612
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was being invited to spend an evening with one of the most pas–
sionate figures in Middle Eastern politics. And I had already seen
enough of this country and this people to know that their politics were
immensely momentous,
interesting,
to me in particular and to all
my
contemporaries... . Is it not difficult, then, to conceive my hesitation?
In Paris, it is difficult. In Beirut, not at all. The Lebanon is an
unstable construction, delicately balanced between Christians and Mos–
lems-and the mysterious Druzes, who seem to be neither the one nor
the other. Edde was opposed to this balance, i.e., opposed to the pact
by which the country lived . He claimed that the predominately Mos–
lem territories of the north and the south had been arbitrarily added
to the country at the close of the French mandate. They were inhabited
by large numbers of typical Arab fellahin, ignorant, impoverished and
illiterate. The looked, not towards Beirut, but towards Damascus and
Cairo. They were in no sense Lebanese.
The real Lebanon, the only one, was the "Mountain," the tradi·
tional fortress of Christianity in the Middle East, inhabited by devout
peasants whose standard of living was comparable to that of the north·
ern Itali ans, or even the French. These people, said Edde, were not
Arabs. They had their own
mOTes,
their own history; a remarkably
prosperous one since the Capitulations of 1860. For centuries they had
defended their high-perched monasteries, impervious to Islam. And they
were now being sold by Bechara el-Khoury, a Christian himself, God
forgive him, for fear of the wooden sabers of the Arab League. Bechara
groveled before the Syrians, accepted every insult and economic dis·
advantage, did what he could to prove himself more Arab than the
Arabs. But the real Lebanese knew that their enemies were not the
white men in Tel Aviv, but the cynical Asiatic rulers of Damascus and
Bagdad.
Such was the argument of Emile Edde. I had had a taste of it
already, racism and all, from his son. But whether or not the Moun·
tain was being sacrificed to appease the Moslems, I knew that
Edd~
would not dare to say these things aloud. In the Lebanon, Christians
and Moslems could not discuss each other in public except with the
tortuous and over-insistent politeness which was born of their common
anxiety. Anything more, or less, they viewed as incitement to murder.
There was something half-grasped and vaguely familiar in this
communal obsession, something which filled me with a naive excite–
ment, as though I were discovering the key to an old and terrifying
dream. One looked at a map of the Fertile Crescent and found Syria,
the Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Transjordan. One transferred to these abo
