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Absolutely, Nassrallah captivates! He certainly captivates me because, through his galumph from unique to typical, through his role in this latest contrived battle for Lebanon’s soul, I can say much of what needs to be said about our regrettable circumstance.
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Not so fast with the winks or the accusations! Don’t start running wild with joy or brooding in disappointment. The story is a little more intricate than that. No, not intricate like our Lebanese politics; intricate the way our Arab humanity, on a rare day, appreciates life’s complexities.
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On these pages of mine the thoughts and convictions that feed my very sour mood about Nassrallah and his Party of God are just as hostile towards the other side. And just like my disagreements with the so-called coalition of March 14 are about essentials, my differences with Hezbollah and its prodigal son are about fundamentals. They do not shrink after a master stroke on the military battlefield and balloon after a political misdeed. They are constant because, from the start, we were worlds apart.
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Beyond a singular meeting of minds over Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation of the South before 2000, who they are and what they are about and who I am and what I want have always made the gulf between us vast and unbridgeable--vast because it is that void that forever separates Islamism from secularism; unbridgeable because there was a time, not so long ago, when Shiism pursued deliverance from marginalization through choices that were passionately nonsectarian and Hezbollah, for me, is a heartbreaking reminder of the collapse of that ambition. Vast because I have an addiction for thinking my way through anything, and their heaven-sanctioned instructions cover everything from ballot box habits to bathroom rituals. Unbridgeable because, for me, Iranian-Syrian patronage is the stuff of nightmares, but for them it is an ideal state of affairs. Vast because we both feel such outrage against Israeli savagery, but I alone feel it against Syrian brutality. Unbridgeable because they keep hollering at us that the sublime is only in them, that rectitude loves only them, and I keep whispering to myself the words of that dear poet Samih al Qassem, “Beware the rights of rhetoric dancing on blood.” Vast—and here I go walking again on the edge overlooking that damned valley of heresy—because they and Israel are ever so thankful for each other’s existence and both are ever so distressed by mine.
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There! This is the flesh and skin of the antagonisms between me and Hezbollah. On their surface are scattered the very reasons that make this Levantine creature so feeble. Understand, would you, there are no good and bad guys fighting it out in Lebanon, and although there are currently two warring narratives of its future, both are so utterly devoid of anything remotely decent, so disrespectful towards this country’s desperate need to overcome its crippling deficiencies, that my refusal to subscribe to either is at peace with itself, undisturbed by doubts. I wonder though how many have made this escape along with me? For, sadly, in the midst of the emotions violently thrashing about in a horrendous blizzard of recriminations and counter-allegations, our politics has hurled us yet again into the tightest of spots—two, actually; the ones that go by the names of either and or.
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The other day, I read these strangely comforting words by Annia Ciezadlo, the Christian Science Monitor’s woman in our neighborhood: “…Once again, Lebanon is facing the oldest, saddest choice in the modern Arab world: between undemocratic religious militants and a greedy, corrupt elite whose biggest selling point is its dubious ability to keep the militants at bay.” (Sect Symbols, The Nation, March 5, 2007). Ciezadlo, bless her heart, gets it. Hezbollah and March 14 may be in an existential tussle, but it is not about what shape a new, lovely Lebanon will take, it is about who gets to control the old, broken one. And barely under the surface of the sanctimonious vitriol and devil-may-care brinksmanship that have been consuming the country lurk the very ugly propositions of this nasty group and that miserable lot, each horsewhipping us into joining it in the trenches.
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This fight may well be about issues of extreme import. It may be about the sword that the international tribunal for Hariri’s assassination is sure to swing over guilty Syria’s head. It may be about Hezbollah’s fury that the summer’s win against Israel unexpectedly contained within it the seeds of their political acquiescence, that the military confrontation had actually accelerated rather than retarded the momentum against their weapons. It may be about Persia’s insistence on finding its place in the sun and the US’s and Israel’s refusal to cede it. It may be about Sunni-Shiite tensions fueled by the demise of the Sunni regime in Baghdad. But these are just the mechanics that are driving this conflict. What has set them in motion is what has always made Lebanon so hooked on self-mutilation: this nation’s incapability of taking itself seriously.
