PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Lebanon's history is UK's Future
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Summary
In this episode of Brokernomics, I am joined by Faraz to talk about the Lebanese civil war. We talk about what it was like growing up in Lebanon in the 70s and 80s, and why we don't want to have another one.
Transcript
00:00:29.440
Now, I need to be schooled on some basic realities and the man to do that is Faraz.
00:00:38.920
I'll tell the audience why I said to you, I think we need to have a chat.
00:00:45.200
It's on two subjects or two very related subjects.
00:00:49.940
The first is I have a very hazy understanding of Lebanon.
00:00:54.940
Because when I was a small child, Lebanon, well, Beirut, Beirut was basically a euphemism
00:01:06.100
So, you know, and in the disconnected, you know, miles away West, you know, that would
00:01:12.460
manifest as, you know, two people were having an argument and somebody else walking and
00:01:16.360
It was just a term for there is great conflict.
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And I'm vaguely aware that there was a conflict and I'm vaguely aware that Lebanon had been
00:01:35.400
It was sort of described as the Paris of the Middle East.
00:01:39.160
It had a large Christian population and Muslim immigration kept on going up and eventually
00:01:48.540
And the reason I'd like to understand that is because the more I hear about what actually
00:01:52.800
happened in Lebanon, the more I think, okay, well, yes, but we're doing all of those
00:01:57.840
And my loose understanding is that once there was a slight majority of Muslims, that's when
00:02:06.400
And I'm sure you'll correct me on the details of that, but I'm looking at this and thinking,
00:02:09.420
well, the demographics in Lebanon just before the civil war is basically where we're going
00:02:20.140
And the second thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we can come to as well, is
00:02:24.020
when you are on the right, you kind of see the absolute madness, the clown world around
00:02:32.820
And sometimes you could just find yourself drifting into, oh, maybe it wouldn't be so
00:02:36.940
bad if we had a civil war and sorted all this out.
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And you put out a very good tweet the other day, basically saying, no.
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But that's harder for us to get our head around because we've not been in one and we
00:02:54.160
Well, I know some of you who's been in one now, but I mean, you know, most of us, we don't
00:03:01.860
We've got no cultural memory of what a civil war is actually like.
00:03:05.960
And actually, it's not a, you know, heroic overthrowing of the government.
00:03:22.460
I was very fortunate that my father had to leave Lebanon because they wanted to kill
00:03:30.120
So I was born abroad in Jordan, but I'd visit Lebanon every summer.
00:03:36.340
And some summers you just have to, you know, spend two days in front of the bathroom because
00:03:42.100
And so if a shell fell, you wouldn't get buried under the rubble as opposed to in your bedroom
00:03:50.700
And so you, you know, I was not as exposed to it as everybody else who lived through the
00:03:57.860
That is more than most 10-year-olds who grew up in this country would be familiar with,
00:04:04.200
As in the whole family is literally huddled in front of the bathroom because there happens
00:04:11.340
And that provides two layers of concrete protecting you, meaning that if a shell were to fall on
00:04:18.640
your house, it wouldn't necessarily penetrate and kill everyone.
00:04:26.220
And that was sort of, you know, the best that's available.
00:04:29.180
So there are stories about my grandmother sort of, you know, there are guests in the
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house and you would invite them to the salon and they'd be sitting there.
00:04:37.620
And then the shelling would start to, please, please, would you, would you, would you join
00:04:42.900
And then everybody would sort of huddle until the shelling was over.
00:04:45.400
Having to make awkward conversation clustered in the bathroom for quite three days or whatever
00:04:50.480
Well, days, hours, whatever, whatever it was until it was over.
00:05:06.080
Because again, I've got a very hazy understanding of this.
00:05:08.200
My very hazy understanding, you can correct this.
00:05:11.880
Well, no, my hazy of Lebanon itself is that in the Middle East, originally there were Jews
00:05:21.760
There was quite a lot of Christians in that region.
