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David Silon

Lebanon isn’t what Israelis think

The war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has been going on for over a year.
Only a month or so ago, did the Israeli leadership have the revelation that they had had enough of Hezbollah rocket fire and that they were going to do something about it. So they started with pagers and walkie talkies and then bombed launcher site after launcher site while eliminating the terrorist organization’s entire leadership. Then the Israeli military leadership and their “experts” claimed that Hezbollah, as well as their Islamist patron, the Iranian regime, are now panicking. Well, they’re obviously not. They’re still firing rockets, killing some, but injuring most, some critically. There’s a tradition among the Israeli military leadership and their “experts” of considering the Israeli people to be really stupid. My opinion, it’s not the people. I wonder if anyone in the military ever thought of, I don’t know, destroying the source of the rockets? According to the laws of physics, Hezbollah can’t launch rockets if there aren’t any.

Lebanon is described as an Arab country, and one that is failed and broken. But what most people don’t realize is, Lebanon is failed and broken because it is not an Arab country. It is an Arab-occupied country, like every other place in the Middle East outside of Arabia, except Israel. The Maronite Christians are the indigenous, Arab-occupied, people of Lebanon, the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians. And the indigenous people of any country in the Middle East could make their respective ancestral homelands paradise if only their homelands were not illegally ruled by an Arab occupation. Just look at Israel. In Lebanon, the Maronites have long suffered from the threats and persecutions and massacres of Hezbollah and their supporters (as well as from the PLO and its supporters before that), just like the Israelis. Now that the Israelis have decided to stop Hezbollah terrorism, the problem is, Israel can’t fight Hezbollah alone. The Maronites, as the indigenous people of Lebanon, must also rise up. Only with a strong indigenous alliance such as that between Israeli Jews and Lebanese Maronites, can Hezbollah be completely destroyed and a more peaceful situation return to the area. (And hopefully, Israel won’t screw up that alliance like it did in 2000.)

In the first century, already during the lifetime of Christ, the Phoenicians began a long process of conversion to Christianity. By the early 5th century, a group of Christians in and around Lebanon began to follow a very pious Syriac monk who resided in the area of nearby Antioch. His name was Maron and he, eventually, formed a separate denomination of Christianity, but in communion with the Roman Catholic church. His followers came to be known as Maronites and they lived mostly in and around the mountains of Lebanon. When the Arabs invaded and conquered Lebanon in the 7th century, as they did throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including Israel, the Phoenician Maronites and all the other indigenous peoples were affected. The Arabs, at first, came as liberators, ending the severe persecutions suffered under the Christian Byzantine Empire. But conquerors being conquerors, and colonizers and occupiers being colonizers and occupiers, that sense of freedom was short-lived, and soon, Arab persecution of their non-Arab subjects, whether Christian or Muslim, set in. But in spite of all this, the Phoenicians did succeed in re-establishing their homeland’s “independence” in 676, centered around Mount Lebanon. From this territory, a defense organization, the Mardaites, whose origins are disputed but some say, were of Persian origin, was formed.

During the latter period of the Arab occupation, the Arabs would often expel the Phoenician Maronites from their lands throughout Lebanon, resulting in many battles being fought between the Mardaites and the Arabs. Meanwhile, Arab colonialist settlers settled in these newly cleared lands and eventually, they became a force to be reckoned with. The battles against the Mardaites resumed even after the Crusader period in the 12th and 13th centuries when it was now the Islamic forces of the Mameluke  Empire as well as the local Arabs that had to be dealt with. Eventually however, the Mardaite warriors were soundly defeated, the mountains of Lebanon were laid waste, the people massacred, and the survivors scattered to other parts of the country. This was the end of the Mardaite defense movement and the continuation of Muslim persecution which occurred even after Lebanon was conquered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1517. During this time, many foreigners, either voluntarily or involuntarily, settled in the ancestral Phoenician Maronite homeland and it soon became a hodgepodge of different communities, some friendly, some not. But regardless, aside from the Arab Muslims they had had to contend with for centuries, the Phoenician Maronites, were now forced to share their homeland with these other foreign communities. After the defeat of the Napoleonic invasion of Israel in 1799, the Phoenician Maronites, as well as the Jews and Druze of the Levant, began to participate in international affairs. For Lebanon, this brought in much French influence (due to the close relationship with France going back to the Crusader period), which eventually led to the French mandate over the country after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. During the Mandate period, the Phoenician Maronites spearheaded the movement for Lebanese independence envisioning equal rights for all communities regardless of background. In the 30s, they even made friendly gestures to the leaders of the Zionist movement in British Mandatory Palestine as one indigenous people to another. In 1943, Lebanon regained its independence, but this was a mixed blessing. The Maronites had only partial control of their ancestral homeland. The Lebanese government had to be shared through a system of confessional representation where only a representative of each community can hold a certain seat in government. This gave birth to rampant corruption and incompetance. And to top it all off, the local Arab settlers, if not due to demographics then through influence, forced Lebanon to identify itself as an Arab country and to join the Arab League when it was founded in 1945. Beginning in the 70s, the Phoenician Maronites were persecuted and massacred by the PLO and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homeland. With the rise of Hezbollah in the early 80s, decades of persecution against the Maronites, and acts of aggression against Israel, has provoked a severe reaction from the latter.

Today, with Hezbollah causing chaos and mayhem in the area, now would be a good time for the Phoenician Maronites to rise up and take back their ancestral homeland from the illegal Arab occupiers. Only with Lebanon once again under the control of its original people, could that country become what it once was – the Switzerland of the Middle East, with Israel as the mini-Switzerland.

About the Author
David currently lives in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles pursuing many interests. He is totally anti-Zionist and is a pro-Israel blogger who also blogs about the histories of the other Arab-occupied indigenous peoples of the Middle East and North (see IndMiddleEast.blogspot.com). His booklet, The Occupied Territories [by David Marc], about these indigenous peoples, is currently sold on Amazon.
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