The Guardians of the Cedars started to form a militia in the years leading up to the Lebanese Civil War and commenced military operations in April 1975.

In April, Guardian fighters held a line in the area of Hadath, Kfar Shima, and Bsaba, south of Beirut, against a coalition of Palestinian, PSP, and SSNP forces.

[5] In 1985 the Guardians of the Cedars mounted a fierce defense of Kfar-Fallus and Jezzine, battling Palestinians and Shiite-Druze militias and protected thousands of Christians in South Lebanon.

The Guardians and other militias were largely reorganized into the South Lebanon Army, preserving much of the early ideology while adopting new military tactics.

The LRP militia began to be quietly raised in 1974 by Sakr in his capacity as president of the Party, though it was only in September 1975 when they made their existence public in an official communiqué as the Guardians of the Cedars.

Although the membership of the GoC was exclusively Maronite, Sakr allegedly maintained a loyal personal bodyguard made up of Lebanese Shia Muslims, but little is known about them.

Besides being provided with funds and training by the Kataeb Party and the Al-Tanzim, the Guardians also claimed to have received direct aid from Israel as early as 1974.

They fielded a mechanized force consisting of a single M50 Super Sherman medium tank, some BTR-152[7] and M113 armored personnel carriers,[8] a few M42A1 Duster SPAAGs and Chaimite V200[9] armoured cars backed by gun trucks or technicals.

In stark contrast to other Christian factions, the LRP/GoC despised any illegal activities such as drug-trafficking, extortion or looting, and their leader Sakr never sought to establish an autonomous personal fiefdom.

After heavy Palestinian involvement in the Lebanese Civil War, the Guardians cultivated ties with the Israeli military, receiving weapons and support.

Saqr is now considered as a traitor to the Lebanese government, alongside the likes of Antoine Lahad who resided in Tel Aviv under Mossad protection until his death in 2015.

[14] According to an Israeli military observer Haim 'Arev, the soldiers of the Guardians of the Cedars were the best and most experienced fighters among the militias that constituted the Lebanese Front.

Apparently a splinter of the Guardians of the Cedars, they held similar views to those of this party – expressed just prior to the war in anti-Palestinian graffiti bearing the 'JIHA' signature scrubbed in the walls of east Beirut's buildings – very little is known about this small and obscure organization.

The refugee population also included a substantial element of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters, especially after the 1970 Black September events in Jordan.

Still, some of the rhetoric used by the LRP in advocating its domestic policies was revived during the Cedar Revolution in 2005, which forced the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon and led to expectations of political reform.

It labored extensively to create or discover non-Arab cultural expressions, and went so far as to design a new alphabet for Lebanese Arabic, which it claims is a language in its own right.

While there were several other movements on the Christian side in Lebanon that cooperated with Israel during the war, the LNR was the only organization openly and ideologically committed to this, regarding a Lebanese-Israeli axis as the best protection against Arabism and the Palestinians.

[citation needed] The GoC was strongly anti-Palestinian, and argued for the forcible removal of all Palestinians and other non-Lebanese (e.g. Syrians) from Lebanon, both civilians and armed fighters.

1989 saw the Guardians once more fighting the Syrians alongside the Lebanese Army in support of the military interim government of General Michel Aoun.

In October 1990, as part of the end of the war, the reorganized Lebanese government forced Prime Minister Aoun out of power under Syrian demands and commands.

[16][17][18] Today, the reorganized Guardians of the Cedars is a legal and fully functional political party; lately, the term Movement of Lebanese Nationalism (Arabic: حركة القومية اللبنانية transliterated as Harakat al-Qawmiyya al-Lubnaniyya) abbreviated as MLN[19] was added to its name and it is now known as The Guardians of the Cedars Party - Movement of Lebanese Nationalism (in Arabic حزب حراس الأرز- حركة القومية اللبنانية).