When the two countries achieved their independence from France, the geography was more residence- than demography-based. It continued to permit the Maronites to claim pride of place, while there were more Christians in Syria at the time than there were in Lebanon. It was said by many that the Maronite Patriarch declined to ask for the borders of Lebanon to extend to Wadi Nasara in Syria and include the Orthodox Christians there. Much of this is the stuff of legend, although the number of Christians in Syria and their presence made the Christians of Lebanon feel two things. One was a reassurance that Syria also had a “Christian face,” one not limited to the history of Christianity. The second was that the feeling of Lebanon as a modern political entity had become strong enough to allow Lebanese and Syrian Christians to perceive that they differed from each other. It’s true that Michel Chiha added “refuge for oppressed minorities” to his definition of Lebanon, but he also retained an idea of “non-neighborly” relations with certain groups, namely the Armenians, Syriacs and Assyrians, and not the fundamental bloc of Syrian Christians.
These two new separate political entities were to a large extent determined by the psychological independence of each. There was awareness that the division of these two-post-Sykes-Picot political entities wasn’t particularly favorable when it came to the Druze of each country, for example, even though the Druze had a role in establishing the idea of Lebanon. But everything has changed today. The era of Maronite supremacy in Lebanon has ended, while the numerical supremacy of Syrian Christians compared to Lebanese Christians lost its impact long ago. Lebanese Christians have only taken modest advantage of the loss of Iraq and Syria’s loss of a large number of Christians. At the same time, Christians in the Levant have lost their sense of separation based on these post-Sykes-Picot states. You begin to hear comments such as “they dress and eat like we do.” There has been an increasing sense of a common Levantine Christianity, not just because Gen. Michel Aoun and his political current have exploited this notion, or because of the policy of “alliance of minorities,” but because it’s an automatic result of the collapse of these states.
In reality, the ways of dealing with Syrian Christian refugees can be measured on two levels.
The first is when “Syrians” are discussed as a whole. Previously, during the Civil War and era of Syrian tutelage, it was preferable to speak of “the Syrian,” a singular that also meant an absolute. It meant Hafez Assad, the Syrian army, and Syrian workers. Today, there is less talk of “the Syrian” in this sense; people have come to speak of them in the plural, in a reference to their demographic weight and the repercussions of their presence.
At the second level, there is a serious attempt to distinguish among “the Syrians” and not render all of them “Syrians,” when this term is used. The largest concentration of Syrians is in areas with a high percentage of Sunnis, such as north and east Lebanon, with the resulting daily burden of life in these areas. But “the Syrians” in the view of Lebanese Christians and Shiites form a “Sunni bloc,” which represents a dual problem. First, they aren’t Lebanese, but like the Palestinians in Lebanon they’re potential members of Lebanon’s Sunni sect. Today, the overwhelming majority of residents of Lebanon from all nationalities are Sunni, and this is expressed in types of sectarian awareness in different forms, much of which involves tension. This doesn’t take away from the formation of a Sunni Lebanese negativity toward the refugees, while there is the irony of the emergence of people who blame the Syrians for their revolution against the regime of Bashar Assad, while there are those who blame them for not bringing down the regime. This feeds a general negativity, some of it of an offensive character, based on these two contradictory foundations.
In the custom of Lebanese Christians, Syrians mean one thing, and Syrian Christians mean something else. They are, socially, and in relation to the Lebanese imagination, not just Christian but Lebanese also, or the “most Lebanese” of the Syrians. At the same time, there is a slowdown in the rise of the numbers of refugees and this intersects with the fact that most of them are Sunnis, i.e. the third major component of Lebanon, albeit divided into three categories: Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian.
There are certainly feelings of racism against Syrian refugees. They have been “created” as an element that is different than Lebanese but it hasn’t produced a unified Lebanese response to them. There is no all-encompassing Lebanese racism, but rather racisms, each having its own problem with the Syrians; this intersects with the problem with Lebanese as well.
This meeting of racisms at a particular moment might hint that we are on the threshold of having the conviction, even if passively, that the Lebanese have become a people in and of itself. It might also hint that what was torn apart by the Syrian tutelage and uprising is being united by the demographic threat, but this is deceptive.
This sectarian consciousness is a vital, malevolent thing. On the one hand, it overestimates the seriousness of the colonial division of Syria and Lebanon, while on the other, it breaks down these “national” borders with its knowledge, functions and desires.