civil war in Lebanon by G. VERGEAT sonnel cut off from all these international economic operations has been created, representing a technical capital needed for the development of the Arab economies based on oil as well as for the penetration of the investment of imperialist capital in the Arab East. Totally concentrated around Beirut, this activity, oriented toward outside the country, has drawn more than half the population of the country into the capital city through the jobs that have been created and through the financial by-products it generates. A small and medium-sized trading sector has developed in Beirut linked to the enormous growth in services in all branches. Under the domination of the Maronite Christian bourgeoisie, this activity has reflected itself within the Framework of institutional confessionalism in a policy of religious discrimination in the private and public schools, in the state administration, and on the job market, a discrimination that tends to penalize the Muslim population. Secondary and university education in French and English by institutions owned by French and American religious or secular organizations reflects the total integration, both economic and cultural, of the Maronite bourgeoisie into imperialism. Development of the present situation The most cherished desire of this ruling class was to maintain this state of affairs as long as possible. The Muslim wing of the Lebanese bourgeoisie shares this
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LEBANON desire with its Maronite colleagues. This attitude implies keeping Lebanon out of the social and political convulsions of the Arab East, out of the wars of aggression waged by Israel against the Arab states. This meant preventing the Arabization of Lebanon and maintaining an underhanded policy of de facto recognition of the Zionist state. Above all, Arab nationalism in reaction to Zionist aggression could not be allowed to gain a foothold in Lebanon. But that is just what happened. The consequences of the Zionist enterprise in the Arab East have been manifested in the country in several ways. The settlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees after 1948 in camps around the suburbs of Beirut, Tripoli, and Saida, people with no jobs or hopes of finding jobs in such an underdeveloped country, created the conditions that led to the crisis now ravaging the country. Little by little, this explosive historical factor came forward as such with the rising mobilization of the Palestinian masses against Zionism throughout the Arab East. With the organization and arming of the Palesfinians outside any real control by the Arab regimes, an independent political and social force emerged in Lebanon, the functioning of which meant that sooner or later there would be a confrontation with the Maronite bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie, paralyzed by galloping laxity and total corruption, with it structures undermined by clique struggles for power, was incapable of reacting on the level of a central Lebanese state. It was difficult if not impossible for the Muslim wing of the confessional system, both the bourgeoisie and the masses, to rest passively in the event of a real attack against the Palestinians: The Lebanese and Palestinian masses are united by the same Arab nationality, and sensitivity to the question of Zionism runs deep among the Lebanese masses. Since 1969 there had been intermittent local armed conflicts when the Maronite bourgeois militias attacked Palestinians, clashes that exactly prefigured the current internal developments. These repeated clashes moved the country further and further toward the limits of generalized civil war. Who had an interest in this war to liquidate the Palestinian resistance? The same forces that were threatened by the spread of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into Lebanese territory, which inevitably led to a linkup between the Lebanese and Palestinian masses. The Muslim bourgeoisie of Lebanon, like its Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian counterparts, wants peacé with Israel but has no means with which to force the Palestinians to submit. Hence it is stuck with the confessional system and solidarizes with the Maronite bourgeoisie out of necessity. For ifs part, the Maronite bourgeoisie has been divided into diverse political currents because of the civil war. The militarily dominant current, the Phalangists (Kataeb in Arabic) of Pierre Gemayel, represent a genuine private army armed hand and foot by American imperialism. The strengthening of the Phalangists represented the initial response of the Maronite bourgeoisie outside the structures of the Lebanese state to the threat it perceived 8 to its socioeconomic order. Driving lance of anti-Palestinian, proimperialist, and pro-Zionist reaction, trained by white mercenaries with combat experience in Africa, the Phalangish recruit mainly among the lower layers of the Maronite bourgeoisie. These layers, whose possessions are directly vulnerable to the exploited and disinherited Arab masses, whether Palestinian or Lebanese, carry on economic activity that is directly oriented toward the internal market and has been affected by the increasing precariousness of the situation during the past several years. The upper financial bourgeoisie involved mainly in international transactions is not as directly affected by the internal conditions in Lebanon. Outbreak of the conflict For the internal conflict to escalate into a process of civil war, however, more was necessary than the permanent conditions of contradiction. The choice of the moment and the pretext had to serve the common interests of imperialism and its allies both in the region in general and in Lebanon in particular. It was the Sinai disengagement accord worked out by Kissinger that gave the signal for the outbreak of hostilities. A Phalangist ambush of a bus carrying Palestinian fighters of the Rejection Front furnished the immediate cause for the explosion. The Phalangists took the initiative, placing the entire Maronite and Muslim bourgeoisie before o fait accompli. The bourgeoisie had no consistent plan
