Welcome to Lebanon!

There was mention of a livable abyss in this Lebanon, in an earlier post (Jan.9, 08)): not like Zimbabwe, not like Haiti, not like Iraq, not that kind of carnage, not that side of turmoil. Something much kinder in fact: death a la carte, chaos on a tight leash, violence that leaks from the kitchen faucet as opposed to that which floods the entire house. In political speak: a tacit agreement between the warring parties to inflict pain but stay away from wholesale torture, to peacefully divvy up the place and sink deep in red ink the sharp, clear lines, the dos and don’ts, that drive its politics.

I pronounced Lebanon dead. Dead because it never could figure our why it must be. Dead because from the start it was made up of tiny dreams, of small calculations, of trivial ambitions, of narrow visions all at odds, all happy to embrace any idea but that of Lebanon. Dead because the cynicism of its shepherds comes in abundance, their wisdom in dribs and drabs. Dead because, for all its blemishes, to its many suitors it remained beautiful, ready to be had again, and again, and again.

But it seemed to me that the so longs and as ifs in this enclave on the Levantine coast might just be enough for a semblance of an afterlife. Perhaps mine was nothing more than fascination with a people who were collectively finished but individually very much alive, going about the business of life while their screaming politics, a mad Mrs. Rochester, let loose dreadful sounds and lunatic giggles every once in a while from the attic reminding the residents below of an ominous moment yet to come. And here it is with us now. This house burns.

Last week’s fury has shown how buffoonery can at a moment’s notice morph into madness. Sacrosanct, sky-high red walls have been brought down. We, Lebanese, are sitting stunned, the politically astute amongst us unable to predict tomorrow or fathom exactly what happened yesterday, the most cynical confidently churning out tactics and chess moves so utterly devilish, so pitch-perfect, you’d think the gods are in this fight and the rest of us are just poor, hapless, stupid humans lining up for the usual ritual sacrifice.

Such is the price of ignorance when you are asked to think your way out of near-total darkness: facts appear to you as shadows would, the tangibles fading in and out of the mind’s eye. And such is the price of ignorance in a Lebanon where the givens are so temperamental and politics is at once unbearably crude and ridiculously complicated. That is why our facial expressions keep changing as we bear witness to a country that keeps swinging between seismic shifts and stasis.

Eventually, and maybe very soon, events will point to the shape of our future. Into it, they are sure to pour the residues of the cruel pounding our realities have just received; realities dictated by sectarian taboos and fed by age-old parochial sentiments; realities sustained by a very fragile regional and local balance of wills and a resistance movement’s multiple identities and grand ambitions.

I don’t know what will happen next, but the latest disturbances were more than replays of Lebanon’s morbidly familiar sectarian discords. They were the last rung in the ladder that has taken the Party of God to the bottom of the Lebanese morass. These past five days have finally ushered in a very provincial Hezbollah--its nationalist credentials now muddied and strategic weight made much lighter. However powerful it shall remain within the political confines of Lebanon, against Israel its status has become perceptibly more vulnerable. For what resistance movement in history has thrived and fought well and won when its own people were deeply suspicious of its intentions and actively hostile to its cause.

It is not clear which ally incited, or which enemy provoked, Hezbollah’s military offensive, but what is unmistakable is that the gambit has failed. I hear its aftershocks are already reverberating in the Southern Suburbs. If this is true, then Damascus and Tehran and Tel Aviv are well into evaluating their impact.

The sad irony for Hezbollah is that it would not have ended up so very small and Lebanese had its grasp of the country’s confessional mosaic not been so mystifyingly weak. I suspect that the party genuinely believed that it had enough cross-sectarian support to bless its assault on the Sunni and Druze pillars of March 14 and the frustrating status quo that has held against its best efforts in the past 18 months. Hezbollah must have been convinced that the Lebanese people, across the divides, are just as taken as the movement is with its exceptionalism, not realizing that in Lebanon no one, however mighty, can ever be an exception to the rules. And hence during a week of crass muscle flexing, the earth shook but time-honored mind-sets and practices barely stirred. Only the sanctity of Hezbollah’s weapons died on the streets of Sunni Beirut and in the villages of the Druze mountains. Only the dignity of its purpose took a serious drubbing.

What a rude awakening!

As of this moment, I have only one message for Siyyid Hassan Nassrallah: Welcome to Lebanon.

So, Who’s the Bimbo? Part Two

I’ve been staring at this swinging Haifa and these floating black swans for weeks on end. Even in private thought I catch myself tiptoeing around these women and the fabrics that clad them. That’s the trouble with our veil: it has become radioactive. On it hang the prospects of a debate that is as contrived and fatuous in certain circles as it is serious and consequential in others. Of all our items of clothing, it carries within it a symbolism that is as political as it is sexual, as chauvinistic as it is emancipatory, as regressive as it is contemporary.

Not for the squeamish, therefore, talk about this precious veil! You have to sew your sentences ever so carefully and stitch your ideas together with such delicacy, although the image you’re finally embroidering deep into the surface of this issue is anything but pretty.

****

There is no doubt they’re special, these women—iconic, really. For many, they tell tales about dissonance and malaise, about rough endings and radical departures, modishness and piety when they are read backward or worn upside down. In conversations here and elsewhere Haifa and the black swans are often tagged as the human summations of our confused sense of Arab Muslim self, testimonies of our inability or unwillingness to write a meaningful narrative that neither plagiarizes from the West nor seeks inspiration in a distressingly introverted Islam.

Haifa, well, Haifa’s story is plain enough—at least to the eye: bimboism, as a supracultural trend, bimboism by the cookie cutter, if you like, and, inevitably, the female as sex object. Wherever you see her, however sassy or attractive she may be, she is everywhere the same. Of course, in her own backyard—the Arab world—poor Haifa carries even heavier baggage for most of the region’s religiously devout: she is visual proof of our drooling mimicry of the West, our susceptibility to its lasciviousness, our flouting, and with such scandalous nonchalance, the very clear commands of Islam. She is the very reason we need to turn back and inward and (for the most zealous among the faithful) fade our femaleness into black.

Which brings me to the lovely ladies traveling by her side. By looks alone, you would think that they and Haifa are worlds apart, that they pray to clashing deities, live by colliding value systems. The dress code alone would make any arguments to the contrary rather cheeky. They themselves would probably bristle at the suggestion that the one thing that makes them appear so physically different from one another is what actually makes of them the best of sisters: sex. Their sex, to be more precise, and the sheer lure of it which Haifa flaunts with such relish and which they hide with such zeal.

Mind you, there are plenty of us women populating the space between Haifa and the niqabis. We all spend fractions of our mornings and evenings determining how much we want to expose of ourselves. Call it our daily give-and-take with our femaleness. Sexuality, shi’na am abaina (whether we want it or not), is the first hanger we take out from a closet crowded with moods, tastes and identities. And here’s where Islamism pretends to leave the premises, all while installing itself king of the house: contrary to its contention that the veil is the Muslim woman’s path away from such potentially demeaning chitchats, it is a march smack into the heart of them, as screaming a voice for the objectification of female sexuality as Haifa’s zigzagging black rope without which her dress and she can never be one. For in that act that a woman takes to cover up in order to render more bearable her seductiveness, to temper—so to speak--the Eve in her, she is not authoring new rules for this ageless game, she’s playing by the oldest of them: like the famous chanteuse, she is embracing her sexuality’s wicked sway over men but is dutifully opting to switch it off rather than turn it on. And so, after traveling long and hard away from Haifa, she finds herself at the end of the trip right where she started: standing very close to the flaming tigress herself.

