Beware of Small States

The first was historical. In ancient times this area had supposedly been home to the Jewish tribes of Asher and Naftali. On the strength of that, a Zionist leader, Menahem Ussishkin, was able to claim that Lebanon, not Palestine, was where the very first colony of the renascent Land of Israel arose.¹ It was located in Sidon; and its members came from the city’s indigenous Jewish community. Originally the protégé of the ‘Lovers of Zion’, a nationalist movement of Russian Jews, the colony preceded Herzl’s ‘political’ Zionism proper, but was subsequently adopted by it. The ‘Lovers of Zion’ had maintained an office in Beirut for buying land to be settled by Russian Jews. In 1908 they became very excited about another potential acquisition, a very large, Christian-owned farm for sale between Sidon and the inland town of Nabatiyah. They wanted it to be the first in a chain of settlements reaching down into Palestine proper. In the end, nothing came of this, nor of Weizmann’s plans to buy several small industries in the Sidon area, including an olive oil factory through which, he believed, the Zionists could eventually control the entire oil industry of the country. But clearly, despite this disappointment, great potentialities still beckoned.

Their second interest was strategic and military: a border situated so much further to the north, and the kind of terrain through which it would have run, would have much enhanced the defences of the future state. And their third was economic: control of, and assured access to, the Litani river, Lebanon’s most abundant, as well as the Lebanese-Syrian headwaters and tributaries of the Jordan, were deemed indispensable for the irrigation of Palestine’s fertile northern plains.² But, along with Transjordan, the Zionists had to forego this prize too. Despite the intense and partisan passions it aroused, the demarcation of the border, destined to become one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, ended up as an arbitrary, pointless and obstructionist line on the map. In truth, it represented little more than just another cold-blooded geographic trade-off between Britain and France in the distribution of their post-war Middle East spoils. The French insisted - and the British did not strenuously demur - that the Litani and territories to its south should go to Lebanon. The basic imperial impulse aside, they did so because many of them found the very idea of a ‘Zionist state’ in Palestine distasteful, even smacking of an Anglo-Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against themselves and the Catholic church,³ and because they wanted to gratify the expansionist ambitions of the Maronites.

The anti-Zionist, not to say anti-Semitic, motives that inspired the French were definitely not shared by their Lebanese protégés. Between Maronites and Zionists it could not be called love at first sight, because they knew each other already. It was, rather, the flowering of a mutual attraction that had lain dormant since that last great Maronite tragedy, the massacres of 1860. Moved to pity by those, Sir Moses Montefiori, a wealthy British Jew, and Adolphe Cremieux, a distinguished French one, had been among the first Europeans to respond to desperate Maronite appeals for help, one by ensuring prominent coverage of their plight in the London Times and setting up a fund for the survivors, and the other by urging the French government to send troops to save them from further slaughter. They had been acting as philanthropists only, not as Jews, still less as ‘Zionists’.⁴ But their charitable action firmly lodged itself in the collective Maronite memory. It contributed not a little to the welcome which early Zionists received when, in the years before the Balfour Declaration, they first made contact with Maronite leaders. Indeed, to their surprise, these seemed, if anything, at least as keen on cultivating a friendship as they were themselves. It was an emotionally gratifying discovery that generated a host of extravagant cliches about Lebanon as ‘an island in the vast Muslim sea’, or ‘window in the wall of Arab enmity’. One of them wrote at the time:

Not only did they want the Jews to come to Palestine and Syria, but they hoped that the influx of settlers would be large and quick, because it matched their own political and economic interests as Christian Arabs. The Arab Christians were a minority and so were the Jews. If both these minorities increased in numbers they could form a bloc that would counterbalance the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Muslims, which the Christians feared. The intellectual superiority of the Jews and Christians could balance the Muslims’ numerical supremacy ... The Christians ... realized that [Jewish] capital, modern industrial plants and up-to-date production methods would create a climate of prosperity, not only for those who introduced them to the Middle East, but also for the indigenous population.⁵

