Feminism and the Lebanese Phalange. The Two Battles of Jocelyne Khoueiri

A note on sources: much of what the wider world remembers of Jocelyne Khoueiri reaches us through one film — Al Jazeera’s Lebanon’s Women Warriors, part of the network’s Witness documentary strand. Her voice in this post, including the closing words, belongs to that record. This is the kind of preservation work that gives A Filmmaker’s Journal its subject: lives that history was preparing to lose, held in place by the patience of a camera.

When the Middle East comes to mind, the image of a woman on the front lines with a rifle is rarely the first to arrive. Jocelyne Khoueiri spent her life dismantling that expectation. Known across Lebanon as an icon of resistance, she died at the age of sixty-five, leaving behind a legacy of fierce patriotism and a transformation that few of her contemporaries undertook.

A Leader on the Demarcation Lines

Khoueiri’s path into armed struggle began early. In 1972, while studying law and media, she formally joined the Lebanese Kataeb — the Phalange Party. She did not merely participate. She rose to lead the Nizamiyat, the party’s female combatants, and became the public face of women in the Christian militias.

A generation of Lebanese remembers her on the demarcation lines of Beirut, rifle in hand, fighting on some of the most dangerous fronts of the civil war. Lebanon’s Women Warriors preserves her own account of those years: the conviction, the wounds, the rifle she called part of her blood. She let her weapon and her courage speak when she felt the moment demanded it, and she carried the marks of those years on her body for the rest of her life.

Her life then took a turn few expected. As internal divisions tore through the Kataeb and the Lebanese Forces, Khoueiri made the difficult decision to step away. She and her fellow female fighters resigned from the structures they had built, walking away from the battles to which they had given their youth.

The Generation That Followed

The PLO had been driven from Lebanon in 1982. The Israeli invasion of that same year, and the occupation that followed it, defined the next phase of the conflict. Khoueiri’s son took up the Christian national cause his mother had served, and confronted the Israeli forces in Lebanon. He was arrested and imprisoned for twelve years.

A New Kind of Resistance

Putting down the rifle did not mean she stopped fighting. She simply changed the field. With a circle of her former comrades, she gave the rest of her life to prayer, to fasting, and to the Church, and together they founded an initiative they called Women of May 31.

The new mission was at once intimate and political: to strengthen the family as the foundation of Lebanese society, and to safeguard the presence of Christians in Lebanon and across the Middle East. She turned to the teachings of Jesus Christ as the ground of a deeper, more personal kind of change. The work brought her, eventually, into the presence of Pope John Paul II, who blessed her efforts; in his name she later opened a center dedicated to the rehabilitation of broken families.

The Final Choice

Even in her last days, Khoueiri remained restless with projects and possibilities. She had completed the rarest of passages — from armed combat to spiritual and social resistance — without ever surrendering the conviction that drew her to the first battle.

The fullest summary of that life is the one she gave herself:

“I am proud of my military struggle, but my choice today is the truth, which is Jesus Christ.”

Jocelyne Khoueiri’s testimony, and the testimonies of the other women who fought on every side of the Lebanese Civil War, are preserved in Lebanon’s Women Warriors (Al Jazeera). The film is the reason this portrait can be written at all.