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There were many in Lebanon who placed the blame for the 1975 civil war squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. To former president Camille Chamoun, still one of the most influential Maronite leaders in the mid-1970s, the conflict was never a civil war: ?It began and continued to be a war between Lebanese and Palestinians? that, he argued, was harnessed by Lebanese Muslims to help them ?seize the supreme authority over the whole of the country.?38 Chamoun was being economical with the truth. Differences between the Lebanese had grown so profound that the Palestinians were no more than a catalyst in a conflict to redefine politics in Lebanon. In the early 1970s, Muslims, Druzes, Pan-Arabs, and Leftist organizations, including some Christians, forged a political coalition called the National Movement. Their goal was to overturn Lebanon’s outdated sectarian system and replace it with a secular democracy of one citizen, one vote. The head of this coalition was Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. Born in 1917 in his family’s stronghold in the village of Moukhtara, Jumblatt studied law and philosophy in Paris and at the Jesuit University in Beirut before entering the Lebanese parliament in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine. “Only a secular, progressive Lebanon freed of confessionalism,” he maintained, “could ever hope to survive.”39 To his critics, Jumblatt’s call for a secular Lebanon was nothing less than a bid for Muslim majority rule—by the mid-1970s, Lebanese Muslims were estimated to outnumber Christians by a ratio of 55:45—and the end of Lebanon’s identity as a Christian state in the Middle East. The Palestinians, in Jumblatt’s view, were but a contributing factor in a war that was fundamentally between the Lebanese. “If the Lebanese had not been ready for an explosion,” he reasoned, “there would have been no explosion.” The differences between Chamoun’s and Jumblatt’s views of Lebanon could not be more profound. The Maronite leader Chamoun was wedded to preserving the National Pact distribution of power—and through it the privileged position of Christians in Lebanon. Jumblatt and the National Movement called for a new order based on equal rights of citizenship that would advantage Lebanon’s Muslim majority. At root it was a power struggle over who would rule Lebanon, with both sides claiming the moral high ground. One contemporary described Chamoun and Jumblatt as “paragons to their supporters and monsters to their opponents” who “detest and cold shoulder one another, both entrenched in their palaces and in their certainties.”40 Conflict between defenders of the status quo and proponents of social revolution came to a head in the spring of 1975. That March, Muslim fishermen in the southern city of Sidon went on strike to protest a new fishing monopoly they feared would destroy their livelihood. The consortium was run by Camille Chamoun and a number of other Maronites, making a sectarian issue of what was at heart industrial action. The fishermen mounted demonstrations, which the Maronite-commanded Lebanese army was dispatched to quell. The National Movement condemned the military intervention as a Maronite army defending Maronite big business. The army fired on protesters and killed Ma‘ruf Sa’d, a Su
Throughout the summer of 1975, life in Beirut took on an u