Foreshadowed here were some of the core beliefs and sentiments which, in years to come, would justify and inspire the ‘minority alliance’ which the Zionists and then, on a far more ambitious scale, the Zionists-turned-Israelis sought to establish with their Maronite neighbours. There was, they argued, a ‘natural harmony of interests’ between them, a common destiny shaped by history, geography, by obvious similarities both of circumstance and outlook on the world.⁶ Both were small peoples or ‘nations’ seeking either to safeguard - or to construct from scratch - their separate status and identity in a vast and populous region which, impelled by theology, temperament and historical memory, would always seek to deny it to them. Both sought their raison d’être in a real or imagined past; the ‘Phoenicianism’ of the Maronites, sometimes called ‘Lebanese Zionism’, was matched by the ‘Hebrew’ revivalism of the Zionists, whose poets and theoreticians would invoke the relations between King Solomon and the Phoenician King Hiram as ancient justification for a renewed, contemporary friendship between the two peoples. The Zionists were pleased to discern in the Maronites something of the ‘European’ qualities they considered themselves to possess: modern, sophisticated, superior to other Arabs, and Muslims, in general. They were, Weizmann assured a Maronite archbishop, ‘the two progressive peoples of the Middle East’.⁷ It was only to be expected that, with their innate, historical disposition to seek a distant European protector, the Maronites should turn, in the same spirit, to this potential new one, so suddenly, so providentially arising on their doorstep. If ever there were a natural partnership against a common adversary it would surely be theirs.

‘Not the western edge of the Arabic Muslim world but the eastern edge of Western Christendom’ — maybe, in their hearts, most Maronites really did feel like that about themselves.⁸ But even if they did, that did not necessarily mean that they, or more importantly their leaders, all automatically followed their hearts where the Zionists were concerned. In fact, from the outset, Maronite leaders fell, by and large, into two opposing camps. There were those, whom we shall call the ‘pro-Zionists’, led by the clergy and the political ideologues, who, immediately and enthusiastically, empathized with them. They saw them as a potential bulwark against Arabs and Muslims, and ally in the preservation of their own ascendancy within multi-confessional Greater Lebanon or, should it ever fall apart, in the resurrection of that older, smaller, predominantly Christian Lebanon to which they would then revert. Opposing them were those, whom we shall call the ‘Arabists’, who contended that the Maronites’ status and security lay, not in befriending the newcomers, but in jealously guarding the modus vivendi they had achieved with the Lebanese Muslims, and, beyond them, with the Arabs and Muslims at large. This would, after all, be no more than a logical continuation, in the field of contemporary politics and diplomacy, of the intellectual and cultural role the Christians had earlier played in the Arab Awakening and the pan-Arab nationalist movement to which it gave rise. Intra-community conflict between the two camps was endemic.⁹ The ‘Arabists’ might have the upper hand one moment, the ‘pro-Zionists’ the next; it largely depended on external circumstances, and not least, of course, on the conduct of the Zionists themselves.

To begin with, the Zionists had no clearly defined or systematic strategy with regard to the Maronites, or any other Middle Eastern minority. There were only tendencies, exploratory probings and personal relationships.¹⁰ Already discernible in these, however, were two basic schools of thought that reflected, and interacted with, the Maronites’ own. Both, of course, valued whatever degree of Arab recognition, goodwill or cooperation they might succeed in eliciting, but neither could ever really be sure whether, in the final analysis, cultivating the ‘minority alliance’ with the Maronites was to help or hinder them in that task. The hope of one school, the ‘interventionists’, was, of course, that it helped. They believed in actively encouraging and supporting the ‘pro-Zionists’ wherever and whenever the opportunity arose. Naturally, it would have been better to win over the Arab and Muslim mainstream. But ‘beggars couldn’t be choosers’, and the probability of achieving agreement with a minority, however small and unrepresentative, should not be sacrificed for the improbability of ever achieving one with the majority. Besides, it might actually pay off in the end, and encourage other, less likely quarters to follow in the Maronites’ footsteps. The fear of the non-interventionist school, by contrast, was that too active a courtship of the ‘pro-Zionists’, and too ardent a response from them, would merely alarm the ‘Arabists’, and then turn all the Muslims against all the Maronites. In the ‘small state’ of Lebanon, any position anyone took automatically generated its own antithesis, between the rival sects internally, and between the rival states, to which the sects were invariably linked, regionally and internationally. Carried too far, such a cycle of action and reaction would threaten the very foundations of the state itself, and the crucial, but always fragile, National Pact which secured the Maronites’ pre-eminence in it. Not surprisingly, then, however exalted the interventionists’ ‘pro-Zionist’ friends might be - a patriarch, a president, or both - however ardent their convictions, they could never carry the whole Maronite community with them, let alone the country at large. In their dealings with the Zionists, and later the Israelis, they would forever swear in private what they dared not support in public; they would promise, but rarely deliver. Although this happened again and again, the interventionists never gave up. Decades on, they would finally triumph - but only to have their triumph quickly turn to disaster.