for holding back the Palestinians and muzzling the increasingly combative Lebanese masses. Behind these clashes, the internationalization of the conflict was quite obvious. Through the medium of the Lebanese, this conflict opposes Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on the one hand to American imperialism and Israel on the other. It is around these two axes that the camps have formed on the battleField. The stakes of the combat are the conditions of a general "peaceful settlement" in the region: On the oneside, Israel wants to maximally reduce the Fighting capacity of the Palestinians before any possible final agreement with the Arab states is reached; the United States, Lebanon, and Arab regimes like those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan share this desire. On the other side, fearing that a separate peace between Israel and Egypt would isolate them in face of the United States and Israel, the Boothist leaders in Syria, while also seeking a general peace agreement in the region (although on different terms), want at all costs to prevent the conclusion of the separate peace already set in motion by the Sinai disengagement accord; directly linked to those Palestinian forces that can be utilized as means of exerting pressure, the Syrians want to integrate the Palestinians, especially Fateh and the PLO, into a general settlement. This position tallies with the positions of French imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy, who have diplomatically recognized the PLO and favor a solution that entails the creation of a Palestinian rump state. Thus, the two camps in the Lebanese conflict indirectly represent Syria on the one hand and Israel on the other. A direct American intervention in Lebanon as in 1958 or an Israeli invasion would threaten to provoke a rising of the Arab masses in the region, which would challenge the bourgeois regimes in each country, thus wreeking the chances for an imperialist peace. The immediate objective of the Phalangists was to force the Lebanese army to intervene against the Palestinians, to reproduce in Lebanon the Black September that occurred in Jordan in 1970. But the Lebanese army was neutralized by the popular upsurge and by the combativity of the masses. What occurred instead was the fusion in struggle of the Lebanese and Palestinian Arab masses. The first manifestation of this rank-and-file armed linkup occurred last spring in Saida in reaction to an attempt by Beirut high finance to forcibly take over the local coastal fisheries. (The prime mover of this operation, Camille Chamoun, present minister of the interior, was the man who demanded the sending of American troops in 1958, when he was president of the republic.) In face of these threats of being deprived of their means of making a living, the fishermen, the local population, and the Palestinians launched a real insurrection. These events were revealing to both the Maronite right and the masses themselves, who became more conscious of their own power. If was a warning that was duly noted by the Phalangists.
The first objective of the Phalangists was not attained; the conflict then settled into successive rounds involving ever broader sectors of the masses. The linkup between the Palestinian detachments and the Lebanese masses, led by their armed political organizations, prevented the conflict from being reduced to one between Phalangists and Palestiniars, which could have permitted the intervention of the army. The use of the army, the rank and file of which is Muslim while the officers are Maronite, could have provoked the total breakup of the unity of the armed forces. Kept apart from the fighting, the army would remain the only significant guarantor that the interests of the bourgeoisie would be maintained. The country's slide into civil war occurred most violently during the summer. The involvement of broader and broader sectors of the masses in the fighting was an illustration of the predominance of confessionalism. This confessionalism was also the direct cause of the atrocities that were committed by the two camps, which demonstrates the political backwardness of the broad masses. Democratic, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist slogans were raised by those sectors influenced by the Lebanese revolutionary organizations. At the beginning of the fighting, the clashes were limited to the armed detachments of both camps. What followed from this was an exclusion of the masses, because of their lack of political and military preparation to deal with the situation in an overall manner. But the course of events compelled the organized mobilization and arming of the masses. Only then a tum began to occur, a turn that the gave the armed conflicts a dimension of civil war in which the center of gravity of the crisis was no longer a conflict between Phalangists and Palestinians, but a conflict between the Arab masses and imperialist reaction. The masses began to struggle for themselves, independently of the bourgeois political apparatuses. Thus, the risk became very great, first for the Maronite bourgeoisie and then for the Muslim bourgeoisie. The sifuation got further and further out of their control, wrecking any attempt to apply the combined plan of the Phalangists, Israel, and American imperialism. It was during the summer that the tendency toward the mass politicization of the conflict asserted itself more strongly, going beyond the original framework of the hostilities and going beyond the policy insisted on by Syria and the PLO. This process manifested itself in the popular neighborhoods that were most affected by the economic consequences of the civil war. Wages were no longer paid, work stopped, food supplies were no longer assured by the usual means (the markets disappeared because of the spread of the fighting). The masses were thus compelled to initiate a process of elementary self-organization in order to obtain and distribute means of subsistence. In many cases, the inclinations of the inhabitants of the neighborhoods and the intervention of the mili-
