Politics and War in Lebanon

Unraveling the Enigma

Mordechai Nisan

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351498333
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politique et relations internationales
• Sous-sujet: Politique

Lebanon is an exceptionally misunderstood country; its religious politics are typically misrepresented and denigrated in Western political commentary. Politics and War in Lebanon offers a lucid examination of Lebanese society and politics. Mordechai Nisan examines Lebanon in its own termson its own cultural turf. He then points to the causes of political disintegration in 1975 and explores the capacity of Lebanon to recover and retain its unique national poise.Avoiding disorienting Western stereotypes, Nisan presents Lebanon in its own native frame of reference, as a multi-ethnic country that operates according to its immutable and enigmatic political forms. Lebanon is different from other Arab countries, as demonstrated through its very complex electoral system, its tradition of cross-elite cooperation, and its special sense of Lebanese national identity that differentiates it from its overbearing Syrian neighbor.Nisan explores intra-Maronite Christian feuds, identifies Syria's occupation strategy, analyzes the violence of the Palestinians, and studies Israel's failed policy strategy and the role of Hezbollah in the Lebanese power equation. Lebanon is caught between its special historical identity as a country ofpoise, creativity, and liberty and the interminable warfare in the streets and villages of the country. Although its future appears dim, its resilience enabled it to prevail in the past, and may yet continue to do so.

Part One

The Mystique and the Malaise

Since antiquity Lebanon has been in communion with God and mankind, hovering between faith and action, split between its essential internal nature and the existential condition of its life. To love life and escape destruction beckons Lebanon to make efforts for survival and development, yet its fate may have been determined from time immemorial. It has endured the vicissitudes of history and foreign conquests, the aggressors who have their names etched in the stela at Nahr el-Kalb (“Dog River”) north of Beirut. As witnesses the Lebanese spread across the globe. The Lebanese manifested fortitude in facing the ills and dangers of life, all the while sustaining an insular individuality, though mingling with others. A profound self-consciousness delivers the Lebanese from the mundane to a higher level of life, with a will and freedom that endow them with the strength to maintain a certain independence while powers and governments—in ancient and modern times—tried to conquer and control them. Although striving for a state, the Lebanese are bound to civil society in a way that confounds the articulation of the value of a state as a framework of law and obligation, submission and discipline. The state as a unity represents an objective manifestation of selfhood but at one and same time menaces freedom and diversity, particular selfhood itself, for these “free spirits.” The state implanted on earth seems to clash with the divine connection on high, and leaves the challenge of their fusion as the test for binding worlds together. A certain gloom hangs over Lebanon, which needs harmony of community and interests to sustain its special voyage through history, in isolation from without and in peace within. It is this elusive quest for peace and security at home, either through the freedom of its citizens or the authority of the state, that continues to elude Lebanon. At no time was it ever clear that Lebanon was a normative democracy in the political sense of the term, subject to popular opinion or philosophically dedicated to the liberties of its people. Lebanon was born from another skein, scheme, and time, so that the use of certain Western terminology is alien to its isolated case in history. Lebanon has its own rhythm and rhyme whose secret national code requires plumbing its ancient soul from within. Greatness does not depend upon success, but on the power to be one’s self. And to use history for the purpose of life is the fundamental prescription for Lebanon to remain bound to its destiny, without seeking novelty as a sign of progress. The actual for Lebanon must always be subordinated under the historical for Lebanon to see the light of the future. History is the gateway for Lebanon’s life.

1

The Civilization(s) of Lebanon

In the long history of Lebanon, there is a powerful mixture of charm and grief. This magical country is adorned with multiple and various civilizational layers ranging from ancient to modern times. Some represented welcome additions that enriched the people, while others threatened the integrity of their identity and culture. Note the sublime snow-peaked mountains, sacred cedar trees, flowing rivers, and ancient temple remnants, as well as the continuous legacy of faith, stamina, and courage that the Lebanese possess; and yet Lebanon has been the victim of foreign conquests and human deprivations that seem endemic to such a tiny land squeezed in by predators and the sea. Its glorious past may, as a reminiscent reflection, serve as an escape from melancholy days that have passed in recent years and decades. Looking back becomes both a form of pride and a distractive denial of the ruinous vicissitudes of Lebanese life.

