This interview took place between Left Turn founding editor Bilal El-Amine and editor Sasha Wright and will be featured in the upcoming issue of Left Turn.

LT: What was the political atmosphere in Lebanon like before the latest invasion by Israel?

BE: On the Israeli/Lebanese front - even though Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in May of 2000 - there were a number of issues that Israel deliberately left open that could have easily been resolved. Israel kept some Lebanese land called the Shebaa Farms. Israel would not provide maps for the mines that they had planted throughout South Lebanon that caused many injuries and deaths in the South. Israel continued its constant breaches of Lebanese airspace with almost daily incursions by Israeli warplanes over Lebanon. Israel also refused to release the Lebanese prisoners still in Israeli prisons - there were many of them at that time. The issue of the prisoners took one slight step forward in 2004, when Israel finally decided to do a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, but even then, Israel held on to three Lebanese prisoners at the last minute before the exchange.

The long and devastating occupation by the Israelis by all accounts killed approximately 20,000 Lebanese from 1982 to 2000. Then when Israel was driven out at great sacrifice through the Islamic resistance - the military wing of Hezbollah - Israel decided to hold onto a few things to keep that front open. These are all minor issues that Israel could have completely put to an end. Instead, Israel decided to keep a few things that would be a source of friction to provide them with an excuse to go back into Lebanon at a later stage and try to rearrange the political balance inside the country in their favor, as they tried to do in 1982. Israel felt that it was humiliated by having to withdraw from Lebanon and wanted to exact revenge on Hezbollah, so they kept these files open. That is really where the story starts about who started this round of fighting.

Within Lebanon, the political atmosphere was as usual, divided - mainly because of the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. Many people thought Syria was the culprit and the country became divided along the lines between Syria's allies - the "loyalists" considered to be Hezbollah and a number of other groups and the "opposition" made up of Hariri supporters, the Druze, and the Christians of Lebanon. After the elections the so-called opposition came into power and they were essentially running the government. Hezbollah joined the government after winning a very solid base in the elections, but nevertheless it acted more as an opposition party to the neo-liberal Hariri block.

There was a lot of pressure on Hezbollah to disarm from the Hariri folks in cooperation with the Americans and the French based on UN Security Council Resolution 1559 that was passed after Hariri's assassination that called for the Syrians to leave Lebanon as well as the disarming of all militias in Lebanon. In the run-up to what happened in July, there was a lot of discussion about what would it take for Hezbollah to willingly disarm and Hezbollah was quite open about discussing it. Many people thought that the fact that Syria was finally forced to leave Lebanon would have a cataclysmic impact on Hezbollah and they would collapse completely, but in fact the very opposite started happening. Hezbollah was probably at the peak of its popularity and the Hariri government - with the US behind them - was having a difficult time getting them to disarm.

LT: What have been the effects of Israel's attacks on Lebanese civil society? What has been the response of Lebanese activists and NGOs?

BE: Israel used a shock treatment approach to Lebanon hoping that by attacking the country as a whole - the civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves - that Israel would be able to turn people against Hezbollah, which hasn't worked. Israel thought it could destabilize the country for a long period of time by just sticking their finger on all of the wounds, and particularly, the sectarian divisions that exist here. Israel's plan was to pulverize the country's infrastructure and then displace a quarter of the country - mainly Shia Muslims - and force them to live in Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze areas - hoping that frictions would develop and the Lebanese would be at each others' throats fairly quickly and put pressure to bear on Hezbollah and its supporters internally.

No one in Lebanon, particularly not the government, was prepared to deal with any of this, whether on the level of helping to defend the country or helping to deal with the humanitarian disaster that was created in the course of one month. The NGOs were also completely overwhelmed. Some of the NGOs were able to move quickly and do some good work, and many of them are connected to Hezbollah and other political parties here. But also, a lot of young people who are unaffiliated activists around various issues moved very quickly to address the large number of displaced people that were flooding into Beirut and other areas - living in parks and being put up in schools which are completely inadequate for living.

These young people started one relief effort in a park, trying to bring people food and help them find a place to stay, and then it developed more into more organized volunteer groups and the beginnings of NGOs or aid agencies that bring food, distribute it, and provide shelter for people. I've heard of several of these groups who have taken a slightly political tone as well. One of them is called Samidoun, which translates into a rather ugly word in English "steadfastness," but it is how people characterize being in solidarity with the resistance. The refugees, and all of us, are going to have to hold fast so that the resistance can be able to do the same at the front and the two allow each other to stand up in the face of Israel. By helping the displaced and dealing with their issues, it's a way of supporting the resistance.

That front was just as important as the front that Hezbollah was fighting on at the border with Israel. These people and organizations tried their best. But when you have a land, sea, and air blockade against you, and you have F-16's pulverizing the country; destroying all the fuel; bombing milk factories and chicken farms; driving people from virtually all of the agricultural land in the south and east of the country; causing all sorts of mayhem; and not allowing the Red Cross or even the UN to bring in supplies and aid - no one could possibly keep up and deal with that kind of situation. But it did actually allow for a spirit of solidarity to develop that probably bridges a lot of the sectarian divides that exist in the country.

LT: How does the attack on Hezbollah fit into the US and Israeli plans for the region as a whole, with Iraq and the war on terror?

BE: There's always been a close coincidence of interest between Israel and the US in the region. Both of them stand in opposition to everyone else in the region, although for different reasons For the US, the oil factor is obviously the key. The US wants to ensure that there is no opposition or resistance to them in the region - it does not want any nationalist movement, or any kind of movement, that could try to divert more of the region's oil profits towards developing the region and its people or potentially use oil as a weapon against the US. Rather, the US wants to keep the region under US control and it has gotten more aggressive since George W. Bush came in with this policy of trying to literally re-shape the whole region so it is cleansed of any opposition to the US, whether it's a movement or a regime.

Israel's very foundation was opposed by all the Arabs, and came at the cost of the Palestinian people and also the neighboring countries. Israel has continually waged wars upon and humiliated just about every country in the region. Most of the people in the region feel that it's an unjust situation and feel a great deal of hostility towards Israel.

So Israel and the US end up being in the same boat and obviously they support each other in advancing their interests in the region. Policy statements were written by neocons in the US for the Israeli and US governments that outlined a plan to wipe the slate clean in the Middle East - to get rid of stubborn regimes that they can't get under their control like Syria, Iraq during Saddam's time, Iran, as well as any movements like Hezbollah and Hamas. Neocons argued that it was in the interest of both Israel and the United States to topple or break these regimes and movements.

Both Israel and the US had been preparing to deal a blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon sooner or later, and because Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, they decided to do it at this time. The US, as it always has, gave Israel diplomatic cover when Israel came under a lot of pressure. Then the US delayed as much as possible when Hezbollah's resistance undermined their plans. To compensate for this, the US drew up a resolution that is heavily in favor of Israel. So where Israel actually failed on the ground, the US tried to save it diplomatically with a UN resolution.

LT: What is your analysis on the recent negotiations for a cease-fire?

