The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

The ongoing mobilisations across the West supporting Palestine are a tremendous step forward. They are, along with the ongoing resistance of the Palestinian people, a key element in challenging the Zionist state, which is backed to the hilt by the Western powers.

The other key element in challenging Israel is revolt in the Arab states. The Arab Spring of 2011 showed the potential of the Arab working class to take on their reactionary ruling classes and Western backers. This is part of a long history of revolutionary upsurges in the region going back as far as 1919 in Egypt, Iraq in 1958, Yemen in the 1960s and many more since. Often the revolts combined struggle against imperialist rule and the local capitalist class with a challenge to the Israeli state. The uprising that swept Lebanon in the 1970s, which culminated in the civil war that began in 1975, is a classic case that has important lessons for the struggle today.

Amazing as it may seem now, from the 1950s through to the 1970s Lebanon was held up as the capitalist success story of the Middle East. A booming economy based on banking, trade, real estate speculation and tourism had transformed a rural society into a modern capitalist one, in which various religious groups supposedly lived in harmony.

In a 1973 book, Modernisation without Revolution, Lebanese academic Elie Salem said that Lebanon “has developed successful institutions to ensure continuing modernisation with a minimum of social and political strain and without resort to a radical ideology ... the gains ... are the result of stable political institutions and of a formula for government based on conciliation and consensus”.

This was more fairytale than reality. The gains of the boom were monopolised by a tiny minority, and poverty was rife. A 1960 study indicated that 82 percent of families had earnings at or below the poverty level. Beirut, the cosmopolitan city of nightclubs and chic penthouses, was surrounded by the “belt of misery”, a series of shantytowns where hundreds of thousands lived in squalor.

The rich flaunted their money. Beirut sported more luxury cars, grand swimming pools and flashy apartments than almost any place in the world. Reflecting the priorities of the wealthy, jewellery and precious metals accounted for 30 percent of imports.

Yet the very process of capitalist modernisation began to undermine the governing structure and social system. Big business dominated by merchants and bankers favoured a weak government and a no-holds-barred market economy with a bare minimum of spending on health, education and social welfare. Meanwhile, the rural poor, driven off the land into the cities, formed a super-exploited working class. Those who remained on the land were increasingly embittered. Already by the mid-1950s, Lebanese capitalism was straining under the pressure of the contradictions that would crush it.

In the early 1960s there was talk of reform under a new president. This served to hasten the pace of social mobilisation. The eventual blocking of most reforms by capitalist interests magnified the sense of deprivation.

Lebanon had been carved out of Syria by French imperialism to better preserve imperial power. Exploiting the traditional imperial policy of divide and rule, France sought to make its clients, the Maronite Christians, the dominant force. Fifty-five percent of seats in parliament were allocated to Christians and 45 percent to Muslims. The president had to be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of parliament a Shiite. Public service jobs were divided up on sectarian lines. Civil marriage was illegal.

Democracy was a mere charade. You did not vote where you lived, but in the village where you were born. This severely inhibited the development of working-class parties.

The Maronite bourgeoisie was the main beneficiary of this system, but the wealthy from all the sectarian groups went along with it.

Politics operated on the basis of powerful mafia-style political bosses called zaims. No zaim exercised authority to the same degree as the Sunni zaim Rashid Karami. In November 1970, Karami went to Tripoli to lay a wreath on his father’s grave. It had rained that morning. Karami eyed the mud, looked at his expensive European shoes, turned and snapped his fingers. His three bodyguards lay face down in the mud while he walked over their backs to place his floral tribute on his father’s grave.

Sectarianism was consistently used to divide the working class and still remains an incredibly powerful force in Lebanon. But in the lead-up to the civil war, the sectarian system began to be rejected by the mass of people. Support for the Palestinians cut across sectarian lines. A poll in Beirut in 1968 showed that 93 percent of Muslims and 64 percent of Christians strongly supported the Palestinian guerrillas.

After the crushing of the PLO in Jordan in 1971, Lebanon became the centre of the resistance. By 1975 there were about 350,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, mostly living in appalling conditions in refugee camps. Palestinians faced daily discrimination and harassment by the military security apparatus, the Deuxieme Bureau. The government denied Palestinians citizenship and confined them to the lowest paid jobs.

Between 1968 and 1975, Israel committed more than 6,200 acts of aggression against Lebanon. These raids radicalised the predominantly Shiite population of the south and led to the rapid growth of the Lebanese Communist Party, the Organisation of Communist Action and other socialist groups, which organised armed militias to repel Israeli attacks.

Students often act as a radar that responds to the first signals of injustices and contradictions in society. From the late 1960s, there was a tremendous wave of radicalisation and protests amongst university and high school students. Muslim and Christian students organised combined protests.

The Palestinian resistance acted as a magnet for this radicalising layer. The May 1968 revolt in France also had a significant impact, as many young Lebanese studied there. It led to the rise of a new left.

