Juan Cole for Informed Comment
The Israeli destruction of south Lebanon, with Bint Jbeil having been apparently wiped off the face of the earth, and some of Nabatieh in ruins as Israeli troops besiege it, is only the latest way in which the outside world has shaped this region, as Karim Eid-Sabbagh argued in a fine paper on “A brief history of tobacco, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperial war in south Lebanon.”
People in south Lebanon were predominantly peasants, i.e. small farmers and day laborers, in the nineteenth century. They lived under the rule of the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul, which had taken this region in 1516. They were part of Ottoman Syria.
They originally grew grains for local consumption, but increasingly from 1850 began growing tobacco for the world market (actually mainly for Egyptian cigarette manufacturers). Their ability to practice free enterprise, however, ended in 1883 when the Ottoman state gave a Tobacco concession to a consortium of Austrian, German and French interests. This decree created a marketing monopoly for tobacco, which hurt growers and indigenous merchants, but created a revenue stream for the Ottoman sultan and his government. The ability of locals to get rich off cash-cropping tobacco was thus curtailed, and the region remained poor.
South Lebanon was a crossroads, with north-south trade through it from Beirut down through Ottoman Palestine to El Arish and thence to Egypt, and from Tyre and Sidon along the Mediterranean coast inland to Damascus.
During WW I, people in what is now Lebanon faced a famine, as the Ottoman state requisitioned grain and donkeys for the troops.
After the war, the French seized Ottoman Syria. They faced opposition from the Muslim majority, and thought that local Christians would be more favorable to them. Paris thus carved Lebanon out of Syria, giving it a 51% Christian majority, to which they attached the Shia of the south and the Sunnis of Tripoli and Akkar in the north. Although the French invented political geography and demographics the administrators didn’t seem to stop to think that the Christian majority might not last, as favored Christians became well off and had smaller families or emigrated to the U.S., Brazil, and West Africa.
South Lebanon was predominantly Shi`a Muslim, like Iran and Iraq, and would-be clergymen studied in Najaf in Iraq. Shia resistance fighters attacked French installations in the 1920s, objecting to being hived off from Syria. In 1936 people in Bint Jbeil, who suffered from the Tobacco Monopoly that France had just taken over from the Ottomans, rose up.
France itself was occupied by Germany during WW II, and the Vichy found it difficult to retain Lebanon and Syria in the face of local opposition and British pressure. Lebanon became independent in November 1943, though most wealth and political power was concentrated among Christians and Sunnis in Beirut and points north.
In 1948, the European Jews who had been brought into the Mandate of Palestine by the British engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians, but also grabbed seven Shia villages in southern Lebanon, expelling their inhabitants. The establishment of Israel cut southern Lebanon off from its overland trade to Palestine and Egypt and helped make it a backwater. The Israelis also expelled Palestinians from their homes into Lebanon, where they lived in squalid refugee camps among Shia villages.
Largely Shia southern Lebanon was the poorest part of that country. The population benefited from electrification in the 1960s and the advent of tractors and combines for tobacco farming. However, a lot of share-croppers and day laborers were put out of work by this mechanization. They went to Beirut as construction workers and settled in Dahieh, which became a Shia stronghold. The Western press calls it a “Hezbollah” stronghold but it is mostly civilians.
In 1982 the militant and expansionist Likud government of Israel invaded south Lebanon and occupied 10% of Lebanese territory until the year 2000. They occupiers became hated, and the Shia mobilized against them. Hezbollah was founded for this purpose in 1984. It sniped at, attacked, and bombed Israeli outposts until it finally drove the Israelis from the country.
Shia are likely about a third of the Lebanese population. They are still the poorest group, and the one with the least formal political power, though the armed Hezbollah militia gives them some clout.
Photo of Tyre, Lebanon, by Tim Broadbent on Unsplash
The Israelis created Hezbollah by their brutal occupation. It became a thorn in their side, but also a pretext for further attempts to weaken Lebanese society and annex parts of the country, which they attempted unsuccessfully in 2006.
With sophisticated American weaponry and increasing cyber-capabilities, the present far, far, far right government in Israel has decided to make another attempt to occupy south Lebanon. This time, it seems bent on removing popular resistance by simply razing towns such as Bint Jbeil, and perhaps that is what they have in mind for Nabatieh. Some of the techniques the Netanyahu government pioneered in Gaza, of destruction of building and infrastructure and mass ethnic cleansing, are being applied to south Lebanon.
Iran is attempting to ensure that Netanyahu’s predations in Lebanon cease, as a prerequisite for an armistice or long-term cease-fire with the US at the Strait of Hormuz.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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