Haugbolle 143In fact, this discourse resembles the way in which other groups who feel
excluded from power in postwar Lebanon formulate their regret. Most
people involved with the Christian Right feel that they lost the war to
Syria and its supporters. Others, including a member of the Kata’ib’s
female unit al-niz.āmiyyāt [The Female Regulars], maintain that they were
right in defending Lebanon against the Palestinians in 1975, and what
they see as their nationalist sacrifices have not been paid due respect in
postwar Lebanon:
I cannot say that I completely regret having taken part in the
war. And especially in the first two years when we acted in
lieu of the army. ... But I can say that the war didn’t lead to
any results. As for the Palestinians, we [Christians] weren’t
the ones who expelled them. We only wanted to safeguard
Lebanon, but we participated in its destruction. (Pierre, NLP)
I ask myself: had it been possible for those meeting in Ta’if to
decide that Lebanon is the ultimate homeland for all Lebanese,
had it not been for the sacrifices of our [Kata’ib’s] young men?
What hurts me most is when people accuse the young men
of betrayal, because people’s memory, and especially in the
young generation, has blotted out parts of the resistance and
only remembers the fighting in the last two years [the Aoun-
Ja ́ja ́ war]. I long for the day when we will be able to honour
the young martyrs who sacrificed their lives so that we can
live. (Jocelyne, Kata’ib)^53The fall guy
Several observers have argued that the Lebanese Civil War created a new
nationalism out of the experience of suffering “simultaneously, but not
together,” as Samir Franjieh has put it.^54 The fractured public during the
war created an ambiguous foundation for postwar nationalism, where
memories of “imagined fraternity” and bodily experiences of separa-
tion blended, competed and were manipulated by social and political
actors. This article has shown how public memories and interactions in