BE: UN Security Council Resolution 1701 calls for a cessation of hostilities but not an immediate cease-fire. Actually, Hezbollah is called upon to stop all of its attacks but 1701 calls on Israel to only stop its offensive operations. Israel has always described its most aggressive and preemptive wars as defensive and therefore it will interpret any action it wants as being defensive and will continue attacking in this way if the international community allows it. The resolution also blames Hezbollah for this war and it does not say a single word about the month of Israeli war crimes committed against the Lebanese population - nothing about the excesses and the breaches of all sorts of conventions of war. Neither does 1701 have any word about reparations after Israel has literally destroyed the country. So UN Resolution 1701 rewards Israel in many respects, despite it waging a war of terror and committing a series of war crimes. On the question of the prisoners, which is at the heart of this whole matter, 1701 calls for the unconditional release of the Israeli prisoners but says nothing about the Lebanese prisoners. Hezbollah has accepted 1701 because of its characteristic flexibility and pragmatism. But we have yet to see how 1701 will be interpreted on the ground, especially by Israel who will read it for every advantage it can possibly get.

LT: Does UN resolution 1701 call for the disarmament of Hezbollah?

BE: No. 1701 calls for the Lebanese army to deploy south of the Litani River and to increase the number of the UN forces in South Lebanon already. 1701 does not directly call for the disarming of Hezbollah but it does say that previous resolutions must be implemented, referring to Resolution 1559, suggesting that disarming Hezbollah should be part of it.

LT: What has been Hezbollah's role in Lebanese politics in recent years?

BE: Essentially, if it weren't for the 1982 invasion of by the Israelis I don't think there would have been a Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah grew out of Israel's invasion and very long occupation. Israel very mistakenly decided to extend well beyond its immediate goals at that time which was to expel the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, from Lebanon. In only about three months into the invasion, Israel was able to achieve that goal and the PLO was shipped out of Lebanon to various countries. However, rather than withdrawing at that point, the Israelis decided that they were going to stay and essentially impose a new order and force Lebanon to sign a peace treaty and impose themselves as a overlord of Lebanon.

The Israelis obviously are not the most delicate in the way they work in their means of occupation and were rather heavy-handed using torture, imprisonment, and collective punishment widely - all of the things that Israel does in Gaza and the West Bank. This caused people throughout the south of Lebanon and through most of Lebanon to rebel and to begin to fight back.

Hezbollah at first started as an umbrella group for many small factions that were beginning to gather around the idea of developing an effective resistance organization to the occupation. By 1985, they had declared their statement of purpose, called the "Open Letter," where they started to formulate some of their ideas; but they didn't really elect a leadership until the late 1980s.

Since its founding, Hezbollah has surprised people that have very negative images of Islamist activist groups. Hezbollah established itself as an Islamist group that is very open and tolerant and is not fixated on imposing an Islamic state on people that do not want one and has said so from the very beginning. When Hezbollah liberated the South of Lebanon, there was a small but substantial number of Christians in the South, many of whom collaborated with Israeli occupation quite openly and were the front line torturers and thugs for the Israelis. But when the area was liberated, there was not a single incident of sectarian revenge against collaborators, Christian or Muslim.

Hezbollah then went on to immerse itself into the political mainstream of Lebanon, trying to establish itself as a Lebanese party and participate more and more in the government. They first did this in the parliament, where Hezbollah enjoyed a lot of success and became the largest parliamentary block. In the most recent round of elections, they took it one step further and joined the cabinet of the government with two ministers. This was called the Lebanization process and some people split off from Hezbollah because of this track. Nevertheless, Hezbollah has continued to immerse itself into Lebanese politics.

Although often accused of being Syrian or Iranian agents, Hezbollah actually represents the high point for the Shia Muslims of Lebanon who have been represented in the past by people who did not have their best interests at heart. Hezbollah is very much a Lebanese party with tremendous popular support, probably more that any political party has, whether in Lebanon or elsewhere. Hezbollah can call hundreds of thousands into the streets within an hour because they are very well organized and have really delivered for these very people, whether by driving out one of the mightiest armies in the world after twenty-odd years of occupation, representing their interests in the government, or through humanitarian work improving the livelihood of the people it represents.

LT: How would you characterize the leader of Hezbollah and how is he seen in the Arab world especially after the latest confrontation with Israel?

BE: Some call him the new Saladin others call him the new Nasser (the Arab nationalist hero of the 1960s). Nasrallah's pictures are now raised in protests across the Arab world, although he is very distinctly a Shia cleric and most Muslims in the Arab world are Sunni and in the past would have had prejudices against Shia. That has all fallen by the wayside after this outbreak of fighting. Nasrallah has really become a hero to many Arabs. He is someone who, as they say "lifts our spirits."

Nasrallah and Hezbollah have presented an alternative to the corrupt Arab regimes - who amass great money and weapons but at the cost of their own people or to use against their own people - and also an alternative to Al Qaeda and that kind of very right-wing Islamist politics that had been presented as the opposition before.

LT: What are Iran and Syria's real roles in the recent conflict? What influence do they have on Hezbollah?

BE: Iran is the main backer of Hezbollah - providing them with money and other kinds of support. No doubt this support was critical to the formation of Hezbollah, for sustaining it throughout this time, and its success. Nevertheless, Hezbollah was very much an organic development rooted in Lebanon. The Iranian revolutionary guards helped train the early members of Hezbollah, especially in fighting and military matters. But there has hardly been a foreign participation in Hezbollah - it has been primarily Lebanese. I would say Hezbollah is about 99% Shia Lebanese - mainly people who were affected by the occupation of Lebanon. The Iranian Revolution provided the support and the inspiration but really Hezbollah took off only after the Israeli invasion and grew because of the long occupation that followed.

Syria has mainly been a conduit for Hezbollah to get arms and also when the Syrians were in control of Lebanon before 2005 they had an agreement with Hezbollah that they would be given freedom to conduct the resistance without intervention.

No one denies that there is an alliance or relationship. The problem comes when opponents of Hezbollah present this argument that Hezbollah does not act in the interest of the people of Lebanon and that Hezbollah is a puppet or a stooge of either the Syrians or the Iranians. But, at every point, if you examine Hezbollah's record it has always acted within the interests of at least the people it represents here in the country and it represents one third of the people. Whatever decisions that Hezbollah makes are made here in Lebanon and implemented here.

There is also an attempt to link them also for other reasons - to tie Hezbollah to the "axis of evil" making things convenient for US and Israel who want to force them into a common front so they can take them all out as they tried to do in this war and haven't really succeeded.

LT: How will this confrontation affect Palestinians in Lebanon and Palestine?

BE: Over all, the effect on Palestinians would be that they've seen a resistance movement be able to fend off, and maybe more than fend off, the Israeli army and for a second time break the armor of invincibility that the Israeli army relies on to keep everyone, particularly the Palestinians, down. And maybe this has given them a boost after many years of continuous assaults by Israel. Maybe this has exposed them to a set of tactics, ways of organization, and ways of resistance.

After the liberation of Southern Lebanon in 2000 it was only few months before the second Intifada began in Palestine, and many attribute what Hezbollah was able to do to the Israeli army in Southern Lebanon as at least one cause or inspiration of that Intifada. The fate of the Lebanon and Palestine are very much tied together. Many people suggest that Hamas is now beginning to adopt more of Hezbollah's approach to politics and how to conduct itself rather than operating like the more traditional Islamist groups that focus less on fighting occupation and US imperialism and more on Islamic morals and sectarian issues.

LT: How should the US Left view Hezbollah?

