As the world weighs the horrifying scenario of a “big war” in the Middle East and the likely impact on the world economy, starting with the oil price, spare a thought for the people in the eye of the storm.
I don't think Lebanon is more corrupt than other countries.
The problem with Lebanon is that for Israel to feel secure, everything around needs either be crashed (all republics) or made totally subservient (all kingdoms). The words sanctions appears only once in the post. One sees similar analyses about Venezuela, for instance, with its economy on the doldrums, analyses that never report on the sanctions imposed by the US.
Iraq is blackmailed to support US presence and abide by some US diktates by having all its oil proceeds forced through New York banks and blocked in case of disobedience.
But the last sentence indicates the failings of western policies towards Lebanon and the wider area: "Whether the current escalation of tension results in full-scale warfare, one thing is for sure: the imbrication of politics and everyday life goes far too deep to be extirpated through bombing, shelling or assassination." But this will not stop with an Israel in the chockehold of a rabid ethnonationalistic frenzy. Maybe somebody should have a serious talk with Israel? Would solve a lot of problems in the area...
Actually, Israelis would feel secure if our neighbors didn't explicitly call for our destruction on a daily or weekly basis. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Does it not confound you Israel is surrounded by all these despotic/Third World countries, yet Israel is an OECD country, with DNA in the very technology you are using, and the only things Lebanon/Syria/Yemen/Egypt/Jordan/Iraq exports to the world are terrorists/refugees and poverty? Where is the science? Where is the "let's build up our country instead of tearing down Israel"? Why don't you comment on Assad killing what, 500,000 Syrians and creating a refugee flood that has destroyed Europe's future (and apparently has crippled Lebanon as well)? Why don't you mention the fact Hamas built 500 km of tunnels under civilian infrastructure? Why are all aspersions cast on Israel? Play nice, accept our presence, and become a modern country. Or not.
More than 25% of Palestinian males were killed in the anti-British revolt in mid 1930s, when was a 1 and half year of revolt against the British occupation. And after 1945, UK,US have run interferences in all those countries. As it was siege socialism (see Cuba), there was siege Arabism in the middle east, and only the autocratic regimes that were supine to the west were left unhindered.
The biggest exporters of terror to the world are hands down, the US, Israel and UK and there are full libraries documenting these actions.
Gulf monarcj=hies and US have moved to do regime change in Syria and brought arms from Libya and mercenaries from all over and is Assad that killed Syrians? Have you heard of the Operation Timber Sycamore?
I think Israel needs to become a modern country because right now is steeped deep in Bronze Age barbarism. All the world has heard now the call to treat Palestinians like the Amalek (everyone and their livestock to be killed). Israel is a pariah state and non-Zionist Jews are leaving.
Exactly. More emphasis on the fact that Israel bullied and brutalised Lebanon by invading that country and the US has supported this teenage disfunctional child that has held a victim mentality to the point of paranoia and psychosis. I stand with Jews who stand against the terrible dispossessions and incarcerations of Palestinian people.
The West has forced Hezbollah and Hamas into being, the US and Britain supported zionism which is colonisation which caused displacement and a legacy of tragedy.
I live in a colonising country and like many of us, I come from a mix of colonised and the coloniser. We all need to look at our position in this current collapse of the world. Financial capitalism profits from colonisation. It has seen Empires steal resources and lend them back to those that were stolen from. It is time to wipe the debts and start again, to lay down the arms and start again, to share living together instead of one dominating another. It is time to end capitalism and create a new kind of socialism.
It is time to demand the right of return for Palestinians and to promise Lebanon that it won't be invaded, ditto Yemen, ditto Iran and Iraq. US foreign policy is about domination, domination of the Middle East, domination of the Pacific. Once that stops we might all be free and the planet might stop burning.
I believe any economic order benefits from colonization. Examples include the Soviet Union and Communist China. And capitalism profits from non-colonizing activities as well - see South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia.
