300 • 17 ISRAEL'S REBIRTH AND THE RISE OF ARAB NATIONALISMRepublic of Syria had grown embittered during a generation of unwanted
French rule. After French troops had subdued Faysal's Arab army in 1920,
they had taken control of all the areas mandated to France under the San
Remo agreements. The French mandate administration tried to foster eco¬
nomic development but did its best to stifle Arab nationalism in the land of
its birth. Syria was not prepared for self-rule as Wilson's mandate scheme
had envisaged; it was not even offered a constitution until 1936, and then
the French National Assembly rejected it. In the 1920s the French had frag¬
mented Syria to keep its people from combining against the mandatory
government. Most of the French divisions proved unworkable and had to
be shelved, but two became permanent. One was the separation in 1938 of
the region around Alexandretta and its formal annexation by Turkey in the
following year. The other was the creation of Lebanon as a separate state,
about which we must digress at length.
The mainly Christian area around Mount Lebanon enjoyed local auton¬
omy from 1861 to 1914 within the Ottoman Empire, an arrangement that
had been guaranteed by the European powers (especially France) following
a massacre of many Christians in 1860. Most of Mount Lebanon's Chris¬
tians were Maronites, in communion with the Roman Catholic church.
They traded with France and sent their children to French mission schools.
Unlike most of Syria's inhabitants, they welcomed the French occupation
after World War I. Hoping to buttress the Maronites' power over other reli¬
gious groups, France created an enlarged Lebanon by adding the coastal
towns of Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon to the historic Mount Lebanon. The re¬
sulting entity, slightly more than half Christian, proved stable (meaning
pro-French) enough to be given a constitution and some local autonomy in
- French control of Lebanon lasted until 1943, while its large landown¬
ing families evolved into an elite class of merchants and bankers. Their gov¬
ernment was "democratic" in the sense that its legislators were popularly
elected, but we would call it a constitutional oligarchy, for the wealth and
power were concentrated within the leading families.
Lebanon's system also preserved religious divisions by allocating to each
sect a fixed share of the parliamentary seats and administrative posts. The
apportionment was based on a census taken by the French in 1932. But no
census has been taken since then, as the Maronites and several other sects
fear that any head count would show their relative decline. The influx in
1948 of some 150,000 Palestinian refugees complicated the arrangement.
Lebanon quickly absorbed those who were Christian, but the Muslim ma¬
jority was denied citizenship and confined in large refugee camps. Had
any census been taken that included the Palestinians and left out those