00:05:24.960
That was, you know, Middle East being Middle East, whatever, until 1400 something Islam
00:05:32.060
They were a little bit feisty in their spreading out and recruitment process and all the rest
00:05:39.160
And the Lebanese Christians kind of clustered around the mountains and then the Muslims took
00:05:48.820
So 1400 years ago, the Muslims begin their heresy.
00:05:52.700
And they, like all heresies, are seeking first material power.
00:05:59.060
And Islam is quite unique in its obsession with gaining power and ruling.
00:06:05.340
So the Jews have a long history of not being in power.
00:06:08.000
The Christians had 300 years of oppression before Rome was converted.
00:06:20.540
With not just expansionism, but also political power, worldly power, temporal power.
00:06:25.800
And the separation between the temporal and the spiritual is very limited in Islam, whereas
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With Christians, because they started out under Rome, it was, okay, we don't have power, but
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And I suppose that was a kind of foundational thing for them.
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And so they kind of got used to just, okay, well, we can just wait for the spiritual rewards
00:06:53.560
where with Islam, it was all, no, we're taking both.
00:07:02.680
So what Islam did was that it sort of said, you can stay Christian or you can stay Jewish.
00:07:16.700
And with some randomization of the application of it.
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I have said before that the first Muslims were basically just Jews who wanted a tax break.
00:07:35.360
Because what you're reducing, what you're taking away from that is the sheer pride and arrogance
00:07:40.840
And that it tells the Jews that your beliefs are all wrong because you've been lying in
00:07:47.420
And it tells the Muslims, the Christians that your beliefs are all wrong because you've falsified
00:07:53.920
And that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ never happened.
00:07:56.640
Well, I have read the Quran and basically it's just grabbing hodgepodge bits of the Jewish
00:08:03.220
and Christian holy books in a kind of random order plus stories about Mohammed.
00:08:12.220
I think the story of the flood is in there like 40 times and it's just randomly interspersed.
00:08:17.020
So the story of Moses keeps on getting repeated in different versions.
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There is some order in the first chapter, Surat al-Baqarah, which sort of goes through a very brief
00:08:30.820
summary of bits and pieces, especially of Genesis and Exodus.
00:08:40.780
But with all of those stories, there's a reason why there's a deeper truth hidden within them.
00:08:46.420
But with the Islamic version, none of that's been understood.
00:08:49.920
And it's just they just get a bit of the narrative and whack it in there.
00:08:55.980
And they don't give any of the characters real depth.
00:09:00.940
So if you were to look at Abraham, the story about Abraham lying to Pharaoh and saying that
00:09:05.820
his wife is a sister is sort of briefly mentioned in the Quran.
00:09:09.180
But without the sort of broader context that gives it meaning, which is that here was a man who was so weak
00:09:19.020
that he had to lie about his wife being his sister.
00:09:24.760
And then from this very fragile, very broken man, he takes him and makes him the father of nations.
00:09:31.600
So that sort of implication is you could look for it if you then refer to the Jewish scriptures, but sort of missing.
00:09:45.540
The deeper meaning of the crucifixion, it's completely taken away because the Muslim interpretation is that
00:09:51.080
depending on which Muslim authority you believe, either Judas Iscariot was crucified instead of Christ,
00:09:58.960
meaning that, you know, that changes the story a little bit, or that Christ had one of his disciples be crucified for him
00:10:08.520
while he hid away, which is insulting to Jesus Christ in every sense.
00:10:19.540
But the focus, I think, is the insistence on temporal power.
00:10:23.860
So after the Islamic invasions, the majority population that Muslims ruled over was still Christian.
00:10:36.360
And most Christians said, OK, we'll pay the poll tax.
00:10:39.820
And what really changed things was the westernization of Middle Eastern Christians,
00:10:45.520
whereby they slowed down in terms of reproducing, whereas the Muslims just went mad.
00:11:00.600
And that shifted the demographic balance quite a bit in places like Syria, places like Lebanon, even in Palestine.
00:11:07.020
Palestine, that really shifted the demographic balance.
