Thinking Fits

What Exactly is Going on in Syria?

2012-02-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

The Missing Narrative

It was bound to happen. A standoff over Syria! One big prize, two clashing camps, two contrived narratives and a singularly cynical game that has shoved out of the arena anyone and anything remotely moral or principled or ethical or halfway decent about Syria.

Bashar, as they like to say in gringo land, is one lucky S.O.B. Syria simmered while the rest of us got to watch the Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan, Bahraini and Yemeni scenarios—and each is indeed a scenario unto itself—unfold, leaving along the way a trail of instructive lessons, and not only for the Chinese and Russians.

No one, least of all us Arabs, plunged into this uproarious year expecting only the best of intentions or outcomes. Opportunities here, even a sentiment as ridiculously novel as hope, come with warning signs stamped all over them. Only this raw fact could be relied upon as a constant from the moment the people began to openly demand something different, better.

The push for change in this region was always going to be messy, complicated and morally taxing, forcing good souls into terrible choices. Do you remember that scene in Sophie’s Choice, when the Nazi officer at the train station, with the trains waiting to depart for his killing fields, asks Meryl Streep to pick between her son and daughter? “Take the girl! Take the girl!” she finally cries out, when the officer was about to take both.

Only the matter of an unbearably hard existence that finally prompted rage to dare rise against variously vicious Arab systems can be romanticized in the current mayhem. The rest of the story is all about the unavoidably distasteful and hardnosed haggling between the shapers of our future destiny. What the uprisings have so far achieved for the people is a possible seat at the table. And that for some of our patrons is already offensive enough.

Long before the blatantly opportunistic Syrian Muslim Brothers or comically inept Syrian National Council (SNC) or the “fictional” Free Syrian Army (FSA) pretended to believe in the righteousness of Western intervention, the genuinely Syrian and unarmed uprising was racing towards that most God awful question: What will we do, who could we turn to when the going gets really tough with a monstrously tough regime?

And imagine, just imagine, a possibly “revolutionary” mood in the Arab world, with regional and international forces happy to cheer on or tusk-tusk from the sidelines. Imagine something even more extraordinary: Qatar and Saudi Arabia wanting and seeking change in Syria because they’re just appalled by Assad’s brutality and are so very keen on a “democratic” Syria. But imagine something even more extraordinary still: that the people’s battle could actually be won without foreign powers squeezing and isolating, through sanctions and other such non-military means, Assad Inc.

I am not asking you to suspend your disbelief just to score a rhetorical point. I am calling on those making the arguments for each side to actually make them. Because those who warn against foreign intervention, as a matter of principle, and those demanding it, as a matter of life and death, have conveniently elected to sidestep the context that makes the Syrian case the ugly dilemma that it is.

The very sad truth for the Syrians--for all of us Arabs--is that there is no easy or honorable answer. That’s why practically every single article is so rich with why or why not and conspicuously poor on the practical options left to a people approaching midnight.

The sorriest irony about Syria is that the chatter is all about foreign intervention, or what is referred to as the next best thing—arming the opposition--when, from the outset, neither was ever an option for the powers that be. Because Syria is not Libya, as numerous experts continue to point out, foreign military intervention is just not feasible, while militarizing the rebellion would be tantamount to lighting up Syria, the one scenario everybody wants to avoid at all costs. If Bashar understood one thing, he understood this, and then cleverly proceeded to turn the uprising into a military conflict, inflaming sectarian divisions, egging on vengeance, radicalizing Islamist insurgents, mining minorities’ fears, and pushing regional and international forces to confront the one eventuality they were least keen on for the country.

Astonishingly, the so-called anti-imperialist camp is obsessing about foreign military intervention as if that is the only door open to foreign meddlers. The fact is the West already has quit a bit of what it wants, as I wrote back in May. For them, a weak Bashar is almost as good as a gone Bashar, because the Assads’ regional weight was always an extension of their internal strength. Undercut the latter and you will have contained the former. And that is where Bashar is today: isolated, embattled, trapped and economically enfeebled, with time and energy only for saving his and his family’s neck.

True, the Qataris and Saudis gradually became keen on regaining Syria for the Sunnis, but that, for the West, is hardly a prerequisite to stealing Iran’s (and Hezbollah’s) thunder.

As for Russia, the US, Qatar, the Arab League, the UN and that great piece of theater, regrettably, of all the impertinences we’ve been hearing about, the only one that counts is that of the West insisting that Russia cede its cards in Syria as well, because, you see, it’s all a matter of principle.

Standoff!

Syrians are dying and will continue to die in greater numbers as Assad stacks up for himself enough chips for that ultimate bargain. And bargain he will. Russia came in to help him do precisely that. Of course, it is all high stakes and very risky, but then that’s what Syria has always been about.

Meanwhile, bizarrely, seasoned observers continue to busy themselves in heated discussions about the pros and cons of foreign intervention, when Syria, whatever it was, is already lost. Soon, brace yourself for the horse-trading, out of which we will begin to see the shape of the new Syria—hopefully still intact.

One Arab's Post-it on the Arab Revolt

2012-02-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

Caution: this is not an update.

It’s come to this for the Arab revolt. To be gawked at, poked, bullied, pushed this way and that, pitied by some, feared by many and truly befriended only by die-hards.

It’s not just strangers who gape in wonderment. The locals as well are at once riveted and unnerved by the beast. It’s been, what? 12 months--an ant’s scream out there in the wilderness, but never mind that--a roaring millennium in web years and this creature still won’t reveal its actual colors.

And so, the guessing game must proceed, because, well…because it simply must proceed. I am not being ironic here. People, decent people, make a serious living off of it. For all I know, the whole world ticks because of it. And, as is our wont, the more uncertain the moment, the more incessant our need to pound it to death and render it benign and reassuringly familiar.

I suppose, if only for effort, the professionals—journalists, hacks, pundits, anthropologists…--should be thanked. Except that they’re flailing as they hold all ten fingers to the wind, and left with very little to fall back on, they’ve begun to hang on, for dear life, to the same themes.

For a while now, I’ve been feeling like a beggar in these revolts. I go from site to site, rag to rag, pundit to pundit, mind in hand, looking for the rare informed opinion in the piles of junk. There is something distinctly unusual about this upheaval (as Egypt’s SCAF keep discovering after every bold decision turned gaffe), and yet, remarkably, most of the literature divides between déjà vu (been there, done that) and something wicked this way comes.

Often, friends call me as they sit stunned, not from living the revolts but from reading about them. While the Aluf Benn’s of this world can’t quite keep a lid on their overzealous imagination and predict--for sure--a total breakup of the postcolonial Middle East (except for Israel, of course), the Robert Kaplan’s see little more than a “crisis of centralized authority.” Sort of like, “Oh, Jesus, shit, you’re dying;” vs. “Take these! And get a grip on yourself, will you, woman!” after which comes the knowing look back and,” I’ll call ya in the morning,” before the door slams shot.

But these are the ones singing at the door of the echo chamber. The hum inside is all about Islamist upsurge and the equally revelatory it’s one thing to remove a dictator, it’s another to change a regime, which swells into a rapturous crescendo with, we really don’t know what will happen, but, since this is the Arab world, this may well turn out to be a tempest in a Turkish coffee cup. Which actually works out just fine, because the Turkish Model is the best of the available wannabes and the Arab Muslim Brothers are happy to do business even if they look so damn hairy. Win, win, when you think about it—for the West, at least.

Then, inevitably, comes the mind-numbing repeat of the same question: Will they or will they not play nice? After which come the tricky answers to it: yes, no, yes and no, with the same, exact reasons reappearing in different paragraphs in different articles.

Just like that, a year of revolts and we already have a body of consensus, which, soon enough, will solidify into groupthink and then finally cement as conventional wisdom.

Too bad, because—I don’t know? I could be wrong—it seems like the surface has barely been scratched and already vital questions are being left by the wayside for societies in genuine flux. For example, silly as it may sound, what exactly does an Islamist upsurge mean? Would, say, less than 40% of eligible voters qualify as an upsurge, or might it suggest an intriguing twist in the electoral system that lands you with a much bigger slice of parliament than of life? I wonder if it would not make sense to look into who voted for whom and why? (Here are a few hints from Gallup). And where, dare we ask, might these interesting factoids fit in this stimulating discourse?

In the Middle East and North Africa, SMEs [small and medium sized companies] comprise the most substantive part of the economy: there are 12 million SMEs, which make up 95 percent of the private sector… In Egypt, these enterprises account for about 75 percent of total employment and 80 percent of the gross domestic product.

Nothing major, a few questions for more nuance and added insight, so that when the brave types leap into judgments and fall flat on their faces they have something soft to cushion the crash.

Truth be told, there are the rare wise voices reduced, alas, in this din of mad harmony, to whispers. I do need to name names, just because I am so grateful: Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group, Nicholas Pelham of MERIP and the New York Review of Books, Mona el-Ghobashi of Barnard, Khalil Anani of Durham University, along with a few merciful others. (By all means, feel free to click on the links).

Then there is the tempo of these dizzying times which we Arabs get from those, like us, who are living them day in, day out. Raw footage, I call it; or, to borrow from the Economist’s review of Ahdaf Soeif’s new book, Cairo: My City, My Revolution, those “well-observed details [that] have an unmistakable ring of truth…revisionist historians ignore…at their peril.”

But, really, when it comes down to it, what makes these revolts especially intriguing for us Arabs is the utter disarray into which our own clairvoyants have fallen. Once upon a time, we were not meant to tell the difference between conspiracy and conviction, between high principle and base interest, between rhetoric and action. Now, once immovable ideologues are jumping all over the place, ostensible democrats are offended, Islamists are having to discover the meaning of victory (although the West seems to have figured it all out) and brothers in arms are parting company.

The rules are a changing and, for a people who have been stuck for so long in the trenches, that alone is liberating enough.

Rest in Peace, Nassib Lahoud!

2012-02-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, over dinner with a couple of this town’s star journalists, a friend asked me, ”Who is the one Lebanese politician you would miss when gone?” I didn’t skip a beat: “Nassib Lahoud.”

My friend’s devastating comeback was equally swift. “But poor Nassib is already dead.”

That has always been the tragedy of Lebanon. Decency here is a certain kind of death. And much of what made Nassib Lahoud so magnificent in life and yet so unpromising in politics was his decency. Remarkably, it was only one of his many handicaps as a politician. His incorruptibility, his non-sectarianism, his visceral distaste for violence, his peculiar deference to principle made him universally admired but rendered him fundamentally peripheral when it came to the hard politics of this hard place.

I often yearned for Nassib to be more passionate, feistier, wilier, louder. But I was wrong. His was the quiet method, and he loved Lebanon enough not to succumb to her ugly ways.

Of this country’s countless failings, perhaps the most ruinous is her cruel indifference towards her children. And how cruel she has always been to the likes of Nassib, and how kind and generous he was in return.

I knew Nassib and loved him. I know Lebanon, and I am so desperate to love her.

I mourn him today. But I mourn Lebanon even more for her loss.

Between Slaughter and Elections

2011-12-12T07:24:00.000-08:00

A harrowing picture to add to the most memorable about 2011: a lone girl standing over a pile of death, some faces barely in their teens; some still in babyhood. The contortions of anguish, you think, as she registers the horrific sight that engulfs her. A family gone, perhaps; a life, hers, theirs, ended by unfathomable, unfathomable, you keep repeating to yourself, cruelty and madness.

You stare and then you click, desperate to leave her, because the moment is you at your most ridiculous.

Not that the murderers in Afghanistan who harvested 63 Shiite souls last Tuesday had it in mind, but the picture of a people dying there while another in Egypt were rambunctiously voting is sort of apt: a juxtaposition of yearnings, one for a nightmarish kind of silence, the other for a less painful existence; two orgies, of death and of life; a clean break between future and past…you pray.

I wonder if I am reading too much into these two events, drawing a line between them that’s not there, or even scrubbing out of them the messy realities that bind trauma to joy in this embattled region.

In any case, it is early days yet. “Spring” is barely behind us, and already elections are being oversold as good behavior certificates. That’s the thing about elections: they’re so damned convenient. They could be the most visible manifestation of a people’s will or the easiest forgeries of it; they’re the quickest fix for revolution, or war, or peace…when it starts itching for tangible yields.

And the yield in Egypt, as disheartening as it seems to many, is nothing short of enlightening. You’re too quick to the trigger if you think I am about to marvel at the Islamists’ win. As surprising as it is to those who must have been living on Mars for the past few decades, it is in fact the least interesting revelation about Egypt’s mood and our reactions to it.

By way of the obligatory preface, let me stress that the motive here is not to debunk the ballot’s judgment in this first round, however imperfect the performance has been: the disorganization, the tricks, the miles-long lines, the money flooding in from some friendly folks in the area looking to elbow their way of life in... It is almost impossible to measure this imperfection’s impact on the final tally, although there is much benefit to the public good in harping loudly and frequently about the point.

And, yes, much can be (and has already been) said against a bizarre electoral process that defies—because, of course, it means to—all sense. In this, the Egyptians are not alone, although they do stand at the extreme end of electoral systems that insist on convoluted interpretations of the people’s intent.

But such are the current rules of this Egyptian game, such are its weaknesses and such is the upshot: the Islamists, combined, are almost sure to enjoy more than 60 percent of the vote and constitute the majority in parliament.

This is not, however, where I really want to go. The elections in Egypt are only a small part of a much bigger, still blank canvas of change. What they draw for us are just a few pieces of the final picture. It’s the trends that dance around them that are worth a lingering thought.

And one very clear thought for the jubilant and the defeated is that victory should never beget silence—not when the soul of a nation is being negotiated between its people. There is nothing run-of-the-mill about these times and nothing ordinary about the winds that have converged to rid us of a certain way of politics and life. Even when we ought to nod to the ballot’s verdict, there is no tyranny that should attach itself to the fundamentals that will govern the space to which we all need to belong. Otherwise, elections become little more than shortcuts to dictatorship, the most dangerous chinks in the democratic edifice they are meant to protect.

In my last post about Arab Women and Revolution, a few of Islamism’s fans insisted that this is the time to let the winning side show its stuff in quietude. But consensus is never born in silence, it emerges only when the discussion remains vibrant. Track records, ideology, convictions, hope, indeed skepticism, have a role to play in plotting the future’s trajectory, because the future is for everybody, winners and losers alike. Otherwise, let your eyes never leave that lone woman.

Here’s another thought, for what it’s worth: In this first round, voter turnout stood at 52 percent, of which the Muslim Brothers’ party list won around 37 percent, the Salafists' 24 percent. Almost half of eligible voters in these districts did not vote. That leaves the MB and the Salafists with 31 percent (19 and 12 percent, respectively) of the entire spectrum of voters—respectable by any standard but nowhere near enough to put a halt to the country’s momentous discourse.

What Now for the Women of Egypt?

2011-12-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

We are barely through the first stage of Egypt’s parliamentary elections and the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, having clinched well over 50 percent of the vote, are already rhapsodizing about the beauty of democracy which was to the Salafists—until, when was it, yesterday?--a Western concoction alien to the spirit and letter of Islam.

Many are already in a panic. And with good reason. Widen the lens to the larger Middle East and you will very quickly discover that, left to its own devices, Islamism is never in the mood to engage. Witness Iran since 1979, Sudan since 1989, Gaza since 2006… With a majority in parliament, Egyptian Islamists could easily decide there is nothing really to discuss. But what makes these examples uniquely revelatory is the one feature they all share: domination of the state and its tools of coercion by the ruling party.

Egyptians fretting about their liberties should keep this foremost in their calculus. That, so far, the Muslim Brotherhood is having to argue its case all the way to the altar does suggest that Bayat’s post-Islamist realities have already started creeping into Egypt, but what it also reflects is the MB’s keen awareness of the imperatives of accommodation in a country in which it has considerable reach and influence but one which it does not control--yet. If only for this, Egypt’s future promises to be different from Iran’s or any of these other Islamist polities.

Juxtapose revolutionary Egypt and Iran if you like. You don’t have to peer too closely before the disparities begin to impose themselves. Note how the left quickly sublimated its beliefs to Khomeini’s, and watch the reticence of Egypt’s leftists and liberals, however disorganized they currently are. Register how Iran’s army was swiftly kicked out of the political arena in ‘79, and how Egypt’s very likely will retain much of its heft in Egyptian politics. Mark the fact that Iran’s youth gave all, in awe to the presence and charisma of the septuagenarian Khomeini, and how Egypt’s are just not buying in a marketplace conspicuously empty of such overpowering men.

But, most of all, remember that Egypt’s victorious Islamists will soon populate a government that has already incorporated quite a bit of what they preach, whereas Khomeini had to start practically from scratch. That’s the road Mubarak paved so nicely for his Brothers, and if things turn out badly, that may well turn out to be his most enduring legacy.

But if religious conservatism brings Iran and Egypt together in many social mores and legal codes, so do the years that have tested the solutions of political Islam itself. On that fundamental matter of piety alone, the sure rewards in Iran have been as mocked by burgeoning prostitution and rampant drug abuse as they have been by widespread sexual harassment in Egypt, where close to 80% of adult females are veiled.

The electoral results appear to argue against such talk; after all, how much skepticism can there be in a landslide? And yet, it would be pure folly to assume that the numbers confirm an outright, wholesale embrace of fundamentalist convictions. There is much to disentangle in this unfolding Egyptian story, and we are still on the very first page. What’s more, we all know that only a few of its authors are Egyptian and only some of the events likely to impact it will be homegrown.

As Pankaj Mishra points out in a recent piece, the electoral rise of political Islam may owe much to the Arab people’s deep comfort with Islamic principles as ultimate guidelines in politics as in life. But it doubtless owes just as much to a relentless, decades long hammering of civil society by oppressive regimes that cynically shored up Islamism at the expense of all other trends.

In any case, we soon will find out, as Mishra puts it, “…whether and how the new Islam-minded rulers of the Arab world will enshrine [diversity and pluralism] in legal and political institutions as opposed to declaring that the Shariah contains all that you need.”

Needless to say, the quintessential test will be how these rulers proceed on the question of us women.

****

The moment, as unnerving as it is, calls for extreme vigilance and grit, not panic and fear.

The Egyptian revolution has forced the political playing field wide open. It is crucial that it remain so. Just as this new climate has already challenged the SCAF, it shall the MB and Salafists. How these three antagonists-cum-allies interact in this crucial stage is, of course, of serious consequence for the future of a democratic Egypt, but without control over the state’s tools of coercion and violence, the Islamists can neither unilaterally impose their will nor circumvent the judgment of future ballots.

Alas, for Egypt’s women, the path forward will be full of pitfalls and setbacks and insults and assaults and groping... The violence that women have been subjected to in Tahrir Square before anywhere else stands as a sad marker of the misogyny that unites many an oppressor and revolutionary. But Egyptian women need only recall Iran’s in reassuring themselves that tenacity and ingenuity can beat even the worst of odds.

"NOT NOW!" On Arab Women and Revolution. Part 2

2011-11-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Quest for Identity

Egypt and Iran

Touch us women, in much of the Middle East, and you touch the essence of life. This is how entangled our story has become with that of politics and culture and religion.

Call it destiny, the way we find ourselves, willingly or not, at the center of our societies’ passionate quest for identity. In a century of existential struggles, large and small, real and imagined, we could be the clearest expression of a beleaguered people’s thirst for a sense of self. In times during which practically every argument of consequence has been with a much too domineering West, we could be at once a symbol of resistance to colonial cultural theft and a measure of resilience against its encroachments. Still more, we could be deployed by the conservatism that envelops us--or indeed offer ourselves--as the first line of defense against the very temptation of modernity. Such has been the importance of this fight that the narrowest interpretations of Islam would always be invoked to imbue earthly purpose with heavenly intent.

Colliding ideologies thus found common cause against a common enemy: the West. No less significantly, the pseudo-secular state and ascendant Islamists clashed over practically everything but agreed over the finer sex, the “weakest link” in embattled societies. Tradeoffs were sealed: politics in exchange for family.

The veil—imposed or freely taken up-- became the public face of this debacle. Multitudes of women covered up and “stood emancipation on its head.” But, in truth, the real high stakes were in the web of canons and precepts and customs and caveats that intertwine to define a woman’s position at home and out. For these, personal status laws became both shield and sanctuary. Meddle with them and you would be meddling with much more than the old way of doing things; you would literally be opening the backdoor to foreign conspiracies. Worst still, you would be challenging the word of God himself.

However diverse the histories of women in various countries of the area, this same story more or less played itself out wherever they lived. It did in Egypt.

Between 1919, when Egyptians revolted against colonial Britain, and 2011, when they rid themselves of Mubarak, is close to a century of activism for and against women’s rights. Every victory came with a pack of setbacks and a throng of accusations; and change, when it happened, was always hard fought and piecemeal.

As the 21^st century drew its first breath, Egypt yielded some more and finally allowed its women to apply for a passport or travel without permission from a male guardian (2000), to give citizenship to children from foreign husbands (2004), to become judges (2008)…

Still, if you were to stack up the results, the tally, for those sympathetic to the cause, is sure to be very disappointing. The discriminations are not only spotted in the huge gap between the “in principle” and “ in practice,” but in the actual paper trail itself. Exceptions and conditions come with every established right. While Islamic jurisprudence qualifies the “equality” of women in citizenship, the penal code is no less bold about its prejudices even at their most ridiculous, as they are in Article 277 of the penal code which states that the “man is guilty [of adultery] only if he commits the act at his marital home, a woman is guilty regardless of where the act takes place.”[1]

To be sure, some aspects of this protracted struggle for gender equality echo others East and West against entrenched patriarchy. And yet, from the outset, here, in this angry patch of the earth, the issue has always been just as much about fortifying “Muslim” identity and safeguarding indigenous tradition against perceived Western assaults as it has been about preserving male privilege.

****

It is in fact this shared sense of injury and indignation against an imperialist West that rallied Iranian leftists and secularists of most stripes behind Khomeini before the revolution—at last the dawn of an “ethical Muslim society,” they thought. Certainly, it is what rendered them mute when, immediately after toppling the Shah, Khomeini moved to topple the freedoms women had gained under him. Whatever was achieved under a despotic regime backed by the US became the kiss of death. As Janet Afary explains in Sexual Politics in Iran, “For the Ayatollahs, the modern woman was a source of ritual pollution; for the radical lay thinkers, the apolitical westernized woman was a duped agent of imperialist cultural hegemony…” (p.237). And hence, as Iranian women, in the tens of thousands, descended on the streets of Tehran on March 8 and 12, 1979, to protest Khomeini’s flurry of edicts and actions, the left demanded that they put their claims to rest. “Not Now,” was the message.

Khomeini issued his pronouncements, much like one ticks off a long overdue to-do list: On February 26, he suspended the Family Protection Law; on March 3, he put a stop to decrees appointing women as judges; on March 4, he deemed divorce solely the man’s prerogative; on March 6, he froze women out of the army; on March 7, he brought the veil to the workplace; on March 29, he segregated sports; on May 21, he banned co-education; on June 3, he told married women they could no longer attend regular high school; on June 13, he shut down daycare centers, admonishing working mothers to quit their jobs and attend to their households.

By 1981, the ground rules were all set. For those women who had hoped for a freer life, the new constitution and penal code coalesced as bars do in a prison. For those who enjoyed so little to start with, khomeini’s blessings and tokens, though few and miserly, were enough to win more legroom in very oppressive environments. From the start, the revolution would crow about and rely on its own female cadre.

****

If Islamist Iran stood in 1979 as a spritely promise, in 2011, it stands as a feat with a few gray hairs in its beard: thirty two years as telling about the limitations of Islamism as they are about civil society’s own remarkable bounce.

Today, austere as the regime still is, women are walking around with fewer shackles. In fact, they can pretty much tick off their accomplishments over three hard decades, much like Khomeini ticked off his strictures at the beginning of them. They are

ü palpably more literate (88%);

ü more educated, comprising 60% of university graduates and the majority of students in Medicine, Basic Sciences, Experimental Sciences and Humanities and Arts;

ü more literary (in the mid-1990s, there were 20-30 female writers; in 2009 they topped 450).

Iranian women have yet to sit on the bench or run for the presidency but they are in parliament. By 1986, their participation in the formal sector fell to 9%; by 2010, it had climbed back up to 14%. In the 1980s, they presided over a trickle of publishing houses; in 2005, they boasted 100 of them.

To the state goes the credit for embracing literacy and health care, especially in the rural areas. Everywhere else, applause has to go to the tenacity of Persia’s women who ran with every windfall and opportunity: a devastating Iran-Iraq war that changed the dynamic of marriage and family; the harsh economic realities that made it easier for them to go out and earn an education and a living, a tired Islamist idea that gave way simply because it had to…

On their own, these strides may seem modest—and they are if measured against ambition and possibility. But they tower when compared to where it all began back in 1979. This, in an Islamist state that, as recently as 2006, declared with a straight face feminists along with “mystics, dervishes, devil worshipers, journalists, bloggers, secular students and intellectuals, reformists, as the main threats to the national security of the country.”[2]

At present, Iran may well be post-Islamist, as Assef Bayat describes it. You can tell by the constant jostling for space between system and society that the ruling elite is well aware that after “a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy, and sources of legitimacy of Islamism” have been “exhausted even among its once-ardent supporters.”

[1] Mariz Tadros, The Status of Women in Egypt: What Would the Post-Mubarak Era Offer Them, Freedom House, 2010, p.4.

[2] Classification was made in a security report produced by the political bureau of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Mentioned in Fatimeh Sadeghi’s Foot Soldiers of The Islamic Republic’s Cultural Modesty. MERIP, The Islamic Revolution At 30, Spring 2009, no.250, p.51.

"Not Now!" On Arab Women and Revolution

2011-11-27T06:28:00.000-08:00

This is a long piece (please tell me I don’t need to apologize for it), so I have erred on the side of caution and split it into three parts which I will post over the course of the next few days.

