The geopolitical changes that affected all the Middle Eastern countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II called the future of the region’s Armenian communities into question. One of the most important transformations in this part of the world occurred almost immediately hostilities ceased: the French and British army and civil administration began to withdraw. New, independent states were born, among them Syria and Lebanon in 1943 and Jordan in 1946. The end of the mandatory regimes caused a good deal of apprehension among Middle Eastern Armenians, in Syria and Lebanon in particular; rightly or wrongly, most of them had considered the French administration a protective force. Doubtless this attitude, widespread in Armenian circles, was one of the reasons for the massive “repatriation” movement to Soviet Armenia.
Yet a considerable number of Armenians continued to make their homes in the Middle East. Some would-be emigrants had been unable to secure their place in the caravans of repatriates before Soviet Armenia called an abrupt halt to the trans¬fer of diasporan populations to Armenia in 1948. Others never considered settling in Soviet Armenia, despite the shift in the political winds in their adoptive countries in the Middle East. The pessimistic predictions ventured by many in the region’s Armenian communities after the war turned out to be rather wide of the mark: while tens of thousands of “repatriates” discovered the macabre world of the Soviets, two Middle Eastern countries, Lebanon and Iran, enjoyed a period of unhoped-for economic prosperity, and their Armenian communities profited fully from it. Thanks to this general upturn, new, relatively affluent, well-established Armenian social strata emerged. Iran and, especially, Lebanon of¬fered environments that fostered the consolidation of Armenian community life. Armenian elementary schools and high schools were built here; books and journals proliferated; there was an intense artistic life, and an intelligentsia came into being. These were all indications that the Lebanese capital had become a vibrant pole of attraction for the Armenian world, a pleasant, secure place in which to live and a model of development and organization for the entire Armenian diaspora in the 1950s and 1960s.
But this radiant image of a restructured Near East flourishing under the protection of newly independent states cannot be generalized to the whole of the region. For, in the same period, events fraught with con¬se¬quences were taking place in Palestine, a country on Lebanon’s borders that had, until recently, been governed by the British Mandatory administration. The 1948 creation of the state of Israel led directly to the first Arab-Israeli war and the involuntary exodus of tens of thousands ... Read all
The Middle East in Crisis