In these early days, it didn’t much matter what this or that Maronite might propose to this or that Zionist, or vice versa. It didn’t much matter, for example, that, in 1920, even before Greater Lebanon had officially come into being, a land-purchaser called Yehoshua Hankin, professing to represent the Zionist Organization in Palestine, rushed to sign a treaty with an extreme, freebooting ‘pro-Zionist’ called Najib Sfeir, and two colleagues, professing to represent something called the Nationalist Group in Syria and Lebanon. Under this pact, the Maronites recognized the Jews’ right to a ‘national home’ in the Land of Israel, and unlimited immigration into it, while the Zionists recognized the Christians’ right to an independent Lebanon separate from Muslim Syria and pledged assistance in developing it.^II

It might have been profoundly significant as a harbinger of things to come, embodying as it did the basic principles of the ‘minority alliance’ idea; and it did at least prove that ‘the Zionists had something to talk about with the Lebanese and someone with whom to talk’.¹² But nothing much was going to come of it at the time. For, at this embryonic stage, the Zionist movement simply lacked the intrinsic weight and resources for serious political and diplomatic - let alone military - intervention anywhere in the region. Moreover, its principal leaders, both in Palestine and London, were heavily engaged in their central task, the ‘up-building’ of the ‘national home’ in Palestine itself, and the higher strategies and calculations which that required. Maronite friendship and its potentialities, however pleasant and gratifying, still occupied a small place in those. And finally it didn’t much matter because of the whole Arab temper of the times.

What the Palestinians - and doubtless a good many Arabs - certainly did know, or at least strongly sensed, was that worse was sure to come, and that with the Jewish immigrants ‘coming up’, the land being ‘redeemed’ and labour ‘conquered’, with an alien, ethnocentric and self-segregating society arising in their midst, dispossession was likely to be their ultimate fate. They could not but sense, too, that, if this went on, force - or counter-force as they considered it - would be their only means of preventing it. For legitimate constitutional means were being systematically denied them. True, there was to have been democracy, and its offspring, self-determination, in Palestine; had not the great powers decreed it? Unfortunately for the Palestinians, however, these blessings of civilization were to be for the newcomers only, the aliens from overseas, not for them, the original inhabitants of the land. ‘The democratic principle’, said Weizmann, ’which reckons with the relative numerical strength and brutal numbers, operates against us, for there are five Arabs [actually there were about ten] to one Jew‘,¹⁵ and the ‘treacherous Arabs’ could not be allowed to manipulate this circumstance in their own favour. The Zionists would brook no representative government until, their majority assured through immigration, they could outvote the natives they were preparing to displace. And thus it came to pass; the British Mandatory authorities, resisting all Palestinian appeals and petitions, duly obliged them in that. So, at one remove, did the United States. For, in Washington’s corridors of power, a Jewish lobby was already giving an impressive adumbration of the mighty machine it would eventually become. By 1922, under its persuasions, Congress had already made up its mind. For it, supporting the Zionists, ‘one of those oppressed smaller nationalities which must have an opportunity to assert themselves’, was ‘in line with the principles of self-determination’; supporting the Palestinians, who — ‘backward, poor and ignorant’ — had reduced the biblical ‘land of milk and honey’ to ‘a ravaged and spoiled land’, was not.¹⁶

But, sense it though Palestinians and Arabs did, that worse-to-come still lay in the inscrutable future. And - who knows? - given what, in Arab eyes, would have been the sheer, the scarcely credible, enormity of it, perhaps it might never have been suffered to come at all. So it was that the general temper, between Arabs and Jews, was still, relatively speaking, casual and relaxed. Indeed, it is hard nowadays to imagine the ease and freedom with which Palestinian Jews could travel around the Arab world. Only the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, primitive, impoverished, and steeped in Wahhabite xenophobia, looked askance at Jews and Christians alike. Elsewhere, Jews might get lectures on their politics, but they would be hospitably received in their persons. Their officials and journalists routinely met with Arab leaders of every political persuasion. Their students patronized Arab universities.¹⁷ Their businessmen and tourists filled Arab hotels. They exported their manufactures through much of the region.