Two episodes back-to-back--Alia Magda al-Mahdi’s nude stare beckoning a challenge to Egyptians and their uprising, and the beating of columnist Mona Eltahawy in the Interior Ministry that smacked of sexual assault—have thrust women back into Egypt’s burning arena after months of fade out.

Eltahawy’s is the very old and depressingly familiar story that Arab women have been living on the streets, at home, in the fields, at work, in jail...: sexual intimidation or violence for the specific purpose of humiliating, demeaning, and finally dehumanizing. Of course, this is an argument that almost every society has long had with its women; in some places the method is restrained, in others it is ferocious. But Arab society’s spat with its own comes with a nasty twist. Call it the female and the question of identity.

Which makes Alia’s subversive act among the most provocative—and frankly weird--instants of the Egyptian revolt. If the attack on Mona jolts us backward, the unusual audacity of Alia is egging us forward. She might not belong anywhere in the political fervor of Tahrir Square, but she certainly has crashed the party and forced the supposedly revolutionary discourse to take notice.

She poses naked; her expression is neutral, almost childlike. There is no come-hither look, no call for quick love--just a nude model’s posture playing its part for the lens. Only the red hair clip and shoes are a concession to color in an otherwise black and white world, as if she is harking back to a forgotten past.

At first look, Alia’s mischievousness seems self-indulgent, distracting. And yet, the remarkable boldness of the photo and its author compel a second look. Hers is at once a statement against hypocrisy--“Put on trial the artists' models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity”—and a combat-ready attachment to “freedom of expression.”

Through this photo alone Alia has reminded us of the very generous meaning of revolution--and our own very stingy definition of it.

Among Egypt’s liberals, there is as much rage against Alia as there is against the SCAF. And therein may lie her point. That sexual harassment has become a particularly acute problem in an increasingly conservative, if not downright Islamized, Egypt is one of Islamism’s most bitter and telling ironies. But there is not much to debate about female nudity with the Muslim Brotherhood. There is, however, plenty to mine and expose in a liberal’s fury. Alia transcends politics and reaches for Egypt itself. She is speaking to life’s many tyrannies, of which politics is but one.

I really doubt the saboteur in her will go far. Not now. Not here. Alas, she is way, way, ahead of her times, and with that, history has taught us, comes a very heavy price.

These are the incidents surrounding Mona Eltahaway and Alia, and they are just the latest in a series that, combined, help tell the fascinating story of the modern Middle East and its women, a story that is at its most nervous in Egypt and its most daring in Iran.

****

Revolution

You could tell by the evening’s debris that Tahrir Square on that day, March 8, was not in the mood for liberation. Strewn here and there was the litter of a demonstration gone wrong. On some placards, the furious in the crowds wrote “Not Now,” on others they settled for shoe prints and the X sign. Had you been there earlier, you would have heard words and witnessed behavior to match the harsh verdicts on those posters.

Out in Tahrir, in rather small numbers to mark International Women’s Day and declare their cause a daughter of the Egyptian revolution, women activists were heckled, harassed and then chased out of the Square. A few were cuffed and sent off to jail. “Go back home and cook mahshi!” (stuffed Zuchini), was the stalest of the insults. A forced virginity test for the arrested single women was arguably the most alarming, not to mention demeaning.

The implication of the encounter was clear enough: yet again, women were called in for a people’s freedom and called out for their own. This revolution would leave her behind, much like revolutions before it. And, of course, because of who and where we are, no revolution is resonating louder to the skeptics today than the Iranian one of 1979. For the power of the Persian example lies not only in that initial inspired moment that brought the Pahlavi dynasty down, but in the three decades that came after it, a time as emblematic of radical change as it is of retreats and letdowns, none more so than for the daughters of Iran’s uprising.

So, now that it is our turn in the Arab world to flip the page, eyes look back at Iran as they look now at Egypt for any hint of what might come. Because serious as the differences are between the two countries—and they are serious—at first look the similarities are one too many, especially on that incessant question of women and identity.

Much is at stake here, and not only for Egypt’s female gender. As the pendulum threatens to swing everywhere in this East, nervous talk of counterrevolution is actually outpacing upheaval itself. Egypt is standing at the door of an Arab reformation as it has at that of every contemporary Arab cause--good or bad. The way Egypt goes, so very likely shall many in the region.

Where Do We Go Now?

2011-11-17T07:27:00.000-08:00

On Nadine Labaki"s film

I imagine a tiny village, a signing blurb, a fine painter’s sketch of that other mess that goes by the name of Lebanon.

I imagine this village simpler, earthier, more endearing than its larger agitated self.

I imagine its knack for humor much stronger than its taste for cruelty; and if this last must be, then I imagine it bashful, apologetic, almost child-like in its expressions and intent.

I imagine it in the here and now and yet suspended in space and time, its hoary face practically intact, its connection to the world an old, beat up TV, its physical contact with it through a couple of teenagers and their rinky-dink motorbike.

I imagine its daily rhythms as Cinema Paradiso’s, its mood Il Postino’s, its chatter Il Mediterraneo’s.

I imagine it split between Christians and Muslims. I imagine all its Muslim women veiled so that the viewer can tell them apart.

I imagine its men basic, stupid, one-dimensional creatures, ready to pounce for the silliest of reasons, to fist fight for the flimsiest of slights. And I imagine the war—yes, that war whose history is everywhere in mind but nowhere in sight—all theirs, the proverbial cross to carry around.

I imagine all the villages’ women wise, nurturing, funny, wily matriarchs. I imagine them--to a woman—free of all that taints their men.

I imagine the village’s priest and sheikh truly above the fray, even happy to exchange places on any given day.

I imagine angry scenes all of a sudden springing up just to prove a point; a few funny scenes to lighten up the pace; a few Ukrainian blondes to remind me of today’s Lebanon that lives somewhere, somehow beyond.

I imagine a single, tragic death, but I imagine it taking place far away, because who among these good people could be guilty of such an ugly act.

And so, I imagine a story about an atrocious sectarianism in an atrocious Lebanon, but I imagine narrating it with the sweetest of voices, because mine is the sweetest of visions.

There you have it: Where Do We Go Now?

*****

You might imagine by now that I didn’t like Nadine Labaki’s movie, but actually I didn’t mind it much. She did well with the casting, she didn’t do that badly with the dialogue, and the sentimentality wasn’t over the top. There isn’t a single original idea in the entire script; still there is talent to be had, and that is good enough to applaud.

But who am I to talk? The movie is a hit. In Lebanon, people just can’t get over that fuzzy feeling that the country may yet be good, although everywhere you look it might look all bad. The people will get the message, some are no doubt thinking, although why a movie would do any better than 70 years of hatred and violence and death is, I guess, too cynical of a question to ask.

To her, I say bravo for turning something very real and hideous into something that we have it in us to overcome. That’s what I call suspension of disbelief in the service of a mighty dream. To the Lebanese, I say cheering a movie is not enough of an excuse or a pass. If you truly support the message, why are only a handful of you joining the actual call for all this to end?

Then again, this might be asking too much and just to poop on everybody’s party and make a fuss. After all, surely the accolades in Toronto’s film festival—much like those idiotic puff pieces about Lebanon in the New York Times—should do the trick.

Shoot Me, I am An Arab!

2011-10-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

In gratitude to David Aaron Miller

That so-called week of Palestine at the UN back in September, it was like playing house or bus trip to Harissa (my favorite, but this is not the time to explain) back in the days; you knew it was all make-believe, you knew it would last only through the afternoon, and yet you played your part as if it were for real because it was all such fun.

In fact, for weeks before Mahmoud Abbas’s UN speech, they went at it—Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Quartet, Ban Ki Moon, the US, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy…--and, as usual, we the spectators were asked to suspend disbelief, many even downright giddy to be in on the thing.

True, much of politics is about pretense, but I doubt there’s a problem in this world that outperforms Palestine. And I really doubt there’s a problem that has to spin so much yarn in order to conceal what is so glaringly obvious.

For it is glaringly obvious that Abbas presides over an entity (the Palestinian Authority) and controls the West Bank through an arrangement (the Oslo Accords) that allowed Israel to perpetuate an occupation on the cheap, increase the number of settlers from 116,000 in 1993, when Oslo was signed, to 530,000 in 2011, boost settlements to 121, outposts to 101, and incorporate around 40 percent of the land to service both the colonies and their occupants.

It is glaringly obvious that Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman et al, contrary to all appearances, are actually ecstatic about Oslo’s achievements which have been instrumental in killing the two-state solution in the light of day and with plenty of political cover.

And it is glaringly obvious that the US has been happy to help sponsor, finance and put in place the administrative and security structures and frameworks that have helped the PA act as such an effective enforcer for the Israeli occupation. All done, needless to say, in the name of peace and prosperity and justice and moderation….

We can argue about the ugly details all you want. We can disagree about motives, point and wag fingers and try to sink the entire story in a morass of ifs, buts and maybes. But after all is said and done we would still find ourselves back in the company of these essential facts: 20 years of Oslo, 20 years of the PA, 531,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 121 settlements, 101 outposts and no less than 40 percent of the land to make them whole and the rest of the Territories a body of severed parts. Whichever side you’re on, whatever your convictions, these are the facts on the ground that have turned the dream of a Palestine, even on the 22% left after 1948, into yet another one of this saga’s victims.

Point being? If Oslo were a cow, it would be emaciated, sucked to death, with not a drop of milk to offer. Simply put, the game is up! And more so for Abbas than for his two partners, because, two decades into Oslo, they can boast many gains for their side, while he cannot point to a single one for Palestine. Conversely, should Oslo fold, the two could well suffer serious losses (internationalization of the conflict, termination of security arrangements, upheaval, a prohibitively expensive return to the occupation…), while Abbas might conceivably breath a sigh of relief because of what turned out to be a horrendous deal. Love him or hate him, Abbas went into this partnership (he and his master Arafat) with the impression that it would yield a semblance of a Palestine, and all they have now is the ridiculous idea of it.

All of which explains why Abbas, the US and Israel’s man—another glaringly obvious fact which you’re welcome to condemn or applaud (but certainly not ignore) depending on where you stand--has decided to plead for statehood at the UN, and why Israel and the US are upset with him for not keeping up the pretense. He’s bankrupt and dangerously exposed at a time when an Arab leader would rather not be either. He’s lost pretty much everything, so where’s the risk, as things fall part, in carving for himself a bit of leg room in that deep hole that he fell, eyes wide open, into?

This is but one of many interpretations of this unfolding drama. As if to confirm it, however, Netanyahu himself delivered what Gideon Levy aptly described as a “giant blah, blah” of a speech, throughout which he displayed all the usual qualities that make allies recoil with infinite more horror than do enemies. Not to be outdone, Obama stood before us, a small man burping out small ideas.

Of course, Abbas had to pitch his tent somewhere else. And, frankly, for that bit of rude clarity, Obama deserves a badge of honor from the Palestinians no less sizeable than the one bestowed upon him by Netanyahu and Lieberman.

I, for one, am delighted with him, and I think him marvelous for making such little effort to jazz up the rhetoric—as politicians are wont to do--to compensate for dim policy. In a region long hobbled by external deceits and homegrown fantasies, mistaken conjecture about imperial purpose can have potentially devastating consequences. At a minimum, it can lead to dangerously misplaced expectations by writhing societies looking for inspiration in all the wrong places. Obama has made it abundantly clear that, in this current struggle for change in the Arab world, the US shall lead from behind—way, way behind—and for that we should be eternally grateful.

Now we—most of all the Palestinians amongst us—need not suffer fools gladly whenever they start peddling grand American plans and ideals. Obama’s speech was that rare occasion when positive spin actually highlighted the hard facts it so dearly meant to obscure: the hands-off attitude towards peace; the need to “draw down” after years of exuberant and very costly overreach; the absolute necessity of focusing attention inward during an unusually pressing circumstance; the very flexible policy towards the Arab revolts, depending on US interest and the party in power, but the constancy towards Israel regardless of US interest and the party in power.

This is a much-diminished president speaking for a much-diminished superpower. Surely we can take a hint and run with it? Thankfully, for the Palestinians, the smart choices are few and stark clear. Their quest for liberation, as Rashid Khalidi wrote a few days ago, “will have to return from a two-decade hiatus at a rigged negotiating table to its original and most representative form: popular, grassroots, nonviolent struggle on the ground and among Palestinians in exile.”

Right after Obama’s speech, Middle East specialist and onetime US negotiator David Aaron Miller blogged it out with political scientist Daniel Levy on Bloggingheads. During the conversation, Miller, for whom the bid for Palestinian statehood is “not the main issue,” pointed out that Obama owed it to those who elected him (Miller included) not to waste any precious political capital on an ungrateful problem, when the priority is to get reelected and prevent the country from slipping into—God forbid—the hands of Governor Rick Perry.

America is in a “slow bleed,” Miller cautioned, nowhere near well enough at home, nor “feared, loved or respected” enough abroad to make much of a difference anyway. Worst still, he added, little could be done for Abbas, “who sits on a Palestinian humpty dumpty”-- neither taking Israel to the “woodshed,” nor waging another futile diplomatic offensive, when the status quo had not yet become untenable for the Palestinians and Israel.

I guess Miller hasn’t been out much lately.

Remarkably, in making all these presumably sobering arguments against muscular American engagement in the peace process, Miller ends up ceding the case to Levy, whose closing point is if the US is so exhausted by it all, why beat up on Abbas, that poor sod of a “humpty dumpty,” for trying to climb down that miserable wall?

At one point in the give and take, in a wonderful flash of candor, the ex-diplomat said, ”Shoot me, I am an American,” in owning up to his current passion for US politics and little else.

“Shoot me, I am an Arab,” I found myself whispering to the screen, before switching off and tuning out.

Dare we hope that this sentiment will prove a turning point in Arab-American history?

We’re Screwed! So Say Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

2011-09-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

Done with the first draft of my post (Let’s Talk Turkey!) a few nights ago, I came upon the New York Review of Books’ tweet on Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s The Arab Counterrevolution. Theirs has been the very useful habit of dispersing the hot air on which every once in a while floats a new Palestinian-Israeli solution. So I thought, plenty of hot air around now, might as well read on for added insight from two judicious men before I send off my post.

Well, it must be the times, because I don’t recall I have come across such a confused perspective about the Arab uprisings written with such self-assured clarity, and by such normally fastidious analysts. It’s not Malley and Agha’s insistence on debunking the moment and its potential that’s bewildering—evidence abounds about a counterrevolution at work—but the sense the reader gets that even the flimsiest signs of trouble over the horizon would have been more than enough for them to doom the Arab revolts to failure. In fact, as far as the two authors are concerned, the “Arab Revolution” ended on February 11, barely five weeks after it had started. Alas, that’s when pristine turned to murky, and innocence—apparently, for Agha and Malley, a most essential prerequisite for a successful revolution--lost out to the Middle East’s usual medley of local hatreds and external plots.

There are many hints in the exposé about the duo’s dyed-in-the-wool skepticism about 2011 as a year with deep positive reach, but it’s this sentence that really clinched it for me: “The popular uprisings were broadly welcomed, but they do not neatly fit the social and political makeup of traditional communities often organized along tribal and kinship ties, where religion has a central part and foreign meddling is the norm.” In blunter words, none of this was supposed to happen, but since it did, clearly it will come to nothing. Or blunter still: since we didn’t predict any of this, better second-guess it than second-guess ourselves.

So, on the one hand, we have a revolution that somehow has managed to topple two entrenched dictators and unleash a “complex brew” that threatens to overturn a decades-old regional order. On the other, this is actually nothing more than a spontaneous if genuine “public rebuke” by various amorphous groups, which is destined to sputter out and die in societies that are too traditional, too tribal, too sectarian and too religious to allow for the possibility of a new era that is in any way an improvement over the old one. Add to this mix, foreign busybodies, organized parties with hostile agendas and militaries averse to change as a matter of temperament, and you’ve got yourself a dud.

As for the conundrum as to how these groups, composed largely of “young demonstrators,” succeeded in overcoming such seemingly insurmountable odds and pushing history in a direction that these societies, by their sheer makeup, and these regimes, by their sheer repressive nature, and these foreign meddlers, by their sheer meddling, should not have allowed in the first place, Agha and Malley opt for the very original “revolutions devour their children,” at the end of eleven pages that expend much energy explaining why this isn’t a revolution. Besides, what’s to devour if you’re already dead?

Extraordinarily, Agha and Malley resort to historical precedence to demonstrate why nothing good will (not could, not may) come out of this fury, and identify none other than Gamal Abd al Nasser and the uproarious, ideologies-driven 1950s and ‘60s, to prove the point.

That this time around the Gamals are conspicuously absent, the army is not in “the vanguard” of change, the ideologies of old are in tatters and counterrevolution itself is walking around practically naked for all to see is acknowledged by the authors but certainly none of the lessons of the past. It’s never made clear why these differences don’t count for much, but Agha and Malley offer this at least by way of an answer: “Although the military was the vanguard then, the rebellions of 2011 arose from similar emotions and are inspired by similar aspirations.” See! Keep wishing for the same damned thing and you’re condemned to never achieving it.

It’s as if the two experts are saying we’ve been here before, but it doesn’t make a difference either way, because this is where we’re going to end up anyway. Why? Well, because we’ve been here before. It’s sort of like being in the Amazonian jungles, this Arab world: it really matters where you’ve been, but then again, what does it matter where you’ve been if where your heading pretty much looks the same, even if it is an entirely different place?

As for what compelled the two to devote so much ink to making a truckload of insights that are so patently obvious, it is simply to make sure that we know what we already know: “Things are not as they seem.” Which is kind of funny because their article argues exactly that: things are bad, and they are just as they seem.

Now, if you wanted to have a bit of fun with this, here’s an additional small sample of wisdoms, with some comments in italics to guide you through the nuance:

· It started out so nice but then it turned ugly. I guess that counts for a bad omen, because, for Agha and Malley, in order for revolutions to be good they have to be “peaceful, homegrown, spontaneous, and seemingly unified,” or they’re not—good revolutions, that is.

· Old regime elements are resilient and will hang on. That was the biggest surprise in the piece.

· There are “two relatively untarnished” groups--the army and the Islamists—which are poised to sweep the deck should they choose (or have) to, even if at times and in many places they act positively senile or stupid, because, for God’s sake, look at the rest of the lot.

· The Islamists, for one, stand to gain the most from this Arab Spring, but, come to think about it, the season may prove a little too nippy for them: infighting within the Muslim Brotherhood, and/or competition with Salafists, and/or tensions between hostility to and close relations with the West, and/or people’s suspicion and/or support…

· Islamists are “the only significant political force with a vision and program unsullied, because untested, by the exercise of, or complicity in, power.” But wait, they know “the alarm they inspire at and home and abroad,” and they are on a mission to reassure.” Well, I mean, if they are untarnished, unsullied and untested, why in God’s name are they bending over backward to reassure, I wonder?

· Oh, no, this is not happening in a vacuum--“interlopers are legion.” La?...Bala! (No, really?”), was all I could muster for that one.

· This could be good or bad for each or a combination of the following: Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, America, you name it… Which, thankfully, narrows it down a bit.

For the record, I am not pissed because Agha and Malley have argued an Arab counterrevolution; I am pissed because they’ve argued it so badly. They should stick to woe-is-me Palestine, because—this is just a gut feeling, mind you—it “neatly fits [their] social and political” outlook.

Let's Talk Turkey

2011-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Just in case some of us are still skeptical about the sheer audacity of these times, give this a try: rummage in your mind’s attic for the year 1956 and a picture of Gamal Abd al Nasser, dust both off, and then tack them on that busy clipboard of history next to 2011 and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

(Aside: this is not a partial response to Robert Malley and Hussein Agha’s The Arab Counterrevolution in NRB; although we do touch on some similar themes, this post was written before I read the two gentlemen. In any case, my view on the piece will come in two days.)

Actually, I am going out on a limb here on regional winners and losers in this Arab Spring, however reminiscent of the past the future threatens to become.

Now tick them sixty years and their collapsing vistas off: the bygone days of military coups that could prance around as do revolutions; the general-cum-father-cum-savior; the roar of an Arab Umma on the rise; ideologies in their Sunday suits with the rhetoric to match; Islamism, present, certainly, but lurking much like that quiet, awkward kid in the corner of the class…Palestine! Real and graspable.

Turkey, Iran and Israel, three cubs nursing on the sidelines…The Soviet Union and the United States, two giants with plenty of zest and way early in the fight.

It’s hardly necessary to keep revisiting the harsh elements that reduced an interesting prospect into a figment of a people’s overactive imagination. Besides, there is no better tonic for the heart’s pain than fast-forward.

So, a new century, a new Arab moment, a new painting in the making. It’s fascinating to watch the 21^st century opting to pick up where it left off in the early years of the last and rejigging the old chosen path. There was a hint of an Arab Awakening then rising in the shadows of warring empires—the Ottoman one dying to stay alive, the European one literally sharpening the knife.

And here we are, almost one hundred years after the fact, with a few of us seemingly resurgent again, battered and arguably all the more sober because of it--and with such uncanny if unplanned timing--helping Turkey to recapture some of that glorious past. But, frankly, even before the Tunisians first rose, Turkey in the three way regional race against Iran and Israel, was looking more and more like a stud: a country oozing with testosterone, while Israel acts like an overwrought menopausal has-been and Iran runs around grabbing its crotch.

Or think of it this way: Sunni in a sea of Sunnis; a “respectable” (as in we don’t do murder and beards) Islamist model in a world desperate for one; an economic powerhouse; a government with electorally validated popular appeal versus a seriously dysfunctional Jewish democracy and a seriously dysfunctional Shiite theocracy; a solid member of NATO; a strong ally of an overburdened US willing to cede some of the chores of empire; strategic location; all the right rhetoric on Palestine, muscle flexing with Israel like no Iranian or Arab can.

Or think of it this way: Erdogan is about to make a visit to Egypt and (last I heard) speak in Tahrir Square. Can you imagine any Arab or Iranian leader daring even to propose that outing without bringing down the house? Can you think of any power, say, China and Russia, trying to reach a deal with Syria’s Bashar in the absence of Erdogan? And, conceivably, if it ever musters the strength, a so-called Palestinian solution without Turkey as part of the plan?

There are, as with everything in life, the downsides: a far too confident Turkish leadership overreaching, an EU yet to put out the welcome mat; Iran and Israel outdone, joining hands here and there to overturn the cart; the Kurdish problem reasserting itself through Syria, Iraq and Iran… But all things are relative, and in this regional competition for influence, the era is certainly Turkey’s for the taking.

Hezbollah’s Quandary

2011-08-21T23:25:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is a bank manager in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs, Hezbollah’s own dominion in Beirut. Neither she nor I have any proof of it, but her appointment to that location most probably was a clear concession to Lebanon’s sectarian method. Well educated (an MBA from the very French USJ, Universite De San Joseph), tough and, yes, above all Shiite, her superiors must have figure she would navigate the terrain as “natives” would.

In Hezbollah’s playbook, my friend is a difficult number: a supporter of the Resistance against Israel and a skeptic everywhere else. She will, on many occasions, cut it some slack in the very confessional politics of Lebanon, but she will do it with eyes wide-open, ears perked up and a mouth poised to ask all the awkward questions. The iffiest kind of supporter, you might say, for an organization that prefers its lovers of the diehard variety.

I can’t be sure of this woman’s strength on the ground--most opinion polls point to strong Shiite support for Hezbollah, but none attempts to gauge the quality of it. However, I think I can get away with proposing that the nature and intensity of the battles the group often has to wage make her count. As prized as Hezbollah’s ardent supporters are, the Hezb knows only too well that loneliness in Lebanon’s sectarian wilderness is not exactly smart positioning, especially for a party whose ambitions are way grander than and too audacious for the country to which it presumably belongs. If Hassan Nassrallah indulges his quarrelsome Maronite ally Michel Aoun a tad bit too much, he indulges him precisely for that.

A while ago, my bank manager friend told me that her most annoying days at the bank are typically those that come in the immediate aftermath of a Nassrallah speech. Everything and everyone grows to sizes bizarrely larger than life—the muscles, especially those around the chest area, the swagger of peacocked-men into the branch, the demands for fee discounts, easier access to loans, bigger overdrafts… I am, so to speak, the shadow of my master.

None of that now. Of course, the theatrics of defiance are imperative for a group that always stands accused of (or is often up to) something, but listen harder and you will notice that the boys’ mood has in fact turned quieter. The indictments of four Hezbollah men in the murder of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005 (“circumstantial” though evidence might be) and the trouble in Syria are conspiring to keep normally high heads down. And just because it’s such a delicious Gotcha! moment for its detractors, the air is abuzz with Hezbollah’s double standard in embracing revolt in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain while shunning it in Syria.

No doubt, the sight of holier-than-thou warriors having to openly pick their way through the Arab uprisings, much like their hypocritical nemesis the West, is the perfect setup for a smirk. But as embarrassing as the nitpicking is to Hezbollah, the true source of its discomfort is more disquieting still.

For a while now, the Party of God has been wrestling with the headaches that attach to an enterprise that juggles, with insistence, its multiple identities as a military resistance, a political party and a social movement whose devotion to Persia’s Wilayat al Faqih (Khomeini’s Guardianship of the Jurist) is at once an unabashed show of supranational loyalties (normal among Lebanese sects) and an explicit statement about political orientation if not intent.

Call it the heavy price of success. It is no small feat to start out fringe, Islamist and Shiite and grow within two decades into a military powerhouse with a track record of credible wins against Israel, a thriving local operation and region-wide appeal even in the staunchest Sunni quarters. Everything its progenitors dearly wanted it to achieve, Hezbollah did, for unlike Lebanon’s other sectarian bosses, its business, from the outset, was never really meant to be strictly Lebanese and, as unavoidably Shiite as it is, its concerns were never merely parochial.

But now, arguably for the first time in its 30-year life, Hezbollah is being forced to choose between its precious identities. Worst still, for the first time since its signature label—the resistance against Israel--won it faithful followers in ideological camps not particularly keen on any of its other titles, it’s being called upon to spell out the definition of this resistance.

