Lebanon’s complicated religious landscape, which the National Pact paid lip service to, is down to its geography

Arab nationalists won a stunning victory in elections in Lebanon , a country the French had created two decades earlier .

The winners, Bechara el-Khoury and Riad al-Solh , had received substantial, surreptitious British help behind the scenes.

Soon afterwards they reached an unwritten deal known as the National Pact .

This division of responsibilities down religious lines has been followed scrupulously ever since.

Less well-known was the other important commitment that the two men made.

By the second half of the Fifties , there was growing tension.

The constitution enshrined a Christian bias to the electoral system based on a 1932 census of the population.

Many Lebanese were enthused by the charismatic Egyptian leader’s pan-Arab dream and feared he might take over.

The murder of a prominent, pro-Nasser journalist added to the tension.

Hezbollah became Israel ’s most dangerous opponent in Lebanon in the 1990s .