The Jibrail Rural Fellowship Cooperative, 1943–1967
Jibrail, 1943–1958: Rural development as an answer to communism
“We never meant to destroy your house. It was the American’s house we were aiming at,” one of the insurgents told Munir Khoury when hostilities subsided in Jibrail, in Lebanon’s Akkar region, in 1958.
The Khoury family had for more than a decade been closely associated with the American missionaries Neale and Edith Alter, who founded the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center, a bastion of rural economic development and protestant evangelism, and a surprising locus of the Cold War struggle for influence in the Middle East.
From the earliest experimental education efforts in 1943 until the dissolution of the property in 1967, the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center would struggle with French colonialist bureaucracy, water rights disputes, poultry market bubbles, civil unrest, internecine drama, and intersectarian resentments. Jibrail’s story is in microcosm the story of American use of agricultural development assistance in the Middle East as soft power, and of autochthonous Lebanese resistance to both environmental despoliation and economic exploitation.
In the midst of Lebanon’s ongoing financial crisis, in the immediate aftermath of forest fires throughout the Levant, and following harrowing events in Akkar, a story at the perplex of environmental, economic, and religious history warrants telling.
American missionaries in the Middle East, 1819–1984
Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk sailed for Jerusalem in late 1819, tasked by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions with evangelizing the Jewish population of Palestine and thereby bringing about the apocalypse and the end of time. Driven out of Jerusalem by both civil and religious authorities, and suffering illness, the men decamped for Malta within two years. The Commissioners would re-establish a mission station in Beirut in 1833 — the city’s status as early as the 1840s as the most important port in the Ottoman Empire, and its Christian majority population made it the hub of mission activity in the whole Middle East through to 1984.
Early mission work focused on adult literacy, Bible translation, and publishing. Riding the crest of the increasingly literate and literary middle class society during the Nahda, or Awakening, Protestant missionaries expanded into early education. Boys’ schools and girls’ schools grew to as many as 300 students in Beirut and Abeih by the 1840s. In 1862 the Syrian Protestant College was organized; it would become the American University of Beirut in 1920. The American School for Girls in Beirut, organized in 1835, would become the American Junior College for Women in 1927 — the present-day Lebanese American University.
The first evangelical church in Syria was organized in Beirut in 1848; by 1921 the existing three presbyteries united to form a synod. Though a Syrian Evangelical Church was organized, its communicants remained few and the Church continued to function with the Mission until 1959. In that year, the American Protestant Mission in Syria/Lebanon was dissolved and its work and program integrated into the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon.
Mission partnership in Syria and Lebanon continued, with the American Presbyterian representative sitting on Synod committees, on the board of Beirut University College, supporting the work of the Near East School of Theology, and continuing to administer property formerly owned by the UPCUSA. After the 1967 war, mission work in the whole of the Middle East — including Iran, Iraq, and Egypt — was administered in Beirut. In May 1984, the United Presbyterian Representative Overseas for Syria, Ben Weir, was kidnapped by members of Hezbollah and held hostage for 16 months.
Agricultural missions in Lebanon and Syria
Agricultural mission work in Lebanon and Syria, as elsewhere in the world, proceeded from the assumption, if not always the proof, that the people being missioned to could not feed, clothe, or care for themselves. In its least paternalistic form, this assumption manifested as the conviction that with the application of American “modern” technology and scientific methods, and with the inculcation especially in children of habits of cleanliness, thrift, and industry, the people being missioned to would prosper.
Without doubt, the receptiveness of the emergent middle classes of the Middle East to American-style education and technological advances — viz., the parents of Alborz College in Tehran calling it “a factory that produces men” — lends the missionary case some merit. Especially in the period following the First World War, education, especially in engineering and physical sciences, was a stepping stone to prosperity for the post-Ottoman middle class, and scores if not hundreds of young men and women — from Beirut, Cairo, Hamadan, Tehran — studied abroad via the Protestant mission endeavor.
What the missionaries could offer the farmers and villagers of Lebanon and Syria was not prosperity but mere subsistence. Underdevelopment of agriculture, and systematic despoliation of the environment by occupying powers combined to diminish rural life, peaking in the 1915 famine on Mount Lebanon. Historians have found a range of culprits of the decades’-long ecocide, from monocultural mulberry cultivation during the silk boom, to European trade restrictions, to locusts. Rural Lebanon and Syria, by the early 1920s, offered a clean slate for agricultural mission experimentation. Success would be broadcast in terms of how rural life there would be transformed to resemble rural life in the United States. A 1936 Presbyterian mission proposal suggested cultivating varietals of spineless cactus at the edge of the desert around Hama, to be used as communal grazing areas for Bedouin herders, a plan alleged to have worked in Montana. As late as 1950, irrigated corn production in the Southern Bekaa Valley would be heralded on the cover of the Cedar Bough. Maize, as a water-intensive crop, has hovered between 2 and 3 tons per hectare in Lebanon since 1960; average American production per hectare over the same period rose from 4 to 11 tons per hectare. It’s likely that American missionaries’ unwillingness to suit crops to the local environment has contributed to long-term underdevelopment of agriculture in Lebanon.