Inevitably - with its scenic beauty and summer mountain cool, its sea, rivers and greenery, conviviality and superb cuisine - Lebanon had long since established itself as the tourist Mecca of the driest, hottest region on earth. And the rapidly swelling ranks of immigrant Palestinian Jewry were quick to join Arab vacationers in its coastal towns and hill resorts. They became a veritable bulwark of the Lebanese economy. Local hoteliers went to great lengths to allure them. They hired kosher cooks and subscribed to Hebrew newspapers. The government even produced a tourist manual in Hebrew, whose preface proclaimed that ‘Anyone who wants to lengthen his days, taste paradise and feel the world to come should spend some time in Lebanon beneath the shade of its splendid cedars, breathing its healthy air, drinking its good waters, and pampering himself with its glorious visions of nature.’¹⁹

For the Jewish visitors, at least the active Zionists among them - and who could tell who was or wasn’t one of those? - tourism was not just tourism. It exemplified the function that Lebanon was earmarked to play in their wider, political and strategic scheme of things: that of listening post and propaganda platform for the whole Arab world. The array of Arab ministers, journalists and businessmen he came across at the resorts so impressed one such visitor that he proposed to the Zionist executive that it ‘plant’ staff members with every one of them in order to cultivate and befriend these influential Arabs - relationships which, he contended, would eventually help achieve an amicable settlement in Palestine. It was of a piece with another Zionist activity to which Lebanon particularly lent itself. As the region’s most open society, it also had its most flourishing - and venal - newspaper industry. Zionist representatives tried to win more favourable, or at least less hostile, coverage for their cause. At least one newspaper, la Syrie, was permanently on their payroll. They paid for the publication of pro-Zionist articles in others.²⁰

Lebanese property-owners were no less interested in Zionist money, especially given the high prices, often in European currencies, they were ready to pay. Weizmann marvelled at the way the Zionist Organization was being ‘inundated with the most attractive offers from landowners in Syria and Lebanon’.²¹ Lebanese entrepreneurs sought Jewish capital, or participation in joint ventures. Occasionally the Jews set up an enterprise on their own, such as a match factory in the coastal town of Damur.²² Jewish business delegations would be warmly received in Beirut; the Lebanese sponsored a pavilion at the trade fair in Tel Aviv. By the mid-thirties imports and exports between Palestine and Lebanon (and Syria) far exceeded those between Palestine and any other Arab country. There were cultural, scholarly and literary exchanges too.

Maronites, by virtue of their politics and their sometimes greater means, were foremost in these affairs. But they were certainly not alone. Many Arabs were unwilling to sell land or property directly to the Jews, so a group of Sunni Muslim merchants in Beirut offered to buy it themselves, and then sell it on, making a handsome profit in the process.²³ Some Sunnis even engaged the Zionists politically, without the genuine enthusiasm of the Maronites no doubt, but in quite far-reaching ways nonetheless. Riad Sulh, scion of one of Muslim Beirut’s great political families and a future prime minister, presented himself as an influential figure within the Arab nationalist movement. That made it all the more remarkable that he should have proposed the bargain that he did. If, he said, the Zionists would throw their financial and political weight behind the pan-Arab cause in French-ruled ‘Greater Syria’, he could conjure up an ‘Arab Balfour Declaration’ and get the Palestinians to honour it.²⁴

