By: Dennis Walker

Monash Asia Institute - Monash University (Australia)

Summary:

For those clerical Lebanese writers bound to the West by French and Latin, the slaughter of World War I showed that both pro-Catholic and secularist ideologies had failed to maintain peace and prosperity in Europe. The clericists felt they were tied to the fate of the European states the secularism of which they hated by binding themselves aesthetically to the Latin languages. They also felt the need of a protector against some Muslims after Turkish hostility in Mount Lebanon destroyed the old ideology of Ottoman multisectarian developmental tendency]].

This study will analyze a sampling of Lebanese images and assessments of World War I taken from the clerical intellectual journal al-Mashriq, edited by Fr. Luis Shaykhu , and the more popular but likewise Jesuit-founded al-Bashir newspaper from 1919-1925. A nativist tradition has existed in Maronite discourses that has been the reverse of eager to imbibe Europe's patterns of Catholicism, or French or other Western languages, or the secularized ideologies or histories of France and other Western societies. But as publications founded by European Catholics, and inclusive in their Catholicism rather than just Maronite, al-Mashriq and al-Bashīr carried the maximum range of reactions to the European as well as Middle Eastern theatres of the Great War.

THE PERCEPTIONS OF THE WARRING WESTERNERS

1. Images of France (and French-speaking Belgium) in WW1

1.1. Ambivalence to France and the West

The pre-World War I and post-WW1 setting of al-Mashriq had inculcated neither automatic support for Western powers such as France, nor automatic alienation from Muslim groups. Many clerical Catholic educators and writers in the 1920s feared that rising radical forces inspired by French anti-Christianity might soon take overall control of all levels of education in Lebanon, threatening both the clericists' survival as an elite and the transmission of a sectionally modernized Catholicism to new generations.

Opposed local writers argued that secularist education had to be expanded to integrate the heterogeneous sects of post-1920 Greater Lebanon lest it one day fall apart. The dislike both clericists and modernizing Christians were developing for French and Western cultures qua exclusionary absolutes in education and government was Arabist common ground with Muslims that could foster some features for a linguistic nationalism.

The World War in some ways had underscored the need of the region's Christians for a Protector. But, in a sense, Shaykhu and his fellow conservatives were simultaneously arguing against the modern world as that was being patterned into existence by the history of the West, in particular thinkers who drew upon the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. One of the gravest consequences of WW1 for clericist writers was that by bringing down the Tsarist state it had ushered atheistical Communists to political power. But Catholic conservatives in Lebanon in the early 1920s characterized socialisms and the infant Soviet Union as one late emanation of the much wider secular sector of European Enlightenment thought that had been launched in France. 

Clearly, Shaykhū - ideologue revered of a Maronite Church that was buying more and more agricultural land and would under Patriarch Antun 'Aridah's  venture into modern services and manufactures - was reluctant to let even social democratic parties or trade unions pursue any special interest of poor groups within politics.

Most clericists and Lebanese modernists read French, and both groups were anxious to prove to readers of Arabic that Europe was on their side. Such respect for France and the West among Christian Lebanese favored the secularists more than the clericists in the debate given the movement of many West European nationalist states and certainly the French state to post-Christian patterns and ideas.

However, the spread in Lebanon of French-medium institutions and of connections with the French state had, since the 18th century, improved the material welfare and the bargaining power of diverse categories of Maronites in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire. Shaykhu  and other clericists who felt little love for some central thought-patterns and institutions connected to the secular French state, had still received formal Christian education in French: that language bonded them aesthetically to that polity. This acculturation and the formal Catholicism of most Frenchmen had kept enough strength to rally those writers to a French state they disliked when the context became her survival in the face of Germany.

