Pierre Gemayel

Pierre Amine Gemayel, also spelled Jmayyel, Jemayyel or al-Jumayyil (بيار الجميّل; 6 November 1905 – 29 August 1984), was a Lebanese political leader.

A Maronite Catholic, he is remembered as the founder of the Kataeb Party (also known as the Phalangist Party), as a parliamentary powerbroker, and as the father of Bachir Gemayel and Amine Gemayel, both of whom were elected to the presidency of the republic in his lifetime.

Pierre Gemayel was born on 6 November 1905 in Bikfaya, Lebanon into a Maronite family.

His father Amine Bachir Gemayel, known as Abou Ali, and his uncle were forced to flee to Egypt after being sentenced to death in 1914 for opposing Ottoman rule, returning to Lebanon only at the end of World War I.

Gemayel was educated at Jesuit school.

He went on to study pharmacy at the French faculty of medicine in Beirut, where he later opened a pharmacy.

He owned a pharmacy in Haifa, Palestine.

The pharmacy was located in Sahat Al Hanatir (Carriage Square).

Gemayel also took an interest in sport, playing football.

He opposed the French Mandate over Lebanon in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and advocated an independent state, free from foreign control.

He was known for his deft political maneuvering, which led him to take positions which were seen by supporters as pragmatic, but by opponents as contradictory, or even hypocritical.

Although publicly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, he later changed his position due to Palestinian support of the Lebanese National Movement and its calls to end the National Pact and establish non-sectarian democracy.

Gemayel also had a career in football in the 1930s, captaining the Lebanon national team as a player.

The foundation of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party by Antun Saadeh in 1932 was the trigger for the establishment of the Kateb Party, since the former actively tried to influence Lebanon towards the Syrian interests, leading to direct challenge for Lebanese nationalists.

The founders of the Kataeb Party were young, French-educated and middle-class professionals who committed to independent and Western-oriented Lebanon.

He also became the first Lebanese football referee to officiate matches internationally, and was the second president of the Lebanese Football Association, between 1935 and 1939.

In 1935 he became president of the Lebanese Football Association (LFA); the same year he became Lebanon's first referee to officiate internationally.

As captain of the Lebanon national team, Gemayel attended the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, alongside Hussein Sejaan, the former LFA president.

After the games, he also visited various Central European countries.

On his return to Lebanon from Europe, in 1936 Gemayel founded Al Kataeb Al Loubnaniyyah party (Phalangist Party a.k.a. Kataeb Party) with Georges Naqqache, Charles Helou, Chafic Nassif and Hamid Franjieh, who was later replaced with Emile Yared, modelling the party after the Spanish and Italian Fascist parties he had observed there.

Gemayel was also influenced from the Sokol movement of Czechoslovakia during this visit to the Central Europe after the 1936 Olympic games, and employed the doctrine of this movement while founding the Kataeb party.

Kataeb Party is described as a right-wing Christian Party.

It survived a French attempt to forcibly dissolve it in 1937 and took part in an uprising against the French Mandate in 1943, but despite its membership of 35,000, it operated on the fringes of Lebanese politics.

Gemayel remained president of the LFA until 1939.

It was not until the Civil War of 1958, that Gemayel emerged as a leader of the right-wing nationalist (mainly Christian) movement that opposed a Nasserist and Arab-nationalist inspired attempt to overthrow the government of president Camille Chamoun and supported the return of foreign troops to Lebanon.

In the aftermath of the war, Gemayel was appointed a cabinet minister in a four-member Unity government.

Two years later, Gemayel was elected to the National Assembly, from a Beirut constituency, a seat he held for the rest of his life.

In 1958, Gemayel was appointed deputy to then prime minister Rashid Karami.

By the end of the 1960s, the Kataeb Party held 9 seats in the National Assembly, making it one of the largest groupings in Lebanon's notoriously fractured and sectarian parliament.

For instance, he was minister of finance from 1960 to 1961 and in 1968, and the minister of public works in 1970.

Lebanon has long been a battleground in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Gemayel's position was always solid and consistent advocating a Lebanon separated from the other Arab states and linked to France and the West.

He opposed the presence of the Palestinian refugees.

His supporters viewed this as a sign of strength and patriotism, while his detractors saw it as incoherent.

Charles Helou, who later served as Lebanon's president from 1964 to 1970, was one of the founders.

By the time of his presidency, however, Helou was no longer a party member, and Gemayel unsuccessfully opposed him in the presidential election of 1964.

In the years before and after Lebanon's independence, Gemayel's influence and that of the Kataeb Party was limited.

Although his bids for the presidency in 1964 and 1970 were unsuccessful, Gemayel continued to hold cabinet posts intermittently throughout the remaining quarter-century of his life.

Gemayel reluctantly signed the Cairo Agreement of 1969 under enormous pressure from the international community, which allowed Palestinian guerrillas to set up bases on Lebanese soil, from which to carry out actions against Israel.

He later defended his actions, saying that Lebanon really had no choice.

In the 1970s, he came to oppose the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon.