Beware of Small States Quotes

“the people of Lebanon’ were offering a ‘model’ and a ‘strong proof that it is not only Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem which Arab armies and peoples are capable of liberating, but - with one small decision and a bit of determination - [the whole of] Palestine too, from the river to the sea’.4”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

“But the Bush Administration did not yet understand, or, if it did, did not yet care enough to try to stop it. Yet even it was getting seriously upset with its Israeli protégé - albeit mainly for military and strategic, rather than moral, reasons. It was not simply that Israel had failed to expand the war on Hizbullah by attacking Syria too. For that is what ‘many parts’ of the Bush Administration, led by the passionately pro-Israeli neoconservative, National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, had been urging it to do, and there was a ‘lot of anger’ in the White House that it hadn’t.106”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

“In years gone by, when Israel’s military pride was at its height, the standard jocular boast about Lebanon had been that, if ever it needed to conquer it, its army band would suffice. Now, upon returning from their service there, its soldiers threw themselves to the ground and kissed Israeli soil in gratitude for their survival, or, in the despised Lebanese and Palestinian manner, expressed their immense relief in celebratory salvos of automatic fire.87”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

“Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that ‘when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists’ increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals‘, while this ‘Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization’.28”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

“Lebanon, it seems, was almost designed to be the everlasting battleground for others’ political, strategic and ideological conflicts, conflicts which sometimes escalate into their proxy wars.”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

“(‘Lebanonization’) become an official part of the French language, defined in the latest editions of Larousse as ‘a process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities’, and ‘tending to replace “balkanisation”’.”
― David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East