Lebanon: the struggle of a small country in a regional context.

• Author: Ellis, Kail C.

This observation concerned the Lebanon of the early nineteenth century, but it is relevant to an understanding of contemporary Lebanon. Two destructive civil wars have interrupted Lebanon's struggle to develop a national identity out of its various social, religious, ethnic, and class groups. Although the weakness of its inter-sect political system of government has allowed outside forces to influence its domestic affairs, its location in a turbulent, highly symbolic, and culturally significant part of the world has made entanglements in regional conflicts impossible to avoid. As a result, the Lebanese see themselves as a people helpless in the face of more powerful outside forces, and as innocent of any responsibility for the social and political havoc that has racked their country.

Syria, Israel, and the Palestinians have influenced Lebanon's political system, and each continues to be inextricably involved in Lebanon's internal affairs. Each has fought wars on Lebanon's soil that continue to imperil both the future of the region and Lebanon itself.

SYRIAN-LEBANESE RELATIONS

From their inception, Syrian-Lebanese relations have been influenced by the carving out of Greater Lebanon's new borders in 1920 from provinces that Arab nationalists regarded as historically belonging to an independent Arab Syria. This separation gave rise to an irredentism that has only recently reached an uneasy reassurance in Syria's President Hafiz al-Asad's reference to sha'b wahid fi baladayn, "one people in two countries."

After Syria and Lebanon achieved independence in 1943, both countries gradually came to accept their roles as separate national identities: Syria as the heart of pan-Arab nationalism and Lebanon as independent and sovereign but within the Arab world. This understanding was affirmed by Lebanon's Sunni and Maronite communities in the National Pact of 1943, and by the Alexandria Protocol of 1944. Lebanon's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity were guaranteed by the Arab League Pact of 22 March 1945.

THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

The history of modern Lebanon is roughly contemporary to that of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and for most of its existence Lebanon has been struggling to contain the effects of that connection.(2) Lebanon's role in that conflict was determined primarily by its sectarian composition. Dominated by a conservative Christian leadership anxious to maintain its connection with the West, the Lebanese government officially opposed the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, but it had neither the desire nor the ability to participate actively in the conflict. Lebanon's position as a charter member of the Arab League required at least a limited military and political role in support of the Palestinians, and it did send a token force, estimated at from 1,000 to 2,000 men, to its border with Palestine.(3)

Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Lebanon's position toward the Arab-Israeli conflict was influenced considerably by the minority status of the Christians in the Middle East. Some Maronite Christian leaders, both ecclesiastical and lay, adopted a policy favorable to Zionism in the belief that this would counter pan-Islamic and pan-Arabist movements that saw Lebanon as part of the Syrian Arab hinterland. In July 1947, the Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, Ignatiyus Mubarak, presented a memorandum to the UN Special Committee on Palestine in which he declared that "to consider Palestine and Lebanon as parts of the Arab world would amount to a denial of history."(4) He also declared that "Lebanon as well as Palestine should remain as permanent homes for the minorities in the Arab world," and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.(5)

Some influential Lebanese perceived Israel as a useful buffer between themselves and the Arab nationalism of their neighbors. This led several members of the government not only to support a Jewish state in Palestine but also to espouse Western-sponsored defense schemes for the Middle East. In 1951, Charles Malik, then Lebanon's Ambassador to Washington and the United Nations, predicted that in the event of war in the Middle East, the Arabs would have to cooperate with Israel,(6) thus foreshadowing the alliance of the Lebanese forces with Israel during the 1975-76 civil war. The emergence in the mid-1950s of Gamal Abdel Nasser as the champion of pan-Arabism and the Palestinian cause gave Lebanon's Muslim and progressive groups added support and complicated the government's pro-Western leanings, especially its embrace of the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957.

THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 left Lebanon as host to an estimated 141,882 Palestinians, mainly from the Galilee in northern Palestine.(7) Fifty years later that number has grown to as many as 400,000, with the result that, for Lebanese of all confessions, the future of the Palestinians in their country has become the most pressing issue in any regional peace settlement.

