Those of us who are most accustomed to reading religious arguments, will know that, both in the Hebrew and in the Christian Bible, it is mentioned several times that, once conquered the Jewish city of Jerusalem, King David and his son and successor , King Solomon, wanted to expand and embellish it with imposing construction works, the most important of which were the "Royal Palace" and the "Temple of God". The material chosen in both cases to carry out the projects was wood obtained from the majestic cedar of Lebanon while the workers trained to complete the work were provided by Hiram, lord of Tire and most important among the kings of the Phoenicians, the only other ruler of the Middle East who, according to the Bible, "dealt with David and Solomon on an equal footing"; such a flattering definition, in a text that, at best, reserves words of hostility and contempt for other peoples and sovereigns of the same age, should not be ignored.
The foundations of modern Lebanon were laid in the period between 1.500 and 539 BC, when the Phoenician civilization developed from what had survived, after the invasions of the Israelites, of the Canaanite one and, subsequently, reached its apogee by founding the first A real "world economic empire". Although nowadays Lebanon is rather hastily described as an "Arab country", given that Arabic is the language most spoken in the territory and 95% of the inhabitants are classified as "Arab" according to official statistics, this designation is absolutely arbitrary.
Just like the other peoples of the Levant (Cypriots, Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians), the Lebanese are the descendants of a mix of ethnic, religious and cultural groups that have invaded, occupied or simply settled in that territory in the last 6.000 years. For this reason it is easy to say that, yesterday as today, Lebanon has always been the most multiconfessional and multicommunity of the Arab countries and the Middle East in general. The current Lebanese constitution officially recognizes the existence of 18 ethno-religious communities grouped roughly into three Muslims and a dozen Christians, plus other minor communities. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the fifties of the twentieth century, Christians were the largest group, and then left space for Muslims.
In Lebanon there is a sort of generalized taboo on the demographic question, and this explains why an official census has never been held since 1932; the cumbersome electoral system, sectarianism and the pre-approved subdivision of the "seats", in addition to the need to ensure peaceful coexistence among all communities, have meant that, for the quiet political life, the "real" numbers are deliberately ignored . Nonetheless, this fundamental mutation has not escaped anyone, be it the scientist, the local administrator or the common man of the street, to whatever confession they belong. What is not clear, however, is the amplitude of the oscillation and this leaves the field open to speculation.
Fertility and emigration differentials made Maronite Christians, Eastern Rite Catholics, the most numerous when the so-called "Great Lebanon" was created by the French mandate authorities in the aftermath of the end of the Ottoman Empire, from 32% in 1922 to 19-21% today. They ceded hegemony to the Shiites, whose proportion during the same period increased from 17,2% to 27-32%.
Demographic metamorphosis could not have taken place without affecting political balances; It made "political Maronitism" tremble, this quasi-monopoly of the key posts of the state held by the most important Christian group and was the backdrop for both the crisis of 1958 and the dramatic civil war of 1975-90. In hindsight, however, Lebanon is used to such peaceful or violent adaptations to demography. It should be remembered, for example, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the supreme authority over the territory of present-day Lebanon was administered by the Ottoman Empire through a Druze emir. However, already at that time, power was imperceptibly passing into the hands of the Maronites, much more demographically dynamic than the numerically stagnant Druze. Even at that time, the political adjustment took place with an act of violence with over 10.000 Maronites who were massacred by the Druze during the community violence of 1860. Although militarily victorious, the Druze could not help but gradually surrender control of the territory to Maronites, slipping into a subordinate position after over 400 years of unchallenged domination.
