Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  The 1943 National Pact, then, materialized in the context of dual fears harbored by both Christians and Muslims. On the one hand, Christians feared losing control to the demographic reality of a Muslim majority and a union with Syria; on the other hand, Muslims feared the close relationship between Maronite Christians and imperial governments, in particular France. After several rounds of negotiations between Maronites and Muslims—mostly Sunnis, as the Shi’a still had very little power—the National Pact stated that the government’s top posts would be distributed along religious lines and the Lebanese parliament would be comprised of Christians and Muslims in a ratio of 6:5. This governmental design, also called a confessional system, was meant to be a short-term solution that would eventually evolve into something more democratic. Instead, the confessional system only exacerbated already heightened tensions and provided the structural factors that would lead to the Lebanese Civil War.

  The growing discontent coincided with shifting demographics. The 1932 census stated that Christians outnumbered Muslims, but it had become obvious since then that the demographic makeup of Lebanon had been moving in the opposite direction. In the years following the establishment of the State of Israel, Lebanon also became home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, who, while living as refugees, were mostly Muslim.

  Tensions in Lebanon increased dramatically following a 1970 crisis in Jordan in which King Hussein nearly lost control of his country to a Palestinian insurrection. After successfully restoring order using the Jordanian Air Force and the threat of American intervention, King Hussein expelled thousands of Palestinians from Jordan. Many of these Palestinians were relocated to Lebanon, where they joined the growing community of Palestinian refugees from previous Arab-Israeli wars. Many of these newcomers had taken part in the fighting against King Hussein and found a logical union with the recently created Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then based in southern Lebanon.

  Prior to 1975, tensions in Lebanon were high, but most of the violence consisted of isolated incidents between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, and a handful of clashes between the Lebanese army and the Palestian Liberation Organization in 1969 and 1973. Everything changed on April 13, 1975, when a group of Palestinian gunmen, in an attempt to assassinate Christian leader Pierre Gemayel, killed four members of the right-wing Christian Phalangist Party, including the son of prominent Phalangi leader Joseph Saadi. Responding immediately, vengeful Phalangists attacked a bus in the Beirut suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh, killing twenty-seven Palestinian passengers. A cycle of reprisals and counterattacks began and lasted until 1976. In one such set of reprisal killings, known as Black Saturday, Christian Phalangists erected roadblocks around Beirut and slit the throats of anyone carrying a Muslim identity card. Muslim parties followed with their own set of attacks, and by the end of the day three hundred Christians and Muslims were dead. These incidents were no longer isolated; instead, they were the links in a chain of events that would lead to civil war.

  One month later, Christian Phalangists seized the Palestinian camps of Qarantina and Tell al-Zaatar, massacring Palestinians inside. Palestinians from Syria now came to Lebanon to aid in the struggle. Joining together with the predominantly Druze Lebanese National Movement and its leader, Kamal Jumblat, they raided the town of Damour just south of Beirut and cleansed it of Christians. This Palestinian-Druze Union successfully pushed the Maronite Christians back to East Beirut and Mount Lebanon and led to the division of the city between the Christian East and the Muslim West along what became known as the green line.

  In 1976, a concerned Syrian president Hafez al-Assad worried that the engagement of Syrian Palestinians in the Lebanese conflict might actually compromise his authority over his own population. Al-Assad, conscious of his status as one of the dominant leaders in the region, did not want to see Lebanon fall to Palestinian control. While he had supported the PLO activities since the late 1960s, the fast growth of the organization precipitated fears in Syria that the Palestinians could threaten the status quo. As a result, he sought to mediate an end to the conflict by proposing an adjustment to the National Pact that would shift the ratio of Christians to Muslims in parliament from 6:5 to 1:1. These efforts were fruitless, as Druze Kamal Jumblat and his influential Lebanese National Movement pushed for a complete eradication of the confessional system, from which the Druze were largely excluded.

  With talks breaking down, the fighting persisted. By January 1976, the Lebanese army of nineteen thousand men had collapsed; its soldiers took their weapons and either went home or joined one of an array of belligerent groups. In the absence of a national army, the Palestinian militias became the dominant military force in Lebanon. It seemed that while the Lebanese Christians, Muslims, and Druze were plagued with factionalism and rivalry, the Palestinians might seize the moment and actually take control of Lebanon. Hafez al-Assad grew increasingly concerned and decided to intervene to aid the Maronite Christians and avoid a complete collapse of the Lebanese state and the spread of violence into Syria; the last thing al-Assad wanted was to face the same Palestinian military challenge that his rival King Hussein had experienced in 1970. In May 1977, Syria sent twenty-two thousand troops to Lebanon, and by November of that year, the Syrian army entered West Beirut and put a temporary end to the two years of fighting. While his initial objective was to stabilize the immediate region, al-Assad’s ultimate goal—which was eventually achieved—was to establish a pro-Syrian government and transform Lebanon into a Syrian satellite state.