Surveys conducted in 1970 and 1971, before the height of the radicalisation, showed 68 percent of Shiite students agreed with the statement, “What is needed is revolution, not reform”. Sixty percent of Shiite students were for socialism and 21 percent for communism. Even among the Christians, 38 percent of Orthodox, 34 percent of Catholics and 26 percent of Maronites supported socialism.

In response to the growing radicalisation, Maronite capitalists backed the setting up of fascist militias funded by the Saudis and Israel. The largest militia, the Kataeb or Phalange, had been directly inspired by General Franco’s Spanish fascists of the 1930s. The fascists attacked Palestinians, strikers and Christian student protesters.

It was not just Maronite bosses who were worried by the growing radicalism. Wealthy Sunni families saw their interests threatened and tried to head off discontent by fostering sectarian divisions.

Amongst the Shiites, the most deprived community, the left built a strong working-class base. To meet this threat, wealthy Shiites backed the formation of an Islamist movement, known as Amal. Nabih Berri, today the speaker of parliament and a close ally of Hezbollah, is typical of the capitalists who formed Amal. Reflecting the logic of communalist politics, Berri, a diamond trader who made a fortune in Sierra Leone, subsequently went on to launch murderous wars on the Palestinians and the left.

In Lebanon’s greatest demonstration, 250,000—roughly a tenth of the population—marched in protest after the Israelis assassinated three Palestinian leaders in Beirut in 1973. The Lebanese army refused to lift a finger to fight the Israelis but instead tried to crush the resistance.

This led to days of fighting around the refugee camps in which the Palestinians were backed by armed supporters of the Communist parties and radical nationalists. A seemingly endless series of protests, occupations and marches ended in bitter fighting with the security forces.

Typical of the explosive student struggles was a strike and occupation in March 1974 at the American University of Beirut over fees. The strike lasted 41 days, until 500 members of the security forces raided the campus. Armoured cars knocked down the campus gates and arrested 61 students. The students responded by storming off campus and blocking highways with burning tyres and fighting the security forces.

1970-75 was a period of tremendous revolt in rural areas and more strikes than in the 25 years since the departure of the French. To this social agitation, the state had only one answer: army and police violence. There was an armed insurrection by peasants in the desperately poor northern Aakar region in 1970 and again in 1974. Peasant revolts flared in the Bekaa and the south.

Rising militancy among shop stewards and rank and file workers led to the formation of workplace committees to challenge conservative union leaders. During a strike at chocolate and biscuit factories, the security forces fired on workers, killing a man and a woman, wounding five others and arresting more. Popular outrage led 25,000 to protest against police brutality.

In August 1973, a highly successful general strike was called by the main trade union federation, the General Council of Labor, demanding price controls. But the union officials did not follow up the action.

In February 1974, the union federation cancelled another general strike. This outraged workers. Defying federation orders, south Lebanon unions proceeded with the strike, as did workers led by their workers’ committees in one of the main industrial centres of Beirut. In Tripoli, union members sacked the office of the union federation in protest.

Strikes and demonstrations in all parts of the country marked the few months before the outbreak of civil war. Striking tobacco workers, one of the main industries, won wage increases. Even prisoners went on strike. As the tension mounted, all the ingredients were coming into place for a socialist revolution.

It all came to a head in February 1975 with a strike by the fisher people in the ports of Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli. The mayor of Sidon was shot by the army while leading a protest. A follow-up demonstration resulted in armed clashes between soldiers and left-wing Lebanese fighters and radical Palestinian groups.

A popular resistance committee armed the population to defend Sidon and ran it for two weeks. The army commander then ordered the bombardment of Sidon. A wave of anger swept the country. The final straw came on Sunday, 13 April 1975, when right-wing gunmen ambushed a busload of Palestinians in Beirut, killing 27. Barricades immediately went up all over the city.

The next morning the civil war proper began. In some areas, the fighting was a straightforward class conflict as Shiite and Kurdish slum-dwellers, backed by Communists and other radicals, attacked fascist forces in prosperous suburbs.

People were forced to flee their homes. But, while very few Muslims or Palestinians remained in areas controlled by the right, a large number of Christians continued living in areas dominated by the PLO or the left.

Throughout 1975, PLO leader Yasser Arafat largely kept the PLO out of the fighting, which was carried by the Lebanese left and radical nationalists in alliance with radical Palestinian groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). However, Phalangist attacks on refugee camps in East Beirut brought the PLO into the war. This radically shifted the balance of forces in favour of the left, which was further strengthened by mutinies in the Lebanese army.

The deeply unpopular Assad regime in Syria became increasingly worried at the prospect of a left triumph. In June 1976, backed by the US and with the acquiescence of Israel, Syria invaded.

In and of itself the invasion was not enough to crush the revolt, which had deep social roots. It could well have backfired and led to the fall of Assad’s dictatorship, as there was deep opposition to the regime’s support for the fascists. Many fighters Syria sent in went over to the PLO. But in October 1976, the PLO cut a deal with Assad to end its resistance.