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As usual, in this mess of a situation the silliest slogans are mixing it up with the highest stakes. Like a battered wife, real economic grievances, genuine political aspirations, time and again, have been beaten to a pulp and stripped from any meaning by political bosses who still thrive on the adulation of their supporters and the complicity or silence of the others. Without even the trace of a smirk, March 14 have whipped their people into a frenzy about the pitch blackness of Iranian-Syrian tyranny conniving against the rainbow colors of Lebanon’s recovering democracy. And with a face as grim as their own scary tale, Hezbollah have roused their masses against an American-Israeli puppet government hell bent on fighting the axis of Truth, Justice, the Arab Nation and the Muslim Umma.
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All this is such farcical theater--the actors so bombastic, their lines so over-the-top—you’d think folks are lining up for a bit of fun, but the queues are for much more than that: sides are being taken. Even the thinking ones are having to choose their teams as Lebanon revs up for another possibly bloody joust. Alas, the song of discord, and perhaps that of full-fledged mayhem, can be heard again and our leaders, marionettes that they are, have synchronized their death dance to the beat of foreign drummers.
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But you’ve heard all this before. In fact, there would have been nothing unfamiliar about this game had it not been for the entry of its newest player: Hezbollah. The forces of March 14, along with old hands like Michel Aoun, Nabih Berri, Suleiman Frangieh..., have long been known to Lebanese, but the Man and men of Hezbollah, until two years ago, revealed themselves to us only at dusk, when the horizon is picture perfect and the day, tired and half-sleepy, begins to unwind. Much like those soldiers of old returning from their wars, to most of us, they appeared beautiful, glimmering with the battlefield’s dirt and dust. Political bickering was for the local and the small; Hezbollah’s was an identity and a stature deserving of larger regional, even international, tumult. They were here and very present, but as they went about studiously setting up shop, from schools to hospitals to databanks to underground tunnels, they only made quick visits to the back alleys of Lebanese politics where the others had long ago established permanent residence.
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But that was then. And now?
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A mere glance at the Lebanon of the past two years would reveal a political landscape that hovers between a paradox and an irony. In the most fundamental of ways it has been radically transformed and yet remains remarkably recognizable because the more this place changes, the more it stays the same. True, today, Lebanon is very far from where it was before 2005. Syria, once our one and only queen, has been knocked off her throne, and Hezbollah, for long an honored resistance movement that nitpicked its way through its obligations and our favors, is, at this very moment, smack in the middle of the political turmoil. True, its seems like the entire script has been rewritten since Hariri was expedited to his grave: politicians have changed roles, electoral alliances that made strange bedfellows of Hezbollah and Samir Geagea have come and gone, Aoun returned a March 14 star and ended up as Suleiman Frangieh’s ally and Hezbollah’s man of the hour…
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But these are the time-honored shenanigans which make our politics so authentically Lebanese and so blatantly unprincipled. There is hardly anything untried we can marvel at in these stale schemes and dizzying tactics. It is Hezbollah’s entry into the boxing ring that has made this match so different and the serious bruising that the party and its man have taken so fascinating to watch. Because once circumstances changed after Hariri’s assassination, our fickle reality, not to mention Syria and Iran, demanded a different kind of performance from Hezbollah. And when it came—predictably self-righteous and imperious, but surprisingly clumsy and capricious—the enigma that made Nassrallah and Hezbollah storybook fabulous began to crack. And now that the mystique is gone it turns out that Hezbollah, full of guile against Israel, is petty, shrill and bizarrely lumbering against the many Lebanese who no longer sympathize with it or its cause.
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See! Ti ti, ti ti, mitil ma rihti mitil ma jiti (as you went you came). Our sadistic democracy has imposed parity again. There are no more giants in our midst; all our politicians, thankfully, now come in miniature sizes.