Presbyterian agricultural work in Lebanon and Syria is effectively concentrated in Jibrail. The first forays of American University of Beirut’s Village Welfare Service in 1933 began there. American Point Four funds went there. So, eventually did Neale and Edith Alter.
The Alters
Neale and Edith Alter arrived in Hama, Syria in 1923, appointed to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Syria-Lebanon mission, their task to evangelize Muslim city dwellers. Neale had grown up on a farm in western Pennsylvania, had been shaped by the State College agricultural extension program, and was dedicated to connecting rural people to urban centers.
Samuel Neale Alter was born 20 April 1894 in Harrison Township, near Freeport, Pennsylvania, and attended Grove City College and Western Theological Seminary. While at Seminary he was active in the Student Volunteer Movement, and spent a summer preaching in South Dakota. He applied to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions at age 24 in 1919. The portrait of Alter that emerges from the records is of a driven, single-minded, and wiry evangelist — young Neale was 5-foot-7 and 115 pounds when he applied for missionary service. One reference wrote of Alter, “He is a clean fellow, but a little dogmatic and determined. He ought to run up against some men who would contradict him and laugh at him and make him stand up on his own legs intellectually.” Another writer was more blunt: “Will be a useful man — not brilliant, but reliable.”
Alter was appointed to the PCUSA Syria mission 20 December 1920, but delayed service for a year of divinity school in Edinburgh. He was assigned to Suk el Gharb for language training from 1921 to 1923. There he met Edith Maria Thomas, of the British mission to Syria. She married him on furlough in October of 1923 and the couple returned to Hama to undertake “work among Muslims.” Alter would serve as a roving evangelist, “watching over the churches, counseling with the native pastors, and acting as a sort of embryo bishop or missionary superintendent.” Though assigned to evangelism, the material living conditions of the people of Hama changed the Alters’ work. Edith was particularly invested in the lives of the women she met, both in Hama and in Deir ez Zor. Writing home in the summer of 1929, she describes her contact with the mufti of Deir ez Zor, whose daughter in law spent seven years at a mission school in Beirut. Even prosperous, Western-leaning young women were frequently undereducated: “There may be a gramophone and all the latest Paris fashions and yet a young girl of seventeen or eighteen will have no ambition to read or write.” Edith’s concern for the material conditions of women in Syria verges on rebuke: “Our neighbor downstairs, while preparing for her eleventh child, takes it quite as a matter of course that four out of the eleven have died […] I have been impressed more forcibly than ever by the emptiness and shallowness of the life of a Moslem woman in Hama.”
From 1930 to 1941, Neale served on the Syria mission’s Evangelistic Committee, developing a plan for a series of “rural residence stations,” identified by their climate: between the Akkar and Homs “coast and mountain”; from Homs to Hama “the cereal plain”; in Salamia “between desert and sown”; and Deir ez Zor, “desert.” Though systematic rural education centers on Alter’s model did not emerge, the couple’s work in the 1930s was itinerant, and increasingly focused on material improvements in home life. In a letter of 1 March 1939, Alter recounts (or given the more vaudevillian details, invents) a village trip to screen an educational film on flyborne disease. His host, evidently disgusted, immediately buys a screened food cupboard for the house, to keep out flies; his wife locks their chickens in it instead. Alter’s point is that quick mechanical fixes to rural poverty don’t exist. Alter adds that flyborne and waterborne diseases kill half of all children under two years old, and “to prevent more tragedies we must find a way to educate the women as well as the men in matters relating to village reconstruction and reform.”
Thinking of his life as a farm boy commuting to town for high school, Alter saw western civilization as founded on urban contempt for rural people, who were either “slaves” or “hay-seeds.” Alter treated the global rural-urban divide in frankly apocalyptic terms. In a 1947 annual report from Jibrail, he writes of rural wastage and cities burdened with migrants, “If we are to avoid the present chaos with the great gulf between rural and city people, and the worldwide rush of rural people towards urban centers, we must take positive steps in the not too distant future to develop a rural-urban civilization.” Work at Jibrail, for the Alters, was part of the church’s ministry of reconciliation, particularly important work for the multiethnic and multisectarian population of the Akkar — Sunni, Metwali, Alawi, protestant, Greek Orthodox, Maronite — “who must learn to live together in peace and harmony, if there is to be any peace, or ultimately any world peace.”