But of course, in these nervous times these musings are tantamount to petty rabblerousing, akin to pissing on someone’s party. It would defeat the objective of all this name calling inside and out, wouldn’t it, if these symbols of our cultural waywardness (Haifa) or religious atavisms (the black swans) turn out to be the creative handiwork of the very same mindset? A sharboukeh, we call this quandary in Arabic, a real tangle, because entire civilizations have been mobilized, enough books have been churned out to stack up libraries, intellectual powerhouses have been called in, eyebrows are in permanent mating, mouths are salivating all around their angry rim…You want to laugh at all this, but somehow something about the sorry sight kills the glib in you.

So, I don’t want to be glib about any of it, and I especially don’t want to be glib about the veil. Not the veil! Because here’s a piece of fabric that might well be as old as Gilgamesh himself and yet is forever young and vibrant. It has lived in so many countries and travelled to so many places, no more than a formality in that culture, no less than chastity itself in this one. It’s a chameleon: to some, soft and colorful and ever so light on the face; to others, heavy and immovable, wrapping bodies the way death swallows up life. It is versatile: to that daughter a quiet, even tentative, negotiation with “modernity;” to this one, pitchfork-angry, despotic and sadistic. It can play uncle, protecting its weary women from the incessant harassments of idiotic men, or be the best disguise for naughty girls in need of the perfect cover on illicit outings. It also can be out-and-out political, as the last few decades have shown. Yes, this perennial hallmark of female virtue has entered the political fray, in certain neighborhoods willingly, in others with its feet kicking and dragging. It has become a basic matter of identity--not all of it, to be sure, but enough of it for many of us to wear it as an act of cultural and political rebellion. It is no small irony, of course, that by willfully choosing to make our sexuality so inconspicuous we have rendered it the most conspicuous marker of this supposedly new identity.

Impressive, this remarkable ability of a piece of fabric to straddle so many realms and crown so many heads! How cleverly it mixes sexuality with politics with jingoism with culture with religion, and makes of the female the most valuable currency in this endless haggling over who we are. To talk about the veil today as a mere religious requirement would in fact be a violation of its civil and political rights: it strips it from much of its substance, denies its actual appeal and silences the crowds of motivations that have carried it triumphant out of its religious bounds. In countries that have made of diversity and pluralism umbrellas for feuding lifestyles and conflicting belief systems, the veil can be pretty much whatever it wants to be. However widespread and assertive it is in its own milieu, at its most ambitious it would be only one among many chapters on the challenges of assimilation and tolerance. But in instinctively conservative societies, the more popular it is, the more unnerving it becomes. Just by showing up, it has the capacity to harass women whose sexuality is as irreligious as it is apolitical. Watch it in Turkey become a victim of its resounding success everywhere in the region: no matter how loud or truthful its protestations that it is nothing more than a fulfillment of a scriptural obligation, no one will believe it. And with good reason, because if Islam’s manifest destiny is to colonize every dominion of life—or if it is in fact life itself, as its Islamist champions openly claim
--then the veil is the most vivid demonstration of its irredentist tendencies.

*****

None of us has to spend too much time figuring out the reasons for the veil and its glory. They run around in rowdy packs screaming their way down our history. One is about a frazzled people’s hope that their religion will help them crawl out of their deep well of impotence. One is about how fickle we Middle Easterners always were about our secularism and how little we appreciated the beauty of it. One is about the search for companionship in landscapes emptied from every lover but religion. Yet another is nothing more than misogyny calling itself the word of God. Still others are about the need to believe that Islam can offer its own version of modernity, that there is more than one way to feel liberated and free, even if it means living in tomb-like darkness. That our womanhood should become so hopelessly entangled in an entire region’s convulsive relationship with its faith, its history, its place in the here and now, its political masters, the West, tells you how utterly indispensible we are in this struggle and how confounding our situation is because of it.

But don’t go around mocking those women who think they have set themselves free by covering up. That they have stood emancipation on its head in this day and age is no easy feat. And kid yourself not, most of them are no pushovers—sort of like Haifa herself. Research (see Lara Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii Lebanon, and Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate) reveals that younger generations of educated women from secular middle and upper middle class families have enthusiastically taken up the veil to create for themselves a life that is self-consciously skeptical about a Westernism that comes in all or nothing packages. They want to pick and choose their way through things contemporary, mix and match PhDs’ and careers and financial independence with a white veil and tight black skirt today, a mauve one and jeans tomorrow. On many an intrepid face, you see lipstick accentuating the color of humility, bright eye liner complimenting it. In marveling at these women, we rarely compute that their rather imaginatively veiled displays are actually far more demanding of Islamism (yes, the ism is deliberate) than they are of the modern life. The latter is happy to indulge them as much as it tolerates all of us, all the way to Haifa’s side of the bargain. It is the former that is being asked to concede much because it is infinitely more particular about what it wants from its women. It is being asked to concede that the veil speaks with more than one tongue, likes having more than one interpretation, enjoys more than one standard, boasts more than one cultural accent, even if it dwells happily within the shifting walls of its faith.

*****

Still, as a woman of this place and of this religion, as someone who, without hesitation, insists on every woman’s right to live with the veil or without it, I cannot but wonder at the astounding cleverness of this piece of cloth. All these twists and turns and layers and upon layers of emotions and thoughts and expectations and disappointments and heartbreaks suffusing it and imbuing it with such meaning, when, in truth, it has always been, by its own admission, about one very crude supposition: the sinful magnetism of the female and the burden we shoulder in physically shielding men from her.

Had I been, strictly speaking, a woman of faith, I might have lingered momentarily, as other woman have before me, at the obvious notion that since God went through all this trouble to create all this attractiveness in the female, the last thing he would want her to do is wrap it up. And since this life presumably is one long test of human will, I would have puzzled over why the onus then is not on the man to get over it and control his ups and downs. Not very rigorous intellectual or theological observations, I admit, and yet somehow they seem more than enough--at least for this female.  

So, Who’s the Bimbo? Part One

Our politics is a narcissistic, shrill creature, isn’t she? There is no hope for perils of the tight-lipped kind in her presence. She raves and rants and kills, shoving shyer tragedies to the back pages, as if our center stage is only for cataclysms that come with ticking bombs. And what an ungrateful prima donna she is, for where would she be, who would love her, who would even give her a second glance if it were not for the shushed chronic injustices that make her so bloody and passionate.

But every once in a while, a wrong too terrible to hide or an offense too titillating to keep under wraps screams its way into the open, and suddenly the world lets out fleeting cries for the many sad souls inhabiting this place.

They’re writing about us Middle Eastern women—again. We’re news once more, along with quick death in Lebanon, slow death in Gaza, every kind of death in Iraq, and "yo mama" shouting matches between the US and Iran, between Syria and Lebanon, Hamas and Fatah, Hezbollah and March 14th…

A heinous honor killing, a particularly gruesome rape, loud heartbreak, and we’re back.

