Lebanon Agonistes
Sifting the signal-noise ratio in the Eastern Med, with a coda on the Substack flap.
Today’s post, once we get down to it, is about Lebanon, tricked off by something attention-arresting the Lebanese prime minister said a few days ago. After we’re done with Lebanon, a coda follows, being a short comment on a burgeoning controversy about this platform itself. I owe you my view of this. But before we get down to that business, a few notes to readers are in order given the extreme youth of this venue. We are not yet fully oriented toward one another, I suspect, despite the abundance of orthogonal side hints I’ve been dropping along the path of my writing. If you’re too busy for housekeeping remarks, by all means skip down to the next subhead. You may miss out on some mild amusement, but I’ll never know…
Before this post the only one of substance has been the foregoing essay on the Ukraine-in-NATO debate, but recall that said post began with a story about how a published essay of mine on that subject came to be. By telling that story I managed to segue from my introductory post, which set forth my reasons for creating this Substack platform earlier this month—one of which was the increasing difficulty of finding an appropriate outlet for serious long-form essays—into the substance of the matter. If readers followed the post’s directions, the substance was of two parts: the Quillette essay referred to and the additional substance in the post itself. I’m no Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, or even David Mitchell, but I enjoy well-crafted layered, cross-referential writing and like to do it myself when the opportunity arises. Be advised: If that’s not your thing, a wide world of the written word awaits you elsewhere.
The Ukraine/NATO post elicited some technical, non-substantive questions from a few readers. One was, could I please turn on the AI robot “voice” so that what I write can also be heard as if it were a podcast? Even if I could figure out how to do that, the answer is “no” (which is why I am not liable to spend time figuring out how to do it). Later, perhaps some months from now and with any luck at all, you will learn my reasons for declining.
Another question was, could I please activate comments? (These two questions were from the same person, as it happens.) Yes, if I can find the right button to push, I’ll do that once the paywall comes into play. Paying readers will have access to comments, meaning they can make comments and also read and interact with other readers who offer comments. Seems to me that those who fork over the dough deserve some special benefit, and of course parsing the readership that way may act as a modest fillip to my bank account as free subscribers, simply unable to contain their wholesome curiosity, rush to elevate their status.
Another question was, how come no hyperlinks? Answer: I prefer clean copy when possible, because while I want much of my writing here to be serious, by which I mean answerable to standard scholarly rules of evidence and logic, I don’t want it to be excessively academic. But when a reference is necessary or too useful to the reader to exclude, I prefer footnotes to hyperlinks.
Why don’t I like hyperlinks? Because you can’t see them unless you break the rhythm of your reading in order to click on them. With a footnote at the bottom of a page, you with your uncanny visual abilities can decide almost immediately if you wish to break off from the main text flow and look down. With a footnote you can see at a glance if the note is just a reference or if it is discursive; if you decide to skip it altogether or just temporarily your eyes have never left the page, making it effortless to keep your place and maintain your reading rhythm. With footnotes, therefore, the deft reader gets to choose how and in what sequence to imbibe the words on the screen page as on a printed page. (As some wise wag said, the written narrative featured instant replay long before sports broadcasters and producers came up with it.) With hyperlinks, someone else—maybe the author, maybe an editor, and you can’t know which—usurps that choice and does deeds for reasons ever opaque to you. So, no hyperlinks here, and if ever there is a second edition of my book Political Writing: A Guide to the Essentials (2013) I intend to include some version of this short discussion about hyperlinks versus footnotes in it.
Just bye the bye, if someone knows how to insert accented letters when composing on Substack, like you can do on Word, send an email and instruct me please. Does it bother me that words and phrases like “voila” and “vis-a-vis” and “Wurzburg” just don’t look right here? Damn straight it does. I am a stickler. Can’t help it.