]I agree that the US needs to retreat from domination of the Middle East. I disagree that we should demand (or that are demands have much impact) the right of return for Palestinians. At some point, border changes are real. Otherwise, let's also demand the right of return for Germans to go back and claim their homes in Western Poland. If we demand anything, it should be a joint demand from the "West" and the Islamic world that Israel and the Palestinians agree to "some end result" on their own. But again, our ability to demand cannot effectively be backed up. Do you think for a second if the US and Europe were to cut Israel loose, that either Russia or China wouldn't step in as a new patron/ally?
Russia and China already are highly involved in the Israeli economy. The US actively intervenes to limit the growth of their involvement; the metaphor of a vacuum of patronage doesn’t really fit, there is rather already a hostile relation especially against China.
I'll apologize if I've missed your point, but I think your statement supports my hypothesis. Russia and China are engaged with Israel economically, and if the US canceled our alliance-like relationship with Israel, one or both would increase political engagement accordingly.
ANd all these dispossessed people should never be compensated for their losses, eh?! Unlike the Jews that died or left Europe during WWII, there are plenty of compensation given to them, just look at the German state. The Polish state is being forced to make whole for all Jewish properties forcefully abandoned due to German occupation.
If it is to have justice, everyone should get justice, no?
Sorry but you have no idea what you’re talking about. Poland does not even recognize citizenship for many Jews of Polish descent much less host property restitution negotiations with foreign Jews. This is not even possible due to the extensive nationalization of property under socialism thus breaking any continuous chain of private ownership.
What does this have to do with Polish restitution? It is a U.S. law being protested by the Polish far right wing who chooses to make it a fake hot button issue for their elections. There won’t be any actual change of land or business ownership.
Right of return of Palestinians, to where? Jordan? Do you seriously think Israel is going to let itself become a non-Jewish state? That is a laughable suggestion. The Arabs were offered a country in 1947. They chose war. They lost the war. History was written by the victors, not losers who keep losing. there is no such thing as a "refugee" 3 generations after a war. They move on and live. Take a look at Israel's neighbors. Look at the wasteland this area was during the Ottoman Empire. This is what Israel would look like if the Arabs were in control. The only thing you are calling for is the destruction of 8 million Jews. We will pass, thank you very much. We prefer to be alive.
Why were the Jewish people not offered a place in defeated Germany? After all, it was Germany that inflicted the Holocaust on them, no? Nobody asked the Arabs in Palestine what they wanted, and the Brits started receiving Jewish refugees befor WWII.
Anyone would have chosen war when the country is being invaded and people are killed, disposessed and pushed away. There is no legitimate "right of conquest" enshrined in the UN Charter.
As for International Court of Justices, it has released its legal opinion about the Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Bank and settlements, and apartheid, a couple of months ago and they are all illegal.
And no, Palestine was not a wasteland. The big lie: "a land without people for a people without land" is just that, an immense and thoroughly debunked lie. The Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia is a wasteland of dunes, but Palestine was not.
Nobody is calling for the destruction of the Jews in Israel, but everyone is calling for rights for Palestinaians. It is the Zionists that have been calling for the destruction of all Arabs from the river to the sea, long before the October 7.
I found that it is easieer to fight against windmills than to argue against people like you.
Nowbody could answer the question of why Lebabon, as diverse in the 1970s as now was able to function, but all got blown up and forever destroyed after the Israeli intervention...Intervention that with the help of western powers continues to this day.
I was in Israel when it invaded Lebanon and even a conservative defensive Israeli said Israel would have invaded Turkey as well if so many people had not been against it. The internal and external propaganda of Israel's US-funded propaganda machine mean that many people forget or have never known the real history but some of us do know. I changed from being a friend of Israel to someone who has experienced the hospitality and love of Palestinians and other peoples in the Middle East, and who passionately supports the right of return for Palestinians. I also have experienced the thuggery of the US military in the Middle East, virtually a take over, all the bases and these young men and women programmed to kill. US citizens who are trained to view Arab people as the enemy. There lies the real anti semitism.