For the Zionists Qassam was a kind of freak, the product of unnatural fanaticism, and the movement he inspired banditry and murder, a reversion to what Weizmann called the ‘barbarism of the desert’. The Manchester Guardian, whose editor, C. P. Scott, was a friend of Weizmann and devout and influential supporter of his cause, greatly admired the havlaga — or ‘self-restraint’ - which the Zionists exhibited in the face of continual terrorism ‘organized from outside’.²⁶ ‘Self-restraint’ and its inseparable companion, tahar haneshek, or ‘purity of arms’, were concepts rooted in Jewish ethics by which the Zionist ‘self-defence’ organizations had always professed to set great store. In the United States Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes told the Zionists that ‘the enemy against whom you are forced to contend are ... the enemies of all human progress’.²⁷ Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that ‘when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists’ increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals‘, while this ‘Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization’.²⁸ The British put down the Rebellion, often with such cruel and brutal methods that, as one of their doctors confided to his diary, they could ‘probably [have] taught Hitler something he didn’t know about running concentration camps’.²⁹ And the Zionists joined in: the Arabs may have begun the violence, but they imitated and, with their much improved techniques, far outdid them. All of them - not just the ‘terrorist’ undergrounds, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, but the official, mainstream Hagana - abandoned ‘self-restraint’, if they had ever really practised it. A policy of indiscriminate ‘reprisals’ took its place. These, wrote the official historian of the Irgun, ‘did not aim at those who had perpetrated acts of violence against the Jews, and had no geographic connection with the places where they had done so. The principal consideration in the choice of target was first accessibility, and then the [maximum] number of Arabs that could be hit.’³⁰ At the climax of their anti-Arab rampage, with bombs in market-places or mosques, grenades hurled into buses or the machine-gunning of trains, they killed more Palestinians, 140, in the space of three weeks than the Palestinians had killed Jews in the year and a half since the Rebellion began - an achievement over which the Irgun’s National Bulletin openly exulted.³¹

Palestinian violence was ‘terror’, an evil which, in and of itself, nullified the legitimacy of any cause it might have claimed to promote. Zionist violence, though no less terroristic in nature, was ‘self-defence’ against it. That, at its baldest, became the moral antithesis by which the Zionists would ever after seek to define the conflict. The Great Rebellion was the first really sustained and systematic instance of it, and - what with the rise of Hitler and the racist legislation, violence and spoliation he was already unleashing on German Jewry - of the emotionally understandable, but undiscriminating, sympathy it commanded in Britain, America, and Western democracies in general. It was not, of course, a view shared by the Arabs.

It was with the Rebellion, in fact, that the struggle for Palestine first became truly ‘Arabized’, and has remained so ever since. Which is not to say - pace the Manchester Guardian - that it was ‘organized from outside’, that argument being then, even more than it is today, a characteristic way of disparaging the authenticity of Palestinian resistance. But many Arabs did swell the ranks of the Palestinian guerilla bands. They were moved not merely by solidarity with the Palestinians, but, on pan-Arab grounds, by outrage at the kind of solutions the British were now proposing for an intractable problem of their own, utterly foreseeable making: the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, and the consequent, irrevocable loss, to the Arabs, of an inalienable part of their ancestral homeland. There were riots and demonstrations around the Arab world. Popular congresses told Arab rulers that they should treat the Palestinian cause as their own. Not just the Zionists were reviled, but their Western supporters too. Arab governments collectively warned Britain that it ‘must choose between our friendship and the Jews’.³²

The boundary which the British and French empires had interposed between their new Middle Eastern possessions proved so inept and indefensible that, in the later stages of the Rebellion, the British had to construct a barbed-wire entanglement, the ‘Tegart Line’, which, two metres high and two deep, and strung on stakes set in concrete, ran its entire length from Lake Tiberias to the Mediterranean. An obstacle to the commerce on which both Jews and Arabs so much depended, it angered everyone, peaceable traders and guerillas alike; it came under constant assault, and Lebanese market-places were soon inundated with wiring pilfered from it.³⁴ Then, lacking manpower, the British authorized the formation of a Jewish auxiliary police force and put it under the command of one of their own officers, Orde Wingate, who, unbeknown to them, had become a fanatical devotee of Zionism. He devised the ‘special night squads’, units in which he inculcated those principles of offensive daring, surprise, deep penetration and high mobility which Israel later developed to the full. Some of their operations carried them over the border - and thus it was that Jews who used to slip casually across it for social or business reasons now found themselves doing so at dead of night, with guns, on very different missions. In one such operation, the sergeant of a British company whom Wingate had enlisted to take part in it, shouted at them: ‘I think you are totally ignorant in your Ramat Yochanan [Hagana training base] since you do not even know the elementary use of bayonets when attacking dirty Arabs: how can you put your left foot in front!’³⁵ So, at least in part, it was in the remote and rugged hills and valleys of South Lebanon that these special night squads ‘gradually became what Wingate secretly intended, the beginnings of a Jewish army’.³⁶

