ABSTRACT
Lebanon involuntarily became a political and military buffer between Israel and its Moslem neighbors as a matter of geographic necessity. Lebanon, and the Lebanese, was a creation of extra-regional powers and politics. The country is a classic example of the interplay of politics and geography in what remains essentially tribal/clan highland/mountaineer sociology. The main political and economic center of Lebanon consists of the narrow coastal plain where ridges of the Lebanon Mountains often reach the sea and separate the coast into a series of small fertile basins. In the mid-1800s the area that was to become modern Lebanon was then the autonomous province of Mount Lebanon within the Ottoman empire. Lebanese politics have always been based upon a tribal, medieval socio-political system of only tenuous political stability. Moslem population of Lebanon goaded on by their pan-Arab nationalism and by the resident Palestinians in the refugee camps, grew increasingly partisan.
