السبت، 7 أغسطس 2010

Lebanon Garden of thorns


Two writers unpick Lebanon’s complexities

Jul 1st 2010

Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East. By David Hirst. Nation; 480 pages; $29.95. Faber; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle. By Michael Young. Simon & Schuster; 296 pages; $26 and £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A SMALL country, so fractured and so disputed, Lebanon is both alluring and frightening. The attraction is the landscape and free-spirited people; its compact richness such a contrast to the region’s parched topography and monolithic politics. The danger is its propensity to explode.

All this makes Lebanon a fascinating subject, but also a hazardous one for its chroniclers. The colourful pieces of its sectarian kaleidoscope, and the contributions of meddling neighbours, never cease shifting into new shapes. A writer may capture a moment and perspective, but all will surely have re-formed by the time his or her book hits the shelves.

Just now, for instance, Lebanon is riding a boom in tourism and construction, a sudden balmy spell following years of turbulence. Those troubles began in 2005 with the car bomb that killed Rafik Hariri, a billionaire five-time prime minister, and sparked the uprising that ended a long, uncomfortable period of Syrian hegemony. They carried on into the 2006 war with Israel, and then flared up again in a nail-biting contest between delicately balanced factions, each pushed by foreign powers with regional ambitions, that only subsided following elections last year.

It is hard to think of two writers better qualified to unpick Lebanon’s complexities than David Hirst and Michael Young. Both their books exude the doom-laden mood that has now lifted from the country, though it will very likely descend once more soon enough. Mr Hirst, the dean of foreign correspondents in Beirut after five decades in residence, begins his tale with Lebanon’s creation in the wake of the first world war, as a French gift to the Maronite Christians of the coastal Levant who had long seen Paris and the Vatican as their saviours. Mr Young, a Lebanese scholar and commentator, starts with the rebirth that followed the tangled horror of the 1975-90 civil war, in which those Christians, having long since lost their bare majority in numbers, struggled and failed to maintain their dominance.

Both have sharp ears for quotes and a fine way with words. Mr Hirst, for instance, recalls the comment of a PLO commander, explaining how the Palestinians, from 1969 until the crushing Israeli invasion of 1982, sustained an armed statelet whose existence helped provoke the civil war. Lebanon was simply, he said, “a garden without a fence”. Mr Young paints incisive portraits, such as one describing the world-weary Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt, “his eyelids for ever sagging under the weight of his impossible choices.” His depiction of Michel Aoun, a renegade Christian civil-war general who returned, 15 years later, to lead a breakaway faction allied to Hizbullah, the Shia Party of God, is aptly cutting: “There was a devouring dissatisfaction to the man, the spite of someone who felt the deck was stacked against him…alongside the peasant suspicion of someone avid to protect his measured gains.”

Mr Young’s account is partisan, if tempered by a reluctant acceptance that Lebanon’s curse, sectarianism, has also proved a shield for individual freedom in a region where this is in short supply. His main villain is Syria, along with its ally Iran and their joint factotum, Hizbullah, whose embattled mindset and glorification of armed struggle inevitably sabotage efforts to construct a more durable polity. “There is Lebanon, and there is Hizbullah’s Lebanon,” he concludes, “one or the other will prevail, but together they cannot co-exist in a stable way.”

Mr Hirst is less forthright about his prejudices, but has the advantage of a longer memory. Equally unromantic regarding Lebanon’s own failings, he pins the larger part of the blame for its recent sufferings squarely on what he calls “a vastly more arbitrary example of late-imperial arrogance, geopolitical caprice and perniciously misguided philanthropy”: Israel.

Mr Young describes post-civil-war Lebanon as being “built on a foundation of officially sanctioned amnesia”. But memory does provide a salutary window into other worlds. Mr Hirst reminds the reader that back in the 1930s, the Lebanese government printed tourist brochures in Hebrew, and sponsored Lebanese pavilions at Tel Aviv trade fairs

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