Adonis Diaries

Many USA and Western diplomats have described Lebanon during its civil war (1975-1991) as a special quarantine area.  This civil war was sustained by the super powers to retaining the quarantine on Lebanon (State buffer zone) in order to prevent the spread of the Middle East social and political diseases such as feudalism, sectarianism, tribalism, caste systems, and extremist ideologies (prevalent in the Arabic and Islamic States) to the surrounding Western nations. 

These diplomats failed to add the disease of apartheid which is the trademark of the State of Israel.  This quarantine lasted for more than 17 years, and in the meanwhile the USA administrations in the 80′s and 90′s created, financed and trained a potent disease in Afghanistan.

Every stated rescue mission to Lebanon was not meant for the stability and security of the Lebanese people but for the purpose of larger strategic aims in the Middle East with the land of Lebanon as a staging base.  It is the Lebanese who encouraged the other nations to look at them not as a Nation, but as anonymous people living on a piece of land that the UN admitted as a member in 1946 among the “independent” States. 

This perception was created because all the successive Lebanese governments never behaved as administering and managing a Nation but as fief hoods for sectarian leaders who rule over modern serfs.  Even after an unimaginably lengthy and terrible civil war every single monster militia leader was pardoned by a decree from the Parliament and the ferocious sectarian leaders were inducted into the successive governments and Parliaments. 

Arnold Toynbee said that for certain people history necessarily repeat itself because they are lazy students. Most probably, it seems that history repeats itself because philosophical concepts or paradigms on life, death, the nature of Gods, free will, and predestination keep repeating themselves. The Lebanese certainly are not very hot on archiving their history, and even less on reading and revisiting their past; we have the tendency to say that what is past is past and we don’t care but for the present and how to live a good life.   This saying is true for the public consumption because, on the individual level, family feuds never vanish or are forgotten or forgiven; grandchildren still hate the grandchildren of another family simply because they overheard that their grand-grand parents were in feud.

Lebanon and Palestine have suffered the same calamities of past history again and again; these two States might never had any chance for lasting peace and stability. Syria could have fallen in the same trap because it was seriously targeted by the super powers if the dictatorship in Syria didn’t manage to re-read its history and learn from past adversities at the expense of democracy; Syria did not bed with theocratic systems and tamed clerical religious powers. 

In ancient history, the City-States of inland Syria barely put a fight to a powerful invader; it is as if Syria learned to normally change skins and share in the dominion of the new Empire that displaced the former; it is as if Syria believed it was actually the new invader.

The US and the European States are creating another current “quarantine area” in the Near East: It is called Gaza.  They want to shelter the Moubarak regime of Egypt from the contamination of HAMAS!  As if the Egyptian Moslems Brotherhood was not founded around 1940, a decade before the forceful creation of the State of Israel.  They want to shelter the apartheid State of Israel from religious extremist trend; as if Zionism was not created around 1880, over a century ago before Islam got virulent in 1990.