A Greek-Orthodox friend of mine from Byblos-Lebanonused to say that he could not possibly be a Christian-Lebanesewithout first being a Jewish-Lebanese.Fady Gadeh (July 2017)
While on a furtive visit to Lebanon in the summer of 1986, I made pilgrimage to the celebrated biblical “Cedars of the Lord ,” in Bsharré. At that time, Lebanon was still in the throes of “civil war,” its government a “puppet regime” beholden to the Syrian occupation army controlling large swaths of Lebanese territory, ruling them in classic colonial fashion. The cruelty visited on the Syrian people in our time, in these sad decades of twenty-first century, had their first dress rehearsals and dry runs in Syrian-occupied Lebanon of the late twentieth century. The Syrian Arab-Baath regime, that has been beating the Syrian people to a pulp in our times, is the same one that had pummelled Lebanon and battered the Lebanese into submission during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, murdering thousands of civilians, wiping out entire neighborhoods, raining destruction on schools, hospitals, churches, and other sanctuaries where the powerless ordinarily sought shelter. Much like the French under Nazi occupation, Syrian-occupied Lebanon was rendered a “slave state” wrapped inside a “police state” apparatus. Syria maintained a stranglehold not only on the government, policy, political loyalties, school curricula, the media, and the military, but indeed on the smallest minutiae of Lebanese public and private life. Merely, speaking of a “Syrian occupation” as such was met with the cruelest of punishments. Likewise toeing a political line or trotting out an idea, innocuous as they might have been in any different context but deviating from what is normatively “Arab,” “Arab nationalist,” and therefore “rejectionist” was also viewed as conspiratorial, subversive, disloyal, treasonous, and indeed “Zionist” and punishable by kidnapping, disappearance, death, or worse.1 “Lebanon’s erstwhile democratic foundations and its once diverse political landscape have all but crumbled as a result of Syrian tampering,” wrote the Middle East Quarterly in September 2000, a brutal occupation bringing about a “systematic alteration of Lebanon’s character,” atrophying what had in effect become “the world’s only satellite state” by the late 1980s.2
That was the Lebanon that I was visiting in 1986, a grotesque deformation of the model of diversity and tolerance and freedom that I had left five years earlier. Even in its war-torn state, Lebanon still held on to its image as the “Switzerland of the Middle East”. And I still held on to that old snapshot of the Lebanon of old remembrances, even as I could see its degradation, in real time, before my eyes…
Bsharré, or “the Cedars”—(L-arez), as the region is referred to colloquially—is a village of northern Mount Lebanon , perched at a five-thousand-foot altitude over an abyss astride the edge of the biblical cedar forests and the mouth of the Maronite’s Valley of the Sainted, Wadi Qodishe . Bsharré was also the native village of Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), the doyen of modern Lebanese literature, a national icon and an author and mystic who wrote the bulk of his work in English; a beloved household name in America of the early twentieth century as much he is a “revered prophet” in Lebanon proper today. Although he lived most of his life between Boston, New York, and Paris, Gibran’s wish had been to be buried in his native village, in the Maronite monastery of his youth, where he received his early education. His surviving sister answered her brother’s deathbed wish, and in 1931 purchased that seventh-century hermitage of his yearnings, which was to become his final resting place. My visit to Bsharré in 1986 was mainly to “make pilgrimage”—a national ritual of sorts for Lebanese expatriates and residents alike—to cast a gaze over at Lebanon’s national symbol, the “Cedars of the Lord ,” and call on the Saint-Sergius Monastery of Gibran’s youth and eternal life, which in 1975 had become the Kahlil Gibran Museum.
Housing some 450 originals of the poet’s paintings and charcoal drawings, the museum also contained a good number of his personal effects, including items of clothing, painting, and writing tools (easels, brushes, notebooks, palettes, empty canvas, etc.,) and the original furnishings of his New York and Boston work studios and apartments. While walking through a biographical memorial swarming with “pilgrims” meandering quietly, pensively, wandering through the exhibits, muted, as if in a spiritual trance or on some religious quest, I stopped at a replica of what looked like Gibran’s “living room,” intrigued by an ornate menorah that had caught my eye sitting atop a reddish-brown mahogany cabinet. As I began remarking to a companion on “how interesting,” and indeed “how distinctly characteristic” of “Gibran the ecumenical mystic” it was to have among his personal (American) possessions one of the most distinctively Jewish of symbols, we were intruded upon by a curt corrective from an uninvited “tour-guide”: “That’s a simple candelabrum, sir,” he told me rather abruptly, in a loud reproachful tone. “Gibran hated the Jews, and could not have possibly owned a menorah,” he barked. “Gibran hated?” I inquired softly, with the somewhat condescending smirk of an opinionated twenty-three-year-old fresh-out-of-college know-it-all. “What happened to Gibran the mystic, the humanist, the universalist ‘lover of mankind’ trotted out by your museum, sir?” I asked. “Yes,” retorted the unsolicited expert, “Gibran was all of that, you’re right, but he hated the Jews too; and what you have wrongly identified as a ‘menorah’ is in fact a seven-branched candlestick, that’s all!” Unable to contain my contempt for this poor man’s towering intellect, I burst out in laughter, disturbing the serenity of the monastery museum where visitors had surely come for meditation, not to be dealt my crazy laughter. With tears in my eyes, I reached into my pocket, took my wallet out, and started handing my uninvited guide a 5 Lebanese Liras bill—the equivalent of a single shiny US dime at that time—as my mind went racing for some sassy comeback. But before I could open my mouth, before I could tell that village-idiot what to do with his dime (mind you my intent was noble; I simply wanted him to buy himself a dictionary and look up the word “Menorah”), my Lebanese friend had yanked me by my arm, almost dislocating my shoulder, whisking me out of the museum and into his car, driving off, his wheels screeching in a cloud of burnt rubber as if fleeing a bank robbery scene straight out of a Starsky and Hutch episode.
