Lebanon

So much to “cover”!  This week, I wanted to connect the growing dissonance about belonging with its violent consequences in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The era was so fraught that Billy Joel seemed the best introduction as the students got settled.

I began by talking about the exercise Thursday, trying to reckon with the perspectives of each of the three authors so we could figure out what happened.  Analyzing sources is important, I argued, and we can learn even from explicitly “untrue” sources.  My example: fairytales.  What can we learn from such fiction?  They offered terrific ideas: methods of economic production (pricked her finger on a spindle), kinds of housing, value structures, forests as frightening, class divisions, and others.

At the same time, I emphasized, all sources are not equally valid or trustworthy or believable.  Corroborating evidence is always essential.  So rejecting a source because you disagree or because their tone seems strident isn’t helpful.  I reminded them of the need for a historian to have a split screen.

And the only question from Thursday was really helpful in discussion which things matter: “Was the economic situation as important as the human rights situation in wanting to overthrow the government?”  Different historians focus on different things in trying to understand the past, so the answer would depend on which historians one read or talked to.

One of the four basic themes on which we are focusing this semester is the question of who belongs.  The Lebanese civil war of the 1970s is a devastating window into the issue, and its antecedents offer perspective and context.  So I began with a map of the French division of “Syria” during the mandate and the longstanding European demand to be able to “protect” Ottoman minorities.  Their “protection” led to the 1943 National Pact, which offered an opportunity to remind the students of their readings on the 1860 Damascus riots and the problem of borders that came after World War I.

Then I introduced another strand: the refugees from the creation of Israel in 1948, the new refugees from the war in 1967, and the establishment of competing Palestinian nationalist organizations.  As Palestinians began to emulate the Algerian liberation movement, they tried to create a space in Jordan from which to operate.  Jordan’s King Hussein, threatened by the hijackings that followed, along with Israeli strikes against Palestinian bases on the border, attacked the Palestinian organizations, resulting in thousands of dead.  I talked about three consequences:

• the creation of Black September, the organization that carried out the Munich Olympics hostage crisis
• the new refugees flooding into Lebanon and destabilizing the precarious religious balance institutionalized in the 1943 Lebanese National Pact
• the alienation of non-Palestinian residents of Jordan.

Readings for this week included discussions of the We Are All Jordan campaign of the last decade, and descriptions of the changing geographic boundaries within Beirut as a result of the civil war.

But in addition to demography and war, analyzing Lebanon’s economy is also essential to understand the outbreak of war in the 1970s.  I described the gap between Beirut, Playground of the Rich on one hand, and Beirut, Slums for the Poor on the other, and a political/economic system in which each of the confessional groups were represented among the wealthiest 4%, who seem to have encouraged them to identify with co-religionists instead of with the other underemployed and impoverished people in the city’s surroundings.  Then I briefly compared the Lebanese Nationalist Movement’s and the Phalange’s positions on confessional politics, reform, and restricting Palestinian fighters on Lebanese soil.  After a very brief mention of the horrors of the civil war, I tried to summarize the connections among the three “minority” issues in the neighboring states.  It seemed a long lecture, and I never even got to the Israeli invasion in 1982.