Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict
by Sandra Mackey
The villains of the postcolonial world are the mapmakers, and Sandra Mackey doesn’t entirely spare them. About one-fifth of the way into her strongly detailed but not sprawling story of Lebanon’s role in the Arab world, she remembers the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, when Iraq’s King Faisal and the famed Lawrence of Arabia made a brief plea for an Arab state, which went ignored: “British and French mapmakers were already huddled behind closed doors drawing the boundaries of what would become the Arab states of Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon…. In the pursuit of Western interests, ethnic groups, tribes, and religions from Iraq to Lebanon were thrown together in political entities often void of logic.”
But Mackey’s study doesn’t content itself with blaming Western influence alone for the region’s woes. Modern Lebanon has been the battleground – often literal – of conflicts involving Israel and the U.S., but also Syria and Iran, whose complicated histories of involvement Mackey includes here. Its large population of Palestinian refugees (whom Mackey calls “victims and villains”) divides Lebanese opinion and draw objections from other Arab states. Internally, Lebanon is devastatingly fractious. Its first civil war came in 1958, building on tensions raised by the budding pan-Arabism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Later, during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, in the utter absence of an effective government or army, 186 warring factions fought, mostly on behalf of a handful of major religious-based groupings, to protect their slivers of a land smaller than Connecticut.
Mackey traces the origin of Lebanon’s weak state and strong family ties back to Arab countries’ roots in the hard-scrabble Bedouin people, whose very survival in a harsh desert climate necessitated dependence on extended families. When Islam arose, its practitioners adopted Bedouin values while spreading their faith over centuries, creating an Arab civilization from Babylonian, Phoenician, and Assyrian peoples. Mackey traces too the split between Sunni and Shia (the understanding of which still bedevils many in the West), and how it cemented sectarian strife in the region. She tells the story of Lebanon’s uniquely privileged Maronite Christian community, which has been seen by the West and Israel as a “rose among thorns” for centuries. She explores the Ottoman Empire, and how, to sustain power over its massive territory with relatively little manpower, it encouraged local sect-based rule. It was during the Ottoman era that religious identities hardened, that Maronite fought fiercely against Druze, and a two-decade civil war first hit Lebanon.
Throughout these historical takes, Mackey builds her case that Lebanon epitomizes the Arab states and their struggles. There are distinctions among the countries, certainly: Lebanon is resource poor, and it has a strong Christian and Western influence. It is less stable and more devastated than all but, perhaps, Iraq (previously held together, Mackey writes in a typically incisive phrase, by the “steel will and spiked heel” of Saddam Hussein). Nonetheless, the countries share religion and language. And more precisely, as Mackey argues, they share family- and tribe-based leadership by elites who hold tight to power. They also share a history of devastating political conflicts with the West, Israel, fellow Arab states, and with their own populations.
The tragedy of Lebanon, and of the story Mackey tells, is “how easily Lebanon descended into chaos” in 1975, at the start of its civil war. As Mackey details the infighting and the incursions by Israel and Syria and the U.S., she parallels the earth-shaking events elsewhere in the world: an America spent from Vietnam and the bombing of its barracks in Beirut; of OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices and the ensuing recession; of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Hezbollah’s consequent rise in Lebanon. She necessarily ends on a dire note, with Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and the ensuing devastation, and with the rise of a politicized, powerful, often violent Islam in Sunni and Shia sects. Mackey’s line about Lebanon’s easy descent, in this context, seems a warning to readers of the precariousness of all Arab states, and thus the world.
Excerpt: “Even defined in terms of Arab culture, modernization challenges Arab societies because it requires them to surrender their various forms of tribalism to the common identity required by a nation…. In this failure to find a common identity, which can be achieved only through altering the patterns of the past, the Lebanese serve as a mirror of the Arabs.”
Further Reading: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
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