The “Apple of Discord”: The Btekhnay Rally and the (Ephemeral?) Subversion of Mount Lebanon’s Politics of Space (1965)

On the early autumn of 1965, the village of Btekhnayeh, in the caza of Aley, Mount Lebanon, became for a few days the center of Lebanese political life. After months of intense mobilizations, with the support of a coalition of leftist forces headed by the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) Kamal Jumblatt, on September 25 about 20.000 fruit growers from the whole region held an unprecedented demonstration to oppose and denounce the speculative policies of the agricultural monopolists, marking the first great public questioning of the Merchant Republic and its social costs. This unexpected showdown and the symbolic transgression of the very foundations of Lebanese post-colonial order that it conveyed provoked among Lebanese conservative political circles an incredible alarm. So to re-establish the symbolic boundaries that the growers had blatantly transgressed, a counter-rally in the neighboring village of Naba Safa was immediately organized for the following week. There, the re-appropriation and the re-signification of the political spatiality of Mount Lebanon performed by the Btekhnayeh attendants were reverted and re-semantized, in a veritable mirror game in whose nooks historical, ideological and even dynastic rivalries found their terrain of confrontation. The Btekhnayeh rally represented the inaugural act of the transition of rural Lebanon from a locus of preservation to a locus of conflict and contestation of Lebanese post-colonial order. To lead and trace the boundaries of this transition, the political contention of Lebanese peasantry, whose organic relation with the Leftist and progressive forces deeply modified the political geographies and balances of power of the country. Nevertheless, despite upon this process sedimented a substantial part of the domestic tensions, fractures and alliances ultimately expressed in the Lebanese Civil War, exception made for the South of Lebanon, the radicalization of Lebanese rural spatialities has found little space in the research agendas on the country. The purposed contribution wants to put a first landmark on the investigation of the subject, through the genealogical retrieval of the Btekhnayeh rally and its spatial-political implications. In particular, after tracing a brief historical overview of the political representations of Mount Lebanon and their political-ideological function, the contribution will investigate the role played by the use and the signification of space in the events exposed, to then re-collocate them in the broader set of political, socio-economic and ideological tensions which were crossing the country and their aftermaths. The paper contends that the under-investigation of the contention-driven radicalization of rural Lebanon has severely limited the knowledge and the understanding of the contentious dynamics which crossed and shaped the national political landscape during the Civil conflict, as it was also from the prior rural strives that the actors and the agendas which opposed each other from region to region during the War stemmed from.