The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  Unlike the Hezbollah rally, this one was genuinely multiconfessional. A token number of Christian, Sunni, and Druze citizens attended Hezbollah’s event, but the overwhelming majority of people who showed up on that day were Shias. The March 14 rally brought together a huge number of people from all the other main groups.

  Christian and Muslim unity was a major theme on March 14, though in practice there was really only much unity between Christians and Sunnis. The spirit of ecumenism was real, even so. A number of demonstrators carried signs with a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent placed next to each other. A vendor sold necklaces with a crescent and cross fused together into a pendant.

  “They have buried their tiny differences to reveal the concept of a unified Lebanon, and that is excellent,” said Maronite Christian Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir.23 “There was no difference between a Paul, a Pierre, a Mohammad, or a Mustafa.”

  Every Arab country in the world turned against Syria after this. Even Iran, al-Assad’s most reliable ally, took a step back and no longer upheld Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, at least not in public. The U.S. and France, of course, stepped up their campaign to get Damascus out of Beirut.

  Al-Assad was particularly concerned that U.S. President George W. Bush might do something crazy, as he did in Iraq. “Please send this message,” he said to Joe Klein at Time magazine.24 “I am not Saddam Hussein. I want to cooperate.”

  Nabil took me to Freedom Camp, the city of tents around Martyrs Square built by young people who swore they wouldn’t budge until their demands were met. The “permanent” population was 700, and it doubled on weekends.

  “First,” Nabil said, “all Syrian soldiers and intelligence agents must leave Lebanon now and forever. We need an international inquiry into the assassination of Rafik Hariri. And we demand free and fair elections—on time, without delay—in May.”

  They pitched their camp in Beirut’s city center, the one place where all of Lebanon converged in its lush variety. From here you could sometimes hear the soft peal of church bells and the muezzin’s call to Muslim prayer at the same time. Rafik Hariri was buried right across the street next to the mosque he built, which itself was adjacent to the Church of St. George. I could see the soft turquoise waters of the Mediterranean and the snow-capped peak of Mount Sannine in the Mount Lebanon range towering over the city.

  In the center of camp was the Martyrs Statue, still riddled with bullet holes from the war. It portrayed two women—one a Christian, the other a Muslim—standing together over their fallen sons where the Turkish authorities hanged nationalists who clamored for independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1916.

  There, Nabil introduced me to Asma Andraos, a young corporate events planner who said she had little interest in politics until after Hariri was killed and she couldn’t think of much else.

  “I never felt so enraged in my life,” she said. “Who do they think they are?”

  She may not have known much about politics, but she knew plenty about planning events, and she put everything she had into getting as many people as possible downtown on March 14.

  “Ironically,” she said, “Hezbollah helped. The Sunnis are usually passive and hard to stir up, but when Hezbollah brought all those Shias down here to support the people who murdered Hariri, they knew they had to come out in huge numbers.”

  That was the dirty secret everyone in Lebanon understood perfectly and few Westerners wanted to think about. Politics in Lebanon were dangerously split along a fault line more than a thousand years old. Most foreign observers, myself included, saw the upheaval as a struggle for freedom against a tyrannical system and its defenders. That wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t entirely explain what was happening. The rift between Sunni and Shia Muslims that erupted in the eighth century ripped right through the center of Lebanon. For all the talk of freedom, democracy, coexistence, and national unity, Hezbollah’s rally on March 8 showed everyone that hundreds of thousands of people from one of the country’s three largest sects had other ideas. And they had their own army.

  The Middle East is sometimes derided as a region of “tribes with flags”25 rather than authentic nation-states. Egypt has a coherent national identity, as does Tunisia, but tribalism trumps nationalism almost everywhere else. Everywhere, that is, except Lebanon.

  In Lebanon, it’s all about sects. And there are more than just the main three, or four if you count the Druze. The state officially recognizes eighteen different religious communities that have been cobbled together into the most unlikely of polities.

  The Christians alone can be broken down into several: among them Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, and Maronites. The Maronites are the largest of these and actually make up the majority of Lebanon’s Christians. They’re the ones who came up with the idea of an independent Lebanon in the first place, and they used their power and numbers to shape it to their advantage as much as they could.

  The original Maronites were a small community of followers of Saint Maroun in the Orontes Valley of Syria who were persecuted by the Byzantine authorities ruling the area at the time. In the sixth century, they took flight to the green valleys and snow-capped peaks of the Mount Lebanon range along the shore of the Eastern Mediterranean, where they could practice their version of Christianity as they pleased. They were physically safe in their mountain fastness and, just as important, they were culturally safe.

  The Arab invasion and conquest soon followed, but the Maronites refused to convert to Islam, and they were able to rejoin Christian civilization when the Crusaders arrived from Europe in the twelfth century. They forged strong cultural and political ties with France at the time that persist even today. French names like Claude, Pierre, and Michel are as common among Lebanese as Arabic names like Omar, Ali, and Mohammad.

  The Maronites later forged ties with Rome and became officially Catholic, though they retained distinct traits. Their liturgy, for instance, is still in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Most have never considered themselves Arabs. While they speak the everyday Lebanese version of Arabic, they trace their community’s history not to Arabia but to the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and—a bit less plausibly—to the ancient Phoenicians who built Lebanon’s first civilization.