****

And why shouldn’t we enjoy the limelight every now and then! We have become exhibit A, the primo piatto, the weapon of choice for lovers and enemies in this furious orgy of loathing between East and West. Not that our looks have not been bandied about many a time in the past to give license to bigotry or justification for misogyny. But one would have thought our use-by date as pictographs had pretty much passed, we had been poked and picked on for so long. Instead, here we are in a new century, with new hairdos, living with the same old rage, the same old slogans, the same old effigies, on the same old terrain.

For an offended and humiliated East, we are the barometer for Eastern submissiveness to Western temptation. For an offended and mortified West, we are the caption that leads every conversation about Islam’s perennial backwardness. Many have literally drawn the lines of battle across our bodies and faces, as if our visage, and how much we reveal of it, is the only arbiter of who and what we are. Clothes have emerged as markers of our distance from or proximity to the West, ciphers of what is right and wrong about us--for both sides. Through such expedient visual abbreviations, a slit miniskirt has become either a shortcut to modernity or a sprint towards blasphemy, the niqab an appalling denial of the female self or an explicit expression of purity. Whichever way you turn us now, we are, by the sheer power of our appearance, the shield against imperial lust or the most telling piece of evidence of Islamic tyranny.

In this way, very complicated, inconvenient realities are tamed and made simple-- ironically for all those who have chosen this fight. In this way, the chauvinism that makes one of repressive states and Islamists is brushed out of the debate, moderation is rendered in photoplay and the hard work of progress is replaced with grand gestures. For evidence of a modernizing Dubai, you no longer have to waste your time researching family and personal status laws, review the fatwas that help set them, suffer long visits with actual cases, or check police archives; just go to the beach and ogle the bikinis while your downing those martinis. For proof of Egypt’s secularism, the public spats between Husni Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood more than suffice; you don’t need to dig deep into the myriad civil-cum-religious statutes and court rulings that chain up women the way manacles shackle their prisoners. For portraitures of westernized emancipation, my free-falling hair need only speak to my freedom, the veil against hers; for Islamic-inspired liberation, the exact same symbol will do, only in reverse. Now are these pictures not worth more than a thousand words?

Forgotten in these burning trenches are the minutia of female subjugation and the web of tribal customs,  laws and sacred Islamic (and yes, Christian) writs that connive to give them absolute sanction: the rapes that almost always go unpunished, the victims of honor killings that are cut down and committed to collective memory as agents of disgrace, the mother who will never get custody of her pubescent children, the divorce that will never happen unless he wants it to, the wife who cannot open a business without her husband’s permission, the physical violence that passes for patriarchal prerogative, the sexual abuse that races out of the closet only when it is chased out by scandal.

But then, this is terror at its most efficient and subtle, quietly ruining lives and targeting mostly female prey. It minds its own business and asks others to mind theirs. It takes place in private arenas—back alleys, bedrooms, courtrooms—far from the madding crowd. It is smart, has age-old traditions for dear friends, the silence of the mighty as an accessory, a callous system as enabler. Why disown it when the stakes seem so small, the sufferers so expendable, the rewards so mercurial? Why pay the heavy price of what is sure to be a vicious squabble, when the label of modernity or liberalism or secularism can be had for much cheaper?

Especially when the war on terror itself, launched in the name of every nifty ideal it could conjure, has in mind much bigger fish to fry. In pursuit of the forces of darkness, it seeks out only that evil with a penchant for visual effects and mass fear. In its playbook, only a lunatic, wired-up Islam qualifies as fanaticism, only suicide bombings, televised beheadings and variations thereof constitute Horrorism, as Martin Amis coined it for them and us. With such high bars set for villainy, breezy is the test of tolerance for any regime, however reactionary, any fundamentalism, however vile, so long as they stick to discreet forms of wickedness in their own little backyards. And let’s face it, the beauty of women’s oppression, ugly as it is, is its capacity to be so ordinary because it is so commonplace. Juxtaposed against streets soaked in blood, heads rolling, towers falling, our pain pales as do our cries of protest, because this struggle is not about the substance of extremism, just the violence of it, and not all expressions of it, just that one that runs after the powerful and their interests.

Notice the sighs of relief when Sayyid Imam al Sharif, the first emir of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, recently published from his Cairene cell a series of ten lectures that called for an end to “suicidal” Jihad and described Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri as feeble-minded imposters who are “ignorant in their religion.” Sunni radicalism finally could boast its hawks and doves: Jihadi ideologues were breaking ranks with al Qaeda and the canons of murder were being rethought. And yet, the only genuine break between Imam al Sharif and his old comrades is in his revised how-to manual. The rest of the lectures are just as frighteningly zealous and monomaniacal as all the other extremist diatribes. Of women, needless to say, there is nary a mention in the lectures because there was nary a demand for it from the outside.

And so the story goes with the gang-raped girl from Qatif. If mercy had not come in the garish shape of a scandal, we would not have been able to marvel at the sight of a most enlightened Saudi king wrist-slapping his Wahhabi judiciary with a public pardon. Even in quick, antiseptic takes, the girl’s ordeal horrifies just as much as it astounds: a married girl of eighteen from the Eastern province is coaxed by her blackmailing ex-boyfriend into an afternoon car ride in order to retrieve an old photograph. The car is intercepted by seven men who drive the two into a remote location and gang-rape them into the evening’s twilight. Instead of remaining silent as she heals, the bride tells her husband she wants legal relief. Although rape in Saudi Arabia is punishable by death, the Sharia court hands out lashings and prison sentences of varying strictness, the severest not exceeding a few years worth of incarceration. For “illegally mingling” with a male, the girl herself gets 90 lashes which, as punishment for her appeal, increase to 200 and jail time. Incensed by the verdict, her unusually sympathetic husband and her intrepid lawyer decide to take this pubic; the media pick up the story, people everywhere are outraged, the regime is shamed, enter His Majesty and his much needed forgiveness to lighten up the red faces. The nightmare now begins to relax slowly into something less hellish.

From horrendous start to fairytale finish, this story blends the harshest of facts with the worst of fictions. If it were not for the husband’s support, this rape would have gone silently the way of countless others into oblivion. And humane though it was, the royal pardon was infinitely more merciful on Wahhabism than it was on the girl. Otherwise, why opt for a pardon and let the court’s decision stand as correct and defensible? Why insist that a monarch’s selective compassion and rhetorical devotion to reforms somehow render more forgiving this hate-filled Wahhabism which he espouses?

But such are the paths to salvation in countries where misogyny is visceral and the Sharia courts are predatory. Had the infuriated parents of the gang-raped French boy not scratched the slick veneer of Dubai, the very soft prison terms for his rapists would not have turned hard. Had women really mattered in Iraq, hundreds of them would not be falling in the north and south in an epidemic of honor crimes.

****

The Sorbonne and Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Cornell in Qatar, legoland in Dubai: all are examples of how cash can magically recast primeval desert-sheikhdoms as hip, modern-day princedoms. Here’s a conflict that is shot almost entirely in pictures and fought with big guns, big bucks and eye-catching tokenisms. Under the cover of glitz and marble live societies which are nothing more than props in a charade of progress, women who are told to live life as a photo op.

