Leadership of Lebanon and its Future

By Robert G. Rabil

Lebanon has been integral to both cradles of civilizations and hotbeds of conflicts. A Semitic people, the Canaanites, occupied the littoral of Lebanon, out which emerged the Phoenician civilization that was held together by a string of independent Phoenician city-states from the north to the south of the country. As city-states, Tripolis (Tripoli), Byblos (Jbeil), Beirutus (Beirut), Sidon, Tyre and Ba’albeck clustered in their glittering achievements but were weakened by their political disunity. Phoenician cities invented the alphabet and founded colonies in the Mediterranean, most famous of which were Carthage and Cadiz in today’s Tunisia and Spain respectively; yet their weakness and disunity forced them to succumb directly or indirectly to the power of Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian dynasties (1550-332 BCE). Following a siege of seven months by Alexander the Great in 322 BCE, Tyre was destroyed and thousands of its residents were either killed or sold into slavery.

This storied history of success and demise accursed a pattern in Lebanon’s politics as Beirut charted its journey towards a modern nation and state. Greeks, Romans, and Arabs left their indelible marks on Lebanon’s landscape and culture; yet no empire or a regional power has helped mold the socio-political and religious landscape of a country as the Ottoman Empire had helped shape Lebanon. It was under Ottoman rule (1516-1918) that two Druze and Maronite leaders Emir Fakhr al-Din II (1572-1635) and Emir Bashir Shihab II (1767-1850) respectively who, by planting the seeds of Lebanese nationalism, tried to pry their Emirates away from Ottoman rule. They forged relations with Italian, French and Egyptian powers and relied on them in their pursuit of autonomy. Ottoman authorities suppressed their revolt and executed them.

Significantly, sectarianism plagued the reign of Emir Bashir. His Maronite Christian soldiers supported both the Egyptian invasion of Lebanon and Damascus (1831-2) and suppression of Druze revolts. This marked the first time a Lebanese sect supported a foreign power against another sect, subsequently leading to the 1860 massacres in which Druzes, with some help from Muslims, slayed thousands of Christians in Lebanon and Damascus.

Foreign powers, led by France, intervened and stopped the gory mayhem. Consequently Ottoman authorities created a confessional system in which the different sects shared power under an Ottoman governor. Stability was restored until the advent of WWI. Christians suffered a great famine orchestrated by Ottoman authorities to suppress a potential Christian rebellion and prevent Christian collaboration with the French. Ottomans were defeated and France had the mandate over Lebanon. Paris established a confessional system built on the previous one but in which Christians wielded the most power. 

Lebanon took its independence in 1943. It maintained the confessional system and secured a national pact. The National Pact helped bring about under special circumstances communal conciliation, and to some extent unity.  But it neither fostered nor forged a national identity. It was based on a compromise guided by the false assumptions that Muslims would “Arabize” the Christians while Christians would “Lebanonize” Muslims. This also is not to say that the National Pact was supported by a majority of Christians and Muslims. In fact, being a weak state, Lebanon has invited foreign intervention despite the national motto of “No East/No West.” Lebanon’s identity has remained contested. Most importantly, the feudal leadership, which was based on tax farming under Ottoman rule, transformed into a feudal sectarian political leadership that deepened sectarianism in Lebanon, which often led to sectarian violence.

Significantly, international and regional politics overlapped with confessional politics during the Cold War. Broadly speaking, whereas Christians supported the West and endorsed the Eisenhower Doctrine in late 1950s, pan-Arabists, mainly Muslims, supported the strident Arab nationalism advocated by President Jamal abd al-Nasser of Egypt and the Ba’th party. Similarly, whereas the Christian leadership opposed Lebanon’s intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, pan-Arabists, led by the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, the genuine man of the left who had won the Lenin Peace Prize, supported the Palestinian Question as the cause par excellence in the Arab world and sought to remove Maronite hegemony from the state, accusing them of creating a Christian Zion. 

In 1973, Jumblatt founded the National Movement which rallied pan-Arabists, Nasserists, Marxists, Communists, pro-Iraq Ba’thists and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which militarily fronted the National Movement. According to him, “the battle of the National Movement was to save Lebanon and its Arabism and to reaffirm Lebanon’s commitment to the Palestinian cause, foiling the Phalangist conspiracy.” 

No sooner, in 1975, war broke out with vengeance in Lebanon. It was fought along sectarian lines. President Hafiz Asad was alarmed at the shift in the military balance in favor of the National Movement and the PLO. He feared that a victory by the left and the PLO would bring Israel’s intervention on behalf of the Maronites. In summer 1976, Syrian troops entered Lebanon and checked the advances of the National Movement. And in 1977, the Asad regime, purportedly the champion of Arab Nationalism, assassinated Jumblatt.

The murder of Jumblatt coincided with the emergence of the leadership of Bashir Gemayel. His vision rested on strengthening Christian power, doing away with external meddling in Lebanese affairs, and uniting the whole of Lebanon under a strong government. He compared Lebanon to a farm that he wanted to change into a modern, strong, and totally independent state, reflecting Lebanon’s 6,000-year civilization. Seeking a strong ally to help him achieve his vision, Bashir forged a strong relationship with Israel. Maronite leaders had early contacts with Zionists that go back to the Yishuv, which Bashir built on them. Maronites had also an ideological affinity with Zionism as the vehicle of Jewish nationalism. Although Israel had some reservations with Maronite politics, Jerusalem fully supported Bashir and his Lebanese Forces. 

