Is Lebanon Even a Country?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

It’s hard to believe today, but until the 1970s the Israeli border with Lebanon was the quietest of Israel’s frontiers. Lebanon, as a country, never really participated in the Arab wars against the Jewish state. As a state it still doesn’t, actually. So why is this now Israel’s most dangerous boundary?

The problem, of course, is that Lebanon is a failed state, in the fullest sense of the word. It hasn’t really had control of itself since the 1970s, first due to the interference of the PLO and, since the 1980s, the entity in its Shi’ite south adjoining Israel, Hezbollah. In effect, part of Lebanon remains a vassal of Iran.

After the First World War, as the new polity of Greater Lebanon emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Its Maronite-Catholic and French planners envisioned it as a “Christian national home” reminiscent of the Jewish one promised by the Balfour Declaration in Palestine. One prominent Maronite delegate to the postwar peace talks in Paris, Emile Eddé, used the term explicitly.

It was therefore split from the far larger French Mandate of Syria. But the Christians were geographically a small population and desired more territory. So its borders were significantly more encompassing than those of its Ottoman predecessor, the predominantly Christian governorate of Mount Lebanon. In fact, the French authorities worried that the Maronites, Lebanon’s largest Christian denomination, were overreaching by absorbing so much land inhabited by Sunni and Shia Muslims.

But the Christians had suffered from a great famine while under Turkish rule during the war. After the armistice the traumatized Maronites were desperate for agricultural land, and insisted, despite French reservations, on the inclusion within the emerging Lebanon of the mostly Sunni Akkar area north of Tripoli and the heavily Shia Beqaa Valley along the eastern border with Syria. This would eventually lead to their political downfall.

The Shias were the poorest and most downtrodden of the country’s myriad groups, their marginal importance made plain by images of the 1920 ceremony creating the French Mandate of Lebanon. The religious figures flanking the French General Henri Gouraud were the Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek and the Sunni Muslim mufti of Beirut, Sheikh Mustafa Naja. The Shias were not even invited.

Eddé had been clearest among Maronite leaders “in wanting a proper Christian Lebanon rather than a multicommunal mélange.” In 1932 he even begged Paris to lop off the Sunni-majority area around Tripoli and, crucially, the Shia-majority south. “This Christian majority is much too weak to defend against the attraction exerted on it by Syria,” he wrote in a memo.

France eventually buckled to mounting Arab nationalist pressure in its Syrian mandate and granted it qualified independence. To dampen Lebanese Muslim support for unification with Syria, President Eddé agreed to name a Sunni Muslim as prime minister.

This led to the confessionalism that would be codified in the 1943 National Pact that created an independent state. Lebanon would have a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shia parliamentary speaker.

Lebanon soon became a sectarian battleground within its borders. In 1975, confrontations between Christians and Muslims, and Lebanese and Palestinians, exploded into a 15-year civil war. Syria soon invaded and wouldn’t leave for three decades.

Meanwhile, the new Shia rulers in Tehran created a far more militant movement and called it Hezbollah, the Party of God. Intermittent violence, including four major conflagrations, between Hezbollah and Israel has followed ever since, with the Lebanese state virtually a bystander. Hezbollah is embedded in residential and commercial areas of nearly every city and town south of the Litani River. And the Beqaa Valley is a depth zone that includes social presence, logistics, and at times funding and smuggling routes.

Disarmament was the purpose in theory of a November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. But that task was left to the Lebanese Armed Forces, which were not up to the job.

Since the current war with Iran began in February, Hezbollah has stepped up its bombardment of northern Israel and has refused to abide by a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese government. A fragile peace has been declared, but it wasn’t negotiated between the two parties that are actually in conflict with one another.

Hezbollah has no interest in any peace deal with or recognition of any kind of Israel because it would be a violation of its raison d’etre which is to be Iran’s protector. Israel can weaken Hezbollah significantly, but until the Lebanese are able to end being occupied by this movement, Hezbollah will always remain a threat.

Hezbollah maintains its power not only through weapons but also through services, welfare systems, credit, local mediation, and patronage mechanisms. This is why physical strikes on its strongholds do not necessarily translate into a loss of public support.

There is little will and little capacity within Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Lebanon is not a functioning country, but an amalgam of at least five or six factions; compromise has been the order of the day for years and there is no centre that can commit to and enforce any meaningful decision. Until then, Hezbollah calls the shots – literally.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have created a buffer zone in southern Lebanon to severely reduce a potential ground incursion by Hezbollah. But it’s a band-aid solution.