Lebanon's Christians are facing their most existential threat since 1920. They survived the 1975 war but were defeated. Why? Because they behaved like the very same barbarian enemies they were facing and presented themselves by their actions to the international decision-makers as a bunch of nagging barbarians. What will they do if the present challenges develop into another war? Will they behave as a civilized people and thus gain the sympathy of the world - just as the Ukrainians are doing these days? Or will they again lose the war primarily because they lost it in the media?
When the Lebanese War of 1975 erupted on April 13, 1975, I was one block away from the intersection in Ayn Remmaneh where Kataeb Party leader Pierre Gemayel was targeted for assassination as he participated in the opening celebration of a church. Four people were killed, including Gemayel's bodyguard, but Gemayel himself was not hurt. Later that morning, in the heated atmosphere caused by the assassination attempt, the young men of the area, mostly Kataeb Party members, were on high alert when a bus carrying Palestinian fighters perched on the bus roof with their Kalashnikovs pointing in every direction, decided to go through Ayn Remmaneh as they commuted between the Sabra-Shatila fortified camps to the west and the fortified camps of Jisr El-Pacha and Tal-Zaatar in the east. Either they were unaware of the morning's event, or they deliberately crossed through, no one knows. But as they went by an intersection three blocks west of the church where the earlier assassination attempt took place, they fell to the fire of the neighborhood's Kataeb members and somewhere between 22 and 28 Palestinian militants were killed.
For the previous several years prior to that April 13, we had grown accustomed to seeing Palestinian fighters brazenly driving around with their guns, setting up checkpoints, arresting and kidnapping people including members of the Lebanese police and army, holding them hostages, etc. But it was rare for the Palestinians to actually enter residential areas they knew were potentially hostile to them, as they typically drove along major roads and highways that went around such residential areas.
Who knows why on that fateful Sunday the Palestinians decided to go through the very same area of Ayn Remmaneh where the earlier shooting targeting Pierre Gemayel occurred. They usually went around the area, taking the Damascus Road to Hazmiyeh or the Chiyah-Galerie Semaan road then the Camille Chamoun Boulevard.
With the war slowly ratcheting up in what were known then as "rounds", each round of fighting (1-2 weeks) separated from the next round by a lull of a few weeks, until September 1975 when the old souks (markets) of Beirut and its downtown were ravaged by a fire caused by the fighting.
The object of this post is not to recount the history of the Lebanese War of 1975. But this was the context in which the immediate trigger of the war took place. Of course, tensions were building up since 1967 as a result of several incidents and events in Lebanon and the region. There was the 1968 attack by Israeli jets in Beirut Airport in which 13 airliners of the national Middle East Airlines carrier were destroyed on the tarmac in reprisals for an attack on an Israeli Airliner two days earlier by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant organization. There was the 1970 migration of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters from Amman to Beirut after King Hussein massacred his own Palestinians in September of that year. There was the 1972 assassination of Palestinian leader Ghassan Kanafani by a car bomb in Beirut, in reprisals for the Ben Gurion Airport massacre by the Japanese Read Army organization earlier in May of that year. There was the May 1973 assassination by Israeli commandos of three Palestinian leaders in Beirut, Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Abu-Yousef Al-Najjar. Then the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war in which Israel further defeated the Syrians and the Egyptians. Lebanon stayed out of that war.
This tit-for-tat had nothing to do with Lebanon per se. Lebanon at the time was a thriving prosperous cosmopolitan place. It just happened to host the Palestinian refugees and their militant organizations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also migrated to Beirut. But as expected, it wouldn't be long before the Lebanese themselves got involved in spite of themselves. The Ayn Remmaneh incident above was the climax of several incidents between the Lebanese Armed Forces, Security Forces, and ordinary Lebanese citizens on one hand, and the armed Palestinians on the other. Obviously the Palestinians were very nervous, suspecting anyone and everyone to be an infiltrated Israeli agent. I recall one incident where the Palestinians had set up a checkpoint at night near the Shatila camp. A newly married Lebanese couple were returning from a night out on the Raouche seafront, did not see the checkpoint and drove through it, prompting the Palestinians to shoot them dead.
The Lebanese State was completely overwhelmed by this build-up of tensions, and as it tried to respond diplomatically (the 1969 Cairo Accord, the 1973 Melkart Accord) and militarily (I personally witnessed from the town of Hadath the Lebanese Air Force jets bombing the Sabra-Shatila camps in 1973), the Sunni Muslims saw in this an opportunity to score points by undermining their fellow Christian Lebanese. Boycotts of the government by the Sunnis, demonstrations against the Lebanese Army, forcibly removing the teaching of the "Civic Education" subject matter from high school programs (thus undermining the awareness by young Lebanese of their country's constitution and laws), backing the Palestinians against the Lebanese State, etc.