The solution for the Alters was rural education and development. Only sustainable, profitable, and clean village life could stem the flow of rural people to urban centers, or could liberate the village from dependence on the town. After 17 years in Hama, and just as the couple had procured their “mobile unit” for outreach into Hama and Deir ez-Zor, America’s entry into the Second World War forced them to leave Syria. After two years at Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, the couple returned to the Syria-Lebanon mission, stationed in Tripoli.
Beginning in 1933, Afif Tannous of the American University of Beirut ran a rural educational and humanitarian project called the Village Welfare Camp. Students of AUB would travel to a site in the countryside, advise villagers in health, hygiene, and agriculture, and become acquainted with village culture and traditions. In 1939, AUB students assisted villagers near Jaffa and Ramallah during the Arab revolt in Palestine. Rural agricultural development projects sprouted in Lebanon under the auspices of the US Departments of State and Agriculture in the postwar period. In 1946, the US started an agricultural extension program in Lebanon and Syria. Initially focused on training students already enrolled in AUB’s Village Welfare Service in public health, agriculture, and social work, it expanded to support students’ work in villages, and anticipated expanded agricultural extension to schools in Damascus and Baghdad. (Tannous would go on to a long career inside the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.)
Jibrail, a mountain village hard by the Aarqa river, was chosen as the model site for the village welfare summer camps. The camp was set up near a natural spring surrounded by walnut and sycamore; it ran for July and August each year, until 1938. Presbyterian missionaries frequently accompanied the AUB students, and during one of the camps, Neale Alter first saw Munir Khoury at work.
Munir Khoury was born in November 1920, one of six children of a merchant family in Tripoli. Munir’s father’s business declined during the Great Depression, and the family left Tripoli for Jibrail in 1935. Munir finished high school at age 16, and every summer would work alongside the students in the Village Welfare Camp. In 1938 he was hired as an elementary-grades teacher at his alma mater in Tripoli, and in 1940 he joined Antoun Saadeh’s Syrian Social Nationalist Party. One day in 1942, Neale Alter visited Khoury in his classroom: “The man arrived and without preamble, and in his own particular style, asked me to assist him in establishing a comprehensive integrated rural development project which would be launched in my village, Jibrail.”
Khoury brought Alter to Jibrail a few days later, to present his plan for a Village Home Economics School for girls. In Khoury’s memoir, Alter “who spoke Arabic with ease but with an American accent” was welcomed by the villagers, who were surprised by, but not opposed to the idea of prioritizing girls’ education. A council of village notables was formed to work with Alter, including Munir’s mother, and the first classes were held in a building rented from the Khourys. Munir was an unpaid overseer and de facto co-founder of the project, helping during breaks from school in Tripoli, playing the oud during evenings at Jibrail.
The whole plan, beginning in 1944, was extensive — a series of home economics schools, in Jibrail, Hermil, and Holba. The first building in Jibrail went up in 1945; local teenage girls would be trained in “cooking, sewing, home-making and child care, which they would not get should they attend city institutions.” Girls would board at the school in turns, one week on, one week off, and were in charge of kindergarteners at the school, making their lunch, clothing them, and bathing them. Two girls would wash four children, Edith would write, “This assures a good washing at least every fourth day for each child and provides good practice for the girls.” Health and hygiene was of chief importance in the girls’ coursework, number 2 in VHES’ 10-point program: “Health — how to be attractive, how to keep well and what to do when someone is sick.” The school’s coursework required economically viable cottage industries, market accessibility in cities, and “suitable young men to marry” for the newly well-educated girls. The Alters’ next step was a boys’ school.
Initially, boys were assigned book learning: agricultural science, math, Arabic, and civics. Though many of them had had five years in nearby public schools, in Alter’s estimation, “they did not have a good knowledge of their own language because they wasted so much time on French.” The boys were, compared to the girls, “spoiled and pampered,” wanting to drink and smoke during class, frequently tussling, disinterested in geography. Their ears perked up however at Alter’s descriptions of life in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: “They wanted to know the meaning of the word ‘Communist’ since there were promoters of this group who had come from the cities & organized some of the village people into groups or societies.”