Last housekeeping item, for now. The January 4 introduction to “The Raspberry Patch” promised, or threatened, an eclectic range of subject matters. Including this, the third entry in “The Raspberry Patch” collection, not much eclecticism is on display. A Europe post and a Middle East post, both with reference back to contemporary, real-time U.S. policy, and both fitting into a standard foreign policy/international politics bailiwick—eh, big deal, right? But my promise will indeed be honored, and so here, now, I announce the tentative titles of posts four, five, six, and seven—which should take us through the end of January 2024.
Post number four will be “Phenomenology and Analysis.” Some readers, at least, may wish to know my evolved epistemic orientation to the social and cultural sciences. For those who think they won’t be among them, fine; but note that this will not be a long and dreary essay, if I can help it. It may even be a good bit livelier than some may anticipate. Yes, it will engage philosophy as well as sociology, but philosophy, understood properly and presented with a sensitivity to non-initiates, can be simple and clear enough that even children can readily comprehend it. So my eldest son Gabriel has taught me.
Post number five will be “B’shalakh: An Interpretation of a Bridge.” This essay, already written but never published, will deep dive into Exodus XV:22-27. Some readers may be surprised at the broad implications of the proffered interpretation, extending well beyond conventional scriptural analysis. And let me add that I will rarely if ever post here writing of mine that has been published previously, and if I ever do I will be fully transparent about it.
Post number six will be entitled “Barbie and the Garden of Eden.” You never know from whence enlightenment may come. The Barbie movie’s final scene did a Eureka drop on me, and I can barely wait to share it with you.
Speaking of which, playing Boggle with a ten-year old can be breathtaking, too. Yesterday after dinner eldest granddaughter Yael came up with the word “booly,” which all the adults in the game pronounced “not a word.” Except that, as we learned, it is too a word, a word meaning: “a temporary exclosure once common in Ireland for the shelter of cattle or their keepers.” What happened next almost anyone can guess: The adults of a certain age gathered at the table all shouted, “So that’s what “Wooly Booly”—not “Wooly Bully” as written on the old Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs album cover—means! (Actually no, it still doesn’t mean hardly anything after all these years.)
This getting eclectic enough for you yet? Mark in this regard, too, that my next planned essay will be aimed at a specialty magazine called The Edith Wharton Review. (No, I was not an English major at any level of education.)
And post number seven? Not sure about this one yet, but if it works out as I hope it’ll be titled “Playing with Albert’s Toys.” About what will this be? Patience, please.
Playing Diplomatic Chicken Along the Newcombe-Paulet Line
On January 9 the caretaker Prime Minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, declared that Lebanon was prepared to enforce UNSCR 1701 of August 11, 2006, which includes a provision for a demilitarized zone between the Litani River to the north and the so-called Blue Line to the south. No Israeli forces have been in this area for a long time. So in practice it means forcing Hizballah1 to evacuate where it is deployed more like a regular army than a mere terrorist group, and move some 18 miles northward.
What is the Blue Line, many of you may ask, since most of you have probably never heard of it (unlike the much more common locution “green line”)? Well, even if you did not ask you’re about to find out what it is anyway. As you will come to appreciate, it is relevant if not entirely critical to what follows.
The Blue Line, in effect, is the Lebanon-Israel border. It is not always accepted as or called an international border partly because there is no peace treaty or diplomatic recognition between Israel and Lebanon, and partly because some outsiders—for reasons to be made vivid below—insist that Israel is in (illegal) occupation of a small area, only seven by two miles, of Lebanon called Shabaa Farms. Hence “Blue Line” for what is supposedly not an agreed line.
Israel is not in occupation of any of Lebanon. The border between Israel and Lebanon was demarcated by the Newcombe-Paulet Commission in the aftermath of the San Remo conference of April 1920, and since its demarcation was finalized in 1923 few significant disagreements about where the border runs have ever arisen between the two sides—first the British and French mandatory governments and later, after 1948, between the independent states of Lebanon and Israel.2 The border between mandatory Palestine (British) and mandatory Syria (French) was demarcated by this same Commission, also completed in 1923 as a necessary condition for submitting the mandates to the League of Nations. Unlike the Israel-Lebanon border, lots of arguments have arisen in due course over that border.3 Shabaa Farms sits at the intersection of the Israeli-Lebanese-Syrian border. Israel and Syria agree that the area was originally part of Syria; it became part of the occupied Golan Heights after the June 1967 War and was annexed by Israel in 1981.