00:11:13.340
What really drove the Lebanese civil war was in part that demographic imbalance,
00:11:20.300
as the Muslim population kept on growing, because Lebanon used to be just Mount Lebanon.
00:11:25.980
So Beirut, kind of Lebanon, not Lebanon, or just barely.
00:11:39.580
And now it's a two million plus metropolis, pretty much half of the population.
00:11:44.360
So my loose understanding is the demographics were something like 60% Christian, 40% Muslim,
00:11:53.300
And in Mount Lebanon, it was a tiny Shia minority, the Druze and the Christians.
00:12:13.220
But then who came to the conclusion that the hidden meaning of religion is what matters,
00:12:26.920
And they came up with their own holy quintity, holy five, as an answer to the holy trinity,
00:12:35.800
but in a sequential order, whereas in the holy trinity, they're all one at the same time.
00:12:45.600
And who kind of have some bad things to say about Muhammad and praise Ali, his son-in-law and cousin instead.
00:12:57.620
And this is why this minority sort of exists only in the mountains.
00:13:01.360
Similar to the Alawites, another heretical extremist Shia group that only exists in the mountains of Syria.
00:13:18.080
But it's a relatively contained area which you find them.
00:13:22.440
Because that means that you can set up a proper defense and you can beat a more numerous force.
00:13:28.520
So you've got this country which is diverse, but still majority Christian coming into...
00:13:35.400
Majority Christian coming into the 1920s, where basically during the First World War,
00:13:47.320
Because since Mount Lebanon was Christian, it was a way for Western powers to project power.
00:13:57.680
And they decided that we're just going to starve Mount Lebanon completely.
00:14:02.860
And so a third of the population died in famine over a period of three years.
00:14:10.920
To address that, when the French came in 1918, during the defeat of the Ottomans, there was the mandate set up.
00:14:21.300
The Brits started setting up a Jewish homeland in Palestine for what became Israel today.
00:14:28.640
The French took Lebanon and Syria under their mandate.
00:14:40.780
Not the highest part, but yeah, still the best.
00:14:44.740
You're comparing it to the Mamluks, to the Ottomans.
00:14:49.340
You know, you'd have to go back to Crusader times for anything comparable, anything else to think about.
00:14:57.040
And the French and the Christians decided to expand Lebanon from just being Mount Lebanon, to include the plains of the Bekaa Valley, and to include more of the coast.
00:15:11.600
And the idea was that this would give Lebanon a little more depth, and mean that it can't be starved again, because these were good agricultural lands.
00:15:22.220
Whereas the mountain, it's impossible to grow grains in the mountains, because you need flatlands, for example.
00:15:31.700
You know, so this expansion meant that the Christians and the Muslims were... the Christian majority was tiny, as opposed to Mount Lebanon, which is mostly Christian.
00:15:44.300
And this set things up badly, because the Christians modernized, and the Muslims didn't, sociologically speaking, in terms of family, and how you build a family.
00:15:59.420
And that meant that over time, the balance tipped.
00:16:03.340
So Lebanon was set up so that for every six Christian seats in Parliament, there would be five Muslim seats, preserving a Christian majority in Parliament.
00:16:11.620
And having the top positions of the state for the Christians, with the Muslims having pretty important positions, the Speaker of Parliament, the Prime Minister, but with a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the Christian president.
00:16:31.260
Well, I mean, this sounds exactly where the UK is now, where, you know, we've got Muslim mayors running basically everything, Muslim Home Secretary, you know, that...
00:16:38.620
I mean, it's not codified in this way, isn't it?
00:16:41.400
We're not saying, okay, we can have six to five.
00:16:50.220
Because obviously that's very contentious in the Middle East.
00:16:53.060
But I'd imagine opinions differed considerably between the Christian Lebanese and the Muslim Lebanese.
00:17:00.240
And of course, Israel being directly below Lebanon.
00:17:03.920
So, for the Christians, there was some ambivalence about this.
00:17:14.300
Does this mean that we can draw the whole Eastern Mediterranean closer to the West?
