3outside of the country's own borders. At full strength, the army consisted of only 19,000 men, and its training and equip ment were best suited to the maintenance of internal peace.
The Lebanese Army, like the country's government, was a patchwork of contradictions and compromises. In total strength, the army had a slight majority of Muslims. Two thirds of the officers, however, were Christians, as were a majority of its 24 battalion commanders.6 Additionally, the two most important posts in the army Commander of the Armed Forces, and the Chief of Military Intelligence were also Christian. The Muslim factions in the Lebanese population were justifiably suspicious of the country's army.
The Arab Israeli war in 1948 held unpleasant experiences for Lebanon, other than exposing the ineptness and bias of its army. It brought about the beginning of a mass movement of Palestinians from Palestine to Lebanon.7 The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 divided Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Galilee was also to be divided in half; how ever, the Jews were not satisfied with this arrangement, and seized both halves of Galilee.8
The division of Palestine alone was sufficient to cause a mass migration of Arab Palestinians. The Jewish seizure of western Galilee added to the exodus. By the end of the 1948 war, 800,000 Palestinians had fled their country, and, of that total, 140,000 arrived in Lebanon.9 By 1975, the number of Palestinians in Lebanon had increased to 350,000, of which one third remained in the country's refugee camps.10
The entry of the mass of Palestinians into Lebanon increased the level of the country's disunity. In 1951, the country's leading right wing political factions, which were themselves enemies of one another, formed an alliance, whose sole goal was the ouster of President Khoury.11 Adding to the somewhat bizarre character of this alliance was the fact that, although all it membe...