As for the Lebanese people at large, it was naturally among its Muslim half that the Mufti and his cause won the most ardent support. Indeed, even before he arrived, a Zionist representative in the country had complained of a ‘Palestinian atmosphere’ the like of which was ‘not even to be found in Palestine’ itself.³⁷ Palestine was of greater interest to the Lebanese than their own, forthcoming elections, in which it was a highly emotive issue. ‘The most abusive accusation’, said a Jewish Agency report, ‘which the rival parties can find to hurl at one another is to pretend that the other clique is the friend of the Jews. In short, for one and all we are the undesirables and we compromise those who have sympathy for us or who aid our cause.’³⁸ It was because of such a climate, in addition to their traditional rivalry with, and resentment of, the British, that the French were so reluctant to rein in the Mufti or police the southern frontier; they feared that it might touch off some kind of Lebanese rebellion too.³⁹ Peculiarly disturbing to British and Zionists was the fact that Christian Lebanese were becoming notably hostile as well. ‘They have not the same religious and racial affinities with the Palestinian Arabs as have the Muslims’, wrote the British consul in Beirut, ‘but they feel quite genuinely that a great wrong is being done to a neighbouring people with whom they have much in common.’ With Palestinian refugees ‘pouring in daily’, lamented a Zionist representative, Lebanese feelings, ‘including those of the Christians’, now inclined to Arabism.⁴⁰

Similarly, on the Zionist side, as general Arab and Muslim hostility increased, so did the appeal of achieving some kind of ‘minority alliance’ with at least someone, somewhere. And where more appealing than the very country which the Mufti had turned into a Palestinian stronghold, and whose frontier regions were a staging post for attacks on the Jews?⁴² Besides, should not the increasing difficulties of Lebanon’s Christians propel them towards partnership with other, non-Muslim communities like themselves? So reasoned the ‘interventionist’ school. The non-interventionists, while not averse to such a goal, feared that they might propel them from, not toward, it.

For the likes of these, the Rebellion was less a natural response to what the British and Zionists had been doing to the Palestinians than it was a reminder of the melancholic warning a Lebanese Christian proverb - ‘After Saturday, Sunday’ - conveys: once the Muslims have done away with the Jews the Christians’ turn will come.⁴³ One of their Zionist confidants reported that, in their eyes, it was ‘proof of what rule by a Muslim majority would mean’; and they were ‘terribly afraid lest the Arabs win this war’. Apostles of a famously mercantile society, they told him how ‘vitally interested they were in the safety and prosperity of the Jews in Palestine’.⁴⁴ They were alarmed at the losses their traders were already incurring, and perhaps even more so at a Zionist press campaign calling for a Jewish counter-boycott of Lebanon - and especially of its greatest pride, its lucrative, substantially Maronite, tourist industry⁴⁵ The Mufti’s influence on, and penetration of, the Lebanese state and body politic was deeply disturbing to them- and very personally galling to Eddé, in that, whenever his government did try to stop the traffic of men and arms across the frontier, Beirut newspapers would immediately accuse him of connivance with the enemy.⁴⁶ And in the background there lurked a variety of kindred fears. They worried that when Lebanon achieved its independence, as other Arab states were doing, France would no longer be there to defend its Maronite protégés, that nationalist Syria would press an irredentist claim to its lost, now Lebanese provinces, or that the Muslim inhabitants who had come with them would, with their much higher birthrate, soon overtake the Christians’ already much reduced majority of the total population.

