Besides being the first day of Passover, this Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, which in many ways led to the crisis the country faces today. Alberto M. Fernandez considers the role the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser played in sowing the seeds of conflict:

It is the November 1969 Cairo agreement that fatefully set the stage for the civil war. That agreement, in the shadow of the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, legitimized the presence, and military independence, of Palestinian armed factions in Lebanon, creating a Palestinian state within a state which would provoke Israel and disastrously interfere militarily in Lebanese affairs and which would serve as a pattern for future intervention in Lebanon by foreign powers that continues to this day.

Beirut would become the headquarters of Palestinian factions funded by outside regimes—from Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

Lebanon is still to be considered an anti-Israel free-fire zone as it had been under the PLO. Other Arab borders with Israel would remain relatively quiet, but Lebanon would remain an active shooting gallery, first by PLO factions, then by Lebanese factions supported by Syria and Iran (particularly Hizballah). Today Palestinian factions, chiefly Hamas, still fire rockets into Israel, are still armed, and still have their arsenals and enclaves where the Lebanese army dares not go.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.