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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Lebanon might pay a very high price for being such a divided society, but for the one guy that gets a guaranteed government office because he's a specific minority, it's a pretty good deal.

Except there aren't any countries, past or current, where Jews have benefitted from the kind of ethno-religious power sharing that we see in Lebanon or Singapore.

Israel and Russia exist.

Used to happen in New York, and I think in many big US cities. Jews, Irish, Italians all had their well-recognised machines.

In Singapore the power distribution is relatively ‘fairly’ distributed by proportion; the Chinese are in charge, obviously, but they are also the majority. In Lebanon the outcome of the Civil War was an arrangement that is tripartite and so not strictly proportionate but certainly moreso than it was before (and part of the instability is precisely that the Maronites have fewer children but cling onto the power they have, even still). There aren’t many historic examples of states where a large minority of the population (more than 25%, say) have been Jewish. The highest it got in prewar Eastern Europe was 6-10% really, the latter in Poland on the eve of the Second World War. There just aren’t that many Jews.