On an annual scholarship of $400 from the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Munir Khoury began studies in rural sociology at the Presbyterian-affiliated Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 1946. His first culture shock came upon being asked whether he had bought his clothes in New York; at first insulted, he came to understand that Americans’ reactions “implied complete ignorance,” most Americans “know nothing about Lebanon except that it was an Arab country and to them, Arabs still wore the abay and rode camels.” Khoury left Swannanoa to continue his studies at Utah State University in Logan. In his memoirs, he recounts twin shocks which nearly derailed his studies, “the establishment of the Zionist State and the takeover of Palestine” and, in July 1949, just before sitting for finals, the execution of Antoun Saadeh. Khoury returned to Jibrail, with a layover in Paris to represent the program at a UNESCO conference on rural development, to run the boys’ programs, and teach rural sociology and olive culture. Khoury came to see his work in rural sociology, preserving village culture, and improving the health and welfare of villages, to be “in total harmony” with his political activity in the SSNP, and Jibrail was at the heart of both: “My enthusiasm grew alongside my continuous belief that there was no hope for any national renaissance if the roots of true national heritage are neglected.”
Neale Alter spent 1948 — “the most discouraging year of my twenty-seven years on the mission field” — in Jibrail while Edith worked in Tripoli. He lived in a small room with no bath or toilet, as “even the most undesirable living quarters were taken by Palestine refugees.” In his annual report, Alter attributes much of that year’s trouble — building permits bogged down, families removing children from the home economics program — to the declaration of the State of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba: “The Palestine situation created intense feeling against Americans.” While never apparently the proximate cause of any of the obstacles to the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center’s operation, the plight of the Palestinians and America’s support of the State of Israel would continue to stoke tension in the village and across the mission. In a 2 September 1951 letter to a member of staff from El Mina Hospital who was seeking “movie material,” Neale Alter warns, “Because of Jewish US derogatory movie films of people of the Near East the people here are becoming very non-cooperative in movie film making or even in ordinary still picture taking” (emphasis in original).
With construction permits in place, foundations were laid for a new girls’ building in 1949; education permits from Beirut came in 1950. The Alters moved as a couple from El Mina Hospital in Tripoli to the new buildings in 1950.
The next two years would bring struggles — in Neale’s mind, related struggles — over water and communism. Representatives of the U.S. government’s Point Four program had made contact with the American mission in Syria and Lebanon, and with the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon, to identify potential recipients of its development aid. Alter enthusiastically advocated for Synod’s use of Point Four funds: “it is a positive constructive Christian approach to the present world crisis, especially as a countermeasure to the destructive international policies and activities of Russian communism.”
Between 1947, when his bête noire was the Lebanese bureaucracy, and 1951, Alter was radicalized. No documents illuminate his awakening to the threat of communist influence, but his experience was common to many American missionaries, given communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, and the rise of Joseph McCarthy. In his 1951 report to the Syria-Lebanon mission, Alter repeatedly frames the struggles at Jibrail in geostrategic terms, identifying the USSR as the common enemy of the United States and Christendom: “all Christians should unite at once before it is too late” He quotes a letter from fellow missionary Frances Mecca Gray at length: “When Chief Justice Douglas said recently over the air, ‘It is difficult for the average American to understand that the best way to contain Communism is to do something for the people of a village in a country they can hardly locate on the map,’ my thoughts leapt immediately to Jibrail.”
Point Four operatives, in Alter’s estimation, were eager to fund Jibrail’s agricultural extension work to the tune of $10,000 per year. Synod endorsed the plan, the Chemoun government being a major recipient of American aid, but it was quashed by the Board of Foreign Missions in New York. Political considerations moved the Board, following the advice Lebanese intellectual Charles Malik had given to Synod: “The unique position of the U.S. as one able to help the other nations of the world leads to a hatred.” This resentment was expressed in the press: Syria-Lebanon mission records here include a passage from the Damascus newspaper Ash Shoury (Counsel) interviewing patients of a mission hospital in Deir ez-Zor: “What do you want me to say about a hospital founded on preaching and spying, not on medicine? […] These doctors who came to this country did not come for the love of medicine but for preaching.”
As part of a global movement to transfer foreign missions to national churches, the Board of Foreign Missions devolved responsibility to the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon in 1951. This exorcised Alter. Lebanese Protestants consistently directed mission funds away from evangelization missions to rural Muslims, out of caution not to upend the country’s delicate balance of power. Never mind, writes Alter, placing mission work under the Synod would “completely destroy our approach to non-Christians.” Moreover, the Synod would not use the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center, as Alter preferred, as an “answer to Communist propaganda. Many of the Protestant young people have some Communist tendencies […] In the event of a Communist government coming to power in Lebanon, such an institution would be marked for liquidation.”