On the battlefield of this war on terror, we women are what we were in every previous contrived quarrel between East and West: a powerful symbol, a singular image, through which the difference between the two, at an instance, with a dash of the pen or the click of the camera, can be had. More than that we are as irrelevant to this battle as is every one of those lofty notions for which each side is pretending to fight.

Of course, thoughtful minds are not welcome anywhere near this infernal wrangle. For them, no doubt, this whole debacle would be hilarious were it not so noxious. What, after all, could be scarier than demagoguery and ignorance sermonizing to us on behalf of entire civilizations and setting the rules of engagement between them?

Which, on a lighter note, brings me to these sisters.

More on So, Who's the Bimbo, later.

Blah-blah-blah

I am not sure how to greet this 2008 and I don’t know what to call this post. Flipping through pontifications for some insight about this East is like hunting for shy meanings in a world ravaged by blah-blah-blah. But they are there, in that unspoken bit or that gliding mention of a skidding fact which perk up the mornings just when they are about to slide into a murderous ennui.

In this manner Lebanon has been splintering daily on the front page of newspapers and in living rooms. We have no president, our parliament is in hibernation, our government is a paraplegic and our recent past is a repository of wars, assassinations, Israeli cluster bombs crippling our south and a near-empty tent-city crippling our center. If doom had an army, it would conquer thus.

Absent from this screaming tragedy is the whirr of a divided nation purring its way through calamity. It’s as if the Lebanese people had finally descended into the abyss and found it, after all, livable. The state, struck dumb by the political class, parades around practically naked and headless and the implausible becomes an embarrassing fact: we have no need of a Maronite president, a Shiite speaker of the house, a Sunni prime minister and council of ministers because we have no need of the state. So long as each sect has its generous chief and each tribe its caring father; so long as each municipality can pretend to breathe on its own; so long as basic services, such as garbage collection and electricity and water, don’t cease; so long as the army keeps deploying its youngsters here and there to calm and reassure the jittery, Lebanon has no practical need of its politicians. To boot, it turns out that we, the parts, do not need to be the sum of anything in order to add up to something. This country has not been one or whole for a long time now, and while the people seem to have accepted this reality quietly and moved on, our “statesmen” are sounding like Johnny’s-come-lately, warning us that the dire end may yet arrive when, in truth, it has come and gone.

This is the way we live but, admittedly, it is not the way we think because the mind is a creature of habit. Conventional wisdom does not know what to make of a people who seem to have outgrown their myths, and so it sees Lebanon’s latest trouble as a political crisis rather than the last gasps of a state playing catch-up with a country that already functions in pieces. Of course, you would not know this from our hacks because, well, where would they go, what would they do, if this upheaval is exposed for what it actually is: pure political theater that is of no worth to us beyond its entertainment value. It is the sheer audacity of this truth that explains the dissonance between a paralyzed political elite and the hustle and bustle on the streets, the busy shops, the parties, the record sales, the happy balance sheets, the humming factories, the soaring price of real estate, the sects mingling with each other peacefully if, at times, nervously. That this place can chug along in the midst of political turmoil says as much about the state’s insignificance to us as it does about our indifference to it.

All this does not mean that our poor are not hurting, or downtown’s businesses are not suffering, or our peripheries are not limping, or our sectarianism is not alive and kicking. It does not mean that we have become less attractive to the Syrians, or less relevant to the Israelis, or less susceptible to Shaker Abssi’s (remember him of Fath al Islam?) terrorism, or less moved by the region’s whims and wishes. It just means that, for us, for our dreams, our hopes, the Lebanese state is today as it was yesterday and shall be tomorrow: inconsequential on the best of days, a bungler on the worst.

****

Amr Musa, the maestro of the Arab League, arrives today with a new Arab initiative supposedly blessed by every power that matters to Lebanon: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, France and the US. No doubt it comes as well with an Israeli nod. It might succeed this time not because there is anything new or original about it, but because the parties appear to have milked the standoff for all it’s worth. Sadly, whatever comes next, it will mean nothing for the future of Lebanon, for Lebanon is dead.

Chapter Four: The Cacophony of Fear

Graduation Ceremony

Gripping…this hectic whirr in the Middle East! I don’t know on which corner to rest my eyes or to which frenzied shriek or dark whisper I should perk up my ears. It’s like the region is on speed, nervously wigwagging this way and that and yammering away about issues of extreme import but you can’t quite make out what it is trying to do or say exactly; until, that is, you step back--way back--to watch in silence and listen, and then it rushes through you like the brisk charge of a cold chill: the cacophony of fear. We are standing at the tail end of decades of so many things going so wrong in so many places, our timeworn problems are finally running out of patience and the frantic commotion is nothing more than the nervous scramble for cover.

Yes, it would appear the present is at the end of its tether and the future is up for grabs. And by the look of them, each master to a man, they are elbowing their way into the safest seat in the house while they try to figure out in which direction this land’s huffs and puffs will blow them.

Mind you, this is about politics and so much more. To the roving eye, yet another sexually fixated fatwa in Egypt may seem unrelated to the war-obsessed hyperbole that makes one of Cheneyesque aspirations and Nijadian reveries, but, to me, they are not strangers to one another: they play like previews of some sort of communal breakdown and indulge with equal zeal the latest newcomer to a long line of wicked agitators--fear.

You can glimpse fear behind the excursion to Annapolis, can’t you? The real possibility of a decent peace deal is dead, it has suddenly dawned on the high and mighty, and since it is political heresy to deep-six this poor sod of a peace, what better than yet another process to snuff out the stench. That’s the beauty of our peace processes: like a treadmill, they let you pretend that you’re really moving forward when you’re actually running in your place. Except that this old trick is not working its magic anymore. Two thousand and seven is not 1974, the facts on the ground have done most of their ugly work, the heart feels the sorry outcome all too well and dreams are collapsing on Israeli and Palestinian heads. You can’t detect the jitters in Condi’s energetic sprint because, well, she does not have them: she is too far away and ultimately much larger than all this. Besides, wherever her face lands after Annapolis, she knows that in two years’ time she will be heading straight to the roof of The New York Time’s Bestseller List. As for the rest of us, we haven’t an inkling towards which bottomless pit we will be freefalling. Which explains that Prozac smile and Dewar’s brood that keep exchanging places on Mahmoud Abbas’s face, betraying the erratic mood of a man who has not quite figured out whether he’s hammered out a solution or if he’s actually been clobbered by it. Ehud Olmert, who is not sure whether he should give just half an inch or throw caution to the wind and hand over the whole three quarters, has perfected the glazed look, but the sheer inanity of his propositions exposes the magnitude of demography’s defiance, the creeping inutility of Israel’s deterrence and the obvious fretfulness of his Zionism.

Of course, had Hamas played it right it would have been poised to reap the fruits of its adversaries’ failures, but it sits nervous instead, sweat very cold on its forehead and too generous under its armpits, before the jeering verdict of history, not sure how to harmonize its Hammasian threats of retribution with its Hammasi pleas for a reprieve. And the funny thing is that while many of Palestine’s so-called lefties are busy defending the conservative Islamist movement’s offensives in Gaza under the banner of a dazzling, hot-of-the-press resistance strategy called Yillan Aboukum (God Curse Your Father), Hamas’s own moderates have been unusually blunt in their denunciation of its “mistakes,” a slap delivered just as resoundingly by the Palestinian Cause’s most entrenched hardliners, from the relatively young Islamic Jihad to the very old PFLP. Go figure. Hamas is sinking in the polls as little more than a mimic of Fatah’s own catastrophic letdowns, its own cadre is questioning its flared nostrils tactics, other Palestinian parties are challenging its faits accompli, human rights organizations are publicly chronicling its many violations, but our own breed of neocons is steadfastly championing its policies. Search for the rationale in their harangues and you will end up with variations on the same theme: they’re bad, we’re good; they’re wrong, we’re right--and that’s all there is to it. (For details of Hamas’s masterful performance jump back one post.)