1.2. F rance in the War

The Lebanese clericists' vision of the war was shaped by their bilingual bookishness as well as by religious emotions on which Allied propaganda played. Religious and other cultural sites influenced the opting for the French side by the clerical writers. Fascinated by the science of the new technology of long-range bombardment that France too developed in the War, Raf'il Nakhlah the Jesuit noted that German long-range artillery firing on Paris on 23 March 1918 and thereafter from 120 kilometers away killed in a church 79 people who had come for prayer on Good Friday.

2 Germany's indiscriminate

[or intentional? neo-pagan?] bombardments of sacred places of the Christians such as Riems cathedral fueled Shaykhu's  choice of sides: the French troops did not destroy public buildings, churches and palaces and factories as the Germans did, except when they were fortified to shelter hostile Germans - sleight of hand that barely concealed that total war had brutalized the French, too, to religious and other art or sites or culture as precious in themselves. And Shaykh now swallowed too the self-validating propaganda of the French that they, if few others, stood for principles and universal [secular] enterprises far wider than the nationalisms firing the mayhem. A collapse of France would have ended "the freedom and liberty of the whole civilized world" - not a perspective in his Ottoman-era attacks upon freemasonry emanating from the anti-clerical laicist French polity.

The critical issue of the ever expanding illegal Israeli colonial settlements on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) in the West Bank (WB), which are peace killing in eastern Jerusalem in particular, will make or break the newly resumed Palestinian – Israeli negotiations.

On July 29, 2013, those negotiations were resumed in Washington, D.C.; they are scheduled to begin in earnest in mid-August. President Barak Obama hailed them as a “promising step forward.” However, in view of more than twenty years of failed U.S. – sponsored peace making, the new talks “promise” nothing more than being a new round of failure and “conflict management,” in spite of Obama’s belief that “peace is both possible and necessary.”

According to Albert Einstein, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is “insanity,” but that is exactly what John Kerry seems to have achieved after six tours of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East since he was sworn in as the U.S. Secretary of State.

Unless the issue of settlements is addressed in accordance with international and humanitarian law as well as in compliance with the resolutions of the United Nations, Kerry will be shooting himself in the legs and his success in his peace mission would be worse than his failure. The EU’s recent anti-settlement move highlighted this fact. 

However, Kerry seems and sounds determined to pursue his mission on the basis of contradictory terms of reference, laid down by the official letter sent by the former U.S. president George W. Bush to former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon in April 2004, whereby the United States pledged to annex the major Jewish settlements to Israel, to redraw its borders accordingly and to exclude the right of return of Palestinian refugees from any agreement in the future on solving the Arab – Israeli conflict in Palestine peacefully.

Top on the agenda of the resumed negotiations are borders and security; Israel has never defined its borders nor respected the borders set by the United Nations resolution No. 181 of 1947; in the name of security, it demands borders that compromise the viability of any independent Palestinian state on the WB.

From U.S. and Israeli perspectives, “the resumption of negotiations is seen as an objective in itself,” in the words of Ghassan al-Khatib, the former spokesman of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

David Ignatius on August 2 described kerry’s efforts as a “mission impossible,” which if it fails “this time, it will cost the parties dearly;” he described the ensuing negotiations as “a kind of a benign trap, once the prey have been lured inside, it’s difficult for them to escape without either accomplishing .. peace or damaging themselves.”

Indeed in the long run, success of the resumed negotiations warn of creating a political environment that would give “legitimacy” to a new Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip to remove the “armed resistance” there to their outcome, with the overt blessing of the U,S. sponsor of the negotiations and the discreet blessing of the Arab “peace partners.”

However, the expected failure of kerry’s efforts could be worse than the failure of the Camp David summit meeting in September 2000 of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and U.S. former president Bill Clinton.

By sending his negotiators to Washington, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is again compromising his personal credibility, but worse still he risks a Palestinian implosion in the case of success, but in case the negotiations fail he risks a Palestinian explosion in rebellion against both his PA and the Israeli occupation.

Abbas has already antagonized his old allies among the members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) - including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is considered the third influential Palestinian power after the two rivals of Fatah and Hamas - who accuse him of reneging on their consensus not to resume negotiations without a stop to the expansion of Israeli colonial settlements first.

