In the summer of 1943, Arab nationalists won a stunning victory in elections in Lebanon, a country the French had created two decades earlier and ruled ever since. The winners, Bechara el-Khoury and Riad al-Solh, had received substantial, surreptitious British help behind the scenes. Soon afterwards they reached an unwritten deal known as the National Pact: by its terms, Khoury, a Maronite Christian, became president and Al-Solh, who was Sunni, his prime minister. This division of responsibilities down religious lines has been followed scrupulously ever since, even though the country’s demographics have changed. Less well-known was the other important commitment that the two men made. While Khoury promised not to turn to European powers for help again, Al-Solh abandoned his old ambition to merge Lebanon into Syria. Showing a profound awareness of the two dynamics that have made Lebanese history so tragic – its people’s willingness to seek outside help, and outsiders’ readiness to interfere – it was a valiant effort to change the country’s cruel and unrelenting history which was doomed to fail.
Lebanon’s complicated religious landscape, which the National Pact paid lip service to, is down to its geography. For centuries the mountain range that gives the modern state its name provided a safe haven for dissenters. The Maronite Christians fled there after an altercation with the Byzantine church in the seventh century. Their secretive neighbours, the Druzes, were regarded by other Muslims as heretics.
These two groups – Maronite Christian and Druze – lived intermingled in relative peace until the 1830s when Egypt’s ruler Mehmet Ali invaded and upset a delicate balance by trying to enforce conscription. The Ottomans eventually regained control with British help – but this only made matters worse. To try and deny the European powers the excuse to intervene, they announced reforms that gave the Christians and the Jews they ruled the same status as their Muslim subjects, who were scandalised by the effects of this change. Egged on by disgruntled Sunnis, the Druzes pre-emptively attacked the Maronites in 1860. Massacres which began in the mountains spread east to Damascus. This was when the French intervened, forcing the Ottomans to appoint a Christian governor to Mount Lebanon and grant the troubled region autonomy. In hindsight, it was a portent of what was to come.
Before the First World War broke out in 1914, Francois Georges-Picot had been France’s consul in Beirut. As French concerns about British ambitions in the Middle East grew, he forced the British politician Mark Sykes to acknowledge French claims in the region in a secret deal. The now notorious Sykes-Picot agreement would form the basis for the postwar carve-up of the Ottomans’ Arab lands between France and Britain, in which France gained what is now Lebanon and Syria. But as the degree of Syrian opposition to French rule became clear, in 1920 France’s high commissioner hived off Lebanon to curry favour with the Christians. And the French colonial government that followed relied heavily on Christian interpreters, which alienated other groups inside the country. After the French administration in Beirut backed Vichy following the fall of France, the British strong-armed Charles de Gaulle into promising Lebanon and Syria independence and invaded. After two years’ prevarication, De Gaulle’s representative was forced to hold elections, which resulted in the nationalist victories of Khoury and Al-Solh that paved the way to independence. The French left the Levant in 1946; two torrid years later, the British followed them, defeated by Jewish terrorism in Palestine.
After the war that followed Israeli independence in 1948, Lebanon became home for tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had fled north from Galilee, fearing they would be slaughtered by the Israelis. The northern frontier of the new Jewish state was quiet for the next few years. The Lebanese government had a tiny army and no appetite for a confrontation. It moved the Palestinians away from the border to makeshift camps outside Tyre and Sidon and Tripoli. But the immediate postwar decade that followed was peaceful compared to what was to come.
Banking secrecy attracted foreigners, and the minister of the economy even boasted that hashish grown in the country and then smuggled into Egypt made Lebanon several million dollars a year. Beirut’s slightly seedy glamour intoxicated visitors who were largely blind to the fact that the Palestinian refugees living on the fringes of the city were destitute and many ordinary Lebanese in the countryside were desperately poor. Many Western reporters had moved to Beirut after being thrown out of Cairo during the Suez crisis. They traded gossip over numerous martinis at the brutalist St George Hotel, which stands on the city’s famous Corniche, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Among them was Kim Philby, ostensibly working for the Observer and the Economist. He cultivated his colleagues assiduously, well aware that at that time the line between journalism and espionage was indistinct.
By the second half of the Fifties, however, there was growing tension. The constitution had enshrined a Christian bias to the electoral system – based on a 1932 census of the population that no one has ever dared repeat. When Khoury’s successor Camille Chamoun tried to amend the text in the Fifties so that he could enjoy a second term in office without addressing this more fundamental flaw, the Lebanese parliament refused to let him. Its members were aware that since Nasser’s triumph in the 1956 Suez crisis, many Lebanese were enthused by the charismatic Egyptian leader’s pan-Arab dream and feared he might take over. The murder of a prominent, pro-Nasser journalist added to the tension. A Druze attack on Chamoun’s palace – and the simultaneous overthrow of the monarchy in nearby Iraq – prompted the US to intervene, their marines staging an amphibious landing on the beach south of Beirut. “They were loaded with machine-guns, mortars and flame-throwers,” a British journalist recalled, “and muttered ‘excuse me Ma’am’ as they advanced past sunbathers in bikinis, while Lebanese beach boys tried to sell them Cokes and ice-creams.”