Periods of History

Lebanon holds a very special and remarkable place as a country that shines in the history of the ancient world. Charles Corm and others were wont to identify the Phoenician period in the annals of Lebanon as stretching back four thousand or more years in antiquity.¹ This was the Lebanon of shipbuilding and seafaring based at Byblos from the third millennium BCE, the Lebanon of exploration and discovery, of commerce and colonization, which transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a nonoppressive Phoenician trading empire. Sailing into the Atlantic Ocean, the Phoenicians dared northward to the British Isles and southward along the coast of Africa, and crossed the ocean, reaching Brazil and probably America in the twelfth century BCE. Trading posts and colonies, the fruits of enterprising human ingenuity from resilient Tyre and Sidon, dotted the shores of Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, Spain, and Tunisia—where the city of Carthage founded in 814 BCE in North Africa, known as Karta-Hadeshet in the Semitic Phoenician language, became esteemed as the foreign axis of Tyrian expansion, and the nemesis of Rome before the Christian era.²

Literary sources of yore recognized ancient Lebanon’s place in the Orient and the eastern Mediterranean basin and onward to Europe. The eighteenth-century BCE Epic of Gilgamesh refers to Humbaba as guarding the cedar forest from a Mesopotamian assault, while in the Iliad, set in the twelfth century, Homer refers to Sidon, and Herodotus in The Histories relates that he visited a temple dedicated to Hercules, known as Melqart in ancient Phoenicia, in Tyre. Phoenicians of millennia ago fashioned a written alphabet that Cadmus brought to Greece, while Thales (of Phoenician descent) was considered the founder of science in Europe, and Pythagoras, a son of two Phoenician parents, was a father of mathematics and philosophy. Euclid, the fourth-century BCE geometrician, active in Alexandria, was said to have been born in Tyre. A center of learning in the so-called Hellenic era, Lebanon appeared later as an appendage of Europe while in fact it provided Oriental origins for Western science and civilization.

In the biblical legacy Lebanon is considered part of Canaan and a northern extension of the land of Galilee. Lavish praise is heaped upon the cedars as no less than “the trees of God” (Ps 104:16), with the “fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon” (Song 4:15) adorning the country. The lily, the olive tree, and the vine grace the country, and the metaphor of the righteous man as one who will “flourish like a palm tree” and grows like “a cedar in Lebanon” (Ps 92:13) charms the imagination. In this land of mystique, Lamartine, who traveled to Beirut and the mountain (Mount Lebanon) in 1832, poeticized that “in the shadow of the cedars one feels as if in a temple. And what a beautiful temple! What altar closer to heaven!”³ And it was Hiram the King of Tyre (Tzor in Hebrew) who provided Solomon, out of love for David his father, the wood and his Phoenician builders to erect the Temple in Jerusalem slightly less than one thousand years before Christianity (1 Kgs 9–10). The Bible and its prophets of Israel regaled the talents and accomplishments of Tyre and Sidon, with their skillful and adventuresome traders and navigators far and wide (Ezek 27). Yet the Bible foresaw the fall of Phoenicia, as of Israel, to the Assyrian invaders in the eighth century BCE. But the remnants of the Temple of Melqart stand in Tyre, as does the grandeur of the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek, until today. Indeed, Baalbek housed pagan worship but perhaps for the one God (EL), and Adonis, symbolizing resurrection and hope, was a nature god in Jbayl known as Byblos, which for the Greeks served as the root word for the Bible. The idea that the village Ehden in northern Lebanon is biblical Eden was a popular Lebanese myth.⁴

After the trauma and destruction wrought by Assyria, Greece, and Rome against the Phoenicians and their Mediterranean colonies, the emergence of Christianity in Judea and the Galilee became in time, after early persecutions and theological disputes within the Byzantine church and against the Latin church, a liberating opportunity for Lebanon. Initially, the new religion, with its universal and humanitarian perspective, was brought to Lebanon by Jesus, who visited Tyre and Sidon (Mark 3:8). This was followed by the appearance of Christians there and further north in Beirut (Matt 15:21). Both Paul and Peter preached the gospel in Lebanon in the first century CE. Churches were built in Beirut and Jbayl, and construction on a cathedral in Tyre began in the year 314. By the fifth century Christianity was spreading into Mount Lebanon and eastward to the Bekaa valley.

