The Republic of Lebanon

Nation in Jeopardy

David C. Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138642119
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317246176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Torn by civil war, its major city in shambles, and occupied by foreign peacekeeping forces as well as foreign armies, the Republic of Lebanon in the 1980s was struggling to regroup, rebuild and resolve its problems under new leadership. In this analytical survey, first published in 1983, Professor Gordon addresses such questions as why the republic – rooted in the distant past – succumbed to such disintegration. Lebanon's multi-ethnic character and the Palestinian presence are considered fully, and Lebanon is examined in the international context, inevitably with particular reference to the creation of Israel and its consequences. The country is viewed both in its own right and also as a small skiff on a very rough regional and international sea.

1

Introduction

After 1975, Lebanon, a coastal Mediterranean nation smaller than the state of Connecticut and populated by some 3 million, was in a state of disarray and, in some regions, disaster. In 1982 its very existence as a nation was in jeopardy. Why bother to consider it in its own right? one might well ask. Why not treat it simply as the battlefield of larger conflict it appeared to be? After all, the Republic of Lebanon was little more than a complex of hostile and armed enclaves, each beholden directly or indirectly to a foreign body. And it had been an independent republic only since 1943, a period of less than four decades. An agglomeration of different ethnic groups, it seemed never to have developed the inner core or established the legitimacy of a nation, as had, for example, Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden after 1291 and the United Provinces after 1581, two small coalitions that fought the powerful Hapsburgs to emerge as Switzerland and the Netherlands, respectively. Why bother, indeed, with this apparent historical will-o-the-wisp?

As a rationale for the present undertaking, one might reply with the following brief observations. Although Lebanon as an independent nation is very young, the Lebanese experience in multiethnic coexistence, even if often beset by conflict, has roots deep in the seventeenth century, if under several different umbrellas—Ottoman, Egyptian, and French. It has often proved to be a viable and even a prosperous entity, and until recently, compared to most of its fellow Arab states, it was genuinely liberal, open, and republican, with a relatively high standard of living and endowed with some of the best universities and publishing centers in the Middle East. In addition, it has served international finance and commerce as the hub of regional activities and has been an important center for culture and recreation for Europeans, Americans, and other Arabs alike. Even in disaster its entrepreneurial spirit, echoing the remote Phoenicians, has been impressive and augurs well for the future.

In addition, Lebanon has been a laboratory for ethnologists and other students of multiethnic coexistence—even if only as a negative model—this in a world concerned with coexistence on a global scale, with reconciling and integrating diverse peoples into “legitimate,” pluralistic combinations. Perhaps Lebanon may serve only to show what to avoid; more optimistically, it may show that multiethnic coexistence is possible, even with internal flaws, unless destroyed by extrinsic forces. In any case, Lebanon is a small part of the world that needs to be understood, if only as one of the most dangerous points of confrontation on the perilous international scene.

SETTING

Before the twentieth century, the entity called Lebanon consisted (except for occasional periods when under strong princes it held sway over Beirut and the Biqa’ [Bekaa] Valley) of the Mountain, a rugged, gorged, and valleyed area reaching at spots to the coast. This Mountain, running north to south, is separated from the eastern Anti-Lebanon range—also running north-south and dividing today’s Republic of Syria from Lebanon—by the fertile Biqa’ Valley. It is the Anti-Lebanon range, snow-covered in winter, that provides the country’s name (probably from “white” in Aramaic) and makes possible the rain and the streams that feed the coast. It was only in 1920, when the French created Greater Lebanon, that the entity came to include the Biqa’ Valley, Beirut, Tripoli and environs to the north, and Sidon and environs to the south. Lebanon is bordered by Syria to the north and the east, Israel to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. The small size of this nation can be gauged by the fact that Beirut is only a three-to-four-hour drive by car from Damascus and that any part of Lebanon can be reached easily within half a day.

