After 50 years of instability, wars, foreign invasions and occupations, Lebanon seems to have begun taking hold of itself … for the most part (see below). The country has elected a new president (Joseph Aoun), has formed a new government (led by Nawwaf Salam) of competent professionals who are not shills for the political establishment. The country is thus embarking on the long road of repairing the damages left by the joint 50-year-long Syrian-Iranian-Palestinian occupation and their local proxy, the terrorist organization of Hezbollah.
“For the most part” is because there is one major stumbling block left that seems to be causing major headaches as the new administration pushes forward on many, really many, fronts. Nothing works normally in the country, and everything is tainted with either corruption (endemic to every public service administration), incompetence, or religious monopolies (schools, hospitals…) whose dominance over “their people” is secured by a rabid and determined undermining of the public sector.
Imagine that Catholic schools, for example, siphon off public funds to run their operations, while public schools continue to lag behind in infrastructure and quality of education. Why doesn’t the government use that money to improve its own educational institutions and let the private/religious sector fend on its own? Isn’t that how it is supposed to be in the very raw and poorly regulated free market that is practiced in Lebanon?
Imagine that all Muslim clergy (imams, muftis, sheikhs…) are employees of the government and receive paychecks and benefits like any other public sector employee, while Christian clergy do not. For the decades of their domination (thanks to Syria and Iran), the Muslims have had an orgiastic plundering hunger for public funds and donations from friendly overseas countries.
The country is ungovernable the way it is set up. After five decades of wars and persecution, most Christians have fled into exile, while the country has been swamped by hundreds of thousands of Muslim Palestinian refugees gracefully and genocidally provided by the colonial foreign Jewish settler neighbor to the south, and by more than 2 million Muslim Syrian refugees abundantly and generously furnished by the vulgar Syrian Assad dictatorship next door. From a 50-50 demographic balance well into the 1970s (when the Palestinian-Syrian-Islamic fundamentalist assault against the country began), the Christians’ numbers have dwindled to an estimated 25%.
No census has been carried out since 1932, for fear of exposing Lebanon’s dirty secret: the actual sectarian composition of the country. But the country is governed by a constitution and a gentleman’s agreement (known as the National Pact), both of which affirm the principle of مناصفة (munasafa) or the 50-50 distribution of everything political and administrative (including in public administration hierarchies, the military, the judiciary, etc.) between Christians and Muslims.
In other words, the country’s 25% Christian population is entitled to 50% of the State, while the 75% Muslim population gets only the remaining 50%. With so many Christians living overseas (with very little chances of ever returning), there aren’t enough Christians to fill vacant positions up and down the state offices. Not to mention the chronic disgruntlement of the Muslims at being discriminated against by this system, which they express every generation or so through civil unrest, wars, or obstructionism.
But very few people right now, on the heels of five decades of torment, want to rock the boat of representation as it stands. The Shiite community has argued for a مثالثة (muthalatha) or a 33-33-33 distribution of power between the Maronites (largest Christian community), the Sunni Muslims, and the Shiite Muslims. But the Christians viscerally reject this proposal, and amending the constitution remains a challenge, and any serious push in that direction risks pushing the Christians into some form of separation from the Muslims. In fact, short of calling for a partition of the country, the Christians have been pushing for “decentralization” or even “federation”, both of which ensure at the very least that the Christians can rule themselves within their own districts, while the Muslims do likewise in their own districts.
One thing is certain: Just like French-speaking Québec ensures a specific Canadian character that keeps Canada separate from the United States (Anglophone Canada has nothing fundamentally distinct from its southern US neighbor), Lebanon’s Christians ensure a specific Lebanese character that distinguishes it from the vast Muslim and Arab world around it. Any Christian move to separate from the Muslims, in a decentralized or federal system, terrifies the Lebanese Muslims who stand to become another irrelevant Muslim community that might be forced to join Syria next door.
At the present time, with Israel having emasculated the hyper-macho Muslim Shiites of Hezbollah and the Amal movement (the Shiite duo), the question facing Lebanon and its news government is a truly existential one.
On one hand, Israel and the US have given the Lebanese government anywhere between 2-6 months to disarm Hezbollah which was the only private militia to remain extant after the 1989 Taif Agreement that ended the acute phase of the Syrian-Palestinian-Iranian war against Lebanon (1975-1990). Israel’s latest war (2024) has decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and capabilities, though the Iranian-governed militia still retains enough power to cause trouble. The 2-6 months timeframe is dictated by Israel’s imperative of securing its northern settlements before the new school year in the Fall of 2025. If the Lebanese state does not disarm Hezbollah, Israel will retain Lebanese territory in the south under occupation as a buffer zone and will retain the freedom of bombing targets inside Lebanon it considers a threat to its security. Alternatively, if the Lebanese State does manage to disarm Hezbollah, the prospects are there for a definitive delineation of the border on the basis of the 1949 Truce, a return of the displaced Lebanese to their villages in the south, the Arab (Saudi, Qatari, and UAE) funding for the reconstruction of the demolished south, and perhaps even a peace treaty and a normalization of relations (though this seems like a far-fetched mirage at this point).
On the other hand, the vast majority of the Lebanese also want Hezbollah to disarm and reduce itself to a political party. Unless Hezbollah disarms voluntarily, the alternative would be to disarm it by force, which would pit the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) against Hezbollah in a major civil war (a real “civil” war this time between Lebanese parties, while the 1975-1990 was essentially a war by the Palestinians, Iran and Syria against the Lebanese state though it is erroneously labeled a “civil” war).
Thus, the Lebanese government of Joseph Aoun and Nawwaf Salam is facing the abyss. Its only exit out of two bleak scenarios (an Israeli war or a civil war) is to convince Hezbollah to give up its arms. This is really the most significant, and indeed existential, challenge facing Lebanon at this moment. All other challenges, refurbishing the country’s finances and banking system, combating corruption, and all the decays of the past five decades, can be easily met once the Hezbollah infection is dealt with: Lebanon has the know-how and the competences required. But if the Hezbollah disarmament challenge is not met, the country could fall back into violence. The Christians in particular see this as the final litmus test of the participatory type of goverment they’ve had since 1920: Division of power between the various communities. If Hezbollah refuses to disarm and the country suffers from an internecine conflict that would inevitably draw Israel in, the Christians will very likely seek to separate themselves from the Muslims.
Prior to 1920, Lebanon was an autonomous “Mount Lebanon Governorate” – Mutasaarifiyah – that managed to evict the Ottoman Turks just like Egypt, Greece and others had done during the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire was beginning to fall apart. “Mount Lebanon” is geographically the central mountain chain comprising the essence of the Christian population. A smaller “Mount Lebanon” Republic could be resurrected by shedding the formerly Syrian Muslim regions annexed to it in 1920 to create the Greater Lebanon we know of today. Borders constantly move in the course of history. Perhaps Lebanon’s borders are about to change one more time in a contraction rather than an expansion.