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You want specifics? There are plenty, and not all of them in the usual places that people like to look. If you prefer to stick to the mainstream, you could think back to that March 8th day two years ago, when, for no good reason at all, Nassrallah, probably elated by the throngs, scoffed at the size of the competition and its orange foulards, and received the first counterpunch by the astonishing turnout on March 14 that sent his chubby cheeks into deep red. Or you could dwell on that picture that showed him offering Rustum Ghazzaleh, Syria’s do-it man in Lebanon, a gold-plated Kalashnikov as a fare-thee-well present—a sight, I have to admit, that still unsettles my stomach. You could even ponder that evening a few months ago, when, shocked by the Sunni backlash to his onslaught on Prime Minister Saniora and rattled by the street chaos unleashed by his own burning tires and road-blocs, Nassrallah had to issue a political fatwa, of all things, against fitna (strife). Or you could mull over Hezbollah’s resignations from Saniora’s government. Unnerved by a majority they helped create through parliamentary elections which they endorsed and actively participated in, Hezbollah do not only walk out of the cabinet—which is their right—but decide they do not like this game after all and did not want to play with the rest of us anymore. Not for parliament this quarrel of theirs, for the streets, we were told; this rule as well, they insisted, owes them its exceptions.
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However, if you’d rather pick your anecdotes from way off the beaten track, there is that time last summer, immediately after the Hezbollah’s triumph, when a woman begged for Nassrallah’s overcoat so that she can rub herself against it, and the party, t.v. cameras in tow, delivers it, leaving us to enjoy the show. A silly episode this, but—kid yourself not--so, so, so, very telling.
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The Man Who Thought He knew It All and Fell from the Sky Straight to His Bunker. If I were ever to write about the odyssey of Nassrallah between March 8, 2005, and this Thursday in 2007, I would decorate its cover with this title--not a very elegant one, I have to say, but it is a rather tight sum-up to an act that has been no less lacking in grace.
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If you are one of those who think Nassrallah still stands tall, listen to that pipsqueak Ahmad Fatfat, one of March 14's attack dogs, the next time he tares at Nassrallah in one of his press conferences. You can almost hear wings being clipped. And no basmalah!
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If for no other reason than this I look back at the past two years with the most rueful of thoughts, not because there was never any hope of extracting from an unexpected and fleeting moment a Lebanon that is tangibly better and different, but because there was.
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That famous March 14 day that asked Bashar Assad and Hassan Nassrallah to zoom out and take in the million and some faces would have been no more than a gathering of the paid and the umbilically attached had it not been for the likes of me—the stubbornly unaffiliated who went to Martyr Square to give that moment a chance.
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I did it because a series of Syrian blunders had opened the door for this smothered, decaying nation, and I wanted to help her exit. I did it because I was apoplectic that decency could be trampled upon so often, for so long and with such nonchalance. I did it because I wanted our chiefs to register that the fury is more mine than theirs and the will to change is not for them alone to orchestrate. I did it because, on practically every issue, Hariri and I were diametrically opposed and I wanted my enraged reaction to his horrific death to be a clear message to his assassins.
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Of course I knew that many among the old cast of characters were maestros in the art of debased give-and-take, their record glaringly bad, their political acrobatics hilarious to the ear and eye, their purpose, beyond the ouster of Syria, around which most of the sane could (and did) rally, painfully parochial. And it was lamentably manifest to me that our pervasive sectarianism had rendered our civic society dirt poor and barren, incapable of bringing to life, let alone nurturing, enlightened notions. So it was not naiveté that propelled me. It was actually the opposite: for once I did not want the jaded spectator in me to lecture on the events from the sidelines. On this possible turning point, I simply could not turn my back. That a mortal squabble between Syrian patrons and Lebanese cronies might just morph into something vaguely more elevated was a prospect titillating enough to stir me. That civil action could mobilize new names and make some space for a progressive secularism in this sea of multi-sectarian disaffection became, for me, a possibility well worth entertaining. But, as they say, il ain bassira wil yad aassira (the eye sees but the arm cannot reach). The usual screaming matches drowned out the whispers of fresh voices, blood, yet again, became the currency of payback, and those, like Samir Kassir, who imbued our quest with some eloquence, are lying now six feet under.
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They failed! I failed! And here I am exactly were Ciezadlo has found me: an old arena, two packs of players, and a sucker of an audience who--which ever side wins--is sure to be the biggest loser.
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Time for confessions! I have been struggling, truly struggling, with this last post for almost three weeks now. I suppose delicate themes call for delicate renditions, but our volatile times would not settle for anything dispassionate.