National reconciliation between the PLO and Hamas will be put on hold for at least the nine months which the negotiators set as the time frame for their negotiations.

His decision put on hold as well any Palestinian new attempt to join international organizations to build on the UN General Assembly’s recognition of Palestine as a non-member state in September 2012.

The new talks are merely “the beginning of the beginning” of “a long process” in which “there is no guarantee” for success, according to former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

All this boils down to winning Israel more time to dictate whatever borders it deems “secured,” by creating more facts on the OPT. For Palestinians, this is a waste of time that makes their dream of a national homeland in an independent state more remote. No surprise then the Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu on July 27 saw in the resumption of negotiations “a vital strategic interest of the state of Israel.”

Kerry’s personal success seems to have pressured Palestinians into being fooled again into jumping to “final status” negotiations as the best way to absolve Israel from honoring its commitments in compliance with the “interim” accords it had signed with the PLO.

Bitter Past Experience

The Palestinian wide –spread opposition to the resumption of talks is accusing Abbas of being a “believer” in peace who is about to get “stung from the same hole twice,” in reference to the bloody outcome of the U.S. – hosted Camp David summit in September 2000.

Then, the U.S. administration of Clinton pressured Arafat into “final status” negotiations. Barak, then the Israeli prime minister, found in the Camp David final status talks a golden pretext not to implement the third stage of the Oslo accords, namely to withdraw the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) from about 95% of the West Bank (WB) area and hand it over to the PA.

Linking the WB and Gaza by a “corridor” that allows free movement of people and goods between them was another commitment that has yet to be honored by Israel.

“Trying” and failing is better than “doing nothing,” Kerry said, but the failure of the Camp David trilateral summit led to the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising); ever since both the failure and the uprising were additional pretexts for the successive Israeli governments not to honor both commitments; moreover, both pretexts were the justification they used to reoccupy militarily all the PA areas and to coordinate with the U.S. the “removal” of Arafat and the “change” of his regime.

The critical issue of the illegal Israeli colonial settlements on the WB will make or break the new Kerry – sponsored talks. On July 29, James M. Wall wrote: “Israel plays the peace process game not to give away ill-gotten gains, but to protect them;” settlements come on top of those “gains;” they were “gained” under the umbrella of the “peace process,” with the tacit blessing of the well - intentioned Palestinian negotiator who did not make their removal a precondition to the resumption of peace talks right from the start.

The 2000 summit collapsed because of the Israeli insistence on continued building of colonial settlements, especially in eastern Jerusalem, which doomed to failure the peace process launched in Madrid in 1991. kerry’s resumed negotiations opened while the settlement expansion continues unabated. Now Abbas seems too late to rectify this grave mistake. No surprise the failure of the negotiations seems inevitable and will only revive the Palestinian – Israeli stalemate.

Israel’s 2013 Herzliya Assessment concluded: “The status-quo in the Palestinian territories is not sustainable, and definitely not durable… the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate is untenable. It will lead to a Palestinian mass public uprising with sporadic violence.”

Obama appealed to the negotiators to “approach these talks in good faith,” but the Secretary General of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, questioned the “good faith” of the U.S. and Israel who were “conferring about security” without the Palestinians, as if it was “their bilateral security,” although security is “a central and fundamental issue of ours and concerns our future as a whole.” Abed Rabbo’s Israeli partner in the Geneva Initiative, former cabinet minister Yossi Beilin, writing in The Jerusalem post on July 30, questioned the “good faith” of Netanyahu who “has reneged on all that he has said throughout his political career.”

Defying the bitter experience of twenty – year old peace process and strong opposition at home, Abbas seems voluntarily dragged into his last test of U.S. credibility as the peace broker, which will make or break his political career at the age of 76 years.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

An elderly lady was standing at the railing of the cruise ship holding her hat tight so that it would not blow away in the wind.

