The modern nation of Lebanon formally came into existence in 1943 when its previous occupiers, the French, were

themselves occupied by the Germans, and the French government in exile said, basically,

you're on the path to freedom, Lebanon, but under our stewardship.

And a government that was then elected in Lebanon almost immediately said,

yeah, no, we are running ourselves now, which in turn led to the French imprisoning that new

government, only to release them a few weeks later in the wake of a great deal of international

pressure to do so. Lebanon then became a founding member

of the United Nations in 1945, which mooted the claims the French government was still trying

to make on the area, even several years after that initial shift toward independence. The country

had a somewhat unusual power-sharing structure that allotted

influence to different religious groups based on the number of people following each religion,

with the majority of that power thus imbued in Christian and Sunni Muslim leaders in coastal cities,

Shia Muslim leaders in the south and parts of the eastern portion of the country, and smaller Christian and Druze groups in the country's

mountainous regions. When the state of Israel was established just south of Lebanon in 1948, however. There were a series of conflicts

between regional Muslim-dominated countries and Israel, which led to a surge in Palestinian refugees,

fleeing Israel into Lebanon, numbering around 100,000 people initially, but reportedly up to somewhere

between 174,000 and 450,000 as of 2017. Part of why it's so tricky to get a solid number on this

is because of how chaotic that surge in immigration was for the region, and because of how

ramshackle the refugee camps were, and in some cases remain, as Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

usually can't get citizenship or ID cards, much less own property, or even work in certain

occupations, like medicine or law,

and they haven't been allowed to return to Israel either, leaving them in kind of a limbo

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