A Journey Through Lebanon: An Unfinished History 3|4
Part II | A Dislocated Identity That Resists Simplification
4. Religion: Institutionalized Division
If language and culture create ambiguity over identity in Lebanon, religion produces something even more rigid: institutionalized division. Lebanon is one of the few Middle Eastern countries where Christianity still holds significant political weight. In 1932, during the French Mandate, Lebanon conducted its first, and to this day only national census. The results indicated a slight Christian demographic majority, with Muslims forming a smaller proportion of the population.
This census has long been criticized as methodologically biased. Scholars argue that the Mandate authorities manipulated administrative boundaries, population registration, and diaspora inclusion, thereby inflating Christian numbers. Yet the results became the fixed baseline for political distribution, a reference table that continues to shape Lebanese politics today.
Upon independence in 1943, political, religious, and social elites reached an unwritten but binding agreement known as the 「National Pact」. Based on the demographics from the census, the presidency was reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime ministership for a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament for a Shi‘a Muslim. Parliamentary seats were distributed in a 6:5 ratio favoring Christians over Muslims. At the time, this arrangement represented an attempt to engineer coexistence within a multi-religious society, a strategic compromise aimed at preventing immediate conflict.
Yet two structural problems followed. First, sectarianism was institutionalized. What was meant as a temporary compromise turned sectarian identity into a prerequisite for political participation. Religious affiliation ceased to be merely spiritual; it became a direct proxy for political power and resource allocation. This framework hardened over time and remains largely intact today.
Second, the system rested on obsolete data. Lebanon’s political structure in the 21st century is still based on a census conducted over 90 years ago. No national census has been carried out since, not due to technical incapacity, but because any new count would threaten the foundations of power-sharing. Updated demographics would likely trigger redistribution of power, unsettling entrenched interests. Unsurprisingly, such reform is resisted.
One must acknowledge that this mechanism did manage to avoid immediate conflict in a deeply pluralistic society initially. For more than a decade, it provided relative stability and enabled economic growth. Lebanon was once celebrated as the “Paris of the East” or the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” But over time, demographic change, migration, differential birth rates, and waves of refugees altered the social fabric, while the political structure remained frozen. What had once been an equilibrium became a source of tension.
This is why religious division in Lebanon is not merely about identity; it is embedded in institutions, power, and resource distribution. Political expression is confined within sectarian frameworks. Leaders prioritize sectarian, communal, or even familial interests over national ones. The state becomes a tool rather than a collective project. Public dissatisfaction finds no institutional outlet, because the system does not recognize individuals as citizens. It demands that they first declare which sect they represent, where their allegiance lies. Conflict, under such constraints, inevitably erupts in more extreme forms.
In 1958, Lebanon experienced its first major political crisis, involving conservative Christian forces on one side and Muslim groups and Arab nationalists on the other. The conflict revolved externally around alignment with Arab unity versus Western alliances, and internally around sectarian distribution of power. Though temporarily resolved through U.S. mediation and domestic compromise, it foreshadowed deeper ruptures.
The most devastating chapter of the civil war began on April 13, 1975, and lasted until 1990. Over fifteen years, approximately 150,000 people were killed, and up to a million displaced. This was not a binary Christian–Muslim war, but a series of overlapping conflicts involving sectarian militias, Palestinian armed groups, Syrian intervention, and Israel’s 1982 invasion. Lebanon became, in effect, a regional power keg.
For analytical clarity, the war can be simplified into two broad camps. On one side stood Christian militias, led by the Phalangists (Kataeb Regulatory Forces), seeking to preserve Christian political supremacy. On the other stood a Muslim-leftist alliance: the Lebanese National Movement and the PLO, along with Shi‘a Amal and Druze militias, opposing sectarian power-sharing and advocating broader reform. Some may ask why the PLO appeared in the Lebanese Civil War at all, not as a peripheral cameo, but as one of its main characters. This is an important question. Allow me to hold the answer in suspense; I will return to it in detail later.