A gentleman approached her and said, "Pardon me, madam..

I do not intend to be forward but did you know that your dress is blowing up in this high wind?"

"Yes, I know," said the lady. “I need both my hands to hold onto this hat."

"But madam, you must know that you are not wearing any panties and your privates are exposed!" said the gentleman in earnest.

The woman looked down, then back up at the man and replied, "Sir, anything you see down there is 75 years old. 

I just bought this hat yesterday!"

A fourth wave of the Egyptian revolution seems inevitable, until the revolution changes the regime or the regime emerges victorious, pending another revolution.

The January 25 revolution in Egypt, which removed the former president Hosni Mubarak from power in 2011 and, in its second wave, overwhelmed the first anniversary of his elected successor Mohammad Morsi on June 30, 2013 with millions over millions of anti - Muslim Brotherhood protesters until the military intervened to remove him in turn three days later, is now entering its third stage without yet being completed, fulfilled or finished.

In a statement issued on July 27, 2013, US Secretary of State John Kerry grasped the fact that the Egyptian revolution has not yet run its course; “Its final verdict is not yet decided,” he said, “but it will be forever impacted by what happens right now.” He described the situation prevailing “now” as a “pivotal moment for Egypt.”

Years ago, John C. Campbel, in “Foreign Policy,” had described the Middle East as “a house of containment built on shifting sands,” from the perspective of the United States, and his description still applies today, no better than to the current state of affairs in Egypt, where the state has become more like a house of cards.

So far, Egypt’s revolution was more a “regime exchange” than a “regime change.” The old pro – U.S. market economy centers of power had merely rotated power among the liberal “remnants” of the Mubarak regime and the conservatives of his opposition led by the Muslim Brotherhood, with the military playing the role of the arbiter. For example, the Sawiris family billionaires who were milking them are coming back now after they were replaced by the billionaire and MB leader Khairat al-Shater and his ilks during the Morsi era. They were thus far successful in derailing and containing the revolution, which has changed nothing of the old regime, neither internally nor externally.

This rotation of power has so far proved an effective mechanism in containing the revolution and derailing it away from evolving into a new order. The political polarization along these lines is another mechanism; Mazda Majidi on July 20 wrote on the Web site of the U.S. Party of Socialism and Liberation: “A long confrontation with the military on one side and Brotherhood supporters on the other could yield a situation where the people in the streets right now will be sidelined,” and consequently their revolution aborted.

Washington D.C. is adapting to this “regime exchange” in order to prevent a “change in the regime,” which the successive US administrations have nurtured as a strategic asset to both the United States and its Israeli regional ally since the Camp David accords of 1979.

Answering his question whether the removal of Morsi was a U.S.-engineered coup, Majidi wrote that “Washington would have had no incentive to orchestrate a military coup to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood (MB);” Morsi “worked well with the U.S.,” “played a key role” in brokering a truce between Israel and Hamas in late 2012,” and in the conflict in Syria, he and the MB “were solidly behind the U.S. effort to overthrow the Syrian state;” accordingly, “Washington could live with Morsi, but it obviously has no problems with Egypt's military,” who are the most committed to the strategic ties with the U.S. and the best guardians of the peace treaty with Israel.

Maintaining or discarding those ties and that treaty will undoubtedly be the most vital dividing line externally between fulfilling the Egyptian revolution and derailing it away from disturbing the regional balance of power and status quo, which both the U.S and the Israeli beneficiaries thereof have nurtured during the past more than three decades as their “holy cow.”

No surprise, therefore, that the internal threats to this status quo have become the concern of the U.S. and Israeli allies, but Israel in particular. Israeli leaders seemed on alert to preempt this threat. On July 26, President Shimon Peres said in an Al-Hurra TV channel: “What is politics if it can’t provide people with bread?” Backed by US Republican Senator Rand Paul, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now urging the West to adopt a new “Marshall Plan” for the Egyptian economy.