As the car went off careening down Mount Lebanon , in the direction of the coast below—out of Syrian-controlled Lebanon and into the safety of Christian-held East Beirut —Ziad, the childhood friend, who had driven me to Gibran’s hermitage, went off the handle screaming his head off, tearing my ears out with insult and invective, wishing I had never come to Lebanon that summer. “What are you insane?” he kept howling; “you think this is America, eh?” “You think you can speak your mind here like it’s the Boston tea party? You think you can tell a two-bit Syrian thug off and live to tell about it here? You think you can advertise your righteous indignation with our anti-Semites and get away with it here? Shut up, man! Just shut up, okay?! This is not America here, okay? Look around you! Please, for the love of God just look around you and keep your big fucking mouth shut over here!!” I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t squeak out a single solitary peep.
Then, taking a deep breath, clearing out a throat audibly strained by the sustained screaming of earlier, Ziad picked up where he had just left off and began yelling again, his voice now skipping, slipping like the tires of his Citroën hugging the narrow turns of the mountain terrain, sounding more like a little girl’s little shrieks, than the authoritative angry priest of earlier, preachifying. But he also sounded a bit worn out, all the energy drained out of him, and so he switched down to his calmer, more reasoned sermonizing; a friend offering friendly advice. “If someone here tells you Gibran hated Jews,” he said, “then the right answer is ‘yes, sir, he sure did; and a fine anti-Semite he was; like you; like me; like all of us righteous victims of them rapacious Jews!’ Understood?” I shook my head approvingly. Reluctantly. “The Lebanon of your memories is finished, my friend,” said my priest friend; “it’s kaput; yesterday’s news; this is a new era now; and don’t you dare try countering the inverted realities of this new age; our new age! Re-read 1984 perhaps, before your next visit to Lebanon, okay?!”
Those words seared me to the depths of my being back then, in the summer of 1986. Yet they never rang more true than they do today, at this writing more than thirty years since they were first uttered, since they ripped to shreds all my smug assumptions about an idealized Lebanon. Ziad passed on in the Fall of that same year, and I never got the chance to tell him how right he was; how sorry I was, to have put his life and the lives of his family and his parishioners in danger practicing my silly “freedom of expression” and “freedom to dissent”; in a place that had just committed collective suicide; and a country that had lost all its bearings and all its reasons for being as a “federation of minorities.” By 1986, the Lebanon of my younger years, the Lebanon of Ziad’s childhood and mine, liberal, unorthodox, irreverent, libertine, iconoclastic, open to its own diversity and to a world beyond nationalist prison walls, had become a “slave-republic” beholden to the phobias of its neighborhood, the hang-ups of xenophobes and pan-nationalists and champions of motley fronts “of rejection and steadfastness and confrontation.”3
But there were better days for Lebanon once. One needed not be overly old or nostalgic noted the late Fouad Ajami , to recall with affection a multi-cultural Lebanon where eighteen different communities jostled and feuded for power and influence and relevance; where Lebanese beholden to the creed of Arab nationalism met their match in “Lebanese who thought of their country as a piece of Europe at the foot of a splendid mountain [… and who] savored the language of France ” as if it were their own.4 This was the Lebanon of the Jews; a Lebanon with Jews; and a Lebanon where Jewish life was also a Lebanese mode of being. There are many cultural, literary, and political snippets from a Lebanon of a mere century ago that bear this out. Many of them populate the text of this volume. Others are revealed here as prefatory testimony, as “primary sources” revealing a Lebanese political culture and social ethos unrecognizable in today’s obscurantist climes.
The first passage reproduced herewith, revealing a Lebanon at odds with its “tarnished” early twenty-first century image, is the text of a letter from the Maronite Archbishopric of Beirut , addressed to the Chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine . In 1947, under a United Nations charter demanding recommendations be made on the future of British Mandate Palestine—sovereignty over which was then being disputed by both Muslims and Jews, under very difficult, violent circumstances—UNSCOP, made up of representatives of eleven UN member nations, was tasked with investigating the cause of the conflict in Palestine and if possible, devising a ...