BE: This is important, especially for what I see in US left approaches to Islamic activism. Obviously there's a very self-serving interpretation of Islamism, or what people often wrongly call Islamic fundamentalism, that the right wing uses as its new bogey-man after communism as a justification for aggression of and unilateralism. This right-wing interpretation is often a caricature of Islamists as fanatic terrorists killing people for the sake of killing that we see in the mainstream media and in Washington. This interpretation unfortunately extends into much of US Left analysis.

Many people on the left in the US make the mistake that any time they see a movement that has Islam as part of the way it expresses its politics, they immediately put it into one category that some go as far as calling Islamic fascism and others call reactionary. There's often very little distinction made between the various trends in Islamism that exist now. These trends are so varied at certain points that Islamism almost ceases to be a useful term. For example, if you look at secular groups, it is very hard to put all secular groups in one political category. The fascists were secular and the republicans are technically a secular group; and then there are Marxists and anarchists on the left. You have to look at Islamism in the same way. There are many different groups that exist under that umbrella and they're quite varied and have different histories. This is particularly true with Hezbollah because there is such a profound difference between Hezbollah and some of the other Islamist groups that it is very difficult to even talk about them as being part of the same movement.

There has to be a deeper understanding and we have to lift the prejudice that just because there's religious expression in the politics it does not immediately mean that it's a reactionary movement or a movement that we have to be wary of. Al Qaeda is a reactionary organization - it seems to simply want to enforce Islam; it probably has some very sectarian anti-Christian and anti-Jewish and even anti-Shia politics; and it uses horrific methods to achieve its goals. Hezbollah is the very opposite of that - it is a national liberation movement of a certain sector of the population here that has always been at the bottom and at the very margins. Hezbollah represents the very high point of the Lebanese Shia's self-organization and this just happens to be the way they express themselves.

Hezbollah has been a very successful movement and it has been rather open and tolerant at many levels - it has not sought to impose Islamic morals on secular people or people of other religions and its tactics are often the same as any social movement. Hezbollah does have an armed resistance wing, but that is something that was forced upon it by the Israeli occupation and it has never used that against anyone except the Israeli occupation.

So we have to be really wary of this knee-jerk reaction to any movement that has Islamic content, as you will find most movements do here in the Middle East and increasingly so. We have to look past that and see the real content - what the movement represents, what its goals are, what its tactics are - and judge it on that basis.

LT: Among many anti-capitalist activists, the tendency has not been to compare Hezbollah to Al-Qaeda, but to compare them to the Islamists in the Iranian Revolution. Can you discuss that comparison?

BE: Hezbollah's goal is not to create an Islamic state here. There has historically been a big difference between the Shia of Lebanon and the Shia of Iran at the ideological level because the Shia here have always been a minority and the underdog; while in Iran, Shiism has been a state religion for five hundred years or so and the clergy that led the revolution there were in a vastly different position than the ones here. Although Iran developed an opposition to American imperialism, no doubt that's what fueled the Islamic revolution in Iran, once they were in power the nature of that regime changed profoundly. Hezbollah's politics, even though they've now merged within the state, have actually gone in a more liberal, open, flexible, and pragmatic direction.

Hezbollah's leadership has literally no resemblance to the Mullahs of Iran - nor do they take their orders from them. In terms of religious leadership, what they call a spiritual leadership, there's a local cleric by the name of Fadlallah, who provides much of the religious guidance to Shia in Lebanon. If you read his stuff he's extremely liberal. We shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that just because Iran financially supports Hezbollah that they're one and the same. There are quite substantial differences.

LT: What are important things for US activists to be doing in order to support the Lebanese people? What will be the most important thing in the next stage?

BE: There are a lot of things that can be done. The most basic thing is raising funds to help re-build the country. Helping the country to re-build quickly will be a continuation of the resistance that happened and a way sending the message to Israel, "All your brutality is not going to break us and we will rebuild and be strong again." People can also come here, as some did in Palestine, to see for themselves, take pictures and videos, and use them as a tool when they get back to relay the real story back to people in the states in effective ways.

We need to try to follow up on the war crimes that Israel committed, and there are dozens. I've heard of efforts even in the US to do this. By drawing up some cases and then taking them to any courts that we possibly can, whether it's the United States or in Europe or in other international bodies, we may not get justice but at least it would a be way of making sure that Israel knows that it is going to be held accountable.

The heart of why Israel is such a source of instability and wars in the region is because its very foundation was at the cost of hundreds of thousands of people - Israel was founded on stolen land and it is in continuous confrontation with all of the people around it. We have to find a way of removing that source of friction and aggression and the only way is to address the Palestinian question and all of the outlying problems that have developed from that, including Israel's occupation of Syrian and Lebanese land.



Bilal El-Amine, founding editor of Left Turn, moved back to his native Lebanon over a year ago. When Israel started bombing Lebanon, Bilal did what he knows best and started reporting for independent media outlets on the Israeli devastation of the country and the Lebanese resistance. He reported almost daily from South Lebanon throughout the 33-day invasion for Flashpoints on Pacifica radio network. He can be reached at zaloom33@yahoo.com. Left Turn editor, Sasha Wright, spoke with Bilal immediately after the UN "cease-fire" resolution was passed about the context of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, its impacts on Lebanese society and politics, and about the South Lebanese Resistance and Hezbollah.

Lebanon for Beginners

Laurie King, Electronic Lebanon, July 2006

For many Americans, the names "Lebanon" and "Beirut" have long been synonymous with violence, chaos, terrorism, hostage-taking, and anti-US organizations, ideologies, and activities. These place names are often bywords for a total breakdown of social, political, and legal order. Indeed, the noun "Lebanization" has been applied to numerous situations of internecine ethnic conflicts played out in urban settings. Countering such conventional perceptions, this introduction to recent Lebanese history argues that even during the worst phases of Lebanon's multidimensional wars (usually fought in and over Beirut) order and patterns were evident in the structures and levels of confrontation: local, national, regional, and international.

Multiple strategies, sometimes in concert, though more often in competition, shaped the dynamic sociopolitical context of Lebanon over a period of sixteen years. As the war progressed, fighting became protracted and a war system was institutionalized, giving rise to a new class of warlord/politicians and nouveaux riches decision makers. Beirut was dissected socially and devastated physically. The post-war era witnessed remarkable rebuilding and sustainable reconciliation, but insufficient institutional and legal reforms.

Lebanon's war years were destructive and seemingly endless. By the late 1980s, a paralytic situation obtained: no one side could decisively win or lose on the military level. On the socioeconomic level, most Lebanese were unequivocally losers. On the political level, the Lebanese war, despite its monotonous logic of internecine violence, gave rise to dramatic developments in the form of new players, tactics, ideologies, and alliances. Even seasoned Middle East observers were taken by surprise at the latter developments, most clearly demonstrated by the emergence of the radical Shi'i militias, Islamic Jihaad and Hizbullah (Party of God), also known as the Islamic Resistance (al-muqaawamah al-islaamiyyah). These new political and military actors were born of local and regional events: the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Although Lebanon exhibits a number of unique sociopolitical characteristics, to be discussed below, its contemporary history cannot be understood outside of the larger historical, sociological, and political context of the contemporary Middle East.

The formation of ethnic groups in the Middle East, as well as the dynamics of collaboration and competition among such groups and between these groups and the states in which they are situated, arise from ever-changing balances of power and shifting frameworks of decision-making and resource distribution at the local, national, regional, and international levels. Such political processes are present in every region of the world, but in the Middle East, long a "cross-roads" linking diverse cultures, languages, economies, and environments, political phenomena and processes arising from the cross-fertilization of diverse peoples have always been pronounced. Since ancient times, and indeed, up until the present moment, the region has been a key prize for various world powers, from the ancient Roman and Persian empires, to the European colonial powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and ultimately, to the multinational corporations and high-tech Western armies of the present era.