Rhetoric aside, the real tension between love of freedom and indifference to democracy is common among many a liberation movement. The nature of the battle compels it: the do-and-die climate, the feverish passion for the cause, the need for a stealth existence, absolute secrecy, unwavering discipline, total loyalty… For Hezbollah especially, it’s always been just as much about politico-religious beliefs as it is about the struggle itself.

But until the Arab uprisings, none of this really mattered: the Israeli menace--even after the 2000 withdrawal from South Lebanon--remained real to enough people, the region’s authoritarianism hard-wearing to enough people, Lebanon’s democracy a joke to enough people, society’s sectarianism agreeable to enough people, Hezbollah itself flexible to enough people… Although, mainly due to the party’s increasing potency over the past ten years, friction began to appear between its different priorities, the situation was more or less manageable—that is until the Arab uprisings.

In Hezbollah’s defense, a few commentators (not all sympathetic to it) have been arguing that the Arab rebels are asking too much from a force whose overriding mission is the fight against Israel. For all of Hezbollah’s pretensions and talents, these commentators add, democracy is one particular practice it was never interested in mastering, let alone embracing as part of its cause.

All true. And all irrelevant. However persuasive the fine points and nuances, Nasrallah never thought he would actually have to tiptoe around them. And now he has to—all the time. Finally, Freedom for Palestine, in Arab discourse, is no more an orphan. To love it is to love all its other long lost sisters--democracy, dignity, justice…—everywhere, for the sake of Palestine and us Arabs as well.

Hezbollah’s diehards don’t care one way or the other, but my bank manager friend does, along with all those who were happy to lend the Resistance plenty of good will in the name of Arab and Palestinian dignity.

The extraordinary irony in this singularly challenging regional circumstance is that the American-Israeli conspiracy, real or not, is actually tangential to this part of Hezbollah’s quandary. In fact, pretty much like Nasrallah, Khamenei and Bashar, neither the US nor Israel, each for its own patently obvious reasons, is particularly happy to see Palestine reunited with its sisters.

The indictments, Syria’s anguish and the threat to strategic depth and breathing space, the Sunni-Shiite fault lines in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s own delicate internal power politics, the emergence of Turkey and its clever game plan for Palestine and the Arab revolts: all these make for an unusually demoralizing suite of challenges for Hezbollah. But the pressures on it to come forward and own up on the critical question of resistance, in its full, unbridled meaning, may yet prove the most daunting of them all.

Is Everything Up in the Air in the Arab Spring?

2011-07-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

To blog or not to blog? It has been this kind of month. If your site is not in the business of archiving and commenting on the day’s happenings—or, as a friend volunteered, if you’re knitting your way through history--it makes little sense to join the hysteria. With the detritus of theories and scenarios clogging up the view and numbing the senses, you find yourself rhapsodizing about the wisdom of silence in the throes of frenzy.

I suppose it’s time for more knitting.

Moods here have this lull in their swing: the ebb and flow of euphoria as doubts accumulate about the uprisings’ ability to sustain their original sprint. The odds were great to begin with, they say, and now, after the initial shock, stasis and the many forces that love it are rebuilding stamina again, threatening to turn the race for deep change into a tedious push and shove game. Ironically, both those who are reveling in and squirming from the moment are sounding the same alarms, the former warning of sabotage, the latter rooting for it.

So, here we are, seven months into rebellion. Outrage still in Tahrir Square. Frustrated fury in Yemen and Syria. A not so quiet simmer in Bahrain, while Libya roils, as Qaddafi and the rebels, inch by inch, fight for precious terrain.

Conspiracy talk, dire predictions, accusations from the left huffing and puffing about the West, rants from the right pissing on the brash audacity of the East are giving the uprisings the run around, by turns pumping them up and smacking them down. Adding to the noise are those with seriously offended sensibilities or wounded ideologies, who, like drunkards, are stumbling their way through events, at whim applauding or fulminating against the revolts.

And, pray tell, the skeptics are asking: Where do the region’s age-old maladies fit in all of this tumult? The sectarianisms that are supposed to divide us; the colonial legacies that mar us; the greed that stalks us; the feeble democratic impulse that cripples us; that religion that shackles us…

Opinions are colliding, but the same overarching question wraps up almost every argument: Will we find ourselves starting afresh a few years down the line, or will we be stomaching more of the same under a different name? As in, is this for real, or is fate just pulling our leg?

Bizarrely, lost in the storm of words and actions is the heavy baggage that the uprisings have already dumped from the surface of these realities. True, the systems in Tunisia and Egypt were only too happy to decapitate tottering heads if only to save themselves; worse, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria—each for its own set of reasons--have yet to begrudge their people even this fleetingly gratifying gift. But a look back at the past seven months, however hasty, is enough to remind us that had the old narrative been that sturdy we wouldn’t be struggling for the ground in these tectonic shifts.

In 2007, Annia Ceizadlo, a correspondent with a remarkable feel for the region’s politics, wrote this: “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.”

The revolts, nascent though they are, have already damaged much of the area’s political fabric, none more severely than this storyline by which we have lived and been smothered to near death in the last 40 years. And with it, the parts that have made it strong and whole are coming under severe pressure to evolve: the authoritarianism that enveloped it; the Islamism that was nurtured by it and thrived because of it; more recently the neoliberal economic policies that were supposed to shore it up but ended up undermining it; the geopolitics of the area that drew its rationale from it…

The impression among many is that the current fight is about how much of the old status quo can be saved, when in actual fact it’s about how much of the new one can be tamed and made to deliver.

Hence the rise in accolades waxing lyrical about the Turkish model that has married the least noxious brand of political Islam with the most believable type of democracy to the most robust market-friendly economy. Equally conspicuous is the distance between Turkey and the region’s other masters in capitalizing on the potential windfalls of the Arab Spring.

In Turkey’s growing shadow, you are sure to glimpse Iran’s nervous swagger in the hard knuckle race for regional influence. Not far from both are the tensions between a miffed and recalcitrant Saudi Arabia, with suddenly so much and so many to buy off and nothing to sell, and the US, which has caught the trend and is looking for the most effective way of sublimating it to its dynamic interests.

Witness the openness being expressed towards an Arab Muslim Brotherhood whose credentials appear most appropriate to the moment: their innate capitalist instincts; their strong fealty to the army and/or strong channels of contact with the powers that be; their strength in the mainstream and their eagerness to deal; conveniently, their newfound willingness to graciously (if always clumsily) give and take with society’s other constituencies…

Note as well the pace and nature of dissent coming from within these movements in places like Egypt, which, for the first time in decades, are having to compete and reinvent themselves in a deregulated marketplace of political parties and ideas.*

Nothing about this emerging status quo is neat or even remotely irreversible, all thanks to the popular stirrings, which ironically were the ones to let loose the forces that made the previous one so indefensible. Nothing in the Turkish experiment—not the stubbornness of the state and army’s secularism, not the particularities and size of its economy, not the tactical and wily pragmatism of its Justice and Development Party--finds its likeness anywhere in the Arab world. Moreover, we have yet to figure out where to place in the looming panorama the extraordinary sight of a “democratic” Israel turning more illiberal and more bigoted still, law by law, settlement by settlement, Netanyahu by Lieberman, as its Arab neighbors, for the first time in recent memory, clamor for a freer future.

But if the details pack the devil in them and the contradictions and uncertainties are littering the path to the new order, the vision and intent, for those who like to think of themselves as the deciders, is this. And in their efforts to put together the nuts and bolts of the new Middle East, perhaps the biggest challenge will be the single most significant realization by the rebels yet: that their voice matters and it is at its most effective when it is relentless and ground up.

* For some of the best reporting on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood follow Yasmine Al Rashidi in The New York Review of Books.

On Being Lebanese

2011-06-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

In this Arab Spring

If you have any hope in you, you would throw back your head in ecstasy as you read this description by James Wood of the role of Pat, VS Naipaul’s late wife, in Peter French’s The World Is What It Is:

Her presence in this biography is a hush around Vidia’s noise; her job is merely to hold the big drum of his ego in the right position, the better for him to strike the vital life rhythm.

Every once in a while, you come across a thread of words, a thought, or an image that thieve from a whole archive of wisdom to lay before you an epic of a tale. Very few approach Wood's absurdly beautiful turn of the pen, but they don’t need to in rendering suddenly stark clear and simple the tortuous tangibles of the act of living.

Even a passing comment can stop you in your tracks. Years ago, sometime in the late 1980s, a very famous Lebanese basketball player went to Jordan to attend the wedding of a friend. He was gracious enough, star that he was, to play in a show game with Jordanian players. As he entered the hall, he started chatting with an official who asked him if he is Arab. “Lebanese,” the famous one answered, prompting the usual, “Well, we’re all Arab, right?” from the official. The honored guest quickly shot back, “Yes, but we’re a bit faster.”

There, in a split second of a comeback, crowed that Lebanese specialness vis-à-vis the rest of the Arab crowd: to the hip, more with it and quicker; to the journalist, the standard for which all other Arabs pine; to the deal maker, more nimble and canny--to boot, way more suave; to the politician, more lightweight and all the better for that…

On and on, this story has played itself out, part real, part stereotype, part truth, part bluff, in every other drawing room in this city. The implicit identity here, of course, is Beiruti, the sense of belonging at once very particular and incessantly unattached.

Through turmoil and war, bedlam and breakup, debauchery and grime, the many precious years during which every special bit about this assaulted country gave in and then up, the impression has been that when other Arabs look ahead, they are sure to find us Lebanese, however roughed up we are. That is until this Arab Spring gave all this the lie, and we finally had to admit that we are very far behind.

All too predictably the laments have started. The novelist Elias Khoury let out a bizarre cry last week, “Why does Beirut commit suicide through silence?” as if Beirut’s children had not hushed it into stillness decades back. That was, after all, the point of the war, wasn’t it? Discovered only when the debris had finally settled and the profundity of the destruction was revealed to all. Silence! Silence to all the pretence--or hope for those who dared believe—that there was special meaning in being Lebanese.

But Khoury should be forgiven his wishful thinking, for never have a people been this rich with individual talent and this starved of collective enterprise. Never has a leadership been less aware of the destructiveness of political genius if not tempered by a sense of ethics and decency. Never has a country been this susceptible to success and this bent on failure.

Lubnan al Rissalah, Lebanon the Example! You can’t Google it, but it’s the cliché that our politicians always use to spin the ugliness. It’s the idea that our thinkers fall back on when they desperately want something to look forward to. It’s certainly the name by which other Arabs like to hail us when they want to lull our demons to sleep. And we have, indeed, become the example for Arab tyrants in their fight against an Arab people rising. Beware, the message says: with change, chaos; with chaos, anarchy; with anarchy, sectarian strife; with strife, disintegration. “Lebanonization” (labnant), then, is a short heaving moment away. Or to put it more simply, as dictators are want to do: “Is that what you want? Another Lebanon!”

A cautionary tale, that’s who we are: this is not the kind of nation you want to be, not the kind of state you want to have, not the kind of hate you want to feel, not the kind of politics you want to play, not the kind of business you want to do… Sure, Beirut is fun enough, especially after dark, but why be one when you can have your way with it and then fly back home to safety?

If the whole idea was for us to lead by example, we certainly have.

And so, we wait out this Arab Spring with barely anything on offer or anything to add. Or we react, each brood, of course, for its own sake. We wait for the Saudis to decide which way they want to play the Sunni card. We wait for bloodshed here should the Assads fail there. We wait for Iran to figure out how it might adapt. We wait to see how Hezbollah will mind its kneecaps. We wait for Israel to pounce. We wait for governments to form, and then we wait for them to fall. We wait for the summer to get hotter, for the mountains of garbage to rise higher, for the lights to go out, for the sea to get murkier, for our youth to pack up and leave, for the trees to become even lonelier…

But I’ve already written this so many times in so many different ways. Better wrap it up with somebody else’s words. Here’s Khaled Saggieyh’s for the road: ”Never has Lebanon been more washed out, more hobbled, more devoid of any meaning than it appears now.” (Akhbar Newspaper, June 6, 2011).

Towards a New Narrative

2011-05-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

A mob of ifs, buts and maybes has been let loose in the region.

The Middle East hasn’t been this prickly since that grab fest at the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire gasped its last and the Arabs were about to breathe their first. It wasn’t in the stars then, alas: new overlords, new states, nations, borders, flags, anthems…The 1950s, however exciting, don’t even compare. Tested as the colonial map was, it more or less held firm; only ruling heads swayed or fell.

But it’s not only dictators that are tumbling now. Entire landscapes, once tamed and mastered, want to rewrite the future as planned. The people, who had been pretty much deleted out of every power’s playbook, are making a dash for it with a long list of demands, and, frankly, neither they nor the systems they want brought down are familiar with this kind of tumult.

The furious tempo and nature of the turmoil have made a mess of things for forces that had long lined up across this area’s countless divides. Colliding interests are suddenly mixing it up and deeply held beliefs are having to contend with very inconvenient facts.

The reference here is not to the obvious. It’s always been hilarious but never extraordinary to catch feuding countries in one-night stands or even elicit tangles of the more passionate and lasting kind. Not that Hezbollah and Iran stumbling over Syria much like the US over Yemen and Bahrain is not worth a pause. But what deserves more than a passing thought is the way this upheaval has forced out into the glare of light the unvarnished pragmatism that has long held court among the Arab world’s supposedly die-hard camps. We are used to vilifying the US--and rightly—for putting narrow interest before lofty ideals, but it’s not everyday that we get to witness the most “principled”, not to mention righteous, of us Arabs owning up to and questioning their own handshakes with unsavory regimes.

So far, this serious blow to the decades-old understanding between (let’s call it) the traditional resistance front and “rejectionist” states is one of the Arab uprising’s more interesting if underreported achievements. “‘Resistance’ against Israel [and the US] was for the longest time a pass for savagery against one’s own people, now it has become the very argument against it,” I wrote in an April post. What was deemed, for many in this influential front, a matter of priorities for 60 years has become a blatant contradiction in a mere five months.

Perhaps no intellectual symbolizes this break better than Azmi Bishara, the more thought-full among Arab nationalists and a former Knesset member, who was good enough to dwell on this hardnosed quid pro quo, at long last according the Syrian people precedence over all other considerations. Even journalists and pundits, like the staunchly populist Ibrahim Amin of the Lebanese Akhbar, who remain hopeful (and confident) that Bashar Assad will in fact champion change and lead it in Syria, have had to narrow the gap between their convictions and their politics, emphasizing the imperatives of reform while engaging in the usual conversation about conspiracy.

It is hard to overstress the extent to which “rejectionist” countries, and movements allied with them, relied on these sources of external legitimacy in covering for domestic cruelty and delegitimizing internal dissent. Now the logic no longer holds for those who helped such states make this case to the Arab masses.

Already the question of legitimacy is demanding answers beyond that of Palestine, casting an eye towards those of governance and citizenship. And soon, the discourse on resistance is sure to ponder a more meaningful definition than the longtime favorites of loud posturing and cynical belligerence, neither one of which was ever remotely credible in confronting the daunting challenge of Israel.

Marrying the quest for freedom from occupation to that of freedom from oppression finally has become both urgent and feasible. To the Arab revolt goes the credit for bringing together two pursuits that should have never been apart.

Extraordinarily, this momentous shift is taking place at a critical juncture in the Arab-Israeli impasse. Never has Israel suffered from such an utter lack of imagination, and never has it been so utterly wrong about its many existential quandaries. Never have the Palestinians’ grasp of the utility of nonviolent resistance been sharper and more sensitized to its pull. Never have the Arabs been more keenly aware of the power of their reach and the possibilities of a more dignified life.

But, remarkably, if the Arab Spring and the evolving Palestinian story are threatening to render moot Israel’s strategies of confrontation, they certainly have done the same to Iran and Hezbollah’s. It’s not only the Islamist movement and the Republic’s strategic depth that is endangered by the changing Syrian circumstance; their brand of rejectionism is quickly becoming less convincing as they pick their way through the Arab uprisings.

Hamid Dabashi said it in his piece on “The Dilemma of the Islamic Republic”: “This is the season of exposing hypocrisies, overcoming public secrets, opening the democratic veins of young and robust societies, exposing the clogged arteries of decrepit rulers bereft by their own moral senility.”

Which paradoxically takes us back to that essential matter of pragmatism in the way that we, as a coveted, embattled and now erupting East, deal with powerful forces, local and foreign, whose foothold and interests here are real, deep and pervasive.

Western analysts, Professor Michael Hudson argues, have to revisit their false conceptions of an Arab people who have defied stereotype and expectation. The pressure as well is on their Arab counterparts to move beyond the old paradigms that have placed foreign connivance and hostile encirclement as immovable screens in our interaction with those who mean and have the capacity to influence our region.

Talk of counterrevolution and conspiracy is rampant today, no doubt for good reasons, but we Arabs have just snatched opportunity from the jaws of history, and against such odds. Had we been doomed to a marionette-life, the last five months wouldn’t have been so damned riveting to live and inspiring to watch. One of the more instructive lessons of these revolutionary times is that we are capable of leading and forcing others to cede the initiative.

But practically nothing in the recent literature comes close to a reasonable proposition on how to take Arab aspirations forward in the context of an international arena that simply won’t take no for an answer. Beyond ideology, beyond the narrative of empire, which is as matter of fact as life itself, however dearly we wish it were otherwise, how do we engage with a world that is unavoidably intrusive? To this paramount question, we as Arabs need some serious thoughts that are as rich with nuance and skepticism as they are free of paranoid sloganeering.

The Trouble with Syria

2011-05-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

No country quite like Syria embodies the complexities and contradictions that run through the Arab world the way threads bind a garment of screaming patchworks. But forget for a minute that this is a republic with a crown on its head. Forget that this bastion of resistance never could see the irony in championing Palestinian rights while withholding those of its own people. Forget even that this is a Syria that prides itself on being the beating heart of an Arabhood that never quite came to life and that pines for Lebanon much like an amputee yearns for a severed leg.

As interesting as all this is, it’s not what makes Syria so special. Love it or hate it, Syria matters because for the past 40 years, ever since Hafez Assad seized power, the country has turned from patsy to regional player. War by other means, sabotage as a preamble to diplomacy, or dreaded afterwards should it fail, playing footsy with the forces that inhabit our underworld while shaking hands with the beau monde above: this has been the stuff of Syria’s success in a very tough neighborhood, where the tightest of alliances are drawn in quicksand and the enemy is just as often friend as adversary. It has helped, of course, that Syria itself is the jewel of the Levant, home to the most thorny problem in the area: the Arab-Israeli dilemma. What the geography lacks in resources and wealth, it more than compensates for in trouble.

But Hafez Assad would not have been able to play the outside so confidently, had he not controlled everything and everyone on the inside so well. How else could he have bequeathed it all to his son Bashar, and without so much as a feather daring to ruffle?

Rumor has had it that Bashar is not Hafez. True. The glaring mistakes early in his tenure are proof enough. And yet, for all of his shortcomings, by the time Bashar reached his tenth year in office, Syria had become at once a strategic portal for Turkey, Iran and Israel. In Lebanon, it has proved practically impossible to sidestep or dislodge, even in the worst days of 2005, when its army was ushered out. In Iraq, it has refined the role of spoiler-cum-fixer into a high art. In Palestine, it has given Hamas backbone, denying Mubarak control over that crucial card. With Israel, it has maintained the quietest border on the front and conveniently consolidated all the push buttons of the resistance in Damascus. For Hezbollah and Iran, it has acted like a gaping hole in an Arab Sunni wall.

No, not Jekyll and Hyde, more like Batman this side up, the Joker that side down.

Barely a month ago, President Assad was so sure of his exceptionalism, he boldly declared, “If you did not see the need for reform before what happened in Egypt and in Tunisia, it is too late to do any reform. This is first. Second, if you do it just because of what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, then it is going to be a reaction, not an action; and as long as what you are doing is a reaction you are going to fail.”

He didn’t know it then, but he was actually the first to call it right before Syria actually flared up.

Like all the other masters of this Arab house, Assad thought he knew his people better than anyone else. He turned out to be dangerously misguided. But surely the Syrians must know one or two things about him and the Family. They are no pushovers. They won’t fade into the sunset or retire to Qardaha, from whence they hark. More to the point, they are convinced that, for them and their sect, after defeat comes certain death. Hafez Assad once famously quipped, “Min al qassr ila al qabr,” from the palace to the grave. That’s because, for the Alawites, life only recently has been pretty much exactly the reverse: from the grave to the palace. Call this sect’s centuries-long destitution what you like, but its tormented history is key to understanding its psyche, however different Syria’s present circumstance is.

By way of a peek into a distressingly murky future, most commentators are guessing regime collapse and/or civil strife. But the Assads have more than enough firepower and grit to last for a long time, and in order for civil war to become full-fledged, the opposition will have to be very well armed and financed. So far, and all conspiracy talk aside, neither Saudi Arabia, nor Israel and the US, the oft-cited culprits, are keen on wreaking this kind of havoc or on seeing the back of Assad. Not because they love him so much, but because they cannot imagine Syria and the Levant without him—literally. There’s just too much mayhem in the pipeline, too big of a forest fire to put out (to paraphrase from Nessim Taleb and Mark Blyth’s Black Swan of Cairo) and too many frightening regional eventualities should Syria totally breakdown.

However, this threesome is certainly eager to downsize the country, but getting Assad to compromise over the hot files doesn’t appear achievable now; he’s in combat mode and once more a pariah. So, if there is malicious intent of a sort, it is to sap him, bog him down, deny him that which gave his family’s reign so much strength for the larger part of the past four decades--a very tight grip on Syria itself. Neither killing the regime nor civil war will do the job. But a tired, wobbly and constantly worried Bashar: now that’s something they can live with until he’s finally ready to bargain away his trophies.

As for the Assads, the primary objective is, of course, to stay at the helm. From there, analysts have to walk backwards and see how much they and their faction are willing to give up in order for them to retain the levers of power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is plenty of incentive for them to negotiate their way out of this impasse. Time, though, is running out, and so are their options. The more they wait, the more creative they will have to be with a people fast running out of fear or good will.

Before you waste your time searching the past for clues, precedents, in this case, don’t count for much. This is the first time in 40 years that Syria faces this kind of popular discontent. Back in 1982, it was a very aggressive generation of Muslim Brothers that stirred the pot. They could be cornered, isolated and then snuffed out. This time around, it is the people who first rose up in arms. This time around, the leadership knows there really are no foreign conspiracies, just internal heartbreak. The remedies for it may be very costly, but they are as obvious as they are unavoidable.

Beshweish (Easy Now, or Slowly, Slowly)!

2011-04-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

On Revolution and Counterrevolution

“In the Middle East the reality of continuity has always been masked by a surface impression of cataclysm,” William Dalrymple wrote in From The Holy Mountain, back in the twilight of the old century.

He was on a mission then to capture the last breath of Christianity where it took its first, but his march was inevitably through what felt like a dying Eastern expanse, anguished landscapes that are as lush with color as they are soaked-wet with tears.

The implication of Dalrymple’s panoramas was damning: catastrophe in the Arab world, though real enough, is the flipside of stasis. Excusable. Nineteen ninety-four was not a time of revolution. Dalrymple was not issuing forth on the meaning and possibilities of uprisings, but on those of chronic violence in a place whose stubborn fundamental flaws belied the onrush of change.

We are, however, in revolutionary times today. Not surprisingly, the skeptics are many and talk of counterrevolution is rampant, as well it should be. But in warning against hostile forces, some observers are not just drawing on the example of revolutions old (French) and new (Iranian), they are invoking variations of Dalrymple’s verdict: try as we might, we Arabs are just not in the business of serious change. Our democratic pulse is dangerously faint, our attachment to civil rights is selective and self-serving, our politics is captive to the dictates of religion, our militaries are loath to cede power, our rulers are too brutal, our societies are convulsed by warring sectarian identities, our foreign enemies are many, our history is practically devoid of a single hint that we know how to turn a promising moment into a lived one…

The challenge, really, is too herculean and our will is pint-sized.

Understandably absent from this argument is the inconvenient fact that these were the reasons cited against the probability of an uprising in the first place. Barely, three months ago, most experts were agreeing that Arab regimes had perfected the art of survival, domesticating a once threatening Islamism and securing a whole people’s subservience through a potent mix of terror and bribery.

And yet, here we are in the midst of galling winds that have wiped clean heretofore unshakable vistas from this East.

In the end, all these tremors may amount to nothing more than “surface impressions of cataclysm.” After all, a quick run through a stack of chronological postcards is all one needs to take in the full panoramic measure of the devastation wrought by our enduring defects.

But this tumult already is different from all others that came before it in this sorry pocket of our history. The fury was not decreed by fiat and did not come courtesy of coup d’etat or foreign invasion. It was not hammered out in secret, smoke-filled rooms. It did not choose to express itself through “Islam is the solution.” It did not reflexively reach for the gun, even in now very bloody Libya.

The walls have not crumbled, it is true, but huge slabs are lying in tiny pieces around them. The once impregnable fear barriers have given way everywhere, even in still fearsome Syria. More than this, defunct formulas have been laid to rest and loathsome quid pro quos have been sorely tested. “Resistance” against Israel was for the longest time a pass for savagery against one’s own people, now it has become the very argument against it. If in doubt, ask al Akhbar’s Ibrahim Amin about it. Taboos have become run-of-the mill conversation, as talk of constitutional monarchy in Jordan finally establishes firm anchor.

The whole question of regime legitimacy and what sustains it is now in search of new answers. Paradoxically, for revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike, this has become the inescapable point of departure for those looking to shape the future in their favor, the US and the West included.

So, I suppose, in the presence of the evidence before us so far, it might not be such a bad idea to second-guess conventional wisdom and resist groupthink as we try to assess the prospect of our uprisings. It’s an even better idea to remember that today’s events are not devoid of history; they are in fact carrying within them the full weight and meaning of a fraught 20^th century, even as they deploy and put into play the telltale signs of the 21st.