The struggle against communism extended to Jibrail’s efforts to secure water for their orchards and their planned dairy and poultry operations. On furlough in 1952, the Alters had left Munir Khoury in charge of the JRFC, and had tasked him with gaining a new supply of water. In a 6 March 1952 letter to mission secretary Jim Willoughby, Alter blames the slow permitting process for a new water pipe to the Jibrail compound on “local communistic aggitors [sic].” The lines to the compound were cut several times by local people; in May Munir paid off the saboteurs for 1400 Lebanese pilastres. In June, Alter again writes to Willoughby, believing the local government to be under communist influence, “they seem to have broken the whole water cistern at government direction.” Other missionaries indicate to Alter and Willoughby that the pitched battles over water are part of a family quarrel — other families were jealous of improvements to the Khourys’ compound — but Alter has none of it: “I after careful prolonged study & observation feel that it is part of a much bigger issue — whether we or Russian controlled communism are to be victorious in the [Middle East].”
Whatever Alter’s theories, permitting was at issue — the new pipe drew from a nearby spring rather than “various newly tapped seepages,” and JRFC would contend with local government and landowners for secure access to water for the rest of its tenure. In November of that year, water saboteurs shot a villager trying to keep them from again breaking the pipe. The Board of Foreign Missions covered damages for the man from emergency funds.
Neale and Edith spent 1952 on furlough, much of their time taken up raising funds for Jibrail. In June Neale traveled to New York, and met with Nelson Rockefeller, who expressed interest in using his American International Association to support Jibrail. Neale also met with representatives of the Ford Foundation, which were productive, despite, in Neale’s words, “the Roman Catholic hand directing the institution.” By 1954, these efforts would bloom into a Rural Institute, a series of development seminars sponsored by the Near East Council of Churches and Agricultural Missions, Inc. By 1957, Jibrail is secure enough that Alter prepares a five-year plan, to include additional buildings; a staff of 14 people; basic, rather than vocational education; health and hygiene efforts; and local leadership training.
There is radio silence from Alter in the records of the Syria-Lebanon mission for much of 1958. Then comes a “Summary of Emergency Expenses, Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center”
15,000 indemnity paid to Shaikh
476 payments to rebels by staff-members in connection with Shaikh death, or for safe-conduct
500 expenses of Tribal court in dealing with family of Shaikh
At Jibrail, in early July, insurgents bombed the Khoury residence, and burned and looted other mission buildings. The attack killed Shaikh, a Muslim leader from a nearby village who had come to Jibrail in hopes of warding off the attack. Two weeks later, “somewhat as a surprise” the attackers returned, burning everything down to the goat pen and chicken coops. The Alters, then on furlough, remained in the United States and retired from missionary service in 1959, writing in their last annual report:
“We do not know what the future will be […] The complications of international politics and the inevitable misunderstandings of our motives play a part in the story of destruction, but if the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center had an answer for the desperate needs of a spiritually and physically under-developed rural society, it would certainly be a target of attack by forces bent on creating chaos and insecurity.”
Jibrail 1958 to 1967: After the Revolution
Word to evacuate came in the night by radio, in late May 1958, and the Hannas, Ed, Arpiné, their six-year-old son Philip, and Arpiné’s parents, Levon and Josephine Yenovkian, hurriedly packed a jeep and a Ford and fled their two story home in Jibrail. For four years the Hannas had worked with Neale and Edith Alter at the Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center, an experimental agricultural school in north Lebanon, until the revolution came.
A tide of pan-Arab nationalism initiated by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s successful defense of Egypt in the 1956 Suez crisis peaked in Lebanon in 1958. On 1 February 1958, the governments of Egypt and Syria united to form the United Arab Republic, greeted by raucous celebratory marches among young people in the streets of Beirut. Riots erupted in Tyre in late March after five boys were arrested for trampling a Lebanese flag while waving that of the UAR. Lebanon’s president, the pro-Western Camille Chamoun, derided the Nasserites — pan-Arabism was, “for some in Lebanon, a source of income, a springboard for attaining cheap popularity, and a stage for dwarfs and mountebanks” — while his foreign secretary Charles Malik asked the Eisenhower administration for military assistance. Lebanon and Libya had been the only Arab states to endorse the Eisenhower Doctrine, and Chamoun cast the pan-Arabists as communist-inspired.
In the early hours of 8 May 1958, the editor of a left-wing newspaper was assassinated. The largely Sunni and pan-Arabist National Front blamed the Chamoun government and called for a general strike. Violence became pandemic. In Tripoli 16 people died in one night during clashes between armed cadres of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and strike supporters; Druze soldiers of Kamal Jumblatt attacked the presidential palace at Beit ed-Dine, to be repelled by a rival Druze faction. Intercommunal strife would reach Jibrail.
Chamoun’s closeness with the United States government and the Protestant church in Lebanon, called the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon, made any American mission-related property a target of the insurgents. In an event that spring, covered in the 15 June 1958 issue of Presbyterian Life, Chamoun had personally dedicated a new parish house of NESSL in Beirut, conferred a decoration of Synod official Farid Audeh, and “paid tribute to Protestants in all fields of endeavor.”