Needless to say, few countries recognized the Israeli annexation at the time or since—obviously including Syria. But that’s not relevant to the purpose at hand. What is relevant is that the only reason that some outside actors insist that Shabaa Farms is Lebanese territory is to create a pretext for Hizballah to deploy its forces along the border, so to defy UNSCR 1701 and force the Lebanese government, such as it has become, to forego its would-be benefits.
There is not a lot of entertainment value in contemporary Middle Eastern affairs, and whatever there was before October 7 has all but vanished since. But every once in a while something funny happens in the form of very wry humor, and PM Mikati’s January 9 declaration is an example. To appreciate the humor, however, the reader needs to be able to sift through the very low signal-to-noise ratio in the region’s political, diplomatic, and journalistic palaver as it comes across to the New World. To do that, however, one has to have invested a fair bit of time and effort in understanding this stuff. Most people have not thus invested, for every good reason, so here in North America the small AP or Reuters report of Mikati’s remarks likely passed conscious attention the way a maple helicopter spins harmlessly past one’s shoulder. But not to me, so let me clue you in to the chortle.
When I read this I guffawed heartily, as would any curmudgeonly realist reading some random piece of macabre news in the daily paper. It reminded me of another lighthearted moment, many years ago, when then-Secretary of State George Shultz, at the time of an earlier agreement and an earlier UN Security Council resolution-cum-precursor to UNSCR 1701 concerning Lebanon, declaimed from a State Department podium (I even know which podium…..if that podium could speak, wow…..) that the agreement would enable the Lebanese Army to return to the southern part of the country. This was amusing to those of us who knew that the Lebanese Army had never been in the south of the country, let alone controlled it, since Lebanon became an independent state on November 22, 1943. Just like you can’t have mo’ lasses if you haven’t had any lasses, you cannot return to a place you’ve never been to. Tee-hee, see?
Like so many things about this part of the world, this is a seemingly simple but actually monumentally complex and esoteric fact to understand. But it must be understood for the current state of Israeli-Lebanese relations to make any sense in the context of the current Israel-Hamas war. Please don’t run for cover, yet: I have no intention of discussing that war as such, now or later. Too much stress and pain would be involved, and I’m not intent on pissing off my doctors with gratuitous indulgences. I merely want to help bring you up to speed on a facet of the ongoing crisis which gets a lot less attention in our decayed, clickbait media than it deserves.
How so? Because most of the U.S.-based journalists who write on this region really don’t understand it very well, and to compensate for that most major media corporations used to hire knowledgeable stringers in the region. Few do that anymore because they think the large majority of Americans don’t care about such things, and so, they reason, why endure the expense? Hence the spiral of mediocre journalism discouraging readers from following a lot of international news, which leads to decisions to spend still fewer resources to cover such news, and so on down and down we have gone over roughly the past three decades. Happily there is still the BBC and Radio Garden.
Let’s get to the punchline now, and then go back and unpack the reason it’s funny. Only with the help of Divine intervention, and possibly not even then, could the Lebanese Army forcibly evict Hizballah from the area between the Litani and the “Blue Line” if it didn’t feel like going there. Risible is a kind word for what the Prime Minister said. It was a little like, if you can imagine this some years ago, Rick Moranis threatening to punch Hacksaw Reynolds in the nose. If PM Mikati knows this (he does), and everyone in the region past the age of about nine-years old knows this (they do), and they know that Mikati knows it (they do), and Mikati knows they know he knows it (he does), then why say something utterly beyond his power to bring about?
Well, that marks the end of the humor and the portal to the point: He said it because he is desperate. Mikati is looking for help from any quarter to prevent a major Israeli attack on Lebanon. Here are the three key facts that form the background for Mikati’s desperation. In the interest of brevity my confidence in my readers leads me to assume that you can put the facts together yourself in order to see the bigger picture.