The numerical rise of the Shiites, the next step in the demographic evolution of the country, may seem like an irony of history, in fact the French mandate authorities had been tempted to predict their long-term disappearance! Such a strong numerical increase after a century depends on a high birth rate that the French had not adequately assessed. Although Lebanon as a whole had passed the 50% threshold of male literacy for men aged between 20 and 24 as early as 1920, to obtain the same result for women it was necessary to wait for 1957, but already by 1950 the total national fertility rate had started to drop for all communities except Shiites. In fact, up to the 1975-90 war, Lebanese Shiite women, on average throughout their reproductive life, gave birth to 8,5 children on average; this was the absolute record for the entire Middle East (perhaps equaled only by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish women of Israel). In terms of demographic transition, the delay of the Shiites was evident compared to the Sunnis (6,9 children per woman), the Druze (5,3 children per woman) and Maronite Christians (5,1 children per woman). Without going to seek the explanation in hypothetical religious hyperbolas, this difference is easily explained by remembering that the Shiites have always represented in Lebanon the poorest and least schooled community group and this explains both the high fertility and the high mortality that characterized them until recently. Although delayed, however, educational development has arrived, and with it the demographic transition. Their fertility began to decline around 1975, a phenomenon which partly contributes to explaining the violence of the civil war but which also allows us to glimpse the possibility of a peaceful Lebanon as regards community tensions.
It is clear that the Lebanese civil war broke out at the decisive moment of the demographic transition of the country, while the latter is destabilized not only by the mass changes related to the communities and by the massive influx of Palestinian refugees, but also because the Muslim communities are invested by a cultural and demographic transformation of considerable size. Education, residency in the city, openness to the media, the globalization of spirits are no longer the prerogative of Christians alone and this modernization directly affects reproductive behavior. The speed of the transition between 1975 and 2015 was in fact higher among Shiites (-3,2% of births on an annual basis) than among all other groups (-3% among Sunnis, -2,3% between Maronites and other Christians). But in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the world and in history, a destabilization of traditional mentalities caused by progress contributes to explaining the apparent absurdity of the 1975-90 civil war (which, on the whole, caused mourning of varying magnitude to as many as 96 % of the population). This war, as well as the Israeli bombings, in particular those of 2006, caused an indiscriminate pauperization of the confessions, which certainly contributed to the adoption of the restricted mononuclear family in the last few years.
A quick comparison starting from today's data shows how communities have come closer together demographically, perhaps expecting to become politically too. In 2015 the fertility of Shiite women fell to 2,2 children per woman (from 8,5 in 1975), that of the Sunnis to 1,9 (from 6,9 in 1975), that of the Druze to 1,55 (against 5,3 in 1975), that of Maronites at 1,7 (compared to 5,1 in 1975) and that of non-Maronite Christian women at 1,5 (compared to 5 in 1975). Compared to those of the country as a whole (5,5 children per woman in 1975 and 1,74 children per woman in 2015), the data of the various communities demonstrate how, despite apparent cultural and religious differences, all Lebanese communities are converging towards a common model of family planning, and by extension, of material and value development.
Marriage is much later everywhere than in other Arab countries and the age differences between the spouses are closer and here too, the Shiite areas show a strong propensity for "modernity". Not only that, viewed in a broader perspective, the data of Lebanon are absolutely comparable with those of the countries of the European continent and most of the ex-Soviet area; first of all the Arab countries and the Middle East in general, Lebanon is moving towards a family model of European origin. The Lebanese couple is everywhere nuclear, in Muslim as well as Christian regions.
Curiously, by deciding to group the data for the two major fields (Muslim and Christian) we would find that the differences relating to total fertility are substantially similar to those existing, for example, between France and the United Kingdom. It is not certain that these family choices have cheered the leaders of Hezbollah and Amal, the main Shiite political parties, who would have probably preferred an increase in their electoral and militant base thanks to a Shiite "cradle war". But political parties or machine guns of militant organizations cannot force people to have more children than they want and even Hezbollah's initiative to finance, in its specialized clinics, whole very expensive programs for the fight against infertility and for the in vitro fertilization, did not produce the expected effects.
A final aspect that deserves our attention is that related to matrilocality and endogamy; in fact, it often happens that women are the heads of families in southern Shiite Lebanon as well as in Christian Beirut. Indeed, matrilocality is even more widespread in the Shiite south of Lebanon (14%) than in the Christian zone (4,3%) or in the north with a Sunni majority (11,3%).