The Hannas came to Jibrail in 1954, Ed to serve chiefly as Neale Alter’s administrative assistant, and Arpiné to teach in the girls’ school with Edith Alter and the Lebanese teachers Huda Boutros, Salwa Khoury Maamary and Nuhad Younes Haddad. Ed and Arpiné had met in 1949 at a relief center for impoverished residents of Sidon; Ed taught at the Presbyterian Sidon Boys’ School, Arpiné at the Sidon Girls’ School. Arpiné was Armenian, the daughter of parents who fled Turkey for Palestine. She was born in Acre in 1924, and educated at the Ramallah Friends School. The Yenovkians remained in Palestine until 1957, when they decided to join Ed and Arpiné in Lebanon, driving to a remote border crossing between Lebanon and Israel, in a car laden with clothes and furniture.
Fleeing Jibrail, the Hannas and Yenovkians headed due west for a coastal village, likely Aabdeh. A local authority, the dabit, warned them not to drive for Tripoli overnight, and put the family up in his home. The dabit bought Ed Hanna’s Ford on the spot. The next morning the Yenovkians caught a cab back to Jibrail to pack some of the things they’d carried from Palestine just the year before, and the Hannas, driving Neale Alter’s jeep accompanied by a Lebanese security detail made for the Iraqi Petroleum Company installation at Tripoli. The Hannas found their way to Beirut, staying briefly at the American Mission compound, then at the American University of Beirut, before returning to Sidon.
A 1959 report on Jibrail by Presbyterian rural work specialist Richard O. Comfort, noting that “during the rebellion of last year all the buildings were bombed and looted,” recommended careful study of whether and how to reopen the experiment. In any case, “the initiative in these matters should come from Lebanon and not the United States.” Lebanon’s violence remained unresolved. Jim Willoughby, gently dissuading Neale Alter from returning in November 1958, notes “No trace has ever been found of Vartan Saghdejian of NEST, who disappeared on one of the last days of the disturbances. The Jessie Taylor Home has been occupied by the Kurds. I do not know what luck the YWCA will have in ousting them.” For its part, the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon voted not to reopen Jibrail.
Neale Alter, on furlough in the United States, had other plans. In September 1959, he and Edith attended seminars at the International Cooperation Center in Bozeman, Montana, and at Pennsylvania State University in State College, and Neale began to shepherd potential grant money to Jibrail. The work would be restyled the Jibrail Cooperative Society, and would introduce dairy cattle in north Lebanon, to be funded by the Ohio Christian Rural Overseas Program (Ohio CROP) and Agricultural Missions, Inc. His letters express single-mindedness and overweening hope in equal measure. Munir Khoury and Huda Boutros had not formed a non-profit at Jibrail, a prerequisite for CROP’s distribution of funds, frustrating Alter. Neale found hope in Synod’s interest in developing a rural parish at Minyara, and notes the arrival of Ben Weir there, counting him a supporter of Jibrail.
Meanwhile, Munir Khoury and Huda Boutros had begun a “holding project” at Jibrail, laying the ground work for a dairy cooperative, and Jim Willoughby, working within the Near East Council of Churches, began handling donations from overseas. Though the original Jibrail Rural Fellowship Center had an account in the hands of the American mission of 24,000LL, difficulties in disbursing those funds after the passage of control to the Synod made the funds, “frozen,” in Alter’s telling. The chief new contribution to the cooperative in November 1959 came from the Alters’ son Harry, working in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia as a government relations analyst for Aramco. With Harry’s $350, Willoughby opens an account called “Dairy cooperative,” and soon contributions from Ohio CROP, and from the world service committee of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.) would fund the project into the summer of 1960. The new money restarts teaching at Jibrail, paying former teachers Salwa, Fahad, and Abu Fareed, and a youth, Abdulla.
Through 1960, Alter lobbies the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations for funding. The Commission officially demurs, suggesting that the Near East Council of Churches fund the project instead. Unofficially, commissioners were loath to fund the new project. On behalf of the Syria-Lebanon mission, COEMAR was still trying to settle claims against it brought by the Khoury family for lost rent, unfair water allocation, and damage to fruit trees at Jibrail. J. W. Willoughby in Beirut in an 18 August 1960 letter to Rodney Sundberg at COEMAR boils over; Presbyterians should “withdraw immediately from any connection with Jibrail rather than pay what smacked all blackmail.”
