On Saturday, I noted in parentheses that one of the primary causes for Lebanon's civil erosion was the migration of terrorists and gangs following Yasser Arafat's 1970 expulsion from Jordan. Today on National Review, Mordechai Nisan explains:
Lebanese nationalism is tested by loyalty to the special national ethos, and pride in the Lebanese heritage is not limited to the Christians alone. Rafiq Hariri, the Sunni Muslim, demonstrated far more dedication to his country in the face of Syrian occupation than the Damascus-appointed Maronite president Emile Lahoud. No one group has a monopoly on patriotism because personal choice rather than religious affiliation is the benchmark for the love of homeland in Lebanon.The war in Lebanon that erupted in 1975 was not at its core a civil war at all. It was triggered by a sweeping Palestinian armed assault on Lebanese sovereignty, beginning in the late 1960s. PLO factions, spreading through southern Lebanon and coastal cities and into the mountain, were becoming masters of the land. The beginning of the war in Beirut in April 1975 was primarily a Lebanese-Palestinian conflagration, which in 1976 further deteriorated and exacerbated into a Syrian-Lebanese war. Assad's Baathist regime in Damascus moved to fulfill its vision of "Greater Syria" and swallowed up Lebanon in stages, until a full occupation regime solidified under the Taif Accord of 1989 and the military conquest of Baabda, the presidential palace, and all of Beirut in 1990.
"Individual-state patriotism," says Nisan, "deals a blow to the myth of pan-Arab nationalism," something to which yesterday's Beirut protesters, holding crosses and the Koran, could attest. Freeman nationalism makes one from many.