War risks reigniting tensions between Lebanon’s kaleidoscope of communities

To drive away from Beirut’s Mediterranean coastline is to climb, up into the rugged, unrelenting ridges of Mount Lebanon. The limestone mountain range that traverses huge lengths of Lebanon lent the country not just its name but beauty, diversity – and a combustible political culture that risks being inflamed again as Israeli forces invade.

For centuries before modern Lebanon was established, its mountains were a natural barrier to invading armies. For the region’s religious minorities – especially Christians and Druze – they became a sanctuary. Ensconced in remote mountain villages, the kaleidoscope of communities that would eventually form the Lebanese nation developed distinct identities, histories and anxieties over their own survival. Lebanon, wrote one of it great historians, Kamal Salibi, was “a house of many mansions”.

How to govern such a diverse country – the constitution recognises and apportions power across 18 official faiths – is unresolved to this day. With the fall of the Ottomans, power over Lebanon passed to French colonial authorities, who carved out borders and imposed a constitution that blatantly favoured the country’s Maronite Catholics. They were guaranteed the presidency, a Christian majority in parliament and control of the Lebanese army.

It was unviable from the outset. For years, the country’s fast-growing Sunni and Shia populations agitated for a fairer share of power. Tensions regularly boiled over into street battles in Beirut. The influx of displaced Palestinians after the creation of Israel strained the social fabric even further.

In 1975, it tore. Over the next 15 years, the Lebanese state dissolved and the country descended into a civil war fought between a bewildering array of militias allied to different political causes and religious creeds.

The Lebanese civil war, from 1975 until 1990, was a hugely complex conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of at least 100,000 people, pitting Sunnis, Christians, Shia and Druze against each other.

The war was further complicated by interventions from Lebanon’s neighbours Israel and Syria, and by the presence of a sizeable Palestinian refugee population which was also targeted, most notoriously during the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982.

Although some of the politically aligned militias involved were not initially sectarian, as the war developed it became increasingly sectarian in nature.

The start of the war is generally dated as 13 April 1975, when Christian militiamen attacked a bus carrying Palestinians to a refugee camp. As clashes between militias from different communities spread, the country’s armed forces and political system split, with Beirut itself dividing along what would be known as the green line between Muslim west Beirut and Christian east Beirut.

In a conflict that would be marked by massacres and inter-communal brutality, the first external intervention was by Syria’s armed forces in 1976 to address the imbalance of power. Israel became increasingly involved, launching a full-scale invasion in 1982 (the first Lebanese war) and laying siege to Muslim areas of west Beirut. During this period, Christian militias were permitted entry by Israeli forces into the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where they killed hundreds in revenge for the assassination of the Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

The conflict finally ended in 1990 with an agreement on political power-sharing based on representation for the different communities.

East Beirut, predominantly Christian, was divided from majority-Muslim west Beirut by a “green line” that snaked across the centre of the city and was riddled with snipers and armed checkpoints. Depending on the political temperature of the day, or the whims of the young militiamen stationed at them, crossing these borders could be deadly. About 17,000 Lebanese people were forcibly disappeared during the war, many for belonging to the “wrong” faith and crossing the wrong checkpoint at the wrong time.

Past Israeli governments have sought to exploit Lebanon’s ruptures. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, trying to drive out Palestinian militants using the country as a launching pad, it formed alliances with rightwing Christian militias, who saw the opportunity to reassert their primacy over the country.

Infamously, in September 1982 the Israeli army fired illumination flares into the sky above two areas of Beirut, Sabra and Shatila, populated by Palestinian families, allowing their Christian collaborators to go house to house slaughtering mostly women and children.

By 1989, Israel had long given up on its Christian allies and all sides of the Lebanese civil war were exhausted. They gave up their arms in exchange for a new political deal that distributed power along more equitable lines. Lebanese people who had spent years confined to particular Beirut neighbourhoods or mountain villages started the process of reweaving a diverse society.

Just one militia was permitted to keep its weapons: Hezbollah, representing Lebanon’s Shia Muslims, in order to fight a continued Israeli occupation of Lebanon’s south.

War gave way in the 1990s to rebuilding and a debt-fuelled economic boom, and though Lebanon’s social divisions are thought to have lessened, they remain unhealed, a toxic legacy passed down the generations. Marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody disputes are still decided according to religious, not civil law. Political offices are still decided along sectarian lines. Too often, Lebanese people meeting each other still ask innocuous-sounding questions (What’s your last name? Where are you from?) that will cast light on their religious affiliation.

As another Israeli invasion builds in southern Lebanon, and warplanes bomb primarily Shia areas of Beirut, there are fears these old scars could reopen. At least a million Lebanese people are on the move, many seeking shelter in neighbourhoods and villages largely populated by other sects.

Civil society leaders have emphasised that so far Lebanese people have shown each other solidarity. But as the crisis lengthens, the few signs of disharmony – reports of landlords refusing to house Shia families for fear of becoming targets of Israeli drones, or videos of arguments between displaced Shia and the residents of a predominantly Christian neighbourhood – threaten to spread.

For Hezbollah, it means they must watch their backs even as they fight on the frontline against Israel. For much of the past two decades, the militia group – the most powerful force in Lebanon – has shown political savvy, striking an alliance with a powerful Christian party, and working at times with the Sunni party of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri (whom Hezbollah members are accused of having assassinated 19 years ago).

“Hezbollah has been sensitive to the idea that the Shia community cannot be isolated,” said Michael Young, a senior editor at Carnegie Middle East. But these relationships had grown strained in recent years, he added.

When Beirut’s port exploded in 2020, damaging the primarily Christian neighbourhoods surrounding it, Hezbollah blocked any meaningful investigation of the blast. The group’s involvement in the Syrian civil war also alienated many Sunnis. It meant that as tensions with Israel started to soar last October, “they entered the war without a strong sectarian partner on the other side”, Young said.

Over the past days, Hezbollah’s political opponents from across Lebanon’s sectarian spectrum have been muted in their criticism. But many will be considering that Hezbollah may emerge from this war substantially diminished, and if it does, it could provide an opportunity to rebalance power in the country once again.

“Everyone must be thinking about – if Hezbollah is weakened, what are the ways we can not find ourselves in this situation again?” Young said. “They want to widen their room to manoeuvre.”