Thanks to its marked strategic importance, the Middle East and its people are no strangers to the intrigues and interventions of local, regional, and global politics. The most harrowing episodes of interethnic conflict in the Middle East have occurred when all three dimensions of competition for political power and economic resources -- global, regional and local -- have coincided, as they did in Lebanon during its long and bloody civil war, which was also a regional war fought out on Lebanese soil.

Defining the Terms

The Middle East or Near East has been characterized as such in relation to the Far East (China, Southeast Asia and Japan), indicating that the vantage point for determining these locations was not indigenous, but rather, Eurocentric. The perspective from which this label was coined was that of Britain and France, the former colonial powers. Here, we find an initial -- and telling -- indication of the historical tensions and conflicts surrounding issues of identity and power in the Middle East: the region has been defined and represented from the outside, not from within. This troubling reality has sparked various nationalist and religious movements over the years desiring to assert regional or national autonomy from Western political and cultural domination. Even many decades after the end of colonial rule, Western interests and interventions can still evoke deep emotions and great controversies.

The West's direct or implicit role in some of the continuing tensions and injustices in the region, particularly those associated with Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory and Israeli military attacks on Lebanon, or the US role in Iraq and the current militarization of the Arab Gulf region, are interpreted through a lens of suspicion, outrage, and anger. Ironically, although direct colonial rule long since ended, the dynamics of the current global capitalist economy and the Middle East's weak role therein replicate relationships of dependency between the region and the leading industrialized nations of the West.

The imperialist roots of the region's geographical labeling notwithstanding, the Middle East is conventionally described as stretching from Morocco and Mauritania in the west to Iran in the east, and from Turkey in the north to Sudan in the south. The area of this large and culturally diverse region, which is double the size of the continental United States, encompasses territory on three different continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia), and is home to over 370 million people, among whom Muslims constitute 82 percent of the population, Christians 9 percent, and Jews 7 percent. The region also includes other religious groups that do not fit neatly into the categories of the three monotheistic faiths, such as followers of the Druze faith, adepts of the ancient Zoroastrian faith (found in Iran and India), and followers the relatively new Baha'i faith that first originated in Iran, where it is now brutally repressed.

Since the newly-formed states of the region did not emerge as a result of long-term, organic economic and political processes, but rather, from the quick sketching of colonial powers' pens, few Middle Eastern states' boundaries coincided with pre-existing geographic, linguistic, riverine, or cultural borders (Egypt, Turkey, and Iran are the only exceptions). Consequently, a variety of identity crises and ethnic conflicts were built into the new states -- and thus into the new regional state system -- of the post-colonial Middle East from the outset. The crisis of national integration has been a continuing theme in the region, expressed through various permutations: military coups, politicized religious movements, strict language policies, and the sedentarization or transfer of population groups that posed direct or indirect challenges to the legitimacy of state borders or the control of state resources.

While few states in the Middle East can boast ethnic, linguistic, or cultural homogeneity, nearly all have tried to achieve it, some by force, particularly in the Sudan, and usually at the expense of weaker ethnic groups. The first and most horrific expression of ultra-nationalism in the region was the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the second decade of the 20th century. The second was Israel's destruction of Palestine.

Socio-economic dimensions

Although fabulous oil wealth can easily be found in the Middle East, particularly in the countries of the Arab Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman), the vast majority of Middle Eastern people are more familiar with poverty or the fear of its imminent arrival. The gap between the region's haves and have-nots is profound, dramatic, and deepening. Perceived and actual economic inequalities influence the formation and mobilization of ethnic groupings, particularly in those countries in which the rich and poor live in close proximity, such as Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey.

A growing economic trend throughout the region as a whole is massive rural-to-urban migration, imposing potentially dangerous social, economic, infrastructural and environmental strains on "mega-cities" such as Cairo, Istanbul, Khartoum, Beirut, Amman, and Tehran, which have populations ranging from two to fourteen million and suffer from resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and insufficient employment opportunities for the largely young, male, unskilled masses continuously flowing into their bursting metropolitan boundaries.

In assessing ethnicity in any region, including the Middle East, we must avoid the easy assumption that ethnic differences are essentially physiological differences. Ethnic differences are also class differences. The assumption that ethnic groups are determined primarily by objective biological criteria such as hair, skin, and eye color, or height and physique, and only further distinguished by such characteristics as language, cultural patterns, and religious faith, has facilitated racial stereotyping and racism in many societies. Social scientists examining the phenomenon of ethnicity stress that it is a strategic, more so than a genetic, phenomenon.

Ethnic identity, whether defined according to subjective criteria (an individual's awareness of and feelings about his or her membership in a particular ethnic category), or objective criteria (others' categorization of an individual on the basis of physical, cultural or linguistic characteristics), cannot exist in a homogeneous society in which everyone shares the same cultural, religious, class, and linguistic background. Ethnicity and ethnic identity are oppositional or dialectical phenomena; they only emerge in societies comprised of different types of peoples from a wide variety of backgrounds. Ethnicity is everywhere a feature of plural societies characterized by cultural, economic, linguistic or religious heterogeneity and inequalities of class, wealth, privilege, and access to resources.

With increasing migration from rural to urban areas and the impact of enhanced communications and transportation systems, individuals and groups from a wide variety of cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds have suddenly been brought into contact with each other throughout the developing world. In the rapidly expanding cities of the Middle East, various ethnic groups interact and compete with one another in new and frequently alienating sociopolitical contexts characterized by economic scarcity and uneven development.

The recognition of ethnic differences thus implies the recognition of economic and political differences as well. The ensuing awareness of relative and absolute economic disparities can easily lead to conflict, competition, and opposition organized along ethnic lines.

Identity as a function of administrative regimes

Identity is neither programmed nor pre-existing; it is constantly being shaped by the interplay of contexts and the dynamics of power inherent in such contexts. If identities were determined by virtually immutable genetic realities alone, then we would expect to see the same categorizations, symbols, and expressions of identity enduring over time in the same place, regardless of economic, cultural, or political developments. This is clearly not the case in the Middle East, a region that has experienced rapid metamorphoses from empire to colonial regimes to modern nation state structures in less than a century, and in which organized ethnic and religious groupings have emerged in different periods to compete for power, resources, and privileges, thus highlighting the contingency and relativity of identity.

Under conditions of empire, familial and confessional (sectarian) identities were most significant in the region. Under conditions of centralized state administrations, new regional, class, cultural, and ethnic identities -- and consequently, new conflicts -- have come to the fore as laws and policies imposed identities on people that were new, uncomfortable, and even, in some cases, objectionable. A dual dynamic of identity is evident in the context of the modern nation state in the region. One aspect of this dynamic is that identities can be claimed actively by people affiliating as members of a particular group in order to mobilize efforts to secure access to scarce resources or threatened rights, or in competition with other groups for control of the state's resource distribution mechanisms.

The opposite aspect of this dynamic is identification as an involuntary process, as in those situations in which the state, desiring to safeguard or project a vision of its own ethnic purity or religious unity, imposes limited and limiting identities from above while forbidding the expression of contradictory identities from below.