First, Mikati is only a caretaker Prime Minister, because there is no President, and without a President in Lebanon’s system there is for practical purposes not much of a government. The President’s office has been empty since October 2022 when Michel Aoun’s term ended. The Parliament has been unable to elect a successor despite more than a dozen attempts because Hizballah’s representatives have repeatedly sabotaged the process at the behest of the organization’s paymaster: the Iranian government. The persistent condition of the Lebanon government as what amounts to a lame-canard administration makes it easier for the Iranian regime to control the country from afar via its proxy. Lebanon has a government in the sense that it has a bureaucracy and the employees have tasks to perform and they (sometimes) get paid for performing them. But it has only the body of a government these days—there’s no head. In a presidential system like Lebanon’s, no initiatives can be undertaken with that office vacant. Indeed, by itself the parliament in its current state cannot even agree on and pass a budget.
Second, Hizballah has launched short-range missiles into northern Israel every day since October 7, forcing Israel to evacuate Kiryat Shmona and other smaller northern towns and kibbutzim—more than 50,000 people have been displaced. This has led the Israeli government to threaten Hizballah: Stop the missiles and shelling or you will be seriously inconvenienced. The Israeli government, and U.S. officials as well, assume that despite the typical over-the-top rhetoric of Hizballah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, neither he nor his Iranian masters want a full-scale war to erupt. To raise confidence in that assumption, the Biden Administration ordered the aircraft carrier USS Ford and its attendant battlegroup into the Eastern Med after October 7. Doing that conveyed roughly the same message to Tehran that Israeli power conveys to Beirut: cool it; think before you leap off the high dive.
So far restraint has mastered impulse. Mikati and Nasrallah both know that what Israel has done in Gaza, whatever one thinks of the various tactics, it could do to Hizballah many times over if it decided it needed to do so. The bigger problem for the Lebanese is that Hizballah’s abundance of longer-rage missiles are mostly located north of the Litani already, so an Israeli attack to be effective would likely aim to destroy not just Hizballah’s forces south of the Litani but would hit a lot of Lebanon as well. Thus, when Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant insists that UNSCR 1701 be implemented now or else, it puts Lebanon and its feckless government between a very heavy rock and a very hard place. Hence the desperation. Clearly, the Lebanese (as well as the Israelis) prefer diplomacy to war to move Hizballah north out of pot-shot range. Their interests are aligned with each other and with the United States, and against Hizballah, Iran, and by tacit indirection, Hamas.
Third, Mikati is not just pleading with Israel to take it easy, by making clear that it is not Lebanon’s fault that Hizballah is snipping across the border, shooting short-range missiles into Israel, and hosting senior Hamas officials, as well. In effect he is also signaling to the Biden Administration to keep a carrier battlegroup nearby, because all else equal the more worried the mullahs are the more restrained Nasrallah will be—obviously within the curiously loose limits that apply particularly in this part of the world. No doubt PM Mikati was unhappy when the USS Ford battlegroup rotated out of the Eastern Med and was replaced by a far less formidable ensemble of older and fewer ships (the USS Bataan, USS Mesa Verde, and the USS Carter Hall).4 And no doubt he was made happy again a few weeks later when U.S. forces finally responded to Houthi interference with shipping in and around the Red Sea. Any successful U.S. demonstration of resolve against an Iranian proxy is good news to him, for it increases the likelihood that a major escalation of fighting that would engulf Lebanon will not occur. Can U.S. pressure, with some assistance in that regard from our NATO allies (especially France), actually get Hizballah moved out of Lebanon’s south? Not likely.
By waving UNSCR 1701 in the air PM Mikati is also in effect pleading with the Saudi regime to please recognize the disastrous condition of the Lebanese economy—it would be a basket case if the Lebanese even had a basket—and to help out again as it has done many times before. Problem is, there’s not much the Saudis can buy in Lebanon these days, given the constraints would-be sellers are under to provide anything of value. Alas, the Saudis are not philanthropists where Lebanon is concerned; better to describe them as competitive investors vis-a-vis Syria.