Mount Lebanon, which rises to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) at its highest point, and the Anti-Lebanon, which rises to 9,000 feet (2,700 meters) and continues south to the Hermon range, which is about the same height, embrace the Biqa’ Valley, which is 3,000 feet (900 meters) above sea level; it is here that two of Lebanon’s important rivers, the Orontes going north and the Litani going south, have their sources. Both the Biqa’ and the Anti-Lebanon are drier than the west. In Mount Lebanon springs make it possible to cultivate crops 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) up by the use of terracing; bananas can be grown on the coast; olives, vines, and figs can be cultivated on the low foothills; cereals, apricots, and pears on the middle slopes; and apples and potatoes on the higher levels.

Lebanon is one of the most heavily urbanized parts of the Arab world. By 1975 some 61 percent of the population lived in urban centers of more than 5,000. Among the confessions, 84 percent of the Sunnites, 60 percent of the Greek Orthodox, 45 percent of the Maronites, 55 percent of the Shi’ites, and 55 percent of the Druzes lived in urban areas. Only Bahrain among the Arab states was more densely populated than Lebanon: Lebanon’s population density was 1,295 persons per square mile (498 per square kilometer).

Although the climate, generally, is moderate Mediterranean, there are different zones, each with its own particular characteristics; the coast is humid in summer, cold in winter; the high mountains are very cold and snow-covered during much of the period from September to April and refreshingly cool in summer; and the Biqa’ has low humidity in summer and is cold and has strong winds in winter. Skiing is available in winter in the mountains; swimming, most of the year. Once an important silk producer, Lebanon now produces mainly fruits, vegetables, wine, and tobacco, like other Mediterranean lands, and like each of these, it has—or had at one time—its own particular charm, both as a resort and as a place to live and work. And like these it is rich in relics and monuments of many centuries of history. In Lebanon, in particular, this past is easily accessible as well as abundant.

As impressive as any monument is the grove of the famous Cedars of Bsharrah, which recalls biblical times and serves as a national symbol. In Beirut, the Grand Mosque of ‘Umar, its base stones Roman and Byzantine, was a Crusader cathedral until its conversion in the thirteenth century. Rome is everywhere; in the aqueduct outside Beirut, in small temples, mosaics, and the monumental remains of Baalbeck. Relics of the Phoenicians can be found in Byblos, around the well-preserved Crusader castle, and in Tyre, where a Roman hippodrome has also been uncovered. The Mamluks of the fourteenth century are represented by several watchtowers along the coast, the Ayyubids by the extant castle of Mousayliha, the Umayyads of the eighth century by the castle-resort of Anjar, the amirate of Bashir II by the beautifully decorated nineteenth-century palace of Beit ad-Din, and the Crusaders by several castles besides Byblos, including one on Sidon’s shore and Beaufort, which looks into Israel and had until June 1982 withstood heavy and frequent bombardment. At the mouth of the Dog River (Nahr al-Kalb) plaques commemorate the passage of the Assyrians (seventh century B.C.), the Romans (third century A.D.), and Napoleon III (1860), among others. A more recent plaque commemorates the departure of the last French troops on December 31, 1946. Myth pervades the countryside. A structure at Nebi Yunis is claimed to be the tomb of Noah; a small chapel-mosque (al-Khadr) where St. George killed the dragon; and the Nahr Ibrahim in March and April is said to flow with the blood of Adonis (the color results from minerals in the riverbed).

MULTIETHNICITY

The most important fact about Lebanon’s human geography is the multiplicity of sectarian or confessional communities, Christian, Muslim, and other, not one of which can claim to constitute a majority. The Lebanese entity was predominantly Christian before the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, but since then Muslims have had the edge numerically and today the Muslim Shi’ites probably constitute the largest sect. Fertility rates have been generally higher among Muslims than among Christians, even though Islam allows for contraception and Catholicism does not. And the creation of Greater Lebanon, by bringing into the entity areas that were predominantly Muslim, had obvious important social and political consequences. Officially, the census of 1932 has remained the basis for the distribution of public and political power and authority; proposals to take a new census have been considered a threat by many Christians. Acceptance of the 1932 census, which showed Christians to be a majority, has thus been one of the compromises that has made the nation a possibility. Officially, the largest confession remains the Maronite, and the largest Muslim confession, the Sunnite.