****

Luckily, Islamism’s story stays interesting well beyond Gaza’s borders. Where Hamas is heading Jordan’s own brotherly firebrands are almost sure to follow, so quick were they before to trade on its coup in Gaza, so shocked they are now by their own debacle in Amman. These are early days yet, but the heated debate between the party’s alarmed moderates and emboldened rejectionists has broken into a fight, the former look like they’re winning, the latter are preparing to take a hike and the party is patching up its very old friendship with the Hashemites; all while the people watch and ask themselves: What’s the difference between these nincompoops and the country’s other potato heads? At 17 percent, the Muslim Brothers’ popular base is where it has always been but the protest vote might just be looking for fresh faces.

Reality bites!

Go west to Egypt and you are witness to an embarrassing show of featherbrained Azhar Sheikhs issuing harebrained alerts and fatwas that are making a farce of Islam. (To the gentlemen out there who are too teased by that lady manning the desk next you at the office: just suck on those boobies five times--yes, it has to be five breast feedings--and you will have suckled her way from a fair maiden into a mother. Now that she is forbidden to you sexually she can remove her hijab and drive you into an even more lustful frenzy). As a friend of mine said last week, “This is all becoming positively pornographic.” Not to be outdone by Azhar’s officialdom, Egyptian Islamists’ petitions, death threats and lawsuits are hounding any poet, any thought and any gesture that wants to negotiate space with their diktats. Apparently, life’s inescapable encroachments on a harassed, confounded, wooden brand of Islam has scared the wits out of its guardians and now all they can do is fight back where it really counts: under the bed sheets, on the pages of a book, in the office…

Palestine is vanishing, unemployment has built for itself a mighty presence in our economies, poverty keeps welcoming new recruits, Iraq writhes, Iran and the US are coming to the unknowable end of their nasty song and dance, Lebanon might just be falling apart, every human right is in retreat, religion is in desperate need of a meaningful discourse with all things cotemporary and, like robots stuck in rewind mode, all these silly bearded buggers keep repeating is “Islam is the solution,” and then they proceed to tell their men which boob to go for and which poetry to let pass.

No wonder the ladies in the picture took the hint and turned the lights out. When you’re covered up like this in the office--and everywhere else, for that matter—who, in God’s name, would want to suck on anything or anyone hanging about. But, of course, these are not the women the suspended Azhar Sheikh-cum-lecturer had in mind when he was counseling pious men to shoot straight for the cupped ones. When night is your constant companion, there is no need, is there, for fatwas to make the days any darker.

I know that what is pitch black to me might be luminosity itself to another, and it is a given—for me, at least—that the black shroud is every woman’s right to wear. Each of our veils betrays a very specific choice, an arrangement—if you like--between the veiled woman and her religious convictions. In that style that barely conceals the hair, or that which tightly rings the head, or that which covers the face like a pall is that woman’s decision about how much of herself she wants to cede to her faith. This picture, you need to understand, is not about the right to choose, it is about the actual choice itself and what it wishes to communicate. In truth, between the juvenile vulgarity of these men and the very loud silence of these shrouded women is sinking the entire edifice of a sober, vigorous Islam. And perhaps this has been the intention all along because when even the most mundane happenings in life offend your religion, any conversation about them becomes unavoidably offensive; and under offensive in this age of contrived civilizational conflict falls every opinion that dares to disagree with yours. Misogyny becomes thus a matter of religious tradition, intolerance a quest for authenticity, rejection of diversity an embrace of purity. By the same token, arguments such as mine become culturally insensitive, women’s rights a Western conspiracy against Islam’s virility; a poet’s flirtatious verse a violation of Islam’s chastity and finally dialogue itself a total waste of time.

Needless to say, those who take their Islam seriously can still find hope in Lebanon’s highest Shiite cleric, Imam Mohammad Hussein Faddlallah, but he’s the guy who is constantly telling us, great or not, Islam has no business in politics. He is also the one who, in a fatwa a little while ago, banned honor killing as a “repulsive act,” while Egypt’s Azhar was insisting that if two actors get married in a TV show then, as far as the Islamic courts are concerned, they are actually married.

Alas, in this embattled arena, it has become devastatingly clear that Faddlallah and clerics of his persuasion, be they Sunni or Shiite, are like the good boy playing all by himself in the corner while the raving mad kids are wreaking havoc all over the playground. Had this idiocy been taking place in the margins of our lives, at the most it would have been mildly discomforting, at the least mildly entertaining. But political Islam is not a sideshow; to it belongs almost the entire expanse of the political vacuum long plowed and fed by our states, and its phobias are finding their way—unhindered if not aided--into our legal domain, our educational systems, our social fabric and our future. These self-appointed protectors of Islam are ensconced, practically alone, in our belly, and in the absence of genuinely strong counter-currents our societies have become frighteningly susceptible to the caprice of the most obtuse of men. This is why every time I look at the picture I purse my lips lest I cry my heart out: towards darkness we are all marching, and the protestations of our secularists and our Faddlallahs are as hushed as the still night caressing my window.

****

Let’s turn to the Iranian-American rumpus for a change of tempo. There, too, all I see is fear: a Cheneyesque fear that the US will never get its day with Iran that is just as intense as a Nijadian fear that it won’t either. And lurking under this fear is the much older apprehensiveness of a rising regional power itching ever so incessantly for its rightful place in the sun and a reticent superpower (and its Israeli friend) agitating ever so incessantly about it getting there.

America and its Iranian nemesis are swaying back and forth in the void between the two cliffs of peace and war because neither side can quite call it: too much has already been gained and lost in Iraq, too much is still hanging ripe for the picking and neither party is able to calculate the true risks of blood or negotiate the tangible windfalls from a handshake. And so, the tug between the yeas and the nays inside each camp keeps moving forward and backward while the rest of us watch in wonderment.

I say wonderment because the stakes are at their highest and American competence is at its weakest, and the sight of a superpower that neither knows, nor cares, nor cares to know is sending shivers up and down our collective Arab spine. It is not America’s imperial venture that is so disconcerting—this is an old story, much older than America, with which we are intimately familiar. It is its astonishing incompetence in steering this venture that is adding oodles of fear to our dread. I must admit I was never a sucker for America’s highfalutin morality tales, but in that yawning gap that separates its soaring rhetoric from the wrongs of Abu Ghraib, of football games with millions of dollars of Iraqi money, of a blatantly exploitive oil law, of Blackwater—all poignant symbols of a wayward occupation burdened by mishaps and bad intentions--reside many of us, now more than ever, in mortal fear of American’s next blundering adventure.

