Lebanon's Past Century: Prelude to Disintegration or Regeneration?

By Mary Barrett

By the mid-nineteenth century the Arabs had lived for 350 years under Ottoman Turkish rule. But the intellectuals of the Arab world, looking forward to a time of independence, were considering the form their society and its government would take. Europe had moved into a period of centralized government and industrialization. Its need for control over raw materials, trade routes, an cheap labor accounted for its adventures into more richly endowed and less sophisticated areas of the globe.

In World War I Turkey and Germany were allies. England, already deeply involved in the Arab world, signed official documents with Sherif Hussein of Mecca promising support for Arab nationalist aspirations in return for help in defeating Turkey. The Arabs fulfilled their end of the bargain unaware that Britain and France had secretly agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves. After the war, as founding members of the newly formed League of Nations, they were able to fulfill their ambitions via "mandates." England was awarded Palestine and Iraq. France acquired Syria, which it promptly partitioned.

To previously autonomous Mount Lebanon, where the largest Christian community in the Middle East already lived in symbiosis with French ambitions, France added Tripoli, Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, Sidon, Tyre, and lands south to the Palestinian border, depriving geographical Syria of much of its most valuable farm land and sea coast. Lebanon was constructed to present the Christians with a separate country in which they could be considered a ruling majority, thus avoiding absorption into the Islamic world. In 1926, France brokered a constitution that institutionalized the confessional system of Mount Lebanon, imposing it on the whole country. It required that all citizens possess documents identifying them as members of a particular sect (confession). In 1943, with its defeat by Nazi Germany, France had to abandon the mandate and Lebanon gained independence. In the National Pact, Muslim and Christian leaders undertook what they viewed as a first step in national planning, a verbal agreement that the president would be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shi'ite Muslim. The legislature was to be composed of a six-to-five ratio of Christians to Muslims. This pattern of allocation of seats in parliament by sect also prevailed throughout the civil service.

During the mandate years, as the Maronite politicians gathered power and control, they made the system conform to their benefit. The people of the south, mostly Shi'ite and mostly very poor, were only as significant to the government as the tribute of the local big land owners. Although comprising 20 percent of the population, less than one percent of the budget was allocated for their schools, public health needs, roads, sewers, or utilities.

There was no investment in public projects. Tobacco plantations took over more and more of the land as laws were introduced which deprived small farmers of their ancestral holdings, turning them into laborers on their own land. With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the people of the south were abruptly separated from traditional commercial, cultural, educational, and often family ties. The area was flooded with destitute Palestinians driven from their homes by Zionist armies, while many of the Palestinian intelligentsia relocated to Beirut. The port of Beirut was the beneficiary of the Arab boycott of the port of Haifa. The city became the commercial and cultural center of the Middle East. Huge fortunes were made as a cosmopolitan city became host to thousands of foreign nationals.

Although many Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and members of other urban minorities shared in the economic prosperity, in general the economic gap between the privileged and the disenfranchised widened. People in the halls of power simply did not empathize with the wretched of the south. The Maronite rightists did identify, however with Israeli exclusivism. Bypassing the interests of Lebanon as a whole, they made deals on the side with Israeli interests, much to the displeasure of many Lebanese, Muslim, Christian, and Druze alike.

The emergence of various social movements—pan-Arabism, Syrian reunification, communism, trade unionism and a strong, leftist Lebanese national movement favoring "deconfessionalization" and a one-citizen-one-vote formula—threatened Maronite control. Amid escalating violence, President Camille Chamoun brought matters to a head in 1958 by trying to manipulate the parliament to allow him another term. He ordered the army to confront the protesters and called on the US to crush the rebellion. All-out civil war was averted when the Maronite commander of the army refused to turn the troops against the people. US Marines landed but did not engage.

The 1967 war brought many more refugees, and the civil war in Jordan in 1970 saw the transfer of the PLO to south Lebanon. Meanwhile, with a higher Muslim birthrate and higher Christian emigrations, there was widespreadMuslim and Druze discontent with allocation of political power based upona claimed Christian majority Now a major force in Lebanese politics, the Palestinians often cooperated with the "progressive" groups dedicated to reallocation of political power. The "rightists" responded with a proliferation of militias and greater cooperation with Israel.

An alleged attempt on the life of Maronite political chieftain Pierre Gemayel and the massacre in a Maronite neighborhood of a bus load of Palestinians escalated into a new civil war in the spring of 1975. Brutal sectarian massacres followed one another as Beirut was divided by a swath of destruction marking the separation of "Christian" East and "Muslim" West Beirut.

War raged, but when Muslim and Druze militias and their Palestinian allies seemed to be on the brink of success, Syrian forces, with a subsequent mandate from the Arab League, rolled into Lebanon, halted the fighting, and, in effect, froze the unresolved dispute. Civil chaos, punctuated by deadly outbreaks of sectarian fighting, has continued since 1976. Israel has occupied Lebanese territory captured during its 1978 incursion into southern Lebanon and enlarged during an all-out 1982 invasion which took Israeli forces to Beirut and in which 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians died. The strife has resulted in continued Syrian presence, which in turn has taken on a life of its own. Syrian military commanders, like the Christian and Muslim Lebanese militia commanders, extract "taxes" and fees in their individual fiefdoms.

The Lebanese people have suffered together for so long that they may finally become just that: uniquely Lebanese. The possibility that the Palestinian uprising in Israeli-occupied territory can deliver an international conference from which Lebanese sovereignty could reemerge offers the first flicker of hope for a future in which the Lebanese could make their own decisions.

Mary Barrett is a free-lance writer based in Boston. She is currently completing a book entitled View From Below: Palestinian Stories of Occupation and Rebellion.