Contexts and Catalysts of Ethnicity in the Middle East

The peoples of the Middle East are no strangers to harsh and uncertain environments, whether natural, economic, or political. Inhabiting an ecological zone characterized by aridity, steep valleys, rugged mountains, few rivers, scant rainfall, and poor soils, Middle Eastern communities were traditionally compelled to combine a variety of modes of subsistence, or mixed economies, such as pastoral nomadism, small scale agriculture, commerce and fishing, in order to make a living. Groups dwelling in this arid and semi-arid region also developed distinctive cultural patterns and sociopolitical institutions that served to minimize the hardships and uncertainties of their natural environment.

Up until the present era, the peoples of the Middle East have remained justly famous for loyal attachment to their families and religious communities, distinctive rituals of hospitality and conflict mediation, a preference for shifting and fluid coalitions rather than enduring, corporate socio-political organizations, and flexible kin-based collectivities, such as the lineage and the tribe, which until quite recently performed most of the social, economic, and political functions of communities in the absence of centralized state governments.

Prior to the advent of the nation state system, and even before the colonial era, most of the peoples of the region (with the exception of those living in Morocco, Mauritania, and Iran) lived under Ottoman rule in the sociopolitical framework of a vast and multi-ethnic Islamic empire. Day-to-day matters of administration and basic governance were overseen and discharged by local political elites chosen by the Ottoman rulers, as well as the local clergy. The Ottoman Empire was organized not according to ethnic or national principles and categories, but according to religious distinctions. Subjects of the Ottoman Sultan did not identify themselves as Ottomans, Turks, Arabs, Azeris, Berbers, or Kurds, but rather, as Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Druze. The crucially distinguishing social categories were religion, class, and gender.

Within this socio-political setting, Muslims constituted the majority, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of power, rank, status, and opportunities. Christians and Jews were formally recognized as respected religious minorities -- "Peoples of the Book" -- and categorized as dhimmi communities (literally meaning "on the conscience" of the larger and more powerful Muslim community). Christians and Jews were to be protected from harm or persecution by the majority Muslim community in return for their acceptance of a subordinate social and political status, payment of a special head tax (jizya) in exchange for their exemption from military service, and refraining from any public display of their religions, such as processions and liturgical ceremonies.

Dhimmi communities were under the jurisdiction of Islamic courts in the event of criminal cases and some property disputes, but otherwise obeyed the jurisdiction of their own communities' religious laws and precepts concerning any issues touching upon religious and family matters. As non-Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Jews were not subject to the rulings of shari'a (Islamic law) in matters of personal status such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, and other family issues. Instead, Christian sects and Druze and Jewish communities sought guidance, mediation, and rulings from their own religious leaders, who had the power to make binding judicial decisions in the domain of family law and to represent their religious communities in official dealings with the Ottoman authorities. This system of legally recognized, non-Muslim communal autonomy was known as the millet system (meaning "people" or "community" in Turkish).

The Middle East's cultural heterogeneity stemmed from geography as much as from Ottoman social categorizations, however. The ecological characteristics of the region, combined with the prevalence of rugged mountains, deep valleys, and virtually impassable desert expanses, compelled different communities to live in small, close-knit, family groupings widely separated from each other and unlinked in any overarching political or economic organization. This facilitated pronounced diversity in the region. For example, the three key cities of present-day Iraq, all of which are linked by rivers (Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra) had completely different systems of weights and measures and currencies until the late 19th century.

During the Ottoman era, the rugged mountainous areas of the Eastern Mediterranean became a refuge for a variety of Christian sects and Islamic splinter groups seeking to escape persecution by orthodox religious authorities. Dwelling high atop these mountains, minority groups such as the Maronites, Druze, Shi'a, and Alawites could pursue their religious traditions free of interference from either Christian or Muslim authorities. Religious refugees thus rendered the mountainous zones of the region culturally and religiously diverse: Not only the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, but also the mountainous regions of northern Iraq and Eastern Turkey, as well as mountainous regions of North Africa, have traditionally been home to minority groups such as the Kurds, Assyrians, and Berber tribes.

Middle Eastern cities have always evidenced cultural and religious heterogeneity. The plural nature of Middle Eastern urban space is inscribed in the very towers, walls, and gates which marked off the various named quarters of traditional urban settlements, e.g., "the Muslim Quarter," "the Armenian Quarter," the "Jewish Quarter," the "Orthodox Quarter," etc., as we find in such ancient cities as Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. The spatial separation of different religious and ethnic groups in the traditional Middle Eastern city was paralleled by a division of labor between these distinct communities.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews occupied different professional categories in the Ottoman social and economic structure. The traditional city's division of labor was usually characterized by accommodation, complementarity, and integration rather than by competition and conflict. Muslims held influential positions in religious courts and schools as well as in the military and in local governmental administration, while non-Muslims served primarily as doctors, merchants, advisors, artisans, and religious and legal specialists for their own sectarian communities.

The Ottoman-era division of labor is recorded to this day in the names of many Christian families from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria designating the professional and artisan roles that their ancestors played in Ottoman society, e.g., sabbagh (dyer), hakim (doctor), khabbaz (baker), sayigh (goldsmith), hayek (weaver), najjar, (carpenter), khoury (priest), and shammas (sexton).

The cultural and religious heterogeneity of the Middle East is thus neither a new phenomenon associated with rapid urbanization nor a function of the creation of nation states in this century. Nor is cultural diversity a byproduct of colonialism (although colonial powers certainly employed "divide and rule" tactics to consolidate their control of local societies and political systems under their rule). Different ethnic and religious groups have been living side by side in the Middle East for centuries, occasionally in conflict, but more often than not in harmony.

What is new is a transformed structure of relationships between different ethnic and religious groups within the contemporary Middle Eastern nation state. Here, we see the aforementioned interplay of context and ethnic identity: in the administrative context of the nation state, the social, political, and economic frameworks in which different groups interact, work, and struggle are no longer characterized by traditional guidelines of complementarity but by the uncertainties of competition. Although the Ottoman Empire was not an ideal model of economic efficiency or social justice, it nevertheless encouraged relations of intercommunal accommodation and cooperation to a greater degree than did subsequent colonial regimes or the imposed nation state system.

From empire to nation states

The relative balance and insularity of the Ottoman social universe was increasingly disturbed in the 18th and 19th centuries by European peoples, processes, and events. By the late 18th century, Ottoman authorities had grown alarmed by Europe's increasing military prowess and administrative efficacy, and accordingly attempted to copy European developments and practices so as to enhance their own control over the Empire's far-flung territory and resources. In the 19th century, Ottoman officials implemented a series of administrative and legal reforms, primarily to keep up with European advances, but partly to instill a sense of Ottoman identity and a renewed sense of order throughout the Empire.

Trade is frequently described as "the fig leaf of imperialism," and from the indigenous Muslim perspective during the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire, this was a valid assessment of increasing European penetration into the region. European commercial representatives set up agencies and field offices in such cities as Aleppo and Beirut, and close relations soon developed between Europeans and local Christian and Jewish merchants, artisans, traders and translators.

The non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire benefited from these contacts and relationships not only economically, but also culturally and politically. By the middle of the 19th century, European powers were lobbying the Ottoman Sultan for better treatment and even protection of particular dhimmi communities, as well as special protections for European commercial agents and representatives in the region and for their local employees and contacts among the Ottoman Christian and Jewish population as well.