All this and we still have not even touched on the fear of the International Tribunal that grips Syria and shepherds its every move; or the fear of a resistance-free future that alarms Hezbollah and explains much (but certainly not all) of its machinations; or the fear of a ferocious Syrian comeback that paralyzes March 14th and guides much (but certainly not all) of its intrigues; or the fear of us Lebanese from the infantilism that afflicts our political class and makes a sorry joke of this pseudo-nation.

Fear! The cacophony of fear is what you’re hearing but cannot decipher, so don’t strain yourself by joining in the hue and cry. Sit back—way back—and listen in silence because the future is up for grabs and good predictions are just too hard to come by.

The Last of My Heart-to-hearts with Israel

Of Facts and Truths (Part Four)

Lawain Raiheen, Baba? (As in Where To, Bro?)


“Electricity was disconnected 24 hours ago. Today they stopped both the electricity and water; tomorrow they will cut off the air…” (Umm Jabr/mother of Jabr, resident of Gaza/Al Hayyat Newspaper, August 21, 2007).

My thanks to Umm Jabr for this beeline to the Palestinian predicament. Sharru al Baliyyati Ma Yudhik (In that Most Distressing Part of a Catastrophe is the Comical) declares an Arab proverb, but Umm Jabr’s description goes one further. With one spur-of-the-moment quip, it distills for us the paradox that trusses like a chain the entirety of the Palestinian-Israeli dilemma: the futility of Israeli supremacy and the potency in Palestinian dispossession. Render it into fact and truth and you would come up with this mother of all combos: the fact of Israel and the truth of Palestine. Delicious, no? It leaps over the nitty-gritty and gets us where we want to go in a jiffy, for what better turn of phrase can there be for the confounding state in which Israelis and Palestinians find themselves close to a century into this accursed conflict. And the beauty of it is that it takes you to the essence of the problem today without having to quibble with any piece of its history. It allows you to stand whereever you want in this divide, wax rhapsodic about any myth you fancy, ignore all those facts that give you indigestion and flaunt others that make you sleep well at night, because, in the end, whichever way you choose to understand this hatred, you would still come face to face with the fact of Israel and the truth of Palestine.

So, as we waddle through this Palestinian-Israeli morass and contemplate the collective nervous breakdown in the region that may yet convert a decades-old stasis into a future of randomness and shockers—for all--it seems appropriate to ask: Lawain raiheen, baba?

****

I want to spend a few moments on the Palestinians and their Palestine. It is perhaps the saddest irony of their plight that at a time when frustrated ambition and unusually daring international criticism are sending Israel deep into a funk the Palestinian resistance itself has come down to a simple question of math: multiplication, to be precise. As if by foresight, the Palestinian people had long ago given up on their leadership’s ability to deliver liberation and so they began to deliver babies instead. Lots of them. So many in fact that today, even as Umm Jabr prepares to bottle up her air, whichever way the Israeli state calculates the numbers it keeps coming up with fifty-fifty—and, as time ticks, the odds against it are only getting worse. By just being and multiplying inside and all around Israel, the Palestinians have reduced its pursuit of a pure Jewish democracy into a pipedream. And if success or failure is measured through the narrow prism of that incessant Israeli quest alone, then the Palestinians have already won the fight. You might think this a hollow victory for a people in tatters, akin to a plucked-to-the-bone rooster crowing over his pile of garbage, but then you would be ignoring the paradox that explains the potency in Palestinian dispossession: because they are losers everywhere in this struggle except where it most counts for Israel, the hollow victory is not theirs, it is hers. True, as they appear to us, the Palestinians, noose around their neck, are teetering on the edge of a falling chair: very poor, very hungry, under siege, in the throes of a full-fledged suicidal paroxysm, as luckless in their hapless leadership as they are in their merciless enemy. But it is equally true that, in victory, Israel is no closer to salvation than the Palestinians are in defeat—if only because of those numbers.

This moral and demographic quandary in which Israel has put itself since 1967, because of its conviction that a biblical carte blanch and epical yearnings justify earthly conquest, is pretty much what it has to show for forty years of occupation in the name of redemption. Perhaps the most exasperating part of this journey for Israel has been its inability to write the post-1967 narrative in the spirit of the 1948 one. Neither its exalted conception of itself nor the world’s sympathetic conception of it proved immune enough to its blatantly predatory policies, and the unfortunate outcome is written all over the Israeli state’s current distress.

By any measure, the dismal health of the Palestinian resistance should be finding its reflection in a jubilant Israel, full of exuberance and confidence; and yet all we seem to be getting from across the border is a polity in serious need of therapy. It embraces peace in principle but concedes almost nothing for it in practice; it makes Abbas to order, proceeds to castrate him, then throws him in the bin as defective merchandise, only to take him out, dust him off and pat him on the back as partner; its people are torn, swinging between screams for messianic retribution and secular demands for the easy life; it scorns the Arabs for constantly playing the victim and falls reflexively into a me-against-an-anti-Semitic world mode every time somebody questions its actions; to the West it wants to play the underdog, with us it behaves as the big honcho and for its people it cannot help but be part democracy part Goliath, secular but viscerally religious, civilized and yet atavistic, liberal with a disturbing tolerance towards its fanaticism. A nation with a very open heart, you could say, or a very weird-looking hybrid.

And as Israel nervously paces this way and that, reeling from years of trying to square so many circles, this most forbidding of questions has been making its rounds among ever widening (and not a few loyal) crowds: If, as Israel claims, living by the sword is the only way it can survive amongst us barbarians, has it not then failed as the singular answer to the Jewish Problem? If Israel was born for a reason, it was to be a peaceful, safe, enlightened home for the eternally beleaguered Jewish people. But a military fortress is by its very nature a sanctuary only for the besieged, safety and security can have no credible claim on reality in a state of constant war and enlightenment cannot breathe in a Sparta. Hence, as the Jewish state swashbuckles its way through one debacle after another, the futility of its supremacy grows more obvious to the eye because at its heart resides the very reason for its weakness.

A mighty gathering for the Jewish Diaspora Israel may be, but to the Jewish Problem it has made of itself a most unconvincing answer.

****

Not your ordinary variety these Israeli doldrums, part of the usual ups and downs of our hectic Levantine existence. No, this is not the malaise that wafts through the living rooms of torpid Sunday afternoons. This one comes with frantic head scratching and sweat because the hours are refusing to stand still, the ailments are many, the wounds are festering, we are all out of band aids, the magic wand is out of commission and something tells us that tomorrow just does not want to look anything like yesterday. I guess in a very funny way Israel has finally gotten what it has always secretly wanted: it is one of us now; very near if not dear and certainly deep in this bleakness along with the rest of us.

****

All these heart-to-hearts with Israel and I am still tiptoeing at the gates of Palestine, aren’t I, as if the problem--purely a matter of Israeli waywardness and the world’s indifference--has nothing to say for itself. I do not want to attempt an anatomy of the tragedy of a people browbeaten by indigenous ineptitudes and externally cooked injustices, but I would like to visit for a while with their latest crisis, watershed that it is in Palestinian suffering.

