On the other hand, the authoritarian, military character that colored governments, both Arab nationalist and reactionary alike, made Beirut the sole free space for political refugees and opponents of different governments, as well as a public arena for conflicts between these regimes, conflicts between them and Israel, and internal conflicts within Israel itself.
With their traditional business acumen, the Lebanese realized that they could benefit enormously from this state of affairs. A black market in all kinds of goods flourished, from books to prostitution, and all of Lebanon became an open marketplace for ideas and commodities. Dozens of newspapers were published, financed by different factions — or rather, political parties and organizations were formed, financed by the different factions.
The average Lebanese citizen assumed the character of a middleman. All he needed was to wear — even if it was borrowed — the most splendid clothes and latest fashions, and use the latest gadgets, in order to succeed in selling the goods he had imported from the West and sought to re-export to Arabs. Members of parliament came to pride themselves on the foreign embassy that backed them. It was common knowledge that anyone who wasn’t being paid by some source was a failure, and unworthy of respect.
As for the Arab forces of reaction and the colonial powers, they began to promote the idea of “prosperity, economic freedom and democracy” as successful Lebanese products. But the glittering façade of Hamra Street could not conceal the country’s different reality. Along with the luxury buildings that went up in downtown Beirut and in the aristocratic neighborhoods was a belt of tin-sheet shacks around the city. And in Akkar, Jabal Amil and the Bekaa (regions where the majority of the inhabitants were Shiites) peasants lived in a disgraceful condition of servitude. Anyone who dared to rebel against the landowning nobility was forbidden from being appointed to the police, and his children were prevented from attending government schools. If he was a tobacco farmer, he was not allowed seeds, and for his harvest, he only received the lowest prices. The state recruited for government service from a group of longstanding Maronite, Sunni and Shiite families that held a monopoly on the country’s affairs and wealth.
In the meantime, the number of Muslims steadily grew, until they came to form the majority of inhabitants. The Maronites — as the British magazine The Economist acknowledged — no longer made up more than 20 percent of all Lebanese. This increase in the number of Muslims was due to none other than the Shiites, who now — according to the same magazine — represented a quarter of the population. The end of the 1960s witnessed the beginning of their ascent under the strong leadership of the ambitious Imam Musa al-Sadr, who succeeded in uniting the Shiite masses around him in the Movement of the Dispossessed, before his disappearance in Libya in 1978.
But the 1960s also ended with the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the powerful champion of the Arab nationalist street in Lebanon, and the bulwark to whom Muslim leaders turned for protection as they demanded a redistribution of power. Everyone looked around, searching for a new champion, and they soon found one in the Palestinian resistance.
The link between the situations in Palestine and Lebanon dates back to the beginning of the British incursion into the region. The same year that the British occupied Egypt (1882), Jewish settlers were building their first settlements on the heights overlooking the Litani River. Later, British communications with Arab leaders would always insist on the “special circumstances” of both the Jews in Palestine and the Maronites in Lebanon.
It was an irony of fate that Lebanon owed its flourishing growth to the Palestinian problem. The vast wealth that the ruling families accumulated arose thanks to the Arab — Israeli struggle, and the defeats and victories equally that befell the Arabs over the course of it.
As a result of the defeat of the Arab armies and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the center of economic activity moved from Palestine to Lebanon, and especially the role as broker which Palestine had previously held in the fields of business, transportation and tourism. Palestinian refugees took part in the development of the service industry, and the “economic miracle” was supported by the Arab boycott of Israel and the Arab consensus to remove Lebanon from the group of states maintaining an armed struggle with Israel which consequently exempted it from armaments expenditures. On the other hand, the Arab victory in October 1973 led to a doubling of oil profits and an influx of capital into Lebanon. The exchange value of the Lebanese lira against the dollar increased to 2.3 from 3.25 at the beginning of 1970.
As far as Israel was concerned, it didn’t hide its ambitions in Lebanon for a moment. In February 1954, Ben Gurion wrote to Moshe Sharett, saying, “It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab Union. Other minorities in Arab countries are all Muslim, with the exception of Egypt’s Copts. But Egypt is the most harmonious and cohesive of all the Arab countries… The creation of a Christian state in Lebanon can be considered a natural course of action with historical roots… Achieving something like that in normal times is next to impossible… but in times of confusion or revolution or civil war, things can take a different turn.’’
On the eve of the Israeli attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister, declared to the correspondent of the French newspaper Le Monde that “a thirsty Israel cannot stand by with its hands tied while watching the waters of the Litani flow uselessly into the sea”.
Faced with that, Lebanese governments took on the role of Israel’s enforcer within Lebanon. Following Israel’s founding, 100,000 Palestinians migrated to Lebanon. The Lebanese government granted citizenship to 40,00 °Christians among them, and imposed on the rest a life fit for dogs in refugee camps ruled by security officers.
A new Palestinian influx occurred following Israel’s seizure of the West Bank up to the Jordan River, as well as the Gaza strip in 1967. Several thousands more settled into the refugee camps in southern Lebanon and in the areas around Beirut.
Lebanese authorities imposed a blockade on the Palestinian camps, and prevented Palestinians from moving from one camp to another, or to the city, except by prior permission. They forbade them from establishing political organizations or communicating with them. They pursued and killed all who tried to slip back into Israel. Similarly, they forbade Palestinian workers from enjoying government benefits. The latter found themselves forced to take onerous, marginal jobs, and at wages lower than what their Lebanese peers earned. As one writer put it, misery, poverty and displacement were smoldering embers in the alleyways of the camps and within the tin-sheet houses.
But the defeat of nationalist Arab leaders in 1967 made it possible for the Palestinians to organize themselves in armed federations. In 1969, when Lebanese authorities attempted to curtail fedayeen operations in southern Lebanon during an Israeli attack on Beirut’s airport, in the course of which thirteen Lebanese civilian planes were destroyed with no interference from the army, the first major clash between the two sides occurred. It ended with the involvement of Gamal Abdel Nasser as mediator and the signing of the secret Cairo Agreement in November of the same year. This gave Palestinians the right to work, live and move freely in Lebanon, to have supervision over the refugee camps, and to establish stationhouses for the armed struggle (the military police) within them.
With this agreement, the clash between the Palestinian resistance and the forces opposed to them was delayed for a time. But it began to escalate again after King Hussein began liquidating Palestinian resistance forces in Jordan in 1970. As a consequence, thousands more Palestinians were displaced to Lebanon, which also became the primary point of access to the occupied territories.