Take Tunisia and Egypt. Practically everything Tunisians and Egyptians did (and are still doing) since they first rebelled—their stubborn presence on the ground, the sophistication of their tactics, the energy in their demands, the absence of one party and one champion guiding them towards the light…--has a history laden with disappointments and betrayals written all over it. Mythical men and the junkyards overflowing with their broken promises appear to have been left behind in now obsolete times. When “sane” voices pressed for an early compromise, a deep memory and still open wounds counseled otherwise.

This is how Ben Ali fell. This is how Mubarak did not last till September and Suleiman never got to be president. This is how Shafic went the way of Suleiman, and Sherif, Sourour and Azmi, three main enablers of Mubarak’s rule, have fallen one by one.

Most likely, this is also why, much to the chagrin of the army and many besides, “Tahriris” are refusing to let go of their Square, lest acquiescence signal that they have moved on. If Egypt’s Military Council is looking to recalibrate its performance, and if indeed it means to help the country transition to a democracy, it would do well to register the toll decades of deception have taken on the people.

But if the Council and the Muslim Brothers seem at times clumsy and downright crude in their actions, it’s because the new climate is as unfamiliar to them as it is to the “Tahriris” themselves, who could well be very close to overplaying their hand. Politics has just received the kiss of life. True, the military and their Brothers did well in the March 19 constitutional referendum, but the vote was not extraordinary for confirming the obvious—residual trust in the army and the organizational skills of the Islamists--but for laying bare, and so early, the boorish orientation and method of the MB which they’ve been trying so hard to hide. That the give and take is reaching deep into their rank and file and leadership cadre is in itself a significant response to this new age of people power.

None of this says that the revolution is sure to reach safe harbor. Economies are reeling, testing people’s nerves and patience. More ominously, counterrevolution, in Egypt and elsewhere, won’t take no for an answer. It still has a strong reserve of good will in the West, its allies in the region are many, changing sides and positions depending on the country. And needless to say, nothing in these uprisings is the least bit attractive to a very conservative, Shi’it-allergic, cash rich, miffed Gulf region.

But in contemplating what is yet to come, we do need to remember that Bouazizi did not kill himself for spite, Jan 25 did not just happen asudden and from both issued a pretty powerful contagion.

Perhaps the most important hallmark of the past decade in Egypt has been the reinvigoration of three different trends—professional, associational and workforce—within civil society that finally converged and brought the immovable Mubarak down. In “The Paraxis of the Egyptian Revolution,” a MERIP article teeming with superb insight and razor-sharp analysis, Mona al Ghobashy shows how these three trends had years of street and civic action before reaching Tahrir Square on Jan 25.

There was sweat and blood and sacrifice for years before 2011’s face-offs. This is a dynamic that is already grown up and well out of the cradle. Strangling it is not impossible, but it will be very costly and far from easy.

The West is Bad. Now Can We Move On?

2011-03-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

What’s extraordinary about the constant back and forth on double standards in this region is that it is taking place at all.

Regrettably, moral high grounds are too often claimed by many and almost always owned by none. To be lectured by Nicola Sarkozy or Barack Obama about the supremacy of Arab humanity’s quest for freedom and dignity is no more asinine than listening to Ali Khameni or Hassan Nassrallah pounding the lecterns in its name. Tyrannies are constantly giving each other passes and alibis in the Gazan, Syrian, Iranian and Sudanese barracks as they do in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and every other wretched system in the Western camp.

Certainly it is tyranny that makes one of clashing regimes and betrays with such vehemence their shared love of hypocrisy. Here, on the reactionary side, is Saudi Arabia supporting the no-fly zone in Libya while issuing Wahhabist fatwas against popular discontent in the kingdom itself; and there, on the revolutionary side, is the Iranian clerical order celebrating rebellion everywhere around it but warning its own citizens that protesting price increases would be nothing short of treason.

The diehards on both sides, obviously, have their bones to pick in this fight; for the rest of us, the argument is very distracting and all the more annoying because of it. This is not to say that the damned moot point doesn’t belong anywhere in our spats. It does, right at the very beginning of the conversation, so that we can quickly get it out of the way, or at the tail end of it, so that we don’t have to sit through yet another harangue about how everyone wants a piece of us and the beauty of just saying no.

There are, it goes without saying, very grey areas of serious consequence in, say, today’s squabble over Libya, including the selectivity of blunt Western action there. Our fingers have been pointing at countless cynical motivations, from that fat, old fart, greed, to the more interesting one of fear: fear by a West that understood almost immediately after Gaddafi bared his teeth that it would not be easy to recycle him this time around, and so all too quickly declared against him. However, when the maniacal dictator appeared to regain momentum, the West had to move lest he soon enough direct his wrath against them.

Fine! Each reason has its ardent followers and an army of experts to egg them on. Along with rigorous political analysis that is paying due respect to uniqueness of location, the presence of human agency and its fallibilities and possibly employable tensions between the interests and tactics of longtime friends, we have, Oh, woe is me, it must be the oil, a one-liner that always wants to play the ode.

The basic truth is that the West is not (and has never ever been) here to do us Arabs any favors. And while, as a matter of principle and law, we have the perfect right to insist (always) on non-interference in our affairs, we also have the basic wits—and certainly the experience--to know that this right roams our earth an orphan.

We also have enough sense in us to admit that temporary marriages of convenience between the worst of friends happen all the time here. We surely have enough intelligence to appreciate that mining openings and opportunities goes both ways, and being the victim is not the only role at our disposal. Mistaking deep convictions for sound reasoning has no place in serious debates about paths forward. Not unless we want to kick ourselves out of this round of history as well.

However cynical its long term intentions in Libya may be, this much is stark clear about the West’s current military operations in it: they did help avert a bloodbath and they did stop Gaddafi in his tracks. Because of it, Libya is still in play and change in the Middle East can still savor yet another victory.

Some of us on the outside can afford to quibble with these facts, but the Libyans themselves, including Gaddafi, are dead sure about them.

There is much that Western intervention will not solve and much it no doubt will complicate, none more important than the shape of a Libya(s) free of Africa’s king of kings, but there is quite a bit in it for rebelling Libyans to exploit, most crucially the breather it is giving them to regroup and tip the balance in their favor.

It’s not neat, it’s not pretty, but it’ll have to do for now.

****

We are a well-endowed, strategically located region forever exposed.

No matter!

For the West, the most screaming of the past two months’ realizations is that the Arab people do have a say. Had not enough Tunisians and Egyptians made their stubborn stand, Sarkozy’s henchmen would still be tipsy at sea with Tunisia’s Trabelsis and the White House would still be all tangled up explaining why Husni, for all his blemishes, is not Ben Ali.

Here’s another realization for us Arabs to keep close by as we plow ahead: the West’s eternal love of stability can be just as much a push for change as against it. Even conspirators listen when they’re made to.

Frankly, the uprisings are haggling in high stakes, chaotic, unpredictable, dead serious times. A few years from now, we could well be looking at completely new geographies and living in totally different political climates, some imaginably sunny, others possibly still grim and damp. Crying foul is good and right, but to those who are always itching to vent, think overture and not an entire symphony, so that we can get on with the very messy business of wringing out of these changes a more promising life.

Already in Egypt, counterrevolution is in overdrive. Already malicious intent is conspiring with business as usual to pick on women, belittling the revolution and making a mockery of its nascent achievements. Mubarak is gone, but deep in the well of the system are cliques of bureaucrats, thugs and army men working hard to paint on the same old ugly legacy a fresh face.

And since we’re on the subject of foreign busybodies and rabble-rousers, watch how this neighborhood’s old hands, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, rev up their energies and deploy their resources as trouble ups its tempo in the Levant. There is plenty for them to spoil in this upheaval, at times hand-in-hand, at others at loggerheads. Looking for interesting scenarios? Watch how they all—each for their own reasons—come together for the Assads in Syria and battle it out in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen.

This is the test that is before us, and it is about to get much harder. But, as a good woman from the human rights community put it to me the other day, “Democracy is as strong as the people force it to be.” Similarly, the West is as amenable as we force it to be.

Yes, the West may be bad. Get over it! We need to move on.

So, What Gives?

2011-03-11T07:33:00.000-08:00

On Niall Ferguson, Benjamin Barber and the Moment

Which is it, the moment or the medium, that is failing historians like Niall Ferguson and Benjamin Barber? Reading them in Newsweek and Foreign Policy or watching them on CNN, one is astonished at the chagrin with which an historic Arab jolt is first disparaged and then swiftly thereafter dispatched as so much unruly history.

To be fair, they’re two among many who seem to be suffering from acute discombobulation when speculating on the meaning and implications of the recent Arab uprisings. The unbearable pressures of the times perhaps.

Still, you would have liked to see intellectual rigor—at least in the normally feisty and audacious Ferguson--meet, as equal, this momentous turn of events. Even Christopher Hitchens, who in Vanity Fair takes a machete to hope for Egypt, bows willingly to nuance and the relevant detail of history.

So, what gives for Ferguson et al?

Is it far too many years and too much energy invested in a sure way of thinking about us Arabs, and then we upped and made a mess of it all?

It’s not the party pooping that is objectionable. Although I find myself easily agreeing with one of the comments on Ferguson’s article in Newsweek that he “seems to value the search for controversy as much as the search for truth,” playing the devil’s advocate is almost always useful, especially in heady times of euphoria.

Moreover, we all hold Ferguson’s caveats about revolutions--the deceivingly bright early hour, the ensuing vacuum into which the most organized (and hard-line) political groups jump and lay siege to, the tyranny that is almost sure to follow…—as self-evident. Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution (for one) sits just as well read and comfy on many a shelf in this region as it does on his.

But if indeed the future could become very untidy for us Arabs, it’s all the more reason for the head scratchers out West to avoid a cut and paste effort in explaining the nature and consequences of the tumult.

It’s this failure of nerve and imagination that frankly leaves the observer in full smirk mode. I don’t expect Ferguson to cheer revolting Arabs on—God forbid--but I do expect him to put up a better fight against them. His aversion to UnAmerican Revolutions is so feebly argued, the reader begins to suspect he’s desperately trying to yawn his way out of his contract with Newsweek.

He chides the two-year old presidency of Obama for cutting back on US investments in local reformists (what we call here the kiss of death) and for failing to exploit divisions within Islamism, with hardly a line about how and where, and then he offers this piercing abbreviation of George Bush’s winning strategy in the Middle East: “…Bush put an end to all that double talk by practicing as well as preaching a policy of democratization—using force to establish elected governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Surely an endorsement ringing enough to wake Karzai up from his drug induced stupor and make him run in yet another free and fair election. As for ending the double talk, Saudi Arabia’s women are still bending over backward in thanks to the Bush Administration.

After moping from one sloppy assertion to another, Ferguson reaches this unusually prescient conclusion:

“In the absence of an American strategy, the probability of a worst-case scenario creeps up every day—a scenario of the sort that ultimately arose in revolutionary France, Russia, and China….

Yes, Americans love revolutions. But they should stick to loving their own.”

Well, that’s helpful. It kinda puts that whole strategy thing into perspective.

If you really want to distill from Ferguson’s point some kind of an essence, it can only be this: better a thousand times regime change by foreign force (costs included) than a homegrown, down-top crack at it. Why? Because, well, just because…it’s neater that way.

So, first they shame you for not having it in you, then they want to spank you for proving them wrong.

Benjamin Barber (to Fareed Zakaria in GPS/CNN), poor man, is “ambivalent” about all these new winds blowing through the Arab world—and rightly so--but not a tad bit about his role in laundering the likes of Saif al-Islam and his father’s Libya. When pressed in Foreign Policy, the most he can muster is, I am not the only opportunist--or buffoon--around (“wrong, who got it wrong?”); the entire Western establishment was in on it, including Human Rights Watch, Blackstone, Blair, and Prince Andrew. “I mean, it's just 20/20 hindsight.”

It’s not that Barber was alone (or unique) in choosing to work within oppressive systems to try to reform them, but his choice does compel him, doesn’t it, to point to a single tangible improvement Saif can own up to after seven no doubt hard years of changing his father’s nasty habits—just one credible reform that helped make the lives of Libyans less terrified or more dignified and helped make Barber’s own involvement with the highfalutin heir apparent somewhat less embarrassing to him and his judgment.

But frankly, this is just too silly. All of it! The temptation is to laugh it away--except for that same nagging question I had upon reading Martin Amis’s Horrorism about Islamism in the English Guardian five years ago: “Why would a man with his pulsating intellect, a man who seems to know enough and know it well write as if he knows nothing at all?”

In truth, mainstream media are not ideal platforms for historians or authors at their most ponderous. But nuance and intellectual integrity don’t need much room and they don’t need a special podium.

It’s not the medium that is failing Ferguson and Barber; it’s the moment.

Small Fry

2011-03-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, at a small dinner party, a friend of mine chided me for ignoring Lebanon in my posts. “Why the silence?”

“Small fry, it’s because we’re small fry,” was my comeback.

I am hiding the varnish in this post because I suspect that sugarcoating very embarrassing realities in the midst of swirling events would only serve to further confuse an already confusing situation.

Political earthquakes in other Arab countries have pushed us out of the limelight. But it’s the cruel contrast between entire nations finally rising to the occasion and us sinking deeper into our Lebanese morass that has exposed us for the tiny people that we are.

Watch us now squabbling over ministries, fighting over quotas and under the table deals as other people clamor for dignity and citizenship. While we twist in the wind, they’re busy unleashing it against once omnipotent systems.

If you have been wondering as of late about our civil society, the answer is literally standing there desperate for you to catch it. Legend has it—at least among those who have concocted it out of their vivid imagination—that, in 2005, Lebanon rose first and sang away Syrian domination. True, more than one third of the population did come out, some of them genuinely (if naively) on the lookout for progressive ideas, but then, as with everything Lebanese, a possibly interesting moment turned into a hoax. Quickly enough, the Sect spread its wings, lest any of its children take themselves seriously, and swept them back into the fold.

Lebanon today withers precisely because there is no civil society fighting for it. There are just civic-minded individuals, lone voices in a cold, hostile, terrible sectarian wilderness. Guess how many Lebanese heeded the call for a civil state a few days ago? 2000.

No wonder, nearly everybody is shrugging us out of the picture. Even al Akhbar, the leading local daily, has relegated us to its midsection. Siyyed Hassan Nassrallah himself huffs and puffs about occupying Galilee if—that is if--Israel dares attack, but the warning falls on Arab politics much like pennies on a carpet.

Funny thing is, right about when Tunisia happened, Lebanon itself was hit by yet another political tornado. But juxtaposed against the mighty sight of Tunisia, we looked like the spoilt crybabies of the region.

As I write, not even Lebanon’s naval gazers, including quite a few of its own occupants, can muster the strength to waste time on this one.

****

Still, as my friend pleaded, we are part of this neighborhood and, satisfying as ignoring us is, Lebanon does deserve a couple of lines on its predicament if only because it is the go-to place when powers want to make a point or pick an argument.

So, here are a few lines on the latest:

Last month, in quick sequence that is astounding for the oft slumberous pace of Lebanese politics, the Syrian-Saudi deal over the special tribunal for the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri collapses under US (and some Saudi) pressure, Hezbollah and its allies resign from Sa’ad Hariri’s cabinet and, when all were looking straight ahead, out from the other end emerges ex-Prime Minister and current parliamentarian Najib Mikati (by any measure neither a particular friend of Hezbollah’s nor a staunch ally of Syria’s) to get 69 out of 128 parliamentary endorsements and sets out to form a new government.

Sunni Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri, son of the slain Rafic, head of the largest parliamentary bloc and the mightiest man in his sect is not only brought down but thrown out by the Shiite Party of God and Syria’s Bashar, with barely a growl from his Sunni clan, a peep from Riyadh and the briefest of wait-and-see-statements from the White House.

One of the thickest redlines that zigzag through every artery of this country is thus crossed and the only ones boohooing are Sa’ad and his March 14chums. By way of coups, they really don’t come smoother than that.

Hezbollah and Syria’s arm-twisting was transparent and, it goes without saying, predictable. The quick footwork was the surprise. When everybody thought the “coup” would be loud, rough, all-or-nothing, possibly even bayonet lead, and made their calculations accordingly, the Shiite movement and our Syrian neighbor went creative.

Not that Mikati is close to forming a cabinet, mind you. After all, why would Syria help us pretend that we can run things by ourselves when we clearly can’t? To those cursing it, I say salute it instead.

****

When mulling over the nonsense that goes for politics in this place, there are three conclusions you should seriously flirt with, neither one of which, by the way, signals anything remotely intriguing about its future.

Let’s start small: the Hariri House rose with Rafic and it died with him. The feather-like fall of a Sunni prime minister at the hands of a Hezbollah-led, Syrian directed coalition means that Saudi Arabia—partly because of the unnerving incompetence of Sa’ad the son—is revisiting its old Hariri-driven Lebanon policy. A 20-year tradition has thus come to an ignominious end, none more so than for the family itself. From here on, expect the Saudis to reach out to a wider circle of Sunni faces in representing its Lebanese interests.

This doesn’t in any way imply that the Hariris are retiring from politics—although one hopes they’re inching closer to that option--but it does indicate that, as of now, it is perfectly reasonable for the public to shrink this overinflated balloon back down to size.

More than this, the ease with which presumably screaming-red sectarian lines were trampled upon confirms that the ground rules of Lebanese politics are fictitious, pretty much like the country itself, and are little more than expressions of the moods and whims of foreign patrons. It sounds like I am stating the obvious, but, believe it or not, there are still many who think that the local scene and its complex web of conventions actually count. They do, until they don’t. There are no real internal guideposts for the way of things, only external ones.

And that’s only one of so many reasons why we’re such small fry.

That’s not my angry voice you’re hearing in this piece, it’s the sound of my heart breaking.

If Turns into When…

2011-02-16T00:09:00.000-08:00

Listening to the effusive statements of support for the people of Egypt and the “unfolding” Islamic revolution in the land of the Nile by virtually the entire leadership of Iran, I was reminded of that wonderful Persian adage: “You say something; I believe it. You insist; I begin to wonder. You swear on it; I know you’re lying.”

The dear gentlemen could well be autocrats at their most clueless, but the look and feel is that of a clumsy brood scrambling to own a narrative that has disowned them even in their very own country. As if to make sure that the lie was not lost on any of us, their chest pounding was taking place in full view of renewed house arrests, imprisonments and clampdowns on opposition websites and news outlets.

The twin tools of oppression and appeasement, not to mention talk of foreign conspiracies, are, of course, almost identical to Mubarak’s and those of every other maestro still standing. Different from each other as all these despots are, when push comes to shove they all become brothers in arms: same tactics, same rhetoric, same textbook, really, and a frightening (or reassuring, as the case maybe) paucity of imagination.

Perhaps Iran’s strongmen are under the firm impression that their time-tested methods will prevent a repeat of upheaval on their own streets, those that in fact were the first in the area to agitate against power in 2009. Perhaps they feel that they have already weathered past unrest and are now home free, ready to reap the windfall of a collapsing Arab order. Perhaps, like Bashar Assad, they think that Palestine and populism have placed them on the right side of history.

We soon shall see. But of the many messages that are hanging everywhere on Ben Ali and Mubarak’s exits, like post-it-notes on the clipboard of history, one reads like a thrilling dispatch from the trenches:

If has finally turned into When…All bets are off…For everybody…

Each and every locale, however unique its features and many its complexities, deserves to be in our sight. But already, the lines that had defined the old geopolitical map don’t count. Israel, only three months ago, looked across the entire Arab landscape and, except for a bump or two, saw flatlands all the way to Turkey and Iran. In good time, it could well be the Arabs (and Palestinians) who will turn more challenging and Iran more bland.

But gone as well are the challenges of the old, familiar kind. If, indeed, dignity is the lead aspiration and grievance in Tunisia and Egypt, it is because of so much more than Palestine. Citizenship, it might help Bashar and AhmadiNejad to know, is the cause for which Tunisians and Egyptians marched. That old one-two of brute force and breadcrumbs--that’s the rule of thumb that the Tunisian and Egyptian people have just retired.

Gone, finally, is the smug certainty that the Arab person just does not have it in them; that the security state can guarantee continuity in the absence of leadership; that fear is a good enough substitute for performance; that inhuman treatment and indecency can be camouflaged by lofty rhetoric, even if the name of God himself is invoked as fan and sponsor.

If arrogance and contempt for the Arab person did Ben Ali and Mubarak in, so they shall Israel and, yes, all those lined up with or against it in the region.

****

Conjecture has become all of a sudden fun. But of all the newfound realities competing for our attention, two have grabbed for themselves seats in the front: the imperative of open dissent and the beauty of nonviolence. The rest--and there are many making their entrance--need patience and more time still.

To be sure, that decades-long debate among clean, serious and well intentioned people on the feasibility of working within repressive systems to improve them has finally been settled: the proposition is not only silly, it is downright dangerous.

So, for those who have long hoped that discreet prodding is more than enough to persuade stern men to become more gentle; or for those who have long believed that islands of excellence can swim in a sea of muck; or for those who have long compared regimes and thanked their stars that they live under this ugly one and not that merciless one; or for those who have long kept silent about unbearable humiliation because Palestine comes first, Tunisia and Egypt have rendered a clear answer.

Whispers by these good people will have to turn into open reservations, private demands into public declarations. They will have to lobby and put conditions in the glare of light, make their voice part of the conversation. There is no case anymore for acquiescence, but there is a very compelling one for change and hope, and they have to be its most passionate advocates.

Nonviolence is a thing of beauty that Tunisia and Egypt have made live again. If Palestine was becoming increasingly unlikely because of the scandalous duplicity of Abbas and the astonishing idiocy of Hamas, the nonviolence of the Tunisian and Egyptian resistance has just recast it as doable.

Now is the time for the Palestinians to commit wholesale to peaceful resistance for Palestine, as some of them have been doing in the villages and by the Wall. The task is daunting and the facts on the ground are extremely unfriendly; however, the Palestinians have the pedigree, the experience and a strong network of alliances that reaches into the heart of Israel and the West. They have a stumped, stark naked enemy in the Israeli occupation. They have the cause and the world’s attention if they want it—but only for the briefest of moments.

“Lesson Over…”

2011-02-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

From an Egyptian banner, “Lesson over, stupid.” (Intaha al darss ya ghabi).

In the last post, sent out barely a few days before Egypt raged, I offered a closing insight that perhaps many felt—especially those always on the look out at for their favorite scarecrow, the Islamists--was a little too hopeful:

“So far, the 21^st century has proved anything but dull. Perhaps one of the more interesting recent developments of the past five years is the way energized civil societies have been surprising the powers that be, fundamentalists included. In these testy times, neither pseudo-secular states nor Islamism need feel entirely too comfortable should the time for change finally come.”

Well, Egypt’s civil society has risen to the occasion, and I suspect that its Islamic fundamentalists were no less surprised than Mubarak himself. For in turning out in the streets, Egyptians finally needed neither the prodding nor the guidance of the former, and feared neither the ire nor the retribution of the latter.

In figuring out the next phase in Egypt’s tumult, this fact should be reverberating in every observer’s reasoning.

Now we have to see how the army plays along. I am betting that it will soon decide that it has very little choice but to uproot Mubarak and the top brass of his regime, if only to preserve its discretionary powers as ultimate arbiter in Egypt. To forfeit its extraordinary standing and aura within Egyptian society for the sake of a totally discredited, exposed, openly reviled and doddering ruling elite would be unfathomable even if its interests do not really clash with theirs.

In any case, we won’t have to wait too long—days or hours--for the answer.

****

But as entrancing as it is to watch Tunisians and Egyptians drawing, in the midst of the fog and storms, the face of their future, I would like to obsess about those features of years past that made these two peoples convulse with such unanticipated relentlessness.

I will not waste time on an anatomy of chronic frustration and disappointment, because as telling as it would be, it won’t explain what made quiet anguish turn into loud fury.

Suffice it to say that everywhere your gaze turned as of late, it looked like a pile up of pain colliding head on from every direction. Endemic poverty, appallingly bad governance, crony capitalism that embarrassed even IMF’s most ardent diehards, unvarnished repression… And since Arab youth are the stars of the moment, dire predictions about their loitering anger has long been at the heart of practically every worthy read on this region’s predicament.

And yet, in glaring view of this mess, only the most sensitive of eyes detected restless lives. It’s as if Arab authoritarianism had unlocked the secret to permanent rule, however atrocious it gets. The joke that ran around like a fact, until Bouazizi burned himself alive and brought Tunisia to its feet, was that the more the world changes, the more Arabs want to stay the same.

So, what made a presumed deaf mute scream?

Of all the reasons racing to the finish line, one might just make it ahead of the rest once havoc settles down: in the end, Ben Ali and Mubarak had simply gone too far. Hold the “no shit, Sherlock!” because this rationale is not as plain and straightforward at it sounds.

Having neutered (murdered, exiled, jailed, tortured, spied on, infiltrated, scared the wits out of…) all organized political opposition, rendering it either too feeble (the left) or demonizing it out of contention (political Islam), Ben Ali and Mubarak assumed the system had become impregnable against rupture.

Once in that frame of mind, a certain kind of cannibalism became the way of once clever, ears-to-the-ground men. They started mindlessly eating into every sector and strata of society—middle classes, intelligentsia, labor, professional associations, etc—whose tacit support or acquiescence, at a minimum, is vital for continuity.

Contempt took over with deafening effect. Whatever stirrings the regimes registered, they deemed as the usual blather of spineless disaffection. And in fact, Egypt, for one, has been rumbling for quite some time, but the system, thinking its powers limitless, judged the movements little more than trouble whining from the far edges of the garden.

****

It is hardly surprising, then, that revolt, when it came to Tunisia and Egypt, different as they are, was anything but organized. I mean, is it not extraordinary that in both countries pervasive intelligence services failed in predicting, let alone preempting the uproar?

The truth is that while Ben Ali, Mubarak and their men kept thinking in the box, the people upped and decided to walk wholesale out of it.

As an Egyptian friend of mine just told me, “So many things came into place and the timing, unbeknownst to all of us, was right.”