Another important demographic factor is that while in certain districts one sect or another may predominate, in all areas there is overlapping, even within particular villages—a reality that makes both for unity and, in troubled times, for a dangerous struggle for turf. Each confession has its own sense of community, but none is monolithic. Within each there are extended-family rivalries and competing interests, and although communities tend to be exclusive and self-enclosed in some ways, they have also been interwoven in a common destiny, and on some levels of social and political discourse, they interact and cooperate with one another. It is this cooperation that affords Lebanon the chance of becoming a viable nation. Even if the threat of disintegration and warfare has always been present, and even if the appellation the “Switzerland of the East” now sounds stale and hollow, there have been periods when the nation has flourished with a common and communal ethos.

At the end of the sixteenth century the larger part of the Mountain was occupied by Shi’ites, while the Maronites were grouped in the north and the Druzes in the south, particularly in the Shuf (the region south of Beirut). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Maronites expanded south and the Druzes north; the Shi’ites lost much of their land. As the Maronites moved south into Kisrwan, they rebelled against Shi’ite overlords and drove the Shi’ites out; in general the Shi’ites were forced out of the central part of the Mountain to occupy the periphery, as they do today. The Maronites penetrated even into the Druze Shuf to become agricultural workers under Druze feudal lords. The alliance of Maronite and Druze was dominant. The great mass of the Sunnites, and many Greek Orthodox, entered the system only with the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, when Beirut and the littoral were integrated finally, as they had previously been occasionally, into the Lebanese entity.

Among the important Christian groups are Uniate Catholics—Catholics who are under the pope’s authority but practice particular rites of their own. These groups include Maronites, Greek Catholics, and Armenian Catholics. Other Christian groups include Roman Catholics, Armenian (Gregorian) Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Nestorian Assyrians. Muslim groups include the Shi’ites (called Mitawalis in Lebanon) and Sunnites. The Druzes, although they are often grouped with Muslims, have a faith of their own. In all, the number of sects is twenty-two. Each of these forms one or another of the tesserae of what is sometimes called the Lebanese mosaic; the dynamic by which each acts as a unit and interacts with the others is usually termed “confessionalism” or “sectarianism” (ta’ifiya in Arabic).

The Maronites took their name from the fourth-century pious monk Marun. Led by Patriarch Yuhanna Marun (died c. 707), they sought sanctuary in the Qadishah Valley of Lebanon in the seventh century after troubles with the Byzantine government and with Jacobites (a Syrian sect holding that Christ has only one nature) in western Syria. Eventually, in 1790, Bkirke was made the headquarters of the Maronite patriarchs “of Antioch and the Rest of the Orient.” Originally monothelite (that is, holding that Christ has one will but two natures), they entered into partial communion with Rome in the twelfth century and into full communion in 1736. The patriarch is elected by a conclave of Maronite bishops; if no choice can be made within fifteen days, the pope in Rome makes the appointment. Maronites in the main have aligned themselves over the centuries with the West—with the Crusaders, for example, and with Napoleon during the siege of Acre (1799)—and they maintain close cultural and emotional ties to France. Constantin-François Volney, the famous eighteenth-century traveler, remarked on their independent-mindedness, but he also warned, prophetically, of their religious passion and rigidity. The Maronites constituted the bulk of the inhabitants of the Mountain proper and continue to be the plurality there to this day.

The Greek Catholics (also called Melchites) are the descendants of a group of Greek Orthodox who in 1724 left that church and, while keeping their Greek rites, entered into communion with Rome. Their religious leader is the patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and the rest of the Orient, traditionally resident in Cairo. Their chief city in Lebanon is Zahlah, at the foot of Mount Sannin. The patriarchs of the other Uniate groups, the Syrian Catholics and the Armenian Catholics, reside in Beirut. The Armenian Catholics, as well as the Armenian Orthodox, have the Armenian language as bearer of their particular non-Arab heritage. Both arrived in Lebanon in large numbers after the Armenian massacres at the hands of the Turks before, during, and after World War I. The leading patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox is the catholicos of Etchmiadzin in Soviet Armenia.

