Greater Lebanon

And today, through Lebanon, all our work is to bring back our identity, to save our identity, because this will help the people make the right choices and know where to go.

So today we're going through exactly what happened when Grand Liban, Greater Lebanon, became independent in 1943.

Between its creation in 1920 and its independence in 1943, there was this huge conflict between the two currents.

The Maronites, who were called isolationists, who wanted the Syriac language, who wanted the Christian identity, who wanted to be Mediterranean, and then the Maronites that were called integrationists, and who actually wanted to reject all that and to become Arabs, to be able to integrate within the Arab world.

Except among the Christian population of Mount Lebanon, resentment against the French presence was nearly universal.

and in Syria, feelings against the creation of Greater Lebanon and the division of the rest of the country into four separate statelets ran high.

Syrian notables, educated in the West or at Ottoman schools, and accustomed to running their local administrations deeply, resented orders that made the actions of every local official subject to French approval.

Syrian military officers were offended when forced to accept commissions far below their Ottoman ranks.