The Intifāḍat al-Dikhān: Elements of peasant conflict in the South of Lebanon on the eve of the civil war

From the late 1960s up to the outbreak of the Civil War (1975-1990), Lebanon experienced the widest and most longstanding wave of social conflict in its post-colonial history. Amid this unprecedented upsurge, combative peasant movements emerged and activated from the deep North to the deepest South, becoming an integral part of the process of transgressive activation of Lebanese subaltern groups upon which the domestic dynamics leading up to the Civil War (1975-1990) sedimented and found expression. Among them, a prominent position got occupied by the tobacco growers of South Lebanon. Their mobilization for better purchase prices and licensing policies quickly became a broad-based accusation against the organic relation between political and economic power defining the nature and articulation of the Lebanese state. In their process of politicization and organizing, a central role was played by the Lebanese Marxist Lefts, most notably – albeit not exclusively – the Communist Party (LCP), which, especially after the Third Congress of 1972, put the agrarian question to the core of its militant agenda. Based on new and original documentary and oral sources, the article aims to retrieve the forgotten history of South Lebanon’s Intifāḍat al-Dikhān (Tobacco intifada, as it is commonly named by those who embodied it), framing it in the complex dialectics between structural triggers, state repression, and the new commitment to direct action by the Lebanese Marxist Lefts in the shadow of the Global 1960s.