The Arab Countries • 301Christians who had moved to Europe or the Americas, it could have been
proven that most Lebanese after 1948 were Muslim. Instead, the system of
proportional representation by religious sects continued to reflect Leba¬
non's situation under the French mandate. By unwritten agreement, the
president was always a Maronite Christian and the prime minister a Sunni
Muslim; the other high posts went to the various smaller sects. The leaders
also agreed to cooperate, in spite of their religious differences, to preserve
Lebanon's independence and territorial integrity. This national pact (as it
is always called) meant that the Christians would not try to keep Lebanon
tied to France or to recreate an autonomous Mount Lebanon under their
own control, whereas the Muslims would not seek to reunite the country
with Syria or any hypothetical pan-Arab state.
This understanding, to which all Christian and Muslim leaders sub¬
scribed in 1943, guided Lebanon through a coup d'état in 1952 and a civil
war in 1958, up to the catastrophic breakdown of 1975-1991. Lebanon
seemed to thrive under the system, but a few families retained most of its
wealth and power. The government and army were too weak to protect the
country or even to preserve order, and Beirut's free press became an arena
for competing liberal, pan-Arab, and socialist ideologies. The influx of
Palestinians, whom the Christian elite refused to assimilate, would under¬
mine the system.
Our digression on Lebanon may help show how Israel's creation affected
Syria. The Syrians resented not only the amputation of Alexandretta and
the creation of Lebanon during the French mandate era but also the West¬
ern powers' earlier decision to separate Palestine and Transjordan. Why not
reunite what the West had divided? By the late 1940s, the British and French
had given up their mandates; surely, therefore, what had been Faysal's Arab
kingdom in 1918 could now become a republic of Greater Syria. But there
were two flies in the ointment. One was the creation of Israel, which the
Syrians saw as an imperialist plot to keep the area divided and under West¬
ern control. The other was Abdallah and his family. Indeed, there was a
group of Syrians, the People's Party, who wanted Arab unity restored, un¬
der Hashimite rule, in the form of an organic union of all Fertile Crescent
states, including Iraq. But the Syrians in power from 1945, that is, the Na¬
tionalist Party, wanted to keep the Hashimites from ruling Syria. They, too,
desired Arab unity, but under the aegis of the Arab League, and they fa¬
vored closer ties with Egypt and Saudi Arabia than with Iraq and Jordan.
Accordingly, Syria fought against Israel in 1948 in alliance with Egypt and
in competition with Jordan's Arab Legion. The poor showing of Syria's
troops led to scandals in Damascus. The discredited civilian government