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appearance, and enormous energy, Sadr soon attracted the interest and support of the Shia middle class. Sadr represented an alternative path to the ossified feudal barons and the alarming revolutionaries of the left, one that combined communal awareness, progress, and reform.
    He worked hard to heighten a sense of communal identity among the geographically isolated Shias, traveling with unflagging energy from one end of the country to the other. Although the focus of his work was on the betterment of Lebanon’s Shias, Sadr also reached out to other communities and—to the initial outrage of the more conservative members of the Shia clerical establishment, known as the
ulama—
regularly preached in churches. On one occasion, Sadr was due to deliver a sermon in Alma Shaab, a Maronite village on the Israeli border, but found the road blocked by the huge crowd that had arrived to hear him speak. He and his aide Abdullah Yazbek were forced to leave their car and walk through fields of tobacco to reach the church.
    â€œWe arrived at the church thirty minutes late and the people had grown anxious,” Yazbek recalls. “But the moment he arrived and stood on the pulpit where all could see him, the people lost control. They were Christians, but they were yelling
‘Allah u-Akbar’
like Muslims. The way people treated him, it was as if he was Jesus Christ. Christians used to tell me how lucky we were to have someone like this.”
    Sadr’s popularity provoked the enmity of the entrenched feudal barons, who recognized that this dynamic cleric represented a threat to theirstranglehold on the Shia community. Sadr sought to undermine their influence by lobbying for the creation of the Higher Shia Council, which was established in 1967 as the principal representative organ for Lebanese Shias. The following year, he formed the Harakat al-Mahrummin, the Movement of the Deprived, which would become his main vehicle for civil and social activism on behalf of the poorest members of society. Although it was formed as a nonsectarian organization—its deputy was a Christian bishop—for all practical purposes it was the first large-scale Shia political and social organization in Lebanon.
The Rise of the Fedayeen
    In the second half of the 1960s, Sadr found that his efforts to politically and socially mobilize the Shia community were becoming complicated by the emergence of Palestinian militants in south Lebanon and with it the initial sparks of a cross-border conflict with Israel.
    Lebanon, like Israel’s other Arab neighbors, had reluctantly absorbed large numbers of Palestinian refugees during the Arab-Israeli war that followed the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. By the late 1950s, Palestinian factions espousing armed resistance against Israel were beginning to emerge. The most important of these early Palestinian factions was Fatah, led by a young engineer called Yasser Arafat. Fatah’s initial military operations—the first from Lebanon was in June 1965—were low-key, sporadic, and often unsuccessful. But that changed in the wake of the June 1967 war, when Israel launched surprise attacks against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. By the time a cease-fire was signed six days later, Israel had captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, tripling the size of the Jewish state in just six days.
    Lebanon was spared direct involvement in the war, but Israel’s swift seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria was to have future implications for Lebanese territorial sovereignty and regional security. While Israeli forces pushed eastward deeper into Syrian territory, their land grab in the northern Golan was checked by the border with Lebanon. However,the Israelis discovered that there was some ambiguity over exactly where Syria ended and Lebanon began, thanks to the laxity with which the French