It remains only to briefly account for why Lebanon is in the sorry condition it is now in. We’re not going to play the turtles-on-top-of-turtles-all-the-way-down game, not to worry. Just one or two turtles down will suffice.
The ur-source of the Lebanon’s current problem goes back to its inception as an independent state in 1943. That inception was shaped by what had come before (what inception isn’t?), and that needs a gloss.
For something like four centuries—1517 to 1918—Lebanon, then consisting of a smaller area called Mount Lebanon, was a part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans ruled the Middle East by dint of the millet system. Millet means nation in Turkish. The millet system was a kind of imperial federalism, defined in the main by confessional group, which is to say by religious or “confessional” groups. The Turks were happy most of the time to let non-Turks and non-Sunni Muslims run their own communal affairs so long as they didn’t cause trouble, didn’t serve as a corridor for unbidden foreign influence in the empire, and coughed up their share of taxes and recruits for the military as required. So in Lebanon, a small but polyglot place thanks to geography (on the Med) and topography (mountainous), Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholic Christians, Armenians, Jews, and Shi`a Muslims all ran their own local affairs in their informal sub-districts in the country. Each confessional community organized itself locally through the major extended family clans that defined the social structure of the place, and that also dominated and structured economic life.
When the Great War ended Turkish rule over its Arab territories, the British and the French essentially froze whatever post-Ottoman political activities might have arisen at least to some extent—more so in some places, like Lebanon, than in others, like Palestine, whose political order was inflected by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. As far as Lebanon was concerned, the millet system basically continued without the Turks. The French, as it happened, were well versed in the kind of federal imperialism which preferred to work through local proxies whenever possible. They excelled at the stratagem of divide et impera, often using local minorities to do French bidding when it came to things like collecting taxes and manning the police force. In 1923 the French also unilaterally formed a new border between what used to be Mount Lebanon and Syria by adding Sunni areas to the east, at first called Greater Lebanon but after a few years just plain Lebanon—Liban, in French. The aim was to dilute and balance against Maronite dominance in the country. (The French also messed more or less simultaneously with the Syrian border in informal compensation, adding Cilicia in the north.5)
World War II put an end to all that: Lebanon emerged independent in the midst of the war and was confronted with the novel task of creating a political order basically from scratch. The National Pact, as it became known, essentially continued the millet system, but with no overlords in a foreign metropole to order and guard it. So Lebanon, well known for the Anti-Lebanon mountains, with their wondrous natural beauty and ski slopes, became in essence an anti-state.
The National Pact deliberately created a weak central authority so that the major organized faith communities could continue to enjoy broad autonomy. The three largest communities—the Maronites mainly in the Chouf just above Beirut (but also in a patch of the south around Jezzine), the Sunnis in the north around Tripoli and in the east bordering Syria, and the Shi`a in the south—were allowed their own police and militia, in all three cases with about as much or more clout than the national army. The central government virtually never collected taxes through which it provided standard services, including schools, as in most normal countries. The local communities took care of primary education, and practically everything else. Instead the government collected excise taxes on imports and exports coming in and out of the port of Beirut, and then distributed money to the patriarchal family heads of the three main groups to use as a patronage resource. (When I taught the Comparative Politics of the Middle East at Penn many years ago, students had more trouble wrapping their heads around the Lebanese anti-state than anything else in the course.)
The National Pact agreement also divided the powers of the central government, such as it was, to wit: the President has to be a Maronite; the Prime Minister has to be a Sunni, and the Speaker of Parliament has to be a Shi`a. This hierarchical division was nominally based on the 1932 census conducted by the French authorities. It became taboo to conduct another census after independence in 1943 because everybody knew, or suspected, that the size of the Maronite community had shrunk significantly, mainly due to emigration. Nevertheless, the Maronites became primus inter pares anyway because the community was relatively well-educated, relatively well off, and its Western and French orientation (there’s a lot of history here, going back at least to the 12th-century French Crusades) played well with Lebanon’s most important trading partners.