Lebanon was a beautiful abundant country before Israel brought it to its knees and it had to find aid wherever it could. Pity you listen to well paid hasbara propaganda rather than visiting those places, and finding the real stories. I am a journalist who did that.
Lebanon is more corrupt than other countries just by virtue of the confessional voting system and the disenfranchisement of Palestinian and other refugees who have been denied voting rights for almost a century as they would shift the balance away from Christian dominance of official institutions. The presence of the U.S.’s Middle East CIA HQ, US military participation in drug and arms smuggling through Beirut, and U.S. inflammation of decades of civil war (including between Hezbollah and the PLO) also made the country corrupt by default. Discounting these basic facts makes it difficult to analyze the country’s economy beyond hypotheticals.
I am a secular American living in Israel. Can any of you please explain why Hezbollah has been launching missiles at Israel for the past 10 months? Are we fighting over land? Have innocent Lebanese civilians been forced out of Israel? It sounds like all of you are followers of Iran; America is the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan. Poor Lebanon, it would be the jewel of the world were it not for Israel. Pity those Iranians, if only Israel didn't exist, there would not have been an Islamic revolution. and Yemen, oh great and wonderful Yemen. Israel is the reason it has not progressed in, well, ever.
This story should have ended the day Israel beat back 6 Arab armies in 1948. You lose a war, the spoils go to the victor. Instead, the Arabs and their sympathizers (most of the commentators here) decided to rewrite the definition of "refugee", which incomprehensibly remains in effect to this day (again, thanks to the support of yourselves). Since several of you do not like Capitalism, perhaps you would prefer to live under the thumb of the Chinese or the Soviets? Ask the Eastern Europeans how much they loved 4 decades of oppressive Communism.
You mean all those ethnically clensed Palestinians trying to get back their land and properties? And Israel hunting them down and in the process destroying Lebanon and sowing inter faith hatred?
Fascinating piece. The fact I found most startling concerns the gasoline-for-gold deal between Iran and Venezuela, since Venezuela has, according to some accounts, the largest oil reserves in the world (about twice as much as Iran). According to the same Atlantic Institute report quoted in the piece such is the state of disrepair of the Venezuelan oil industry that the country faces endemic gasoline shortages and is being propped by fuel imports from Iran (whose oil industry itself is in not in the best of shapes). A commonality between Maduro-run Venezuela and Hezbollah-run Lebanon is that they are an example of regress from upper-middle to lower-middle income economies (technically, Venezuela’s classification has been suspended by the WB due to lack of data, which suggests that the statistical authorities and the oil industry are in similar shape; the country may have actually descended further down the income scale). Maduro-run Venezuela and Hezbollah-run Lebanon have at least another thing in common: they can both count on the vocal support of France Unbowed’s leader Jean-Louis Melenchon. This may not bode well for the future of the French economy, should France Unbowed get any close to the levers of economic power.
I teach a small unit on economic instability, and this is a great case study on many levels to use with students.
Lebanon not the most corrupt state, maybe, maybe not, but it is certainly one of the most pliable states in the ME. its government appears to be totally captured by other bad actors, both internal and external. The majority of the population appear to be just hostages, waiting for the next calamity to befall them. How can this cycle be broken?
Apart from the general breakdown of Lebanese institutions and everything mixed up with Hezbollah: In 2020, the Banque du Liban and the governor Riad Salameh were accused of enriching themselves. What can be done?
I don't think Lebanon is more corrupt than other countries.
The problem with Lebanon is that for Israel to feel secure, everything around needs either be crashed (all republics) or made totally subservient (all kingdoms). The words sanctions appears only once in the post. One sees similar analyses about Venezuela, for instance, with its economy on the doldrums, analyses that never report on the sanctions imposed by the US.
Iraq is blackmailed to support US presence and abide by some US diktates by having all its oil proceeds forced through New York banks and blocked in case of disobedience.