Lebanese matrilocality is a direct legacy of the Phoenician past, and its permanence at such important levels precisely among Muslim communities constitutes further evidence that the historical and cultural substrate on which the country rests is as strong among Muslims as it is between Christians, with all due respect to those who, in the past or present, would like to see the only "true Lebanese" in the Maronites as having the primacy of "Phoenicianism". Lebanon is not even divided openly by the problem of the choice between endogamy and exogamy, because Christians (Maronites and non-Maronites) are not, like other Christians in the world, totally refractory to the marriage between carnal cousins: 10,7% in the Mount area of Lebanon against 20% in the Shiite area of southern Lebanon. Although the difference is not insignificant, even the rate that corresponds to the Shiite region remains significantly lower than that of neighboring Syria, where it reaches 35%. These demographic convergences contradict a political topicality which suggests that conflicts between communities could resume; on the contrary, perhaps these data are the precursor sign of the political and ideological understandings to come. If, due to their demographic behavior, the Shiites reached the other Lebanese, they would do so because they share the same values more than they normally believe and beyond what they themselves think. In any case, they appear to be closer culturally to the Lebanese Christians, Sunnis and Druze than they are to the Syrians (more than 3 children before the current civil war) and to the Jordanians who continue to give birth to almost 4 children, or to Israeli Jews who are at 3,1.
The demographic present of Lebanon perhaps heralds a "Swiss" political future, an original form of democracy, communitarianized yes, but negotiating and peaceful. The proof of what has just been said can be found in the events that characterized the recent Lebanese political history when, in the aftermath of the Syrian withdrawal, the country was involved in a new dramatic war with Israel (through Hezbollah) which was followed by a profound political crisis that lasted between 2006 and 2008 and characterized by numerous high-profile assassinations (such as that of Pierre Amine Gemayel in 2006) and real clashes between state authorities and Sunni-inspired fundamentalist groups (battles in the fields of Nahr al-Bared, Tripoli and Ain al-Hilweh in 2007) and between different factions of the national political-confessional array (2008), as well as by the current protests that have been paralyzing the country since October 2019. the country has repeatedly found itself on the brink of the abyss and most of the international observers have given the appearance of a new war civil, all local political actors have finally opted for negotiation which, although not completely satisfactory for the more extremist fringes, does not mind the centers of power around which big business revolves or ordinary people.
Quiet, even if not completely stabilized, the internal front, the only real threats to Lebanon's stability are of an "external" nature and come from the two countries which, in the past and in the present, have influenced and influence the events more than any other of the "Country of the Cedars": Syria and Israel. Lebanon is one of the few states in the world that is still officially at war with Israel. The Lebanese armed forces participated in the disastrous "First Arab-Israeli War", in 1948-49, and subsequently, the country welcomed a large number of Palestinian refugees (who today amount to almost 500.000 souls), in addition to the PLO headquarters itself. (1970); events that greatly contributed to breaking the already delicate internal balance and plunging the country into civil war.
Israel has intervened numerous times and for various reasons in Lebanon but, overall, the general strategy towards its albeit fragile northern neighbor has failed dramatically, with even embarrassing implications if one thinks, for example, that the massive intervention of 1982 ( Operation Peace in Galilee), while managing to bring about the withdrawal of the PLO from the country, laid the foundations for the birth of Hezbollah, while the violent bombings of 2006 aimed at destroying the military power of the Shiite militant party, instead ended up increasing popularity at home and abroad.
Although even in recent years Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene again in Lebanon due to the renewed power of Hezbollah, there are a number of considerations that should make strategists of the Jewish state desist from the "easy trigger" policy. First of all, because already in 2006 Hezbollah has shown that it possesses the armaments necessary to engage the Israeli Defense Forces in an exhausting asymmetric conflict and to be able to inflict a "local defeat" on it. Furthermore, the availability of a powerful arsenal of rockets and medium-range missiles (which according to some estimates would have now exceeded 150.000 pieces) would guarantee the movement, in the event of an escalation, to unleash for several weeks a continuous flood of fire against the whole territory Israel, from Metulla to Eilat, and against which even the multilayer deployment of the Israeli anti-missile defense would ultimately be impotent. If Israel wants to provoke a new conflict against Hezbollah on Lebanese soil, it will do so only at its own risk.
