Haugbolle 133war and Syria’s grip on postwar Lebanon. For a long time any attempt
to come to terms with the radicalism of the past was preceded by the
necessity of continuing the struggle for independence. This widespread
sense of loss in the Christian community, termed al-ih.bāt. al-Masῑh.ῑ [the
Christian disenchantment], produced nostalgia for the time before the
civil war and for the war itself, which in turn isolated the position of the
Christian Right, both on a popular and a political level, and made it even
more unreceptive to critique.^39
e political fragmentation of the Christian community hardened Th
communitarian defensiveness but also gave birth to a certain row over the
Christian past. In 2000, the sociologist Nasri Salhab in his book al-Mas’ala
al-Maruniyya [The Maronite Question] subtitled al-Asbab al-Tarikhiyya
li-l-Ihbat al-Maruni [The Historical Roots of the Maronite Frustration]
called for the Maronites to face up to their past mistakes. If the Maronites
took a critical look at themselves, Salhab wrote, they would see that their
“war of liberation” ended in suppression, and that they lost the moral
guidance of Christianity and closed themselves off in a defensive and
degenerate sectarianism.^40
ther attempts to dismantle the ideology of the Christian Right O
have come from outside the Christian community, and even from out-
side Lebanon. In 2004, French journalist Alain Ménargues published Les
Secrets de la Guerre du Liban which portrays the Christian Right from
Bashir Jumayil’s ascent to Sabra and Shatila, based on interviews with key
actors in the war.^41 The book became a bestseller in Lebanon. The por-
trait is anything but flattering and includes details of the leadership’s close
connections to the Israeli government. Of course, the Christian Right
was not alone in committing massacres and getting caught up in sectar-
ian exclusiveness. But in the context of the ongoing conflict with Israel
and widespread sympathy for the Palestinian Intifada, their cooperation
with Israel constitutes something akin to a cardinal sin. The climax of this
cooperation and the “main file” against the Christian Right remains the
Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, in which Christian mili-
tiaman killed more than two thousand Palestinian civilians in revenge
of Bashir Jumayil’s death days earlier. The massacre caused an interna-
tional uproar and forced then-Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon to
step down. In the postwar period, Sabra and Shatila, more so than other