owers, to award them self determination by
extending their small Lebanese territory to what they dubbed "Greater
Lebanon", referring to a geographic unit comprising Mount Lebanon and its
coast, and the Beqaa Valley to its east. After the First World War, France took
hold of the formerly Ottoman holdings in the northern Levant, and expanded the
borders of Mount Lebanon in 1920 to form Greater Lebanon which was to be
populated by remnants of the Middle Eastern Christian community. While the
Christians ended up gaining territorially the new borders merely ended the
demographic dominance of Christians in the newly created territory of Lebanon
