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.
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