Hardly had Eddé become president than an emissary of Weizmann laid before him a fully-fledged, draft ‘treaty of friendship’. The most advanced step yet in the formalization of a Lebanese-Zionist relationship, it recognized the future Jewish state in Palestine - before the British or Zionists were even talking openly about such a thing - and foresaw a political and military alliance between it and an independent Lebanon. In private, at least, Eddé enthusiastically endorsed it. It was only to be aborted by the French high commissioner, who correctly estimated that such open encouragement of Zionist aspirations in Palestine would be anathema to all Muslims, most Christians, and many an ‘Arabist’ Maronite too.⁴⁷ On the very day that, in July 1937, a British commission of inquiry issued its long-awaited report on the situation in Palestine, and, in the course of it, proposed - to the fury of the Arabs - that it be partitioned into a Jewish and an Arab state, Eddé met Weizmann in Paris and declared: ‘Now that the Peel Report is an official document, I have the honour of congratulating the first President of the future Jewish state.’⁴⁸

As Weizmann eagerly - though in the end unsuccessfully - promoted a scheme for the resettlement in Lebanon of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and many Lebanese, mainly Maronite, eagerly acclaimed the business opportunities this would bring, Patriarch Arida called on all Maronite churches to pray for European Jewry - and offered patriarchal property near Beirut for sale to the Zionist Organization. From Beirut’s synagogue in Wadi Abu Jamil, the Archbishop of Beirut, Ignace Mubarak, the most intrepid ‘pro-Zionist’ of them all, announced that Lebanon had plenty of room for all those Jews who had not been ‘amicably received by the Arabs of Palestine ... We want to say to you: be welcome, Jews ... I now declare myself the archbishop of the Jews.‘⁴⁹ It was not so much as Zionists, or even as Jews, that he and others would have welcomed them, but simply as non-Muslims, and ‘high-quality’, European ones to boot, who would tilt the inter-communal, demographic balance back in favour of shrinking Christian Lebanon.

But what the Aridas, Eddés and Mubaraks represented did not endure; it was, in fact, no more than the high-water mark, for an entire generation, of the Zionists’ influence in Lebanon, of any prospect of their securing a ‘minority alliance’ within the Arab country that had always held out most promise of one. For the rest of the pre-state period - and indeed for a long way into Israeli statehood - they had to contend with the ‘Arabists’ of the Maronite community who, aided in part by the Middle Eastern consequences of French defeat in the Second World War, were soon to establish, and then consolidate, their ascendancy over the ‘pro-Zionists’.⁵⁰ The Arabists’ decisive breakthrough came in 1943, with Lebanon’s formal independence, the accession to the presidency of Eddé’s great rival, Bishara al-Khouri, and the adoption of the National Pact, the inter-communal, power-sharing compromise which, by its very nature, virtually ordained a pan-Arab nationalist, anti-Zionist vocation for the new-born state.

Khouri was no less concerned about his community’s status under the Pact than Eddé. In contrast with Eddé, however, Khouri, French-educated but steeped in Arabic culture, looked on France not as the guarantor of this independent, Maronite-dominated Lebanon, but as an obstacle to the Christian-Muslim cooperation which alone could ensure it. So under Khouri Lebanon now formally adopted anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Christian and Maronite officials applied it. State-endorsed anti-Zionist sentiment spread unhindered, promoting opposition not merely to the Zionist project in Palestine, but to its possible designs on Lebanon as well. New laws were passed which, with the Zionists as their real and principal target, severely restricted the purchase of land by foreigners. Lebanon became a founding member of the Arab League. In 1946, it co-chaired the first of those Arab summits which, for decades to come, were almost always to place Palestine, the ‘permanent emergency’ of Palestine, at the top of their agenda. In 1946, appearing before an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, all Lebanese witnesses, Christian as well as Muslim, were described as expressing a ‘violent opposition to Zionism, a determination to resist it at all costs, and an unwillingness to consider the immigration of one single Jew to Palestine’. Lebanon’s official delegate in the US, the Greek Orthodox Charles Malik, effectively established himself as ‘the unofficial annunciator in the West of Arab opposition to the creation of the state of Israel’.⁵¹ In sum, wrote Laura Zittrain Eisenberg, a historian of Zionist-Maronite relations, ‘“Christian Lebanon”, the notion which guided the Jewish Agency’s policy towards Lebanon, was acting very much like an “Arab” country.’⁵²

