How a famine and a genocide shaped two nations
Israel and Lebanon are two nations shaped by trauma—The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon and the Holocaust—yet while Israel’s scars forged a fortress for a beleaguered nation, Lebanon’s fears drew borders that became a deadly trap for its inhabitants.
It’s fascinating to examine why this happened, but first, let’s get the geography and demographics out of the way because in the end of the day, this is what it’s all about: land and people.
Unlike Israel, there has never been such a state as Lebanon, nor was “Lebanese” a national identity. The term was been purely geographical and quite vague. The modern borders of Lebanon were drawn under the French mandate in 1920, the same year as Palestine was created by the British. Prior to that, Lebanon was the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a predominantly Christian and Druze region of the Ottoman Empire.
Originally, the entire French mandate was called “Syria.” However, wanting to maximize their territorial gains following WWI, France moved the Lebanon-Syrian border to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. This territory had historically belonged to Damascus and was culturally closer to it than to Beirut.
This change of borders wasn’t a purely cynical imperialist move, however.
In 1919, a Lebanese delegation led by Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek asked for a significant extension of the frontiers of the Lebanon Mutasarrifate, arguing that the additional areas constituted natural parts of Lebanon.
This was rather shortsighted of the Maronites, since it resulted in the Christian community losing its absolute majority in Lebanon. However, their desire for more land was not the result of greed, but trauma.
Just like the Jews in Palestine desired to have a state with as many Jews as possible due to the horror of the Holocaust, which saw two third of the Jews of the Old World murdered by the non-Jews they lived among, the Lebanese were motivated to have as much land as possible by the Great Famine of 1915-1918.
Strangely, it’s an event few people outside of Lebanon know about, even though it killed half the population of a country and was almost entirely manmade.
A starving family in Lebanon
The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) was caused by three factors coming together during World War I:
The Ottoman requisitions and restrictions on food, which worsened shortages.
The Allied blockade of the eastern Mediterranean that blocked food imports.
Local hoarding and profiteering.
During the famine, 200,000 people living in Mount Lebanon died, creating an existential fear of not having enough land to independently feed the population, just like the Holocaust created an existential fear not being able to independently defend the population.
As a consequence of the border shift, the demographics of Lebanon changed dramatically. Sunnis increased X8 and Shias increase X4. Christians became barely half the population, which is what the British originally planned for the Jews in Palestine.
In 1943, the new Lebanese government voted to abolish the mandate. The French grudgingly agreed and the last French troops withdrew in 1946, one year before the British left Palestine, leading to the creation of the State of Israel.
Both regions soon experienced civil wars fueled by the heterogeneity of the population.
The post-Holocaust Jewish strategy prioritized military self-reliance and a centralized nation state designed to prevent Jewish helplessness; a Jewish fortress where Jews would not depend on anyone to protect them.
The war in Palestine resulted in the creation of a Jewish state with an absolute Jewish majority, following a population exchange with the surrounding Arab states. The conflict is rarely framed this way, but this is what it was: the Arabs fled from areas under Jewish control while Jews fled from areas under Arab control.
Israel’s goal was achieved: a strong and stable nation state, albeit with smaller borders than it had hoped.
Meanwhile, post-famine fear in Lebanon led the fledgling state to demand the borders of “Greater Lebanon.” By expanding beyond Mount Lebanon to ensure economic viability, they incorporated diverse sectarian populations without a unifying national narrative. The political system designed to protect the cohesion of these diverse groups sharing the same land eventually paralyzed the state, making its borders a pressure cooker rather than a shield. The result was several bloody civil wars and a failed state that constantly succumbs to foreign influence.
As it turns out, in the Middle East, diversity is not our strength.
