Abstract
Much of the historiography on the intercourse between Palestinian Jews and Lebanese Maronites concerns only the two peoples’ relations in the seventies and eighties. This thesis, in contrast, attempts a departure from this scholarship, joining the handful of other works that chart the history of the Zionist-Maronite relationship in its earliest incarnation. From its inception to its abeyance beginning in 1948, this almost thirty-year relationship was marked by a search of a formal alliance. This thesis, by presenting a panoptical survey of early Zionist-Maronite relations, explores the many dimensions of this pursuit. It details the Zionists and Maronites’ numerous commonalities that made an alliance desirable and apparently possible; it profiles the specific elements among the Zionists and Maronites who sought an entente; it examines each of the measures the two peoples took to this end; and it analyzes why this protracted pursuit ultimately failed. The study concludes that the liabilities of a formal association with the Zionists in the Middle East and “Arabist” developments in Lebanon beginning in the early forties conspired to prevent the Zionists and Maronites’ friendship from graduating to a formal alliance.