With the crushing of the Palestinian upsurge in Jordan in 1970, Lebanon was now the Palestinian fighters’ most important base of operations. More than 400,000 Palestinians lived as refugees in a country of some 3 million people. In 1969 the Lebanese government had been forced to grant the Palestinians and their organizations wide latitude to organize and control the refugee camps. This deepened the revolt of growing numbers of Lebanese against an archaic political and social setup.

The French imperialists, rulers of Lebanon until the end of World War II, had sponsored a political arrangement under which the president and armed forces chief of staff had to be Maronite Christians. The much less powerful post of prime minister went to a Sunni Muslim and the largely symbolic post of speaker of the Chamber of Deputies to a Shiite Muslim. The parliament was divided according to a six-to-five ratio in favor of the Maronite Christians, based on a 1932 census, the last official census taken in Lebanon.

This guaranteed ascendancy to that section of merchants and landlords belonging to the Maronite denomination. They had worked hand in glove first with the French and later with the U.S. imperialists.

This setup largely disenfranchised Muslims, including most of the workers and farmers. By 1975 Muslims made up at least 60 percent of the population.

By formalizing divisions based on religious affiliation, the system blocked the forging of a unified, independent Lebanese nation. There was plenty of leeway for the French government and other imperialist powers to use divide-and-rule tactics.

A 1958 revolt against this system had been contained through U.S. military intervention. The rise of the Palestinian movement helped spur a new uprising. A broad range of opposition groups pressed for revamping the political system and supported the Palestinian struggle. The power of the Maronite-dominated army and rightist militias formed to defend Maronite privileges was increasingly challenged by militias based in the predominantly Muslim communities.

In 1975 the army began to disintegrate as revolts spread among officers and rank-and-file soldiers who supported majority rule. From the start of the conflict, leaders of the Phalange, an ultrarightist paramilitary party based in the Maronite communities, declared that disarming the Palestinians was a top priority.

Fatah, the leading group in the PLO, advocated nonintervention in political disputes in host countries as long as Palestinians were granted freedom of action in fighting for Palestine. However, when the Lebanese rightists destroyed a refugee camp, inhabited mostly by Palestinian Christians, and laid siege to the Tel al-Zaatar camp, home to more than 50,000 people, the PLO, including Fatah, joined forces with the Lebanese nationalists against the rightists. As the coalition of rebel forces gained ground, Syrian troops entered the country in April 1976 to prop up the government and prevent the defeat of the rightists. Syrian President Assad favored modifications in the Lebanese political structure that would strengthen Muslim- and thereby, he hoped, Syrian-influence in Lebanon. He viewed an allied regime in Lebanon as a buffer against Israeli attacks. But Assad opposed the revolutionary upsurge that threatened to topple the regime.

Syrian troops tied down Lebanese nationalist and Palestinian fighters outside Beirut while the rightists and the Lebanese army closed in on Palestinian refugee camps. This culminated in the siege and fall of the Tel al-Zaatar camp and the slaughter of many hundreds of camp residents.

In a news conference before reporters were allowed in to view the carnage, Bashir Gemayel, commander of the Phalange militia, proclaimed, “We are proud of what you are going to see here.” Gemayel was to become the first choice of the Israeli regime and Washington to rule Lebanon six years later.

On Oct. 13, 1976, Syrian troops attempted to deal further blows to the Lebanese nationalist forces and their Palestinian allies with an attack, backed up by the Phalangist militia, on the village of Bhamdoun. Syrian troops were pushed back, however, and the civil war settled into a stalemate.

In the wake of these battles five Arab heads of state met with Yassir Arafat in Saudi Arabia. They authorized Syrian troops, together with a few units from other countries, to police Lebanon under the Lebanese government’s command. But they also reaffirmed the 1969 accords permitting Palestinian forces to operate in Lebanon.
 
 
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6,000 Syrian troops retreat to Lebanon-Syria border
Protests in Lebanon demand full withdrawal; Saudi, Egyptian gov’ts press for pullout  
 
 
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