I once spoke with an Orthodox Christian from Beirut. When recalling the war, he avoided grand narratives. He said simply: Beirut was split in two by one street: Damascus Street. Before the war, it was an ordinary thoroughfare named for the road leading to Damascus. It was therefore a symbol of connection rather than division. Mixed neighborhoods lined its sides: shops, schools and cafés, woven together in everyday life. Beirut itself was a deeply mixed city, where religion, class, and ethnicity were not rigidly mapped onto geographic boundaries. But everything started to change after 1975.
In April 1975, as isolated acts of violence rapidly escalated into full-scale conflicts, urban space was forced to become militarized. At first, clashes were sporadic and fluid. But it soon became clear to all armed factions that a defensible, identifiable, and controllable boundary was needed. Damascus Street became the hot zone.
From an urban-structural perspective, Damascus Street is a straight, wide axis that runs through the heart of Beirut, making it easy to seal off and turning it into a natural line of separation between east and west. From a demographic and religious standpoint, it also happened to lie along the fault line between the city’s two main communities: areas to the east and north increasingly came under Christian, particularly Maronite control, while areas to the west and south were largely dominated by Muslim communities, including Sunni and Shi‘a groups, as well as forces linked to the PLO. Geography, population, and military logic converged at this point.
The trees have taken over the space after human retreat
By 1976, this dividing line had solidified, known as the “Green Line”, not because it was safe, but because the no-man’s-land gradually became overgrown with weeds. Buildings on both sides were abandoned, the street emptied of civilian life, and snipers occupied rooftops. Crossing meant risking life. For the first time, Beirut was physically split in two: East Beirut, largely controlled by Christian militias, and West Beirut, dominated by Muslim factions. This was no longer a temporary condition, but a reality that lasted for the next fifteen years.
Throughout the civil war, people had to relearn how to use their city. Going to school, going to work, visiting family, falling in love. Everything had to begin with a single question: does this route cross the Green Line? An entire generation grew up inside this spatial fracture. Beirut was no longer a map. It became a set of routes, some permitted, others forbidden. Of course, we are no strangers to such stories in modern history: from East and West Berlin to North and South Korea.
Finally, in 1990, the civil war formally ended. Barricades were removed, checkpoints dismantled, and the city reopened. But Damascus Street never fully returned to being simply “a street.” Many people, walking across it for the first time in years, still did so with hesitation. The division of space seemed to have been internalized, absorbed into the body as scar tissue.
Even today, in the streets of Beirut, you will see buildings that were never completely repaired, and bullet holes that remain starkly visible on the walls. I can’t tell whether their continued presence is merely the result of stalled reconstruction, or an intentional preservation of history as witness. They are neither monuments nor tourist attractions. They are simply there. And in that quiet presence, they remind me that this city was once forced to make a single street carry the weight of all the contradictions, internal and external, that Lebanon as a whole could not resolve.
In fact, postwar Lebanon never fully escaped sectarian constraints. Even if the rules have slightly shifted in practice, the peace that followed the war still feels fragile and stagnant. That is why Beirut’s peace today carries a strange texture. It is neither tense nor relaxed; it is not collapsing, and yet it never truly heals. The country feels as if it has been pinned to a particular historical moment, still operating, but rarely moving forward.
For ordinary people, even when grand narratives are constantly available, daily life is defined more by small, accumulating breakdowns, sometimes to the point of collapse. Citizens navigate power outages, privatized services, and economic stagnation. Trust in institutions has eroded. People learn how to live around the state, rather than through it. The currency and financial system have nearly imploded. In the face of staggering prices, the U.S. dollar has all but replaced the Lebanese pound as the currency of everyday life. People’s savings could evaporate overnight as the banking system crumbles. Merchants come to trust only one thing: U.S. banknotes, money that can be held, counted, and kept.
Walking through Beirut today, I often feel as if I’m seeing two realities at once: a highly refined way of living, and a public structure that is nearly paralyzed. Peace here is not an endpoint. It is an extended in-between, within which, people continue to live, to adapt, and to move forward.
