In retrospect there is little doubt that the armed Palestinian militias played a central destabilizing role in the disintegration of the fragile sectarian balance of pre-war Lebanese society. Professor Khazen presents a convincing and well-documented argument for his thesis. However sympathetic one may be for the cause of Palestinian irredentism, it is difficult to challenge the fact that Lebanon paid an inordinately high price for the ruthless ethnic cleansing by the Israeli army in those areas that came under their control in 1948-49. How the Palestinians were able to become such a powerful armed presence inside a theoretically sovereign state makes for fascinating reading.

The author recognizes from the outset that the Lebanese Civil War was in fact many conflicts fought at different times and on different levels, and does not fit neatly into any previous standard model. “Was it a classic civil war, ...an insurgence that never took off, ...a regional war? In some ways,” he concludes, “[it] was none of these. In others it was all of them” (p. 3). Unlike most civil conflicts where “the state is either the central arena for conflict or the force behind the conflict,” in Lebanon this was never the case. From the late 1960s and onwards he argues, “the [Lebanese] state was neutralized politically and militarily. And as the war progressed, the state was not only marginal to the conflict, it was not even a party to it” (p. 7). Central authority gradually ceased to exist and finally disappeared altogether. I remember early on in the civil war a journalist critically interviewing a member of parliament as to why the government wasn’t doing anything to prevent the descent into chaos. “How can we meet to do something?” the exasperated MP replied. “They’ve stolen the chairs!” “They” of course were the often ambiguous and anonymous forces that Lebanese society, precariously balanced on a sectarian-based political compromise, could not deal with. Power abhors a political vacuum, and into this sudden collapse of central authority poured any number of forces desperate for power, the PLO notable among them.

In the first four chapters Professor Khazen traces the events building up to, and the early development of, the Lebanese state; chapters 5-9 reveal how by 1975 it was very different from any other Arab country. Its Christian character was only one of several major characteristics setting it apart. Lebanon, unlike every other Arab state, had developed no massive bureaucracy as a governmental “control device” (p. 115). Very few people in Lebanon owed anything to the government, with the notable exception of taxes, which were rarely if ever paid. Loyalty was to a personal leader, not a central authority. This weakness was even a feature of the armed forces, the most vital support of any central government. Jordan was able to get rid of the PLO in 1970-71 precisely because it did have a strong central government backed by a bureaucracy and army loyal to the king, who embodied authority. When the PLO moved into southern Lebanon, it encountered no state authority to prevent its setting up shop.

Chapters 10-16 deal with the growing armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon after 1970 and the failure of the government to challenge it successfully. External pressures from other Arab countries had as much to do with this as did internal weaknesses, but by the time of the events of April 1975, which triggered the outbreak of war, the PLO had an armed force ready to fight for its survival. Internal politics had pushed the Maronites and their paramilitary supporters from the Kataib (Phalangist) party into a corner. The Sunnis – the Maronites’ traditional partners since independence – sensed an opportunity to undo the unwritten constitution of 1943 with which most Muslims had not been comfortable. Kamal Junblatt, leader of the Druze, frustrated by his inability to become president under the Sunni-Maronite power-sharing agreement, sided with the PLO. The stage was set for conflict.

The remaining chapters (17-30) focus on the first stage of the war, in which the PLO and its allies threatened to destabilize not only Lebanon but neighboring Arab states, notably Syria, “whose interests in Lebanon in early 1976 were little served by a drastic restructuring of the political system” (p. 331). The ensuing military intervention also served a longstanding Syrian ambition to bring Lebanon, detached from Syria by the French mandate authorities in 1926, back to the Greater Syrian fold. The PLO and their Sunni allies were eventually forced back to the Beirut refugee camps in October 1979, but not before large areas of Mount Lebanon along the Beirut to Damascus highway, notably the resort towns of Bhamdoun and Alayh, had been destroyed and remain largely so to this day.

The author is especially critical of the Western media’s demonization of the Christian forces and their view that “at worst the PLO was caught in the fire and was thus driven into a war which it sought to avoid and in which it was little involved.” An example of this “spin” is Edward Said’s assertion that “the PLO’s destabilization of Lebanon is a myth” (p. 361). Although personally a strong supporter of Palestinian statehood and the return of the refugees to their homeland, I find Khazen’s arguments compelling. There is little doubt in my mind that the “PLO armed presence has fundamentally derailed the course of Lebanese politics and has deeply disrupted sectarian relations” (p. 362; for a full analysis of the author’s argument in support of this view see chapter 27, pp. 362-364). How Lebanon might have developed had there been no PLO factor is the inevitable question to which the author devotes several brief speculative paragraphs, but this is only guesswork. The reality was a PLO military presence, and, as the author concludes, “With regional problems linked to the PLO, the loads were much greater than the capabilities of Lebanon’s consensual politics and sectarian democracy” (p. 392).

Farid El-Khazen, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, writes extremely well, and he and his editors have done a splendid job in their overall presentation. Errors and misprints are few and minor. Notes are copious, and the bibliography reflects a thorough coverage of available material. No index is without citation omissions (I encountered several), but this one is very useful if somewhat brief (15 pages) for such a lengthy text.

Not everyone will agree with Professor Khazen’s basic thesis, but his research and scholarship cannot be faulted. Only three questionable statistics ought to be pointed out, first in table 5.1 (p. 58), in which he cites figures showing no Druze or Greek Orthodox living in the South or the Beqa regions. Both communities are a strong presence in the towns and villages of Rashayya and Hasbayya in the southern Beqa, and the Orthodox are very numerous in the South Lebanon district of Marjuyun (the seat of one of their metropolitans), and in the Central Beqa both in and around the city of Zahlah (the seat of another metropolitan). Also why, in the same table, would one combine the Greek Catholics with the Armenians (mostly non-Catholic) as a single group for statistical purposes? They are in no way related either by allegiance or language. On page 299 he gives the distribution of armed forces in the Palestinian refugee camps in 1975 as including a highly improbable 73,000 at al-Rashidiyya near Tyre. This clearly should be 7,300 as shown in table 24.1 (p. 326), where the figures for 1976 show the same camp as having 3,000 “fighters” and 4,000 “militia,” for a total of 7,500. Finally, did the Communist party in Lebanon really have 40,000 members and 5,000 armed militiamen in 1975 (table 22.4)? If so, what happened to them?