Dr Dueck's research, funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, examines the responses of Christians and Muslims in Syria and Lebanon to the Zionist movement from 1917 to 1982, with particular emphasis on how these reactions affected Lebanon's emerging political structures, Syro-Lebanese relations and French Mandatory policies. Its importance lies in its analysis of the coexistence, within both faiths, of pragmatic hope for religiously tolerant national governments alongside polemical calls for inter-confessional political segregation. Zionism proved a potent source of conflict in Syria and Lebanon because many Lebanese Christians aspired to create their own 'foyer chrétien', analogous to the Jewish Homeland in Palestine and anathema to the wishes of the regional Muslim majority. Such aspirations, however, were opposed not only by Muslims, but also by many Christians who embraced a vision of multi-religious Arab unity as the basis of their national identity and consequently responded differently to the Zionist political model.