The other hot front is Syria. Here Lebanon plays a game as complicated as the civil war that is shaking its cumbersome neighbor; in fact, state authorities are trying in every way to prevent the country from being dragged into a war in which, at the same time, Hezbollah plays an absolutely fundamental role.
Already since the degeneration of the 2011 street protests, Hezbollah has sided openly with the government of Damascus and, since 2013, has deployed a good part of its fighting force and its arsenals in Syrian territory in order to crush the Sunni insurgency. The endeavor has not proved at all simple for the "Party of God" which, to date, seems to have lost almost 2 men in the course of grueling fighting in the Levantine land. Although the armed intervention in Syria has raised many controversies in the "Country of the Cedars" and has favored an intensification of the institutional clash between "the Alliance of March 14th" and "the Alliance of March 8th" (the two main galaxies of parties respectively "anti-Syria" and "pro-Syria"), the degeneration of the war in Syria into open sectarian conflict and "proto-world war" has meant that, over time, the various souls of the Lebanese political-confessional panorama eventually convinced themselves of the "sacredness" of Hezbollah's intervention to encourage the re-stabilization of the powerful neighbor.
For its part, Hezbollah has done everything to capitalize on the domestic front by presenting its involvement in the "Siraq" war as an operation that, in addition to the Iranian ones, also holds Lebanese national interests at heart. Hence the riot not only of Hezbollah's yellow pennants but also of Lebanese national flags at every funeral of the Shiite casualties at the front.
In the meantime, at home, the Lebanese Customs Service has seized, over the past few years, huge quantities of weapons, money and drugs directed towards the Syrian carter while the various intelligence agencies of the country, especially the very powerful "Direction Générale de la Sécurité de l 'Etat Libanais "and" La Sûreté Générale "carefully monitor the activities of Sunni extremist groups on the territory of the country, in the refugee camps (which now house over 2 million Syrians) and on the Syrian territories facing Lebanese territory. Thanks to these coverage and to a substantial close collaboration both with Hezbollah and with the Syrian Armed Forces, both the Lebanese Armed Forces (Forces Armées Libanaises) and the Internal Security Forces (Forces de Sécurité Intérieure) while failing to prevent all attacks terrorists, however, managed to effectively limit the offensive episodes of both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra on Lebanese territory and prevent the complex of external pressures and internal centrifugal pressures from causing the fire to break out.
Finally, it is necessary to ask what possibilities will open up for Lebanon once the conflict in Syria reaches its long-awaited conclusion. Well, it is absolutely foreseeable that, in the years immediately following the end of the crisis, Lebanon will become the main hub for direct funding for the reconstruction of the battered near Levantine and that the country will play a first-rate role on the Syrian scene, alongside the far more powerful than Iran, Russia and China. The destruction caused by the war and the intervention of foreign powers have undoubtedly weakened both Syria and President Assad, with the result that he is no longer able to project the same influence over the years on the "Country of the Cedars" pre-crisis, in fact, it is very likely that the power relations will be reversed, with Syria much more dependent on the Lebanese economic assets, the Hezbollah militias and the cooperation with the Lebanese secret services for its reconstruction, security and prevention of terrorist infiltrations and attacks. The labyrinth of the Syrian bureaucracy is as complicated as the civil war itself, and the Lebanese banks are the only ones to have both the operational skills and the hooks to sail safely and quickly this "sea" exactly as their Phoenician ancestors sailed the Mediterranean .
From his tomb located about four kilometers away from Tire, in the present-day village of Hannaouiye / Hanawiya, King Hiram rests and smiles satisfied, thinking that, nowadays as in the biblical era, all commercial traffic in the Middle East that matters have their favorite hub in his land.
