Let’s make this a new chapter and move on as we go backward.
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Beirut on a Sunday in June. A brisk, early swim—alone. None of the usual souls is at the pool four days after the assassination of Walid Eido, one of Sa’ad Harriri’s mps. I remember that line in The Year of Living Dangerously: “And so it begins.” Of course, it was a love affair these words were ushering in. No tentative whispers or fluttering butterflies here, just the footsteps of ominous beginnings.
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Sure, the omens had long lit the way to this moment—if you care to look back, they dress every paragraph of Pieces of me In This--but now you can actually see societies, a battered culture, self-respect, delusions, about to shatter all over the floor. We used to live our outbursts, more or less, one at time, but catastrophe does not care for timid displays of its gifts anymore; it wants to parade them in full regalia.
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Slow-motion collapse is eerie. The banal and the calamitous share the day’s space, blithely chatting away the ticking seconds, as people swing between routine and disaster. Soon, perhaps, soon the action may overrun us Lebanese in fast-forward—like Gaza this very minute, like Iraq three years ago.
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Look around you! These are not landscapes of political devastation you glimpse—devastation is for the birds, for the editorial pages; it has been sitting amongst us like a nonagenarian grandfather muttering every once in a while incomprehensibly. What those eyes of yours behold is a panorama of Arab shame on which is etched every imaginable visage of indecency.
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I am already well into a Tuesday. It is not the seventy-eight killed in a suicide bombing in a Shiite mosque in Baghdad that bespeak of an Iraqi nation in utter despair, it is those orphaned children with severe disabilities naked on the floor and chained to their beds (Al Hayyat, June 20, 2007). We can, with some persuasiveness, blame Iraqi fratricide on too many years of Saddam, or on foreign cabals in cahoots with local partners, but in front of the door of what Zionist or American conspiracy do we Arabs dump this humanitarian tragedy? Under what excuse do we shove such cruel behavior towards the weakest, the most helpless, the real innocents in this Iraqi family? What good is a country’s glorious past if its present finds it in such ignominy? Of what use are memories of greatness when, in the here and now, our conduct is so disgraceful? It is understandable that the Iraqi state is overwhelmed, that the Iraqi people are shellshocked, but is it fathomable that we collectively should succumb to such moral depravity? You’re not going to throw at me that Rumsfeldain gem, are you? “Stuff happens.” You’re not going to mention the street children of Brazil, or the child soldiers of Congo? That only adds to their dishonor but it takes nothing away from ours.
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And it is not the gunfire between Hamas and Fatah in the streets of Gaza that exposes a Palestinian leadership oscillating between madness and idiocy, between perfidy and contemptibility; it is the sight of a pair of glazed eyes staring out of the face of a Palestinian child as he waits for his family’s turn to march away from Gaza into yet another exile—that eternal Palestinian exile.
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Not so long ago, instability in our region was boring; unimaginative in its violence, predictable even in its surprises. But there is something of the capricious and unknowable in this bedlam. Not only the lame amongst us are feeling the punishing rewards of their stupidity, the smart ones who have long trifled with them are also facing the unintended afterclaps of their own cleverness. While the Palestinians agonize from the near-fatal wounds inflicted by their pathetic imitation of a resistance, Israel squirms from the terrifying corrosiveness of a colonial mentality that mocks its democratic Jewishness as it eats its way through the last of the two-state solution. While Hamas brings into full circle the incompetence, the fecklessness, the boundless cynicism, that started with Yasser Arafat, Israel ponders four million traumatized Palestinians whose multiplying numbers are the true and only measure of their hope for meaningful recognition.
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How anachronistic is it for the Derchewitzes and Finklesteins to debate the right and wrong of Zionism, when on the ground are gathered millions of Palestinians irritating every Israeli fait accompli and breathing life into that most mortifying of possibilities: an Israeli-Palestinian bi-national state! How mystified Israel must be that the murder of one half-good idea—two people, two states--can so furtively bring birth to the ruinous notion of one post-Zionist state for all. Impossible? Sure. Now.
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But what do you do with an occupied people who refuse to die or go away, crouching, furious and spent with barely anything to lose, at your doorstep? How many times do you pummel them, how many monsters do you breed in their midst, how many of their “moderate” leaders do you turn into straw men, how many of their God-obsessed fighters do you first feed and caress and then demonize, how many check points do you erect to humiliate them, how much of their land do you grab, how many of their resources do you confiscate, how many settlements do you implant on their expanse, how many settlers do you spread between them, how tall, how permanent, of a wall do you build to isolate them, before you realize that inhumanity kills both ways?
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If all this pain is administered for survival, for security, for protection against a treacherous subhuman lot, why do I find you, Israel, in the throes of an existential crisis? Why the befuddlement and the nervous sweat? Why the harsh censure from Avraham Burg, the one-time head of your Knesset and Youssuf Burg’s son? Why such disillusionment in Moshe Arens’ son? Why the fury of Ehud Olmert’s daughter? Why the anti-wall protests by Menachem Begin’s grandson? You say this is proof that you are Democracy itself. They are saying, This is precisely because you are not.
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Be patient! My thoughts are still in mid-stream.
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