Lebanon under French Occupation

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On April 10, 1946 AD, the last French troops left Lebanon. In the wake of World War I and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Britain and France occupied the extensive land of Shaam or Greater Syria, and carved it up into Palestine and Jordan under British control, and modern Syria and Lebanon under French control.
The French plan was to create a Christian state in Lebanon for the local Maronite sect in order to weaken the Muslim majority, similar to the plot of the British to illegally settle the Zionists of Europe in Palestine for creating Israel. In 1943, the French government in exile, while France was under German occupation, imposed a communally divisive constitution on Lebanon, according to which the President should be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the parliament a Shi’ite Muslim, although the Shi’ites were the largest single group in the land.
In 1945, following end of World War Two, Lebanon was granted independence and the following year the French forces withdrew. The Shi’ite Muslims, although the largest single group in Lebanon, were long oppressed since the time of the Ayyubid and Ottoman rulers, until the arrival of the charismatic Iranian religious scholar, Imam Seyyed Musa Sadr in the late 1950s.
He uplifted their social status and prepared the ground for making them a powerful force in Lebanon. Today, the legendary anti-terrorist movement, Hezbollah, not only defends the birthrights of the Lebanese Shi’ites but the rights of all people of Lebanon against the plots of the Zionist entity, the US, West European regimes, Arab reactionary states, and their local agents, trying to subvert the country.