Khaled Said, the blogger who was beaten to death in 2010 by the police, the years of labor action to no avail, the church bombing that warned of a community cajoled into falling apart, the rigged parliamentary elections that reaped 97% of the vote for the official party with such impunity…

And then Twitter and facebook that could not be silenced no matter how hard the bad boys tried.

These were clear signs that this rule had just gone too far.

Once Ben Ali fell, Egyptians could only ask themselves, Why not Mubarak as well?

A pollster told me recently, “fear works.”

It does, but only for a while.

There are lessons for us as we forecast who’s next.

The question is: Are the rulers still standing actually listening?

Letter from Egypt

2011-01-28T06:45:00.000-08:00

From Yasmina in Egypt, in the very early hours of Egypt's Day(s) of Rage.

(Yasmina, forgive the impromptu and selective translation...)

Well, happy that you went down at noon?...

I am glad you’re here tonight.

The question provoked me.

Was it a picnic that I was going to?

Is it not a must for me to be there?

Or do I have a feather in my head?

And all those young ones out there; they’re, what?

Sons of dogs?...

But I did go yesterday behind my parents’ back…

All passion…

Anguished chants. “ This situation cannot go on.”

Would you believe, all these throngs… and no bissbiss,

no hisshiss?

People, old and young, with money and without,

wanting the same thing: to bring the regime down.

And how magnificent that,

“One, two, the Egyptian people, where are you?”

But then I had to leave…

Demonstrations in the afternoon picked up speed.

With my parents at home.

Feel the pulse, I thought.

“So what if I joined?”

Are you stupid, or have you gone mad?”…

I was about to go mad…

Are these people down there defending

a country not my own?

But then I did go down today, behind their back.

Everything is different.

Violence!

Security, security, security, everywhere.

Youth running.

Tanks.

Tear gas.

Disquiet in the heart.

The “wasps” came to push the crowds…

Tear gas.

Left, right.

Up and down.

Pac-Man like.

I walk…

Ambulances

Tala’t Harb…

Mohammad Farid…

Mohammad Basioni…

This is a fearful regime pretending it is not,

A clueless government pretending it is,

A crooked employee playing honest,

A grimy human being playing clean.

Today is not yesterday.

Chaos! Brutality!

...

The Original Arabic Text

ها انبسطتى لما روحتى الظهر؟
بس انا مبسوطة ان انت مروحتيش بالليل؟
اسئلة استفزتنى, هو انا راحة رحلة علشان انبسط ؟ ده واجب عليه
ولا انا على راسي ريشة والشباب اللى بيروح يتظاهر دول ولاد كلب؟ هو مش مهم لو حصلهم حاجة? امال لو مرحناش مين اللى حيغيير.
للاسف انا روحت امبارح الظهر من ورا اهلى روحت وكان كلى حماس وقد ايه كل حاجة كانت متحضرة بنهتف بحرقة فعلا مش عاجبنا حال البلد. تصدقوا مع كل الاعداد دي ما حد عاكس ولا بسبس ولا حسحس. كل الناس كبير اوصغير معاه فلوس او ممعاهوش كان يريد حاجه واحده "اسقاط النظام ويا سلام علي "واحد اتنين, الشعب المصري فين" ونشاور للناس فى بيوتها اللي بتتفرج علينا ملبلكونة ونشجعها تنزل وكنت بسئل هى الناس دى مستنية ايه علشان يبقى ليها دور وتنزل فالشارع, هما مبسوطين كمتفرجين, هما مبسوطين فى حياتهم وراضين بحالهم وحال الدنيا. وبعد شوية للاسف اضطريت امشى في نصف اليوم وسيبت المظاهرة امام محكمة النقض عند الاسعاف فى تجمهر كبير متسالم.
وروحت البيت وبعد شوية ابتديت المظاهرات تشد حيلها اوي عند بيتنا وبقينا انا واهلى المتفرجين. فقولت اجس النبض
-         فيها ايه يعنى لو نزلت؟
-         انتي عبيطة ولا اتجننتى؟ ممكن في اي وقت يقلب بضرب
-         طاب حأنزل اشوف صحابى
-         لالا مافيش نزول خالص النهاردة
وكانت كلمة لا رجعة فيها, كنت ساعتها فعلا حتجنن, ازاى مش حأنزل تانى واكمل اللى ابتديته؟ منا شايفة انها سلمية, يعنى هما اللى نزلوا فالشارع بيدفعوا على بلد غير بلدى؟ هما اهلى مش مضايقين من النظام ولا مبسوطين فيه؟ ولا هما كبار وانا لسه عيلة؟
الحقيقة انا طلعت جبانة لانى مقدرتش اقف قدام أهلى علشان اغير فكرهم, امال ازاى عايزة أغيير النظام؟؟؟؟؟
و تانى روحت النهاردة فالخفا وبالصدفة فى نفس مكان مسيبت المظاهرة امبارح, بس كل حاجة كانت متغيرة ووحشية.
امن امن امن بالشوم في كل حتة وشباب بيجري نحيتنا وواحد واقف جوه عربية مضرعة وبينشن فيهم قنابل الغاز.
وقلبي انقبض... والدبابير جت تمشى الحشود ومجموعة امن ماشية تهش الحشود بالبنادق المسيلة. كان منظرهم زى pac man يمين شمال فوق تحت متبرمجين ومش فاهمين.
لاقيت ان ماليش لازمة انا مش جايه اتفرج على بهدلت شعبى, انا جايه اقول اللى فى قلبى.
ومشيت وعديت عربيات الامن:
في الاسعاف:14 عربية
طلعت حرب : 8
محمد فريد: 6
محمد بسيونى 4
شوارع كتيرة معرفش اسمها بتوٌصل للتحرير ما بين 4 الى 8 في كل شارع
مطلع الكوبري يجى 15
ميدان عابدين يجى 16
كان فيه حوالى 150عربية حوالين ميدان التحرير ده طبعا غير المضرعات اللى يا بترش ميه يا بتنش غاز.
وجنب بيتى عند مطلع كوبري اكتوبر كان فيه 12 عربية علشان يمنعوا حد يروح التحرير.
ده نظام خايف وعامل نفسه مش خايف...
ودي حكومة مش عارفة وعاملة نفسها عارفة
وده موظف مش امين وعامل نفسه امين
وده بنى ادم مش نضيف وعامل نفسه نضيف

بس المهم انهاردة الناس اللي فالشارع اتغيرت, مش كلهم زي امبارح, الهمج والعنف ابتدى, يمكن علشان فيه ناس اتشجعت تشارك فعلا جعانة ومستبيعة وطفحة الكوتة.
وقد ايه كان فيه مخبرين و امن لابسين ملكى عادي , علشان يتوهوا ويقفشوا فالشباب من غير ميبقوا باينيين قوى.
25 يناير غير 26 يناير.
حتى انهاردة اتعكست مهو 25خلص وشكرا على كده ونرجع بقى نطلع الكبت
بس ياتري 28 يناير و 4 فبراير وسبتمبر و2011 حيحصل فيها ايه؟
ياتري حسنى بيفكر في ايه وحالنا ليه بقي كده يا مصر يا مصرياللى بتاعتى بس اتنهبتى واحنا بنتفرج.
العمارة اللى قدام مدخل محكمة النقض فالاسعاف اسمها عمارة الشواربى باشا بصوا عليها, ادخلوا مداخلها الاربعة, شوفوا الفن والزخرفة وانتم تعرفوا ليه يا خسارتك يا مصرياللي بتاعتى بس اتنهبى واحنا بنتفرج
مش عارفة اقول قوم يا مصرى ولا خلاص مافيش فايدة حاجة تتصلح وتتغيير. حنتبدى من فين ولا فين.

قوم يا مصري مصري دايما بتناديك
رجعلى نصري وامجادى وحياة عينيك

The Larger Context (Part 2)

2011-01-22T05:49:00.000-08:00

Islamism and the Tunisian Test Case

When Hazem Amin was researching the life of Abu Qtadeh, the mufti of al Qaeda in North Africa, for The Orphaned Salafi, he went to Ras al Ain, in Amman, Jordan, where the mufti grew up. During the course of an interview with one of the neighborhood residents, the gentleman explained to Amin that “religion here is the stuff of life.”

This statement encapsulates the remarkable achievement of Islamism over the past four decades. For political Islam has never been only about politics, but about social transformation—and hence the catchall “Islam is the answer.” The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) might own this motto but, today, millions of Muslims, many of whom don’t belong to the party, live by it.

That the Gods were smiling upon Islamism, whatever its creed, from the 1960s until well into the 1990s is a well-known fact. Had the US not embraced the trend to fend off Soviet influence; had Saudi Arabia not pumped massive amounts of money to saturate the region with fundamentalist notions, particularly its own Wahhabist version; had the mullahs not taken over Iran in 1978; had the supposed secularism of our dictatorships, monarchies and “republics” alike, not been so self-serving, dubious and capricious…Islamism’s hard work would have turned much harder.

And you’ve got to hand it to them, they did work hard: home-to-home, school-to-school, mosque-to-mosque, law-by-law, rich and poor, one veil at a time, until whole sections of Arab society imbibed and finally internalized the social and political precepts of fundamentalist thought.

The true measure of Islamism’s success is this magnificent reach and not the specific clout of any individual politico-religious party.

****

A public arena divvied up between Islamic fundamentalism and the pseudo-secular Arab state: this is the dynamic that came to dominate the regional scene in the last quarter of the 20th century.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that in the latest (December 2010) Pew/Gallup Poll on Muslim Attitudes, pluralities of Egyptians (85%) and Jordanians (76%) approve of Islamic influence over political life, just as they do gender segregation (Egypt/54%, Jordan/50%), the stoning of people who commit adultery (Egypt/82%, Jordan/70%) and the death penalty (Egypt/84%, Jordan/85%) for those who leave the Muslim religion.

It’s not surprising as well that all responses cut across age and gender: men and women, older generations and younger are more or less on the same page.

Extraordinarily, this mindset sits almost oblivious next to the respondents’ favorite form of government. Yep, you guessed it! Democracy (Egypt/59%, Jordan/69%). As if to say, these tenets are givens (mussalamat), matters of belief, where democratic practice has no say and no business.

I have my quibbles with the poll,* among them the unhelpfully small number of Arab countries (Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon) covered in it. Therefore, these results, although echoed in other studies, are best appreciated as qualitative insights, although it is hard to imagine, for example, how the Arab Gulf would exhibit more liberal inclinations.

Still what is instructive about the survey is the stark contrasts it reveals between societies that espouse different systems. In Turkey, a full 31% of respondents view Islam’s role in politics negatively, as opposed to 38% who view it positively. Moreover, the Turks’ aversion to gender segregation (13%), stoning for adultery (16%) and the death penalty (5%) for those who abandon Islam becomes all the more telling when juxtaposed against Jordan and Egypt’s keen support for them.

One does not want to give in easily to the temptations of oversimplification, but, surely, Turkey’s relatively stable democracy and the longstanding secular streak of the state are relevant factors in it’s notable lack of enthusiasm for these “harsh laws,” as the poll describes them.

(I would have liked to include Lebanon in these quick juxtapositions, but I still have too many questions about the research methodology for that country).

****

All of which makes extremely annoying the exclusion of Tunisia from the survey, for this first country to walk out on the so-called Arab order also happens to be the one state that insisted on its secular character.

Part of the exceptionalism of the Tunisian revolt is that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was thrown out for bread and butter without any meddling from God and Crescent. Where other regimes were content to spar with fundamentalism all while incorporating quite a bit of what it preaches, the Tunisian one was vociferous about combating it everywhere it could catch it, along with all other forms of opposition. Which pretty much explains the near absence of any organized effort behind the recent street protests that helped flip the army and bring down the tyrant.

As Tunisians begin their baby steps into a suddenly unpredictable future, and as we watch how the wind will blow in other Arab corners, this difference between Tunisia and its Arab sisters may prove the most salient yet.

****

No one really knows if Ben Ali’s fall will turn into a contagion. If anything, Tunisia’s bad circumstance was still palpably better than that of its neighbors. Clearly, the answer lies just as much with the top echelons of intelligence services and armies as it does in the people’s readiness for serious (and necessarily fatal) action.

But since pundits are beginning to indulge again in ritual speculations about the Arab status quo, it seems necessary to remind those who are captive to stale conventional wisdoms that Islamism, over the course of the past 40 years, had in fact grown into a main fixture of it, in power (Sudan, Gaza, Saudi Arabia…) and out (Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Algeria…).

Track records are just as available for Sudan’s Bashir and Hamas as they are for the Palestinian Authority, for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as they are for Mubarak, for Jordan’s Brothers as they are for the Hashemites. There is no need for head scratching and conjecture here.

Needless to say, after September 11 and Iraq, you need not be curious about the kind of life Salafi-Jihadis propose for the Middle East.

This has been our Arab order for a long time now. If age has been unkind to it, it has been unkind all around.

Islamism, no doubt has considerable mass appeal, but these are not the 1980s, and success did bring with it extreme exposure. If walls begin to fall and the space that opens up is, in fact, allowed or forced to be capacious, Islamism, strong as it is, very likely will have to contend with competing forces, faint though they currently are.

So far, the 21^st century has proved anything but dull. Perhaps one of the more interesting recent developments of the past five years is the way energized civil societies have been surprising the powers that be, fundamentalists included. In these testy times, neither they nor the pseudo-secular states need feel entirely too comfortable should the time for change finally come.

* Most of the questions do not have more focused follow-ups; bizarrely, the questionnaires did not include definitions to certain concepts before testing them; and, most inconceivable of all, in Lebanon the team apparently conducted the survey in Hezbollah territory without a chaperone.

The Mutating Tragedy of Salafi-Jihadism (Part I)

2011-01-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

On the murders in Alexandria and Punjab and Hazem Amin’s new book The Orphaned Salafi

In a region riven with violence, a silencer long favored by the state before it became an article of faith for the fanatically “faithful,” what’s a Coptic church bombing in Alexandria or a murder of a defiant Punjabi governor, Salam Taseer, who dared “blaspheme”?

Rack them up, reflex urges you, for these are only the latest distress signals from a chronically troubled people. And true enough, you can actually run a line of connecting dots from Gaza to Sana’a to Darfur to Nahr al Bared to Cairo, Baghdad and Kandahar. The common denominators are a few, the shared experiences many.

Confronted by an unnerving blend of low-grade hate and full-fledged mayhem, the predictable—and dangerous—reaction by many is a contentment to let thoughts float on the surface of seemingly inexorable events, because, well, this is the Middle East, after all.

And when a hideous act demands some kind of an answer, the habit is to dump it in the lap of extremists, be they—depending, of course, on who’s making the argument--in cahoots with or the duped mercenaries of foreign masters, renegades from otherwise nonviolent fundamentalist camps, or desperate individuals simply unhinged by an abundance of poverty, humiliation and tyranny.

It’s not that Extremism is the wrong answer; it’s just a non-answer. As an Arabic proverb has it, it’s like “explaining water with water.” It takes you everywhere and nowhere. When you utter it, it’s as if you’ve said absolutely nothing at all. Worst still, it’s a wonderful escape hatch. Walk through it and all you need to do is cut and paste the standard set of band aid solutions: symbolic goodwill gestures towards the victims, branding the perpetrators as alien to society and system, an orgiastic show of national pride and unity, anti terrorism clampdowns and, always, blaming the outsider.

But there is something very specific and very disturbing to be said about the murders in Alexandria and Punjab and much of the violence in this heaving and burning expanse. And Hazem Amin’s just published The Orphaned Salafi (Saki Books, 190 pages), a fascinating collection of vignettes that frame and explain Salafi-Jihadism and those who gave it the kiss of life, says it.

Once you have implanted religion at the center of a society’s identity and value system in an environment that is as illiberal in its parts (homes, curricula, personal status laws, politico-religious parties, mosque…) as it is in sum (authoritarian polities), it is literally a very short and easy ride between mainstream and extreme.

Islamism, made commonplace, visceral and transcendent, becomes an ecosystem, a freewheeling democracy of a sort, where laws and norms and dos and don’ts are any believer’s business. Under it, unifying civil codes are negotiable for some, anathema for others. Morality is an exhortation or a sword. The community (umma) is uniquely Muslim. Citizenship is an exclusive club membership, with privileges and pecking orders. The Other is potentially everyone but the blessed self and its silhouette. Sure, there are Shiite nuances and fine distinctions between one creed and the other, but these are details that accessorize the essence.

In Islamism’s orbit, differences of opinion or strategies between, say, the ever so mainstream Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and more radical Islamist elements, or tensions between the state and fundamentalist activists are real but beside the point and misleading when exploring origins and exits.

Seen from this prism, Extremism is not an oozing wound; it’s a condition. It’s not a noxious smell seeping from the basement; it’s the musty air that hangs everywhere in a long shuttered house. You can’t lock it up or chase it away, but you can lift away those pitch-black curtains, open wide those windows and let in the light.

****

This is not what Hazem Amin sets out to do in his book, the overarching purpose of which is to pull the Palestinian dimension into the heart and start of Salafi-Jihadism. But this is what I walked away with.

Not that Amin’s purpose is not worth probing. The Orphaned Salafi is a whirlwind of traumas and their traumatized men, of birthplaces and early decisive encounters, of stations on the warpath and cities that become incubators for combustible converging trends, of ominous meetings bringing together fearsome duets, fiery shaykhs and brutal disciples mad about their faith and dying to shed blood in its name.

The language is Arabic, the style is smooth, the footnotes are a sprinkle and the research is devoid of any foreign input.

The elusive question is Salafi-Jihadism. Amin’s path to it is through a series of human portraits, and the names, the places, the influences and the situations that etched them.

The locales are between a lost Palestine and the shores of the Gulf, neighborhoods crowded with a people in exile and deserts swimming in oil and long immersed in an austere Salafi faith with a particularly prickly temperament.

The founding fathers are Palestinian men shorn of a home and a national identity looking for a community to embrace them as brothers in an inhospitable Arab habitat.

The destination is the Muslim umma, where rootlessness and “foreignness” melt in the all-encompassing embrace of Islam.

The nannies are mainstream politico-religious parties (MB) that offer sanctuary and span borders, and seemingly laical “revolutionary” movements (Yasser Arafat’s Fatah) eager to nurture every manner of Palestinian would be soldier. It just so happens the two are more than acquaintances; they know each other well from back when, during the days of Abu Ammar in Kuwait.

The mood is somber, the psychology latently “perturbed.” The self thirsts for an identity that transcends borders and is committed to radical change for its sake. Behind this agitation stands an inspiration: Sayyid Qutb, that most famous of Egyptian Muslim Brothers who was one of the first to call for jihad against a “heretical” Arab order.

Things are simmering. And, for Amin, as opaque and shifty as the environment that nurtures Salafi-Jihadism is, in the “Palestinian case,” three factors give it anchor: a “weakness in the original [Palestinian] identity and the others that followed it…a turmoil of values, and the Diaspora’s exposure to a wind coming from the desert and another from the river’s western shores.” (p.143).

It is worth serious consideration, then, that the first act on the road to global jihad was Palestinian Islamist Saleh Sarriya’s failed takeover of the Egyptian Technical Military Academy in 1974, in an attempt to overthrow Anwar Sadat. That the all-time rallying cause, when it finally comes, would be Afghanistan, thousands of miles away from Palestine, led by Palestinian Islamist Abdullah Azzam, “the first Shaykh of the Saudi Jihadi” (p.50) and of Osama himself. That Palestinian Islamist Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi and Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death dance would play itself out in Iraq. That Palestinian Islamist Abu Qtadeh presides now as the Mufti of al-Qaeda in North Africa.

Although there is very little room for larger contexts in Amin’s narrative, certainly one of the most compelling implications of his argument concerns the Palestinian problem itself. For those in the West who are still wondering about its true impact on our politics and its weight in one of this region’s most confounding dilemmas—global jihad--Amin’s is a very persuasive and original angle.

But it is also in the way that he disentangles the skein of forces that give shape to these men and their mission that the reader begins to understand the real depth and breadth of the presumably fringe phenomenon that is Salafi-Jihadism.

It is therefore nothing short of illuminating to meet Mohammad Ibn Sourour, a Syrian Muslim Brother who brought Salafism into the Ahkwani (MB) house, and Nasser al Din al Albani, the father of Salafism in the Levant, both of whom helped nudge into one two technically separate faiths--Jihadism and Salafism. Equally, to know that it is to Mohammad Rifai, the head of the MB branch in Zarqa, Jordan, and Muslim Brothers like him that Azzam turned when recruiting Afghan Arab fighters for Afghanistan.

The Orphaned Salafi is bound together with such like threads. Amin, a Lebanese journalist with quite a few years on the trail of global jihad behind him, is surefooted in his insights but is a skeptical storyteller wrestling with a subject that refuses to keep still. Mine is not a review, though, and I am not a jihad expert. It is ultimately for those to argue with Amin over emphases and omissions, many of them not altogether inconsequential to the debate itself. Such as, for example, the degree to which Iran can take credit for the rise of Islamism within the Sunni Lebanese scene (of all ironies!) and specifically the Palestinian refugee camps--a major argument in Roger Bernier’s Everyday Jihad, and a total exclusion from The Orphaned Salafi. It’s intriguing as well that Amin does not feel the need to follow the money, an essential piece in any investigation of the spread of Salafi-Jihadism, even if his attention was focused on other dimensions.

Suffice it to say that Amin’s material is sure to make the field of Salafi-Jihadism even lusher than it already is.

Larger contexts next in Part Two.

WikiLeaks, Pew and Hezbollah

2010-12-21T23:11:00.000-08:00

Not one leak from Wiki about the Middle East, not even a single cable, qualifies as a shocker.

Beyond the gratification of catching rabbits in the headlights that has brought a big, toothy smile to the grumpiest of faces, we are today exactly where we were before Julian Assange hung, for all to see, our dirty Arab laundry.

That Elias (nicknamed Lulu) al Murr, the Lebanese (Christian) Defense Minister, felt free to advise our Israeli neighbors to hit, in the next war, only Shiite areas and spare “sympathetic” Christian ones, that he so kindly informed the American Ambassador to Lebanon that Shiites join the army to eat, while Christians do it for country, frankly, came as no surprise to most Lebanese. It was not so long ago that some of us were harrumphing openly about the odor of Shiite piss in the center of Beirut, when Hezbollah set up and manned much of the tent city in 2006 and 2007.

In effect, what Murr had downloaded to American ears, he and his ilk—and there’s plenty of them—were burping over dinner tables and expelling in drawings rooms for more years than one dares count. Which explains why Murr is still Defense Minister, why President Michel Suleiman, who chose him as part of his quota in the cabinet, did not feel compelled to issue a this-has-nothing-to-do-with-me statement, why Hezbollah has yet to pillory Lulu (must not be the optimal time to play this chip) and why life just goes on in this “prototype” of a country. It’s also why a smirk, and never shock, claims us for keeps when we’re done reading the day’s batch of disclosures.

Still, how could information so passé and predictable be so delicious? Well, first off, there is that Gotcha! moment that never fails to satisfy, especially us Arabs, precisely because it’s only the people high up who are always having all the fun.

Tell the truth, how lucky was John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, to be privy to the advice of Saudi Arabia’s king Abdullah on Guantanamo’s released detainees?

His Majesty: “You should put an electronic chip in the legs of those detainees. It really works. We do it to eagles and horses.”

Brennan: Humm... Nifty idea. Except that horses don’t have good lawyers.”

Besides, it’s one thing to know that hypocrisy (not to mention sheer idiocy) is alive and well in politics, it’s quite another to see it live, in action, and not to have to wait for the rare slip up or the history books.

****

But now that things might come to a head, once more, in Lebanon, WikiLeaks’ exposures do serve as a useful reminder of the very thorny terrain that meets the many-turbaned Hezbollah beyond its own diehard Shiite expanse. A terrain which the last, and just published, Pew Research Center Survey of Muslim Attitudes (April-May 2010) has rendered in telling numbers.

Of these results, three summarize succinctly the delicate realities that the Shiite movement has to work with as it erects different shields to protect it against various indictments that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is almost sure to issue against it for the murder of Rafiq Hariri: an extraordinary 94% of Lebanese Shiites have a “favorable opinion” of Hezbollah, while an equally potent 84% of Sunnis and 79% of Christians do not.

Adding a coat thick with meaning to these three brass tacks is the survey’s gauge of passions for and against the group: whereas 31% of surveyed Lebanese have “a very favorable” opinion of it, a heftier 51% have a “very unfavorable” one.

And although the available report does not isolate the percentage of those Shiites who have a “very favorable” opinion as opposed to those who are “somewhat favorable,” which would give us an idea about how that 94% divides up between the real enthusiasts and the tepid ones, it is reasonable to conclude from the above data that much of the fervor that holds up the 31% comes from the Shiite community itself.

In simpler language: at home, Hezbollah is pretty much on its own. While it clearly can snuggle up content in the embrace of its folks, the rest of the country is lined up against it.

Not particularly irrelevant sentiments for the resistance as it revs up to deal with an anticipated offensive of the legal kind by the Special Tribunal and possibly of the opportunistic variety by an Israeli foe with one eye cast on its northern borders and the other gazing far at the Persian horizon.

To those who have puzzled over the Party of God’s insistence, up to barely a minute ago, on aggressively upping the ante against Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri (reject the court or else!) at a time when it supposedly needs to be searching for a happy middle ground in a hostile climate, therein lies their answer: Hezbollah knows that, in Lebanon, it has already lost much of the non-Shiite audience, and whatever mediums there are, none looks remotely happy. With its back very close to the wall, the movement thought it might as well try some relatively high stakes tactics.

Moreover, Hezbollah also figured that, iffy as the situation clearly is, it’s still not doing too badly. Enveloped by the love of its “people,” stacked up to its teeth in arms, protected by devoted worriers, surrounded by foolish Lebanese adversaries and backed by crafty Syrian and Iranian allies, the party felt that it could afford to rattle the other side with some very intimidating maneuvers.