The appearance in northern Syria of the saintly ascetic Maron, who died in 410, created a body of disciples that brought an evangelic spirit to Mount Lebanon. There the original inhabitants of the mountain, notably of Phoenician descent with their Syriac-Aramaic (not Greek) culture, sported a military disposition toward foreigners. They fought off the Umayyad Arabs from Damascus in the seventh century, demonstrating a fierce assertion of independence in their mountain refuge. The emergence of Maronitism exuded strength in the land, and without any inconsistency Christianity in its doctrine promised that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” But it was the combination of humility and militancy that would feature in the Lebanese national profile as the Maronites shaped the people’s identity from the fifth century onward. With the founding of the Maronite church under Patriarch Youhana Maroun in 676, Lebanon acquired a national church and the Maronite church acquired a homeland.⁵ Throughout the stormy history of this small, embattled people, the topography of Lebanon built character and provided safety as the two mountain ranges, Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, separated the country from Syria and the desert further east. Lebanese historian Jawad Boulos considered that the eastern range saved Lebanon from the Syrian-Arab threat and preserved the people’s distinct identity. However, with the coming of the Muslim period in the early seventh century, and the rapid expansion of Islam across the region, Lebanon too was targeted by the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus. The Sunni and Shiite communities developed in the country, Sunnis on the coast and northern areas, Shiites in the east and southern parts. They generally considered themselves to be inhabiting Greater Syria, known as Aram in the biblical period, rather than “the Lebanon” whose location was somewhat limited in popular consciousness to the mountain. The Islamic hadith literature recognized the sanctity of the land of the cedars because the building of Makam Ibrahim—the Kabaa in Mecca—was attributed to earth gathered from many mountains, among them Mount Lebanon, Sinai, and the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

The Crusader period in the East, which brought European Christian armies to Lebanon in 1099, offered the Maronites an alliance with France against the predatory Muslim environment. The mountain Mardaites-Maronites joined with the Crusaders—whose monuments are still visible in Tripoli, Jbayl, Sidon, and elsewhere—and conquered most of Lebanon from Muslim rule. Later, in 1215, the Maronite patriarchate consolidated ties with the Catholic church in Rome, while France in 1250 declared its commitment on behalf of the Lebanese Maronites. This Oriental Christian people was now bound to the West, in no less an exceptional way than when their ancient Phoenician ancestors wandered westward from their eastern seaboard on the Mediterranean. It was the extraordinary capacity to culturally absorb this dichotomous reality into the Lebanese experience that allowed Antoun Ghattas Karam to write in the name of Lebanon that “je suis en effet l’Orient et je suis l’Occident, je suis le carrefour et je suis le virage” (“I am indeed the East and I am the West, I am the crossroads and I am the curve”).⁶ The very fact that the Maronites were a native Eastern people that chose to associate with the Catholic church in the West illustrated, in the view of Père Saliba Bou Assaf, their openness to all—to all in Lebanon as reflected in its being the home to seventeen confessional communities (tawa’if ).⁷ Geographically and otherwise, it was noted by a number of Lebanese that Lebanon is a Mediterranean nation importing civilizational materials from far and wide; here was the “meeting place of all of Man’s major undertakings,” wrote author and diplomat Georges Naccache in 1949.⁸

Openness and diversity characterized Lebanon’s domestic human tapestry as it featured in Lebanon’s international panorama. The Qadeesha Valley was the home of early Maronite monks and hermits, Shiites settled in the Bekaa in the east, and Druze in Wadi Taym in the south. Lebanon was a religious refuge in particular for small individualistic communities, but all the while Lebanon was contending with imperial powers that sought Lebanon’s dissolution or assimilation within broader regional states. The Mamluks, for example, based in particular in Egypt, penetrated all the way to Bsharre in Mount Lebanon in 1283 and defeated the Maronites in battle in 1307. This said, Sunni Muslims and Orthodox Christians were traditionally oriented toward the hegemonic Islamic power in the Syrian hinterland, though the Druze and the Maronites, as the historic founding peoples of Lebanon, looked inward as befit small sects under siege.