Restoration of the dynamited Khoury property was not included in the “emergency” payments for Jibrail — those had largely been dedicated to buying off the rebels, and compensating the family of Shaikh — and Munir Khoury, in addition to rebuilding the family home, wanted to ensure that the Jibrail Center persisted. The Americans interpreted his intentions differently. Alter writes to Willoughby of Khoury’s “extravagant demands” and that Munir is “completely dominated by his scheming mother” — and he looks forward to the return to Lebanon of Samir Maamary, who had completed a bachelor’s degree at the Ohio State University, funded by an Ohio CROP scholarship. COEMAR would settle Munir’s claims in May 1961 for $2500, on condition that he have nothing to do with a reopened Jibrail.
After a failed coup attempt against the government of Fuad Chehab by SSNP members in 1961, Khoury and other party leaders were arrested. Facing a sentence of four years, Khoury used his trial as an opportunity to decry political repression; his sentence was doubled, and he would serve seven years as a political prisoner, freed in a 1969 general amnesty.
The patchwork of authority over the projects at Jibrail — accounts held by COEMAR, land owned by Synod, funding from Ohio CROP routed through NECC, a Jibraili Board of Directors — would be centralized in 1960. Responding to requests from within the Synod to move agricultural work from Jibrail to elsewhere in the Akkar, Ben Weir defended work at Jibrail, if only “to avoid at this point the expense of selling one property and buying another, before we know how the project might succeed.” In January the Synod and COEMAR would formally transfer control of the newly-styled Akkar Area Cooperative to Ohio CROP. CROP operative Clyde Rogers would arrive in Jibrail in the spring of 1961 to secure feed for livestock, begin repairs on the buildings damaged in 1958, and to start a poultry program.
CROP operations in dairy and poultry were extensive. The first transfers of cows and chickens, donated by Ohio Presbyterians, came in September 1961. By the fall of 1962, CROP’s Keith Buchs had established disease eradication, livestock feeding, and artificial insemination programs. In a mid-October letter home he reports the successful sale of cooperative products: “The Volkswagen that left here on Thursday morning was loaded as we had envisioned from the beginning of this project. It had eggs (to be delivered at BCW0, rabbits (to be delivered on the road to Beirut), and milk (to be delivered in Tripoli).” On his return, Buchs packed the Volkswagen with “1100 baby broiler chicks.” The poultry program would grow to 150 laying chickens and 3000 chicks. These included, one morning in April 1963, “new breeding stock from the U.S. which arrived at 4:00 AM, peeping contentedly after their journey.”
Dairy proved a harder sell. Dairy cattle imported from the U.S. produced a grade of milk which CROP staff believed was wasted if sold wholesale to leben and labneh producers. CROP staff dreamed of building a pasteurization plant and starting door to door milk delivery, and as late as 1964, believed that the dairy program at Jibrail lacked “only better marketing procedures to make a profit.” Though kept afloat by the poultry program, margins for the Akkar Cooperative were never large — it returned $50,000 on expenditures of $45,000 in 1961; $93,000 on $86,000 in 1962; and $228,000 on $223,000 in 1963. And the success of the poultry operation was its own undoing. In 1964, the Akkar region would produce 187,000 kilograms of poultry, growing the regional economy by $1 million LL, but by the end of the year markets corrected for this glut, and the price of chicken retreated to the break-even mark. CROP, likely seeing the writing on the wall, in July 1964 negotiated a formal transfer of the Akkar operations to the NECC, represented by Ben Weir. The cooperative strained under debt for chicken feed, and by the summer of 1965, the 17 farmers involved were urged to go it alone. The NECC dissolved the Akkar Cooperative in April 1966, and deeded its Jibrail property back to COEMAR that July. Weir presided over the final sale of the property in April 1967.
Nada Khoury, who returned to Lebanon after years in the United Kingdom, retains vivid memories of the cooperative to this day. For the first several years of her father Munir’s imprisonment, she and her two sisters spent the summer with their grandparents in Jibrail, while their mother worked in Beirut. “We hated it: Mom would come and see us during the weekends, but then leave early in the morning Monday mornings to go to work. We got very bored in our isolated house away from the village centre.” Nevertheless, the cooperative held cherished memories for all the Khoury family. Nada’s grandmother Marianna, and after his release her father, spoke fondly of the early work at Jibrail, remembering Neale Alter as a strong, guiding influence. Nada and her sisters, and Janan, Samir Maamary’s niece, often played near the cooperative’s abandoned buildings, next door to her grandmother’s house.
Samir Maamary would settle in the United States. Ed and Arpiné Hanna would leave Sidon for Beirut in 1972, and remain there until 1985, through much of the Lebanese Civil War. Neale and Edith Alter would spend 1963 and 1964 working for the UPCUSA to identify sites for affordable housing for retired missionaries; Neale died in March of 1964 in Maryville, Tennessee. Edith would retire to Westminster Gardens in Duarte, California in 1967. Munir Khoury died in 2015.
