Sonallah Ibrahim - Beirut, Beirut

Arab oil money flooded Lebanon’s banks, invigorating the finance and banking markets, which consist of foreign and partly-Lebanese-owned banks whose function is to move Arab funds to international markets. A new class of bankers, businessmen, managers, administrators and accountants appeared, suited to work for the oil companies of Arab countries whose main offices were located in Beirut.

This led to a tourism boom, and Beirut became a center for services of all kinds, including leisure services. Getting rich quick — in any way, shape or form — became the goal, even if it was done at the expense of moral values, or even national ones. Beirut turned into a center for political conspiracy and espionage, and a haven for the white slave trade.

By virtue of the confessional system, by which positions of political leadership and government posts, along with wealth, moved from fathers to sons, fortunes in real estate — built-on, unbuilt, industrial and commercial — piled up in the hands of a few, who profited from a weak central authority and the poverty of the majority of the citizens. Half of the population ended up earning 18 percent of the gross national income, while the other half earned 82 percent. The greatest share of that 82 percent went to the top 5 percent of the population.

Thus a new component — the social component — was added to the religious-confessional struggle which was about to develop into a national struggle over Lebanese identity. But just as the nationalist struggle continued to be dominated by sectarianism, the social struggle also remained within this framework. Coalitions and political parties — however much they assumed the guise of political or social ideologies — continued to be façades for religious communities, and sometimes for families and clans.

The spread of nationalism that swept over the Arab peoples at the beginning of the 1950s, under the twin banners of complete independence from colonialism and Arab unity, had the effect of stoking the fires of the nationalist struggle over Lebanese identity. The Arab nationalist movement reached its peak with the outbreak of the Algerian Revolution, and the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Great Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956, the Maronites and Camille Chamoun, president of the Republic of Lebanon, didn’t conceal their sympathy for the attack; the Phalangist Party newspaper applauded it.

Naturally, the victory of the Arab nationalist movement, with the failure of the tripartite aggression, led to a strengthening of the position of the front hostile to the Maronites. It also led to the United States playing a primary role on the Arab stage.

According to Jonathan Randal, a reporter for the Washington Post , “A former American ambassador years later remarked of that period [the 1950s], ‘We were buying people wholesale. I would not be surprised to discover that everyone important in Lebanon was on the CIA payroll…’”

And so, no sooner had the United States launched its operation to take the place of Great Britain and France in the Arab Middle East, via the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, than Lebanon became the only Arab country that ventured to make public its acceptance of it.

But Arab nationalism continued to spread: Jordan cancelled its treaty with Great Britain, in February 1958 the union of Egypt and Syria was announced, and collectively, Arab emotions ran high. Thousands of Lebanese poured into Damascus to catch a glimpse of “their Nasser”.

Taking a cue from Gamal Abdel Nasser and Arab nationalism, Sunni and Shiite leaders — chief of whom were the two Sunnis Saeb Salam (the Saudis’ top man in Lebanon) and Rashid Karami , and the Shiite Kamil al-As’ad (also with ties to Saudi Arabia) — found that the time was right to take a bigger slice of the pie, of which the Maronites had taken the lion’s share, in response to the secret assassination squads formed by Camille Chamoun (who in the early 1970s was exposed as having been in the pay of the British intelligence service). So, in cooperation with Kamal Jumblatt , the leader of the Druze, Chamoun’s former ally and his rival for the leadership of the Chouf district, they ignited what was later known as the “revolt” of 1958, relying on the nationalist enthusiasm of the Arab street. The Muslims resorted to arms, raising aloft photos of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

July 14, 1958 was the high-water mark for Arab nationalism, when the monarchy fell in Iraq, and in seconds, the Baghdad Pact collapsed. Full Arab unity appeared to be on the horizon. Nasser flew across the Mediterranean to Moscow, in preparation for a full confrontation with colonial powers old and new. At this point, Chamoun sought the help of the American, British and French ambassadors. The response from Washington reached him in the early hours of the following day, and at 3 pm that same day — July 15 — around 2,000 khaki-clad US marines landed, about 5 miles south of Beirut, ostensibly to protect Lebanon from Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the following days, the total number of American forces in Lebanon reached around 15,000 combatants.

The “revolt” ended with an Egyptian — American agreement to choose General Fu’ad Chehab as a new president for the Republic. As a result, the US marines withdrew. But the Phalangist Party rebelled against the agreement. The Phalangist Party was founded by the Maronite leader Pierre Gemayel in 1939 on the model of (and taking its name from) the Spanish fascist Falange Party, following Gemayel’s participation in the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics. He bestowed on it the meaningful motto: “God, the nation, and the family”. Members of the party began kidnapping allies of Saeb Salam and branding their bodies with the mark of a cross. Salam’s allies, in turn, responded in kind. The discord only came to an end once Pierre Gemayel joined the new government as a minister.

With Gemayel’s ascension to the ministry the bloody phase began, which his family started in order to keep their monopoly on the leadership of the Maronite community and maintain their seizure of power. In reality, until that time, the Lebanese hadn’t taken seriously that athlete-pharmacist of erect bearing, with his white hair plastered to his skull, and his ridiculous militias. They derisively called him “Pierre Condom”, a nickname given to him because he ran a pharmacy in Martyrs ’ Square , a few steps from Beirut’s red-light district.

But Gemayel’s appointment to the ministry meant something equally significant: it was tantamount to the adoption of the slogan coined by the Havana-cigar-smoking Muslim leader Saeb al-Salam, the underlying idea of which was: “No winner and no loser.” That meant that all the violence and victims no longer mattered. The past had to be forgotten, and everything should go back to what it was before, on the premise that neither side gained a victory over the other, and consequentially, neither one obtained any special privileges. This slogan became the basis for what is now happening in Lebanon.

The following years marked the apogee of Lebanon’s prosperity. Society’s “socialist” orientation, achieved by the Arab nationalist movement in the wake of Nasser’s well-known nationalization programs, caused the rich in various Arab countries to quake in fear of their own people, and they deposited their wealth in Lebanon’s banks, or invested in its public projects.

On the other hand, the authoritarian, military character that colored governments, both Arab nationalist and reactionary alike, made Beirut the sole free space for political refugees and opponents of different governments, as well as a public arena for conflicts between these regimes, conflicts between them and Israel, and internal conflicts within Israel itself.