Walid Joumblatt, A Destiny in the Levant, Stock Editions, May 13, 2026, 344 pages, €21.90
Among the Joumblatts, one rarely dies in bed. The author of these memoirs presents himself from the outset as a survivor. He was not yet thirty when his father, Kamal Joumblatt, was shot on a road in the Chouf. At the funeral, the Druze spiritual leader clothed him in the abaya, a symbol of transmission. Walid Joumblatt bore this burden for forty years of wars and reversed alliances. A Destiny in the Levant opens in Moukhtara in August 2025 and from there traces back the Lebanese century.
Moukhtara, The Chosen Place
On March 16, 1977, a sports car blocks Kamal Joumblatt’s Mercedes just before Deir Dourite, a village kept as a target, according to his son, so that the crime can be blamed on Christians. Kamal Joumblatt resists and dies on the spot, a victim of a commando that Walid Joumblatt attributes to the services of Hafez al‑Assad. Ascending toward Moukhtara, his son passes by the burned-out cars of Christians that Druze enraged have just massacred, more than three hundred victims in a single day, before rushing through villages to shelter the rescued families. His first political decision, taken that very day against the advice of a cousin, fixes the burial for the next day at thirteen hundred hours, because he wants to end the cycle of vengeance. The paternal Mercedes has been kept on display at the entrance to the estate, in view of all.
Moukhtara, whose name in Arabic means the chosen place, has belonged to the Joumblatts since the late eighteenth century. Before Kamal Joumblatt, the great‑grandfather Bechir had been executed by the Ottomans in Acre in 1825, the grandfather Fouad had been shot down in 1921 while crossing the mountains on his white horse. After Fouad’s death and after Kamal’s, women watched over the domain. Having become a widow, Sitt Nazira governed Moukhtara during her son’s childhood and dispensed justice at her home, where inheritance disputes and marital quarrels were settled. She clasped the hands of men, contrary to Druze custom. In 1925, she advised those who wished to take up arms against the French mandate to join the revolt in Syria rather than inflame the Chouf. May Arslan, Sitt Nazira’s granddaughter and daughter of the emir Chakib, had married Kamal Joumblatt against her family’s wishes, who saw in his clan their perpetual foe. Separated from her husband and living in Paris, she arrived a few hours after the burial to take charge of the house.
The figure of Kamal Joumblatt dominates the book. An aristocrat converted to socialism, he granted Sibline, the last village owned by the family, to the inhabitants around 1950, provoking the great anger of his mother. Each year, he would go to meet his spiritual master near Madras. Walid Joumblatt places the Palestinian cause at the top of his paternal legacy, a cause Kamal Joumblatt embraced among the first in Lebanon and which his grandson Taymour has made his own in June 2023. In March 1976, facing Hafez al‑Assad, Kamal Joumblatt had proclaimed, “I will not enter the great Arab prison.” Walid Joumblatt correctly reads in Bashar al‑Assad’s flight to Moscow in December 2024, after fifty-four years of family rule, the epilogue of that refusal. Three months later, the new Syrian regime arrested General Ibrahim Houeiji in Jableh, named in the book as Kamal Joumblatt’s assassin. On March 16, 2025, before thousands of followers from across Lebanon, Walid Joumblatt declared the end of a nearly half‑century wait and saluted the memory of the Christians who were killed in reprisal in 1977.
Being Druze, the Books of Wisdom
In 1976, after hosting Kamal Joumblatt at his home, François Mitterrand noted in his diary that the Druze formed a “small, invincible people, clinging to its mountain.” Their faith appears in 1017 in Fatimid Egypt under Caliph al‑Hakim. Walid Joumblatt relies on the work of Wissam Halawi, published by Cerf, to connect them to Isma’ili Islam, a branch of Shia Islam which affords a neoplatonist reading of the divine—a God with two faces, one ineffable, the other accessible to those who seek to know Him. The faithful call themselves the People of Tawhid, the Oneness of God. You are born Druze, because the door to conversion closed in the eleventh century. The doctrine is reserved for a minority of initiates, admitted to the Books of Wisdom after forty years, on the basis of a life that the community deems exemplary.
On Thursday evenings, the initiates meditate together in the khalwa, reading books where Pythagoras and Plato are among the masters. Faithful to the Druze belief in metempsychosis, Kamal Joumblatt thought the soul migrates from one existence to another until it dissolves into the universe. The religious assemblies begin with a formula that entrusts each believer with the path of their own quest. Walid Joumblatt emphasizes what the Druze call the conduct, a self‑discipline that translates into courtesy. He himself admits to having remained at the threshold of initiation, because war and politics, he says, devoured him.
Walid Joumblatt asserts for the Druze a double belonging, to the Arab world and to Islam. In 1964, his father obtained from al‑Azhar, through Nasser, a fatwa that opened their pilgrimage to Mecca. In Lebanon, they account for barely six percent of the population. Their community is spread between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel, where they have performed military service since a 1956 law. When the Israeli army sent Druze soldiers in 1982 to reconnect with their cousins in the Chouf, Walid Joumblatt forbade the sheikhs and mayors to deal with the occupier. He is right to note that every Lebanese confession has its own story and that the country’s common history book remains impossible to write.