Roman ruins, Baalback. (Credit:Mark Lane)

Roman ruins, Baalback. (Credit:Mark Lane)

Beaufort Castle, a strategic height captured by Israel in 1982. (Credit: Ellen Harris, Middle East Insight)

Those Greek Orthodox who are Arab by identity (in contrast to Greeks, Russians, and others) come under a patriarch who resides in Damascus or under one who resides in Cairo. Unlike the Maronites, who are concentrated in Lebanon, the Greek Orthodox are widely dispersed in different parts of historical Syria, that is, the area including the modern states of Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria.

The Nestorian Assyrians are a distinct people who sought refuge in Lebanon after the 1933 massacre of their people in Iraq. Other smaller groups residing in Lebanon are Protestants, Roman Catholics, and non-Christian minorities, including Baha’is and Jews, of whom there were about 6,000 in 1975.

TABLE 1.1 Confessional Distribution

Source: Adapted from Michael Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Modernization in Lebanon (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 22, 58.

Among the Muslims are the Shi’ites, members of a branch of Islam that traces the line of descent of the caliphate (succession to the Prophet) from ‘Ali, nephew and son-in-law of Muhammad, through the twelfth imam in succession, who is held to have disappeared for a time, to return one day as mahdi, or messianic savior. The Sunnites, who accept the historical line of succession as valid, are members of the mainstream of Islam in most Arab Muslim countries; since the fourteenth century, they have been the dominant Muslim group in the area. The Kurds are Sunnites, but they speak their own language and have their own identity and historical memory.

Finally, the Druzes, whose leading family, the Ma’ns, laid the foundations of Lebanon in the seventeenth century from their center in the Shuf, were originally Muslims who developed their own identity in the eleventh century when they were converted to the teachings of the Isma’ili Shi’ite Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim (died 1021). The details of their syncretistic and theosophic faith are kept secret by the ‘uqqal, the initiated learned ones. They practice taqiyya (pious dissimulation) when necessary, reject converts, marry among themselves, believe in metempsychosis, and prefer to be known as Muwahiddun (unitarians). In 1975, there were 400,000 to 450,000 Druzes, 150,000 to 170,000 of whom lived in Lebanon; the rest lived in Syria and Israel. Charles Churchill, who witnessed the massacre by the Druzes of many Maronites in 1860, described the fierce bellicosity of the Druzes when aroused and their communal pride and cohesion.

In 1948, with the creation of Israel, about 200,000 Palestinian refugees arrived in Lebanon. The bulk were Sunnites, but many were Christians. Unlike the Armenians, they have not been granted citizenship en masse, nor, as a self-conscious ethnic group bent upon return to their homes, have most wanted to become Lebanese. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the 1970 military defeat of the Palestinians in Jordan, the number of Palestinians in Lebanon rose to 400,000 to 500,000.

IDENTIFICATION

Except for the Armenians and Kurds, the mother tongue of the Lebanese is Arabic, and Arabic is the language of social intercourse in general. However, because the private sector of education is often foreign and continues to emphasize foreign languages (French and English in particular) and because Lebanon has been a merchant-republic, bilingualism and trilingualism are widespread, in some cases to the detriment of the Arabic language itself. Language has symbolic significance as a dimension of identification; for example, there are Christian families that use French more regularly than they do Arabic. Some extremist Lebanese nationalists, particularly among the Maronites, would go so far as to make the colloquial Lebanese Arabic dialect the language of education in place of classical Arabic, which is the sacred language of Islam, a common heritage of all educated Arabs, and the most important basis for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Formation
• 3 Society
• 4 Economy
• 5 Polity and Politics
• 6 The Collapse of 1975
• 7 Interlude: 1976–1982
• 8 The Israeli Invasion and Its Sequels
• Selected and Annotated Bibliography
• Index