Beware of Small States – Lebanon, Battleground of |the Middle East
By David Hirst
(Faber & Faber, R 194)
When historians come to write the story of our times, they may well call it The Age of Anger. This is a book about that anger in the Middle East: anger, resentment, greed, hatred, envy, cruelty – you name it, it’s there.
No one comes out of it with credit, orchestrated as this menu for misery is by an overriding fear: fear of loss of identity. Christians, Zionists, Sunnis, Shias, Alawis wrestle in varying combinations to protect their interests and way of life.
David Hirst, a veteran English journalist resident in Beirut, Lebanon, who has covered the area for most of his life, brings us this masterful tour de force, a chronicle of the political history of his host country in its infinite complexity.
Lebanon is unique in the context of the Arab world in that it has since its inception accommodated Christians and Muslims. In a unique and for a long time successful constitutional partition, power was shared by Muslims and Christians.
The Christians, French educated and deeply attached to France, gave Lebanon a Western cosmopolitanism.
According to Hirst, it all began to unravel with the formation of the state of Israel. He argues that Zionist ambitions, at first carefully concealed, were focused on the expansion of Israel’s borders by driving Palestinians from lands they had occupied for generations. Arab provocation became a pretext for war, invasion and expulsion.
Many escaped to Lebanon to form vast refugee camps, upsetting the fragile demographic balance that had safeguarded the peaceful coexistence of disparate religious groups in that country.
And so began the battles for the heart of Lebanon. Lebanon became a quagmire where the US, Russia, Israel, Syria, Iraq and Iran played out their proxy wars.
From Ben-Gurion to Sharon it was a Zionist aspiration to expel Palestinians from Lebanon and to form an alliance with Christian Maronites whose Western way of life, they argued, lay closer to that of Jews than Arabs.
To this end the Israeli Defence Force invaded Lebanon in 1982 and teamed up with the right-wing Christian Phalangists, giving them a free hand to perpetrate atrocities in the refugee camps of Shatila and Sabra.
The adventure was to end, as did the many other invasions that were to follow, in ignominy for the invaders and a hardening of attitudes that was to spawn Hezbollah, the military wing of the Shia Muslims of Lebanon. It also divided the Christians, the majority of whom deplored the atrocities at Shatila and Sabra.
In a never-ceasing spiral of violence the disparate ethnic groups began to take each other on. Civil war and internecine strife followed. Behind these conflicts lurked the US, Israel, Syria and Iran.
Hirst never flags; he has a command of the facts and an insight into Middle Eastern affairs that is unique. The work is carefully referenced and rewards the reader with a clear perception of the conflicts that bedevil the region and appear on our television screens every night.