Bachir Gemayel was president of Lebanon for 21 days, until he was assassinated
almost exactly 40 years ago.
He was, however,
Lebanon’s most important president because for large groups of the Lebanese he
was a dream and the embodiment of the promise of the modern state of Lebanon
that was established a century ago in 1920.
اضافة اعلان
But for other large groups of Lebanese he was a
nightmare and the manifestation of an insoluble problem at the core of the
modern state.
The division of the groups is largely sectarian. The
vast majority of those who see Gemayel as a dream are the Christian Maronites,
the closest Eastern Christians to the Roman Catholic Church. The vast majority
of the people who regard him as a nightmare are Muslims.
Yet, the lines blur, and there are those of other
religions, and without any religion, who cross to the other camp and see him as
a president who could have moved Lebanon beyond the decay and blood of the past
40 years of the country’s history.
Blood featured heavily in Gemayel’s story, and he
was a leader of a militia that was accused of a number of the most horrendous
massacres of the Lebanese Civil War.
For his admirers, however, he was not merely a
warrior. He was a savior.
In the early 1970s, large groups of Palestinian
fighters were expelled from Jordan, following the 1970 “Black September”
battles between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanian
armed forces, and came to Lebanon. The fighters joined tens of thousands of
Palestinian refugees who had been in the country since the 1948 war.
For many in Lebanon, especially the country’s
Christians, the influx threatened Lebanon’s delicate demographic and social
balance.
The threat seemed particularly grave because the
Palestinian leadership found an ally in Kamal Jumblatt, the preeminent Lebanese
Druze leader of the time and one of Lebanon’s most sophisticated 20th-century
minds. The meeting between the Palestinians and Jumblatt, and behind him an
array of socialist forces was for most Lebanese Christians a tsunami that could
wipe out their special position in Lebanon.
The Maronites, the followers of Mar Maron, one of
the most intriguing monks in the entire history of Eastern Christianity, felt
compelled to act. They had for centuries been largely farmers in Mount Lebanon,
most of them under the authority of Druze clans.
The situation changed in the 17th and 18th centuries
when demographic trends and successive revolts altered the power dynamics in
Mount Lebanon in favor of the Maronites. But the greatest momentum behind
Maronite power came from Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the
founder of modern Egypt, who took control of the entire Levant in the 1830s.
Throughout that decade he made a
Maronite leader, Bachir Al-Shihabi, his viceroy in Mount Lebanon.
But Maronite power remained contested. Mount Lebanon
witnessed acute violence in the second half of the 19th century, and by the end
of World War I it had become clear that France, which had come to control the
entire Levant, was keen to establish order by creating sectarian-based
statelets in the region.
It was the Maronite Church, however, along with a
select group of Sunni Muslim families from Beirut, that lobbied France for the
creation of a national state. Modern Lebanon came into existence in 1920.
The new state’s key positions were distributed
between the Maronites and Sunni and Shiite Muslims, with a special position
reserved for the Druze. But from its beginning, modern Lebanon was a Maronite
project, and it gave rise to Lebanon’s golden age during the 1950s and 1960s,
especially after liberal, cosmopolitan Egypt was coming to an end after the
fall of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952.
Lebanon emerged as the center of free Arab media,
the financial hub of the region, the birthplace of the most daring art and
culture in the entire Arab Mashreq, and the destination in the region for
entertainment of every sort.
For the vast majority of Maronites, this Lebanon — a
project that encompasses diversity but that is anchored in the Maronite view of
Lebanon as the core of Eastern Christianity — was under threat because of the
influx of tens of thousands of Palestinians. It was aggravated because Yasser
Arafat, the then leader of the PLO, was establishing himself as the de facto
ruler of large parts of the country, and Jumblatt was determined to transform
Lebanese politics by ending the supremacy of the Maronites and the “Christian
Right” as it was then called.
Symbols matter, because they shape people’s collective psyche. But symbols also distort history.
This was the moment when Gemayel rose to power. He
organized his followers, attracted thousands of young Christian Lebanese around
him, obtained funds and arms from near and far, and fought tenaciously and
brutally to promote his cause. The blood that was spilled as a result included
that of many Christian Maronites, particularly those from rival political dynasties.
He was, in a slight distortion of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s
idea, a perfect example of the “will to power”.
However, for many, Gemayel’s most memorable decision
was to ally himself with Israel. Perhaps he and the Christian Maronite leaders
of the time who supported him felt they had no other option. They felt they
were facing an existential threat, and indeed at one moment in 1976–1977
Jumblatt, supported by Palestinian forces, was on the verge of dealing the
Maronites and the Christian Right a devastating defeat.
It was only the categorical refusal of then Syrian
president Hafez Al-Assad to allow such a defeat to take place that gave the
Christian Right another chance in the fight.
Gemayel seized the opportunity that Syria had provided
him, but he calculated that Israel could help him more. He became the political
darling of then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and a close friend of
future Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. It was Gemayel’s alliance with
Israel that spearheaded the latter’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which ended
the presence of the PLO in the country and secured him the Lebanese presidency.
Many who worked closely with Gemayel say that he
intended to enforce the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon,
to strengthen the institutions of the state by eliminating all the militias
including the one he had himself set up, and to forge a new governing structure
for the country, one that would reconcile all Lebanese to the notion of a
unified state.
Perhaps he did indeed intend to do these things. But
his rule did not last long enough for these intentions to be translated into
facts on the ground.
Interestingly, outside Lebanon, Gemayel was then
quickly dispatched to the margins of history. Even in Israel, although Sharon
continued to consider him as a dear friend, Lebanon-focused analysts at
Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad held derogatory views of his
character.
Inside Lebanon, however, Gemayel lives on as a
symbol. For some, he is an icon of the Maronite presence and determination to
sustain their understanding of the idea of modern Lebanon. For others, he
symbolizes a quintessentially narrow identity that could never be reconciled
with those of the other major communities living in the country.
Symbols matter, because they shape people’s
collective psyche. But symbols also distort history. This is particularly
problematic in Lebanon because the inherent sectarian tensions and opposing
views about the essence of the Lebanese project, the Lebanese idea, remain not
far beneath the surface and the decay of the state over recent decades.
Liberating Gemayel’s legacy from the symbols and
legends surrounding him, and subjecting it to serious assessment, could be the
beginning of forging a new understanding among all Lebanese of their history
over the past 40 years.
Blurring emotions into false historicity will only
propagate the confinement of the Lebanese psyche into conflicting narratives of
imagined versions of the past. The result would be a clash of identities that
could ultimately seek diverging futures.
Tarek Osman is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt
on the Brink (2010). A version of this article appeared in print in the
September edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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