Within this context monitors could interpret the U.S. refusal to label the Egyptian military latest intervention on July 3 as a coup, lest the Barak Obama administration become obliged by law to cut the U.S. aid to Egypt. Similarly Qatar, which had sponsored the Morsi –led MB government, would not withdraw its ($7b) support to Egypt. The same applies to the ($12b) prompt financial support extended by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait within (48) hours of the latest “exchange” of power in Egypt, which, in view of the U.S. strategic alliance with the three countries, could not have been promptly forthcoming without a U.S. “green light,” according to anti – American analysts.

Any U.S. Israeli “Marshall Plan,” however, will only be another mechanism to maintain and reinforce the status quo and will not change the regime in Egypt, let alone bringing in a new regime.

Beneficiaries of the status quo are keen to prove to the revolting masses that their revolution has thus far made their bad situation worse: Economically, significant capital fled abroad, Egypt’s debt is a staggering 88 percent of its GDP, tourism collapsed, agriculture hit hard, foreign investment declined, labor unrest spread, unemployment on the rise, inflation soars, economic growth plunged, public finances deteriorated, value of Egyptian pound fell, purchase power of salaries eroded, half of Egyptians live at or below poverty line, etc., and personal safety and public security have become a daily headache, with the harassment of women becoming a social phenomenon.

And in the name of democracy, according to Jon Lee Anderson, writing in The New Yorker on July 5, “the devils long contained in Egypt’s national Pandora’s box having been loosened from their chains,” so “as if everything in Egypt must now be performed by the mob, for the mob, in full view of everyone.”

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

Gaza will remain a matter of national security for Egypt. And regardless of who is in charge in Gaza, Egypt will also remain a strategic asset for Gaza, a lifeline for its people, and a mainstay of its peace and stability.

These are the irreversible facts of the ties between Egypt and Gaza. In other words, when Egypt sneezes, Gaza catches a cold.

Now some people are trying to drive a wedge between Gaza and Egypt, but they will fail. Even at the lowest point of relations between Gaza and the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, few challenged the fact that Gaza and Egypt care for one another.

Today, we hear analysts in the West Bank and Israel predicting the end of Hamas rule in Gaza, just because the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power in Egypt.

To those, I wish to say that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood never hid their ties, were proud of their connections, and made no secret of their cooperation. But the political adversaries of both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt would have us believe that anything that befalls the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will befall Hamas in Gaza, which is a massive exaggeration.

It is true that the recent events in Egypt have put an end to the high hopes Hamas had of strategic cooperation between Gaza and Egypt. It is also true that the image of Hamas as a resistance movement has been shaken. But let’s not believe everything the political adversaries of Hamas say. Let’s not believe their lies, for their only aim is to undermine the Palestinian resistance.

It has to be said, however, that Hamas was optimistic about the Arab Spring and was pleased to see like-minded governments take over in some Arab countries. It is also true that Hamas, perhaps too hastily, assumed that an alliance with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its backers in Qatar would make up for the loss of its allies in Syria and Iran. Still, we must not forget that Hamas is a resistance movement first and foremost. Its connections with the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt don’t change this fact.

Hemmed in by the Israelis, Hamas was always hoping for Egypt to come to its rescue. But even during Mohamed Morsi’s presidency, relations between Egypt and Hamas were not free from tensions and differences. Hamas also had problems with Qatar’s view of the Arab peace plan.

Now the adversaries of Hamas would have us think that just as Egyptians brought down the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinians in Gaza should expel Hamas from government. It is quite telling that Mahmoud Abbas was one of the first Arab presidents to congratulate the Egyptian army on appointing Adli Mansour as president.

Now Hamas stands accused of interfering in Egypt’s domestic affairs. This accusation was made when Morsi was in power and after he was removed from power. Hamas denied time and again that it interfered in Egypt or in any other Arab countries. And the Palestinian ambassador to Cairo, Barakat Al-Farra, said that no such accusation was ever made by Egyptian officials.

