Lebanon

I know you’ve done it. It was your favorite sweater with the perfect amount of wear, soft but not pilly, loose but the collar wasn’t stretched. Comfy but not frayed. Except… what is this little string sticking out? That’s so strange. Let me just slide it out of whatever entangled a stray former piece of a Merino sheep’s winter collection to ensnare itself in my otherwise perfectly worn and definitely not fraying adobe brown three season sweater. And of course you know how this story always ends: with a pile of unattached fragments of 11 microns of fine fine superfine fleece that’s now a soft and useless mess on the floor.

A 19 year old died during an ongoing ceasefire of the war within the war that is the song that never ends…it just goes on and on my friends…(cue campy drinking music.)

I got up bright and early. I was well rested as we’ve actually had some chunks of nights without sirens in most of the country (just don’t tell the children of the North). I’ve been in a good groove with my writing. I have over two weeks before facing another move. I have won 200 games of chess since Duolingo and I began our Intro to Chess mere weeks or months ago.

I saw the morning news. Killed during ongoing ceasefire. Maybe if it wasn’t called a ceasefire, I wouldn’t have pulled that thread. But I myself am not clear—are we in a ceasefire? Who then is ceasing and who is firing? I know that campus idiots everywhere will tell you Israel is to blame, but those warm and fuzzy words of condolence won’t comfort the parents of 19 year old Idan Fooks, or the six others wounded of the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion. This is being called a ceasefire infraction. The third death of its kind since the world proclaimed a ceasefire. Even as I’ve been writing this, literally now, children are being rushed to shelters in the North. So who is ceasing and who is firing?

And when I pulled that thread and just checked in on Times of Israel, two headlines totally destroyed what remained of the sweater of simple answers I meant to deliver in pithy prose today. One was that I realized I have to get back to my series on politics in Israel and many essays would be needed to explain the latest Bennet-Lapid coalition. That’s for another day.

I simultaneously realized that to explain one boy’s death, the third during the ceasefire, I would have to explain Lebanon and the Arab Christians and the Shia versus Sunni Muslims and an Iranian funded proxy called Hezbollah and how that ties to the Palestinian Authority elections this week. I had a lot of explaining to do and I’d have to start before Mohammed’s horse was a twinkle in his mamma’s eye and go back to Zoroastrian and polytheistic Arab tribes and surely I’d have to tie that in to my own experience with Arab tribal leadership alive and well operating a healthy trade in the Minneapolis-St Paul Twin cities of love and liberal freedom while selling their own 15 year old girls into sex slavery.

The histories of all the different Christian Arab tribes alone deserve airtime (see one of my fancy maps below of all the religious groups of Lebanon). And here’s what gets super interesting: political positions in Lebanon are reserved by religious affiliation. Wars and proxies are not necessarily inline with shared religious leadership.

Lebanon’s Presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian. The Prime Ministry is only for a Sunni Muslim. The Speaker of Parliament is a Shia Muslim. Some other ministries are for Greek Orthodox representatives. This confessional system (power sharing by religious community) was established with the modern state of Lebanon in 1943. It is not separation of Church and State, it is co-leadership of the state by the leadership of multiple religions.

But we can’t possibly get to 1943 Lebanon without at least touching on what was there before! For the 400 years prior, from 1299-1922, the Turkish Imperial State controlled the area that is currently Lebanon, as well as that called Israel, Turkey, Jordan and so many countries that I used AI tools and made you this graphic —this was all part of the Islam led Ottoman Empire. (Work in progress please feel free to fact check!)

I really want to tell you all about the Ottoman Empire but then I’ll never be able to hit send today, so another day.

