YOAV KARNY
Must a country be strong in order to exist? Or perhaps its only chance of existing lies in its built-in weakness? This is almost a paradox, just playing with words, is it not? Yet it represents the history of Lebanon in its 80 years of independence, real or imagined.
Lebanon was born out of collapsing French colonialism in 1943, a long time before the French had actually planned to give it independence. But the State of Lebanon was designed even earlier. The French and the Lebanese spent three years writing its constitution at the end of the 1920s. The formula they came up with was so convoluted, so full of contradictions, that its success was completely dependent on the lack of desire on the part of those who compiled it to destroy it, and on the willingness of much stronger neighbors to let it exist.
Syria, for example, which emerged into the light of day at the same time, refused to accept the very idea of a separate Lebanese identity. It thought that what was called Lebanon ought to be part of Greater Syria. Syria refused to establish normal diplomatic relations with Lebanon for decades. If the Lebanese want to talk to it, they should stir themselves and take the high road from Beirut to Damascus.
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