Those who make such allegations not only harm the Palestinians, but also may cause lasting damage to ties between Gaza and Egypt.

I recently heard someone claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood’s fall from grace in Egypt will weaken Hamas to the point that makes it more amenable to Palestinian reconciliation. This is nonsense. For one thing, the Palestinian schism predates the Muslim Brotherhood’s accession to power in Egypt, and it has nothing to do with Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood ties. In fact, the real reason for the delay in reconciliation is that Mahmoud Abbas is still hoping that US Secretary of State John Kerry will succeed in restarting peace talks with Israel.

Also, the Palestinian presidency continues to oppose any acts of resistance in which Hamas and other Palestinian factions living in Gaza choose to engage.

Implicating the Palestinians in Egypt’s currently divisive scene is neither to the benefit of Palestinians nor Egyptians. But it is good news for Israel.

* This article was first published and translated from Arabic by the Al-Ahram Weekly.

** Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

Stop moving away from me

I’ll be leaving very soon

My heart is ticking

Ticking & ticking

And turning as a moon

From up there I’ll be watching

All over you my sweet

To make sure you are comfortable

And the gold beneath your feet

Don’t move away, come back to me

I’ll build your home with tears

I’ll be the cushion for your knees

I’ll be the ring on your finger

I’ll be your every treat

Under their Mandate, the French greatly elaborated confessional patterns in political life.  Yet at the same time the French also built into parliamentary politics a "list" system that fostered a kind of feudalism (_iqta’iyyah).  (This feudalism too, like confessionalism, had had its beginnings in the Ottoman period).  Under the French, most electoral districts were multi-seat districts.  Given the lack of genuine party organizations and that clan loyalties remained so salient, most lists centered around a strong clan leader, usually landed.  Members of other, minority confessions in the electorate would attach themselves to the clan-boss' list on a compromise or payment basis, and pledging complete political fealty.  Money and clan influence, intimidation and violence were to dog Lebanese electoral politics during French rule.  The list system's promotion of the power and wealth of the strong, land-holding boss or _za'im_ was to be denounced as "feudalism" by young Kata’ib, pan-Syrian and pan-Arab and Kata'ib radicals: yet, this “list” set-up divided each sect unit while associating leaders from different sects in a single list.  Thus, the list system, while it delayed the accession of the national bourgeoisie to power, helped contain and defuse the confessionalism inherent in the post-1920 Lebanese polity.

 Social and clan divisions within the Catholic (and other) sects, only deepened by feudal parliamentarism, made it hard to integrate any Catholic nation or sub-nation in Lebanese political life.  By 1931, _al-Bashir_ wrote that "the party differences", divisive day-to-day politics, had shattered the unity of "the sons of the single religion", making it impossible for them to agree on shared ventures to realize "the interest of their [sectarian?] nation" (ummah).  This _al-Bashir_ item evoked an [Islamophobe] sense that "the aggressors" could assail the Christian sects' "religious affairs" and collective "interests" at any time: but no one thought of these, so preoccupied were most Maronites with their "worldly" personal and partisan-political aims.  The item viewed Lebanon's Christians as a threatened minority in relation to the mainly Muslim region: the pan-Catholic journal sought guidelines from Europe with a wrong image that England's Catholic minority had made itself a politically coherent entity to maintain its religious interests vis-a-vis British political parties.  ["al-Din wal-Ahzab" (Religion and the Parties), _al-Bashir_ 3 September 1931].  A correspondent from Hammana in the Jabal lamented that young and old, rich and poor, were now thinking only of party politicking: "this beloved Mount Lebanon is fated to have its sons and interests destroyed" ["In Hammana", _al-Bashir_ 2 April 1931 p. 4].  The radical secularists around the semi-open Syrian nationalist party of Antun Sa'adah excoriated Lebanon's clan-based "feudal" parties for their incapacity to address modern issues.  _al-Bashir's_ laments at parliamentarism's fragmentation of the political sect-unit that might have been shows how even deformed parties that manipulated the sense that the sect was vulnerable, to some extent helped a Lebanese political society to form through small selfishness.  A Lebanese Nation was saved as an inclusive possibility for the future by the clan-fragmentation of rural Lebanon, coupled with the elections and their limited, divisive prizes.  The struggles over the prizes between neighboring clan-bosses of the same sect, the resultant divisions in local society, and the need for a boss to conduct joint actions with bosses of other sects, delayed Islam or Maronitism from cohering as mega-community units in Lebanese politics.  The small, corrupt, divisions in themselves enabled Lebanese society to go on functioning and sometimes even in a way to cohere into something like a nation, for instance when ejecting the French (only possible with British support).

