Beware of Small States – Lebanon: Battle Ground of the Middle EastBy David Hirst Faber, 480pp, £20

BEWARE OF Small Statesis a magnificent, scholarly achievement, amazing in its lucid and concise recounting of the tormented past century of Lebanese and Middle East history. With its publication, 33 years after his masterful The Gun and the Olive Branch, David Hirst reaffirms his place as a leading historian of the region.

Hirst was long the Middle East correspondent for the Guardian, and has lived in Beirut for 50 years, during which time he was banned by six Arab governments and twice kidnapped. Though Hirst witnessed many of the events in this book, he has the modesty not to use the pronoun “I” once in nearly 500 pages.

Hirst takes us from the post first World War carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France through the creation of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians in the 1948 war. The 1956 Suez War, when president Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Egypt, was, Hirst notes, “the last time any American president was to take so resolute, so moral a stand, or anything approaching it, against Israel and ‘the Lobby’.”

The rise of the PLO in Lebanon reinforced the alliance between Israel and Lebanon’s Maronite Catholics, and led to civil war in 1975. Hirsts description of the September 1982 massacre at Sabra and Chatila, when Israeli invaders sent their Lebanese militia allies into the refugee camps, is harrowing:

“Sometimes they tortured before they killed, gouging out eyes, skinning alive, disembowelling. Women and small girls were raped, sometimes half a dozen times, before, breasts severed, they were finished off with axes. Babies were torn limb from limb and their heads smashed against walls. Entering Akka hospital, the assailants assassinated the patients in their beds. They decorated other victims with grenades, or tied them to vehicles and dragged them through the streets alive. They cut off hands to get at rings and bracelets . . .”

After the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, an enemy more dangerous to Israel sprang up there, Hizbullah. The Iranian-backed militia was linked to the suicide bombing that killed 241 US Marines in October 1983, and to the abduction of 87 westerners in seven years. But it won the loyalty of Lebanese Shia Muslims by fighting Israeli occupation, eventually driving Israel out of its self-declared “security zone” in 2000.

Hizbullah and Hamas, the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip, fought Israel to a standstill in 2006 and 2008-9 respectively. “For non-state militias like (Hamas) and Hizbullah, survival – not to be defeated, not to lose possession and control of the territory on which they had fought – was ‘victory’,” Hirst explains.

After the failed 2006 war on Lebanon, Israel developed the “Dahiya doctrine”, named after the Shia suburbs of Beirut, which meant eliminating even the semblance of a distinction between civilian and military targets. To a large extent, this doctrine was played out in Gaza. Both conflicts were characterised by the vastly disproportionate force wielded by Israel. The ratio of Arab to Israeli fatalities rose from 25 to one in Lebanon to 100 to one in Gaza.

The possibility he outlines, of a conflict uniting Hamas and Hizbullah, Syria and Iran against Israel, backed by the US, in what he calls “a Hizbullah-style ‘missile war’ writ large” should send shivers down any readers spine.

Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent for The Irish Times