By WWI the Ottoman Empire was already waning in glory. Then the Turks made a bad bet and sided with the Germans. They lost. Awash in their victory, the UK and France met in secret smoky paneled halls with good food and uptight women or open marriages and haggis and, using their weathered chess boards of the world, decided what should be what in the now almost former Ottoman Empire. Imperial control to replace consolidated tribal management. A new operating manual, new font, a whole new brand kit. In the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain took control of what’s now known as Israel, Iraq and Jordan. (And yes it’s also called Palestine in my map because the entire area was called Palestine by both Jews and non Jews and, well it was quite the spin that only some Arabs of certain Muslim affiliations later, much later, hijacked even the name of the country…) Anyway, France took today’s Lebanon and Syria. Russia got Armenia to the North of what’s shown in the inset map of the pact.

This dividing up of the Ottoman Empire after WWI by the League of Nations became called the Mandate System. European powers would “temporarily” govern the former Ottoman lands until they were “ready” to govern themselves. Colonial rule was established by the same people who changed their name and logo and became the rebranded United Nations after gaining expanded reach with the second Allied victory of WWII.

While Britain got the mandate to control Palestine (aka Israel, Judea, Samaria and Gaza), The French received the mandate for Syria and Lebanon in what was creatively called the French Mandate (1920-1943). During this time, France was its Third Republic.

….just for a minute to catch you up on French rule. For 1,000 years France was a Catholic monarchy. That ended with Marie Antoinette and other shady cake eaters at the end of the 18th Century. Then there was chaos and terror and the massive rise of a short man with a big stick called Napoleon Bonaparte who made himself dictator. By 1804 he crowned himself Emperor of most of Europe. This big sweeping sprawling empire lasted eight years until he invaded Russia and lost. A defeated Napoleon was eventually exiled. For all of the next century France flip flopped between being a Republic and being a Monarchy. Lots of internal bloodshed was had by all.

By WWII, the Third Republic was ruling France as well as Lebanon and Syria. In 1939 they joined the US and UK in declaring war on Nazi Germany. Within a year Germany had crushed and invaded France. France surrendered to the Nazis. Charles De Gaulle refused to surrender, fled to London and ran a movement in exile called “Free France”. Germany moved into Northern France and controlled Paris and coastal areas. Philippe Petain, a French WWI hero, became the head of a new pro-Nazi French state based in the South-Central town of Vichy. Vichy France fully participated in the Nazi anti Jewish laws and death marches, was authoritarian, nationalist, anti-communist. And since they lost, we now agree they were the bad guys. Most Arab Christians and Muslims in The French Mandate (Lebanon-Syria) supported French Vichy.

In 1941, the British and exiled Free France forces invaded Vichy positive Lebanon and Syria. But the invaders were distracted. De Gaulle and his Free French forces were busy liberating Paris from the Germans and the rest of France from the Vichy. (He won then lost control of France from ‘46-‘58 and finally returned to establish France’s fifth and current republic.)

So while the colonial landlord was busy with all its own civil problems and world wars, the residents of Lebanon got together in their own popup campgrounds and negotiated freedom by their terms. The Christians were united under the Maronite Christian leader El Khoury who grew up in Beirut, earned his law degree in Paris, practiced law in Cairo, and came back to Lebanon to hold various senior leadership positions in the French controlled Republic of Lebanon.

His partner in liberation, Riad Al Solh, had been born into a prominent Sunni Muslim family and his father was an Ottoman official and an Arab nationalist. Al Solh also got his law degree in Paris. But where El Khoury served as part of the French led parliament, Al Solh’s activism against the French rule of Lebanon led to a lot of years in French jails.

In 1943 the two agreed on a pact so secret they couldn’t write it down. The National Pact was a private compromise to make an Anti-French rule coalition that could, and did, use French law to declare and support their own independence from French law.

The Christians agreed that modern Lebanon would be an Arab state, neither specifically French nor generally Western. The Sunni Muslims agreed that they would support an independent Lebanon without joining it to Muslim led Syria. Together they made an idea for a government that gave positions to all of other religious minorities (except for the Jews who had been living there since the Spanish expulsion hundreds of years earlier.)

Here’s another WIP map of Lebanon and Syria before and after this other secret pact after a mandate that ended up being two countries of Lebanon and Syria:

Again subject to final factchecking.