The sense of general crisis, and the failure of the French and their client new elite to bring development that could make life in the homeland bearable for ordinary citizens, was in the air for Catholic Lebanese in the early 1930s.  Though some Christian Lebanese elements continued to collaborate most fruitfully with the French, even they and the subordinate Lebanese government were not very hopeful that that partnership could truly make Lebanon's economy viable enough to stop the migration of Lebanese abroad.  The Lebanese Festival held by the U.S. diaspora in Bridgeport, Connecticut and in Detroit, Michigan drew some ruthless reflections from those migrants, which the pro-French press back in Lebanon published.  One Lebanese-American leader, Na'um Mukarzil, suggested that the Lebanese government establish a Department of Migration to make the departure of the Lebanese systematic, since it could not deliver the economic development to end it.  Instead of trying to limit the migration of Lebanese, the Lebanese government should facilitate it.  Mukarzil's two speeches exhorted "patriotic" service of the Lebanese homeland: that "patriotism", though, had to be expressed through economics.  Thus, he voiced a hope that the Lebanese government would encourage diaspora Lebanese in the Americas to extend their stores and family businesses into proper joint-stock companies able to then open branches in Lebanon and stimulate the economy of the homeland from which they had come.  In the same spirit of making US ethnicity's relationship with the homeland across the seas economic, Mukarzil called for the annual Lebanese Festival in Connecticut to contain an exhibition for Lebanese (and general Syrian) food products and manufactures, especially luxury textiles, carpets and handicrafts: the Festival would find markets in the USA for such imports.  Mukarzil did have a vision of bringing Lebanon into a new stage of development, but knew that the Lebanese would have to transform the laissez faire Lebanese state for that: he felt that all post-1920 Lebanese governments had themselves caused the ongoing chaotic migration by not developing the "resources and facilities of the country" (_marafiq al-bilad_).  He called for the Lebanese government to be made interventionist: not just to found a Ministry of Migration to spare diaspora Lebanese who came back to look over the possibilities the "claws" of private-sector "exploiters" ("barathin al-muntafi'in"), but that the government supervise electricity, lighting, irrigation, tobacco, and water supplies.  It was the sluggish development of those that made the enterprising despair and migrate, and offered no openings for any capital they came back with.  Mukarzil had a bleak vision that Lebanon would be unable to develop itself out of its own resource and skill base: thus, migration and the diaspora had to be made a resource: the diaspora was a "school" through which "the developed lands" trained prospective leaders who had to be enticed back to transform Lebanon with their skills and capital ["Fil-Mahjar: al-Mahrajan al-Lubnani", _al-Bashir_ 13 October 1931 p. 1.  Mukarzil delivered one of the speeches on which this article drew at the Lebanese Festival on 4 July 1931, while his brother read the other on his behalf before a function in Detroit on 6 and 7 September.  Mukarzil must have been ideologically congruent with al-Bashir, which referred to him as "our friend"].

