(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When giant explosions tore through Beirut last week, Israel had two immediate reactions: The first was to deny any connection to the blast. This appears to be correct. The Lebanese government (which resigned Monday under public pressure) would never have taken responsibility for the carnage if there had been any plausible way of blaming Israel.
The second reaction could be construed as offering neighborly support. Tel Aviv lit up its city hall with the colors of the Lebanese flag. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz — rival coalition partners who agree on virtually nothing — each offered good wishes and emergency medical aid to the citizens of Beirut.
Unsurprisingly, their gestures were rebuffed. Although they may have simply been pro forma, there is still something disquieting about Israel extending an offer of support to Beirut. The city is an enemy capital. It is also a place with an enduring — and dangerously seductive — hold on the Israeli imagination.
Back in the 1960s, it was axiomatic that Lebanon would not be the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, but it would certainly be the second. Israelis loved Lebanon, a pro-western country ruled largely by a handful of aristocratic Maronite Christian clans. These rulers spoke French, prized western education and eschewed the more virulent strains of Nasserist anti-Zionism alive in the region. They also had personal militias, which sometimes skirmished with one another but often stood together in the face of a rising Muslim population.
In the early 1970s, however, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was booted out of Jordan and set up shop in Beirut and southern Lebanon, where it conducted a campaign of terrorism across the Israeli border. It destabilized the balance of power in Lebanon, and the country’s grandees turned to Israel for salvation. A pact was made, plans were drawn up, and in June 1982 the Israeli army invaded Lebanon.
The idea was that the Israel Defense Forces would join forces with a Maronite Christian militia under the command of Bashir Gemayel, the scion of the Gemayel clan, to drive the PLO out of Lebanon. In exchange, a new Lebanese government would sign a deal with Israel and indeed become the second Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state.
In August 1982, Israel defeated the PLO and expelled its leaders from Lebanon. Bashir Gemayel was elected president that month but assassinated three weeks later by pro-Syrian enemies. His brother Amin Gemayel replaced him, and in 1983 the promised pact between Israel and Lebanon was signed. But it was never implemented, and in 1984 the government of Lebanon repudiated it.