself — in fact, Christ himself visited Lebanon.” 

Native Christians once were a majority in Lebanon.  As recently as the end of World War II, it was the only Christian-majority country in the Middle East.  But they’ve faced systemic genocide at the hands of Muslim armies, mainly from vicious Palestinian armed militias and Hezbollah.  

Shockingly, most of the world have ignored the pleas of Lebanese Christians.

Like the Jews who lived to their south, the Christians faced daily, unending violence by Palestinians and later by the Iranian-supported political party in southern Lebanon called Hezbollah or the Party of God.

As the Emergency Committee To Save the Persecuted and the Enslaved (ECSPE), a human rights group, reported, “During the Civil War, 150,000 people were killed, with the majority being Christians. This forced many Christians to leave the country for their safety. As a result, the number of Lebanese people living outside Lebanon (9-14 million) is higher than the number of Lebanese people living within Lebanon (4.3 million).”

ECSPE calls the civil war “a defining moment in Lebanon’s demographic and political evolution. The war, fought mainly along sectarian lines, had devastating consequences for Lebanon’s Christian population.”

“Muslim militias gained control of several historically Christian cities and territories, while large numbers of Christians were displaced,” the human rights group explains.

“The major player was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which played a central role in sending and establishing Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, particularly after their expulsion from Jordan in the early 1970s; this conflict is known as Black September,” the group notes.

Black September was formed after Jordan’s King Hussein expelled Yasir Arafat’s old Palestine Liberation Organization military arm.

Why did the King oust the PLO from Jordan?

His government ordered them to leave as they terrorized local Jordanians with openly armed terror gangs who roamed throughout the streets of its cities and robbed or kidnapped ordinary Jordanians.  The terrorists hid in Palestinian camps, cowardly seeking refuge in the camps when they weren’t assaulting Jordanians.

Eventually, the PLO plotted to overthrow King Hussein.  The King evicted them. Thousands of heavily armed terror groups escaped to southern Lebanon where they continued their violence, now against Lebanon’s native Christians.

As noted, in southern Lebanon Arafat organized “Black September.”  It was named about the time the King expelled them.

Black September’s very first  act was to assassinate Jordan’s civilian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tel in November 1971.  They gunned him down in the lobby of the Sheraton Cairo Hotel in Egypt while he was attending an Arab League summit.  Then they hijacked airplanes.

In 1972, they displayed their inhumanity by entering the Munich Olympics where they took Israeli athletes hostage and then murdered the entire Olympic team.

Once in Lebanon, the Palestinians violently attacked many non-Muslim groups that opposed them.  As ECSPC reports, “The PLO essentially created a state within a state in certain areas, operating outside the control of the Lebanese government.

As the educational site “ThoughtCo” reports, Hezbollah also operated as a state-within-a-state. The Iranian-financed terror group “is often regarded as a “deep state,” or clandestine government operating within the parliamentary Lebanese government.”

Just to make this personal for Americans, Hezbollah also attacked both the U.S. Embassy and then a U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon.  As ThoughtCo dryly states: “In April 1983, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed, killing 63 people. Six months later, the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed more than 300 people, including 241 U.S. service members. A U.S. court subsequently found that Hezbollah had been behind both attacks.”

Finally, as if it made any difference, the U.S. has done nothing to uproot Hezbollah even as it designated it as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.

It took the Israelis to kill Nasrallah and his evil associates in 2024.

It’s also quite amazing that human rights groups, Christian churches and the Pope never waged a visible, continual campaign against the Palestinians and Hezbollah as they attempted to try to conduct ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim religious communities in southern Lebanon.  The world has largely remained silent.

Now To Rhonda’s Story:

Now, about Rhonda, a bold and courageous Lebanese Christian woman who has lived through her country’s nightmare. I call her Rhonda, although t’s not her real name.  That’s because she fears Hezbollah retaliation against her and her family.

After Rhonda’s perilous escape from Beirut in 1975, she returned to her country a few years later.  Her observations about life in Lebanon under Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups are agonizing.

“My story is about human suffering,” she told me by phone.  “I just want to portray the human side of this.”

In the 1970’s, Rhonda recalls how rockets from Palestinian terrorists slammed into her neighborhood. She recalls how her neighbors were kidnapped off the streets to become long-lost hostages, including her fiancé.

