00:14:44.740You're comparing it to the Mamluks, to the Ottomans.
00:14:49.340You know, you'd have to go back to Crusader times for anything comparable, anything else to think about.
00:14:57.040And 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.
00:15:11.600And 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.
00:15:22.220Whereas the mountain, it's impossible to grow grains in the mountains, because you need flatlands, for example.
00:15:31.700You 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.
00:15:44.300And 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.
00:15:59.420And that meant that over time, the balance tipped.
00:16:03.340So 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.
00:16:11.620And 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.
00:16:28.140So the demographic shift was a big issue.
00:16:31.260Well, 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...
00:16:38.620I mean, it's not codified in this way, isn't it?
00:16:41.400We're not saying, okay, we can have six to five.
00:18:56.200Characterized by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt after the 1952 revolution,
00:19:02.940which was a direct consequence of the defeat of the Egyptian army in 1948.
00:19:10.640Characterized by the uprisings in Syria and the series of coups that happened in Syria from around,
00:19:17.660I want to say, 49 onwards was when the coup season began in Syria.
00:19:23.160And there were years that there would be three coups in one year.
00:19:26.200And that was a consequence of different factions trying to adapt, okay, what are we going to do?
00:19:32.640And the answer seemed to be, well, the only people who went from traditional empire to strong modern state were the Soviets.
00:19:42.820Which means that the socialist model is right.
00:19:45.480And 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.
00:19:58.420Remember that under the Ottoman Caliphate, there was a period where the printing press was banned for 300 years.
00:21:28.280So 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.
00:28:37.820I 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.
00:28:49.900So 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.
00:29:07.820Much more so than the Lebanese, because Lebanon is Christian-led.
00:29:12.340Up to this day, he still has a Christian president.
00:29:19.100They would never tolerate the Palestinians conducting operations out of their territories against Israel because there would be Israeli retaliation.
00:29:29.440Except 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.
00:29:43.280So 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.
00:29:58.480And 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.
00:30:14.260In Lebanon, if this had been done and the Palestinians had been disarmed, the Lebanese civil war would not have happened.
00:30:22.080And the subsequent Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982 would not have happened.
00:30:28.380But the Christian leadership was not strong enough to do it.
00:30:30.980Because the country had to be ruled in partnership with the Muslims, who could at any point resign from the cabinet and paralyze the government.
00:30:42.240Because 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.
00:30:56.100And the rioting would eventually mean that the army would have to be deployed against them and the army would split.
00:31:03.540Which is incidentally what ended up happening several years later.
00:31:06.340So the Arab states were with one side of their mouths saying, we want to maintain the stability of Lebanon.
00:31:15.280With the other side of their mouths, they were pressuring the Lebanese state from 64 until 69.
00:31:21.520Until in 69, they pressured the Lebanese army leadership enough to sign an agreement in Cairo secretly.
00:31:29.360It wasn't revealed until a year or so later or several months later.
00:31:34.900Saying that the Palestinians had the right to conduct armed operations against Israel out of Lebanese territories.