But the last sentence indicates the failings of western policies towards Lebanon and the wider area: "Whether the current escalation of tension results in full-scale warfare, one thing is for sure: the imbrication of politics and everyday life goes far too deep to be extirpated through bombing, shelling or assassination." But this will not stop with an Israel in the chockehold of a rabid ethnonationalistic frenzy. Maybe somebody should have a serious talk with Israel? Would solve a lot of problems in the area...
Actually, Israelis would feel secure if our neighbors didn't explicitly call for our destruction on a daily or weekly basis. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Does it not confound you Israel is surrounded by all these despotic/Third World countries, yet Israel is an OECD country, with DNA in the very technology you are using, and the only things Lebanon/Syria/Yemen/Egypt/Jordan/Iraq exports to the world are terrorists/refugees and poverty? Where is the science? Where is the "let's build up our country instead of tearing down Israel"? Why don't you comment on Assad killing what, 500,000 Syrians and creating a refugee flood that has destroyed Europe's future (and apparently has crippled Lebanon as well)? Why don't you mention the fact Hamas built 500 km of tunnels under civilian infrastructure? Why are all aspersions cast on Israel? Play nice, accept our presence, and become a modern country. Or not.
A big bullshit that you are spewing here mister.
More than 25% of Palestinian males were killed in the anti-British revolt in mid 1930s, when was a 1 and half year of revolt against the British occupation. And after 1945, UK,US have run interferences in all those countries. As it was siege socialism (see Cuba), there was siege Arabism in the middle east, and only the autocratic regimes that were supine to the west were left unhindered.
The biggest exporters of terror to the world are hands down, the US, Israel and UK and there are full libraries documenting these actions.
Gulf monarcj=hies and US have moved to do regime change in Syria and brought arms from Libya and mercenaries from all over and is Assad that killed Syrians? Have you heard of the Operation Timber Sycamore?
I think Israel needs to become a modern country because right now is steeped deep in Bronze Age barbarism. All the world has heard now the call to treat Palestinians like the Amalek (everyone and their livestock to be killed). Israel is a pariah state and non-Zionist Jews are leaving.
Exactly. More emphasis on the fact that Israel bullied and brutalised Lebanon by invading that country and the US has supported this teenage disfunctional child that has held a victim mentality to the point of paranoia and psychosis. I stand with Jews who stand against the terrible dispossessions and incarcerations of Palestinian people.
The West has forced Hezbollah and Hamas into being, the US and Britain supported zionism which is colonisation which caused displacement and a legacy of tragedy.
I live in a colonising country and like many of us, I come from a mix of colonised and the coloniser. We all need to look at our position in this current collapse of the world. Financial capitalism profits from colonisation. It has seen Empires steal resources and lend them back to those that were stolen from. It is time to wipe the debts and start again, to lay down the arms and start again, to share living together instead of one dominating another. It is time to end capitalism and create a new kind of socialism.
It is time to demand the right of return for Palestinians and to promise Lebanon that it won't be invaded, ditto Yemen, ditto Iran and Iraq. US foreign policy is about domination, domination of the Middle East, domination of the Pacific. Once that stops we might all be free and the planet might stop burning.
I believe any economic order benefits from colonization. Examples include the Soviet Union and Communist China. And capitalism profits from non-colonizing activities as well - see South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia.
]I agree that the US needs to retreat from domination of the Middle East. I disagree that we should demand (or that are demands have much impact) the right of return for Palestinians. At some point, border changes are real. Otherwise, let's also demand the right of return for Germans to go back and claim their homes in Western Poland. If we demand anything, it should be a joint demand from the "West" and the Islamic world that Israel and the Palestinians agree to "some end result" on their own. But again, our ability to demand cannot effectively be backed up. Do you think for a second if the US and Europe were to cut Israel loose, that either Russia or China wouldn't step in as a new patron/ally?