Not that the ‘pro-Zionists’ didn’t fight back. So frightened were they at the prospect of Lebanon’s absorption into an enlarged Arab state, despite Arab assurances to the contrary, that they sought to undermine its first, independent, and democratically elected administration. Eddé repeatedly tried to persuade the Jewish Agency that with its financial support he could reclaim the presidency in the next elections and that this time he would finally be able to sign an open treaty of friendship with it. Some in the Agency seemed to have had as unrealistic a view of his capabilities as he did himself. Its leading Lebanon expert, long-time resident of the country and regular emissary to the ‘pro-Zionists’, went so far as to assert that ‘the bulk of Lebanese opinion regards with misgivings and anxiety the beginnings of an Arab imperialism that threatens Lebanon’s territorial integrity’ - a very considerable exaggeration even had he been referring to the country’s Christians only.⁵³ Some urged Lebanon to cast off ‘the artificial mask of pan-Arabism which had been bound on to it from without’.⁵⁴

Others in the Agency did note, however, that the more ground the ‘pro-Zionists’ lost the more extravagant, even hysterical, their ideas were apt to become. One of these was that the Maronites should now retreat from Greater Lebanon, handing back to Syria at least some of those predominantly Muslim territories which they had formerly wrested from it.⁵⁵ And Eddé - who, to be fair, had never believed in Greater Lebanon in the first place - had an even more novel and explosive fancy than that. It was not to Syria, he suggested, that a Christian Lebanon reduced to something like its former dimensions should relinquish some portions of the no longer wanted territory, but to the Jewish state-in-the-making. It could have Tyre and Sidon and the 100,000 Muslims living there. But when he put the matter to Weizmann, even he balked at what he called ‘a gift which bites’.⁵⁶

It was, however, to be the Maronite Church, in the person of Patriarch Arida, which carried this Maronite-Zionist bonding in the pre-state period to its apogee. In 1946 he went to Jerusalem, where, on behalf of the Church and the Maronite community, he signed an agreement with Weizmann on behalf of the Jewish community.⁵⁷ The agreement embodied reciprocal recognitions: of a sovereign Jewish statehood in Palestine and of the independent, Christian character of Lebanon. The Church pledged — with extraordinary presumption - that, once it had achieved political control of the country, it would make the treaty an integral part of Lebanese state policy; it would also, among other things, facilitate the immigration of Jews to Palestine via Lebanon.⁵⁸

It may have been a ‘splendid’ treaty, as one of its Zionist drafters called it, but its very splendour, from his point of view, made it literally horrendous from an Arab one. So horrendous, in fact, that its Maronite sponsors, above all the Patriarch himself, knew very well that, barring a fundamental change of circumstances, it could never be implemented, or even see the light of day. They knew what obloquy their initiative, if exposed, would bring down upon them. So they did not even admit that it existed and utterly denied it if anyone suggested that it did. Indeed, that it be kept ‘strictly confidential’ was a condition of the agreement itself.⁵⁹ For Zionists, then, this treaty - however gratifying in itself, or as an earnest of possible future intent - was in practice all but useless. For their central objective in Lebanon - to impress on the world that they did have important friends and influence in the region - hinged precisely on such a public demonstration of what the Maronites privately felt.⁶⁰ The very desperation that had propelled Arida towards such an extreme position caused him to withdraw from it.

Yet the Zionists, especially the ‘interventionists’ among them, were not to be deterred. Their leaders were predisposed to discern a ‘natural harmony of interests’ between the two communities, and to believe that it was only Arab pressure and propaganda that disturbed it. For such a leadership all those years of personal, social and political dalliance, those early alliance proposals, then the draft treaties, and finally the formal accord, did create at least a sense of progress; and they did so especially, of course, when set against the almost total, dispiriting rejection they ran into everywhere else. Furthermore, they had learned to accept that public denials and private assurances were ‘standard operating procedure for [their] skittish Maronite friends’.⁶¹ When circumstances changed, so would the Maronites, their ‘pro-Zionists’ coming to the fore again. Eventually, in fact, they did.

EARLY DESIGNS ON LEBANON

THE FIRST CONTACTS

ARABS FEAR THE LOSS OF PALESTINE TO THE ZIONISTS, BUT STILL DO BUSINESS WITH ITS JEWS

AND LEBANON EVEN WELCOMES THEM

THE GREAT REBELLION

LEBANON LEADS THE ARABS IN SUPPORT

THE MARONITES DIVIDED BETWEEN ARABS AND ZIONISTS: THEIR ‘ARABISTS’ PREVAIL