The 1983 Israel-Lebanon peace treaty has rightly been described by scholars as “mission impossible” and as a “perfect failure.” It came after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 in which Israel not only sought to wipe out Palestinian armed presence from Lebanon but also aspired to establish a pro-Israeli government in Beirut that would sign a peace treaty with Israel. Signed on May 17, 1983 the agreement was abrogated by the Lebanese government in April 1984 following Syrian pressure, and, in fact, never implemented. Recently declassified documents from Israel and the US shed new light on the content, context and dynamics of the talks among Israel, Lebanon and the United States. Using these documents, this paper reexamines the 1983 agreement with threefold objectives: it analyzes internal Israeli dynamics as they relate to Israeli policies in Lebanon; it studies Lebanese politics in the midst of the civil war; and it explores United States relationship with both Israel and Lebanon and it role as a broker in the Middle East. Furthermore, reading these newly declassified documents allows us to look at a “snapshot” of a significant moment for Lebanon, Israel, and Syria, in which Palestinians were losing their power in Lebanon, Hizbullah was doing its debut steps, Syrian and Iranian strategic alliance was formulating and Israel’s military and moral standing regionally and internationally were showing their first signs of erosion.