Diners enjoy dinner outside Ray’s restaurant on the waterfront in Batroun in Lebanon on July 27. Nightclubs and restaurants in the Christian party town north of Beirut were busy as patrons paid no attention to the growing violence to the south.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
Lebanon is a land of contrasts, with snow-capped mountains a short drive from sandy beaches. In good times, Sunnis, Shias, Christians and Druze live, and let each other live, as they please.
But as the Shia militia Hezbollah has brought the country to the brink of another major conflict with neighbouring Israel, many Lebanese are once again wondering whether the contrasts are too great for the country to continue in its current form.
Concern about co-existing in a state dominated by the Iranian-backed militia has risen since the outbreak of tit-for-tat fighting across the Lebanon-Israel border 10 months ago. Tensions have spiked after a weekend rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which killed 12 Druze children, and a retaliatory Israeli air strike on the Beirut suburb of Harat Hreik, which killed seven, including a senior Hezbollah commander.
Hezbollah, along with Iran and other Tehran-backed militias, was believed to be planning its own retaliation on Thursday, amid warnings from Israel that could lead to all-out war.
Even without such fears, a 2021 poll conducted by the Princeton University-based Arab Barometer found only 10 per cent of Lebanese were satisfied with the country’s political system, which divides power up among the various religious communities.
The 1990 Taif Agreement that ended the country’s 15-year civil war – fought largely along sectarian lines – stipulates that the president should be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.
That system has collapsed in recent years because of Hezbollah’s rising power. The country has been without a president for the past 21 months because Hezbollah has refused to consider anyone but its chosen candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, a Christian aligned with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Lebanon’s parliament has gathered 12 times to try and elect a president, only to have Hezbollah and its allies walk out each time, denying quorum.
“They want a president who will do whatever they want them to do,” said Camille Dory Chamoun, the leader of the National Liberal Party, a small Christian faction.
Mr. Chamoun, whose grandfather was president in the 1950s – a time when Christians were dominant and Muslims complained about the unequal distribution of power – is a leading proponent of the idea of recreating Lebanon as a federal state, keeping its current borders, but with separate, Switzerland-style cantons for each of the major faith groups, so that each can live by their own laws in their own regions.
“After all that we have endured from Hezbollah, a lot of Lebanese are asking for total separation – which is not viable, in my opinion. We prefer a federal system that will keep Lebanon united but that will give autonomy to every confession to run their lives accordingly,” Mr. Chamoun said in an interview at the NLP’s Beirut headquarters this week.
Lebanon is already a divided country in many ways. On Saturday night – as tensions rose in the south of the country after the tragedy in the Golan Heights – nightclubs and restaurants in the Christian party town of Batroun, north of Beirut, were busy as patrons paid no attention to the growing violence 150 kilometres away.
Mike Mubarak, 32, welcomes guests to his roof top bar Bird Haus in the centre of Batroun, Lebanon.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
“Lebanese, by nature, don’t watch the news too much unless something really dire is happening,” Mike Moubarak, the 32-year-old owner of the Bird Haus rooftop bar, said as he directed a table of 16 tequila shots to a group of new arrivals. He had to shout to be heard over the house music.
After the air strike on Harat Hreik, a predominantly Shia suburb on the southern edge of Beirut, some directed almost as much anger at Lebanon’s other sects as they did at Israel. “What I hate is that some Lebanese people don’t even care that we’re in danger. In Batroun, they don’t know or care,” said Jawad Fneich, a 16-year-old working in a corner store around the corner from the building hit by Tuesday’s air strike.
The fighting in south Lebanon is widening that sectarian divide. Israel has frequently targeted the Hezbollah stronghold of Khiam, and the village of Kfarkela, a Shia village flush against the disputed border. The streets of the latter were deserted and lined with rubble from buildings hit by Israeli fire when The Globe drove through last Friday on a patrol with United Nations peacekeepers.
The road from Khiam to Kfarkela passes through the unscathed Christian town of Qlayaa, where children were that day playing and laughing outside the local St. George’s Church. Life appeared almost normal despite the regular artillery and air strikes on Khiam, six kilometres to the east, and Kfarkela, six kilometres to the south.
“Nobody can say it is safe, but we hope it will stay like this,” said Father Antonious Farah, a 40-year-old priest. He smiled and gave no answer when asked why he thought Israel was firing at the villages around Qlayaa, but not his community.
The fighting that began on Oct. 8, when Hezbollah began launching rockets and drones at Israel in what it says was an act of “solidarity” with Hamas, has killed 388 Hezbollah fighters, according to the group, and more than 100 Lebanese civilians. Israel says 21 soldiers and 25 civilians have been killed on its side of the border.
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Lebanon, which the NLP published last year – just before Hezbollah entered the conflict – reveals how complex dividing Lebanon along religious lines would be.
The areas defined as Christian on the proposed constitution’s map are mostly north of Beirut, but also scattered in the largely Shia south. Similarly, there are predominantly Sunni regions both north and south of the capital, while the eastern Bekaa Valley is a hodgepodge of Shia, Sunni and Druze villages.
Beirut, which saw the worst battles of the civil war, is just as difficult to divide now as it was then. Mr. Chamoun is proposing the capital be split into Paris-style arrondissements, although with different levels of taxation – and thus services – from one area to the next. The plan would almost certainly expand the existing chasm between Lebanon’s rich and poor.
Many Lebanese Christians are worried about the country’s shifting demographics, after millions of Maronites left the country during and since the civil war, while the country’s Shia population has continued to grow. The demographic question is so charged that Lebanon – which has an estimated population of 5.5 million, not including an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 500,000 Palestinians – hasn’t conducted a census since 1932, when Christians made up 53 per cent of the population. The current level is believed to be closer to 30 per cent.
Marwan Hamadeh, a senior political figure in the country’s Druze community, said the idea of breaking Lebanon into cantons didn’t work in 1990 and won’t work now. “If it was feasible, it would have already been achieved at the end of the civil war. At the time, the country was already divided,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Hamadeh, who survived a 2004 assassination attempt that he blames on Hezbollah, said the country needed new leadership to help it break out of its sectarian silos. “It’s very difficult, but we need to elect a president that looks a little bit like the old Lebanon but who creates a new Lebanon.”