Abstract

This article examines the role that empathy played during the US intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1958, also known as Operation Blue Bat. Through deep readings of public texts, it explores how a minority of Americans empathized with Lebanese opponents of President Camille Chamoun. After the arrival of US forces, Lebanese anti-Chamounists made their voices heard and feeling felt in the USA via global information providers, enacting cultural interventions. Lebanese dissent was headline news, engendering empathetic processes that reoriented US ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. By using empathy as a point of entry into historical intercultural relations, this article unearths how genuine transnational understandings were socially formed during a moment of conflict. Ultimately, it argues that a focus on empathy gives foreign relations scholars an avenuethateschews nefarious Orientalist binaries and their powers in the process.

Highlights

  • This article examines the role that empathy played during the US intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1958, known as Operation Blue Bat

  • “As a young man who admires the greatness of the United States,” the Lebanese student appealed to Americans “not to let what is happening in the Middle East and Maurice Jr

  • Empathetic processes deepened a dissident strain within the constellation of US public opinion, even as Congress officially approved the US intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1958.57 A “clash of opinions” ensued, leading some US commentators to invoke empathy metaphors when explaining their own opposition to Operation Blue Bat and expressing solidarity with Lebanese anti-Chamounists

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Summary

Introduction

This article examines the role that empathy played during the US intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1958, known as Operation Blue Bat.

Results
Conclusion

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