The Arab World’s New Political Orphans
You’re looking at Burj Square, Beirut, in 1954.
“I sat there alone crying,” she said.
Not her habit, my mother. It’s a mighty tear that dares show itself on the cheeks of this 94 year-old matriarch.
It was a casual morning visit, and we were chatting to the tinkle of coffee cups. I had landed in Beirut the night before after a long absence. The topic of the week was war, the scare of the day Israeli planes’ sonic booms.
“This life. Wars. All these years. Wars. Those poor hounded Palestinians. And us. This life…!” Then she changed the subject.
I’ve written about this pain before. This pain that is in constant search of words that might lull it to sleep if only for a little while. The days of respite we have that are so cruelly short. The feeling of wellbeing that relieves even as it deceives. The moments of cheer and laughter, so very precious because they are so evanescent.
Would you know it by the look of us? To be Levantine is to be exhausted. It is also to be a bit heedless, thick-skinned, resigned. And in between, every so often, teary-eyed.
This is essentially our condition here in Lebanon, as we await possibly another full-fledged war. But what we perceive and expect after October 7 is appreciably different from what we had long-lived before it. That old world is much disfigured, and the old arguments with it.
Arguments that never much varied for decades, which ironically confirmed how chronically unstable we were. You know them! The raison d’être for an armed resistance expired with the Israeli army’s withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. A militarized Hezbollah is undermining the state’s already fragile authority and mocking the army’s role and standing. The costs of war with Israel are too high and our capabilities will never be more than modest. Palestine is a noble cause but it is for the Palestinians to fight. The struggle for freedom is theirs, not ours.
Good, decent people subscribed to these rationales. There is nothing implicitly traitorous, divisive, or defeatist about being keenly aware of your feebleness and of being tired of war and its burdens. There is also every reason for citizens to debate and protest policies and decisions that materially affect their lives.
Of course, these arguments ran hard on two main assumptions. The first, and perhaps most consequential of these, was that Israel may be a reflexively aggressive actor but it’s a rational one; that its territorial ambitions in Lebanon died with its failed 18-year occupation. And anyway, Lebanon is a sovereign nation and the international community (aka the West) can be relied upon to side with it if the Jewish state suffered yet another acute case of earthly expansionism or messianic yearnings.
The second assumption was that a cohesive, well-functioning Lebanese state and a strong army capable of defending it and securing its borders were not necessarily a figment of our imagination; and even if they were, we could muster enough internal strength and external support to will them into existence.
By 2020, we Lebanese had our answer to this second assumption. Entire libraries thrive on the sheer number of books detailing the particulars of our failings. As an Arabic proverb has it: the reasons are many but the death is one. Like it or not–and every good, decent person belongs in the second category–here we all are.
After October 7, Israel’s frightening conduct between the river and the sea, the brazenness with which its demons have been let loose to rage and kill, and Western officialdom’s unabashed complicity as such behavior quickly coalesced into genocide and ethnic cleansing have put to bed the first assumption.
We always knew that Israel had a special Western pass on egregious practices not available to the rest of us. Even as, increasingly, leading human rights organizations, international courts, and legal scholars declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as apartheid, its blockade of Gaza a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and its recurrent “mowing of the lawn” campaigns there as war crimes, major Western governments, foremost among them the US, rejected the consensus itself as reprehensible.
But what we have discovered since October 7 is that, for these governments, there truly is nothing beyond the pale when it comes to Israeli conduct. Every aggression can be justified as self-defense, every atrocity as collateral damage, every massacre as Khamas’ fault for using Palestinians as human shields. Israel could murder and destroy on a genocidal scale, its prisons could be designated as “torture camps,” its officials and Knesset members could hail the rape of prisoners as moral and legal, its ministers could openly advocate the starvation of two million Palestinians without fear of the sanctions and boycotts reserved for other similarly rogue states.
It was quite the punchline that the shocked 80-year old Israeli doctor, who treated the recently gang-raped Palestinian prisoner, delivered at the end of an interview:
To see members of the Knesset saying yes, everything is allowed and legitimate for the ‘terrorists of Nukhba’…What? Did they have to shove a stick up [adolf] Eichmann’s ass? They took him to court, he was prosecuted, and then they hanged him. That is how a [normal] country operates.
But per the German foreign ministry, a genocidal Israel “does care about Gaza” and is still a liberal democracy that is committed to its humanity. The foreign ministry knows this because Israeli officials said so. Like it or not–and every good, decent person belongs in the second category–here we all are.
The Arab world has its new political orphans, then. We are adrift here in the Levant, bereft of those anchors that offer a sense of protection and a semblance of predictability. There are no ground rules, laws, and norms to reassure us, nor arbiters whom we can trust to tell right from wrong, let alone exercise oversight and control.
Inexorably, the politics will catch up with the law. That may well happen sooner than we dare hope. Already, Israel’s war has exposed very serious fissures across its own society and institutions. These are sure signs of deep national crises. Which of course, makes the Jewish state’s calculations now even more reckless and its crimes outrageous.
This is what we Lebanese see as we prepare for possibly all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel. We have yet to appreciate the implications of this new moment, but one conclusion is already very clear to an increasing number of us: until further notice, the only force that stands between us and this demented Israel is Hezbollah.
Many Lebanese continue to protest, as is their right, that had it not been for Hezbollah, Lebanon would have been secure and safe behind its borders; that, as a Lebanese movement, it has no business lending support to the Palestinians; that Hezbollah’s deterrence powers are much more limited than advertised.
Once upon a time, the onus was on Hezbollah to offer persuasive counterpoints. I have the strong sense that our world since October 7 is its own convincing answer.
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On Another Note
To Kill A Mocking Bird! One of the best books of the 20th century. One of that century’s best movies too. And how marvelous was Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch!
But was Finch the genuinely progressive man we think he was? And “Is the book an attack on or an apology for Southern racism? How does its view of race relate to the picture it paints of class and caste in 1930s Alabama?”
Revisionism is the fate of every great work and every heroic figure. David Runciman, In Past Present Future, takes a new look at this old masterpiece and its main character. And, as always, he is magnificent.
Have a listen!