  When France acquired what are modern-day Syria and Lebanon at the end of World War I from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Maronite leaders petitioned French authorities for an independent state of their own, a free Christian homeland in the heart of the Middle East. France was not going to rule these formerly Turkish territories forever, and the Maronites shuddered at the thought of being ruled from the Sunni Arab city of Damascus. Their little piece of the Middle East had always been somewhat apart from the world of the Arabs and Muslims. Mount Lebanon had been a semiautonomous Ottoman province since the sixteenth century and a largely autonomous one since the mid-nineteenth century, as a Mutasarrifiyah under European protection.

  A strictly Maronite homeland in Mount Lebanon, though, wouldn’t be viable. They needed coastline and the port cities of Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon, where large numbers of Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians resided. They also needed agricultural land. Neither the mountains nor the valleys could produce very much food, and the coastal plain was narrow and yielded too little. They needed the hinterlands of the Bekaa Valley and the rolling hills to the south between Tyre and Mount Hermon. Many Shia Muslims lived in those lands.

  Christians just barely made up a majority within those borders and would face a relative population decline before long. Greater Mount Lebanon may have been a Maronite idea, but it could not be a Maronite country. A cultural as well as political accommodation would have to be made with the Muslims and Arabs. The Greek Orthodox Christians weren’t Muslims, of course, but they were more comfortable than the Maronites with the notion of an Arab identity and belonging. While they “Christianized” the Muslims to an extent, especially in Beirut, they were in turn partly “Arabized” by them.

  The
Muslims were no more a unified bloc than the Christians, and the Sunnis and Shias had some things in common with Christians that they did not have with each other. The Shias were less interested than the Sunnis in Pan-Arabism, for instance. At the same time, the coastal and worldly-wise Sunni elite felt more at ease around their Christian colleagues than with the feudal lords from the Shia hinterlands.

  The Maronite and Sunni elite together forged a National Pact, where they divided up power and tried to define what it meant to be Lebanese.

  It wasn’t easy. Lebanon couldn’t be Christian or Maronite, nor could it be Islamic. It couldn’t be Arab—at least not explicitly, and certainly not exclusively. It was something else, something different, something unique in the Middle East. It was pluralist, and it was founded in a spirit of compromise as a Mediterranean country with an “Arab face,” but not an Arab identity.

  Christians made up slightly more than half the population, so they were awarded six seats in parliament for every five given to Muslims. The Maronites, as the dominant sect, took permanent ownership of the presidency. The prime minister’s office would be reserved for the Sunnis, while the Shias were awarded the speaker of parliament. Druze and other minorities were few and therefore barred from the country’s most powerful posts.

  This new Lebanese republic would be guaranteed and protected by France. French was already the second language of the country, and it would be some time before it was eclipsed by English.

  The Sunni rank and file didn’t really buy into the National Pact that had been hammered out among the elite, and some Maronites weren’t completely sold on it either. The Shias were hardly consulted and were rarely even heard from during this period. Their society was rural for the most part, and they had few champions in the capital as adept at politics as the zuama of the Maronites and the Sunnis.

  Lebanon ended up with a weak state, and most of its people seemed to like it that way—not that they had much of a choice. Legislation couldn’t clear parliament but by consensus, and consensus was difficult in a country of varied political ideas and cultural values. No community would tolerate being ruled by the others, so power was radically decentralized away from Beirut. The system was not one that could easily produce dictators or strongmen, and Lebanon became a sort of libertarian land of do-as-you-please.

  The country might have been able to muddle through with its delicate sectarian and political balancing act if the region around it were sedate and at peace with itself. It’s in the heart of the Middle East, though, one of the least stable places on earth. The population is so religiously and ideologically diverse that almost every political cause that arises anywhere in the Middle East has somebody championing it inside Lebanon. As a result, almost every regional conflict since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire has played itself out there.

  In the late 1950s, for instance, when Arab Nationalism swept through the Middle East, many Sunnis in Lebanon thrilled to its charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and became even less interested in Lebanese nationalism, which many still thought of as Maronite, than they were before. A great many Lebanese Sunnis backed Nasser—who would soon merge Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic—and wished to see Lebanon dissolved into the great Arab nation. Maronite President Camille Chamoun panicked and rigged an election. The country fell into crisis, and U.S. Marines were dispatched to keep order.

  The United Arab Republic wasn’t long for the world. Syria seceded from it three years later. Egypt and Syria joined forces again, though, and, along with Jordan, fought the devastating (for them) Six-Day War against Israel in 1967. Egypt lost Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula; Jordan lost the West Bank; and Syria lost the Golan Heights—territories the Israelis promised to give back only after peace treaties were signed.

  Lebanon managed to sit that war out, but it was swallowed nearly whole by the Arab-Israeli conflict when the Sunnis teamed up with Arafat’s PLO and brought the wrath of the Israel Defense Forces down on everyone’s heads.