The Druze, who had started as a branch from Shia Islam and turned inward as a separate mystical sect in the 11th century, stayed in their mountain regions. Families were literally split by the new regional lines with some to this day in Lebanon, others in Syria and many in Northern Israel. At times they fought the Christians, at other times they were allies.

Similarly, the Alawites (aka Nusayris) were a mystical offshoot of Shia Islam that developed in the 9th-10th centuries outside of mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam —who both mistrusted the mystics. France took advantage of this division among Muslim Arabs of the region during the French mandate and recruited alienated minorities including the Druze and Alawites. By serving in the French mandate forces, these minorities were able to come to power afterwards.

While we are not going to get into it now, this opened the path for an Alawite Air Force officer, Hafez Al-Assad, to seize control of Syria in 1970 and then run decades of brutal regime under the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. And until 2024, he made various nefarious alliances with other Shia buddies in Iran and Hezbollah and their mutual besties in Russia. And not only can we not dive into this, I can’t possibly also take you through how a Sunni terrorist rebranded himself a statesman and took over Syria (you know, just temporary until they can rule themselves of course) and how the Druze continue to be monkey in the middle of all the other Muslim in-fighting.

Christian groups were established in the area that is today’s Lebanon many years before Islam was created. If you remember the apostle Peter who converted the first non Jew after he walked North from Joppa until Caesarea. Well, he just kept on walking North and ended up in Antioch which is now in Southern Turkey, North of Lebanon and West of Syria. Peter became Antioch’s first bishop before continuing on to Rome and becoming the first Roman bishop that ended up becoming the papacy.

From that time forward, the Bishop of Antioch oversaw huge Christian communities in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Arabia without reporting, as it were, to the Pope. One, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, is called Greek because they merged the Byzantine Greek (meaning Eastern Roman Empire) traditions with the Arab language and culture in which they lived.

In contrast, the Christian majority Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch leads Lebanon’s Maronite Church day to day under the Roman Pope as the head of the global church. The Maronites are, in short, Arab Catholics. They were formed in the 4th-5th Centuries by followers of St Maron, the ascetic monk in Syria. They use Syriac liturgy with Catholic monastic traditions.

The Melkite Greek Orthodox church split from them then much later (1724) and uses a blend of Byzantine language and tradition under the Roman Catholic papacy.

The Syrian/Assyrian/Chaldean Christians also use Syriac liturgy. The Syriac Catholics and Chaldean Catholics are in communion with the Roman papacy. The Syriac Orthodox and Assyrian church of the East does not recognize the Pope. While most predominantly speak Arabic, some consider themselves Arabs, some do not.

And finally to round out the Christians of Lebanon we get to the last group, the Armenians who are actually a mix of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Armenian Catholics and Armenian Protestants, all who arrived in Lebanon after the Armenian genocide of 1915.

For centuries the Armenian Apostolic Church was a major Christian minority protected under the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Like the Jews and other recognized non Muslim minorities, they were legally subordinate to the Muslim majority but allowed to build their own communities and keep religious practices. As the empire was starting to unravel at the end of the 19th century, other Christians in Ottoman lands like the Balkans had already broken away from the empire.

So losing ground and mistrustful of any Christian minority, the empire started testing the waters and massacring smaller groups of Christian Armenians. After they took that bad bet on Germany and found themselves on the losing side of WWI, the sinking Ottoman Empire blamed their Armenian minority for this devastating loss.

Between 1915-1917, the Young Turk Government slaughtered between 600,000 and 1.5 million of the existing 2.5 million ethnic Armenians in what has been called the first modern (actual not AI generated) genocide. U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. documented the atrocities. Allied powers condemned them as “crimes against humanity and civilization.” No one came to help. Turkey continues to deny this was genocide.