As the State became paralyzed and unable to restore order and clamp down on the Palestinians like King Hussein of Jordan successfully did (because Jordanians and Palestinians are both Sunni Muslims, the divide had no sectarian dimensions), the Lebanese population, in particular the Christians, slowly began to fill the void left by a handicapped State. The Kataeb Party of the Gemayel family became the leading opponent of Palestinian activities that were jeopardizing the stability and future of the country.
Following the Ayn Remmaneh incidents of April 13, 1975 and as the war became part of people's daily lives, the Kataeb were joined by several other parties and groups with their own militias. The Christian leadership formed the joint Lebanese Front, while the Sunnis grouped around them the Druze, the Shiites, and the Palestinians into the National Movement.
For us, ordinary non-partisan Lebanese, and notwithstanding the fact that the Kataeb were facing off forces we clearly perceived as hostile to us, we gradually saw a deterioration in the Kataeb's conduct of the war. From defenders of the Lebanese cause and of Christian areas, the Kataeb became murderers, rapists, thieves, and gangsters. Neighborhoods were dominated by small groups who went about terrorizing their own people with extortion, hashish dealing, robbing abandoned properties, seizing businesses, etc. all under the justification of defending their people. We were their people, but they were robbing us, terrorizing us, etc. I recall the summer of 1978 which we spent under the constant shelling of the Syrian occupation army. Every morning, there was a lull in the shelling and people came out of their basement shelters to go find bread, check on their properties etc. My father and I would walk out to the abandoned outskirts of our neighborhood in an area under construction and slated to become a highway. There, we'd see the burned out bodies of people killed the night before. We'd later learn that these were people who were stopped at checkpoints, or suspected of communicating with, or spying for, the other side. Most often, these were lies and pretexts to cover up for other crimes, like robbing, raping, etc. I remember the calcined body of a woman with a huge cross shoved into her abdominal area. Our own apartment, which was on the front line and which we had abandoned in 1975, was broken into and robbed. The Kataeb took everything, and those items of furniture they could not carry, they smashed. One time, I went in to inspect the apartment looking for salvageable memorabilia, and saw a Kataeb fighter cutting glass panels with a diamond knife. Down the street from the school where I had finished my high school years, there was a grocery store where we purchased sandwiches and drinks and which was owned by a certain George. I later learned from George's wife in the 1990s, after I had left the country and was back for a visit, that the Kataeb thugs of the area had shot George dead point blank because he refused to pay them protection money.
This type of behavior made the Kataeb very unpopular among the Christians. Other groups were no less criminal in their behavior, with the exception of the Guardians of the Cedars militia who were known for their decency and integrity. But they were a minority. Later all these groups were forcibly united into one militia known as the Lebanese Forces by one Bashir Gemayel.
The Kataeb were essentially an ultra-nationalist Fascist party. They were founded in the 1930s by Pierre Gemayel who adulated Mussolini and the other European Fascist movements and cloned Italian Fascism into his own Kataeb party. The word Kataeb is Arabic for Phalanges, like the militias of Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. The avowed enemy of the Kataeb was the SSNP - The Syrian Socialist National Party - which advocated unifying many countries of the Near East into a Greater Syria, just like Hitler wanted to unify all German-speaking populations into his Third Reich. The SSNP was a clone of Hitler's Nazi Party (For astonishing details of this political cloning, see https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html ).
Today, the Kataeb remains the same party owned and run by the Gemayel family. Who knows how the Kataeb will behave in case of a repeat of the 1975 war. But there are two new players on the stage that are likely to face the dilemma of how to conduct a war without the past criminality and brutality of the Kataeb in the coming years: The Lebanese Forces (LF) which were born out of the coerced unification of the Christian militias by Bashir Gemayel circa 1981 and which were initially dominated by the Kataeb until they emerged as a separate force around 1985; and the Tayyar party (or Free Patriotic Movement, FPM) of Gebran Bassil and Michel Aoun. While the LF have so far shown no propensity for violence, the thugs of the Tayyar are already demonstrating their skills. They attacked a funeral procession in Sin-El-Fil last week because it simply passed by their headquarters with the flag of a rival party draping the coffin. Last night on the MTV television station during a political conversation show, the so-called "Old Guard" militia of Gebran Bassil's Tayyar, dressed like Hezbollah's Black Shirts and armed to the hilt, and with premeditated planning, broke into the television station and assaulted people in the live audience. Perhaps inspired by the Iranian theocracy's virulence and violence, Bassil should change his last name to Basij, the name of the Iranian paramilitary organization operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
The Tayyar is today what the Kataeb was in the 1970s: An up-and-coming Fascist Party that cannot tolerate difference. Michel Aoun is out of office, and with the attrition of all the decent elements from the Tayyar, the bottom of the barrel is what constitutes Zebran Basij's following right now. Just like Pierre Gemayel who founded the Kataeb with good intentions, yet his political heirs turned the party into the scum that was on display during the 1975 war, Michel Aoun founded the Tayyar with good intentions and ideas. But Aoun's political heir, Zebran Basij has now decided to transform the Tayyar into a Fascist militia. Maronites NEVER learn from their own history.
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