Political parties
Besides zu’ama, a large number of political parties were active in Lebanon. Some of them were no more than a za’im’s clients. Ideological parties like the Ba’ath and the Communist Party mostly appealed to young, unmarried men who usually left the parties once they started a family.
21 Urbanisation also played a part: people new in town don’t have anything to offer the local zu’ama because they still voted in their village of birth.
22 At the same time the zu’ama in those villages had nothing to offer them because they had no influence in the new habitats of the migrants. As the Sunnis (as well as the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics) traditionally lived in the cities, this factor was not as strong for them. Many Maronites moved to Beirut in the 1950s and in the 1960s and ‘70s, Shi’ites moved there in large numbers.
23 This would be made worse during the course of the civil war by the Israeli raids in southern Lebanon where many Shi’ites lived.
These newcomers were more inclined to join national political parties who were represented in their old as well as their new residences. For the Maronites this was the Kataeb, for the Shi’ites (at first) the communists and radical leftist groups. The Shi’ite radicalisation was reinforced because the areas where they settled were inhabited by Palestinians or had Palestinian camps (more on this in the next chapter).
Most parties combined ideology with personal and sectarian ties. There are a couple of clues to this:
- Party leaders were sometimes members of important families. Farouq al-Moqaddam, for instance, the leader of the 24 October Movement, was a descendant of a family of landowners from Tripoli.24
- Party leaders were often succeeded by their sons or brothers. Bachir Gemayel succeeded his father Pierre as leader of the Kataeb. Walid Jumblatt succeeded his father Kamal. In Sidon the Nasserist Marouf Saad was elected in 1957. He was of humble descent and ideologically (Nasserist) inspired yet he was succeeded by his son Mustapha in 1975. In 1985 he became blind form a bomb attack and his brother Osama took over the executive of his party/militia (though Mustapha was still the leader in a formal sense).25
- The parties often had a following that was limited to a single sect - like the Kataeb for the Maronites, the PSP for the Druze and the SSNP for the Greek Orthodox – or a single town – like Saad’s and al-Moqaddam’s parties. The fact that the party leaders in question were only known or popular locally must have contributed to that.