The radical possibilities of this great social upheaval were quashed. The vicious, sectarian social order that was Lebanese capitalism was preserved.

Sectarianism became more pronounced. The defeat of the left-wing challenge shattered hopes for change. Growing economic difficulties and immense corruption led to widespread emigration and growing dependence of those who remained on the patronage of sectarian political bosses, who gained power and wealth by dispensing largesse and political favours.

The defeat of the left was not due simply to Syria’s invasion. To understand why the tremendous social explosion of the 1970s did not end in a successful socialist revolution, you need to examine critically the politics of the key radical currents.

The main military force, the PLO, adhered to a nationalist program that sought to win a capitalist Palestinian state. It advocated a combination of guerrilla struggle and alliances with Arab regimes.

The PLO leadership opposed mass social mobilisations because they would challenge not just the Zionist state but also the Arab ruling classes. So while the PLO would defend itself when attacked by the right, it was always looking for a compromise.

To the left of the PLO were the Communists and groups such as the PFLP that called themselves Marxist Leninist. A Communist Party of Lebanon and Syria was founded in Beirut in 1924 by a group of workers and intellectuals inspired by the 1917 Russian workers’ revolution. In July 1925, an uprising against colonial rule swept Syria and Lebanon. The French responded with ruthless repression. Police opened fire on a demonstration organised by the Communists in Beirut, killing 10 and wounding 40.

The CP leadership was arrested and the party broken. In the early 1930s the CP revived and, working underground, built strong support among tobacco workers, electricity workers, dock workers and tram workers. However, in 1932-33 the revolutionary CP leaders were purged. A Moscow-trained leadership was installed to carry out the dictates of Russian foreign policy: the policy of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist regime.

The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted was a workers’ revolution in the Middle East, as that would threaten Russian imperial interests. For Stalin and his heirs, the role of the Arab CPs was to find allies for the Russian state, not to advance workers’ interests.

In the late 1930s, Arab Communists explicitly made their peace with local capitalists. As Syrian CP leader Khalid Bagdash put it: “Our demand is not nor will be to confiscate national capital and the factories. We promise ... the national factory owner that we will not look with hate or envy at his national factory but on the contrary we desire its progress and flourishing”.

Rather than mobilise workers against French rule, the CP was told by Moscow to soft-pedal its opposition to imperialism and establish a popular front of middle-class forces. Then, in 1947, the Communists were told to back the setting up of the state of Israel.

Russian support for Israel had a disastrous impact. In 1947, the combined membership of the Lebanese and Syrian CPs peaked at about 18,000. By 1949, it had collapsed to just a few hundred.

Despite defeat after defeat, the class-collaborationist popular front approach was maintained for decades. A leading Soviet expert on underdeveloped countries wrote in 1960: “At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... the central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is ... ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers”.

But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi declared that the Palestinian movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to strategy laid down by Arab governments.

The approach of the Stalinised CPs was totally contrary to the revolutionary aspirations that had inspired the original Arab Communists to fight for the liberation of the working class. This can be seen by comparing the statement just quoted with what Lenin declared in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois-democracy in colonial and backward countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.

The Communists played a major role during the civil war. They had a following that cut across sectarian lines. Both CPs had Christian leaders yet won a Shiite following. The Organisation of Communist Action, in particular, grew rapidly, gaining strong support amongst Shiites in the south and the suburbs of Beirut.

Communist leaders belonged to the inner decision-making circle of the left and nationalist alliance. They were close to Druze leader Kamil Jumblatt, the central leader of the movement. But their approach was not to push the struggle forward to challenge the foundations of Lebanese capitalism. CP leader Georges Hawi declared: “[T]he reforms we are seeking aim at transforming our sectarian feudalistic system into a secular, democratic, liberal system which would maintain the production relationships of capitalism”.

The Communists did not advance a program of reforms to improve the living standards of their working-class supporters. The left did not organise mass democratic control of the areas it occupied, despite the fact that Communists controlled some of the largest suburbs of Beirut.

This approach was self-defeating. It served to undermine the masses’ sense of ownership over the struggle and weakened their fighting capacity. The left conducted the civil war as a military battle, not a social revolt that could galvanise all the popular masses, including the large numbers of Maronite workers and poor peasants, to fight for their liberation.

The emphasis just on nationalist resistance to the Israelis and their fascist allies opened the left and the Palestinian resistance to isolation. This was most graphically demonstrated during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Islamist Amal was able to mobilise sections of the Shiite population against the Palestinians and the left, who they blamed for the devastation wreaked by Israeli attacks. Amal aped the fascist Phalange with its own massacres of Palestinians.

There are stark lessons from the civil war for the Palestinian struggle and the broader Arab world today. The mass of workers and urban poor have the capacity to overthrow the hold of imperialism, the Zionist state and their local rulers. But to achieve that objective demands the construction of a new revolutionary left that breaks with the nationalist and Stalinist tradition that has so blighted the Arab left and instead set its sights on workers’ self-emancipation.