Where To?
You’re looking at Israel’s Ariel Sharon in full and, no doubt, very complimentary gear in Lebanon, in 1982.
It was May 5, 1982, exactly one month before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Nicholas Veliotes, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and Adnan Abu Odeh, Jordan’s Minister of Information and one of King Hussein’s point men on the Palestinian-Jordanian dossier, were lunching at Dominque’s in Washington D.C. During the conversation, Veliotes offered this insight about Israeli policy towards the Palestine Liberation Organization: “Israel’s mistake is that it fails to understand that the PLO is not just infrastructure. It’s also an idea. If it strikes the infrastructure, it doesn’t mean it has killed the idea.”
It didn’t take long for the Israeli leadership, with much Palestinian and Lebanese blood on their hands, to realize that the invasion had failed. Israel did manage to devastate the infrastructure of Beirut and the PLO, ship out the organization to Tunisia, and occupy southern Lebanon. But the Palestinian cause remained very much alive and, to boot, a new idea, in the shape of Hezbollah, lit up in the east and south. In 2000, that “idea” threw the occupying Israeli army out.
In 1986, one year before the Palestinian Intifada in the West Bank and the founding of Hamas in Gaza–yet another idea that continues to confound the Jewish state–Jordan’s King Hussein gave a major televised speech. In it, he announced the failure to form a joint Palestinian-Jordanian peace delegation that could work around the Israeli and American veto against the PLO. For the US to even consider giving the movement a seat at the table, it had to abandon its armed struggle and recognize Israel’s right to exist. Of course, Israel didn’t have to recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination anywhere in their historical home. It was too high and uneven a bar to meet, even for an amenable PLO.
At the time of the King’s speech, which touched on practically every milestone in the intractable struggle over Palestine, systemic Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land and resources had long been well underway and Israeli settlers numbered around 61,000, a fraction of the 750,000 currently ensconced in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In laying out the bourgeoning Israeli conundrum in the Occupied Territories, the King fleshed out “the big question”:
How would Israel behave towards the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as it comes ever closer to annexing the entire land? Would it allow them to stay or expel them?
If it allows them to stay…would it follow the path of South Africa and treat them according to the dictums of racial discrimination?
If it expels them, how would the expulsion happen and under what pretext?
And if it gives them full Israeli citizenship, where would Zionism’s founding fathers’ dream of a pure Jewish state be?
And would the Jews of the world continue to support this state now that it has become binational?
And if [Israel] imposes racial discrimination on [the Palestinians], what would happen to Israeli democracy about which it and its allies boast?
How would Israel reconcile between its claim that it was founded to protect persecuted Jews and its own persecution of others, especially those who are the rightful and legitimate owners of the land, however hard it tries to conceal or dispute this fact.” (Translation mine)
They’re characters from another era, Veliotes and the king, but not their words. That’s the fascinating thing about Israeli-Arab-Palestinian history: even as it has, over the course of a century, morphed and contorted into ever more brutal iterations of Israel, into ever worse suffering for the Palestinians, into ever uglier realities for all of us, at the heart of this history are very stubborn quandaries that just refuse to bend or budge.
There is no graspable Levant we dare speak of today. Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are different only in the shape and size of the fragments they have become. And Israel-Palestine is clearly experiencing its own bloodstained estrangements. At least 22% of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, home to the 5.5 million Palestinians Israel doesn’t want, is in agony, its tiny Gazan west gutted and writhing from genocide, its eastern terrains from army/settler violence and ethnic cleansing. The Jewish state’s own increasingly furious incoherence signals that its heartland is similarly susceptible as well.
The implications are myriad, some rather familiar, others truly disorienting. Organized chaos, we Levantines have grown very used to, but I am not sure we have taken in the true meaning of the withering state.
“Nonstate” actors are at the helm now, thriving in the shadow of countries that were once whole and regimes that were once dominant. In its constitutional weakness Lebanon was once upon a time exceptional, today its model is the norm. The time of conventional polities with conventional armies fighting conventional wars is, therefore, gone.
In the neighborhood, obviously, I have in mind Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iraq’s Shiite militias. In their own special way, they flex serious muscle inside the state as out, and hence the quotation marks encasing nonstate above.
But I think there is every good reason for me to include Israel’s unique contribution to this constellation of forces. National religious and settler groups have found their way to the bowls of the army, the bureaucracy, and the political class even as they have challenged the reach, authority, and integrity of each. The tides strongly suggest these corrosions are well past remedying or reversing.
If not from sane Israeli voices, take it from the Israel Defense Forces’ warnings and laments. Commanders whose very mission in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been the brutal subjugation of the Palestinians, the better for Israelis to steal, annex, and settle the land, openly fear a settler extremism that is even more frightening than theirs.
The farewell speech of Major General Yehuda Fuchs, the retiring head of the army’s Central Command and, astoundingly, a victim of settler bullying himself, was quite blunt:
…in recent months, nationalist crime has reared its head under the cover of war and has led to revenge and sowed calamity and fear in Palestinian residents who do not pose any threat. To my dismay, the local leadership and the spiritual leadership for the most part did not see the threat as we did. It is intimidated and has not found the strength to come out openly and act in accordance with the values of Judaism.
But his alarm is very telling only in the pretense it exposes. As Haaretz’s Amos Harel pointed out, “It is hard to say these things – except when you remember that (then) Lt. Gen. Nitzan Alon said similar things a dozen years ago at the end of his term as commander of the Judea and Samaria Division. The situation has only gotten worse since then.”
Tick-tock went the clock decades ago and here we all are.
So, where to?
In the questions he asked, King Hussein–judged by his critics and admirers alike as a man in perennial search of genuine accommodation with Israel until he clinched it in the 1994 Wadi ‘Araba Peace Treaty–laid out rather accurately the Jewish state’s dire plight. Whether Israelis choose to acknowledge it or not, it is sheer folly to think that they can make life hell for millions of Palestinians equal to them in number on a wee patch of this earth without being consumed by it themselves.
And it is understandable that we Lebanese, for example, should insist on a cohesive and functional state, and pine for a unified army that singularly holds military sway. But in full view of Lebanon’s systemic collapse, the immutably low quality of our ruling elites, and external moods, near and far, it is more sensible to keep pace with trends infinitely more powerful than our will to alter them.
The Syrians and Iraqis are certainly not sighing with relief about their better fortunes. We Levantines are in this together, even though our journeys to this moment have not been the same.
It is incumbent on those of us keen on a semblance of a normal life to focus our attention on fleshing out this new age and proposing the most constructive and creative options within it rather than latching on to a world best mourned as dead.
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On Another Note
Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant are finally married. Do we care?
Yes we do, because the wedding of the son of the wealthiest man in India ($200 billion in worth) to a daughter of a multimillionaire was more than a display of hideously vulgar wealth. It was a commentary on India’s moment as well. Fatima Bhutto in Zeteo is full of eloquence on the meaning behind the event:
This most recent Ambani wedding is not just significant in its extreme vulgarity; in their unrestrained flash, the Ambanis are the human embodiment of India’s dark confluence of money and right-wing Hindu extremism that has grown under Modi’s rule. Ahead of his nuptials, Anant was blessed by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS), a quasi-fascist paramilitary organization that is the ideological heart of Hindutva, right-wing Hindu supremacy. Ambani senior is known to be a close associate of Modi – the prime minister is himself a lifelong RSS member – and the family was front and center at Modi’s inauguration of the Ram Temple earlier this year, a Hindu temple built on the grounds of a 16th-century mosque torn to the ground brick by brick by Indians in an orgy of violence in 1992. Modi was a star guest at the recent wedding festivities.
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