Under European pressure, the Ottoman Sultan issued a degree giving Christians and Jews legal equality with Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, just as the region's incorporation into a European-dominated market economy and the resulting transformation of the local economic system (particularly the shift from subsistence to cash crops) was having a noticeable impact on social and economic relations in the Ottoman world.

Muslim feelings of insecurity, inferiority, and victimization increased during this period of change, and were frequently expressed in attacks on the dhimmi communities. The most dramatic example was the massacres of Christians in the Shouf region of Mt. Lebanon and in Damascus in 1860, an event that increased French and British political and even military intervention in the region, eventually leading to the creation of a protected zone in Mount Lebanon at the instigation of European powers. This autonomous entity in Mount Lebanon, home to Maronites and Druze, was the embryo of the modern Republic of Lebanon.

European powers' concerns about the local non-Muslim population stemmed not from charitable impulses alone. Aiding and allying with local Christian and Jewish interests enabled European states to get their "foot into the door" of the declining Ottoman Empire. European actions in the Ottoman Empire were part and parcel of the "Great Game," the race among various European powers to control the routes to and the extraction of resources from the East, particularly India, where the British enjoyed -- and naturally endeavored to maintain -- a decided strategic advantage. In their pursuit of the "Great Game," the European powers backed different communities' interests, thereby establishing, whether by design or happenstance, the groundwork for the "divide and rule" policies so effectively implemented during the colonial period following the Ottoman Empire's collapse at the end of World War I.

During the colonial era, some groups received preferential treatment from the British and French authorities. The colonial policy of playing various groups off against one another was later echoed in the practices and policies of the new nation states that the colonial powers carved out of the region heedless of any coincidence of ethnic, natural, or linguistic borders. Those who had been favorites during the colonial era frequently became scapegoats after independence.

Lebanon in historical, political, and cultural context

Lebanon is a country marked by profound ethnic diversity because its mountainous terrain was historically so attractive to religious and ethnic minorities fleeing persecution. Lebanon's heterogeneity also stems from the manner in which it was patched together as an administrative territory following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, represents a living remnant of the Ottoman millet system disguised as a centralized nation state. Lebanon began as the aforementioned autonomous region of Mount Lebanon that the French exacted from the Ottoman authorities in the 1860s to protect the Christian dhimmis (primarily the Maronites, an Eastern rite church that was always in communion with Rome and thus had more of a Western orientation than the other Christian sects). Before Lebanon's independence in 1943, the French colonial powers had attached to Mount Lebanon the northern regions of Akkar province, the city of Tripoli and its surroundings, the city of Beirut, and the southern cities of Sidon and Tyre. This deft carving of territories added Sunni, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Jacobite, Assyrian, and Shi'a communities to the largely Maronite and Druze communities of Mount Lebanon.

France's creation of the Republic of Lebanon did not sit well with Syrian leaders or the Syrian populace, who had always considered some of the new territories of Lebanon, particularly the northern provinces and the Beqa'a Valley, its territory. To this day, Syria, which plays an active role in Lebanese affairs, does not have an embassy in Beirut, the Lebanese Capital.

Adding to the mix of confessional groups in the newly forged Lebanese republic (which, at independence, was said to be 51 percent Christian and 49 percent Muslim by manipulations of statistical data) was the arrival in 1948 of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees fleeing war and violence between Palestinian Arabs and European Jews who had been living and settling in Palestine since the last decades of the 19th century. After its establishment in 1948, Israel prohibited the return of the majority of the refugees who had fled or who had been forcibly driven out, in violation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

The arrival of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon presented not only a logistical and economic problem of immense proportions for a new state lacking in resources. The biggest threat posed by the refugees' presence was the potential demographic and political significance of a large Sunni Muslim group in a state dominated by Christians. Many Christian -- and even a few Muslim -- leaders of the new republic feared that the refugees might one day tip the delicate confessional balance and the verbal national pact that enabled Western-oriented Christians to coexist and collaborate with Muslims who looked to the Arab and Islamic world for their identity and ideological influences.

The Lebanese political system is based on confessional (sectarian) power-sharing (called "taa'ifiyya" in Arabic, from the word "ta'ifa," meaning "sect"). Lebanon is unique in being a country comprised solely of minorities -- 18 officially recognized ethno-confessional groups, to be specific. Each group has its guaranteed number of seats in the parliament, and each expects to receive its fair share of ministerial posts. The three largest groups -- the Maronites, the Sunnis and the Shi'a -- get the presidency, the prime ministerial, and the speaker of the parliament positions respectively. Theory and practice rarely coincide in politics, however, and the Maronite community's historic domination of Lebanon's political and economic power structures since before the state's establishment, no less than the context of relative and absolute deprivation and economic inequalities, rising regional Arab nationalist sentiments (particularly pro-Palestinian feelings), and the polarizing influences of the Cold War between the US and the USSR in the region, all led to the eventual conflagration of the war.

Sociological studies consistently emphasize that a minority is not necessarily defined in terms of demographic size, but rather, in terms of relative political and economic power, as well as by distinguishing cultural beliefs and attitudes. If a minority is a group that lacks power, it is only a short leap to the conclusion that a minority group is always a potential victim group.

In Lebanon, the entire population, being a mosaic of contending minorities, was thinking and feeling like potential victims even before the war broke out on April 13, 1975. It is no wonder, then, that the war was so violent, so bitter, and so protracted. Long before the war began, the Lebanese were enmeshed in a political and psychological "economy of scarcity" which left everyone feeling both vulnerable and opportunistic.

Clearly, many of Lebanon's eighteen different sects had valid historical, political, and economic reasons to worry about scarcities of power, security and resources. Taa'ifiyya, however, actually obstructs power-sharing at the grass-roots level and gives rise not to a nation of fellow citizens, but rather, to an arena of pronounced conflict and competition between many anxious and agonistic minority groups. Because of Lebanon's confessionally based system, every individual is encouraged to think of himself or herself as a Maronite, a Shi'i or a Sunni first, and only secondarily as a Lebanese citizen. By emphasizing the group over the individual (and thereby minimizing the individual's choice, power, and sense of responsibility), and by privileging the sect over the state (thus contributing to the fragmentation of the polity), ta'ifiyya cannot but set the stage for future conflicts.

Not only has Lebanon's system of confessional power-sharing had detrimental effects on national identity and the consolidation of the institution of citizenship, it has also complicated Lebanese conceptions, attitudes and behaviors associated with power. In Lebanon, power is not vested in the individual; rather, individuals can only attain power through their community, or, more specifically, through the leader (za'eem) of their community, who usually wields absolute power (backed-up by credible threats of force) in the context of his confessional group. The concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals in Lebanon's political system has increased the sense of powerlessness and dependency which are already so prevalent among the members of each of the country's contending minority communities.

The institutionalization of ethnic and religious identities for legal and administrative purposes, seen most clearly in states such as Lebanon and Israel, is a double-edged sword. Although official recognition of cultural heritage and religious laws may provide answers to individuals' psychological needs and communal organizational problems, it can also trap individuals (particularly women) in the vise of inflexible identity categories not of their own choice or making, thus limiting their personal options and opportunities while preventing the development of a more inclusive sense of overarching national loyalty and identity.

Political and Historical Background of the 1975-1990 Lebanese War

During the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanon was celebrated as "the Switzerland of the Middle East." Beirut, a vibrant Levantine crossroads of cultures, was home to over a million Lebanese from 18 different ethnoconfessional sects, thousands of Palestinian refugees, Arabs fleeing tyrannical regimes, and many European and American families working for ARAMCO and its subsidiaries.