  The warring parties, however, would not allow Syria to move into southern Lebanon, where Palestinian and Israeli fighting led Israel to undertake a push into Lebanon in 1978 that saw its forces reach the outskirts of Beirut. With the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in Beirut, Phalangists fighting Muslims in Beirut, and the Syrians fighting everybody, the city turned into a bloodbath. In just a matter of months, eighteen thousand people lay dead on the streets of Beirut, and in the two years of fighting from 1975 to 1976 it is estimated that more than seventy thousand Lebanese were killed. The Israeli raid was short-lived and Israel eventually withdrew on the condition that it would be replaced by a United Nations force. Syria, however, remained.

  Everything changed once again in 1982 when the Israeli military, responding to continuing border conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, launched a full invasion into southern Lebanon with the objective of removing the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the country and standing up Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel as president of Lebanon. Not only did the Israelis fail to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), but in the midst of this invasion, Palestinian militants allegedly assassinated the new Christian president, Gemayel. In an act of revenge, Phalangist militias entered the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and undertook a horrific massacre that is to this day used against both Christians in Lebanon and the Israelis who condoned the action. The Israeli military again reached as far north as Beirut, eventually occupying all of southern Lebanon.

  In August 1982, a multinational force led by the United States entered Lebanon. Their responsibility was to oversee the evacuation of all foreign troops and the PLO from Beirut, but the force did more harm than good. The American presence inflamed hostilities, and 1982 saw the birth of Hezbollah, the rise of its Shi’ite rival Amal, and several militant Palestinian groups. Terrorist attacks on the United States Embassy and the United States Marine barracks led to the collapse of the multinational force and the withdrawal of the United States from Lebanon.

  Fighting persisted throughout the 1980s, with little movement toward mediation. The already unstable Lebanese government had failed to oversee the election of a successor to President Amine Gemayel—the brother of the slain Bashir—whose term expired in 1988. As a result, Lebanon had no government, with dozens of paramilitary and militia groups each vying for power.

  In 1989, the Arab League oversaw the Taif Agreement, which officially ended the Lebanese Civil
War. The Taif Agreement modified but did not abolish the confessional system. Under the terms of the agreement, Lebanon would have a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, and a Shi’a speaker of parliament. The parliament, which had previously represented Christians as the majority, was now to be divided 50/50 between Christian and Muslim deputies.

  By the time the Taif Agreement had been reached, the war had lasted almost fifteen years. Initially a war between Muslims and Christians, it had spiraled into an orgy of violence that saw not only Christians and Muslims killing each other, but Christians killing Christians and Muslims killing Muslims. By the end of the civil war, as many as a hundred fifty thousand to two hundred thousand people had been killed, an additional three hundred thousand had been wounded, hundreds of thousands had been displaced, and millions had been traumatized, and the economic damage exceeded 20 billion dollars.

  While the civil war that ravaged the country came to an end in 1990, the alienation and humiliation of the generation of Lebanese who had come of age during the conflict persisted under a prolonged Syrian occupation of Lebanon. As long as the Syrians remained in Lebanon, Lebanese youth had little reason to believe in the democratic process of their country. They were under the impression—quite correctly—that Syrian politicians were making laws and ruling under the banner of the Lebanese government. In this context, elections mattered very little, as they were not believed to hold any potential for change. Democracy seemed to be a distant concept so long as the Syrian occupation persisted.

  Nearly two years after the Syrians left Lebanon and the one-month war between Hezbollah and Israel ended in August 2006, Lebanon faced yet another challenge to its nascent democracy as Hezbollah moved itself into downtown Beirut in an effort to collapse the internationally recognized government. Nine months later, the relatively unknown Al-Qaeda affiliated Fatah al-Islam added fuel to the fire by launching an insurgency from the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon, reminding the world that Lebanon’s conflicts are multidimensional. And so the perpetual cycle of tension and violence continues.

  The scene was awesome. People danced on tables, hands were in the air, and the beats from the oversized speakers sent vibrations throughout my entire body. Every now and then the DJ would shut off the music and let the crowd drive the lyrics. The energy was magnificent. The place was packed and I had to weave my way through the crowds to find a small portion of the sand where I could find room to dance. The thought that I was in a Middle Eastern country didn’t even cross my mind as I looked around and saw girls wearing hardly anything, guys in their bathing suits, and couples making out all around me. At the bar, people lined up to do shots, not just out of the glasses, but off of each other’s necks and stomachs. There was nothing conservative about this place.

  The beach party finally ended at six A.M. and Ziad, Walid, and their friend Naylah decided we should head to a club. We went to a place called B0-18; it had a retractable roof, Gothic décor, and thumping house music. As we walked in, I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of men dancing with and kissing other men and a lot of women dancing with and kissing other women. Homosexuality has been banned by most Middle Eastern governments, but I would hear of gay youth in Syria, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and even Iran who would ingeniously use their Bluetooth cell phones to organize underground parties and raves.

