We often read two histories in history books, though one could, for a brief time, eclipse the other. One is the history of wars, which is studded with events like the conquests of Hannibal and Alexander, the Babylonian captivity, the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and the two World Wars...
The other is that of achievements, both material and immaterial alike, in production, trade, institutions, and transportation. This last one is particularly concerned with everything antithetical to war, everything that connects and introduces people to each other. In this category, ages are defined by stone, bronze, or steam, and of the discovery of America, the invention of the printing press, farming and industry, the digging of the Suez and Panama Canals, the construction of railroads, the paving of roads...
Of course, this does not mean there are two separate histories. Without the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, nationalism may have never emerged; without the American Civil War, the slaves might have never been freed... Indeed, each of these two small, distinct, and often contradictory histories has the seeds of a broader, unified history. Thus, the two eventually converge, at some juncture, into a single history.
In Lebanon, which has just marked the 50-year anniversary of its war, this narrative holds only a grain of truth.
The fighting that officially erupted on April 13, 1975, defies firm chronological classification. One could argue, for instance, that the war began in 1969, with the clashes that led to the Cairo Agreement and broke the state's sovereignty over its territory, or in 1973, the year of the relatively minor war compared to the "official" fully-fledged conflict that erupted two years later. We can even add earlier dates, taking us back to 1958, only 15 years after independence.
Pinpointing the end of the war is just as elusive. The official narrative sets the date at 1989, whereby the war ends with the signing of the Taif Agreement. However, one could just as convincingly argue that while the agreement did indeed achieve demonstrable success - at least until 2005 - in establishing an obvious peace, it did not resolve the deeper causes of the conflict, which have continued to simmer beneath that surface.
Even during the years of relative stability between 1989 to 2005, the country had been under the Syrian tutelage, itself laden with the seeds of a postponed war, as subsequent events would go on to show.
In this sense, the success of the Taif era came to echo, on a larger scale and in more flagrant fashion, the earlier success of the Chehabist period in the first half of the 1960s, which ultimately led to the collapse that began in the latter half of that same decade.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that our modern and brief history is one of wars intermittently interrupted by long or brief truces.
And today, many continue to question the end date of the Lebanese war - or wars while its immediate causes, let alone the more distant factors, are still queuing for a long-overdue resolution. We know that ignorance of when and where something begins or ends imbues it with a mysterious, even mythical, quality, as it comes to resemble a timeless essence, a problem without cause and, by extension, without a solution.
Making Lebanon’s situation even more depressing, its wars are deeply entangled with the region’s other conflicts - conflicts that have similarly fluid, shifting timelines. There's some obscurity around when exactly these wars began, or around each of their many beginnings, while there is a great deal of obscurity around the question of whether they will ever eventually end.
Worse still, the wars of the Lebanese have come to nothing beyond war itself. There’s no need to recall the calamities that have damaged and are damaging our economy, education, and healthcare systems; to say nothing about the cost in human lives, or the vicious cycle of "occupation, resistance, liberation, occupation," which leaves us constantly feeling that the ground beneath our feet could slip at any moment.
With every question about the future (like drilling our offshore gas) or about the past (like agreeing to a national history textbook), it becomes clear how seamlessly our appetite for war can devour anything that, for a moment, seems like a non-military pursuit. The grim features of connection’s disintegration and the corrosion of its means have maintained an intense dose of symbolism. The "official" war, after all, began with the attack on a "bus" that was supposed to safely take passengers from one neighborhood to another, and with the demarcation of "frontlines" that rendered the trench into a meeting ground.
Once the clashes began, roads were divided into those deemed "open and running" and those labeled "unsafe" - mind you, the railway network had been out of service shortly before the outbreak of the war. Later on, the Port of Beirut became one of the many casualties of the war’s runaway trajectory, while the airport has remained, for years now, a subject of belligerent dispute that dies down only to flare-up again.
It’s as though the other history, non-war history, only unfolds in the countries of the diaspora, or these countries have become its only viable habitat. It is there that Lebanese manage to move forward, but as individuals who do not share anything national or common, that is, as individuals who do not make up a nation or people. There, they are free of the social bonds but that, in practice, attest only to the total victory of war over everything civic within us.
This overwhelming belligerence tells us that confiscating non-state arms is certainly a necessary step; it is necessary without a shadow of a doubt. Nonetheless, it remains insufficient to bring the perpetual April 13 to an end.
