CHAPTER 1

Sparks in the Tinderbox

The United States, the June War, and the Remaking of the Lebanese Crisis

Near the end of the 1960s, Lebanon was shaken by two events: the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the December 1968 Israeli attack on the Beirut airport. Each prompted a major popular backlash against the Lebanese government and Western interests in Lebanon, straining the country’s confessional political system and calling into question its traditional neutrality in regional and international affairs. Many consider these events to be the regional triggers that set the country on the path to civil war.
If these were earthquakes, however, tensions had long been building up along the country’s fault lines. Lebanon’s sectarian political system had already been tested nearly a decade earlier during the 1958 civil war. In the aftermath of that conflict, a new ruling coalition struck a balance on the internal and foreign policy issues that divided the country. By the late 1960s, the coalition had begun to dissolve in the face of internal and regional pressures, including increasing political interference by the Lebanese military, heightened violence and rhetoric in the inter-Arab and Israeli-Arab conflicts, and a new global wave of revolutionary spirit that was sweeping across the Middle East, and indeed, much of the Third World.
Throughout the 1960s, the United States played a passive yet important role in internal Lebanese politics. In the first years of the decade, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations paid relatively little attention to Lebanon. But as regional politics heated up over the course of the decade, so too did the US interest in Lebanon. US officials attempted to stay close to Lebanon through arms sales and small amounts of economic aid, though neither could defuse the opposition within Lebanon to US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Meanwhile, Lebanese interest in the United States was growing. Both the government and various other groups solicited US support in their internal struggles. At the same time, groups opposed to Western influence in Lebanon launched a coordinated attack on US interests in the country. The 1967 war and the Israeli attack on the Beirut airport strengthened these forces considerably, increasing their prominence and influence over the country’s government, which would ultimately allow the gathering of Palestinian militant groups on its territory.
Lebanese Domestic Tensions on the Eve of the June War
Lebanon’s internal political situation on the eve of the June 1967 war was a direct legacy of the 1958 civil war. During this conflict, Sunni Muslim, Nasserist, and leftist groups rose up against mostly Christian forces loyal to President Camille Chamoun. This coalition resented many aspects of Chamoun’s rule, but the most galling were his announcement of support for the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, his US-funded intervention in the 1957 parliamentary elections, and his 1958 attempt to modify the Lebanese constitution to allow his reelection. Not all Christians supported the president. The Maronite patriarch clashed with Chamoun, while Pierre Gemayel’s Phalange Party (also known by its Arabic name, al-Kataib) stayed largely neutral during the fighting. Nor did all Muslims support the opposition, as Prime Minister Sami al-Sulh remained loyal to the president.1 Nevertheless, the conflict took on strong sectarian overtones, cracking the foundation of sectarian cooperation that was supposed to be the basis for the Lebanese state. The Lebanese army wisely refused to get directly involved in the conflict, instead playing a peacekeeping role between the two sides. Now, in his time of crisis, Chamoun called for the United States to send troops in to restore order. Following a coup against the Western-aligned Hashemite ruler of Iraq, the United States obliged, deploying marines to Lebanon to facilitate an end to the conflict.
A key to the resolution of this crisis was the election of army commander Fouad Chehab to a six-year term as president.2 Chehab’s election ended the rebellion and facilitated the formation of a new government that attempted to deal with the issues of internal development and foreign policy that had led to the conflict in the first place.3 To address the country’s unequal distribution of wealth, his regime undertook a program of modernizing and building up the Lebanese state, expanding state services such as running water and electricity to many rural parts of the country that had previously had neither. Through vocal support for the Arab cause, as well as by aligning himself closely with Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Chehab earned the support of much of Lebanon’s Muslim population.
To his critics, however, Chehab was an aloof ruler with autocratic tendencies whose foreign policy unnecessarily exposed Lebanon to danger. Over time, Chehab gradually extended the control of the army’s intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau (DB), over the country’s internal politics, particularly after a 1961 coup d’état attempt by the Syrian Socialist National Party. Following this incident, the DB began to intervene more heavily in the country’s political life, tapping phone lines, censoring the media, and interfering in elections. At least initially, Chehab drew support from across the Lebanese political spectrum. Some Christian groups, such as Pierre Gemayel’s Phalange Party, supported Chehab’s programs; however, they paid a price for this in support among the Christian population, many of whom saw the Chehabists as catering too much to “Arab” opinion, meaning paying lip service to the idea of Arab nationalism while voicing vocal opposition to Israel. Others, such as Chamoun’s National Liberal Party and Raymond Edde’s National Bloc, vocally opposed the Chehabists, resenting the military’s frequent intervention in domestic affairs.4
The continuity of Chehab’s political legacy was established with the 1964 election of his handpicked successor, Charles Helou, as president. Born in 1913, Helou made his name as a journalist with the French-language newspaper Le Jour. During the 1958 uprising, Helou and several others had established themselves as part of a so-called Third Force that sought a middle ground between the belligerents.5 Helou was elected largely on the basis of his reputation and his association with the Chehabist political movement.6 Over time, however, Helou would develop significant disagreements with the Chehabists and the DB, a political bloc known as the Nahj, whose loyalty to the former president often undermined Helou’s authority. Pensive and prone to periodic bouts of depression, Helou would try to toe the line between two opposing groups, the Chehabists and their mostly Christian opposition. However, this would open him up to charges of weakness and vacillation from both sides.
