Many Lebanese are reaching for well-known historical episodes these days: the repeated partitions of Poland resulting from its position between Russia and Germany, for example, or Belgium's neutrality in the Second World War, which the Nazis disregarded in their sweeping assault on its democratic neighbors. Students of ancient history could go further back, pointing us to the experience of Melos in Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War.
This weak state, perched on a small island, tried to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. However, Melos’s desire to stay out of the conflict did not prevent Athens from demanding its surrender, nor the Athenian invasion that followed. The harsh maxim Thucydides concluded from this episode is that "the strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must."
In 2010, the British writer and journalist David Hurst published a book cut from the same cloth, “Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East.” The late Hurst, who had spent most of his life in Beirut, argued that Lebanon had become a theater for the conflicts of regional and international powers time and again, and that this was due largely to the combination of its domestic sectarian structure and strategic location, which deprived the country of the capacity to act as a political agent.
Small states, then, deserve to be treated with caution, as they are particularly vulnerable to becoming dangerous arenas of great-power competition. That is indeed what we have undergone repeatedly, and it is what we continue to undergo along an ever-escalating trajectory.
We can, on the other hand, find cases to the contrary- cases in which major powers look after smaller states, respecting their weakness or their neutrality. That is how democratic Europe has approached relations with Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, and the United States, until a year ago, approached relations with Canada this way as well.
This is to say that critiquing small states is not enough, or it is incomplete, without also critiquing the major powers that neighbor and surround them.
In any case, in the war currently unfolding in Lebanon one find a striking paradox: it is presumably an offshoot of the American-Israeli-Iranian war; however, it is all but certain that even if the latter were to stop, this would not bring the former to a halt. Such a comparison suggests, among other things, that the fighters in Lebanon are more Iranian than the Iranians themselves, and that the Israeli fighters regard them as such, with their geographic proximity and the state of affairs in Israel's north pushing them in this direction. It has become clear that falling under Israeli occupation- after the death, destruction, displacement, and its humiliations- is what Lebanon's fighters could have avoided but have chosen for themselves and for their people.
It was thus no coincidence that the terms "suicide" and "mass suicide" gained currency, as though Lebanon were Peoples Temple — the religious movement whose fanatic leader Jim Jones drove it, in late 1978, to its "revolutionary suicide" in Jonestown, Guyana. Between those who chose and those who were coerced, the Temple's revolutionaries drank a flavored beverage laced with cyanide and sedatives, leaving this "defiled" world. The death toll that day exceeded 900, more than 300 of them children.
The other- larger even if less immediate- problem, however, has to do with the weakness of weak states and the causes of that weakness. If it is true, as Hurst and others have argued, that fundamental structural realities, like sectarianism, condemn such states to weakness, then what is to be done when sectarianism (or a structural equivalent) is the fundamental pillar of a country’s structure? What is to be done, moreover, if sectarianism is the backbone of Lebanon's unique form of democracy, and when many episodes from the region demonstrate that abolishing it in pursuit of strength paves the way for despotism far more than it does strength? And what, for that matter, is the nature of the strength we are supposedly seeking?
Conversely, to the extent that sectarianism is fundamental to Lebanon’s make-up, betting on change and reform that could modernize society peacefully will remain just as much of an illusion as it always has been.
In these weeds, how can politics, as embodied by the state, function at all? It speaks volumes that every attempt to find a out a way out of war, or to guarantee it will not recur, raises the specter of civil war and a schism in the armed forces.
The Lebanese today are carrying their inability to interrogate themselves and their own formations to a new juncture, one that is more dangerous than any before it. Hezbollah has succeeded in summoning Israeli savagery at a time when the balance of power had vanished entirely, and it is no secret that the Lebanese state can no longer find a listening ear anywhere in the world, even as the Israelis keep up their pressure and continue to squeeze harder.
Offers like a return to the 1949 armistice or to the May 17, 1983 agreement are no longer remotely acceptable. And whereas Washington back then, under Reagan, had adopted and defended the Lebanese position against Israeli demands, today it has no such inclination. Add to this that the United States is itself waging a war in Iran, and its preoccupation with that war and with events in the Gulf- and the enormous global economic repercussions that come with it- and Lebanon is left with none of the elements its people had traditionally counted on.