And so, as the Syrians and Saudis huddled to hammer out a solution, forefingers wagged, eyebrows locked lips, tenors rose, warnings were issued, “cell phone” evidence was bashed, false witnesses were displayed as proof of foul play, the cabinet was brought into a veritable standstill and red lines were drawn. Hezbollah was signaling that it is indeed agitated, pumped up and ready for action.

****

This is where WikiLeaks and Pew’s survey reenter the scene and make a stronger stand.

Serious as the court challenge might be to Hezbollah--and, judging by its behavior, the evidence looks like it might well be packing a punch--its options are, in fact, very limited and chancy.

Although the movement has, as of late, retreated into quieter rhetoric, the gossip is that it would not hesitate, and is even planning, to take over Lebanon to “cut off the hands of the conspiracy.” But the truth is, if Hezbollah actually pursues this path, it would fire up rather than snuff out the plot against it.

Hezbollah’s juggling of its many intertwined identities is not easy in the best of times; in bad ones it can be downright perilous. This, after all, is a force that is at once a social movement, a single-sect political party, a member of parliament and the cabinet, a resistance against Israel and a strategic bridgehead for Syria and Iran.

By turns, and by choice, it is Shiite, Lebanese, Persian and Arab, depending on the day and the argument. It holds serious political sway but is very happy not to reign except over its own dominions. In many ways, it supersedes the Lebanese state but, for insulation, still craves its political cover. It likes to parade as if in no need of legitimacy but fights tooth and nail for every supportive parliamentary decree and cabinet edict.

It is feared but not liked, even by the followers of Maronite Michel Aoun, its most critical local ally. The Sunnis hate it, and those few who side with it for love of the resistance or dislike of the Hariris will decline—as they did during the violence of May 2008—to side with it if it directs its weapons against their sect.

Ponder the advice given only two days ago by ex Prime Minister Selim Hoss, a traditional Sunni friend of Hezbollah’s and perhaps one of Lebanon’s mildest and most decent politicians: “We believe that the resistance is one of the necessities of life…for the Arab people so long as Israel is bent on a policy of aggression, confrontation and unbridled greed. So let the resistors beware that they have no business in the internal affairs of Lebanon and that their main focus should be on the southern borders.” (Al Hayat newspaper, December 20, 2010).

Pointing its guns inside a very divided Lebanese house would dangerously expose and overburden Hezbollah at a time when it should be at its most lithe and lightest, not only for its sake but for those of Syria and Iran.

This leaves the Party of God with action of the strictly civil and political type: massive peaceful street demonstrations, collective resignations from the cabinet, parliamentary votes of no confidence.

No more and perhaps much less, depending on what Syria And Saudi Arabia work out on Sa’ad’s and its behalf.

Changing the Conversation

2010-12-02T01:12:00.000-08:00

All this frenzied sparring going on in the Middle East makes you think small. In the instant. Day by day, the better to catch an oblique, do or die nuance, a hidden turn in a one-way, face-down tumble. Miss a moment, a word, a gesture, and, God forbid, you might just be missing the purpose of it all. The temptation is to keep tabs, in the hope that the tally somehow will weave a story worth knowing.

But frankly, as needlepoint intricate as this book’s authors would like to think it is, there is nothing remotely subtle in the narrative. On its surface lives a certain kind of senselessness that is at once immovable and incapacitating. In the deep of it runs, like a violent undertow, that incessant matter of religion.

Politics here has become nothing more than a very heated argument between warring faiths and sects. Even among members of the same creed and tribe the race is on in the name of prostration and reverence.

Islam, in the Middle East, is a brooding king harangued by too many squabbling princes. Ours feels like a march of folly, to borrow some from Barbara Tuchman, and irony is almost beside itself that none other than religion is actually leading the throngs.

Massacres in Iraqi churches; rumored simulations of a Hezbollah take over of Lebanon; unabashed and apparently daily conversations between AhmadiNejad and the hidden Mahdi; talk by the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ Supreme Guide of “cleansing the system since we carry within us the pure water of the heavens;” women in Hamas’s Gaza being banned from smoking shisha in public cafes…These are just a sample from the latest entries in a years-long running account of puerile, sex-obsessed fatwas, pious rants and sectarian bloodletting.

In this way, the utterly silly has been conspiring with the downright unnerving in the behavior of decision makers from whose hands the lives of so many of us hang. And would that politics here were local and its devastating aftereffects pressure point precise. Would that we the people were mere innocent bystanders and victims without a single bone in this dogfight.

Words like secularism have become blasphemy, privacy in faith proof of heresy. Religion is now practically interchangeable with identity; it has become our highest attainment and our lowest common denominator.

If you are looking to lead and compete in politics nowadays, this is the only game in town. There are no independent forces here—at least none that our best public opinion polls can identify--that amount to anything more than a few brave voices whispering every once in a while from the sidelines, “Is it too much to ask?”

I suppose it hasn’t occurred to our leaders and fundamentalist gatekeepers, who are apoplectic about Israel’s reassuringly blunt Loyalty Oath--which makes allegiance to a Jewish Israel compulsory for non-Jewish aspirants to citizenship--that it made more sense to welcome Israel into the region’s Muslim fold rather than condemn it as an outcast.

After all, what could possibly be offensive to them about this new Israeli measure, which crows atop a growing pile of Israeli laws that scream of discrimination, when searching our own legal codes for examples of religious prejudice would be like picking one’s way through a cotton field in season.

What are we lamenting when we protest this latest show of Israeli bigotry? That they have finally officially come out in the open as one of us?

****

It seems almost beside the point, in the midst of all these deathly my God is better than yours rows, that people here are actually very hard at work at the business of living—and with barely a serious or sensible public policy in sight.

Water, electricity, a proper education, health, the need to create at least 50 million new jobs over the next 10 years if we are to stay put, rich estranged from poor, living galaxies apart…All beside the point. And we haven’t even broached the testier issues of transparency, the rule of law, women’s rights…

In Egypt, you can almost hear the sound of fragile dreams being crushed by a state and an Islamist opposition doing battle over everything that actually does not count.

And so it goes, with varying degrees of pain and embarrassment, in practically every other Middle Eastern destination.

In Bahrain, the few Sunnis battle way too many Shiites, cosmetic reforms going the way of the fight’s other casualties.

In Iraq, the goose that is threatening to lay a million golden eggs, sectarian wrangling has been turned into a fine, if hideous, art.

In Lebanon, close to four million people flail this way and that, like hapless crowds on a sinking deck. As the entire country flounders between clashing cults, the well off work, curse, travel and obsess about the tumult; the poor curse, scramble for crumbs of a living, fret and wait.

****

Right!

These are the lifeless landscapes you are sure to behold if you were standing and peering down.

Crouch and you begin to brush against the faint gusts of wind delicately working their way through them.

Over the last few years, NGOs, by the hundreds—literally—have been sprouting in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan…offering everything from balsam for the destitute to step-ups and beachheads for those who have the remotest readiness (and chance) to want out.

Everywhere you go, there is a loud buzz, growing louder still: entrepreneurship conferences in Dubai (I’ve just come back from a superb one), business incubators in Palestine, youth activism in Amman...

It feels as if civil society is awakening from a decades-long slumber to fill a void carved wide by cruel, old hands.

The private sector is not too far behind. Though still palpably dormant and happy to follow the state’s cue (and orders), you can see it, slow and shy, walking into arenas long abandoned by derelict governments.

Corporate Social Responsibility is making an appearance on every other company’s website and advertising material. Social entrepreneurship is now our sexiest piece of jargon, an enticing presence in the parlance of the rich and powerful.

Charity has always had a nice pull in this part of the world, but it is becoming at once generous and bottom-line smart to offer the less fortunate a sustainable leg up.

And did you notice? Nary a mention of politics in these circles, except for a few daring bloggers giving officialdom a very mild case of the runs.

Engagement is seeking different friends, since Democracy and her daughters (political parties, elections, protests, rallies…) have turned out to be pretty rough company.

****

As is typical of noise that begins as a restless stirring that promises to be a trend, it is almost impossible to tell where this is all going, what it signifies and how far it might reach. As usual, Western commentators have brought out their pens in celebration of the change that is coming. And, as usual, they’re way too excited by the hype.

Serious doers are being lumped with chatty ones, marketing gimmicks are being applauded as a thing of substance (remember that glossy ad campaign that became Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution?).

The US wants a piece of whatever it is we are witnessing. Islamist movements

are walking around with pensive faces and raised eyebrows. Traditional leftists are screaming that this is neoliberalism in disguise blurring sacred divides. Populists are furious that money is daring to exhibit a conscience with a plan. The state is looking for an angle…

Yes, I am exaggerating for effect…but not that much.

The hullabaloo aside, all that one can say in these very, very early hours with near certainty is that it would appear that an increasing number of very determined and visionary individuals are trying very hard to change the conversation.

That’s it for now.

For their sake, the urge is to mount the table and scream down at the nattering, heedless pundits: “Will you shut up for once and just listen!”

Transcend This!

2010-10-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

Basra, Iraq, during the electoral festivities

Casual Notes on the Jordanian, Lebanese and Egyptian Parliamentary Elections.

Truly, the seasonal migration to electoral la-la land is by far the most joyous of our trips in this Middle East. Thankfully, the moment is upon us yet again in Jordan (November 9) and Egypt (November 20), and we’ve barely had time to get over the last ones in Iraq (March 2010) and Lebanon (June 2009).

The passport photos usually do the trick, but it’s the slogans that clinch it for you every single time. A quick car ride through Amman’s circular street life and a big, fat album of reasons for Jordan’s still barren marriage with democracy falls in your lap. A moving queue of funny looking people, a medley of hilarities, and you immediately grasp why, after 21 years of parliamentary elections, Jordan is no more democratic today than it was in 1989, when the golden age of political liberalism officially commenced.

“Jordan is for all Jordanians, and all Jordanians are for Jordan.”

“Your voice equals your honor.”

“Yes, total respect is correct.”

“Yes, the nation is for everyone.”

“Daughter of the nation, sister of everyone.”

“Authority (al Haibah) is paramount.”

“The Right of Return is sacred.”

“Without slogans.”

“Let your voice boom.”

“The roads are for the streets and the streets are for the roads.”

“Yes, yes, and yes, yes.”

“Yes before no, and two no’s don’t equal yes.”

“We know you, you know us, give us your vote.”

(The last four are a friend’s personal contribution to the national effort).

Nothing in these panoramas of idiocy is alien or new. Watching them whizz by you is like a moment of déjà vu that keeps rewinding itself. This has been—and, one seriously suspects, shall be—Amman and Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo and…during every electoral fest.

The tendency on the part of well meaning folks inside and out is, of course, to blame the powers that be. But I think they’re way too miserly. In nonsense alone, this is a recurring embarrassment of riches for which a good chunk of the country’s elite is no less to blame than the state itself. If Jordan disappoints today, it disappoints because of them just as much as it does because of its government. If this is a carnival of fools, the jokers are not only the ones composing the silly tunes, they’re the ones dancing to them.

The odd thing is that as far as pretenses go—a regional indulgence of serious mass appeal—our elections don’t do too well. For all the vote buying, the feasting, the sectarian agitation, the busing en masse and the under-the-table, behind-the-curtain deals, voters are always the dullest guests in these parties. From Egypt’s eternally depressed but not necessarily depressing 20-25%, to Jordan’s somewhat more perky 41% (1989) to 54% (2007) range, to Lebanon’s typical split-the-difference 53%, voter turnoff is always outpacing voter turnout. And we all know, because living here makes us know, that this apathy is not that of the satisfied and comfy.

Really, how extraordinary is it that in a recent poll in Jordan, 62% of those polled stated that “they accepted or agreed with the new [electoral] law,” although 66% “were entirely unaware” of it? Who said Jordanians don’t have a sense of humor?

Which brings to mind the best banner yet of any election (I forget the year), made in—where else?—Egypt:

“Iddi sotak aw matiddihoush,

al-Nabawi Ismail mayhimmoush”

“Whether you cast your vote [for me] or not

Al-Nabawi Ismail cares not.”

(The proud owner of the slogan is none other than al-Nabawi Ismail himself, Egypt’s one time interior minister).

So the obvious question is: for whose eyes is this pretense, because it clearly is not for us?

If you’re in Jordan, you might want to head northwest to Lebanon for an answer.

*****

In September 2010, The International Foundation of Electoral Systems (IFES), an outfit that busies itself with, well, matters electoral, awarded Mr. Ziad Baroud, our Interior Minister, The Charles T. Manatt Prize.

Apparently, IFES was genuinely—and, one has to add, rightly--impressed with the low violence and efficiency of the June 2009 parliamentary elections in a notoriously violent and inefficient locale. If only for the relatively smooth running of the electoral show, Mr. Baroud, by far the most digestible Lebanese interior minister yet, deserved one of those Kindergarten gold stars on his forehead.

But (read this paragraph very slowly) in awarding Mr. Baroud the prize, IFES, without even a hint of irony—as is often the habit of all clueless Western organizations--stated that its purpose is to “highlight that democracy work transcends political parties and national borders.”

Remember that Japanese giggling box that sounds like a bunch of cackling chicken?

Indeed, who better than Baroud for this honor, since Lebanon does not have anything remotely resembling a political party and since our national borders stand now where they’ve always stood, as mere markers of a betting arena? Might as well get a prize for it, we’ve been doing this kind of transcendental democracy work for so long; come to think of it, since that glorious day when “independent” Lebanon came to be in 1943.

Don’t think this is a joke, as hilarious as it all is. Over $1 billion dollars was spent on the 2009 Lebanese elections, $900 million of which came straight from Saudi Arabia’s coffers into Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s March 14 camp. This in a country of four million, give or take, with a GNP of $31 billion and approximately 3.2 million eligible voters, 53% of whom voted. For a touch of context, you might want to give the cost of the 2008 US presidential race a fleeting thought: $2.3 billion, expenses and all.

That this obscene amount of money was spent on a contest whose results were preordained to be utterly meaningless in a tiny, systemically confessional state, where so-called parliamentary and cabinet majorities can never govern without the active acquiescence of the so-called minorities, is remarkable commentary on the importance of window dressing in a country that is itself a window dressing.

It would be unjust, though, to pick on IFES alone, when we should be picking on them all. As is the case with IFES, for the European Union, the Carter Center and countless other Western agencies in the democratic licensing business that congratulated Baroud on a job well done but counseled “more reforms,” democracy is the sum of so many items on a score sheet. Just because the elections don’t matter, are bought, are unrepresentative, have practically no bearing on policy and say practically nothing (or all the wrong things) about a country’s actual progress on the democratic footpath doesn’t mean that efficiency, order and all around good effort on voting day don’t count.

I mean, without these scores how would the West be able to tell the difference between the goner and the redeemable amongst us? Frankly, this alone makes it all worthwhile.

Dead serious business, the “work of democracy” for our regimes and a West desperate to keep the conversation going, lest we all be found out. As dead serious and deadly, in fact, as the peace process itself. Imagine the carnage if the halls should ever fall silent.

Tick Tock!

2010-09-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

There is not a single unhappy story in Lebanon that knows how to keep its hands to itself. This summer’s bad news, which has been raining on everybody’s party, is like a bacchanal of forebodings.

But then, it’s not unusual for this country to let it all hang out. Unlike the people, problems here do not live bubble-like in parallel worlds; they’re so close to one another, they’re like one family.

So it goes without saying that the recent public health warnings about conjunctivitis, typhoid and scabies are of a piece with the blood curdling Burj abu Haidar September clashes that pitted Shiite Hezbollah, a Syrian ally, with Sunni Ahbash, a fundamentalist Syrian-sponsored group.

They’re certainly of a piece with the trickles of electricity that light up the life of only a trickle of Lebanese, the mountains of garbage that tower over us at the entrance to every other city and village as monuments to our carelessness and indignity, with the cities of modern concrete that have wiped clean entire vistas from our past…

Of a piece with the press conferences by Shiite Hezbollah’s Hassan Nassrallah and Shiite Jamil al Sayyed, the former head of the General Security Bureau, that have made ridiculous the once fearsome prospects of the Rafiq Hariri International Tribunal and a punching bag of a dumbstruck Sunni prime minister.

Of a piece with so-called Syrian-Saudi arrangements—SS, as Nabih Berri, the speaker of our venerable parliament, aptly calls the combo--that signify nothing more than an audacious Syrian comeback and a very embarrassing, and telling, Saudi retreat.

Of a piece with the “national unity” government of a brood of sects that long ago laughed these two words out of the room.

And these pieces, few and scattered though they are from a much larger heap, do very well in explaining the mechanics of how Lebanon actually does not work, and hence how it actually refuses to be.

****

My depiction is not exactly unpopular—it’s in good company here-- but, it has to be said, the competition is fierce. A favorite Lebanese mantra (the last line of defense every time we’re about to drop another notch or two) is that the damage wrought by habitual sectarianism, ubiquitous corruption, an on-paper-only state and ugly, destructive behavior all around is actually beside the point, because--look! Just look at it, won’t you?—the country keeps rising from the ashes and going about the business of living.

And what a living! For every sign of impending doom, for every recital of failure or sound of a crash, an example of Lebanese ingenuity or hipness is brought out of the bag by way of a comeback, as if to say, there is that…but then there is this. Jekyll and Hyde breaking the china and painting the house at one and the same time. Daylight chasing the demons of the night. The final comforting picture is that of an army of Houdinis magically escaping the plots hatched against them, or sheer Lebanese grit always pulling itself up by the bootstraps and dusting itself off after every bruising knock out.

Of course, the showcase itself is none other than swinging Beirut (check out Tyler Brûlé’s accolades). I mean, if we’re so bad, how come we’re so hot? It must be in our genes, this instinct to beat the odds, trick, wrong foot, mock our ill fortunes. And what other Eastern city dares display, with such gusto, this remarkable range of liberal moods in a desert of messianic conservatism?

Some commentators go so far as to argue that Lebanon’s deep-to-the-bone sectarianism, as illiberal and noxious as it may seem, forces a stasis that automatically rises like an impregnable separation wall in the face of any sect that connives for more than its designated space. The happy result is a terrible mess, yes, but one that is infinitely more benign and way more freethinking than, say, Hassan Nassrallah at the helm.

There’s a noble cause to rally the crowds around!

And the state? Why, in God’s name, would you insist on it, or miss it even, if you never had any use for it in the first place? Besides, in a region where bad governance reigns like the plague, isn’t it the damndest feeling to run around stark naked in this Hobbsian jungle?

****

These arguments may not be out-and-out silly, but they’re like pats on Lebanon’s back after a merciless street fight with the facts.

And the fact is, Lebanon is for show, not for real. True, once upon a time the show was more than enough to keep the reel turning, but here’s the thing: with time, the performance is getting progressively poorer and more unseemly. The Lebanon of today is not where it started 67 years ago, as problematic as it was then. We’re not at the beginning of the experiment; we’re way past the end. We might have had people guessing a couple of decades back. Now the margin for bluffing is practically nil.

A dear friend told me not so long ago, “God, no matter what, this place keeps coming back and ticking along.” Perhaps, but the ticking sounds he has been hearing recently are not a clear sign of stubborn life, they are the tick tocks announcing the sure approach of midnight.

From Bahr Lubnan’s recently launched environmental awareness campaign. Timely!

What It All Means

2010-08-16T04:14:00.000-07:00

On the International Tribunal Investigating Rafiq Hariri’s Assassination

Since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri has, over the course of five years, deteriorated from a genuine political thriller into a typical Lebanese farce, let me start at The End and jog forward from there: the file of the international tribunal that was set up to investigate the murder has been slammed shut.

The investigation that initially threatened to topple the Syrian regime and promised to squeeze out a tiny bit of the puss that keeps Lebanese politics at fever-pitch has fizzled into yet another embarrassing example about how utterly silly and unnervingly dangerous Lebanon can be. For a very short while there, right after the murder, you thought you were watching the Manchurian Candidate, only to discover, barely months into the act, that you were in fact sitting through Robert Moore’s Murder by Death. Plenty of giggles, but, alas, no David Niven, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, or Truman Capote on this set; just the usual hooligans running amuck in Lebanon’s theater of the absurd.

Extraordinarily, but never surprisingly for us Lebanese, everything that could go wrong with the investigation did—and, as a friend kindly pointed out, everything that could have gone right did not. Key witnesses turned into false; three intelligence chiefs were arrested only to be released after three evidence-poor years; a chain of cell phones making a chain of calls right before and after the hit, once deemed damning, has just been relabeled as dodgy after the discovery of an Israeli-sponsored spy ring that, from all appearances, had infiltrated our telecom system… By the time old, crucial allies, like the Druze’s Walid Jumbulatt, had defected a few weeks ago, the tribunal was practically friendless and defenseless.

And now, the coup de grâce: an enthralling two-hour long press conference by Siyyed Hassan Nassrallah, the head of Hezbollah, who, with aerial footage of Israeli espionage in action, spies’ testimonies about suspicious Hariri-related chores and tasks and a load full of oomph and logic, first reduced the heretofore ironclad case against Syria and (as of late) the Party of God itself into a series of question marks, sinister schemes and doubts, and then, by way of a bonus for those who have long been waiting to wipe it in March 14^’s face, graciously asked the other camp to put its tail between its legs and carry out the mercy-killing itself.

It’s over! It remains for the constantly overwhelmed and the ever so underwhelming Sa’ad Hariri, the son of the late Rafiq and the current prime minister of Lebanon, to take up Nassrallah on his offer, which, after all, would be only the last of many he has taken up from friends and patrons that have so far seen him sleep in Bashar Assad’s Damascene den.

****

But what does it all mean?

Well, for the moment at least, it means two things of infinite more significance than the tribunal and who actually killed Rafiq Hariri.

For Israel and Lebanon, it means that a moody year has just turned even more unpredictable. Recently, many of the people living in our underworld courtesy of the Jewish state have been popping up like bubbles out of a swamp. The revelations, including Nassrallah’s blow-by-blow, point to an Israeli infestation of state and society. One hundred fifty individuals are already under custody, the biggest catch of whom is Fayez Karam, a former head of the military’s counter-espionage unit, a principal member of Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and one of the General’s closest confidantes.

Since covert war became Israel’s battle of choice against Hezbollah after the 2006 faceoff, the policy implications for both are, to say the least, very serious and potentially venomous. No doubt, Israel is already very hard at work revisiting the rules of engagement.

(As an aside: if you are even vaguely familiar with Arab political folklore, I don’t have to tell you that all this is sweet vindication for our conspiracy theorists. Who would dare snigger or roll their eyes now when Hezbollah talks of “environments that cradle spies and traitors.”)

For us Lebanese and for our competing sponsors, it means that in the game of politics, Sa’ad and his entourage are no match for Hezbollah and its Nassrallah. Not that many of us did not know this from the start, and not that this will have any impact on our rock solid sectarian loyalties. But it just so happens that there is much more that goes on in Lebanon than sectarian nitpicking, and in that high stakes regional contest those who are lined up behind Hezbollah must be feeling somewhat more confident about the odds.

Over the past five years, the Shiite movement’s mistakes--the offensive finger wagging, the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, the guns turned in the direction of Beirut and the mountains, the financial scandals…--have been many. But the party’s more recent impressive tactics (and Nassrallah’s own performances) show a team that evaluates and learns from yesterday’s lapses. A feat that seems entirely too daunting for Sa’ad, whose reputation as a featherweight began to take shape when he literally disappeared (rumor had it that he had a breakdown) for an entire week after Hezbollah’s men came calling in May 2008, and finally established deep roots on that supposedly historic day in 2009, when his government received Parliament’s vote of confidence and he proceeded to literally laugh his way through a speech as breathtaking in its ineptness as he clearly is in his.

On the PA, Hamas and that Matter of Palestinian Resistance

2010-07-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

Rarely are surface impressions as riveting as they are this stark simple.

“Truncated archipelago,” was Dr. Rashid Khalidi’s distressingly apt description of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in his 2009 piece on “The Crisis of the Palestinian System.” But the fourth snapshot, coming as it does at the end of this visual abstract of the evolving political geography of the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy, stands like the latest entry in a catalogue of Palestinian retreats and regrets.

Palestine—a fading thumbprint. Look at it, won’t you! There are plenty of doorsteps on which the Palestinians can lay blame for this sorry presence on the map. Certainly their leadership’s is no less deserving than Israel’s. It’s a long, winding, nasty patch of history, but if we were to choose that one miscalculation since 1967 that helped keep a people’s nationhood a figment of their imagination, it would have to be the mistaken conviction by the PLO in 1993--inexcusably picked up by Hamas in 2007--that to rule, under Israeli occupation, is in fact to lead.

But enough of that. So much has been written about the temptations of power that turned two so-called resistance movements into satraps over the Occupied Territories. To dwell on the mistakes and abuses of that period would be like pressing a full set of fingers on an unbearably painful injury. Suffice it to say that in the thick chronicles of this conflict there are plenty of Israeli moves that qualify as chutzpa, many among them, it has to be said, helped see the Zionist dream become a robust reality. But using the Oslo Accords, presumably a framework for liberation, to farm out an occupation that became indefensible (and progressively more costly) after the first mostly nonviolent intifada (1987-1993) is one of those remarkable Israeli tactical achievements that, from the start, had all the makings of strategic folly. Equally, the role that Yasser Arafat and then Hamas willingly, even enthusiastically, played in this book on how to change a liberation organization into a local enforcement agency has marked the Palestinian cause itself with an unforgivably unkind legacy.

And yet, as debilitating as chronic dispossession has been to the nationalist cause of the Palestinians, it is only one of their problem’s many intertwining surface realities. What the four snapshots are missing are the human heartbeats—Israeli and Palestinian—that make silly putty out of thumbprints. Place these on the landscapes above and watch an apparently clear win for Israel turn into a moral and demographic muddle.

****

It has been, then, a rotten game for the Palestinians, but it is far from over. Their struggle for a state may yet have its day. And herein lies perhaps the most daunting challenge for them, for they enter a new kind of battle with Israel as would an orphan into the hazards of life.