The remaining Armenians were subject to mass deportations. Many were driven to the Syrian dessert and then raped, converted, and mutilated along the death marches. The largest number who survived made new lives for themselves in Syria and Lebanon. A visual for you:

For a really flapjack paddy whack superficial view of Islam, the rift between Shia and Sunni started after Mohammad’s death essentially as a question of succession. Islam had begun with a single man. In 570 CE Mohammad was born in Mecca in Arabia (parts of today’s Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the Gulf states). Mecca at the time was already home to the Kaaba which was a sacred temple for the polytheistic gods and their idols of pre-Islamic polytheism. (It would later become the holiest mosque and the place where Muslims face when they pray, as opposed to towards Jerusalem, the direction Jews pray.) One of these many godheads was named Allah. Around 610, Mohammad, who had grown up in a pagan polytheist clan, had a private vision that allah was the only god. No doubt charismatic, he then went to convince, convert and recruit others to his religious army. And for the rest of his lifetime, through brute force and economic impacts, he made Arabia into the first Islamic caliphate. Another (for illustrative not final fact checked purposes) view of the expansion of Islam, primarily via military conquest:

After Mohammad died there was disagreement about who should rule the young Islamic tribes. The Sunni said that the rulers, the caliphate, should be selected by the community. The Shia disagreed and believed that imans are divinely appointed. Below is a view of the region as divided by a controlling Sunni or Shia majority. You’ll see most the world’s Muslims are Sunni with notable exceptions in Iran and Qatar, with mixed populations in palaces like Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. The wars and its alliances, however, are not drawn by Sunni vs Shia collectively.

Here’s the image of Sunni versus Shia (yes, I’m having fun with these visuals today!)

So that’s all super interesting and explanatory of some differences, but it doesn’t track to understanding the current Iranian war and specifically how that relates to Lebanon. So let’s go back to the post mandates and post pacts Lebanese Government of 1943-1975. Remember that was run by the mixed religious tiered representatives of Christians, Sunnis and Shia sects including Druze and Alawites.

After 1948 some groups who later called themselves Palestinian refugees set up camp in Lebanon as well as Syria, Gaza and Judea. But the majority settled in Jordan which, if you remember from my rapid retelling of the history of Israel, was the 80% in the original two state solution that was meant to actually be home to Palestinians while the Jews got their little tiny sliver from the British mandate.

Over time, Palestinian guerrilla aka paramilitary aka terrorist armed groups got powerful in what was now the monarchy of Jordan. Especially problematic was Fatah under chief terrorist Yasser Arafat. This came to its proverbial head in September 1970 when the Palestinian hooligans hijacked several international flights and rerouted them to Jordan. King Hussein, in what was later called Black September, killed thousands of Palestinian terrorists and their families and expelled the rest.

So the PLO moved into Lebanon and used it for the launching pad of some of their most heinous acts including the Munich Massacre of Israelis at the 1972 Olympics. Lebanon was still its post pact multi religious republic; but the PLO was growing in power. They built a semi state within Lebanon including tragically taking over Beruit, which had been the economic and cultural hub of post WWII Lebanon. Before the Palestinian influx, Beruit was called the Paris of the Middle East.

All this trouble trouble bubble and boil really boiled the heck over into a civil war in Lebanon starting in 1975. Remember that in return for holding the most senior government role, the Christians had agreed for Lebanon be an Arab country in culture and priorities. But by the 1970’s the Christians were also no longer the clear religious majority of an Arab Lebanon.

A coalition of groups against the Maronite Christian parties joined together for that one goal—you’ve seen it before and see it today—the coalition of friends who share a common enemy. So the leftists, the Sunni Muslims and Arab nationalist movements connected their cause with the armed Palestinian residents and created the Lebanese National Movement (LNM).

On April 13, 1975 the LNM under the leadership of Palestinian militias, attacked a Christian church gathering in Beruit linked to the Katab, the political party of the Maronite Christians. The Katab militia retaliated by blowing up a bus of Palestinians. Beruit was almost instantly split across a green line with Christian militias in East Beruit and Palestinian militias in the West.

By 1976 it looked like the Christian hold was crumbling and then they had a surprise redemption. The newly ruling Shia Alawite socialist Hafez Al-Assad and his Syrian forces invaded Lebanon. He politically supported the PLO’s cause of destruction of Israel, but he wanted to be in charge, not Arafat.