The Mountain War, the Time of the Wolves
Forty days after the assassination, Walid Joumblatt takes the road to Damascus and sits on the right of the man whom he knows is the mastermind of the murder. Standing in the middle of the living room, Hafez al‑Assad immediately acknowledges the resemblance between the son and the father, then, motionless as a sphinx, delivers a long exposition meant to weary his visitor, who interrupts him to defend his friend Raymond Eddé. Walid Joumblatt justifies this alignment by geography, since the Druze, isolated in their mountains, needed a protector and Syria commanded their access to the Arab world. A year later, betrayed by his Christian allies, Hafez al‑Assad concedes that Kamal Joumblatt was right about the danger posed by the Lebanese right. Walid Joumblatt holds his silence and keeps to himself the question of why, in that case, his father was killed. Soviet weapons reach the Chouf via the depots of the Syrian army. He stores the ammunition even in churches, for which he now asks God’s forgiveness. In the 1980s, at the Cham Palace’s Chinese restaurant, he even shares a lunch with his father’s assassin, who knows he is informed.
In June 1982, the Israeli invasion reaches Moukhtara, where an officer believes he has found proof of Nazism in a copy of Historia featuring Hitler on the cover. Under house arrest, Walid Joumblatt sends back to Damascus the emissary Uri Lubrani when he tries to detach him from Syria, before standing up to Shimon Peres regarding civilians killed at Saida. The militiamen of Bechir Gemayel, led by Samir Geagea, take advantage of the occupation to establish themselves in the Chouf. On September 4, 1983, with the Israeli withdrawal underway, Walid Joumblatt launches an attack on Bhamdoun, which falls on the 7th. When the opposing militia takes refuge in Deir el‑Qamar, he prefers siege to assault, haunted by the memory of his ancestor Said Joumblatt, who had allowed the massacre of 1860 to occur in that same town. Massacres then stain villages such as Kfarmatta or Brih, while nearly 170,000 Christians leave the Chouf, often for good. In fifteen years of war, the Druze ranks lose about 3,500 men. Walid Joumblatt sums it up in one line: “I am not a saint, I fought the war.”
Minister of the Displaced from 1992 to 1998, Walid Joumblatt notes the paradox of his role, which requires him to bring back to their villages the families his battles had driven away. On August 4, 2001, he receives in Moukhtara the Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, the first to visit the Chouf since the nineteenth century, to seal the reconciliation between Druze and Christians. He regards that day as the pinnacle of his political life and as a singular example in Lebanon. In autumn 2024, under Israeli bombs, Druze villages welcome Shiite refugees from the South, and his daughter Dalia organizes shelter for tens of thousands of people. His conviction is sound: the peace of Mount Lebanon is the condition for peace throughout the country.
The Country of Equilibria, a Breath Is Enough
In today’s Lebanon, Walid Joumblatt’s diagnosis first targets the confessional system, originating from Ottoman millets and transmitted unchanged into independent Lebanon since 1943, while Atatürk’s Turkey had abolished it in 1923. He describes an economy in which banks served usurious interest rates of ten to fifteen percent, until the 2019 collapse that ruined small savers. The inquiry into the port blast in 2020 joined the long list of buried directives. To reform the system, he advocates depoliticizing the state from within and strengthening institutions in Fouad Chehab’s mold, adding a progressive tax and a wealth tax.
In the prologue, Walid Joumblatt recounts his visit to the new strongman of Damascus, Ahmed al‑Charaa, in December 2024, then his condemnation of the violence committed by both camps in Suweida, which killed more than 1,500 people in July 2025. This stance earns him the label of traitor from Druze protesters waving Israeli flags. He notes that the disarmament of Hezbollah is debated under the Israeli occupation of the South and that Lebanon’s stability depends on dialogue with the Shiite community, whose frustrations he gauges. In another chapter, he proposes integrating some Hezbollah fighters into the Lebanese army, as the militiamen had been in 1990. Any partition seems absurd to him, even if disguised as federalism.
The war Hezbollah reopened on March 2, 2026, in the wake of American and Israeli strikes against Iran, has already claimed more than four thousand lives in Lebanon. The same day, Nawaf Salam’s government banned Hezbollah’s military activities, with Walid Joumblatt’s immediate backing. Since April, Beirut has been negotiating directly with Israel, under American sponsorship, a zone‑by‑zone withdrawal tied to Hezbollah’s disarmament. The epigraph borrowed from Julien Gracq is borne out in practice: “The truth of balance is that a single breath is enough to move everything.” In Suweida, where Sheikh Hikmat al‑Hijri now presents his community as an integral part of Israel, the danger foreseen by Walid Joumblatt is taking shape. For Lebanon as for Syria, he defends unitary states that respect their minorities.
March 16, the Victory of Reconciliation
Enrichi d’entretiens avec Sébastien de Courtois et Manuel Carcassonne, le livre publié par Stock Editions se distingue aussi par ses aveux. Walid Joumblatt admet avoir manqué, par hésitation, la manifestation du 14 mars 2005, un mois après l’assassinat de son ami Rafic Hariri. Il reconnaît la légitimité des revendications de 2019, portées par une jeunesse venue l’invectiver jusque devant sa maison à Beyrouth. L’humour éclaire parfois le récit, comme lorsque Fidel Castro, après cinq heures de discours, lui demande devant l’ascenseur à quelle confession est son invité, puis qui sont les Druzes. Walid Joumblatt nomme victoire de l’apaisement ce 16 mars 2017 où, quarante ans jour pour jour après le meurtre, il posa l’abaya sur les épaules de son fils Taymour devant la tombe de Kamal Joumblatt. Avec une franchise peu commune chez une personnalité de pouvoir, ces mémoires transmettent aux jeunes Libanais l’héritage reçu dans le sang et le conseil qui accompagna, en 2023, le passage du parti à Taymour: avancer sans peur.
The article Walid Joumblatt, the Survivor of the Mountain first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