It is worth recalling the military and political exploits of the legendary Druze leader Fakhr al-Din II (1572–1635), who grew up in a Maronite environment and acquired an education under the tutelage of Abu Nader el-Khazen in Kesrouan. Blessed with leadership qualities, he became a forerunner of Mount Lebanon’s struggle for independence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, while also initiating European-style modernization projects in the areas of agriculture, construction, and the arts. With only four thousand fighters, mainly Maronites, facing twelve thousand Ottoman troops from Damascus, Fakhr al-Din routed the enemy and was recognized as ruling from “Aleppo to Egypt.” He preferred, it was said, to declare his rule in particular in Mount Lebanon, Sidon, and the Galilee. Based on a historical source, Fakhr al-Din, though born a Druze, was a forerunner of Lebanese nationalism, and once a national personality, he is considered to have adopted a Christian identity. After being captured in the area of Jezzine and brought to Constantinople/Istanbul for execution, the sultan offered him his life if he would pray as a Muslim. He refused, and after being beheaded and stripped of his robes, next to his breast was laid a gold cross shaped like those of Lorraine.⁹ This is the tale that Maronites believe to be true. It is known that the emir’s nephew Mulhim left the Druze faith and adopted Christianity.

Throughout the Ottoman period, from 1516 until 1918, the minority mosaic of confessional groups enjoyed a degree of millet religious communal autonomy. But when threatened with forced conscription and exorbitant taxation, as when the Lebanese faced the rapacious rule of Ahmed al-Jazzar in the late eighteenth century, they resisted in the Matn and elsewhere with a vengeance. At other times, however, intercommunal fighting erupted as in the massacre of Lebanon’s Maronites by the Druze in earlier periods, such as in 1523. Later the murder of many thousands of Maronites in 1859–60 carried more than a hint of Turkish Muslim authorization. Included in that horrific campaign was the razing of Maronite villages in the Matn; the fall of Zahlé; the butchering in Deir al-Kamar; and destruction in the Shouf, Jezzine, and Hasbayya-Rashidiya, and in Marj’ayoun further south.¹⁰ Still, with Turkish thunder roaring from Istanbul to Lebanon, some Muslim notables gave refuge to Christians. Despite all this, the Christian ethic to “love your enemies” and certainly fellow residents of the mountain generally promoted intercommunal reconciliation and a certain spirit of resignation by the Maronites with their varied countrymen. Caesar Farah indeed explains the horrific events of 1860 as due to foreign intervention more than inherent intercommunal hatred, noting Europe’s pressure for reform in the Ottoman Empire. This raised Muslim ire, and the Druze were drawn into the fray. The American missionary Calhoun wrote at the time that the civil war in Lebanon was not truly a religious war and that, in fact, earlier history presented a chronicle of intra-Druze and intra-Christian factiousness more than of interconfessional violence. But since the Druze “have regarded the English as their protectors, and the Maronites in like manner have looked to the French government,” the warfare assumed a religious aspect.¹¹

The active involvement of France led to the inception in Mount Lebanon in 1864 of a special administrative unit (mutasarrafiyya) that lasted until 1914. This political framework rested upon joint representation in the administrative council: four Maronites, three Druze, two Greek Orthodox, one Greek Catholic, one Sunni, and one Shiite. A Christian majority of seven of the twelve members illustrated the balance of power in the mountain; M...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Organizations and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The Mystique and the Malaise
• Part Two: Wars of all Kinds
• Part Three: Death and Life
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Names and Places