Lebanon, like other Arab countries bordering Israel that found themselves hosting Palestinian refugees, absorbed the few that it could, primarily the professional classes, and distributed the rest among camps scattered throughout the country. Unlike its neighbors, Lebanon had unique concerns with the Palestinians. Its capacity to absorb the Palestinians economically, given its proportionately much smaller population, was very limited. In addition, the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians were Muslims who could not be easily absorbed into the mainstream of the country without upsetting the delicate communal balance that had been worked out in the National Pact of 1943.

For their part, the Palestinians did not wish to be absorbed by any country. Having never abandoned the quest to return to Palestine, they looked initially to the Arab countries to rectify the injustice that had been done to them. The desire for a national identity found expression in Nasser's pan-Arabist ideology, which during the Lebanese civil war of 1958 caused them to side with the opposition. Their impact on that struggle was minimal since they were not yet organized as a group either militarily or politically. This quiescent stage was soon to change, as the Palestinians organized both politically and militarily in response to regional events.

THE PLO IN LEBANON

Lebanon's involvement in the Palestine question entered a new phase with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its military arm, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), by the Arab League in 1964. Whereas the other Arab states sharply restricted the movements of the Palestinians and controlled the resistance through government-sponsored guerrilla groups, Lebanon's laissez-faire political system permitted neither the national consensus nor the authoritarian system necessary to enforce such measures.

The emergence of the Palestinian movement as the standard bearer of Arab resistance after the Arabs' military defeat in the June 1967 war was the next phase of Lebanon's involvement in the Palestine question. The defeat had so discredited the Arab governments and the Arab masses had become so demoralized that Arab public opinion looked to the skirmishes and commando operations oft he Palestinians against Israel for some consolation. The rise of the Palestinian resistance, however, contained within it the seeds of division between the Palestinians and the established Arab governments. The Palestinians recognized this danger from the beginning but, determined to pursue the cause of their own national identity and develop the organizations necessary for their political and military operations, largely ignored it.(8) In Lebanon they established guerrilla bases and began recruiting in the refugee camps.

The Palestinian resistance movement accentuated the deep social and political fissures between the Muslim and Christian confessions in Lebanon. The specter of refugee camps being turned into fortified arsenals and of young Palestinians being trained for commando operations threatened most Christian Lebanese and even some of the more conservative Muslims. When the Lebanese authorities attempted to restrict these activities, the Palestinians took advantage of the social and sectarian cleavages between Christians and Muslims to establish a firm basis of support in the country among Muslims and leftist Lebanese of both confessions.

ISRAEL'S POLICY OF RETALIATION

The first installment on this support was the 28 December 1968 Israeli raid on Beirut International Airport.(9) Israel claimed that the raid was in retaliation for a Palestinian attack and hijacking of one of its airplanes over Italy in July 1968. In fact, it was a harbinger of a future policy of retaliation against Lebanon. Israel's Prime Minister Levi Eshkol announced that "a state cannot harbor and encourage an armed force operating from its territory against a neighboring state and be considered immune from reaction."(10) The incident precipitated a series of conflicts between the Lebanese authorities, anxious to put an end to Israeli military actions, and the Palestinian resistance.

Lebanon, now deeply embroiled in the Arab-Israeli conflict, sought to resolve the increasing confrontations with Israel and the Palestinians by defining the conditions under which the Palestinians could operate in Lebanon. Not without some alarm, the government noticed that support for the Palestinians by the radical parties and the Muslim Lebanese was increasingly coupled with criticisms of the Lebanese political system and the privileged position of the Christian community. With the Palestinian movement becoming a lever for the Muslim community to effect political change in Lebanon, Christian politicians reacted by criticizing Palestinian activities as an infringement on Lebanese sovereignty. The resulting tensions between Christians and Muslim politicians, who viewed the Palestinian movement as...