00:17:23.080
For the Muslims, it was a religious humiliation.
00:17:26.800
It came at the time that the Caliphate had just ended.
00:17:31.540
For the first time in Islamic history, there was no Caliph.
00:17:38.560
And although there were periods in history where the actual temporal power of the Caliph was very weak,
00:17:46.420
the Caliphate was still a unifying institution.
00:17:49.540
And it meant that the Muslims had a point of reference.
00:17:55.480
And it's possible for there to be at least some change or moderation because it's coming from a central point.
00:18:00.840
Which is why British policy, especially as the empire expanded, focused on working with the Ottomans
00:18:07.820
because they knew that if the Ottomans were to call for a jihad against the British empire,
00:18:12.940
this would have implications for their ability to maintain parts of the empire that were Muslim.
00:18:21.380
So there was this moral authority that was gone.
00:18:26.280
And then what emerged as a result of that was Islamo-leftism, which is what you're seeing here in Britain.
00:18:34.240
You end up basically with a lot of the Muslim population that wanted to rebel against Israel,
00:18:43.920
looking around and saying, well, what can we do now that the Caliphate is out of the picture?
00:18:49.440
And part of the answer was socialism with Islamic characteristics.
00:18:56.200
Characterized by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt after the 1952 revolution,
00:19:02.940
which was a direct consequence of the defeat of the Egyptian army in 1948.
00:19:10.640
Characterized by the uprisings in Syria and the series of coups that happened in Syria from around,
00:19:17.660
I want to say, 49 onwards was when the coup season began in Syria.
00:19:23.160
And there were years that there would be three coups in one year.
00:19:26.200
And that was a consequence of different factions trying to adapt, okay, what are we going to do?
00:19:32.640
And the answer seemed to be, well, the only people who went from traditional empire to strong modern state were the Soviets.
00:19:45.480
And so we need to adapt that to the Muslim world and we need to control the religious institutions of Islam that have been so far a hindrance to progress.
00:19:58.420
Remember that under the Ottoman Caliphate, there was a period where the printing press was banned for 300 years.
00:20:06.040
To preserve the role of the ulama, the learned scholars of Islam, who partly relied on copying manuscripts for their income.
00:20:17.660
So that emergence of Islamo-leftism was understandable in some senses.
00:20:25.620
And there was a whole debate, is Islam naturally capitalist?
00:20:33.360
I'm of the view that Islam is naturally more capitalist.
00:20:36.540
But also that Islam is fundamentally unprincipled in its pursuit of power.
00:20:45.000
And that was always my take on the emergence of Islam.
00:20:49.180
It was, if you are a Muslim, you can't hurt other Muslims because, you know, they're part of the franchise network.
00:20:54.300
But you can go off and do anything you like to anyone who isn't.
00:20:57.240
And as long as you kick up 10% to the big guy, it's more of a mafia.
00:21:03.220
There is a mafia model that you have to sort of pay a fifth to the ruler, of which a fifth of that is his personal money.
00:21:21.540
Although, in reality, the state wasn't strong enough to actually always collect a fifth.
00:21:28.280
So the reason I mention Israel is because I understand at the time of the creation of Israel, it was something like 55% Christian to about 45% Muslim.
00:21:44.680
So this is the thing that first got me worried.
00:21:47.800
There was a large influx of Muslim integration.
00:21:51.080
Didn't take that long for it to fundamentally change the country and lead a civil war.
00:22:01.480
The first ethnic cleansing, according to Ilan Pape, an Israeli historian, he calls it an ethnic cleansing based on plan de lit.
00:22:09.220
Then there was the ethnic cleansing of 1967, less severe, but another bunch of Palestinians got thrown out.
00:22:17.500
And what had happened was that the Arabs had failed in 1948.
00:22:22.980
They had been saved by the Americans in 1956 when, I think it was the Eden government here.
00:22:32.240
Britain, France, in partnership with Israel, tried to take over the Suez Canal militarily.