Following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Bashir was elected President in August 1982. His vision seemed at hand. But he underestimated the centrality of Lebanon to Syria’s security. He also failed to realize the immensity of the centrifugal forces inherent in Lebanon’s as a weak state with a weak national identity. His vision clashed with Lebanon’s hard regional realities and harsh domestic incongruities. In September 1982, Bashir was assassinated by a pro-Syrian member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).

His murder enfeebled Christian solidarity, which gave way to divisions and internecine in-fighting. In October 1990, Syrian forces raided east Beirut, the last bastion of Christian opposition to Syria, whereupon Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence) occupied Lebanon and implemented the Document of National Understanding, which was brokered by Saudi Arabia and Syria to end Lebanon’s civil war. 

Two leaders emerged under Syrian occupation of Lebanon: Rafiq Hariri and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. A citizen of both Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, allied with the Kingdom, Rafiq Hariri sought to rebuild Beirut as the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Serving as Prime Minister (1992-1998; 2000-2004), the Sunni leader managed to navigate the rough waters of Lebanon’s domestic and regional politics. He strove to strike a delicate balance between his vision of rebuilding Lebanon, Saudi foreign policy and Syrian foreign policy. Arab-Israeli peace negotiations in the 1990s, especially Israeli-Syrian negotiations which reached the precipice of peace, afforded him the political leeway to pursue his vision. Meanwhile, President Asad ruled Lebanon with an iron fist including controlling the Shi’a Islamist party Hezbollah. 

But the death of president Asad, the collapse of peace negotiations, and Israel withdrawal from Lebanon all in 2000 changed the configuration of Middle East politics. Then American invasion of Iraq in 2003 fully destroyed the tenuous regional order. Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah allies sought to foil American attempt at creating a new regional order. Lebanon found itself at the center of international and regional power struggles. Iran and Syria, spearheaded by Hezbollah, sought to bolster Lebanon as the fortress of resistance against Israel. The delicate balance that Hariri sought to maintain collapsed under the diktat of Syria and Hezbollah. Hariri’s attempt at creating an autonomous space in which Lebanon could avert regional power struggles clashed with Syria and Hezbollah’s determination to keep Beirut in the so-called resistance axis. In 2005, Hariri was murdered by Hezbollah members clearly with Syrian collusion. 

The murder of Hariri sparked a domestic and international opprobrium heaped on Syria, which was forced to withdraw from Lebanon. Beirut came under the heavy thumb of Hezbollah. 

The ideological foundations of what would become the Shi’a Islamist party Hezbollah were laid in the 1960s and 1970s in Lebanon by three religious scholars: Ayatollahs Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Muhammad Shamseddine and Imam Musa al-Sadr. The party’s Islamist ideology, however, was very much a reflection of Ayatollah’s Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary doctrine Guardianship of the Juristconsult, which asserted that the Islamic government must be ruled by senior clerics. Neglected by the Lebanese government and bearing the brunt of Israel’s response to the PLO’s terror acts in Israel, these religious scholars sought to empower and unify Lebanon’s Shi’a community. Their efforts were aided by Israel’s 1982 invasion. The Shi’a community, which had initially welcomed the Israeli troops, mobilized against them thanks in large part to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ efforts of inculcating in the Shi’a community both the paramountcy of martyrdom to fight injustice and oppression and the importance of armed struggle as a vessel for achieving political dominance. 

Growing up in a poor family whose lineage is traced to Prophet Muhammad, Nasrallah zealously embraced Khomeini’s revolutionary doctrine and armed struggle against Israel. Thanks to his leadership of Hezbollah since 1992, the party as a non-state actor, on the one hand, established a state within a state in Lebanon, and, on the other, acted as a transnational militant party advancing Iran’s regional ambitions. Israel’s inconclusive confrontation with Hezbollah in 2006 enhanced the reputation of Nasrallah as an Islamic leader on a par with Ayatollahs Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Iran invested heavily in Hezbollah as a deterrent force against Israel and as a key Iranian regional proxy. In fact, Nasrallah led the so-called axis of resistance, which rallied Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and endeavored to create a united front, or a ring of fire, against Israel. 

Following Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah opened a front against Israel in support of Hamas. Israel’s northern front became untenable after months of fighting back Hezbollah. Thousands of Israelis became internally displaced and swaths of territories and houses were set ablaze. After much planning and preparation, Jerusalem launched a campaign to remove Hezbollah’s threat once and for all to Israel. Almost all of Hezbollah’s senior political and military leadership were eliminated, including Nasrallah on September 27. Israel has also destroyed a big chunk of Hezbollah’s military capability. At the time of this writing, Israel continues its campaign to destroy the military infrastructure of Hezbollah. 

If history is any indication, Lebanese leaders from across the country’s sectarian spectrum had different visions and aspirations of Lebanon and were murdered because they were bigger than Lebanon and smaller than the region. Allying themselves with regional and international powers, Emirs Fakhr al-Din and Bashir Shihabi, Jumblatt, Gemayel, Hariri and Nasrallah died in the name of refracted visions untethered to domestic and regional realities. Their politics manifested the aspirations of their movements but also the ideological disparities of inter-communal coexistence and the harsh realities and incongruities of regional politics.  

Throughout its history, Lebanon has not been able to defy regional and international power struggles, save building a strong national identity. Lebanon today has three choices: Become a neutral country, become partitioned, or continue to live in misery by the sword and die by the sword!

*Robert G. Rabil is professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (2003); Syria, United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (2006); Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism (2011); Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism (2014); The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Lebanon: The Double Tragedy of Refugees and Impacted Host Communities (2016); and most recently White Heart (2018). The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of FAU. He can be reached @robertgrabil.