The increasing radicalization of the Arab world, and the implications that this had for Lebanon’s role in regional politics, greatly complicated Helou’s balancing act. Nasser’s Egypt, or the United Arab Republic (UAR), as the union of Egypt and Syria between 1958 and 1961 was known, had long exerted a strong influence in Lebanese affairs. During the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called Arab Cold War grew more intense. After the 1961 breakup of the UAR, a deep mistrust reigned between Egypt and Syria. Tensions between Egypt and Saudi Arabia fueled civil wars in Yemen and an insurgency in Oman.7 Competition between Egypt and Syria on one hand, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the other, manifested in a number of disputes in Lebanon, in the press and elsewhere.8 Meanwhile, regimes with even more militant foreign policy positions than that of Nasser took root in Iraq in 1958 and consolidated power in Syria in 1963. In addition, newly formed Palestinian fedayeen groups, as well as the creation of the PLO as an umbrella group in 1964, added strong voices to those pushing for radical action against Israel. Fatah, a new organization under Yasser Arafat, launched its first attack into Israel from Jordanian territory in 1965.9 As a result, the Arab “center” shifted decidedly toward militarism, subjecting Lebanon to a wide variety of pressures from Arab states.
Given that intra-Arab feuds tended to fuel conflicts within Lebanon, one might have expected an Arab reconciliation to have had a net benefit on the country’s internal politics. However, this was not the case. Relations between Syria and Egypt improved by the mid-1960s, in part because of an agreement to focus on the two countries’ common enemy, Israel. This only brought new pressures to bear on Lebanon’s long-standing neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the 1964 Cairo Summit of the Arab League, some Arab regimes began to push Lebanon to participate in a number of elements of an Arab “common defense strategy” against Israel, such as diverting the waters of the Jordan River, which flowed through southern Lebanon into Israel, and stationing troops from other Arab countries on Lebanese territory. Aware of the sensitivities of the Lebanese internal situation, Egyptian president Nasser personally intervened to prevent Helou from having to host Syrian forces on his country’s territory, telling Helou that in case of trouble, he could call for Egyptian forces instead. However, Nasser still insisted that Lebanon begin work on diverting the Jordan River.10
One important change in the Lebanese domestic political landscape during this period was the growing role of leftist and Arab nationalist political parties. Such groups had been present since before the founding of the Lebanese state in 1943, but they initially played a relatively small role in Lebanese politics. The Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) had had a presence in Lebanon since 1925. Although it was officially banned in 1948, it continued to organize its activities openly, though it had little success in affecting the country’s domestic affairs.11 The Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), originally founded by students at the American University of Beirut (AUB), had branches and operations in a variety of Arab countries, particularly Yemen and Oman. With the exception of a small role in the 1958 crisis, MAN’s activities in Lebanon remained limited. Smaller Baath and Nasserist parties had influence in some localities, but they had no broad base of support. The exception to this general rule about the weakness of the Left was the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) of Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. Jumblatt’s position as a traditional zaim meant that he enjoyed the support of a large part of the Druze community, even as he advocated progressive political positions.12 However, apart from the 1958 civil war, there was little effective cooperation between these groups.
During the 1960s, due in part to regional and international developments, these parties began to focus increasingly on common issues. Some in the Lebanese Left were exposed to the international influences of the 1960s, traveling to youth and student conferences and meeting other Third World leaders in Africa and Latin America.13 The increasingly militant positions of Nasserism and the escalating war in Vietnam contributed to an atmosphere in which these groups began to overcome some of their ideological differences. In the mid-1960s, they began to work together, in large part because of a growing focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In March 1965, the LCP’s Central Committee began to advocate involvement in Arab issues and joining forces with groups such as the MAN and the PSP.14 Among the Arab Nationalists, by the 1960s, splits had begun to develop in the leadership over several issues, including how close they should remain to Nasserism and whether the group should pursue armed action to liberate Palestine. In consonance with Nasser’s wishes, the MAN did not push for military action against Israel, though it began military training.15 Jumblatt played a leading role in exploring alliances with these leftist groups. In 1965, he formed the “Front of Progressive Parties and Powers and Nationalist [wataniyya] Personalities,” which provided a forum for cooperation among these marginal (and marginalized) parties, including the LCP, Baath, and Arab nationalist movements, to affect national politics in a way that their small size might not have otherwise allowed.16
As the leftists were uniting in opposition to the government, two groups who might well have cooperated in support of the status quo in foreign policy—the army and the traditional Maronite Christian leaders—were hardly on friendly terms. Chehab initially enjoyed the support of some Christian leaders. However, the concessions that Chehab and Helou made to Nasserism, including embracing a role within the new common defense strategy against Israel, alienated much of the Maronite population, which began to unite in opposition to the Chehabists. In early 1967, three of the country’s most important Maronite Christian zuama, Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, and Raymond Edde, formed a political grouping called al-Hilf al-Thulathi (usually shortened to Hilf), or Tripartite Alliance, to oppose the Chehabists. This also began to affect President Helou, who understood that the Lebanese president was considered the representative of the Christian population, much as the Sunni prime minister would be expected to represent the interests of Lebanon’s Sunni population.
At this time, the di...