Lebanon

Black shame

Sam Kriss wrote an interesting article in February. Because he’s a leftist, and leftism is always and everywhere the moral disorder of callous altruism, it’s a got a lot of crap in it, but he is trying to transcend that, and there’s food for thought there.¹ He ends up arguing that Israelis and Palestinians will only stop killing each other when they learn to feel enough shame that they can’t go on anymore.

I don’t agree with this take. It might be a cringe liberal platitude, but feeling shame isn’t really that healthy, and this suggestion suffers from the same basic problem as alternative paths to reconciliation, which is that whoever agrees to go first is just surrendering. Here is a video of a Palestinian woman whose child is being treated for free in an Israeli hospital, grinning inanely, like the MENA dipstick she is, about how she wants that same son to be a suicide bomber. That’s what unilateral moral disarmament looks like.

My view, by contrast, is that both sides should be made to realise that their respective nationalisms are hokum. Right now, virtual Israelis are still stuck on proving that there was never such a country as Palestine, and virtual Palestinians are fagging it up rambling about settler colonialism. It’s possible to do a lot better than this. Everyone can get involved. Instead of cheering your team from the sidelines, you can spread the news about how Yasser Arafat was an Alex Jones tier crank who thought Solomon’s temple was in Yemen. LMAO right? Did you know that Arthur Ruppin, who engineered the second aliyah, was a legit nutter who thought the ancient Hebrews were a non-semitic race who had embraced commerce only after intermarrying with the local Arabs and would achieve racial purification by … going to live among the Arabs[?]. Lolwut? If there’s one thing we are good at nowadays (and maybe there is), it’s irony. Isn’t it kind of stupid that the one thing westerners are earnest about is taking sides in a conflict of duelling nonsenses? Do your bit: take the piss, but just do it fairly.

However, there is perhaps one thing both Israelis and Palestinians can learn to feel ashamed about in a productive fashion, and that is the White Mountain.

A jewel in a dungheap

Lebanon is a country of genuinely extraordinary natural beauty, but you don’t get too many points for that. More to the point, it’s also a country of extraordinary artificial beauty. There’s a style called Romanesque, which basically just means what Europeans did after the Roman empire fell apart before they invented Gothic. It’s always been my favourite, personally, because I’m a simple soul and like colourful stripes and nice round arches. Lebanon is a land where Romanesque never quite died because it stayed, against all the odds, a little patch of decayed Rome. There are many aspects to this. Most obviously there is the Maronite Church, the closest thing there is to Roman Christianity, but there are all sorts of little details. The Levant was once famous as the greatest wine-producing region of the Roman empire. For the most part, that died with the spread of the cursed philistinic religion of Mohammedism, but in Lebanon, it continued to this day. Look at the room where the President meets his advisers to discuss how their whole job is a pointless charade because they are cucked by Hizb’Allah.

Nice! Try to picture it without the laptops.

I’m not saying anything original, of course, by observing that Lebanon used to be a pretty great place. Jews thought so too. It was the only Arab country after 1948 whose Jewish population grew. I think it’s self-evident that everyone who played a role in turning Lebanon into the grotty madhouse it is today should be feel shame, which means Israelis and Palestinians do have something they can bond over after all.

Dumping your trash on the neighbours lawn

One of the common beliefs on the Israeli far Right today is that, if we kick out some more Palestinians, it doesn’t really matter where we kick them out to as long as they are gone. This is obviously just a very stupid thing to think because, objectively, most of the problems Israel has had to deal with for the past 75 years were a result of Palestinians on the border causing trouble or downstream of that. It’s also a pretty gross thing to believe because other people also exist, and we already know the role that exiled Palestinians played in bringing down Lebanon.

The Lebanese Civil war was amazingly complex and, every time I try to read about it, I get lost and get a headache. In a certain sense, though, it’s actually really simple. There was an intelligent and cultured group ruling over miscellaneous dumb and uncultured groups. The latter benefitted from being ruled over the former, but they also resented it and thought they should get more because that’s what being dumb and uncultured means. The dumb and uncultured were too numerous to be repressed and, eventually, they succeeded in calling in outside help and taking power, destroying in the process what made it worth taking over in the first place. For half of the globe, this is the tale of the second half of the 20th century, basically, and there are places where it turned out a lot worse than Lebanon.

In this grim story, the ability of the ruling group to ride out another year before everything falls apart is a function of the total resources they can leverage vs. what the restless can. A core weakness the forces of civilization have in the modern world is that they are almost invariably outbred by the Easterlings, making it imperative to avert demographic swamping, and this is where Israel comes in. In 1947-49, something in the region of 110,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon. Lebanon hadn’t done much to deserve this. They declared war in 1948, but they only sent 436 troops and withdrew after taking two villages. In return, they got a group putting all their demographic weight behind the forces of disintegration, and, only 10 years later, the slow, but then quick, process of falling apart began.

