A Country Divided

Lebanon achieved independence from France in 1943 with a political system unlike anything else in the world. The National Pact — an unwritten agreement between Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim leaders — distributed power according to the 1932 census, which showed Christians as a slim majority. The President would always be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim, and parliamentary seats divided 6:5 in favor of Christians. It was a recipe for governance by negotiation, for perpetual coalition-building across sectarian lines, for a country in which identity and politics were permanently fused. The system worked imperfectly — producing regular crises, a brief civil war in 1958, and persistent resentment among communities that felt underrepresented — but it worked well enough to make Beirut into the 'Paris of the Middle East,' a cosmopolitan banking, publishing, and tourism hub that attracted visitors from across the Arab world.

The Palestinian influx fundamentally destabilized this delicate balance. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, approximately 100,000 Palestinian refugees entered Lebanon. Following Jordan's Black September 1970 crackdown that expelled Palestinian fighters, the Palestine Liberation Organization moved its headquarters to Beirut and established a de facto state within a state across the Palestinian refugee camps, which by the early 1970s housed more than 300,000 people. The Cairo Agreement of 1969 had granted the PLO extraordinary autonomy — the right to carry weapons, administer the camps, and conduct operations against Israel from Lebanese soil. Lebanese Christians saw this as an existential threat: an armed foreign force with its own command structure, its own laws, and its own agenda that was drawing Israeli reprisals onto Lebanese villages. Lebanese Muslims and leftists, including Kamal Jumblatt's Lebanese National Movement, saw the PLO as natural allies in a shared struggle against Zionism and Lebanese confessional inequality.

The stage for catastrophe was set by multiple simultaneous crises in the early 1970s. Israel's Operation Spring of Youth in April 1973 sent commandos into Beirut to assassinate PLO leaders, demonstrating that the PLO's presence made Lebanon a battlefield for the Arab-Israeli conflict regardless of Lebanese preferences. The Lebanese Army's weakness — unable to confront either Israel or the PLO — exposed the hollowness of Lebanese state authority. Inflation, inequality, and political frustration radicalized young men from every community. The Phalange militia trained and expanded under Bashir Gemayel's aggressive leadership. Palestinian fedayeen conducted increasingly brazen operations across the country. By April 1975, Lebanese society was a collection of armed factions waiting for a spark.

The spark came on April 13, 1975, when Pierre Gemayel attended the consecration of a church in the Beirut suburb of Ain el-Rummaneh. A shooting erupted that wounded several Phalangists, including possibly Gemayel himself. Hours later, Phalangist gunmen stopped a bus carrying Palestinian workers and Lebanese passengers through the neighborhood and opened fire, killing 27 people. By nightfall, retaliatory killings had spread across Beirut. The Lebanese Civil War had begun.