A regional center for banking, finance, insurance, and import-export trade, Beirut meant very different things to the wide variety of people who lived in her neighborhoods or passed through her streets en route to other destinations. For middle class Arabs in Lebanon and throughout the region, Beirut was a glittering modern capital: sitt ad-dunya, "The Lady of the World" -- the center of Middle Eastern sophistication, luxury, cosmopolitan attitudes, fashions, and pleasures. For Arab intellectuals and aspiring politicians, Beirut offered a welcomed breathing space for discussing, publishing, and actualizing ideas deemed radical or revolutionary elsewhere. For the wealthy from east or west, Beirut was "Paris on the Mediterranean," site of a vibrant and lucrative services industry, deluxe casinos and hotels, and the best hospitals and universities in the Arab world.

Yet Beirut was also a troubled zone of tragic contradictions and painful contrasts: between the ostentatiously wealthy and the miserably poor, citizens and refugees, secularists and religious, Left and Right, Orient and Occident.

Although Beirut has been continuously inhabited for millennia, it was not until the 20th century that the city became demographically and politically significant. The name "Beirut" has either Syriac, Hebrew, or Phoenecian roots, meaning "wells" or "many wells," indicating that this flat triangular plain, which juts into the Mediterranean and enjoys a natural harbor, has always been rich in fresh water sources other than those provided by rivers and snow melts descending from the mountainous regions to the city's south and east (the Shouf region and Mount Lebanon, respectively).

Beirut grew dramatically during the latter half of the 20th century. A middling port town and trading center that took on added importance with the rise of the silk trade in the 18th and 19th century under Ottoman rule, Beirut's population was predominantly Sunni Muslim and Greek Orthodox.

Although Lebanon is conventionally described as multi-confessional, it is primarily in the capital, Beirut, where all of the country's 18 sects actually lived in proximity to one another and shared the same sociological and infrastructural field of interaction and lived and worked in the same physical setting. Beirut was the living embodiment of Lebanese confessionalism, in all its rich cultural and interpersonal potentiality, artistic and literary expression, cosmopolitan attitudes, and fertile ideological and intellectual trends, as well as its implicit tensions, disjunctions, and contradictions. Opportunities and dangers co-existed in the sociopolicical fabric of Beirut; external actors and influences could easily encourage one or the other dimension to flourish.

What makes a city a city is not the number of people who live there, or the existence of different classes, ethnicities, lifestyles, or occupations, but rather, the nature of social role configurations and most crucially how social roles are combined to create new social formations that highlight personal networks, informal structures, diverse role domains that do not necessarily overlap, and various roles that one individual may play in a single day. The militarization and mobilization of distinctively urban networks was key to the carnage visited upon Beirut from 1975-1990.

One Urban Setting, Multiple Levels of Confrontation

The Lebanese war, largely (but not entirely) played out in and through the urban fabric and infrastructure of Beirut, was in fact three overlapping, interpenetrating and dynamically interacting wars:

1. A civil war to influence and alter power sharing within Lebanon among Christians and Muslims. This dimension of the war centered on tensions within the official system of confessional power sharing (at-taa'ifiyya, which had grown unworkable as Muslims began to outnumber Christians. As historian Ussama Makdisi notes in an incisive study of the roots of confessional conflict in Lebanon, sectarianism is not an ancient and deeply rooted identity system. Rather, it first appeared as a thoroughly modern response to jarring, internal and external changes in the mid-19th century Ottoman Empire. Confessionalism, like ethnicity, is about contests for power in uncertain settings, usually urban settings. It is not a genetically transmitted mentality or an ineluctable set of traits. Makdisi further observes that "The war in Lebanon ended, but sectarianism did not." To dismantle sectarianism, he urges us to look not at religion and culture, but rather to attend to political and economic realities as well as local conceptions and practices of power in their articulation and interaction with regional and global political configurations. Confessionalism is grounded in globalization, not tribalism; it is a correlate of processes of modernity, not ancient history. At its birth, Lebanon was anchored in a "gentleman's agreement" between the country's Christian and Muslim political leadership, who represented families and regions, not individuals: Lebanon would be a Christian country with an Arab face, in which Christians would not turn to the West and Muslims would not turn to the Arab world, but rather each group would negotiate and coordinate with each other to create a special balance in which a multi-ethnic sociocultural and political space would be viable on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. The breakdown of this agreement, known as the "National Pact," had actually preceded the war, but was hastened by the second dimension of Lebanon's war;

2. A regional Israeli-Palestinian-Arab war to determine the configuration of power, identity, and influence in the region. This dimension had begun, in fact, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the overt influence of European colonial powers in drawing up the borders of the region's new nation states, a political process that assumed special poignancy in Palestine with Great Britain's promise of the same land to two different peoples. Before the inception of Lebanon's war years, the regional dimension of battle, one expressive of primordial and powerful existential fears of all parties, was largely fought out in and around Palestine and Israel, and usually in the form of dramatic, though short-lived, conventional warfare on battle fields (1948, 1967 and 1973). With the PLO's adoption of Lebanon as its "administrative center" in the early 1970s, and its increasing use of Lebanese territory as a staging ground for attacks on Israel, rationales were readied for Israel's 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon, both of which involved wider, unvoiced strategies to secure Israel's hegemonic position in the region. The 1982 invasion caused the most intensive and extensive physical damage and loss of civilian life, altered the course of the war, deepened political dilemmas for all parties, including the United States, and revealed the extent and dangers of the third dimension of Lebanon's war;

3. The international dimension, which was implicit from the start, given Lebanese connections to both the West and the Arab-Islamic world. Lebanese are inveterate labor migrants, and economic ties between Lebanon, the Persian Gulf states, Western and Central Africa, and North and South America played a role in political lobbying, remittance income, and arms dealing from the start of the war. France, the former colonial power, had intense interests in Lebanese developments, as did the Vatican. Israel and the US were anxious about radical Arab nationalist and Palestinian tendencies in Lebanon. After 1979, and especially after the 1982 Israeli invasion and its bloody aftermath, the Islamic Republic of Iran became a key player in Lebanon. Though political scientists of the 1980s viewed US-USSR confrontations through various proxies in Lebanon as significant, in retrospect, it was the emergence of urban warfare between Western and Islamist groupings that signaled new and evolving international dimensions of conflict in Lebanon and the region.

The multidimensionality and dynamism of the Lebanese conflict was not new, however. Beirut's tensions were beginning to take on regional and international shades of meaning and tension as early as the mid-1950s. Conflicts in the Arab world, coupled with the US-USSR confrontation, certainly colored Lebanon's short-lived though scarring 1958 disturbances. These same conflicts reverberated much more loudly and lethally two decades later, not only because of international developments, but even more so because of social, economic, and political realities within Lebanon, concretized in the urban landscapes and social formations of Beirut.

The "poverty belt" (hizaam al-fuqr) or "misery belt" (hizaam al-ya's) housing Beirut's poor continued to grow during the 1960s, generating its own informal economic and social constellations, based largely on kinship and confessional networks. The weak Lebanese state provided scant assistance to the marginalized poorer classes of Lebanese and Palestinians, so informal family and sectarian networks and patron-client relationships assumed added importance. This ensured that particular families dominated various businesses as well as public and private economic sectors. Residents of the poverty belt formed the bottom ranks of the work force of the port, factories, and the tourism sector of Lebanon's economy, and enjoyed political representation through ethnosectarian and/or trade union organizations. By the war's end, the latter had waned and the former had waxed.