She told me that at the time southern Lebanon was called “Fatahland,” because it became the home of Arafat’s Fatah Party’s PLO and later the sanctuary for the Black September terrorist group.

Rhonda recalls her days as a college student in the 1970’s. “Things just went from  bad to worse.  We were hoping it would get better and the university kept postponing the semester. There was shelling at night, gunfire throughout the day.  We would hide like everyone else did.” 

Rhonda describes the constant fear the Lebanese experienced under Palestinian and Hezbollah rule:  “Have you ever been sniped at while you’re driving?  Have you ever missed a car bomb because you stopped for coffee?  Have you had your friends kidnapped? Have you seen body parts hanging from trees?”

Looking back, she told me, “You know the war started with the Palestinians, who were more armed than the government. Then Hezbollah came in.  They came into the country as fighters for the Iranians. The Iranians seeped in very slowly.”

Rhonda is not a fan of the Palestinians who today are lionized by university professors and young college students in Europe and in the United States. “The Palestinians are foreigners. They shouldn’t really be there. Hezbollah is run by foreigners, and they shouldn’t be there,” she says.

We now turn to the present. She told me she and her friends are delighted Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s supreme leader was killed by the Israelis.

“It’s joyous news,” she says about his death. “It’s unbelievable news.  So many people suffered at the hands of Nasrallah. So many. We became victims of Hezbollah.  You don’t know how much we suffered in Lebanon from Hezbollah.  They were just monsters on the block.

“The killing of Nasrallah is good for Lebanon.  It’s good because Iran was using these people as their shield. They didn’t care.”

She says all her friends know that in the end the issue is Iran. “The problem is not with Hezbollah,” she says. “The problem is with Iran, the snake.

“But now the fight might come to them. We are relieved.  There’s a sense of hope.  Because you see, the Lebanese have had Hezbollah down their throat for more than 40 years. And for the last 25 or 30 years, you couldn’t breathe a word against them.  And now, people are now feeling OK, they’re not invincible.  We can get out from under them.”

Rhonda is also a victim of hostage-taking by the Palestinians. She deeply relates to the families whose relatives and friends are suffering because of the Hamas mass hostage-taking on October 7.

Her fiancé was taken off the street in Beirut and was taken hostage by a Palestinian group. He was never to return. “We have 17,000 like that,” she says, referring to 17,000 Lebanese who were abducted by Palestinian groups. A few were released, but most families never learned their fate.

Rhonda says in some ways, hostage taking is worse than actual death. “It’s better off that someone be killed than to be a hostage.  Because with death, you have the suffering, you can get it over with.  There’s closure. 

“When they’re taken hostage, you don’t know.  Every day it’s ups and downs. Tears and prayers. Talking to people who you think may help, who seem hopeful, but they’re really not. And then in the years, you assume they’re gone.

“In the case with George, my fiancé, about seven or eight years (after he was kidnapped),  we heard there were still Lebanese hostages alive in Syrian prisons.  And everyone got excited.  But nothing came of it.

“And after you’re sitting there, you can’t really accept that he’s gone. Because there’s always a string of hope that’s painful. Hope can be pain. It’s not always something positive.  And of course, then you get disillusioned again.

“It just makes me sick because I know how they (Israelis) are feeling who have kids or husbands taken hostage. When I lost my friends to kidnapping, it’s no different than the Israeli person who’s sitting there with Hamas,” she told me.

Today, she says the Lebanese people are tired. “I think the average population is tired and that the  continued losses at the hands of the Palestinians and Hezbollah is wearing thin.”

She says there still are signs of resistance to Hezbollah. “You know there were billboards taken out six months ago in Lebanon that read, ‘We Don’t Want War. We’ve had enough.’” That’s when Hezbollah was shooting rockets into Israel beginning on October 8, the day after the massacre and has never stopped.

She is disappointed with the Biden administration.  “The U.S. doesn’t have a backbone.  They don’t understand that the only thing these people understand is force,” she told me.

But now, she’s cautiously optimistic. “Maybe this will be a new beginning.  You know, maybe this will be the opening we wanted.  Someday, I want to have breakfast in Tel Aviv and dinner in Beirut. Why not?”