All the serious studies that have been done on the PA and Hamas differ on many points but agree on one: when it comes to that most essential question of resistance, both groups have all but written themselves out of the equation. The rhetoric of engagement versus the rhetoric of armed struggle--this is the trivial difference between the strategies of the PA and Hamas towards Israel. Both latch on to language for cover the way an old hag makes for a towel after an open-air shower. In deed, though never in words, the two are simply out of breath and out of answers. However, theirs is more than a bankruptcy of policy and vision. As Dr. Khalidi writes, “In the wrenching divide that has grown between Fatah and Hamas, and in the growing fissures within Fatah, and between the ‘old Fatah’ and the PA [the Palestinian Authority], there reside the seeds of a dissolution of the Palestinian political system...”

Palestinians are indeed suffering a crisis of existential proportions. They have to plow the future in burning fields guarded by two ghastly custodians. And pouring ink about Hamas’s tenacity in Gaza and Prime minister Salam Fayyad’s technocratic focus on “institution building” in the West Bank misses the crux of this besieged nation’s dire situation: if all that Gaza and the West Bank aspire to be is an efficient prison, then clearly Hamas and the PA have cornered the market for wardens. But the Palestinian people do aspire for and deserve nothing less than their own full-fledged state, and it is blue-sky clear that neither the PA nor Hamas have the faintest idea how to lead the way. Worst still, at this very mature stage of the conflict, when the longstanding two-state solution is giving way to forbidding scenarios that warn of death and mayhem, both leaderships have already begun fortifying their own side of the fortress.

Oftentimes the predictable defense by these two outfits starts and ends with an expression top heavy with symbolism and emotion for Palestinians: steadfastness--sumud in Arabic. Every band-aid or balsam applied by the PA and Hamas under occupation carries that proud stamp. In all fairness, for a frightened, miserably insecure, despondent people the quick fixes and remedies are not exactly negligible. So if you’re in the mood to distribute kudos, be my guest… But lest we be seduced by linguistic subtleties, there is a difference between sumud and stabilizing a punishing status quo. To get credit for the former, the two regimes require all the facilities of the Arabic language and the capacious love of supporters. As for the latter, the glory is all theirs to claim.

The Palestinian people know this. If you were to match on-the-ground insights with the accumulating power of numbers, the trends are not that hard to detect. Neither the PA nor Hamas can credibly claim anywhere close to a popular mandate (the latest PSR poll gives Hamas 38%, its best showing yet since three years, and the Fayyad government 48% approval ratings, mostly for improved security and order), while the field reports point to rising dissent and increasing oppressiveness as standard operating procedure between the two systems and their people.

For far too long, day-to-day has been the Palestinians’ modus operandi. And when approval ratings of the PA and Hamas rise or fall, they don’t with liberation or resistance in mind. Bottom of the list is where these two linger every time the average Palestinian is asked to place in order of importance the weight of their burdens.

****

Now that the Territories have been swathed in darkness it is time for that faint ray of hope. Nil’in, Ma’sara, Budrus, Bil’in, Jayouss, Umm Salamouneh: these are just some of the Palestinian villages that are giving the strongest hint in years that Palestinian civil society still has a pulse. As if in response to the utter failure of leadership in those who were supposed to look out for it, recently it has been galvanizing its own forces against the occupation. As if in response to Fatah and Hamas’s weapons of choice of years past—mind numbing aimless chatter, ever-erect white flags, senseless violence and all—the new generation of community organizers and activists has opted exclusively for legal recourse, civil disobedience and nonviolent protests.

Since many of the villages lost land and livelihood to Israeli settlements and the deliberately invasive Separation Wall, their targets are land theft and settler encroachments. There is no critical mass yet, the skeptics and booby traps are many, there is no real independent party support (just independent voices) and much work is required for the current activism to coalesce into civil disobedience on a society-wide scale. But this budding grassroots effort is sending out a medley of messages that could well be announcing a seismic shift in the Palestinian-Israeli divide.

The loudest and certainly most meaningful of these messages is an insistent pragmatism that embraces nonviolence as the only effective answer to an Israeli occupation that thrives on, even provokes, Palestinian fury to justify to itself and explain away to others its hideousness and feed its rapacity. The implications of this chosen path are as consequential for the PA and Hamas as they are for Israel. For this activism is reaching beyond the usual politics, beyond borders, beyond its own kin and beyond yesterday’s failed experiments and pain. It’s still a toddler, but it’s glaringly aware of the PA and Hamas’s infirmities and it knows the Israeli occupier’s intention and method only too well.

****

This is not 1987. Much has changed since the first largely nonviolent Palestinian intifada in the Occupied Territories erupted and Yasser Arafat, after having been caught totally off guard by it, piggybacked on it and then came in through Oslo and stemmed its already ebbing tide. If 1987 was prologue, then 2010 is epilogue. Over two decades of “self-rule” have passed since 1993, punctuated by corruption, 60,000 intelligence and security agents, systemic violations of human rights, a second very violent intifada, suicide bombings, more settlements, more settlers, less and less land, over 500 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, Israeli redeployment from Gaza, a coup d’état, occupation by remote control, spastic missiles that aim nowhere and everywhere across the Green Line from a destitute cul-de-sac that totally depends on Egypt and Israel for dear life, devastation, an existence from hand to mouth, ruptures, sieges, cease fires …

It’s a very deep ditch that has been dug by the PA and Hamas, and everything about it says serious political vacuum. Palestinian civil society, as exhausted and browbeaten as it is, is taking baby steps into it. And as difficult as prospects for a free future may seem, there is actually much that activists and organizers can work with when gauging the chances for it: the fluid demographic situation in Palestine, the changing geopolitical map in the region, the darkening visage of Israel and her growing estrangement from old allies, the strengthening affinities between them and Israel’s own civil society in fighting the nonviolent fight, increasing civic activism in key Western countries on behalf of Palestine--and ironically, but perhaps most significantly, the dimming star of both the PA and Hamas.

Of Rants and Raves

2010-06-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

April post deleted by accident

They’re at it again. Israel and its regional nemeses, along with the usual augurs on both sides of the mountain, are writing for the Middle East a new epochal storyline: The balance of power has shifted and the next confrontation between Israel and its antagonists will “change the face of the area.”

Meanwhile, every few weeks our newspapers’ front pages are host to assassinations, foiled plots, deportations, mysterious explosions, car bombs, arrests, pointing to a Jean le Carrè underworld of espionage and sabotage in the shadows of the world most of us like to pretend is the only real one.

The sequence of threats and counter threats has been rather entertaining to watch. First, the ominous conclusions in Israeli dailies and by Israeli think tanks that Hezbollah has crossed all the old redlines and rearmed with weapons that pose an unprecedented threat to the Jewish state. Then, a thunderous growl by the Israeli government that it will wreak havoc on the body and soul of Lebanon should—repeat—should Hezbollah attack, followed by a dire warning that the coming faceoff could very well be fought simultaneously on the Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian fronts. And last, the reassurance by this same government that war is not on the agenda.

As if by design, the mind-numbing tune that sources admiring of the rejectionist camp (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas) have been replaying goes something like this: Hezbollah has shattered all the old redlines and Israel has lost the deterrence card. Nassrallah does not lie: The next battle, should—repeat--should Israel attack, will unleash hell on the “Zionist entity,” and the result will be a radically altered geopolitical map. So talk of war is just subterfuge by a furious Israeli state for which war against Lebanon is no longer a cakewalk. To add zest to their euphoric predictions, these same sources also state, with the smug confidence of the tipped off and clued in, that the next war most likely will encompass Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

Once a cycle is complete, a new one almost identical to it starts.

Such extraordinary synchronicity across the divide! It’s like being stuck in an echo chamber.

For examples of this symphonic harmony, check out the war scenarios recently shared by Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea, after which you’re liable to believe that Israel, and the region with it, is inching closer to the Day of Judgment. Then, switch to Al Akhbar’s Ibrahim Amin’s almost daily forecasts, after which you’re liable to believe that all it will take is one final Karate kick for the edifice of Zionism to crumble.

Of course, we—as in we the spectators who are meant to be privy only to the blather that serves as a veneer for what is really going on behind closed doors--must look like chumps hypnotically turning our heads this way and that to catch this tit for that tat, waiting to see if these are indeed the drums of a new kind of war we are hearing, or just the usual fart load of rhetoric.

Trouble is, fear for our clashing titans has always been good for business. These people have muscles they need to flex, followers they need to keep pumped up, armor they have to stack up. Alas, you won’t be getting anywhere close to the truth from their influence peddlers. All I can tell you is that out here in Lebanon many are experiencing an acute case of the jitters. In the south, the mood is downright somber. They feel another one coming.

Personally, I am quite happy to bet that it isn’t, not anytime soon, that is. All the action between Hezbollah and Israel—and clearly there is plenty of it--is already taking place way off the stage and out of the camera’s sight. For the Americans, the Iran file is still open, not to mention the Iraqi and Afghani ones, and hence for the Israelis there is no green light. For Hezbollah, the best offense, now that it is a principal sectarian player in a very sectarian arena, is defense. As for Syria, mano-a-mano type fights has not been its thing for a good while now, and short of a very compelling invitation from the Israelis to join the tussle, it will be content to watch (and help) from the sidelines.

Besides, if—repeat--if the US and Europe move into combat mode against Iran, I seriously doubt they will be asking Israel to do the honors. No insult intended, of course.

*****

Still, as infantile and manifestly self-serving as the rhetoric is, don’t dismiss it out of hand because underneath all this dizzying noise about Armageddon there is a quiet hum of meaningful messages flying back and forth between the two camps. The short of the messages from Hezbollah is that it wants to be an armed resistance as well as a political force of a somewhat more mainstream flavor. Knowing very well the natural friction between this odd couple, Hezbollah has conceived a new and rather original definition to resistance, in the hope that it will set a new and positive tone in the relationship: Armed struggle is no longer about liberating occupied land, but about protecting the one that has already been liberated.

For this Shiite movement, to which goes the credit for harassing the Israeli army out of southern Lebanon in 2000, the idea is simple: In the absence of a real Lebanese state and in the presence of the Zionist enemy (see the last post), Hezbollah shall stick to its guns. However, aware that the national consensus around the resistance during the Israeli occupation of the south has given way to a sectarian consensus against it after liberation, the Party of God understands that it must protect its back. Therefore, it is signaling to one and all that the new and improved purpose of its arms and army is not to liberate the remaining patches of occupied (presumably) Lebanese land, the Shebaa Farms and the town of Ghajar, precious as they are, but to defend the entirety of Lebanon against Israeli aggression.

In other words—ones that Hezbollah is always implying but is loath to utter outright--gone are the days of hit and run surprise attacks and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, for which Hassan Nassrallah himself apologized in the aftermath of the 2006 war in spite of his divine victory over Israel. Even in his latest fiery speech on the occasion of the third anniversary of the assassination of Imad Mughnieyh, a death that has yet to be avenged, the message was, “If you are going to…we will,” as if to say that now that we can reach your heart and rip it the way you have been ripping ours, we won’t unless you do it first.

Put another way, Hezbollah would like to go legit. It wants to join the status quo, not overthrow it. The deterrence card, if indeed it is finally in the Islamist movement’s hands, does alter the longstanding terms of engagement, and that is precisely the point. Without deterrence, Israel would have made sure that Hezbollah’s dual identities would be ruinous for it and Lebanon, as previewed in the 2006 round; with it, Hezbollah figures it got itself (but not necessarily Lebanon) some pretty thick cover.

You won’t hear it from any source close to the resistance, but the first lesson it learned from 2006 is that it cannot, under any circumstance, appear to be the one to start a showdown. What do you think Nassrallah’s mea culpa was for, basking though he was in the glow of a triumph. Which explains why the gentleman keeps reiterating every chance he gets that his finger is actually on the trigger but he won’t be pulling it first.

Of course, there are two obvious questions that are desperate to be asked here. If in fact Hezbollah has turned the tables on Israel, why is it trumpeting such a strategic achievement and surrendering with such zeal the surprise element? And why is Israel happy to play its part in this advertising campaign? Pardon me for asking, but why are these two letting all of us in on it?

I don’t dare keep reframing these incessant questions, lest I be accused of undermining national morale, but what the hell: If, as Hezbollah says, the foundations of the “Zionist entity” have become fundamentally vulnerable—a claim that is making quite a few of the Islamist movement’s protagonists downright giddy and almost itching for a fight--why not silence and slyness in preparation for deliverance? Why the ear-piercing shrieks, the daily chatter, the furious chest pounding? I mean, if Hassan Nassrallah is nothing like Gamal Abdel Nasser, why the blatant mimicry, then?

My guess is because Hezbollah knows that 2010 is nothing like 1967, and so does Israel. It’s not that the Shiite group has reached strategic parity with Israel, it’s that it does not have to in order to inflict pain on the Jewish state like no Arab regime has before. If just a few of Hezbollah’s new long range, guided missiles hit their targets—and in the absence of a missile shield, they will--the battle will have been won, even if Hezbollah is forced to declare it from a Lebanon razed to the ground. And so, it shall be another divine victory for God’s party. Victory because it dared, victory because it could, and—this is crucial—victory because it will not have pulled the trigger first.

It has thus become imperative for Israel to puff up and broadcast the threat from Hezbollah and its regional patrons and allies. It needs to justify the severity of the next attack, prepare the Israeli public for the reality that a chunk of the country is today well within the reach of the enemy, and reconfigure what, in this new age of missile technology, have become near-obsolete benchmarks of victory.

Therefore, until the next violent collision—and it will not be any day soon--Israel’s war of choice will be of the deep cover kind. In fact, this has been the modus operandi between it and Hezbollah ever since 2006. The murder of Hamas’s Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai was a rare, intimate glimpse into an intense war by other means that has been raging in all sorts of places only pieces of which reach the front pages of our newspapers. If only for this reason, the exposure of the Mossad team and its method was at once embarrassing and extremely inconvenient for Israel.

The Collapse of Israel’s Old Narrative

2010-06-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

When the Chicken Came Home to Roost

One can only marvel at the Israeli blunders that have been parading lately before our eyes. Once masterly in her command over unruly events and dexterous in enlisting adversity in the service of opportunity, Israel today seems capable mostly of piling embarrassing faux pas upon serious foul ups.

It is very tempting to blame the current Israeli government, as many already have, for all the recent failures. The infantile arrogance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the thuggery of his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the uncouthness of his deputy Daniel Ayalon and the obtuse stridency of the religious-settler-nationalist mindset that dominates the unabashedly rightist cabinet paint a jarring portrait of the ruling Israeli coalition. The rather comforting conclusion for the country’s more forgiving friends is: a different coalition, a different Israel. But it has become palpably clear that the realities of the Jewish state’s predicament are much starker.

The clumsy performance is quite disorienting for us Arabs, of course. Since her birth in 1948, Israel’s one-twos—so to speak—had become one of the region’s more bankable spectacles. With a mixture of deep awe and boundless frustration, we would collectively line up as exclamation marks at the end of every Israeli affront as they effortlessly morphed, in Israel’s own and the West’s eyes, into a defensive if necessarily rough response to yet another Arab aggression. Our open-mouthed, bug-eyed incomprehension, followed by the hair-tearing, hair-raising screams of our leaders only added to the force of Israel’s argument.

But skilled and nimble as Israel was, her talents were but one among an unusual convergence of factors that made the case for her in the international arena so much stronger than the case for Palestine. In fact, her rise in 1948 and the way she managed to soar for much of her 62-year existence were underwritten by perhaps the 20^th century’s most compelling narrative. To be sure, Zionism’s sense of self-entitlement was of a piece with the larger “civilizational” colonial enterprise that set up shop in the region in those critical early years of the 20^th century (“We made the desert bloom.” Remember that one?). But the narrative derived its irresistible appeal just as much from the West’s long history of horrors committed against the Jewish people and its deep well of guilt about them as it did from Israel’s promise as a Western imprint on backward landscapes.

This extraordinarily potent moral imperative would make of Israel a nation apart from other nations--one for whom any demand for normalcy, or criticism of intent or deed, would be tantamount to a dangerous betrayal of sacred writ and an ominous expression of old, lurking hatreds. Heroism would thus be Israel’s eternal forward position and victimhood her last line of defense. Never mind that, as Jacqueline Rose put it on the occasion of Israel’s 60-year birthday in 2008, “For any student of literary writing, the very tightness of this narrative would be a sure sign that it must be flawed.” The story was epic enough in proportions, alluring enough in potential rewards, to make it pitch perfect.

For this, so many of Israel’s early egregious offenses--including her culpability in the flight and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 that made the Jewish state doable—stayed on the fringes of discourse on the conflict until well into the 1980s. Because of this, the serious injury to the Palestinians came hand in hand with the West’s predictable fecklessness about it. That Arab ineptitude and treachery worked beautifully in Israel’s favor is undeniable. That a better grasp and a keener sense of responsibility towards the situation by us could have measurably lessened the pain and loss of the Palestinian people is equally inarguable. But the truth is, the deck was stacked too high against us and we were simpletons, out of tune with the times, way behind the curve, small-minded, careless, thoughtless, dishonest, off message. Clueless.

We might be faintly better today in understanding the way of things, but, frankly, hardly anything else is different. Our regimes’ paralysis has never been more glaring, their authoritarianism never more entrenched, their attitude towards the Palestinians never more fiendish. What’s more, our reputation as a people is still inches above rock-bottom and Islam itself, never much of an Elvis in the West in the best of times, has been taking much more of a drubbing since September 11.

It’s therefore nothing short of fascinating to see Israel, at the dawn of this new century, joining our ranks, and watch a once unbeatable narrative unravel under the weight of a country that asked too much of it and a West that is beginning to have just about enough—all without us Arabs even so much as batting an eyelash.

*****

If you were to put your finger on a date, it would have to be 1967. This is the year Israel began to write for itself a new storyline that ran like a line edit of the old one. By constructing on a moment of triumph, however glorious and “redemptive” it was, an insidious project of conquest and occupation, Israel essentially started to argue against her own presumably exulted self. True, it has taken 43 years for her breathtaking miscalculation to unfurl its many dire implications, but such is the nature of facts as they do their painstaking work on the ground.

And sure enough, the results are on full display everywhere Israel casts her eyes. After nearly half a century of occupation, the answer to Moshe Dayan’s famous 1977 insistence that “The Question is not ‘what is the solution?’ but ‘how do we live without a solution,’” as the country systematically ate its way into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is miserably clear: pretty badly. Bad enough for Israel, as a matter of fact, that a flotilla of new sound bites and expressions has barged into the conflict’s once absurdly lean and impregnable vocabulary, all courtesy of the Israelis themselves. Longtime favorites that still grease Israel’s spinning machine, such as Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, now have to do battle with an army of subversive intruders, none more disturbing than Israel is fast becoming an Apartheid state.

International documents like The Goldstone Report mingle with Israeli ones titled “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines.” Transfer, population exchanges and a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish state have moved up the Israeli ladder, enjoying top billing on officialdom’s list of favorite exits. And when public opinion polls are cited, what they consistently have to say only adds wind to the drift in Israel’s old storybook narrative: 75% of Israeli Jews “oppose living with Arabs in the same building, 55% of Israeli Jews do not believe “Arabs can reach the same level of cultural development as Jews, “57% of Israelis think “that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely,” 55% of Israeli Jews think Arab Israelis should be encouraged to emigrate.

Israel is feeling under siege, they say in attempting to downplay these sentiments. Palestinian Israelis have grown more restive, Palestinians under occupation have grown more violent, and the world simply must allow us right of way. Would that it were still this uncomplicated for them. For when have fear and racism not been the closest of companions, and when has Israel been less fearful of non-violent Palestinians? Recently, after her first trip to Israel, Margaret Atwood, a self-confessed innocent in Israeli-Palestinian traumas, put her pen to this question and worked it beautifully the way she works her fiction:

Every morning I wake up in fear,” someone told me. “That’s just self-pity, to excuse what’s happening,” said someone else. Of course, fear and self-pity can both be real. But by “what’s happening,” they meant the Shadow…

The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israel’s own fears. The worst the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.

And yet, it is more than fear that gnaws at Israel. In the old days, Ashkenazi-secular was more than enough to describe her face. Now the new mélange of labels for her people, her body politic and armed forces is Mezrahi, religious Zionists, Ultra-orthodox, Haredi, settler, descriptors that act as illuminating guideposts to her unnerving religious and ideological trajectory. Significantly, the repercussions for her are not only internal, as witnessed in her increasingly intimate alliance with the US’s own religious right and neo-conservatives. Peter Beinart summarized it well in his fluent June piece on the Failure of the American Jewish Establishment: “Fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal.”

In theory, there is a way out: a viable, self-respecting Palestinian state. Alas, it sleeps dead in formaldehyde, as Israel’s masters had intended since 1967 and Dov Weissglass, Ariel Sharon’s adviser, helpfully confirmed in 2004. At present, and counting, a full 8% (462,000) of Israeli Jews are settlers in the Occupied Territories, for whose protection, comfort and sustenance over 40% of the area has been confiscated by Israel. Meanwhile, a conservative 5 million Palestinians versus 5.6 million purebred Israeli Jews live in Historical Palestine. Do the math!

All in all a rather untenable situation to which one can easily trace Israel’s current tensions with veteran enthusiasts and the West, a club of which she protests she is a privileged member. Europe has become noticeably less indulgent, and even the longstanding calculations of Israel’s staunchest supporter, the US, are beginning to exhibit heretofore forbidden nuance. It’s one thing for Tony Judt to state that Israel is a strategic liability to the US, it‘s quite another for Anthony Cordesman, the holder of the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center of International and Strategic Studies, to remark on it.

Critically, the attitude of many in the Jewish Diaspora is playing catch up. Organizations such as J Street and J Call are not the work of kooky, American and European Jews Against Israel, they are nascent creations of handwringing, bona fide Zionists who are alarmed about Israel’s indefensible policies.

To boot, the geopolitical map has turned more fluid, as Turkey calibrates the distance between Israel and Iran and positions herself as the trapezist in the region’s ruling triumvirate. Moreover, the emergence of non-state actors like Hezbollah as more than pesky nemeses, largely due to guile and developments in missile technology, is forcing the reassessment of Israel’s near-obsolete formulae for victory.

*****

All those reasons that came together to make Israel so special back when are, in no small part due to her own behavior, falling afoul of each other. Hence it is not sheer happenstance that the Jewish state’s allies are beginning to demand serious retrenchments by her when she herself has become so deeply invested and inextricably enmeshed in her grander self. And it is the widening dissonance between these two trends that shows the real ruptures in that mythical narrative which made everything so dangerously possible for her.

Last April, in an open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ari Shavit, no knee-Jerk Israeli liberal, gave voice to Israel’s quandary:

Mr. Prime Minister, here are the basic facts: The grace period granted the Jewish state by Auschwitz and Treblinka is ending. The generation that knew the Holocaust has left the stage. The generation that remembers the Holocaust is disappearing. What shapes the world's perception of Israel today is not the crematoria, but the checkpoints. Not the trains, but the settlements. As a result, even when we are right, they do not listen to us. Even when we are persecuted, they pay us no heed. The wind is blowing against us.

Indeed it is!

The Domestication of Lebanon and Hezbollah?

2010-01-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Lebanon has been lulled to sleep. Sa’ad Hariri and Bashar Asad got together two weeks ago to bury the hatchet right next to its many victims. The two men kissed, conversed, ate, and now a new era, we are told, has begun between Syria and Lebanon. It all started with a bang four years ago and ended with kibbet batata (potato pie) and tabouleh. And so, for the umpteenth time in our majestic history we Arabs have put a fleeting end to death, mayhem and fury over a dish of delicious mincemeat.

On one side of the aisle, there are sighs of relief and, it goes without saying, some gloating. On the other, there is the dumbest look you’ve ever seen on the face of a Lebanese. Syria and her local allies are kind of giddy; the so-called members of the so-called March 14^th coalition are looking like chumps. As usual, where the regional winds blew Lebanon flew.

Why they raged this way yesterday and are rushing that way today can be found in places of much more consequence than ours, like Iraq, Israel, Iran, the US... As to why Lebanon always goes where these winds want to take it, the answer is, I am afraid, corny and very Lebanese: there has never been enough faith in, enough commitment to, enough love for, this country to help it change its wayward ways.

It has thus been decreed that this decade shall end on a quiet note. But Lebanon’s demons are just napping, you understand. Soon, sooner than you think in fact, they will rise again and feed, as they must, on the chronic maladies of this land: its hideous sectarianism, its sects’ addiction to foreign sugar daddies; the utter contemptibility of almost all of those who preside unhindered over it; its feebleness in a merciless Middle Eastern terrain; the lameness of its state… There’s more where these came from, of course, but why bother?

These afflictions are the fixed eyesores that give the lie to every painter’s touch up of Lebanon. They’re the backdrops that give permanent anchor to its ever-changing landscape. And now that Hezbollah has unveiled its new manifesto, they’re the guides that have to accompany every reader’s travels through the many folds of its purpose.

****

Ever since November 30, 2009, when Siyed Hassan Nassrallah appeared by video link from deep in the ground of an unknown location to announce his party’s platform, there has been speculation that roaring Hezbollah was finally purring its way into the Lebanese den.

At 32 pages, the document is Rubanesque: plump, curvaceous and palpably pleased with its heft. And so it should be. If the Party of God’s stern-faced, agitated 1985 letter was its open bid for a place in Lebanon’s sun, then this manifesto is its quiet declaration that it has secured for itself a wonderful spot in it.

From occupation to liberation, from the wretched earth of downtrodden Shiism to the heights of sectarian power, from the womb of Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran to the warm bosom of warring Lebanon; from resistance, pure and simple, to the infinitely trickier threesome of resistance, deterrence and governance: this has been the journey of Hezbollah over the past two decades. It’s a movement that’s been there, done that, and the manifesto is meant to reflect the wisdom it has acquired along the way.