The second weight of guilt Israel bears comes from its conduct in the Civil War. There are plenty of ways you could defend Israeli intervention in Lebanon, faced, as it was, with constant attacks from the PLO, and, after all, we did intervene on the right side, more or less. But I think that it would be impossible to mount a coherent defence of the actual kind of intervention Israel did. Some of the details are truly ghastly:

The FLLF was set up in 1979^[i] in the wake of the massacre of an Israeli family at Nahariya by militants belonging to the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).^[2] To that end, Maronite Christian, Shiite and Druze operatives were recruited in 1979. The operations which it carried out against the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon were coordinated by Meir Dagan, reportedly without informing the IDF, the Israeli Defense Ministry, the Israeli government and its various defense agencies.^[j] David Agmon, at the time head of Israel's northern command, was one of the few people who were briefed on its operations.^[2] The aim of the series of operations was to “cause chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.”^[2]

Ariel Sharon was the brains behind this organisation, which was a pioneer in using females to evade checkpoints, in the service of reigniting the Civil War during a lull. However, it isn’t even the shady stuff like this that is the worst part, it’s the complete lack of an integrated strategy to do what really mattered, namely preserving Lebanon as a civilized state. In a sense, if Israel had followed a consistently evil policy, it might have been an improvement on what it actually did. Kissinger famously remarked that ‘Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic political system’.² That fundamental need to constantly modify policy in accord with whatever the current needs of coalition building happen to be rendered Israel’s Lebanon policy just one big mess, the chief upshot of which is Hizb’Allah. In 1982, it was not only Christians greeting Israeli troops with flowers and cans of Coke, even the major Shia militia AMAL was happy to see them. We blew that good and proper. They hate us, and for good reason.

There’s a crazy vagrant living upstairs

As for the Palestinians, what can you really say?

On 20 January, under the command of Fatah and as-Sa'iqa, members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leftist Muslim Lebanese militiamen entered Damour.^[11] Along with twenty Phalangist militiamen, civilians - including women, the elderly, and children, and often comprising whole families - were lined up against the walls of their homes and sprayed with machine-gun fire by Palestinians; the Palestinians then systematically dynamited and burned these homes.^[12][3][11] Several of the town's young women were separated from other civilians and gang-raped.^[3] Most estimates of the number killed range from 150 to 250, with the overwhelming majority of these being civilians; Robert Fisk puts the number of civilians massacred at nearly 250, while Israeli professor Mordechai Nisan claims a significantly higher figure of 582.^{[3][13][14][15][16][17]} Among the killed were family members of Elie Hobeika and his fiancée.^[18] For several days after the massacre, 149 bodies of those executed by the Palestinians lay in the streets; this included the corpses of many women who had been raped and of babies who were shot from close range in the back of the head.^[14] In the days following the massacre, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims exhumed the coffins in the town's Christian cemetery and scattered the skeletons of several generations of the town's deceased citizens in the streets.

The Lebanese massacre most western people know about is the later one at Sabra and Shatila, which is quite a good example of Moldbug’s Iron Rope. Next time someone brings it up, you can be that guy and mention that there were actually two Sabra and Shatila massacres, the second committed by the Shi’ites. So, you can’t say the Palestinians didn’t get their comeuppance, but, then, they, like us, didn’t get everyone in Lebanon to hate them by accident.

And then, nothing

At this stage, I thought I might do a neat compendium of Israeli politicians and generals talking about how, if it all kicks off, they are going to send Lebanon to the stone age or equivalent, but the baby is annoyed about something and someone has to take him for a walk. Google it if you’re interested. I reckon 65-35 they do it, and then Lebanon will go from a pale shadow of what it was to no shadow at all. It’s not even, viewed very narrowly, the wrong thing to do. But, by heaven, what have we done, and for what?

1. I’ll confess that, when I started this substack, my target was 200 subscribers by the end of August, and one of my plans if I fell short was to start up a beef with Sam Kriss, but that’s not necessary and also Sam is a subscriber and Substack lets you check up which subscribers actually read your articles. So, hi Sam, please try to write an article which doesn’t use the term ‘dyspraxic’, it literally doesn’t exist! You’re just on the one end of the bell curve.

2. I recall once seeing a more expansive and illuminating version of this quote, but I can’t find it now and perhaps I hallucinated it.