00:22:39.040
And partnered with the Russians to sort of put the final nail in the coffin of the British and French empires.
00:22:45.680
And the result of that was the beginning of the Palestinians from wherever they were against Israel.
00:22:57.140
And this was called the Fidei yin, those who would give their lives for the cause.
00:23:08.820
Because the size of the Arab defeat in 1967 discredited the Arab governments enormously.
00:23:28.220
And there was a quip by the, I think it was either prime minister or defense minister at the time, Rabin, perhaps his first premiership.
00:23:38.560
He was asked, which army shall we send, which division shall we send to Lebanon?
00:23:50.340
I mean, that must have been a conflict in itself.
00:23:51.960
If you've got a country which is half and half almost effectively at this point,
00:23:54.800
especially after these waves of Palestinian immigration.
00:23:58.220
It must have been problematic inside Lebanon that there is this, you know, five armies going against Israel in 1967.
00:24:12.560
You have to understand that throughout the Israeli-Arab conflict,
00:24:19.060
the Muslims of Lebanon, Sunni and Shia, fully sided with the Arabs.
00:24:26.220
which is important because the Sunnis at the time held much more power than the Shia.
00:24:31.520
The Shia at the time, they were the most backwards community in Lebanon.
00:24:35.200
They had been, under the Ottomans, barely tolerated for 400 years.
00:24:40.020
The Ottomans hated Shia Islam because of what they believe is its heresies.
00:24:50.300
And in a way, its heresies make it closer to Christianity.
00:24:55.720
But that's a different conversation for another time.
00:24:58.260
And they were really quite enfeebled and led by a bunch of traditional families whose only focus was enriching themselves.
00:25:09.180
So the Palestinians played a big role in this because as the Fida'iyin movement emerged,
00:25:16.180
emerged, the Muslims who had sided with the Palestinians on a regional perspective or from a regional perspective,
00:25:26.520
thought that now they had an armed ally whom they could use to contend against the Lebanese army,
00:25:40.040
And again, I see the parallels to the current situation where in London you can often have hundreds of thousands marching through London.
00:25:49.620
While you've got the British state, which is, you know, the Muslims, they just don't sign up to the military.
00:25:59.000
In a couple of years' time, people say it as though the absolute number matters.
00:26:05.360
Over the last sort of 20, 30 years, the British army has ended up with a total of maybe 500 Muslims.
00:26:13.540
Over the course of two or three years, perhaps more than 2,000 Muslims joined Islamic State.
00:26:21.300
So the time factor suggests that if things were to kick off, the ability of the Muslims to mobilize,
00:26:31.400
And you just have to see the number of Muslims going out of a mosque on an average Friday to see that.
00:26:36.620
And this would have been the situation in Lebanon in around 1967.
00:26:40.200
They weren't in the military, but they were militant.
00:26:46.820
And so you had basically, you had another thing that has parallels here in Britain,
00:26:52.580
which is the gradual failure of the state to enforce the law.
00:26:57.840
Starting about 64, but really escalating after 1967, the Palestinians began conducting operations
00:27:14.940
Just with support from the leadership of the Muslim political establishment.
00:27:21.680
And pretty much all of the Muslims who weren't in frontline villages that would be targeted by the Israelis.
00:27:28.460
So is this the emergence of Hezbollah or does that come later?
00:27:40.320
The issue was that the Israelis would retaliate with sort of collective punishment.
00:27:47.480
They just bombed the villages from which the people came, the attackers came.
00:27:55.100
Even though they might have been just passing through effectively.
00:27:57.500
Even though they might have been passing through.
00:27:59.340
And that was them putting pressure on the local community to reject the Palestinians.
00:28:04.160
And that was them putting pressure on the Lebanese state to stop the Palestinians.
00:28:10.880
But then throughout the late 60s, you would have these battles with the Palestinians and with Palestinian groups.
00:28:19.320
Where the key problem was that the country would politically implode if the state took a hard enough stance against the Palestinians.
00:28:29.380
Because the Muslim half of the country backed the Palestinians.