Lebanon’s leaderless millet system worked for a while. Lebanon had the freest press in the Arab world, a genuine intellectual and literary life centered around Beirut, and an excellent university or two—including AUB, the American University in Beirut, founded by missionaries in 1863. It also had, by all accounts, some of the best restaurants in the world.
But Lebanon is the smallest country in the Eastern Mediterranean (not counting Cyprus, if Cyprus counts at all) in size and population—even today the population stands at just under 5.6 million. And before long it became a free-range for competing political trends in the Arab world. The rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1952 started what the late Malcolm H. Kerr called “the Arab Cold War” between conservative and mostly pro-Western monarchists and self-styled progressive Arab socialists (carefully) sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The Suez War of 1956 and then both the formation of the United Arab Republic and the Iraqi Revolution in 1958 catalyzed a political crisis in Lebanon, whose population back then was only about 1.75 million. President Eisenhower sent the Marines to keep the place from keeling over in the wrong direction as the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria vied for seats at the table where Lebanon seemed about to be served up as the entree.
Lebanon’s decentralized para-stability returned for a few years, but the rise of Fatah and other Palestinian organizations after the June 1967 War, their ensconcement and subsequent expulsion from Jordan in 1970-71, set the stage for Lebanon’s descent into mayhem. The Palestinian organizations driven from Jordan took up space, uninvited, amid several Palestinian refugee camps in the mainly Shi`a areas of southern Lebanon. They expanded their presence and started launching terrorist raids into Israel. In 1975 the Palestinian presence in the country, and disagreement in Beirut about how to handle it, kindled a protracted civil war and before long a major Syrian intervention.
Then, in 1982, the first Israeli Likud-led government invaded the country determined to eliminate Fatahland. The operation caused widespread damage in Lebanon on top of the damage already wreaked by the civil war, and a good argument can be made that the invasion proved in the longer run counterproductive to Israeli diplomatic and security interests, as well. Why? Because after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the mullahs in Tehran made a special effort to organize and support the confessionally kindred Lebanese Shi`a community, heretofore the poorest and least well organized of Lebanon’s major sectarian groups. Hizballah was born as part of this effort and has remained a wholly-owed Iranian subsidiary ever since. Little by little Iranian influence suborned Lebanon’s deliberately weak-by-design central government, but Israel’s invasion and temporary occupation deepened Lebanon’s political weakness and in due course significantly aided Iranian designs.
And that, in short……whew!…..is why Prime Minister Mikati is in the fix he’s in today, and why he finds himself saying things that are simultaneously necessary and embarrassing. He is a power-challenged man in a small and suborned country, forced to engage in a matrix of geopolitical struggles he will always understand far better than he can influence any strand of it. It is a special case of what Robert S. Vansittart wrote of geopolitics, that it is “. . .an endless game played for joyless victory.”6
Coda: The Substack Crisis that Needn’t Be
Some readers may be aware that two recent essays in the Atlantic have discussed the exit of some writers from Substack protested the presence of radical rightwing content from which the corporate owners profit. You don’t need details from me; just look at the essays by Jonathan M. Katz and more recently Jacob Stern. How do I read all this fuss?
It looks like virtue-signaling to me, and seems akin to both illiberal leftwing and rightwing impulses to stifle dissent. “To silence criticism is to silence freedom,” wrote Sidney Hook a long time ago, and you don’t have to like or credit the criticism for that to be true. It’s not as though Substack moderators throwing neo-Nazis and white supremacists off Substack will shut them up. These days plenty of alternatives exist, both above ground so to speak, and in the dark web netherworld as well. Besides, censorship is not only wrong in a liberal order; it is also counterproductive, because it invariably draws more attention to the bad guys. Thanks to Katz and Stern writing those articles I’d be willing to wager that a lot more eyes have been driven to the noxious drivel than would otherwise be the case.
