Too many minorities
Patrick Desmond
It is a foolish man who claims to under- stand events in the Lebanon in the last month, or over the last seven years, or even over the last century. For, in a world of complex states, Lebanon outstrips almost all the rest, ahead and still running. It is not enough to say that it is an artificial state, or that it is a collection of minorities, or that it represents the irridenla of powerful neighbours. All that is true. But the com- plexities of Lebanon only depart from those Points of reference.
Perhaps the easiest place to begin is with geography. Israel and Lebanon, with coastal Syria, form one of the most impor- tant land bridges in the world. Between the salt water of the Mediterranean and the sand of the great Arabian desert, the three regions provide a narrow corridor of well- watered, level going linking Asia Minor with Africa, the Euphrates with the Nile, the former Iranian and Ottoman empires with the other Islamic lands along the southern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Since the Arab conquests of the seventh century the land bridge has been usually under Islamic control — Abbasid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Saracen, Marneluke, Ottoman with four important periods excepted: those of the Byzantine reconquest of the 10th cen- tury, the Crusading Kingdoms in the 1 1 th- 12th centuries, the French and British man- dates in 1920-43/8, and since the founda- tion of the State of Israel.
Because it has changed hands so many tittles, both between competing Islamic em- pires as well as between Muslims and Chris- tians, the region is littered with remnant minorities. The most exotic are the Druze of southern Lebanon, a heretic Islamic sect now separated from the body of Islam. The Most assertive, at least in modern times, are the Maronite Christians of northern Lebanon and east Beirut, who chose in the seventh century to hold an eccentric doe- tone of the Divine Nature, but are now in communion with Rome. The most numerous are Sunni (orthodox) Muslims. They predominate in Syria but there, as recently in the Lebanon, it is the Shi'ites who are the more politically active. Syria is In fact governed by a Shi'ite sect, the Alawites, who are intensely unpopular with the Sunni orthodox. Added to all these, since 1970, are the refugee Palestinians, largely Shi'ite and burning with the agony °I enforced exile from their lost homeland. , Under the terms of the National Pact of 143, Lebanon was ruled through a power- sliming device, under which the Maronites Provided the President and the Sunni the rime Minister. The speaker of the House was a Shi'a, the deputy premier Greek Or- thodox, the commander of the army a
Maronite, the chief of staff a Druze. These arrangements were also expected to accom- modate economic interests, those of the more prosperous, largely Maronite and Sunni, and the less, Shi'ite and Druze. Of course they did not, altogether, nor did they take account of the fundamentally impor- tant feudal and family ties which also bind most Lebanese. Nevertheless, Lebanon worked, up to a point. A Muslim revolt, partly pan-Arabist but also fuelled by economic discontent, broke out in 1958, but was quelled by the army, to which a symbolic landing by American marines gave important support. As late as 1969 the country was still functioning more or less as the constitution intended. But in the follow- ing year, as a result of King Hussein's ex- pulsion of his militant Palestinians during 'Black September', large numbers of new refugees came to join those who had lived in southern Lebanon and West Beirut since 1948 (the only one of the Arab-Israeli wars in which the Lebanese army joined). The Palestinians set about transforming southern Lebanon into their main base for anti-Israeli operations, causing repercus- sions which led the Lebanese establishment to fear for the country's integrity.
Chief among its fears was that Syria, which has never accepted the separate ex- istence of the Lebanon, would use the Palestinians to secure control of their 'lost' province. And such an aim may well have underlain Syrian support for the PLO and, to a lesser extent, for the other Palesti- nian military organisations. But the out- break of full-scale fighting between the Palestinians and the Lebanese right-wing (largely Christian) militias in 1975 alarmed Syria with the prospect of a Lebanon under Palestinian control — and therefore with the power to provoke an Arab-Israeli war whenever it chose. Syria therefore changed sides and eventually, with the backing of the Arab League, installed an army of oc- cupation in the country. By then the PLO had suffered heavy losses; but so had the Lebanese population, particularly in Beirut and in the south, which was progressively depopulated in succeeding years.
And despite the presence of the Syrian `Arab Deterrent Force', the PLO continued its attacks on Israel from its southern bases, provoking in 1978 a limited and unsuc- cessful Israeli invasion. Its purpose was to establish a military frontier sufficiently far north to protect northern Galilee from PLO bombardment. International pressure forc- ed an Israeli withdrawal, and the insertion of a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) into Israel's temporary positions failed to halt PLO attacks. An odd but important outcome of this episode, however, was that the area between the Israeli frontier and the UNIFIL zone came under the control of a Christian officer of the defunct Lebanese army, a Major Had- dad, whose 'Haddadland' became a useful extension of Israeli territory, in which the PLO could not operate.
Frequent Israeli bombardments, air strikes and incursions further quelled PLO activity and in July 1981 a ceasefire agree- ment was actually arranged — which the PLO seem to have kept. But its presence could not be forgotten by Israel, nor ap- parently tolerated by the Begin govern- ment. Following the shooting of the Israeli ambassador in London, the Israeli army struck, evidently to a Iong-prepared plan which has now culminated in the occupa- tion of the whole of south Lebanon as far as Beirut and the Beirut-Damascus road, though also in the deaths of thousands of Lebanese and the flight of a hundred thou- sand from the battlefield.
Israel's aim, originally announced as the occupation of a zone 25 miles deep, has thus been much exceeded. So has its ex- pected level of activity. The Syrian army has been drawn into the fight, and suffered heavily. The PLO has suffered, too, but still retains its hold on West Beirut, from which it can be expelled only at a heavy cost in Israeli lives and renewed horrors for the ordinary inhabitants. Saudi pressure and Reaganite inclinations — which brought about the Haig resignation — have tem- porarily spared the city. But no means are proposed, nor do they suggest themselves, for evacuating the PLO, even if it is willing to avoid a fight to the death.
So the end of the Israeli campaign is still not in view. The reservists, of whom 100,000 were mobilised, have started to come home, many indignant at the 'ag- gressive' nature of the war, which is also how it is seen by anti-Beginites at home. The regulars, and the tanks, remain. Begin's hope, it is believed, is to reconstitute Lebanon as it was before 1970, with the Christians and indigenous Muslims sharing power and devoting their energies to the commercial life which made the country the most successful trading state in the Arab world. But if this hope is not realised, if the Palestinians somehow live to fight again, if the Syrians transform the north into an armed camp, if the Lebanese Muslims rally to the Arab cause — what then? There is an awful inevitability about the geography of the land bridge, in no way better marked than by the sites of the castles the Crusaders built to guard the landward flank of their Mediterranean holdings. Subeiba, under Mount Hermon, was taken by the Israelis in 1973. Beaufort, on the Litani, has just fallen. Northwards the line of strategic bastions marches through Sahyun and Antioch almost to the border of modern Turkey. No one — at least in the West — would wish on the Israelis the fate of the Latin Kingdom. But the logic of their present policy directs their footsteps towards the spots the Crusaders dinted.
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