Ostensibly under the “peace keeping” direction of Syria, Lebanon became a block to block war zone with street signs dividing territory between the militias of Christians, Palestinians and their leftists comrades, the Syrian army, the Amal Shia, and the Druze mountain fighters.

And then in March of 1978 a squad from Arafat’s Fatah, operating under the PLO, infiltrated Israel by sea from Lebanon. They landed about 18 miles North of Netanya in Ma’agen Michael, seized a bus and did horrors upon horrors and all told 38 Israeli civilians were killed, 13 of whom where children, more than 70 seriously wounded. Israel responded by invading Lebanon with the stated goal of pushing the PLO back behind the Litani River, 15-20 miles north of the Lebanese border with Israel. And then, this is the war that never ends..it just goes on and on my friends. Just put the playlist on auto play.

Israeli support helped the rise of what became the South Lebanon Army which started as a mostly Christian militia. And in the middle of all the chaos in August 1978 the moderate by later comparison Iranian born Shia leader of the Amal party mysteriously disappeared. He had been at a meeting in Libya with the Libyan Arab Republic maniacal leader Muammar Gaddafi. After the death of its moderate by later comparison leader, the Amal party became more radicalized…and then Iran happened.

In 1979, leftist student groups joined the Shia Muslim nationalist revolution that sought to overthrow the Iranian monarchy and create a new caliphate for Islam with Iran as its hub. When Khomeini took the reins, he didn’t trust the Iranian army of men who had formerly served under the Shah. So he created the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC was army, intelligence and covert foreign operations all wrapped into one shared Shia ideology. Its job was, and continues to be, to protect the revolution from within Iran, build an ideological army loyal to the divinely appointed clerics and export the revolution abroad by building proxy forces around the world.

With the death of the more moderate Shia leader in Lebanon in the middle of years of real doorstep to doorstep civil war between the Christians and the PLO, Syria and Israel, the Druze and every minority tribe around- Iran rightly saw opportunity.

With permission from Syria, thousands of Iranian revolutionary guards set up training camps, clerical schools, charities, hospitals, gun storehouses and other warm and fuzzy accessories that just turn any room into a home for your everyday jihadist. And their terrorist military arm in Lebanon was born: Hezbollah, the Party of Allah. In Hezbollah, Iran created a transnational radical army from the ashes of the more moderate Shia Amal arm.

Iran’s revolution created a missionary revolutionary state. The IRGC became its tool. Lebanon’s chaos gave it an opening. Hezbollah became Iran’s most successful foreign project.

In 1982 Israel laid siege to Beruit and surrounded the terrorist Arafat and his Palestinian Liberators. Arafat had directed the the airplane hijackings, the Olympic massacre, the children’s bus bombings. Horror upon horror. The Israelis had him cornered in West Beruit. The U.S. stepped in and negotiated a free cruise by sea for the terrorist Arafat and 14,000 of his Palestinian fighters. The civil war in Lebanon continued. The PLO leader regrouped, rebranded, hugged the Clintons and won the Nobel peace prize.

Today’s Israeli soldiers in Lebanon are the sons and daughters of the Israeli soldiers who fought years in Lebanon to then watch the bad guy sail away, win the Nobel peace prize, keep bombing babies and be hailed as a moderate compared to the Iranian funded terrorists who took hold of Lebanon after the sunset cruise and are now bombing the Israeli grandbabies.

And here we are today. A 19 year old was blown up by a Hezbollah (aka Iranian) drone while the rest of the world says we’re in a ceasefire. Tens of thousands of Israeli school age children have spent so many years, often all the years of their short lives, living under the Iranian missiles fired from ten miles away.

So now we’ve got a big ball of pieces of yarn. Where will this end? Who knows. But apparently if you’re not clear by now: it’s won’t end because someone said there was a ceasefire when no one knows what ceased or who stopped firing.

Until next time.

XO Gavriella