A History of Lebanon

The formula was written down in 1943, as Lebanon slipped free of French control. Its leaders struck an unwritten understanding known as the National Pact, a bargain between the Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim elites. The Christians agreed to stop looking to France and the West for protection; the Muslims agreed to stop seeking union with Syria or a wider Arab state. In exchange, the top jobs were locked in: a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shia speaker of parliament, and a legislature seated six Christians to every five Muslims.

That six-to-five ratio was the heart of it, and its weakness. It rested on a 1932 census — the last one Lebanon ever dared to hold — that gave Christians a slim majority. Hirst underlines the trap. Demographics do not stand still. Muslim communities, and the Shia in particular, grew faster over the following decades, while Christian emigration thinned the other side. Within a generation the numbers no longer matched the arrangement, but the arrangement could not be changed without someone giving up power they had been promised.

The war began in April 1975, when gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Palestinians through a Christian district of Beirut, killing more than two dozen people. Hirst treats the incident less as a cause than as a detonator. The pressures had been building for years; what followed was the collapse of the whole confessional edifice into open fighting. Militias formed along sectarian lines, the army fractured, and the capital split down a demarcation line that became known as the Green Line, cutting Christian east Beirut from the Muslim west.

What makes Hirst's account distinctive is his refusal to keep the war Lebanese. Within a year, Syria had sent its army in — first, remarkably, on the side of the Christians it would later fight, then settling into an occupation that would last nearly three decades. Israel intervened repeatedly against the Palestinian presence, culminating in a full invasion in 1982 that drove all the way to Beirut and besieged the city. Every outside power that had an interest in the region found a Lebanese faction to arm, fund or use, until the country's internal quarrel became a stage for other people's confrontations.

Step back from the timeline and Hirst's larger argument comes into focus. Lebanon's tragedy, in his telling, is not that it was too divided to govern itself, but that its divisions made it uniquely easy for others to govern from outside. A country whose power is parcelled out among communities is a country with a door held open to any neighbor willing to sponsor one of them. The confessional system did not merely fail to prevent foreign interference; it practically invited it, by ensuring that there was always a faction whose grievance a foreign power could exploit.

This is why Hirst keeps returning to the neighbors. Syria treated Lebanon for decades as an extension of its own security, occupying it after the war and shaping its politics until popular protest and the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri finally forced its troops out. Israel occupied a strip of the south for years and shaped Lebanese affairs through its interventions. Iran built Hezbollah into a force more capable than the Lebanese army itself. Saudi Arabia, France and the United States all kept their own channels open. Lebanon's sovereignty was, in practice, always shared with people who did not live there.

Return to Gouraud in Beirut in 1920, drawing borders around communities that had not asked to share a country. Everything that followed was contained in that first act: a state defined by the balance among its parts rather than by anything that bound them together. The confessional formula gave Lebanon a way to exist without agreeing on what it was, and for a while that was enough to build a glittering, improbable capital. It was never enough to build a nation that could stand on its own.