  The club closed at seven A.M. and as it turned out, on that morning Lebanon was holding the last round of its first elections since the withdrawal of Syria the previous year. After the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri—widely believed to have been perpetrated by agents of the Syrian government—the Lebanese people largely put aside their sectarian differences and began calling for the end of the Syrian occupation, which had by then lasted more than twenty years. Even before Hariri’s assassination, the United Nations had passed a resolution calling on all foreign troops to leave Lebanon; the international pressure brought by UN Resolution 1559 bolstered this new Lebanese nationalist movement. In March of 2005, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese came to Martyrs’ Square in Beirut to make their demands heard. They held Lebanese flags, painted the colors of Lebanon on their bodies and faces, and celebrated unity between Christians and Muslims. The only times Lebanese came together like this were for soccer matches and at nightclubs; these demonstrations, later named the Cedar Revolution for the image on Lebanon’s national flag, represented the first time Lebanese had come together to do something other than party. And the revolution was successful: Syria withdrew its troops and Lebanon was finally sovereign. The elections taking place that morning would be the first practical manifestation of that sovereignty.

  I was at this point deliriously tired, but I was thrilled when Naylah insisted that we all drive together to northern Lebanon to witness the election in Tripoli.

  Naylah was particularly vocal about the election, largely because she supported a different candidate than the rest of the group. Like Ziad and Walid, Naylah was a Maronite Christian, but reflective of Lebanese politics, she is part of a different Maronite political faction than the two of them. She insisted that she was the one to show me the elections. Naylah was one of the more energetic people I had met in Lebanon. She had curly black hair, lots of freckles on her nose, and her two favorite topics of conversation were house music and politics.

  While we were driving, Naylah explained that voting in Lebanon was for coalitions and alliances. For instance, Michel Aoun’s predominantly Christian Free Patriotic Movement Party was aligned with Hezbollah, the largest Shi’a party and historic enemy of Aoun, against Future, the predominant Sunni party and ally to Aoun during the Cedar Revolution. None of this really made any sense to me. Naylah explained that the only thing I needed to understand was that just as groups had allied and fought with each other during the war, they were now aligning, realigning, and breaking alliances in the name of politics. Even with this in mind, I found Lebanese politics nearly impossible to understand. I had such a difficult time deciphering who was aligned with which party and what groups were affiliated with what platform or politician. Trying to appreciate the complex dynamics among the groups and the historical contradictions of many of the alliances was enough to give me a constant headache.

  Naylah was a big supporter of Michel Aoun, who led one of the two dominant Christian parties in Lebanon. Aoun had been the interim president of Lebanon at the end of the civil war, but when he spoke out against the Syrian occupation, he was forced into exile. However, like everything in Lebanon, there are multiple sides to every story. Today, many Maronites believe that it was not his anti-Syrian rhetoric that forced him into exile. Instead, many suggest that Aoun’s actions merely prolonged the violence in 1989 and 1990, leading not only to the final and most devastating blow to the Lebanese Christian community, but also to Aoun deserting his troops and fleeing to the French Embassy in October 1990. Back in Lebanon for the first time in fifteen years, Michel Aoun was a very controversial candidate. A Christian and a staunch enemy of Hezbollah, Aoun shocked the Maronite community by aligning himself with the terrorist party in June 2005. Illustrating the complexity of Lebanese politics, Aoun needed Hezbollah support to gain enough votes from Shi’a to win the election in the north. Likewise, Hezbollah needed some Christian support. Even with all the phony alliances and marriages of convenience between Lebanese political parties, many felt that Aoun had gone too far.

  As we drove up the highway, almost every car was adorned with the flag of one of Lebanon’s political parties. Some waved a white flag with a round circle and the Lebanese cedar tree in the middle: This was the flag of the Lebanese Forces Party, led by its incarcerated leader, Samir Geagea. I saw other cars waving the yellow flag with the green rifle in the middle, the signature symbol for Hezbollah. The Aoun supporters, or the Aounies, as they were called, adorned themselves in orange. As an Aounie, Naylah would honk her horn and raise her arm in the air every time we saw an orange flag coming out the window of a car. Fittingly
for Lebanon, it was like a party all the way to Tripoli, as people rode on top of their cars and stood up through the sunroofs.

  “Naylah, is it always like this during election time?” I asked.

  “No, this is different,” she replied sharply. “This is our first election as Lebanese. Since I have been born we have never had elections without Syria occupying our country. Now we can choose our own leaders instead of these corrupt politicians that Syria puts in place to destroy our country.”

  When we arrived in Tripoli, it was a spectacle. There were rallies and gatherings of all parties in parking lots, in front of stores, in clusters of cars, and in public parks. Naylah took me to a parking lot where hundreds of people stood with the orange flag of Michel Aoun. Most of these participants were young and seemed to be mere teenagers, so I assumed Lebanon had a low voting age. This didn’t seem so strange to me: In Iran, young people can vote when they are fifteen years old.

  “How old do you have to be to vote in Lebanon?” I asked Naylah.

  “Twenty-one,” she replied.

  Most of the youth I saw out on election day were not even old enough to vote. For them, the election was about something more than voting and campaigning and taking part in the electoral charades; this election was about feeling truly Lebanese for the first time.