Conclusion
Reflecting on Jibrail in 1955, Neale Alter lamented how American mission work had promoted a flight from the countryside, and described the support of rural people and rural economies in Lebanon using botanical terms: “Many years ago cedars of Lebanon were cut down to build Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and these hillsides were left bare. Our schools had that very same effect on our village life. We need to plant some new cedars on these Lebanon hills.” Reflecting on his life in 2003, Munir Khoury also wrote about the denuded slopes of the Qammou’a mountains: “There were no cars in the area at that time, not until the onset of the Second World War when the invading armies built roads and cut down most of the forest trees and the most beautiful pine and fir trees. That act was achieved in accordance with a criminal agreement with the Lebanese government and a hideous crime was committed in one of the most beautiful natural environments, not only in Lebanon but perhaps in the whole world.”
For Neale Alter, the whole purpose of maintaining a rural agricultural mission was evangelism. Despite having spent 30 years in close contact with the people of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and fully aware of the very small number of Arab converts to Protestant Christianity produced by mission work since 1820, Alter — admittedly, in vehicles aimed at a domestic American audience — continues to speak of mission work according to a Biblical timeline — the cedars of Lebanon cut down for Solomon’s temple. For Munir Khoury, the point of rural agricultural work was to improve rural people’s lives; he speaks on a sixty-year timeline, not of Solomon’s cedars, but of the pines taken down during the 1941 British invasion. For successive American governments, the purpose of agricultural assistance programs, mission-related or not, in the Middle East — in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s phrase, “chicken aid” — was to stem the political and economic influence of the Soviet Union. For American Presbyterian ecclesiastical bureaucrats in New York, the experimental agricultural education center was valuable chiefly insofar as it was economically viable. The success or failure of the experiment at Jibrail would be judged according to these nested or woven interests. Would the people of Jibrail convert en masse to Presbyterianism? Would the children of Jibrail see the Americans among them as a benevolent presence, finish their schooling at the Center, move on to the American University in Beirut, or the Beirut College for Women, come home and apply their education to the benefit of their families and neighbors? Would communism be routed as an ideology throughout Lebanon? Would the co-operative get into the black?
The lattermost question unearths one of the ironies of Presbyterian mission work in Syria and Lebanon, one brought to light repeatedly by Eugene Carson Blake. In 1956, Blake returned from a National Council of Churches trip to Moscow with a warning for the church: the Christian West promoted an economic system which promised to guarantee material prosperity, whereas the officially atheist, communist East promoted immaterial assets — peace and justice. Insofar as an agricultural mission endeavor was graded by its economic output — pounds of chicken, gallons of milk — it promoted capitalism, not Christianity. The more an agricultural mission endeavor was conjoined to success in the markets, the less it could appeal to the moral sentiments of the people it served. In a further reversal, such a failed appeal — repeated time and again in the American missionary encounter with the Arab world — undermined the desired political side-effects of mission work.
In a 4 May 1920 letter to Neale Alter, Stanley White of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions impresses upon the young future missionary the terrible gravity of his assignment: “The peace of the world hangs upon the peace of the Near East.” Though Presbyterian missionaries of the twentieth century frequently viewed their work as a matter of changing the flow of history, it’s best to appraise their work at Jibrail in narrower terms. Using laws which promoted agricultural cooperatives by the Lebanese government in the late 1960s, and despite the decimation of the sector by the Lebanese Civil War, according to one count there are 799 agricultural cooperatives in Lebanon, including in Mareh Bajaa, south of Jibrail. Samir Maamary, in an interview, made the point emphatically. Though it shut down, though it might not have survived the civil war, the Jibrail Cooperative provided a model for the agricultural cooperatives of the present, and potential for the future: “The purpose was to teach.”
Primary sources:
RG 115, box 10, folders 2–3; box 16, folders 18–20 Rural Mission Work, 1932–1956; box 16, folder 21 Rural Churches, 1936–1946, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Syria Mission records, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia PA.
RG 492, box 23, folder 20; box 38, folders 6–8; box 46, folder 21, folder 29, Syria-Lebanon Mission records, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia PA.
RG 360; RG 424; Missionary personnel files, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia PA.
Interview with Phil Hanna, April 2017.
Interview with Nada Khoury Habet, September 2017.
Interview with Samir Maamary, December 2017.
Munir Khoury, The Journey of My Life, (2003); English translation (2018) courtesy Nada Khoury Habet.
Secondary sources:
Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820–2001 (2010).
Karol Sorby, “Lebanon: The Crisis of 1958,” in Asian and African Studies 9 (2000)
Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2009)
Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey, eds., American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (2011)
Harry B. Ellis, Heritage of the Desert (1956)
Ralph A. Felton, Hope Rises from the Land (1955)
