ABSTRACT
The Armenians from the region of Iskenderun who came at the onset of World War II constituted the last large influx. And as neighboring Arab countries became increasingly nationalistic, more of their Armenian population gravitated to Beirut, swelling the community to over 200,000 individuals, who by the 1960s constituted close to 20 percent of Beirut’s population. The self-segregated neighborhoods in Beirut reflected the political organization of Lebanon as a whole. The system of religion-based millets of the Ottoman Empire was preserved under the French, after independence, and persists to this day. Protestant Armenians and Arabs were lumped together because there were not enough of them to constitute separate millets. Since Armenian Protestants were more numerous, the Protestant representative in parliament would usually be an Armenian. Several of the other tenants in our apartment building were particularly interesting. The family that lived on the ground floor kept to themselves.