5. A Reality of Ongoing Tension
Abandoned Buildings covered in bullet holes
Beirut is filled with mesmerizing chaos. In the city center, high-end residential towers rise straight up, dense and vertical, reminiscent of Hong Kong’s Mong Kok. Yet just around the corner, what comes next is a building that has been bombed and completely abandoned. Its exterior walls have lost all color; weeds and trees grow out of empty window frames, reclaiming the space after human retreat. Barbed wire stretches across the street. Military barricades stand openly by the roadside. Nearby, armed soldiers in balaclavas keep watch, and behind them, a small tank is parked in plain sight. None of this comes with an explanation; and that, in itself, is treated as a natural texture of the city.
A few streets away, mornings in the posh neighborhoods begin quietly. A Range Rover gently pulls over; the car door closes with a soft sound. A woman in Chanel dress steps out and walks into a church. Everything appears orderly, with a hint of elegance. Yet even here, municipal sanitation feels optional at best. Piles of garbage line the streets; the last cleanup may have happened weeks ago. When crossing the street, I am stopped by a poorly dressed child holding Damascus roses, one dollar per stem. He tells me his sister is sick, that the family needs money for milk. He speaks quickly, switching between languages, trying to catch even the slightest hesitation in me. This does not feel like begging; it feels more like a display of survival skills: deploying every possible story in exchange for a moment of pause, a second of sympathy.
I feel a knot of fleeting conflict. There is no time to process, or to verify whether these stories are true. I simply move on. To be honest, even now I’m not sure how one is supposed to respond to such forceful contrasts and coexistence all within the same frame. If I had to name the feeling, it would be something close to a schizophrenic sense of disorientation.
This kind of contradiction runs through every layer of social life. I learned that being a civil servant in Lebanon does not mean financial stability. Many government employees earn only a few hundred U.S. dollars a month, barely enough to pay rent, and certainly not enough to plan a future. As a result, most people juggle between multiple jobs just to get by. For many, it feels like in a stalemate, “tomorrow” and “hope” have become abstract concepts. And yet, in that very same city, night falls and music begins. In the old district of Hamra, Arabic music parties are vibrant and intimate. Bodies move close together, dances are light, laughter is genuine. This contrast, though it may seem contradictory, actually makes perfect sense. You could read it as escapism, but I see it more as an immediate response to uncertainty. If tomorrow cannot be trusted, then at least tonight must be fully lived.
Here, living for the moment is not indulgence, rather a rational choice. When long-term planning no longer works, when institutions fail to provide security, the body, music, and the night become the most reliable things left. If you ask almost any foreigners who have been to Beirut, I’d bet most of them will tell you the same thing: Lebanese people throw the best parties in town.
So when I walk through the streets of Beirut, on one side are the frozen traces left by war; on the other, the intense pulse of present-day life. There is barely any transition between the two. My emotions have no time to adjust, and my cognition can’t keep up with the rapid shifts in scenery. In certain moments, I feel that same near-schizophrenic sense of shock again, not because I fail to understand, but because I understand completely, yet struggle to hold all of it within a single, simple logic.
Perhaps this is Beirut in its most honest state: not torn apart, but layered. Not collapsed, yet constantly moving forward with its wounds exposed.
6. An Unavoidable Regional Entanglement | How Lebanon Is Drawn into Other People’s Histories
Earlier, we briefly introduced the concept of the Levant and the scope it encompasses. Lebanon’s identity dilemma is not shaped solely by its internal fractures; to a greater extent, it is also defined by its inescapable Levantine neighbors. Lebanon’s problems have never unfolded in isolation. Rather, the country resembles a piece of land wedged between larger historical plates, bearing pressure from all directions.
