Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Arab nationalism, anti-Israeli hostility, and pro-Palestinian sentiment were at their zenith. Islamic fundamentalism was still to come later in the 1980s, after the Arab debacles in their wars against Israel and the failure of Arab nationalism. With their feebleness and incompetence, the Arabs in general, in particular Egypt and Syria along with the Gulf Arabs (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait primarily) found that tiny and vulnerable Lebanon with its "alien" Christians was a good avatar for "alien" Israel and a fertile ground to demonstrate that they still had some testosterone in their gonads.
So they sent their hatred, their money and their proxy armed hordes of Palestinians, Syrians, Libyans and multitudes of other Arab mercenaries to prove that Arab nationalism was capable of something, of anything, after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. When they couldn't defeat Jewish Israel, they turned their hatred onto Christian Lebanon, which had not joined the wars of 1967 and 1973 because it would have been suicidal for it to do so. They propped up Yasser Arafat with weapons and money into establishing the headquarters of his PLO and satellite organizations in Beirut. They forced Lebanon to cede its southern border with Israel to the PLO in the Cairo Accord of 1969. The PLO began shelling northern Israeli settlements, giving Israel the pretext to retaliate by bombing Lebanese villages. This cycle would continue until 1982 when the PLO was evicted from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion, leaving newly created Hezbollah to take over the enterprise of "liberating Palestine" with its disastrous consequences on Lebanon. Imagine how the liberation of Palestine by the Arabs, as grand and sublime as this objective was, became concentrated to a tiny border strip of the smallest, yet the only democratic and only partly Muslim, Arab country among all the cowardly Muslim Arab dictatorial regimes.
There's too much history to be exhaustive here, but every attempt by the Lebanese to put an end to their torment by regulating Palestinian guerilla activities (e.g. the Melkart Accord) was met with accusations of being anti-Arab, imperialist, pro-Zionist, and isolationist. In the twisted hateful minds of Arab Muslims, Lebanon (being only partly Muslim) had to over-prove its Arab identity by sacrificing itself to the Palestinian cause. Because they're not Muslims, Lebanon's Christians are by definition suspect of "westernism" and must therefore meet a higher standard of Arabity than all the Arab scum around them, which means that Lebanon must go to war alone against Israel to prove itself, while other Muslim Arab countries are under no pressure to prove themselves and have the luxury of making peace with the enemy. Meanwhile, Syria, Jordan and Egypt closed their own borders and denied Arafat and his thugs the right to liberate Palestine from their own borders with Israel, while Lebanon was forced by the Arabs to cede its southern territory to Arafat in the 1969 Cairo Accord.
Jordan had crushed the PLO in the 1970 Black September massacres, but that was OK because King Hussein was a Muslim. But how dare the Christian President of Lebanon try to rein in the PLO and deny it freedom of action on Lebanese soil? Meanwhile, Syria signed a truce with Israel in 1974 in which it effectively ceded the Golan to Israel, followed by Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) who signed peace treaties and normalized their relations with the Jewish state. Lebanon to this day remains the only active Arab war front with Israel, thanks mostly to the perfidy of the Syrian Assad regime which maintained calm on its own occupied and annexed Golan, while inciting Quixotic and disastrous liberation wars right next door along the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Lebanon at the time was the free press center of the Arab world. Every Arab author, poet, journalist, academic or dissident who had fled the drab totalitarianism of the Arab dictatorships of the time had found freedom and shelter in Beirut. From Beirut, the Arab press and dissidents (e.g. Nizar Qabbani, Adonis) were free to criticize the inept and cruel Arab regimes of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and others, and some of these dissidents were hunted down and assassinated by Syria's Mukhabarat services (e.g. Salim Al-Laouzi, editor of Al-Hawadess magazine, who was kidnapped, his hand melted in acid, and his body found in a ditch in 1980). Yet, Lebanon made up for its military weakness with a strong pro-Palestinian press. In 1974, it was the Christian president of Lebanon, Sleiman Frangiyeh Sr., who introduced Yasser Arafat to the United Nations in New York, which paved the way for the eventual recognition of the PLO by Israel and the international community. Up to that time, the world had thought of the Palestinians as mere refugees and not as a nation trying to salvage the land that was forcibly taken from them by the Jewish terrorism of the 1930s and 1940s.
As the 1975 war between the Lebanese and the Palestinians erupted, the Arabs poured money, mercenaries and weapons into the country to support the Palestinians. At the same time, under the cover of opening up to the world and with their newly found oil money, the Sunni Muslim Arabs engaged in a campaign to Islamize the West: They founded mosques and Koranic schools in every European capital, sent hateful preachers to the West who began brainwashing people, and funded terrorist activities (plane hijackings, assassinations, bombings). By 1979, Shiite Muslim Iran too had fallen to Islamic fundamentalism with the anti-Shah revolution and the advent of the Islamic theocracy. Iran joined in the Islamization campaign and immediately engaged in anti-Western terrorism. It founded Hezbollah in Lebanon (1982) which proceeded to chase all western presence out of Lebanon by bombings (US Marine and French paratroopers headquarters, and US and French embassies), kidnappings (the Western hostages saga), hijackings (TWA Flight 847) and multitudes of killings and assassinations. In fact, Iran was doing the same thing in Paris in the early to mid-1980s.
Lebanon was abandoned by the West who couldn't wean itself of Arab oil. A cowardly West took the blows and the attacks against itself without complaining, so why would it try to rescue a friendly but insignificant Lebanon that was suffering the same fate? Lebanon traveled the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s in the Syrian Gulag that the West had colluded to assign it to for fear of upsetting the Arabs. Today, Lebanon is still reeling from the Syrian occupation which left behind it a culture of malfeasance, crime and corruption.
Fast forward to the late 2010s: Today the Arabs are where Lebanon was back in the 1960s and 1970s. They are for the most part allies of the West, they are promoting themselves as beacons of cultural openness, they have made peace with Israel, and have shelved the Palestinian cause into their darkest closets. And Lebanon is today where the Arabs were in the 1960s and 1970s: In absurd military trenches for the Palestinian cause on whose altar it was sacrificed. Israel remains the eternal enemy of Lebanon while most Arabs have opened Israeli embassies in their capitals. Economically it is a ruined country when it was as prosperous in the 1960s as Dubai is today.
This is not irony. It is not the outcome of mistakes or the meanderings of politics. The descent of Lebanon into the hell it finds itself today is a crime initiated by the "brotherly" Arab countries who then dumped its decaying cadaver into the hands of Iran, the Shiite alter ego of the Sunni Arabs, to finish off the mutilation. And now the Arabs are blaming Iran for what it is doing to Lebanon, without expressing any regrets for what they themselves did to the country long before Iran joined in the macabre ritual. It really doesn't matter whether it is Sunni or Shiite Islam that is the butcher. Whether Lebanon as we know it survives this crime remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: The survival of the last free Christians in the East is at stake and the treacherous West and its perfidious Arab allies know it.
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