ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on field research carried out in the South Lebanese Christian enclave of Alma El Chaab. Ethnographic material, particularly but not exclusively, on Jihad and martyrdom traditions from this border town will help to address critical challenges to the legitimacy of governance during the so-called 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war. There are two types of Christians in the Middle East: Christian Arabs, who dislike the West and hate Israel more than they fear Islam, and Eastern Christians, who hold the opposite view. The population of Alma El Chaab includes three Christian denominations: Melkites, Maronites and Protestants. In the Lebanese case, national in-built instability is a product of weak structural local inter-community links, as well as of the fragile interaction between authority representation and identity maintenance. The 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel brought out a kind of collective mobilization that would have otherwise remained the hidden part of a latent conflict, or framed in simple hard-line confrontation.
