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Last time Israel tried to support Arab christians as a faction against crazy islamists we got the Lebanese civil war which is still ongoing. If anything jewish support for ANYTHING delegitimizes it in the eyes of the local polity: see how aggressively Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia downplay their positive relations witb the jews, lest the muslim brotherhood rear up again.
The Maronites were patrician intellectuals whose French-educated elite thought they could continue the colonial system indefinitely after colonialism. If they had agreed to let Israel help them build a Christian state in the late 1950s it would have been fine and they’d literally be living in a rich modern country by now. Their hubris destroyed them, a similar situation played out in South Africa with the Boers.
I accept that the maronites were much more educated and sought to perpetuate their position of relative privilege in the system, but specific to the last decade I believe the maronite insanity in their banking policies is what lead to Lebanons modern version of ruin. That is however a topic for another thread.
Certainly the Maronites are substantially responsible for the banking crisis, but that’s just what happens in highly fractured low trust countries with major sectarian disputes, every group is out for itself. I don’t think an independent 75% Christian Lebanon would be Switzerland or Denmark (or indeed secular Israel) but it would probably be a moderately corrupt Med country on the level of, say, Greece or Malta. They got away with it in part because every tribe there is corrupt and self-serving in its own way.
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