If Substack owners and managers are feeling ill at ease about profiting from bigotry on their site they can always donate their revenues from such sources to some of the fine organizations dedicated to fighting bigotry, racism, and antisemitism. Besides, vast stretches of ambiguity exist between overtly insane material in the internet and merely annoying or disgusting material. Still following Justice Holmes, the law draws the line at outright incitement—shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, as he put it more than a century ago—and in my view so should Substack. Beyond incitement, however, there are at least fifty shades of dreck out there—pardon my Greek—and I pity whoever would be tasked with wading through it all armed with rat poison in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
And what about the illiberal bigotry of the ultra-left? That exists, too. Throw those purveyors off the site, as well?
It’s a slippery slope, and where lines ought to be drawn, and who gets to draw them…..none of it is easy to parse. Just shouting “I quit” and taking my football home with me is a performative gesture in the main. It accomplishes little beyond creating an opportunity to admire one’s own amour propre in a mirror made of electrons. Alas, as Charles Péguy once wrote: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”
If that’s too cryptic for some, let me spell it out plainly: Me and my Substack ain’ goin’ nowhere, and hopefully, as the Zimmerman once put it, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” either.
Let me end on a brief personal note. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and that’s where George Lincoln Rockwell, the erstwhile head of the American Nazi Party, lived as well. In April 1966, when I was just short of turning 15 years old, Playboy magazine carried a long interview with Rockwell. Rockwell told Hugh Hefner’s office that it better not send a Jew to interview him at his Arlington home and headquarters, right down on Wilson Boulevard just a few miles from where I lived. Hefner sent the yet-to-become-justly-famous Alex Haley instead! Hefner must have thought himself so clever…. Haley did a superb job of making Rockwell look like the galactic-scale arsehole he was.
What does this suggest? That it is often better to engage and ridicule hateful speech than it is to try to muffle it. About a year and a half after the Playboy interview appeared (please don’t ask me if at age almost-15 I also looked at the photos in that issue) a disgruntled former party member assassinated Rockwell. Censorship really done right, perhaps? Maybe, but maybe not: Just remember, as Hans-George Gadamer put it, “Nobody has the last word.”
The name of this organization is usually spelled in the American press “Hezbollah” instead of Hizballah. But Hizballah is a technically correct transliteration and Hezbollah (sometimes even Hezbullah) isn’t. The name means Party of God in Arabic. Hizb (with an light guttural “h” sound sometimes rendered in transliteration as an “h” with a single dot beneath) is the word for party, and allah, well, I trust you know what that means.
For a while there was a question of what to do about seven small Metawali Shi`a villages that the Newcombe-Paulet Commission stuck on the Palestine side of the 1923 border when their workers placed the border cairns down in perhaps not exactly the right places. During the 1948 war the villages were depopulated as folks headed north for safety. That essentially ended the issue.
For plentiful details, see my War, Water, and Negotiation in the Middle East: The Case of the Palestine-Syria Border, 1916-23 (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern & African Studies, 1994). One (too) commonly hears or reads the claim that the borders of the states of the modern Middle East were set in 1916 by the Sykes-Picot Accord. This is not so. Those claiming this point of origin have very likely never heard of the Newcombe-Paulet Commission because they have not read the British and French diplomatic archives, and have never heard either of the “Arabian Chapter” problem, which is relevant to the shaping of the borders of Transjordan, or just Jordan since May 1946. Indeed, the border between Transjordan and Iraq was not finalized until 1931.
For details see Dov S. Zakheim, “America needs a carrier strike group to deter Hezbollah,” The Hill, January 5, 2024.
Cilicia’s major city then went by the name of Alexandretta. In 1939 the French traded Cilicia to Turkey in return for its promise not to aid Germany in the coming war. The Turks call the province Hatay, and Alexandretta is now Iskenderun. The independent Syrian government since 1943 has never recognized Hatay’s alienation to Turkey. The area still appears daily on the Syrian television weather map as though it were a part of Syria. Tee-hee? Well, sort of, maybe.
Vansittart, The Mist Procession (Hutchinson of London, 1958), p. 28.