Let me rewind to January 25, 2006, the eve of the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. By that day, the struggle against Israel, Fathawi or Hammasi in its methods, had managed inroads only into itself. Neither in its beseeching demeanor nor in its suicidal tendencies could it deliver for the Palestinians persuasive answers or happy results. After years of the peace of Oslo and the reign of Arafat the Territories were a shambles, despairing from their leaders’ abuses and drained by Israel’s. Shimon Peres might have been boasting when he once said, “At Oslo we were negotiating with ourselves,” but the statement spoke volumes about the costs of Arafat’s political insolvency before he had even set foot in Gaza and the West Bank. If the Intifadah of 1987 had revealed anything about Palestinian resistance is that it was infinitely more vibrant inside Palestine than it ever pretended to be outside. No wonder Arafat was just as rattled by the uprising as Israel--not a pretty sight, the father of a liberation movement playing catch-up with his own people.

Flip through the pages of Palestine’s trauma and you will come across many political misjudgments and moral failings but none compares to Oslo in the breathtaking incompetence with which a nation’s aspirations were laid to rest. The very sorry story of that agreement does not lie in the initial decision to negotiate, it lives in the maps that were never consulted, the lawyers that were turned away, the myriad intelligence agencies that were created, the Palestinians of the Diaspora who were put on the back burner, the Palestinians of the Territories who were told to step aside, the oppressiveness that whipped the strength out of the their civic vigor, the crooked deals that were struck between Arafat’s henchmen and Israeli businessmen, the monopolies that were signed over to front men, the corruption that diverted public funds into private pockets, the patronage system that preferred to buy loyalty rather than earn it.

Oslo is not first and foremost about how the Palestinian people were duped by a conniving Israel, a duplicitous US, a weak Europe and an uncaring Arab world, it is about how they were duped by their own leaders. For any resistance movement there are always choices to be made, most under severe duress in very unfavorable circumstances. How well it fares for its people is in how sincerely it marries between its interests and theirs, how carefully it weighs its limitations against its ambitions, how ready it is to revisit misguided strategies and bad decisions, how adept it is in anticipating the enemy, how quickly it can duck and how fast it can raise its head again.

Elementary, one would think. Apparently not.

Which brings me to Hamas.

****

Long ago, in the aftermath of 1967, Amis Oz told his country that

For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history. And we must remember: as occupiers…Only in the twilight of myth can one speak of the liberation of a land struggling under a foreign yoke. Land is not enslaved…and there is no such thing as a liberation of lands. There are enslaved people…We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them… (Cited in David Remnick’s “The Seventh Day,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2007).

It must have been a severe case of breathless anticipation that made Israel so resistant to this wise counsel, no doubt provoked by boundless euphoria, millennial musings, divine providence and, surely, just the lure of it all. That’s what happens even to the smartest of people when they surprise their wildest expectations. Even, as an Arab, I can imagine what it must have been like for so many Israelis the day after. What voice of doom could possible be heard in the buzz that trailed such an inspired performance?

I need you to indulge me for a minute here: I know that it is a real stretch to suggest that this rapturous feeling may well have been the one that overtook Hamas on the day of its supposedly shocking electoral triumph two years ago. Millennial musings were not involved but certainly divine providence was, not to mention the sheer lure of it all. Political Islam respectably bids for and wins power, Fatah’s 36-year-old dominance (if we use Arafat’s 1969 ascension as our point of departure) collapses at the polls and the Palestinian Authority--a much mocked obese, old fart--would have to accept its fate and welcome Hamas as its new mate. From the back alleys of Palestine into its corridors of power, from the other guys to the people’s choice: all those sleepless nights and all those years of toil had finally paid off for Hamas, and its joy was limitless. Who could blame it? What voice of doom could possible be heard in the buzz that trailed such an inspired performance? The Islamic Movement may not have been performing well against Israel but it was doing very well against the competition. Its discipline in contrast to Fatah’s self-indulgence, its very special relationship with the pulpit versus Fatah’s infidelity to everything but koussa mihshi (stuffed squash) and its no-frills social welfare networks that put to shame Arafat’s profligacy were more than enough to boost the ego and drown out the grim whispers.

But if you are a spoilsport like me, you would have smelled a stinker the day after the elections. For an ecstatic Hamas it’s as if the Resistance had completed the job, as if context had folded its cards, as if its victory had walked into a vacuum and it was up to the brothers to decorate and furnish the space and for the world to obligingly sit in it. Hamas, it would appear, did not quite understand that 42 percent of the popular vote—equal in fact to Fatah’s--does not a landslide make, and that the seventy-four seats it won in the one hundred and thirty-two-seat Council were not a reflection of the people’s unanimous endorsement but of how intelligently it played the rules of the electoral race. It somehow did not grasp that its command of office would actually demand a good deal more of it than it could ever ask of the international community on whose money and goodwill far too many Palestinians literally depended for half a decent living. It inexplicably forgot that the powers-that-be, true to form, were going to ask for everything under the sun, and the Hammasis, torn between the pull of dogmatism and the push of pragmatism, would be able to give only so much. But most mystifying of all is how a group whose rhetoric is obsessed with Israeli conspiracies could be so oblivious to the Israeli booby traps that would find the perfect hiding place in these same pitfalls of victory.

And hence once Hamas imprudently decided to form the government, it did not really take much Israeli effort to choreograph the sequence of events that turned the Movement into a parody of its old fearsome self, starting with a boycotted and isolated cabinet unable to deliver for its people and ending with the violent rift with Fatah and the coup d’etat in Gaza. Now Hamas stands all powerful in every corner of Gaza and yet pathetically vulnerable to every provocation from it—and with every taunt it loses more of its old cool and reveals more of its blemishes. Now it sits like a chump, where Fatah was before it, overwhelmed by the profusion of problems and the dearth of remedies. Now it waits, the easiest of marks for an Israel that will drill even bigger holes in it and for the raging currents anxious to build a house in each one of them.

Pray tell, What part of this nightmare in which Hamas and the Palestinians are living—delectable as it clearly is to Israel--did the Movement think it could outsmart once it took the decision to play such a role in it?

Whatever its calculations were, Hamas deemed the opportunity to lead too magnificent to miss, and lead it did: itself into a most unforgiving exposure and the Palestinians into an even more pitiless existence.

****

There is much fairness in the claim that, with an outright majority of seats in the Legislative Council, it was Hamas’s right to lead the government and the world’s duty to engage it. That the international community was demanding of it down-to-the-boxer-shorts elasticity from which Israel was predictably exempted was clear. That this was only the latest in a series of raw deals thrown like so much leftovers towards the Palestinians was no less glaringly obvious. But that was the stinker that Hamas should have seen coming, in a feud whose history is riddled with raw deals for its people. The excruciatingly one-sided rites of initiation into the “club of the civilized” have always been among the symbols of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Hamas was not interested in performing them, then it had no good reason to seek the chair, let alone so blithely sit in it. It is one thing for Hamas to have been incensed by the West’s double standards, it is entirely another for it have acted as if they had no bearing on its options.

If by its audaciousness Hamas meant to show the world and the Palestinians that it can, through op-ed pieces, finger wagging and circuitous compromises (a la Arafat), negotiate its way into a modicum of understanding with the big boys—two of whom are none other than the US and Israel--the last two years are ample proof of the dangerously amateurish notions it was entertaining. When Hamas won the elections, all things did not suddenly become more equal: The will of 42 percent of the Palestinians did not become more compelling than the West’s, Arab regimes did not develop more sympathy, Iranian and Syrian backing did not daunt Europe and the US and it certainly did not intimidate a delighted Israel. You want to play the blame game, go ahead! God knows the culprits are many. However, if you are going to exclude Hamas from the running, then you’re still stuck at the first stop: The fact is Hamas did win the elections fair and square, but the truth is it lost—and it lost not because of an unyielding West, a hostile US, a nasty Israel, useless Arab brothers and “rogues” for friends, but because when it took its decisions it conveniently forgot that these were the givens.