Syria: An Asymmetrical Levantine Twin
In terms of territorial size, Syria is nearly eighteen times larger than Lebanon. In historical narratives, Syria has long regarded Lebanon as an inseparable part of “Greater Syria.” This perception is not merely ideological; Syria has repeatedly manifested it in concrete political and military campaigns. In 1976, during the Lebanese Civil War, Syria entered Lebanon under the banner of “maintaining order,” establishing a military presence through the Arab League as the so-called Arab Deterrent Force. From that moment onward, Syria overstayed its welcome, began a prolonged intervention in Lebanon’s internal political and military affairs. This presence continued for many years even after the civil war ended, lasting until 2005, profoundly shaping Lebanon’s political trajectory.
For Lebanon’s Christian communities, the pressure came not only from Syria’s military and political dominance, but also from a deeper religious and cultural anxiety. Syria has consistently restated its Islamic identity, fully embracing Islamic principles. For Syria, a Muslim-majority country, this is hardly unusual. But for Lebanon, which has continued to attempt to preserve religious pluralism and where Christianity still occupies a significant place in public life, such a powerful neighboring posture inevitably generated both psychological pressure and tangible political strain.
Israel: A Neighbor Whose Ambiguity Turned Lethal
On the other side, Lebanon’s relationship with Israel evolved from ambiguity into real and persistent danger. At certain moments in history, there existed within Lebanon an imagined possibility: could engagement with this Jewish state offer a form of regional counterweight, easing pressure from the surrounding Muslim world? In retrospect, we know this idea never crystallized into national consensus. Reality soon demonstrated just how distant such ambivalence was from the actual world.
From the beginning, Lebanon’s relationship with Israel was not a symmetrical one between two sovereign states, but a history of repeated entanglement in a war not of its own choosing. For Lebanon, Israel has always been bound to another name: Palestine. After Israel’s founding in 1948, Lebanon absorbed a large wave of exodus from Palestine. This demographic influx gradually reshaped Lebanese society and turned the country into an important base for Palestinian political and military movements.
Before the 1970s, Lebanon was not a direct battlefield with Israel. What fundamentally altered the situation was the concentration of Palestinian armed forces in southern Lebanon. After being expelled from Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, relocated much of its military and political activity to Lebanese territory, using southern Lebanon as a base from which to launch cross-border attacks against Israel.
From Israel’s perspective, this constituted an intolerable security threat. From Lebanon’s perspective, it became a reality it could neither fully control nor escape the consequences of. After the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, state capacity further collapsed, and the south was effectively beyond central control. In this context, Israel launched a large-scale invasion of Lebanon with a clear objective: to dismantle the PLO’s military presence. This invasion not only altered the trajectory of the civil war, but also transformed Israel from an external threat into a physical presence on Lebanese soil. Palestinian armed forces were eventually forced out of Beirut, yet Lebanon did not regain stability as a result.
Israel’s military presence did not resolve insecurity in the south; instead, it gave rise to new forces. In the 1980s, Hezbollah, a Shi‘a movement rooted within Lebanese society gradually emerged. Unlike the Palestinian armed groups before it, Hezbollah derived its legitimacy internally, making resistance against Israel the raison d’être of its political identity. From that point on, conflict with Israel was no longer something that merely passed through Lebanon; it became internalized and enduring.
For decades, Israel and Hezbollah engaged in cycles of low-intensity yet continuous border skirmishes, airstrikes, and rocket attacks. With the outbreak of a new round of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2023–2024, Lebanon was once again drawn in. Israel launched targeted assassinations against Hezbollah’s senior leadership. On September 27, 2024, Israeli airstrikes struck Hezbollah’s headquarters in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, killing its long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah in an underground command center. Nasrallah had been the central figure of Hezbollah since its founding; his death marked not only a tactical peak but also a symbolic escalation of the broader conflict. Shortly afterward, Hashem Safieddine, widely regarded as Nasrallah’s successor, was also fatally targeted in Israeli strikes. This series of assassinations tore apart Hezbollah’s top command structure, severely weakening its military core.
The scale of these airstrikes was immense, causing widespread civilian casualties in Beirut. At least 641 people were killed and 2,058 injured, including children, women, and emergency medical personnel. A ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel was eventually reached in November 2024. Today, if you ask ordinary Lebanese citizens, regardless of whether they ideologically support Hezbollah, their attitude toward Israel is almost uniformly resentment. As an external observer, aware of what has transpired, it is difficult to fault them for this sentiment.