Russia and China already are highly involved in the Israeli economy. The US actively intervenes to limit the growth of their involvement; the metaphor of a vacuum of patronage doesn’t really fit, there is rather already a hostile relation especially against China.
I'll apologize if I've missed your point, but I think your statement supports my hypothesis. Russia and China are engaged with Israel economically, and if the US canceled our alliance-like relationship with Israel, one or both would increase political engagement accordingly.
ANd all these dispossessed people should never be compensated for their losses, eh?! Unlike the Jews that died or left Europe during WWII, there are plenty of compensation given to them, just look at the German state. The Polish state is being forced to make whole for all Jewish properties forcefully abandoned due to German occupation.
If it is to have justice, everyone should get justice, no?
Sorry but you have no idea what you’re talking about. Poland does not even recognize citizenship for many Jews of Polish descent much less host property restitution negotiations with foreign Jews. This is not even possible due to the extensive nationalization of property under socialism thus breaking any continuous chain of private ownership.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/polish-far-right-supporters-protest-against-restitution-of-jewish-property-idUSKCN1SH0HP/
What does this have to do with Polish restitution? It is a U.S. law being protested by the Polish far right wing who chooses to make it a fake hot button issue for their elections. There won’t be any actual change of land or business ownership.
Right of return of Palestinians, to where? Jordan? Do you seriously think Israel is going to let itself become a non-Jewish state? That is a laughable suggestion. The Arabs were offered a country in 1947. They chose war. They lost the war. History was written by the victors, not losers who keep losing. there is no such thing as a "refugee" 3 generations after a war. They move on and live. Take a look at Israel's neighbors. Look at the wasteland this area was during the Ottoman Empire. This is what Israel would look like if the Arabs were in control. The only thing you are calling for is the destruction of 8 million Jews. We will pass, thank you very much. We prefer to be alive.
Why were the Jewish people not offered a place in defeated Germany? After all, it was Germany that inflicted the Holocaust on them, no? Nobody asked the Arabs in Palestine what they wanted, and the Brits started receiving Jewish refugees befor WWII.
Anyone would have chosen war when the country is being invaded and people are killed, disposessed and pushed away. There is no legitimate "right of conquest" enshrined in the UN Charter.
As for International Court of Justices, it has released its legal opinion about the Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Bank and settlements, and apartheid, a couple of months ago and they are all illegal.
And no, Palestine was not a wasteland. The big lie: "a land without people for a people without land" is just that, an immense and thoroughly debunked lie. The Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia is a wasteland of dunes, but Palestine was not.
Nobody is calling for the destruction of the Jews in Israel, but everyone is calling for rights for Palestinaians. It is the Zionists that have been calling for the destruction of all Arabs from the river to the sea, long before the October 7.
Your assertion that somehow israel is responsible for the chaos in Lebanon is absolutely evidence free.
The factionalism corruption incompetence and fanaticism prevalent in Lebanon is responsible for its chaos
Evidence free?
I found that it is easieer to fight against windmills than to argue against people like you.
Nowbody could answer the question of why Lebabon, as diverse in the 1970s as now was able to function, but all got blown up and forever destroyed after the Israeli intervention...Intervention that with the help of western powers continues to this day.
I was in Israel when it invaded Lebanon and even a conservative defensive Israeli said Israel would have invaded Turkey as well if so many people had not been against it. The internal and external propaganda of Israel's US-funded propaganda machine mean that many people forget or have never known the real history but some of us do know. I changed from being a friend of Israel to someone who has experienced the hospitality and love of Palestinians and other peoples in the Middle East, and who passionately supports the right of return for Palestinians. I also have experienced the thuggery of the US military in the Middle East, virtually a take over, all the bases and these young men and women programmed to kill. US citizens who are trained to view Arab people as the enemy. There lies the real anti semitism.
Lebanon was a beautiful abundant country before Israel brought it to its knees and it had to find aid wherever it could. Pity you listen to well paid hasbara propaganda rather than visiting those places, and finding the real stories. I am a journalist who did that.
