Palestine]
1838 Ibrahim took an unfortunate step. At his wits' end to deal with the Druses of the Hauran, who had cost him 15,000 casualties, he called in the Emir Beshir, armed 7,000 Maronites, and sent these against cousins of their fellow-mountaineers. They were successful, and disarmed the Hauran. Beshir, anxious about the effect in the Lebanon, asked that not only should these Maronites retain their arms, but other Maronites be armed, up to 24,000 in all; and Ibrahim, in the first flush of his gratitude, consented.
With the Druses already hostile, after their forcible disarmament, Ibrahim tried, two years later, to take back his gift from the Maronites, and enrol them, as well as the Druses, in his nizam. Beshir seconded this order, by telling each element that the other alone would be disarmed in permanence. Both were soon disillusioned, and each proceeded to sink for a moment its now profound suspicion of the other in a common hatred of the Egyptian. It was known that the Powers had come on the scene in earnest and arrested Ibrahim's advance the previous year, after his crowning victory at Nizib; but it was not yet known that there was division between Great Britain and France. Some Maronites and some Druses rose together, chose a Frenchman for leader, and appealed to the British and French Consuls in Beirut. It was a very partial rising. The mass of the Druses came out, only to return immediately to their obedience: the mass of the Maronites never came out at all. A small body of insurgents kept the field for a time against weak Egyptian forces on the coast; but Ibrahim would quickly have overwhelmed it from the inner country had it not been for events which had nothing at all to do, in their inception, with the Lebanon revolt-the Treaty of London restoring Syria to the Porte, and Mehemet Ali's refusal to yield except to force.
Egyptians driven out; Measures for Settlement.—Great Britain accepted a mandate to execute the London warrant, which France had declined to endorse. The easiest way was to shut Ibrahim from his vital ports.