Lebanon’s relationship with Israel, like so many of its other contradictions, reflects a familiar but powerless condition: wars are not initiated by Lebanon, yet its territory, political space, and civilian population are repeatedly swept into their violent aftermath.
Palestine: The Most Difficult Relationship to Articulate
After speaking of Israel, we cannot skip mentioning Palestine. It is perhaps the most difficult of all to fully and openly articulate.
For a long period after 1948, Lebanon hosted Yasser Arafat and the PLO. In global memory, Arafat is often remembered as the statesman who, alongside Yitzhak Rabin, sought to advance the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in the 90s. Yet this image belongs largely to the later years of his life.
Buildings in Palestinian camp, Beirut 2026
In Lebanon, especially among those who lived through the civil war, Arafat was not merely perceived as a leader who had lost his homeland. He was also remembered as someone who brought war into Lebanon.
Unable to achieve Palestinian statehood on Palestinian soil, the PLO shifted its battleground outward. In Jordan, Arafat openly challenged the state authority, a confrontation that ended in violent suppression. The same pattern later unfolded in Lebanon. In the early years of the Lebanese Civil War, the PLO effectively established a “state within a state,” exercising armed control and high autonomy in refugee camps and surrounding areas. For many Lebanese, this crossed the boundary of hospitality. What they remember are the consequences: Israeli retaliatory strikes in southern Lebanon, the siege of Beirut, and Lebanon’s repeated entanglement in wars that were not originally its own.
Within this collective memory, Arafat is no longer seen merely as a political figurehead, but by some as a direct source of violated sovereignty, instability, and even terror. In the streets of Beirut today, one can encounter both memorials honoring Arafat and expressions of deep resentment toward him. To this day, most Palestinians living in Lebanon continue to reside in segregated communities and refugee camps. In some camps, Arafat’s portrait is painted in the most prominent places, symbolizing an unfinished national struggle. Yet in many Lebanese narratives, his name is closely associated with the word “terrorist.” This is not simply irrational hatred, but a judgment shaped by concrete historical trauma.
After 2011, with the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, Lebanon once again became an unavoidable refuge. A country of roughly six million people absorbed more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees within little more than two decades, along with continuous Palestinian exodus. This was not a matter of choice, but of geography, and the cost has been catastrophic. Lebanon simply lacks the capacity to truly integrate such numbers. Employment, housing, healthcare, education, and public services came under overwhelming strain.
Friendly pastry shop in Syrian camp
As a result, refugees largely live within their own zones: Syrian camps, Palestinian camps, each functioning separately, densely populated, and socially complex. These areas resemble urban villages embedded within the city. They contain daily life and extraordinarily high birth rates, but insufficient education and healthcare, alongside violence and harsh realities many prefer not to confront. Lebanese citizens rarely enter these spaces, local taxis don’t even go there.
They are called “camps,” but in truth they have long since become permanent neighborhoods: with shops, clinics, schools, mosques, tangled electrical wires, and living spaces that can no longer expand. Order is not absent here; it is simply maintained by a different set of forces. Armed groups both enforce order and generate fear. Security and terror coexist in the same alleyway. Good and evil are not always clearly divided.
If the cafés, bars, and seaside promenades of Achrafieh represent one face of Beirut, these camps and settlements represent another. The transition between them is unmarked; you must process it on your own.
Gradually, I came to understand that Lebanon is not lacking in compassion. Compassion, however, is not enough to sustain capacity, nor can it be transformed overnight into the ability to absorb such pressure. A country with a small population and fragile public systems has repeatedly been pushed into the role of managing the aftermath of other people’s wars. Refugee camps thus become a tolerated, yet unresolved presence.
As I write this, I realize that while these observations and analyses are compelling, remaining within grand narratives risks turning reality into abstraction. I want to move closer, not to understand everything, but to see at least a few corners more clearly.
This leads me to the next part: my volunteer experience at a refugee school.