Yes. If Lebanon were corrupt it would be a US pawn like Ukraine or perhaps Iraq.
Lebanon is more corrupt than other countries just by virtue of the confessional voting system and the disenfranchisement of Palestinian and other refugees who have been denied voting rights for almost a century as they would shift the balance away from Christian dominance of official institutions. The presence of the U.S.’s Middle East CIA HQ, US military participation in drug and arms smuggling through Beirut, and U.S. inflammation of decades of civil war (including between Hezbollah and the PLO) also made the country corrupt by default. Discounting these basic facts makes it difficult to analyze the country’s economy beyond hypotheticals.
The key words here are "The presence of the U.S.’s Middle East CIA HQ"
Unfortunately it will reopen again soon https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230530-us-to-build-regional-cia-hub-in-lebanon-report-says/amp/
I am a secular American living in Israel. Can any of you please explain why Hezbollah has been launching missiles at Israel for the past 10 months? Are we fighting over land? Have innocent Lebanese civilians been forced out of Israel? It sounds like all of you are followers of Iran; America is the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan. Poor Lebanon, it would be the jewel of the world were it not for Israel. Pity those Iranians, if only Israel didn't exist, there would not have been an Islamic revolution. and Yemen, oh great and wonderful Yemen. Israel is the reason it has not progressed in, well, ever.
This story should have ended the day Israel beat back 6 Arab armies in 1948. You lose a war, the spoils go to the victor. Instead, the Arabs and their sympathizers (most of the commentators here) decided to rewrite the definition of "refugee", which incomprehensibly remains in effect to this day (again, thanks to the support of yourselves). Since several of you do not like Capitalism, perhaps you would prefer to live under the thumb of the Chinese or the Soviets? Ask the Eastern Europeans how much they loved 4 decades of oppressive Communism.
So, in short, a corrupt upper class and the tentacles of Hezbollah, continue the destruction of Lebanon, begun by the PLO presence in the 70s.
You mean all those ethnically clensed Palestinians trying to get back their land and properties? And Israel hunting them down and in the process destroying Lebanon and sowing inter faith hatred?
Fascinating piece. The fact I found most startling concerns the gasoline-for-gold deal between Iran and Venezuela, since Venezuela has, according to some accounts, the largest oil reserves in the world (about twice as much as Iran). According to the same Atlantic Institute report quoted in the piece such is the state of disrepair of the Venezuelan oil industry that the country faces endemic gasoline shortages and is being propped by fuel imports from Iran (whose oil industry itself is in not in the best of shapes). A commonality between Maduro-run Venezuela and Hezbollah-run Lebanon is that they are an example of regress from upper-middle to lower-middle income economies (technically, Venezuela’s classification has been suspended by the WB due to lack of data, which suggests that the statistical authorities and the oil industry are in similar shape; the country may have actually descended further down the income scale). Maduro-run Venezuela and Hezbollah-run Lebanon have at least another thing in common: they can both count on the vocal support of France Unbowed’s leader Jean-Louis Melenchon. This may not bode well for the future of the French economy, should France Unbowed get any close to the levers of economic power.
The article doesn't address that the Lebanese pound was pegged to the dollar while imports reached 20-25 % of Lebanese GDP?
why wouls a product of failing french colonialism have any real long term prospects?no,virginia,
there is no 'lebanon'.
Just very sad story
And to think Lebanon used to be called the Paris of the Middle East.
Amazing piece.
I teach a small unit on economic instability, and this is a great case study on many levels to use with students.
Lebanon not the most corrupt state, maybe, maybe not, but it is certainly one of the most pliable states in the ME. its government appears to be totally captured by other bad actors, both internal and external. The majority of the population appear to be just hostages, waiting for the next calamity to befall them. How can this cycle be broken?
Apart from the general breakdown of Lebanese institutions and everything mixed up with Hezbollah: In 2020, the Banque du Liban and the governor Riad Salameh were accused of enriching themselves. What can be done?