The poverty belt was to provide a natural constituency for a variety of political resistance groupings and militias during the war. By the late 1960s, the residents of Beirut's "shantytowns" were very receptive to the revolutionary messages of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had relocated its infrastructure, leadership, fighters and funds to Beirut from Amman in 1970-71.

Beirut's faces were many. Identities, interests, goals, affiliations, and perspectives were always plural and subject to rapid changes and shifts in emphases and directions. Multiple modes of organization and frames of meaning made the city intriguing and attractive to outsiders, exciting and charming to its residents, and perplexing to invading or occupying armies. That the city became the stage for local, national, regional, and international confrontations is not surprising. As native Beirutis would sigh each time a new round of fighting or shelling began: Beirut mal'ab duwwali ("Beirut is an international playing field"), a convenient military venue, given its open political and literary culture, its coastal geographical location, and weak state structure, for various actors, formal or informal, state or non-state, who might have a bone to pick or an agenda to pursue.

Even now, more than a decade after the end of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, many Lebanese refer to this dark period as harb al-aakhireen, "the war of others" on Lebanese soil. This characterization is only partly true, however. It was a war co-created and co-ordinated by Lebanese and others -- Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Iranians.

Like other cities of the Middle East, Beirut has witnessed dramatic and rapid processes of urbanization, profound class disparities, and the ensuing psychosocial dislocations and alienation that often result. The organizing principle of any city is that of administrative and economic centralization, consolidation of authority, and redistribution of resources, all of which serves to impact and restructure rural areas in their relationship to urban institutions and processes. The long war in Lebanon gradually reversed and subverted all of these processes: Fragmentation replaced centralization, duplication of economies replaced a formal redistributive economic structure as various militias claimed public facilities, such as ports, for themselves and their community, exacting high taxes and custom duties to fill their coffers, and supplementing this income with illegal activities such as drug and arms sales, protection rackets, and outright robberies.

Pluralism and heterogeneity, the urban mix that makes or breaks a successful city, was banished during the war. The logic of the militias was the logic of cantonization. Beirut's division had its echoes in other Lebanese cities and villages, where fighting and massacres often led to the influx of more villagers into those parts of the capital controlled by "their" co-religionists' militias.

Territory became identity, and identity was ineluctable in the war. In the absence of a state structure and a centralized government, familial and religious networks, and the patron-client relationships linking neighborhoods, cities, regions, and transnational settings and actors, assumed pronounced importance, power, and utility. These networks probably enabled many Lebanese to survive the war, and certainly played a role in keeping the Lebanese economy surprisingly vibrant and resilient from the start of the war until 1983, but these networks also fragmented Lebanon as a nation, and were especially evident in the fracturing of Beirut.

Western commentators often malign diverse social settings such as Beirut and Baghdad as fertile terrain for ethnic conflict and intercommunal violence. It is not, however, the presence of diversity itself that results in political tensions. Rather, it is how various communities are related to one another politically and economically, how they are encapsulated and incorporated into larger political and economic relationships, and whether those relationships are respectful of individual and collective dignity or not, that leads to conflict. Listening to the voices, experiences, and views of people in such diverse settings is crucial for debunking currently popular theories claiming that "clashes of civilizations" are inevitable, and for countering those who speak cavalierly of an "Arab-Islamic exceptionalism" that inevitably derails democratic systems of governance.

Such simplistic observations devoid of cultural contextualization can easily fuel narrow perspectives that slight historical and geostrategic considerations, the problematic, external imposition of the nation-state as an administrative framework in this region, and the dynamics of the global political economy, pinning all political failures instead on "essential cultural predilections" of Arabs and Muslims for tyranny and repression. The role of outside interests and actors, and the way their interests and aims dovetail with those of Lebanese actors, must be fully considered in any analysis of Lebanese politics.



For Further Reading:



Beydoun, Ahmad (1990) "War in the City," in Middle East Report (January-February) 162: 16-20

Cohen, Ronald (1978) "Ethnicity: Problem and focus in anthropology." Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 379-403

Davie, M.F. (1993) Les marqueurs de territoires ideologiques a Beyrouth (1975-1990). in: "Dans la ville, l'affiche", EIDOS/University of Tours, pp 38-58.

Denouex, Guilain (1993) Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal networks in Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. Albany: SUNY Press.

Eller, Jack David (1999) From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on International Ethnic Conflict. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Farsoun, Samih K. (1988) "Class Structure and Social Change in the Arab World." Pp. 221-238 in Hisham Sharabi (ed.), The Next Arab Decade: Alternative Futures. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Fisk, Robert (1990) Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. London: Touchstone Press.

Hanf, Theodore (1993) Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation. London: I.B. Tauris. Hannerz, Ulf 1980 Exploring the City. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harf, Barbara (1993) "Minorities, Rebellion and Repression in North Africa and the Middle East. In Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Ted Gurr, ed. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Harik, Iliya 1972 "The Ethnic Revolution and Political Integration in the Middle East." International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 3:303-323.

Irani, George Emile (1987) Papacy in the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Lebanese War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

Al-Jazeera Productions (2001) Harb Lubnan: Fa Lan yaridd at-taarikh. (Lebanon's War: So History does not Repeat Itself!). A television documentary in 15 episodes.

Jacobs, Jane (1989) The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books.

Karpat, Kamal (1982) "Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era." Pp. 141-170 in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Vol. 2: The Arabic Speaking Lands. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers.

Khalaf, Samir (1985) Lebanon's Predicament. New York: Columbia University Press.

King-Irani, Laurie (2000) "Rituals of Forgiveness and Processes of Empowerment in Post-War Lebanon." In Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts: African "Conflict Medicine." I. Williman Zartmann, ed. Pp. 129-140. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

__________ (2004) "Kinship, Ethnicity and Social Class." In Understanding the Contemporary Middle East. Deborah J. Gerner and Jillian Schwedler, eds. Pp. 263-292. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Makdisi, Ussama (2000) The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moystad, Ole (1999) "Morphogenesis of the Beirut Green-Line: Theoretical Approaches between Architecture and Geography." Cahiers de Geographie du Quebec (December 1999) 42: 421-435.

Nasr, Niqula (1977) Harb lubnaan ... wa maddaaha (The War in Lebanon, and its Environment). Beirut: Dar an-Nasher.

Nasr, Salim (1989) "Lebanon's War: Is the End in Sight?" In Middle East Report (January-February) 162: 4-8.

Pintak, Larry (2003) Seeds of Hate: How America's Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad. London: Pluto Press.

Richani, Nazih (1990) "The Druze of Mount Lebanon: Class Formation in a Civil War," in Middle East Report (January-February) 162: 26-30.

Sayigh, Rosemary (1995) Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon. London: Zed Publishers.

Shararah, Waddah (1978) Huruub al-istitba'a: Lubnan wal-harb al-ahliyyah ad-daa'imah (Successive Wars in Lebanon: The Permanent Civil War.) Beirut: Lebanese University.

Schiff, Ze'ev, and Ehud Ya'ari (1985) Israel's Lebanon War. London: Touchstone Press.

Thank you for this rather in depth history with a neutral format. Well worth reading - :>)