power, matching their dominance of the economy. Under the agreement, Lebanon’s
president would be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker
of the parliament a Shiite Muslim. Moreover, Christians would hold a six-to-five
majority in the parliament. Of the three top officers, the president held the most power
because of the position’s authority to appoint the prime minister, select the cabinet in
consultation with the prime minister and legislators, and command the army.
A 1932 census identifying Christians as a slight majority of Lebanon’s population
formed the basis of the National Covenant. To this day, that count stands as the last
census taken in Lebanon. By the time the Lebanese reached agreement on the
covenant, however, Muslims almost certainly had become the majority. The extent of
their majority continued to grow in subsequent decades.
For years Muslims generally tolerated the division of political power although it
put them at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, conflict seemed all but inevitable. The first
significant period of trouble came in 1958, when President Camille Chamoun called
on the United States to help him suppress a revolt that he accused Syria of foment-
ing. On that occasion, the presence of nearly 15,000 U.S. marines brought short-term
stability and allowed the negotiation of a compromise that kept Lebanon relatively
quiet for more than a decade.
Lebanon’s later descent into civil war stems in large part from the presence of
Palestinian guerrillas, who after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war became increasingly
active in and around refugee camps in southern Lebanon that housed some 300,000
Palestinians. Fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and more rad-
ical groups staged repeated raids and launched rockets across the border into Israel,
provoking Israeli strikes against Palestinian leaders and bombings of villages and
refugee camps on Lebanese territory. Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims fled their
homes in southern Lebanon and moved to ever-expanding slums outside Beirut. The
miserable conditions in these areas bred resentment against a government that seemed
indifferent to the plight of Shiite Lebanese, who also felt victimized by Israel and the
Palestinians.
Yet another agreement papered over Lebanon’s latent conflicts for a time. Meet-
ing with Arab leaders in Cairo in 1969, Lebanese and Palestinian officials worked out
an arrangement under which the PLO could continue to operate in southern Lebanon
but would need government permission to strike across the border into Israel. The
Palestinians used the Cairo agreement as broad authority to do what they wanted from
their bases in southern Lebanon.
Battles in April 1975 between Palestinians and the Phalange militia—part of a
group affiliated with the Gemayels, one of Lebanon’s most powerful Christian fami-
lies—sparked a civil war that lasted, with intervals of relative quiet, until 1990. In its
various forms, the war involved all of Lebanon’s ethnic and political factions and
resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 people—an exact number has never been
determined—the dislocation of hundreds of thousands more, and the destruction of
what had been one of the most vibrant economies in the Middle East.
The intervention of outside powers, notably Israel and Syria, became a constant
feature of the war. Israeli raids against Palestinian guerrillas had also helped create the
conditions for the war. In 1978 Israel launched a limited incursion into Lebanon and
in 1982 a full-scale invasion that eventually devolved into a long-term occupation of
southern Lebanon. Syria’s intervention proved to be even more long-lasting and per-
328 LEBANON AND SYRIA