It is interesting, if perhaps nothing more than a coincidence, that Hezbollah has chosen to commit to print this hard-earned wisdom at a time when Iran’s civil society has been harassing its Islamist regime to get some of its own. There is something to be said for Hezbollah’s effort to downplay the political meaningfulness of the very controversial, and indeed very political, Wilayat al Faqih, when it just so happens the position and its current holder are rapidly losing so much of their luster in their Persian birthplace.

Although Hezbollah’s situation in Lebanon at the moment is somewhat more comfortable than that of its colleagues in Iran, the Islamist movement has had its share of retreats and embarrassments, the latest of which have been the Salah Ezzeddine financial scandal, revelations about rampant prostitution and drug-related crimes in the Southern Suburbs and Hezbollah’s failure, in spite of its best efforts, to win for “the opposition” a parliamentary majority in the June elections, all of which have tarnished the party’s brand and undercut its credibility among its own community of followers.

True, Hezbollah can, with great satisfaction, point to its performance against Israel in the 2006 war and Syria’s recent comeback in the region and Lebanon. But the party’s violent and unnecessarily thuggish turn on West Beirut in May 2008 was the flipside to the sacredness of its resistance status. And as reassuring as Syria’s rebound is, the Iranian system’s palpable distress is enough to suck the pleasure out of seeing Sa’ad Hariri crossing, as many had to before him, the much travelled road to Damascus.

Moreover, Hezbollah may still be basking in Arab adulation for its 2006 “divine victory” against Israel, but it knows very well that its weapons are sure to remain a source of tremendous distrust in the inhospitable sectarian environment of Lebanon. However many fights Hezbollah takes up against Israel, however loud it champions the cause of the disadvantaged and marginalized around the world, in this Lebanon it is seen as what it actually is: An armed Shiite movement, mighty in its dominion but with much less ideological and political sway beyond it.

In this way, Hezbollah has been seesawing between good tidings and bad over the past few years, and the manifesto reads like the effort of a seasoned party trying to protect its achievements, internalize its limitations and anticipate what may prove to be rough days ahead. In effect, this new statement of policy and belief is a truce between the area’s hardnosed realities and Hezbollah’s sense of its own prerogatives. Where it knows it has to and thinks it can afford to now, Hezbollah has “magnanimously” marched forward, and where it sees no reason to and cannot be compelled to, it is staying put.

*****

On every key issue that has shadowed the Party of God since the Lebanese civil war’s end in 1990 and Israel’s withdrawal from the south in 2000, the platform stakes for it a new positioning in the local and regional arenas, the essential elements of which are these:

Hezbollah is a Lebanese, Islamic resistance movement that embraces Lebanon as its home and recognizes it as a nation unto itself. It accepts, even respects, Lebanon’s pluralism and has no interest in pushing for an Islamic revolution in it.

Furthermore, this Islamic resistance is neither a tool of Syria’s nor a submissive daughter of Iran’s, but an ally of both based on shared strategic understandings about the area’s main challenges: Israel and American imperialist designs. And whereas the resistance’s hostility towards the US is negotiable, its rejection of Israel is visceral and undying.

Hence the weapons stay. Hezbollah shall not disarm until and unless either the Israeli menace is permanently removed or the Lebanese state itself acquires all the features of a modern republic: justice, the rule of law, equality of all citizens before the law, transparency, strength, uncontestable authority, accountability, respect of people’s civil and human rights, functionality… These preconditions should not be a cause for alarm but a source of comfort to the Lebanese. The presence of a combat-ready, steely resistance that is integral to the socio-political fabric of Lebanon is a boon to and not a defiance of its weak state. All the more reason then to forge a collaborative partnership between this “popular resistance” and the Lebanese army, under which the former protects Lebanon from Israel while the latter safeguards its internal security.

Hezbollah’s Islamist orientation clearly has not been a barrier to its popularity and friendships with international causes that share its opposition to unbridled capitalism and imperialism. But as admired as it is everywhere that counts, towards the Arab status quo it is willing to offer only rhetorical admonitions, and towards the Arab opposition, including Islamist parties-- which, by the way, are barely mentioned in the 32-page document--only rhetorical consolations.

Put in another way: now that it is one of the masters of the divided Lebanese house, this Shiite, politico-religious, armed-to-the-teeth behemoth does not want to bring it down, it just wants to rearrange the furniture, tinker with the fixtures a bit and keep guard over it.

Obviously, Hezbollah would like to believe that there can be a peaceful marriage between its insistence on being weaponized and its desire to be a full-fledged partner in the Lebanese state. It would like to believe that there is no friction between the demands of armed resistance and the imperatives of political governance. And so long as the threat of Israel and the frailty of Lebanon continue to offer the pretext and Syria and Iran continue to give cover, this marriage, peaceful or not, will last.

Hezbollah in the Larger Scheming of Things

2009-11-02T03:13:00.000-08:00

In the early days of last September, Ibrahim Amin delivered a scorcher. The editor-in-chief of al Akhbar, a leading left-leaning broadsheet whose sympathies for Hezbollah are as visceral as they are principled, wagged his caress-worn finger at the Party of God. It was the surest sign yet that the ululating faux pas involving Mr. Salah Ezziddine had indeed the makings of a full-blown scandal.

On the surface of this man’s sin squirmed a group of embarrassing revelations: the mysterious two days and nights Salah spent with Hezbollah before he was sent on his way to declare his bankruptcy to the Lebanese state; the inconvenient detail that this glaringly pious businessman was not the Madoff of the Shiites, but the Madoff of Hezbollah’s Shiites, a community whose blind faith in him stemmed directly from its blind faith in the Party; the absurdly high 40, 50, even 80% returns on dodgy speculative projects that spoke of sloth and greed and gluttony afflicting a sect which still liked to think of itself as deprived; and, of course, Hezbollah’s indulgence in business practices that mocked not a few teachings by Islam.

But as damaging as these disclosures were, their impact paled before that of the much larger question that recast a seemingly scrawny tale of theft and betrayal as a political bombshell: ensconced in its Shiite terrain, all mighty and divine, did Hezbollah, as Fida’ Itani put it in yet another al Akhbar editorial, shave the beard and put on the neck tie?

Or, as Amin lamented at the end of his September 4th column: “Many years ago, there was a man high up in the enemy’s hierarchy whose name is Uri Lubrani. Do you remember him? He was the coordinator of the enemy’s operations in Lebanon. Once, during a discussion on how to face the tough and stubborn foe that goes by the name of Hezbollah, he remarked: ‘We will be able to nail it only when the contagion that struck the PLO in Lebanon hits it; that is, when it becomes a show off and bourgeois.’ “

In a region where newspapers are little more than echo chambers, this is what we interminably skeptical spectators call an interesting moment. It’s not that newspapers like al Akhbar had never before chided Hezbollah, but whereas the old rebukes were about missteps and miscalculations, this one was about essence and trajectory. The meaning of resistance itself—as an identity, as liberation theology, as a down-to-earth, temptation-free way of life, as a socio-economic proposition in earnest search of alternatives to capitalism and globalization--was on the table. And those who put it there were not the usual disbelievers, but the devotees and admirers. Hezbollah, for the first time, was being called into account by its own followers.

All those dreams and expectations that wove myths on the coattails of genuine achievements were having epiphanies and experiencing doubt. Old sacred truths were becoming fair game in the debate arenas.

****

But the last thing you want to do is treat Salah Ezziddine as a lone matter in a room full of strangers. Context is everything in the Arab world. Salah is not only about the inevitabilities of extreme exposure for a party who has long been on the political scene. Nor is his indecency, and Hezbollah’s implication in it, merely a parable about the particularly odious corruptibility of those who peddle themselves as spokespersons for the deities.

So, when following the thread of Hezbollah’s Salah, you might want to probe farther in the fog for the other intrigues that appear to be wrapped around it. Like those about the UAE’s recent expulsion of around 40 of the many Lebanese Shiites residing in the Emirates, and the forced return of Imam Abd al Mun’im Qubaisi, one of Hezbollah’s fundraisers, from the Ivory Coast’s Abidjan. And those about the court case currently on-going against a so-called Hezbollah cell in the land of the Nile, and the movement’s busted sabotage activities in Azerbaijan. And those about the Katyushas flying from Southern Lebanon into Northern Israel, courtesy of the Battalions of Ziad al Jarah, a Jihadi group with links to al Qaeda, and subsequent Israeli taunts that Hezbollah is losing its grip on the South.

Like pieces, these news items fit into that puzzle that is Israel and Iran, both of whose regimes at present are as seemingly hostile as they are palpably distraught. This is a very intricate dance as colored by Shiite-Sunni sectarianism as it is driven by hard-ball politics. It is all the more interesting, then, that Turkey, the region’s Sunni powerhouse, should be building bridges to and striking deals with Shiite Tehran at a time when Arab Sunnis and other chums of America are encircling Persia’s allies in their own backyard. It is even more interesting that the US, contrary to conventional wisdom, may actually be encouraging Turkey’s extended hand, which explains Israel’s furious facial expressions from what is increasingly looking like a tight spot.

These are delicate times, however. So, mind the ifs and buts and maybes that pester every other line of this unfolding story.

The Only Way is Civil

2009-10-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

They’re rebuilding with mud now in Gaza. Humanitarian aid is still a droplet in the scorching sun. The tunnels built as lungs have become coffins. For Gazans, the toll of Operation Cast Lead stands last in a queue of open, infected wounds. For us, the numbers have become drab memoirs of days time has made less ugly: the left jaw of Gaza’s face smashed, 1,430 people killed, 4000 houses gone, 90,000 human beings made homeless, 179 schools throttled, eight demolished, one-fifth of greenhouses felled, 92 mosques without a prayer in hell… And that’s just for starters. There is a much thicker file lying somewhere about the death of Gaza long before the first bullet last December reached its target. It reads like a Dr.’s check list right before he pulls the plug.

They’ve been combing through Gaza the way detectives survey a crime scene. They want to know which label to attach to the innocent dead: deliberate or collateral damage. Funny...sifting through the charges and counter-charges and watching sobriety arm wrestle with outrage, you almost want to chide yourself for asking a fundamental question to which the answer is as obvious as it is tragic: when life itself collapses, in mad, asymmetrical war or from a slow, bloodless asphyxiation, on whose heads does it actually crumble?

****

Still, it’s good to debate intent when innocence is violence’s casualty. Good for morality. Good for the rule of law. Good for the color gray, for the record, for the next round.

It’s good to ask, as David Landau does: “When does negligence become recklessness, and when does recklessness slip into wanton callousness, and then into deliberate disregard for innocent human life?”

It’s good that shock and anger, no less than applause, are alighting all around Richard Goldstone, a prominent Jewish jurist and supporter of Israel for whom the case against the Jewish state is as clear as it is not simple. A harsh rebuke from a friend is another chip in the edifice of occupation, another badge of shame, another wakeup call, an appeal to the conscience that cannot be ignored.

What does it matter that, with the help of Obama and Abbass, the vote on Goldstone’s report in the UN Human Rights Council has just been delayed till March? The verdict, precisely because it is Goldstone’s, has already achieved its purpose.

As for Obama and Abbass, to which intelligent mind did their actions come as a surprise?

****

Dissent is good. It blurs us vs. them. It forces the matter of blame out of its dark, narrow chambers. It makes self-righteousness squirm. And what vision is more satisfying than that in these Arab and Israeli parts.

It’s been nine months since trigger–happy tempers were brought back down to a simmer in Gaza. Much looks the same. Much has changed. The way of the borders is still the whim of Egypt and Israel. Catastrophes still hover over this anguished land as clouds packing torrential rains and thunder. A bleak existence has become more barren still. Beggary abounds. The missiles are lurking in their hidden sites, but Godly extremists are out and about, as confounding today to Hamas as the Islamist movement itself was once to Fatah.

And yet, we are meant to believe that Hamas triumphs. It triumphs even though every orifice of Gaza is still corked up. It triumphs just to spite that toll. It triumphs without a single tank destroyed, nor a helicopter downed, nor a soldier kidnapped, nor a suicide bomber blitzed for maximum havoc. I paraphrase from an Israeli military source because nutshells don’t come any handier than that. Hamas triumphs because it is still in control even if what it is “securing is a graveyard” (I am borrowing again, this time from a Palestinian source).

Only days into Cast Lead, experts began to talk: Hezbollah will join the fight if Hamas’s position became “desperate.” Ominous predictions delivered in thick-set, think-tank papers and in Op-Eds and news articles. Not everyone bought. You could hear the sarcastic retorts ricochet, as bullets would, off of these reports: good thing for Hezbollah that Hamas, whatever the tally, was always sure to be the winner. I suppose it was hardly relevant to Hezbollah or Hamas—or those experts--that Gaza was pretty desperate from where every Gazan was crouching.

There were those hopelessly spastic missiles, of course, as self-defeating to the Cause as they are degrading to its principles. Sad to see cutting off your nose to spite your face pass for defiant resistance. Even sadder to witness a people’s struggle for liberation starved down to feckless payback. But so it has been between a pitiless occupation conducted by remote control and an obtuse movement for whom resistance is little more than a Pavlovian reflex.

“I can take it like a man.”

If Hamas’s missiles could talk, that’s what they would be saying.

And for quite a few of us Arabs, that somehow is more than enough said.

****

All this sorry business is more than vaguely familiar. It’s been déjà vu in those quarters for years now. Like Fatah, like Hamas. You can grow forests in that space between reality and pretense in Gaza as lush as those that are the legacy of Arafat. Which reminds me of that lamentation by a Palestinian taxi driver in Amman last February: “First we were resisting for the whole of Palestine, then for half of it, then for ‘67, then for the neighborhood, then for a quiet night? Now, we fight to keep the breadcrumbs coming. What the hell kind of resistance is that?”

An intensely focused one, it would appear. You know, the kind with a single-item agenda: to emerge every single time from the rubble and pretend that it has pulled off yet another win. Which reminds me of those words by the late Issam Sartawi, one of Arafat’s closest and dearest, after the 1982 evacuation of the PLO forces from Lebanon: “One more victory like this one and the PLO will find itself on the Fiji Islands.”

Like Arafat, Like Mish’al. It’s a sight, no doubt, Hamas’s Khalid Mish’al doing his own Arafat-like verbal acrobatics and harrumphs in search of a way out--or is it in? But then it was a sight watching Hamas in 2006, like Fatah since 1993, become a master under occupation much as a warden over a prison.

The edge of the cliff is where Palestine stands. To walk the road that took it there is to march through a wasteland bestrewn with mistakes and scarred by abuse. There truly never was much hope in Fatah or Hamas.

But there are faint murmurs, in more serious places by more serious people, about the wisdom of massive civil disobedience, about the humanity of it, the possibility of it as the only path to an exit. There are already glimpses of it by that Wall, on those fields in tiny villages. Incidents of it in the archives. Surely there should be all the space for it now in Palestinian thought.

Life is as hopeless in Palestine as it seems. But as Jeff Halper, the Director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, wrote in a recent piece for Middle East Report, “The Palestinians, exhausted and suffering as they may be, possess a trump card of their own. They are the gatekeepers. Until the majority of Palestinians, and not merely political leaders, declare that the conflict is over, the conflict is not over.”

Bewildering (or Is It Delirious?) Lebanon

2009-08-21T02:51:00.000-07:00

Lebanon seduces. That’s what every smitten foreigner—and they are many—will tell you. There is a sultry feel to the place, they say; seedy, perhaps, yes, and intoxicating all because of it. It could very well be Lebanon’s blithe openness to life’s best and worst possibilities that gives it this special glow even though it actually makes it stink. The taste of the West flirting shamelessly with that irresistible whiff of the East, the covered heads and bared bottoms that promenade in the same neighborhoods, the frills of modernity that obscure the chaotic rhythms of backwardness. A smart people, a dumb country. Botox and Bombs, the grimy glitter of Beirut, the fierceness of the mountains, the drums of war that play as background music to the mindless, never-ending political chatter. Sky Bar on the waterfront, vistas of beards and resistance barely ten minutes south. An Alzheimer stricken country that stubbornly latches on to age-old nasty habits but is amnesiac about yesterday’s horrors…

And then, of course, there are the goons who preside over this Lebanon: warlords and feudal masters, pimps and carpet baggers, small-time thieves and big-time crooks, crazy generals and turbaned warriors--this one with the fine English, that one with the fine wine cellar, another a devotee of Hegel, his nemesis a sucker for Sartre --mixing it up or bringing the house down, as it were, in the closest thing to a democracy in the Arab East.

For a particular type of Westerner there is even more to Lebanon than this delicious array of contradictions. Beirut itself is for lost souls, spooks in training, adventurers looking for a home, a name, an identity, knowledge to buy or sell. You run into them everywhere: in the capital’s sleazy joints, in its still brooding, ponytailed, chin-scratching leftist hangouts, in Tripoli’s burning Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp, in Hezbollah’s southern suburbs, on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, in CounterPunch… Wannabes on the make, they come to Lebanon knowing nothing, and a nice, quick three months later they come out knowing it all. The expertise of choice nowadays is, of course, Hezbollah, but a sojourn here can deliver as well expertise on, say, the psycho-dynamics of Lebanese-Syrian relations, or even on how you can commit a 17-year-long civil murder and claim that the butler did it. And these out-of-towners can be all this, do all that, without much interference or obstruction, for no other Arab hideout, however thrilling, offers the-live-and- let-live mayhem and flesh that Beirut does.

It makes life suddenly worth living, this place, us.

But real as this Lebanon might be for these naifs and floaters with a mission, for little, old Lebanese me (and, no doubt, for other natives), this corner of the Levant is the stuff of fiction, realities donning the many garbs of make believe and performing for a mock nation. In this marvel of a country, so-called multiculturalism can, at the flutter of an eyelash, turn into something hideously sectarian, and warring men by day can, when night’s curtains fall, swing together, drunk and genuinely happy, to the spine-tingling voice of Cesaria Evora. Youth, talent, brains, the future are in flight from this dead-end, and yet, when it comes to blood and gore, to bosoms and lips, Lebanon is way happening. The silliness and cruelty of this dump is not in the speed and ease with which it allows truths and lies and love and hate to exchange places, but in the people’s indifference to the sickening back and forth between them.

For me, the Lebanon I am living in could have become, in time, a mirror of its best yarns but instead decided to settle for its worst illusions. It is the Lebanon where the harassed, tree-rich mountains of yore peer over a filthy, ecoli- infested sea; where gorgeous parties float on thinly roofed lakes of your and my feces; where electricity still comes in dribs and drabs to entire communities; where rampant poverty is tempered and masked by a web of sectarian and feudal patronages; where food poisoning, skin diseases from toxic swimming pools, car pollution and day-long waits in traffic jams during the summer months are brandished as proof of tourism’s love of this haunt; where public works celebrate almost quarterly anniversaries on the same sites year after year after year.

This is the Lebanon that glides, haggard, stateless and broken, through life as if it’s waltzing its evenings away on marble; that thinks its sexy, beautiful, sophisticated, “with it”, when in actual fact it is over the hill, ugly, passé, money grubbing, uncouth, farts all day long, has BO and is downright moronic to boot.

August is a mother, ain’t it?

No, really, on a serious note, the other day, I was leafing through Phillips de Pury & Company’s catalogue for the May 16, 2009, auction and came across two photographs. One, titled Saida, is a shot by Elger Esser of the sea-planted citadel facing the city of Sidon. In life, it is decrepit and swimming in ink blue waters. Through Esser’s lens, it is poetry; for me, if not for him, a visualization of Lebanon as it should be: its damaged beauty still obvious to the eye, still loved, its mood melodic, even serene, its present mature and not allergic to introspection. The other photograph, by Fouad el Khoury, is of Beirut’s corniche on a very stormy day, blurred, perturbed and unbearably sensual. This imagined Lebanon is like a great idea that lives in its lazy author’s head refusing to dart out and become a full-grown story. Of my country’s many tragedies this one tugs most at the heart—at least mine.

2009-06-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

From this Side of the Fence

In this month’s Vanity Fair, Juan Lopez does the “dummies” among us a favor by offering them a peek into “Modern Iranian Culture” through literary means: a couple of lines on several books that can do much better than Twitter in illuminating the colorful rhythms of Iran.

This should help, I am sure. But in this chaos of claims and counterclaims, in this rush of burning images and on-the-run tweets, the more riveting type of news is threatening to obscure quieter realities. Iran’s political crisis is the stuff of history at its most rambunctious and exciting, but the truth of the matter is that modern Persia and its Islamist revolution have been captivating many of us for thirty years now, and the most fascinating dynamic to watch has been the capacity of a robust civil society to grow and consolidate its presence in spite of the regime’s best efforts against it, and the inability of an Islamist idea to take hold and establish solid roots in spite of the regime’s best efforts on its behalf.

Here’s the bottom line: the current debacle might be a high-stakes joust between Iran’s competing elites, with havoc on the streets acting as a prop, but had the revolution been alive and well, had its promise been untarnished, had its achievements been widespread and obvious, had its patrons been as clever and as close to the people as they thought they were, its progenitors would not be at such loggerheads.

Without a doubt, Islamist Iran’s accent is as crude and jarring as that of every other Arab authoritarian rule. But there are qualities to this Iranian polity that make it singular in this region: the often heated give and take between the different poles of influence, the clerical audacity that has often challenged, and still does, the idea of Khomeini’s Wilayat al Faqih (the Guardianship of the Supreme Jurist); the sophistication of many high-ups in the political establishment that both complements and stands in stark contrast to the grime pitilessness of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and blatant thuggery of the Basij Mostazafin (mobilization of the oppressed) voluntary militias; the remarkable resilience and ingenuity of a civil society that keep outsmarting, and even at times derailing, the stubborn encroachments of the state’s piety.

Whereas here, in this Arab dominion, our societies are fractured, tired and cowed by leaderships who stare down, club in hand, as one. So now, as many people in Iran make a statement and take a stand, we gape, confused, not sure if we should be happy or up in arms. For certain, our rulers are fretting that they shall soon miss the brazenly hostile politics of Ahmadenijad. And hilariously, so are quite a few of America’s bashers in the opposition, religious conservatives and so-called leftists alike, who seem to be convinced that Mousavi is the “Great Satan’s” man. To this camp, one can easily add Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who is praying as well for the bad boy of Iran.

But for those who see beyond the very narrow concerns of their agendas, both the streets of Iran and the push and pull in its corridors of power are an impressive sight.

****

It is indeed ironic for the Islamist republic’s masters that at precisely the moment when they thought they were about to finally find their place in the sun, they discovered they were losing it among their own people. The impact of this palpable, though not total, loss of face and legitimacy on their conduct in the regional and international arenas is very likely to be deep and unnerving. If only because of the perception of weakness, Khamenei and his entourage, should they survive this fight, might feel compelled to really jack up the ante.

The plot thickens and, of course, it is early days yet. Still, the most significant development in Iran began to unfold well before the present showdown: the Islamist experiment has been in retreat for quite some time, and one does not have to strain in search of the narratives which have been stacking up against it.

For every story that tells of the wretchedness wrought by foolish pieties and cruel beliefs there is one that speaks of triumphant defiance and unbowed dignity. In the mid-1990s, Iran had no more than 25 to 30 women writers; today, it boasts 400 . Moreover, 60 percent of university graduates are women, and well over half the students in Medicine, Basic Sciences, Humanities and Arts and Experimental Sciences are of the finer sex. What opportunities the clerical order was loath to cede to women, wars and economic difficulties gave them. But would that the state’s miserliness were the only impediment obstructing the path of Iran’s struggling women. For thirty years, laws, decrees, morality crusades and modesty campaigns have conspired to thwart potential, kill dreams and insult. Even a random selection of these is enough to clue in the reader.

Almost immediately after the 1978 revolution, the marriage age for girls was reduced from 18 to nine years (it was raised to 13 years only in 2002) and married women were prohibited by law from attending regular schools. In 1982, the strict Islamic dress code was imposed. Before 1996, punishment for violators was 74 lashes; after it, jail time or a fine. Article 105 of the civil code decrees that “a woman cannot leave her home without her husband’s permission, even to attend her father’s funeral.” In 2005, Tehran’s City Council put forward yet more “Strategies to Extend Piety.” In the same year, a “cultural modesty” campaign was launched to restore strict veiling by doing away with “bad hejab” (I suppose this must mean loose-fitting veil) and daring though technically Islamic hejab (humm…a better fitting but still flowing veil?). In 2006, a security report produced by the political bureau of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) classified feminists along with “mystics, dervishes, devil worshipers, journalists, bloggers, secular students and intellectuals, reformists, as the main threats to the national security of the country.” In 2007, a clamp down on “loose veiling” resulted in the arrest of 150,000 women in the first four days of the drive. In 2008, bicycle riding for woman was prohibited as immoral.

Yet this presumably God-fearing place, this community of the faithful is teeming with so many prostitutes that a few of the more creative mullahs contemplated the establishment of chastity houses to make temporary wives of these women of the night. Tehran, home to 10-12 million people, has an estimated 300,000 prostitutes—that is one out of every ten women of childbearing age. During the craven days of the Shah, the average age of a prostitute was 27; in the devout days of Khamenei, the Imam’s stand-in, it dropped to 20.

For all of the state’s pains to “Command What is Just and Forbid What is Wrong (al Amr bil Marouf wa al Inha’ A’an al Munkar) behind many of its laws and policies is an embarrassment of failure and pullback. In 2000, a poll done by Tehran’s Cultural and Artistic Affairs Council found that 75 percent of the people and 86 percent of students do not say their daily prayers. By its own admission, Iran is the number one drug abuser in the world. As recently as January 2009, the minister of interior and deputy police commander intimated that the public safety program, which in the first four months of its implementation in 2007 resulted in the humiliation or reprimand of one million people and the arrest of another 40,000, is a violation of people’s citizenship rights.

Yes, the regime has the guns and, yes, its Islamist reign is far from over, but the message is sullied, the example is good in every way the theocrats and their enforcers do not want it to be, the charisma is a thing of the past and, it appears, the future is ready to surprise.

A 17th century Isfahani saying admonishes people to “keep a wary eye in front you for a woman, behind you for a mule, and from every direction for a mullah.” Islamism in Iran may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but clearly the Iranian people are.