Given the situation in the Middle East, I’m surprised to realise that I’ve never mentioned The Land and the Book by W. M Thomson, a missionary in the Levant in the nineteenth century. My edition is 1881, but I believe it was first published in 1860. As a fictionalised travelogue of “the Holy Land” with an American visitor, it is intended to relate the geography to the Bible, but of course it accidentally functions as a useful description of the region at that point in the late Ottoman Empire.
I was given the book by a friend decades ago, but only got round to reading it a couple of years since, in time for it to inform my understanding of the events after October 7 last year. In particular, the book serves to debunk the widespread liberal claims that the whole country west of the Jordan has always been an Arab Muslim area, into which the Zionists started muscling with spurious historical claims (including, according to many Arabs, faking 3,800 years of archaeology). “From the River to the Sea” is unhistorical as well as genocidally antisemitic.
I’ve not the space to go into the details here, and there are good YouTube videos that unpack the history, if you can find them between the pro-Palestinian revisionism. Better still, read the book. Suffice it to say that, from an account written long before the whole present controversy, the territory of Palestine, then divided into several separate states under the Province of Damascus, was an under-developed hotch-potch of ethnic and religious groups including the various mutually antagonistic Muslim sects both familiar and heretical (mainly Druze), Christian groups, and indigenous Jews. The Arab population originated in the bloody Muslim conquests of the late first millennium, diluted by the political upheavals ever since.
As the Ottomans weakened, sometimes these areas were culturally pliable – for example, the book speaks of areas that, lacking strong government, had recently been taken over by wild Bedouin from the east and were no longer safe to visit unarmed. Local Ottoman leaders vying for power were sometimes behind such changes in occupancy or religion.
Taking Syria as a whole, there were then around 800,000 Muslims (of which 100,000 were Druze), around 25,000 Jews, 200,000 Maronite Catholics, 150,000 Greek Orthodox, and maybe 120,000 other Christians. These figures do not include up to 200,000 wandering desert Bedouin. In other words, the whole population of the region was less than a couple of million. They rubbed shoulders with mutual suspicion, rather than integrating harmoniously, according to Thomson. Today the Christian and Jewish populations have been largely eradicated from the Muslim-majority countries in the region, and you may recall that a Muslim Druze community in Israel (which has 140,000 Druze) was the victim of a Hezbollah rocket attack this month. In other contexts, that would be termed “ethnic cleansing.”
Today, though, I want to concentrate on Lebanon, just now the centre of the news, because its most significant changes have occurred during my adult lifetime, yet some readers may be too young to know, or may have forgotten, its story. Also, the writer of The Land and the Book was based there, and starts his literary journey there. Why was he in Lebanon? Simply because Lebanon was then a firmly Christian State, and had been since apostolic times. It was mainly Catholic, especially Maronite Catholic, and Orthodox. Thomson, of course, was an Evangelical Protestant. There was a substantial Sunni Muslim minority, though.
In the twentieth century, Lebanon was the most liberal, prosperous and forward looking State in the area, ignoring the newly-refounded Israel. But it made the mistake of welcoming largely Shia immigrants freely from the less prosperous and more conflicted Palestine, with the result that Muslim Arabs began to become, first, a significant proportion and, eventually, a majority. At a certain percentage, Islamic jihad started as atrocities against isolated Christian victims (let the Western reader understand). Muslim-majority settlements (largely PLO backed) then began to set up roadblocks to rob, or sometimes murder, those non-Muslims travelling, and so on as tensions rose. Inevitably a violent reaction took place, which erupted into a full-blow Civil War from 1975 to 1990, dragging in support from bigger neighbours and from the UN.
The eventual peace settlement (brokered by the Arab League for a historically non-Arab nation!) solved, on paper, the sectarian conflict by instituting a Sunni Prime Minister and a Maronite President and dissolving all the militias… except the Iran-backed Shia terrorist group Hezbollah, which slowly took the reins of power until it was in total control of the country. Its heartland became the “buffer-zone” with Israel which the UN peacekeepers are powerless, or unwilling, to control. Hezbollah violence against Christians has continued, together with economic disadvantage from Syrian refugees, leading to mass-emigration. The Christians feel under increasing existential threat.
Today Lebanon, like Gaza, is an economic basket-case, not least because Hezbollah, like Hamas, has spent so much of the country’s wealth on digging military tunnels (like Hamas in Gaza) and buying rockets to fire at Israeli civilians on a regular basis. That’s in addition to funding much of Europe’s drug trade, brothels and sex-trafficking and other peacefully Islamic pursuits. Such gangsterism leaves little room for a government, far too weak to oppose Hezbollah effectively, to govern for the benefit of its citizens.
And to come to my final point, that story is why we should not be surprised – despite Israel launching massive missile strikes on Beirut that have, it seems, wiped out Hezbollah’s high command – to see videos of Lebanese civilians dancing in the streets, singing, and waving Lebanese flags. It may give some clues as to why Syrian and even Iranian crowds are doing the same.
Somehow, though, it seems the UN, our own government, and the BBC don’t approve of such festivities over the troubles of a terrorist gang military organisation.