00:28:37.820
I mean, Keir Starmer has just given, what is it, Palestinian statehood or recognized Palestinian statehood because he's afraid he cannot go after basically half of his voting base.
00:28:49.900
So you see this, the way that Islam plays this nefarious role where the, so to give you an example, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Jordanians, they were all militantly anti-Israel.
00:29:07.820
Much more so than the Lebanese, because Lebanon is Christian-led.
00:29:12.340
Up to this day, he still has a Christian president.
00:29:19.100
They would never tolerate the Palestinians conducting operations out of their territories against Israel because there would be Israeli retaliation.
00:29:29.440
Except in Lebanon because in Lebanon, the Muslims in Lebanon saw that as a way of fighting the Christians and weakening the Christians and calling the Christians disloyal.
00:29:43.280
So in Jordan, it got, the Fideiyin attacks on Israel got to such a problem that there was an actual battle between the Jordanian army and the Fideiyin on the one side versus Israel, the Karama battle.
00:29:58.480
And then the Jordanian army in what is called Black September in 1970 just wipes out the Palestinian militant presence in Jordan and exercises total control and nobody dares say anything about it.
00:30:14.260
In Lebanon, if this had been done and the Palestinians had been disarmed, the Lebanese civil war would not have happened.
00:30:22.080
And the subsequent Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982 would not have happened.
00:30:28.380
But the Christian leadership was not strong enough to do it.
00:30:30.980
Because the country had to be ruled in partnership with the Muslims, who could at any point resign from the cabinet and paralyze the government.
00:30:42.240
Because while you could, because you had to have a Sunni Muslim prime minister, not by the constitution, but because if you didn't, the Muslims would riot.
00:30:56.100
And the rioting would eventually mean that the army would have to be deployed against them and the army would split.
00:31:03.540
Which is incidentally what ended up happening several years later.
00:31:06.340
So the Arab states were with one side of their mouths saying, we want to maintain the stability of Lebanon.
00:31:15.280
With the other side of their mouths, they were pressuring the Lebanese state from 64 until 69.
00:31:21.520
Until in 69, they pressured the Lebanese army leadership enough to sign an agreement in Cairo secretly.
00:31:29.360
It wasn't revealed until a year or so later or several months later.
00:31:34.900
Saying that the Palestinians had the right to conduct armed operations against Israel out of Lebanese territories.
00:31:43.660
While at the same time, if this had happened out of Egypt, they wouldn't tolerate it.
00:31:50.020
In Jordan, it was militarily crushed a year later.
00:31:53.000
And King Hussein at the time bombed the Palestinians camp, the Palestinian camps, to get the Fideiyin out.
00:32:06.300
The Syrian government says, no, you can't operate against Israel from here.
00:32:15.360
At that point, the Muslims think, aha, now we have an army.
00:32:23.760
I don't want to get dragged into this too much.
00:32:25.280
But I mean, this is why I've always believed that the two-state solution is the most unworkable possible solution for Israel.
00:32:33.020
It has to be the three-state solution because Egypt, well, I mean, neither of them want the Palestinians.
00:32:38.260
But it would work because Egypt would be able to control Gaza.
00:32:42.140
And Jordan would be able to control the West Bank.
00:32:44.300
And they would come down on them like a ton of bricks.
00:32:47.520
I mean, it can't work because neither of those countries are willing to take on Palestinians after what happened to Lebanon.
00:32:55.060
Look, 60-70% of Jordan's population is Palestinian.
00:33:06.340
And these guys control the security apparatus and the military alongside a Palestinian and Jordanian business elite.
00:33:12.800
And a king who was actually from Hijaz, from Mecca, but who rules over Jordan.
00:33:24.760
Because it would mean that they have participated again in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
00:33:33.520
Because the Israelis are never going to give up the West Bank for their own religious reasons and for their own strategic reasons.
00:33:43.500
And because the Israelis worship power in a very real sense.
00:33:49.200
They want to use force to clear out the Palestinians of the West Bank.
00:33:59.580
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