When a rupture strikes a family and divorce becomes inevitable, a bitter husband and wife curse the “cursed” day of their marriage. As in that family, many Lebanese today openly declare, in various expressions, ruing the day. For estrangement, when it turns into a rupture, prompts a radical reassessment of fundamental assumptions.
There are those among the Lebanese who now say that their partners did not abide by the terms of the contract, like keeping out of regional conflicts. And there are those who reply, if obliquely, that no such contract was ever concluded in the first place- what happened was that a number approaching the population of the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon was annexed, against its will, to "Greater Lebanon," meaning that it is natural, once the balances of number and power had changed, for the terms that had once applied to apply no longer.
The clash between communities is hard to settle with the simple binary of right and wrong. For each of these communities has a narrative underpinned by historical "facts" mixed with emotions and desires. But the deeper question beneath every debate, even if the debaters deny it, revolves around the reference point to which appeal should be made: is it the nation-state, or the political formation that preceded it? In the first case, the will of the citizens, represented by their constitutional institutions, is the source of the decision; in the second, priority reverts to the bonds of brotherhood, religion, sect, and ethnicity.
In any case, it can now be said that Lebanon's founding epoch, a century and a bit ago, is revealing itself today as having borne the seeds of bad endings whose denial is no longer of any use. And it may have become necessary, now that the country has split emotionally, to recover some of those chapters that the prevailing historiography presented in a fabricated manner- even if a "patriotic" good faith was behind that fabrication.
In that founding epoch, as is known, "Greater Lebanon" was a Christian project, though it did not include all Christians, and joining Syria under Faisal bin al-Hussein was a Muslim project, though it did not include all Muslims. The model of the Mutasarrifate of the Mountain, in turn, was the Christians' model, as though "Greater Lebanon" were meant to be an expansion of the Mutasarrifate that would provide, through the plains of the Bekaa and Akkar and the ports of the coast, the economic condition the Mountain lacked. Yet that same Mutasarrifate had been imposed by force upon the Ottoman sultanate amid the weakness and decline that had battered it.
This difference formulated itself, with greater clarity and transparency, in the relationship between the Lebanese and Syrian national origins. Faisal's state in Damascus was what the advocates of "Greater Lebanon" wanted to separate from. And if General Gouraud's victory over Yusuf al-Azma at Maysalun was the origin of the angry Syrian founding, it was itself the origin of the Lebanese founding, reassured by the protection the Mandate would provide. And while Sadiq Hamza and his comrades appeared, in the narrative that became the Lebanese narrative, as leaders of "gangs" who denied the Lebanese nation and Lebanese patriotism and violated the Christian villages of the south, in the broader Arabist narrative they were drawn as "heroes" who resisted the Mandate.
When the "Great Syrian Revolt" broke out in 1925- the second moment in Syria's national founding- the positions of the sons and grandsons of the Mutasarrifate ranged between reserve and hostility. Thus Lebanon was subjected to the invective of Rashid Salim al-Khoury, the "Village Poet" and Arabism enthusiast, who wondered whether this Lebanon was "friend or foe?" before wishing its people "swift death."
Patriarch al-Huwayyik and a few Christian intellectuals made "Greater Lebanon," but among Muslims not having been consulted on the matter had been the dominant complaint, especially since the areas annexed to Lebanon were historically tied to the Syrian hinterland. That is how the presence of the mufti of Beirut, Mustafa Naja, at the ceremony in which Greater Lebanon was declared, did not prevent him from refusing to assume the office of Mufti in this Lebanon and to dispense with an Ottoman firman by a French decision. The mufti of Tripoli and its leader, Abdel Hamid Karami, was dismissed on the pretext of his support for the "Arab State" in Syria, and was then elected head of the "Congress of the Sons of the Coast" convened in 1928 in Damascus. And dating back to 1920, the notables of the Shiite community and its religious scholars issued similar positions at Wadi al-Hujeir, and in 1926, an Islamic gathering at the "Maqasid Charity" boycotted the entire process of debating the new constitution.
Later, changes came over both banks of the contention, inaugurated by Kazem al-Solh in 1936, and by Bishara al-Khoury and Riad al-Solh, the patrons of independence, in 1943, and then by Patriarch al-Meouchi and Hamid Franjieh in 1958. But the regional conditions, which began to deteriorate with the rise of Nasserism, hardened the original affiliations far more than they weakened them, and strengthened what precedes the nation-state over the nation-state itself. As for those who wagered, after a while, on Chehabist developmentalism and reformism, they were slapped by what happened once weakness afflicted Chehabism, when one portion of the Lebanese sided with the nascent Palestinian resistance, and another took refuge in the "Tripartite Alliance," hardline on the Christian side.
Just as the Muslims had been compelled to accept "Greater Lebanon," the Christians were repeatedly compelled to accept armed resistances that dragged them into regional conflicts they had wanted no part in- the latest and bitterest of them embodied today by Hezbollah- as though coercion must always accompany union, whatever its depth and gravity.
And so that past did not become past; it remained a specter haunting the present and the future, announcing that the seeds of the end were embedded in those beginnings.
