According to Sourcemakeup.com, Lebanon is an Middle Eastern state on the Mediterranean, bordering Israel and Syria, whose history it shared until the foundation of an autonomous state with this name, in 1920. From the Islamic conquest (634) to the end of the Ottoman period, the territory of the present Lebanon had given refuge, in its mountainous part (the Jabal Lubnan) and in the Biqa valley, to Christian and Muslim religious minorities, who had established autonomous communities there. On the coastal strip, with the centers of Tire, Tripoli and Sidon, seat of the Latin kingdoms at the time of the Crusades, the Mamluk and then Ottoman government was exercised, while the mountainous region was dominated in a semi-independent way, from the 12th to the 17th century., from the Ma‛n family, of Druze religion, to which the Emir Fakhr al-din belonged. After the failure, in 1635, of Fakhr al-din’s attempt to establish an autonomous state from Ottoman control, the Shihab family, of Maronite faith, took power and reached its apogee with Emir Bashir Shihab II, appointed governor by the Ottomans. Shihab, however, came into conflict, between 1821 and 1825, with the rival family of the Jumblatt, of Druze faith, which he defeated by allying himself with the Egypt of Muhammad ‛Ali and with France, thus laying the foundations of a sectarian conflict that would be continued until the following century and which led, in the following decades, to great massacres in the two communities. In the conflict, France and Egypt sided with the Maronites, England and the Ottoman Empire with the Druze, until the Ottoman government, with the European agreement, limited the hegemony of the Maronites to a limited territory of Jabal, guaranteeing the Druze de facto power over the remaining internal territory.
The structure achieved in 1920 allowed France to cut out from the mandate on Syria that it had been assigned a State of the Great Lebanon, with its capital Beirut, around theMaronite enclave, adding the coastal area and the Biqa valley, inhabited mainly by Muslims. The Christian demographic majority thus obtained was contested by the Muslims, until the agreements established during the 1920s, and confirmed by the National Pact (1943), shared political power between Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, albeit with an advantage in favor of the former. The fragile equilibrium achieved lasted until 1958, when the foundation of the RAU (united Arab ➔ , Republic) sparked the revolt of the Muslim population, quelled by the American intervention in the country within the framework of the Eisenhower doctrine. The revision of the constitutional pact requested by the Muslims on the basis of the changed demographic balance was denied by the Maronite Christians. The tension increased after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and with the cd. Black September, which moved the bases of the Palestinian guerrilla to Lebanon, violating the sovereignty of the Lebanese state and creating conflicts within the government structure and the national army, destined to split into its sectarian components. In this context, in 1975, the civil war began. Syria intervened alongside the Maronites and against the presence of the PLO, the target of Israeli reprisals for attacks from Lebanese soil. A first truce, reached in 1976, was broken by the intervention of the Christian militias and the beginning of a long series of political assassinations. In 1978, Israel first invaded the Lebanon, occupying the area south of the Litani River, which it would maintain until 2000. The Camp David Accords, in the same year, instead pushed Syria to support the Sunni alliance., Druze and PLO, abandoning the Maronites, who found support in the Israelis. The years up to 1982 saw the intensification of clashes between Syrians and Maronites and the attacks and retaliation of Palestinians and Israelis, while the Shiite population, which had remained on the sidelines of the conflict until then, was born Hizbullah, driven by the Iranian revolution of 1979. In 1982, the Israeli minister M. Begin ordered the invasion of the Lebanon, to eradicate the bases of the Palestinian guerrilla. The Israeli army arrived in Beirut, which it besieged and bombed for weeks, until the intervention of the United Nations and an international peacekeeping force brought the bombing to an end and the protected evacuation of Palestinians and Syrians from Beirut. As the Israeli troops withdrew, B. Gemayel (➔ Giumayyil, Amin), the leader of the Maronite architect of the alliance with the Israelis and leader of the Christian militia, who became president of Lebanon. With the withdrawal of Israel and the expulsion of the PLO, the civil war reignited between the various communities and within them under the direction of Syria, which remained the only external force in the field.
The apex of the conflict was reached when, in 1988, A. Gemayel entrusted the office of prime minister to the Maronite general M. Aoun, violating the rules of the National Pact and sparking the reaction of the Sunni camp and Syria. The intervention of the Arab League managed to bring all the parties together for an agreement, which was signed in 1989 in Taif, and established the rebalancing of the parliamentary representation of the community components, assigning greater weight to Muslims. The last act of the civil war was Aoun’s revolt against the terms of the agreement; this was repressed by Syria, which remained in Lebanon until 2005, accepting to withdraw only after the wave of popular demonstrations (the so-called Cedar Revolution), following the assassination of Prime Minister R. Hariri. Since the end of the war, the country has rebuilt the national political institutions devastated by sectarianism and affirmed its sovereignty, against the interference of Syria and Israel, but also, internally, against the militarization of the southern Shiite regions imposed by Hizbullah; the latter, in the summer of 2006, attacked Israel, causing a new conflict, during which the Israeli army invaded again, briefly, the Lebanon and Beirut was bombed. The 2009 elections, won by the alliance of anti-Syrian, Sunni and Christian parties, confirmed the evolution of Lebanon towards national unity.
