The ruin of Lebanon that we see today cannot be explained by the usual talk of a fragile sectarian mosaic that simply failed to hold. From the founding of the Lebanese state and the departure of the French, the whole story can be compressed into three words: Palestine, Islam, and the rejection of Westernization. Those three are bound together—three faces of a single ideology—and they have been the engine of Lebanon’s destruction for seven decades.
It does not matter whether that ideology was carried by Arab peoples, by Arab regimes, or by Islamic movements. Nasserists, Wahhabis, Baathists, the Iranian axis, on these three points they all agreed, and they all turned against Lebanon. The deepest fault line in the country was a contest over what Lebanon would be: a free, independent, secular state and a bridge to the West, or a piece of the so-called Arab and Islamic world, subject to its will and its agenda. The Christians of Lebanon carried a vision of prosperity. Arrayed against them stood an ideology of terror. In Lebanon, tragically, the ideology of terror won.
To understand the hostility, one must understand what offended the region in the first place. Lebanon’s very existence as a secular identity and a bridge to the West was an irritant to the entire Arab world. A country with a Christian president, the only state in the Middle East where Islam was not the religion of the state, a nation that wanted its primary relationship to be with the West and that took pride in its secular character, this disturbed everyone around it. Were it not for the existence of Israel, the Arab states would have treated Lebanon exactly as they treated Israel: as a target to be eliminated.
So they pursued both. Israel was target number one; Lebanon was target number two. They failed against Israel. But against Lebanon they succeeded, and the tools they used to break it were the same two words they used against everything else, “Israel” and “Palestine.” That is the whole story of Lebanon in miniature. Understand those two words and how they were weaponized, and you understand how the country was dismantled.