                         Mishal Shibli agreed with Mukarzil and al-Bashir's editors that the Lebanese government had spent very little money to try to attract back the large number of Lebanese who had migrated overseas.  He urged that a serious Department of Migration be established that would conduct economic propaganda to entice the migrants or at least some of their capital back to Lebanon.  It could stress the modern judicial system and justice existing in the country, and Lebanon's stability ["Da'irat al-Muhajarat al-Lubnaniyyah" (The Lebanese Department of Migration), _al-Bashir_ 20 October 1931 p. 1].

 Mukarzil in 1931 described the bureaucrats of the subordinate Lebanese particularist statelet as "officials who strive to realize their own interests instead of the public interest".  Discussions about the diaspora highlight that even the conservative Christian nationalist settings have always had pluralistic discussion about the functions of the government machinery.  Some Maronite and Catholic circles have called for a more interventionist, bigger government machinery to meticulously engineer at least aspects of development and social change.  Their recommendations would have modified the sometimes chaotic laissez faire and undirected entrepreneurial course that accented divisions of sects in the Lebanese people, but in the 1960s and 1970s did improve the life of most sectors of the Lebanese through quick development.

                        But there was little chance that any new approach to the Lebanese diaspora would bring any fresh cultural sustenance (though it brought substantial verbal  political support) for the beleaguered particularists in Lebanon.  A new generation of Lebanese in many migrant communities in the Americas were at this time cutting their links with Lebanon to decisively assimilate themselves into their host communities.  The in any case often unpalatably anti-clerical and politically anti-particularist literary activity of the diaspora thus was already a fading tradition.  Thus, according to the New York mahjar newspaper _al-Huda_, a thoughtful somewhat Lebanon-orientated organ under the management of Salum Mukarzal, military service by the youth in the American armed forces was revolutionizing the national identification of “Lebanese and Syrians” in America, making them feel Americans first and anything else only secondarily [“Masiru Muhajirina ba’da Tul al-Ghiyab!” (What is Happening to our migrants after their long absence!) _al-Bashir_ 11 ---19??? --- March 1942]. The Lebanese and Syrians in the United States had formed a “Defend America Committee” [_al-Bashir_ 1 April 1942 p.1].  “The Arab community in America had risen up as one man to support its second homeland, and has begun to make a great contribution to its war effort”.  The youth of the about one million Arabs in America had enlisted in the Armed Forces in their thousands; their women were active in the American Red Cross; the American treasury had praised the Lebanese and Syrian communities for their subscribing millions of dollars in war bonds.  This particular article in _al-Bashir_ was more optimistic about the continued survival of distinct Lebanese culture in the _mahjar_ than the preceding _al-Huda_ item, but noted the delicate problem that “three quarters of the Arab community in America were born there, being the descendants of those struggling heroes who came to the New World during the second half of the past century.  The vast majority of them continued, despite their total integration into American life, to preserve the closest spiritual bonds with their first homeland” [“Mawqif Jaliyatina min al-Harb: al-Nubugh al-Lubnani fi Khidmat al-Hulafa’” (The Stand of Our Community Towards the War: Lebanese Capacity in the Service of the Allies), _al-Bashir_ 14 March 1942].  _al-‘Amal_, the Kataib party newspaper on 20 April 1944 suggested that the newly-formed Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs --- in Lebanon’s own long-term interest --- take unnamed steps to “bring back the largest number of migrants to the homeland and to preserve the Lebanese character of those who delay in returning.”  _al-‘Amal_ thought that “Lebanonism might survive in the diasporas twenty or thirty years more:  the only question is, what will happen after the passing of this brief period of time?”

 The Kata’ib newspaper _al-‘Amal_ was thus visualising institutions under which diaspora communities would be encouraged to repatriate themselves to Lebanon with the capital they accumulated abroad.  Those Lebanese who remained abroad would, perhaps through the provision of educational or cultural institutions that would preserve their original non-local identity, be transformed into an extraterritorial instrument of some Lebanese foreign policies --- an ethnic foreign policy lobby, of which there are many in America today in our new century.

[Researcher at the Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Melbourne 3145, Email: dennis.walker@monash.edu.au].