  By the mid-1980s many Maronites wished to secede, thinking the very idea of a Greater Lebanon was a terrible mistake to begin with. The radical Shia Hezbollah militia, meanwhile, hoped to replicate Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Lebanon. Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt had no interest in imposing a communist dictatorship, but he merrily took arms from the Soviet Union and fought against the Maronite militias and the sectarian system that doomed him to live under a political glass ceiling forever.

  It’s no small wonder that Lebanon even survived. It did survive, though, and the ideas that went into its founding came roaring back stronger than ever when the era of Syrian vassalage ended.

  “It is astonishing how splendidly the Syrians have made a hash of things in Lebanon,” Michael Young wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper.26 “It’s almost as if the regime were reading the lessons taught by Hafez al-Assad backward. Where al-Assad always ensured Syria’s adversaries remained divided, today Damascus has unified the bitterest of old foes.”

  The old foes were united in more than just anger.

  “March 14 was the day the Sunnis joined the Christians in the Lebanese project,” political analyst Eli Khoury told me. “It was in the making before, but it finally came into being then, on that day.”

  The Druze had undergone serious changes, as well.

  Hafez al-Assad killed their leader Kamal Jumblatt in 1977, and his son Walid was forced, when he inherited the position as the zaim of the Druze, to accommodate himself and his people to Syrian power. The Druze are a small minority population in Lebanon, as they are in Syria and in Israel, and they align themselves with the strong horse out of necessity. The senior Jumblatt explained it this way: “Ever alert, [Druze] gauge their surroundings and choose their words carefully, assessing what must be said and what can be said.”

  As with any other people, though, there are limits to how much they can take. “A man just wakes up one day and realizes he’s had enough,” Walid Jumblatt said to author and Middle East analyst Lee Smith.27 “So his life changes.”

  Not everything changed at once, though. He was as staunchly anti-American as his father even after their Progressive Socialist Party no longer accepted arms and largesse from the Soviets. It took some time before he saw potential allies in the Americans, but he eventually did.

  “It’s strange for me to say it,” he said shortly after the uprising in Lebanon started,28 “but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

  He may have overstated things there, but that’s how far he and his people had journeyed from the time of their alliance with Moscow.

  “This is the second republic,” Lebanese scholar Tony Badran wrote,29 “the national accord of 1943 being the first. Ironically, in both instances the agreement entailed an understanding that Lebanon is not to be run like the neighboring authoritarian Arab order. That it had its own unique socio-political culture. At the time, that was mainly the Christian wish. This time around . . . it comes from the mouths of Sunnis, Druze, and not just the traditional foes of Syria.” “The Syrians knew the importance of the Sunnis when they planned the hit,” he added later.30 “Unfortunately, they didn’t plan on this reaction. They certainly didn’t plan on the ‘Lebanonization’ of the Sunnis.”

  Some of the young people in the tent city downtown insisted their struggle was larger than themselves and their own country, that Lebanon with its sectarian divisions was more than just a microcosm of the region they lived in. It was also the place where Catholics named Pierre lived alongside Sunnis and Shias named Omar and Ali. If they could work out a formula to resolve their differences peacefully, they might save the world.

  “You want to know what we’re doing?” Nabil Abou-Charaf said to me seriously. “I’ll tell
you what we’re doing. We are resolving the clash of civilizations.”

  Even those with more moderate ambitions thought they could set the region on fire.

  “The Arab tourists might have fled Beirut after the assassination of Rafik Hariri,” journalist and activist Samir Kassir wrote in the pages of An-Nahar,31 “but they will return with the Beirut Spring. And this time they will not only shop and have fun, they will come seeking the red and white that today crowns the capital of the Arabs. Our Syrian brothers, from laymen to cultured businessmen, might have been startled for a second by what they mistook as hostility toward them. But it is the product of a tyranny that chokes them just as much as it does the Lebanese. They will be happy to return because they know more than others that when the Arab Spring blossoms in Beirut, the roses will bloom in Damascus.”

  The Middle East has an infinite capacity to smash people like him, but that’s what he and his comrades were saying during the Beirut Spring in 2005.

  Roses never did bloom in Damascus. Shortly after he wrote those words, Samir Kassir’s car exploded around him when he turned the ignition key on his way to work in the morning. He was only the first since Hariri in a long line of journalists and officials who would be blown by the Syrian regime into martyrdom.

  Shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many hoped Iraq might become a beacon of sorts in the Middle East, a democratic country that worked and inspired Arab liberals elsewhere to press for change in their own countries. Perhaps that did happen, to an extent. Walid Jumblatt credited Iraq’s first election as having an effect of that sort on him. And it’s certainly possible that Bashar al-Assad would have left Lebanon a little less hastily if he didn’t fear that after Saddam, he might be “next.”

  Most people in the Middle East, however—indeed, most people everywhere in the world—shuddered at Iraq and thought of the place as a charnel house. Baghdad looked a lot like Beirut did in the eighties. Insurgents waged a “resistance” campaign against American soldiers and local security forces, and they massacred civilians in markets with car bombs. Sunni and Shia militias brutally “cleansed” neighborhoods of the other. Al Qaeda operatives kidnapped Western civilians and executed them in front of video cameras.