Hezbollah by Norton Augustus Richard

Author:Norton, Augustus Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Changing Social Tapestry in Post–Civil War Lebanon

Over the past few decades the social tapestry in Lebanon has changed in ways that help explain why sectarianism has kept a stubborn grip on the country, why Hezbollah has succeeded so well in mobilizing support, and why inter-confessional cooperation is more elusive today than it was a few decades ago. The key changes were a result of Lebanon’s terrible civil war, which claimed nearly 150,000 lives, or nearly 5 percent of the country’s population.

It is commonly assumed that the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon, ending in 1990, was a conflict only between Christians and Muslims. There is some truth to this, for the main line of battle, especially in the first years of the conflict, divided the politically dominant Christian Maronite community and the mainly Muslim Palestinian resistance movement, which saw Lebanon as a battleground in their war to wrest a homeland from Israel. However, this notion obscures much more complex patterns of belligerence involving many different sectarian groups at odds over the Palestinian cause. Many Lebanese Christians, especially the Greek Orthodox who accounted for about 10 percent of the population during the civil war, tended to be much more sympathetic than the Maronites to the Palestinians. The non-Arab Armenian community, which is wholly Christian, mostly stayed out of the civil war, with notable exceptions of Armenian groups fighting on both sides. The main pro-Palestinian grouping of Lebanese during the civil war was the Lebanese National Movement, an admixture of Arab nationalists, communists in several flavors, and various sectarian militias, notably from the Druze community, which accounted for about 7 percent of the total population. Most of the Shiʿa backed the Palestinian militias, but smaller yet not insignificant numbers joined the Maronite militias. Later in the war, especially in the 1980s, groups with a distinctly Shiʿi sectarian orientation—particularly Amal and Hezbollah—emerged as significant players. As already noted, Amal opposed the Palestinian guerrillas and Hezbollah supported them.

Most Lebanese and others who witnessed the civil war agree that taʾifiyya (sectarianism, or “confessionalism”) became more pronounced after the civil war than during the war. At least four factors may explain this heightened sectarianism, which have been analyzed incisively by the Lebanese sociologist Salim Nasr (S. Nasr 2003).

For one, the outbreak of intercommunal violence at the start of the civil war forced a significant displacement of people that transformed the previous, socially heterogeneous communities into more segmented patterns of living. An unfortunate example is the well-known shopping district in West Beirut, al-Hamra, where Christians and Muslims had lived closely together in adjacent apartments before the civil war, but today the Christian population has shrunk and Hamra is now predominantly Sunni Muslim. Some observers claim that the ambience of the once cosmopolitan Hamra has suffered as a result of this change. A short visit to Hamra will confirm this impression: If you stand, at ten or eleven in the evening, outside a movie theater that was once packed with patrons, today you will see only a handful of movie-goers trickle into the street when the movie ends.

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