When the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was kicked out of Jordan in 1971, after another Palestinian group tried to assassinate the country’s king, it moved to Lebanon – one of their representatives described the country as “a garden without a fence”. Their left-wing radicalism made them immensely popular among ordinary Lebanese, and terrified the Maronites. And the Lebanese army proved powerless to stop Israel’s pursuit of the groups, which triggered fighting between the different factions in Beirut. The president advised his fellow Christians to take matters into their own hands, and after rival militia set up roadblocks to catch and kill their enemies, the country descended into a civil war which the Maronites looked like they would lose. Next door, Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad (father of the current president), was naturally sympathetic to the Palestinians but he feared what might happen if they won. In 1976 the Syrian army invaded. With the simultaneous support of Syrian artillery and Israeli tanks to the south, the Maronites staged a counteroffensive. It ended with the massacre of some 3,000 Palestinians in Tel al-Zaatar, the largest of the Beirut refugee camps.
In 1978, Palestinian terrorists, who had come from Beirut by boat, hijacked a bus in Tel Aviv and 38 Israelis died in the ensuing shoot-out. Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, sanctioned an invasion of Lebanon but then had to abandon it under pressure from the US president Jimmy Carter. Four years later, with Carter gone, Begin tried again. His plan was to drive out the PLO and install a leading Maronite, Bachir Gemayel, as president. The US secretary of state, Al Haig, described the move as a “lobotomy”. Although Begin promised that the Israeli Defence Force would advance no more than 40 kilometres, it was soon outside Beirut. The PLO agreed to leave following heavy Israeli bombardment of its enclave in west Beirut. Gemayel was sworn in, only to be blown up by a remote-controlled bomb three weeks into his presidency, planted by a man working for the Syrians, who were desperate to prevent the establishment of an Israeli-Maronite alliance. The Israelis used the killing to justify their entry into west Beirut, ostensibly to prevent reprisals. The militia controlled by Gemayel’s family, the Phalange, followed in their wake, entering the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in west Beirut and massacred thousands while the Israelis looked on.
The 1932 census had identified the Shia as the third-largest group in Lebanon, after the Christians and the Sunni. Because of this some of the Iranians involved in the 1979 revolution had spent time in Lebanon: it was a place they knew relatively well. After the Israeli invasion began, in response to Shia calls for help, Iran sent in members of its Revolutionary Guard. Hezbollah was conceived inside the Iranian embassy in Beirut. One of its members drove a car packed with explosives into an Israeli command post in the southern port of Tyre that November, killing at least 75 Israelis and 14 of their Arab prisoners. In April 1983 a truck bomb struck the US embassy just when the CIA’s leading experts on the region were meeting there. Its force was such that the agency’s Near East director’s hand was found in the sea a mile away, his wedding ring still on its third finger. Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed in an Israeli air strike two weeks ago, had been on wanted lists since this period, not least for his role in the infamous attacks on American and French peacekeeper barracks, which took place later the same year and killed more than 300 people. The foreign soldiers soon packed their bags and Israel withdrew its forces to the country’s south. By the time they finally left in 2000, Hezbollah had established itself as Israel’s most dangerous opponent. Its leader Hassan Nasrallah crowed that Israel was “weaker than cobwebs”.
Violence was not the only way that Hezbollah gained influence in this much-bloodied state. It provided schools and hospitals and even micro-finance, making up for the weakness of the Lebanese government. But as the ongoing Syrian presence became increasingly unpopular it came under pressure as well. In 2005 the group was implicated in the murder of prime minister Rafic Hariri, whose reformist ideas had threatened its existence, and tried to claim victory after a deadly cross-border raid into Israel provoked a short but devastating war the year later. Nor was it immune to growing Sunni hatred of the Shia caused by the Iraq war. When this instability spread into neighbouring Syria in the 2010s – the conflict personified in the Western mind by the silhouettes of Islamic State fighters – Hezbollah were soon sucked in. The group had always been close to the Syrian regime and played a crucial role in preventing it from falling. But it has since become clear that Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria was what enabled Israeli intelligence to penetrate the group. Just how well became clear when Israel went on the offensive this September, and killed Nasrallah and dozens of his henchmen, along with many innocent Lebanese civilians.
This is Lebanon’s modern history: bloody and conflicted. Present events are unfortunately of a piece. Lebanon’s defencelessness in the face of another Israeli onslaught, a bankrupt and utterly corrupt state, and a million internally displaced people mean that today, the country stands on the brink of disaster once again.
[See also: The wrongness of Boris Johnson]
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