Gringa, Amercaniah, some of you are murmuring, giving in to imperial dictates and Zionist commands. Yes, well, I know it’s infuriating to let an unkind world so rudely infringe on principle. But you’re letting your anger get in the way of some hard thinking.

Of course Hamas’s room for maneuvering was extremely tight in the aftermath of the elections, but it was there for it to crouch into had it chosen to be more wise than right. Almost immediately after the results were announced it had become apparent to everyone watching that neither Fatah on the inside nor a much-needed openness on the outside was going to give Hamas the chance to probe the possibilities of political evolvement. The Movement then and there should have opted to play the opposition in the Legislative Council and to make its political muscle felt through that body. It might sound absurd to suggest to a majority party in a wobbly, chocking democracy to content itself with playing second fiddle to a foul loser, but 56 percent of the Council is not exactly flimsy, a formidable military force on the ground is not small change and parliamentary cover would have gone much farther than the seat of power in giving Hamas the time and space and opportunity to weave for itself an intelligent exit from a very iffy situation.

But then much in its behavior over the years offered a plethora of strong hints that Hamas was going to be as rigid, as unimaginative and as unsubtle in the game of big politics as it has always been in the business of armed resistance. Its failure, coming that it does hot on the heels of Fatah’s, signals the crisis in which Palestine’s collective leadership finds itself in the daunting battle against Israel.

Curiously, over the past two months, some otherwise intelligent Palestinians have been blessing Hamas’s coup d’etat. “We are with anybody who is against Israel,” they keep repeating as if in a trance. Indeed! How distressed Israel must be at such ingenuous thinking. Yep, the entire Israeli enterprise is in its bunkers fretting about how it’s going to wiggle out of this one.

I say if you want to thank God for something, let it be for those numbers because if it were not for them there would not be any divine victories to celebrate.

****

What now? Well, now the Palestinian people can be happy with two jokers instead one. Or, better, yet ponder this Hollywood duo: Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Two sisters, hideous, loony, inextricably wedded to a horrible eclipse and each other, their girlhood a near-forgotten fraction of a long-dead past, but the pain, the fury, the waste of it all, the sins that return with every flashback, are plastered on their faces and hover, like sentries of providence, over their doomed lives.

No doubt the images offend. And they are meant to. That’s the bittersweet thing about the passage of time: it knocks the wits out of youth’s hubris and clears some space for the thoughtfulness and humility of old age.

Or am I indulging now in my own silly wishful thinking?

Heart-to Heart with Israel/ Cont'd

Of Facts and Truths (Part Three)

Nini Nini Ka’ Ka’ (as in Ne Ne Nee Ne Ne)


As I was heading towards the Syrian-Lebanese border last August, three days after the ceasefire took hold, I received a phone message from a Palestinian acquaintance: Since you are the closest thing to a Shiite I know, I want to congratulate you on this victory. Allah yl’aan Abu Ammar (God curse Abu Ammar, aka Yasser Arafat). To which came my reply: Shiite? Humm… Victory? Really? Glad to inform you we are one on Abu Ammar.

Interesting how a congratulatory message from a self-proclaimed cosmopolitan secular man should unknowingly indulge one of this region’s worst habits: an ugly sectarianism that is constantly insisting it can make itself look pretty. He saw Hezbollah’s triumph as Shiite, he automatically assumed that I, as a Shiite by birth, would identify with it, he himself saw me as a Shiite but, as a Sunni Palestinian, he still took pride in this “Arab” deed, lamenting Arafat’s failure to claim for his people a similar feat.

So Israel, after all, did get its sectarian reaction but in reverse: For a moment there, when the debris had barely had time to settle over the wreckage, the spectacle of Arab parochialism cheering the war’s designated baddie—and a Shiite, no less—must have been a sorry sight for a dumbfounded Israel. The idea was to boost the stock of violence but to destabilize the stage upon which an overconfident Hezbollah and its Persian friends were so freely playing; to punch the whole silly and breathe fervor into its feuding parts. As I wrote in that letter to my American journalist friend towards the end of the fighting:

Bludgeon the country, [Israel] decided, and make it pay for cradling a boastful, cheeky ingrate. Kill it, it even thought, and let its orphans, including Hezbollah, fight over the charred bits and pieces. In either case, let Iran crow like a plucked rooster over the trash heap that would have become Lebanon.

But try as Israel might in thirty-three days of combat, events would not stir as scripted. Its indiscriminant strikes infuriated even those extremely unsympathetic to Hezbollah’s cross-border raid, Christian homes welcomed Shiite refugees, the Resistance’s performance shamed its detractors into enthusiastic (if disingenuous) endorsements, while Maronite Aoun’s alliance with it injected resilience into the country’s fraying national fabric.

Yes, for a little while there, the facts were laughing themselves silly at a fuming Israel. So many of us were overtaken by the hype and so very few felt the chill of the ill winds that were coming. Slow down when reading these next few lines because what transpires between them is far more telling than what occupies the surface: We forgot that Lebanon’s delicate constitution was not made for such pricy victories; that Hezbollah may have won this round but that Lebanon did not; that cunning on the battlefield is an imp without the support of grit in the political arena; that with the people’s sympathy Resistance is a hero but without it it’s a bully; that Hezbollah cannot pack such muscle and expect its envious sisters to stay so scrawny; that it cannot weigh itself in gold while the rest are trading in cents and dimes; that Arabhood is for our poetry books and sectarianism is for real; that arrogance is every smug victor’s Achilles’ heel; that deterrence against Israel involves much more than nini nini Ka’ka’.

Our victory, divine that it was, brought with it a time of reckoning: Scores had to be settled, chips were being called in, loyalties were being put to the test, choices were being called into question. Lebanon begged for foresight and magnanimity but instead, as our he-men were pounding their chests, the smallest of calculations by the pettiest of leaders were shaping the most momentous of happenings (details are always awaiting you in Piss and Hassounah).

****

Today, exactly one year after, from this balcony smack in the center of Beirut, this is the landscape that my eyes see: A Shiite-Sunni drift into a nasty rift, a battered South up to its ears from a life of endless sacrifice, around 20,000 Lebanese and foreign troops dotting a terrain where the Resistance alone used to have free reign, a Party of God which can’t seem to tell the difference anymore between a halo and a hula hoop. Meanwhile, our politics has become even more smarmy, our government is barely functioning, our parliament is shut down, our people cannot quite decide what kind of life they want to live, our sects can’t quite agree on the nation they want to be, our friends and foes can’t quite figure out the game they want us to play, graduates are booking the first flight out while Al Qaeda’s are slithering in…

Now tell me: Who do you think won last summer?

For some of this, of course you would be right to thank Israel (and while you’re at it send a note to the Syrians, the Americans, the Iranians…) but the make, I’ll have you know, is vintage Lebanese.

The fact is Hezbollah won last summer but the truth is it lost.