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LEBANON tants of the far-left organizations resulted in the formafion of popular committees to take charge of these tasks. Concurrently, self-defense teams assured the security of the neighborhoods in which the self-organization of the masses was developing. The truce of the beginning of November intervened when a new stage of the development of the self-organization of the masses was taking shape in certain neighborhoods because of the intervention of the revolutionory organizations, notably the neighborhoods of Shiyah and Nabaa. The objective of these localized but exemplary experiments in self-organization was to form neighborhood councils composed of elected delegates that would go beyond the limits of the independent organization of daily economic life on the scale of the neighborhood in order to pose the problem of an organization of councils in all the neighborhoods linked together and dealing with central political problems. Leaflets distributed by revolutionary Marxists asserted: "We are struggling against Gemayel and Chamoun, but not for Salem and Karameh," thus rejecting the bourgeois solufions of the two central leaders of the Muslim bourgeoisie. These leaflets called for "a workers and peasants government." The slogan of a government of national union was raised by the bourgeois and left reformists, the Progressive Front of Kamal Joumblatt and the Lebanese Communist party. The limited strength of the revolutionary currents and the continued grip of confessionalism over the masses are two elements that make the revolutionary transformation of the civil war difficult or impossible. Moreover, the fighting forces are divided into a multitude of organizations claiming allegiance to Nasserite naSyria (Saiga), all reflecting divergent and contradictory political programs. The bourgeoisie's perspective The Lebanese bourgeoisie and the reformist currents are still in position to control the situation and define solutions. Within the Maronite camp, there are two opposed currents. The current led by the petty and middle bourgeoisie and the lower ranks of the clergy favors a partition of the country, in opposition to the upper bourgeoisie and the high clergy, who call for the maintenance of the present Lebanese entity. These positions are dictated by the respective economic positions of the two currents. The first is limited to the internal market and has nothing to lose from partition; in fact, it could make gains from tourism, relations with Israel, and the offshoots of the direct or indirect military presence of imperialism. For the upper bourgeoisie, the disappearance of Lebanon would mean the destruction of the territorial base from which it carries on its lucrative enterprises, thanks to the semi-Arab and semi-Western character of the Lebanese state. 10
While the upper Maronite bourgeoisie's riches have been little affected by the fighting, the petty and middie bourgeoisie have often been hard hit; shops, restaurants, hotels, buildings, apartments, factories, etc. have been destroyed in great numbers. The rich bourgeoisie have their private armies and capital to protect themselves and their families. The maintenance of Lebanon as an entity implies the complete reform of the structure of the state and therefore the abandonment of confessionalism. Already the religious chiefs of various. Muslim currents have demanded the elimination of confessionalism as a political system. If the constitution is amended, the electoral law changed, and the census retaken — measures that are necessary if confessionalism is to be abolished - the Maronite community would certainly find itself in a minority and would be under the pressure of the hard-liners, who could once again seize some pretext to relaunch a batthe for partition. There has already been some shifting of the Christian population in the Akkar, leading to partial exoduses. The whole business is very delicate. A regroupment is also occurring between the two wings (Muslim and Christion) of the bourgeoisie, the objective being the establishment of a strong authoritarion state that would be rid of the private armies of Gemayel and Chamoun and company, a state capable of controlling the Palestinians and the Lebanese masses while respecting the local cliques. The Karameh-Raymond Edd& axis is the embodiment of this orientation, Karameh representing the Muslim bourgeoisie, Eddé the Maronite bourgeoisie. An important network of support for this solution is now taking shape, assembling the international forces whose political and economic interests converge in this direction. French Imperialism sees this as an alterative to the pro-American clan of Chamoun and Suleiman Franjich and as a new means of boosting its presence in the region in line with the policy developed under Gaullism. The high Maronite clergy, tied body and soul to colonial Christian France, supports this perspective. Moscow has received Eddé on several occasions and has advacated solutions close to those advanced by French imperialism, particularly the recognition of the PLO and a material solution to the Palestinian problem: o Palestinian rump state. Syria also regards this operation with favor. There are two levels to the bourgeois solution to the crisis: First, an agreement between Syria and Israel, negotiated through Kissinger and involving the PLO, which would have the effect of decreasing tensions in Lebanon, thus permitting a restabilized regime to turn against the masses; second, a reform of the structure of the country ensuring the end of civil war. If this operation does not come to pass, a new outbreak of hostilities must be expected; this would also imply a move toward partition, a solution that in one form or another would ease the Muslim masses toward the control of the Syrian state, this posing the development of the Arab revolution in a new context.