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.

Heart-to Heart with Israel/cont'd

Of Facts and Truths (Part Two)

Nifsi Fi wi’ Tfou Aleh (I Want Him and I Spit on Him)


There is no better way to usher you into our house of mirrors and paradoxes, a mirthful abode where the rules giggle every time they are broken, where every absolute and its opposite may share the same bed and the most prudish of principles can turn playful at a moment’s notice.

Let me begin with the year 2000, right before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Eight years into the end of our civil war, the country had become the incarnation of that wonderful Palestinian adage Min Barra Rkham w’ Minjouwah Skham (On the Outside Marble, On the inside Crap). In this most imperfect of democracies, as the charade of reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction lulled the willing and the fatigued into a life of silver linings, fiefdoms thrived, corruption turned frogs into princes and villains and heroes ran around happily exchanging business cards. Lebanon was either flying or sinking, depending on the sect, the day, the issue and—it goes without saying--our pocket’s demands. Underneath it all, bad people with bad intentions kept their eye on the ball, and way above everyone hovered mother Syria, eyes fixed on every single one of her babies.

The South was occupied but so was the rest of the country. It would be sheer heresy for us to even insinuate a likeness between an Israeli offense and an Arab brother’s affront but, emotions aside, on the most practical level, the upshot for us was all the same: Decisions were made but none were made by Lebanon. Between Syria and Israel the dos and don’ts had been agreed, the deal had been sealed and the rough (sometimes bloody) haggling was fine tuned into hardheaded bargaining.

In this context soared Hezbollah, an unusually motivated Iranian-Lebanese Shiite endeavor provoked into life by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and subsequent occupation of the South. Into the pundits’ bag of examples fell yet another illustration of how Israeli brutality suckles the very radicalism it pretends to detest, and into our Arab-Israeli predicament was woven another thread in the paradox that makes of Israel and Islamic fundamentalism the best of friends even though they are the worst of enemies.

There is nothing original about this proposition if you are under the impression that the friendship between the two is the unintended consequence of Israel’s stubborn attachment to physical force as a principal instrument of policy. If that is where you are, then you must be as flummoxed as all those who cannot quite fathom why Israel keeps resorting to methods that further radicalize its foes, or as certain as those others who believe that Israel pursues them merely because it is genuinely (if erroneously) convinced that Arabs understand only force. But if you dig deeper into psyches, if you dare ponder the exhaustively researched ways Islamism and Israel nurture one another’s raison d’etre, if you allow yourself the thought that both cannot survive without a life of stark, frightening contrasts, if you bring yourself to see how both cannot be without their ghouls and monsters, then you will have successfully crossed from the fact of Islamic fundamentalism and Israel as enemies into the truth of their friendship.

****

When Israel occupied Lebanon’s South it gave the most noble of meanings to Hezbollah’s quest. From the start, Hezbollah never really was much interested in our fratricide. There were violations here and there (kidnappings of Lebanese citizens, for one) but when every warlord was busy dipping his hands in Lebanese blood, Hezbollah was content to watch from the sidelines. Its interests lay elsewhere, its technique was different and its ambitions were grander than back-street fights.

By 2000, as Hezbollah, under the auspices of Syria and its active protection, progressed from a firebrand militant group into a flourishing resistance movement with a remarkably successful record against an otherwise unbeatable Israeli army, the cross-sectarian consensus behind its struggle in the South had blossomed into near-reverence. While still purposefully operating on the outskirts of Lebanese politics, it had become a full-fledged enterprise investing in everything from heroism to schooling for its children.

Suddenly Israel up and left, without so much as a goodbye. In some key people’s breath Ya, Habibi (roughly, Oh Dear) ran very close after Allah Akbar. Like clockwork, asinine questions began to be asked, and not only by the “collaborationists” and the “cowardly.” Absent an Israeli occupying army, to what end the arsenal of the Resistance? Absent an Israeli occupying army in a multi-confessional state, to what end a resistance in the exclusive hands of one sect? Absent an Israeli occupying army, to what end a resistance which refuses to cede its role to the state’s revived forces? And if in fact there was and is not much of a state to cede roles to, as Hezbollah claims, to what end then running in its parliamentary elections, taking ministerial portfolios in its governments, filling up quotas in its departments? If this activism actually demonstrated Hezbollah’s willingness to engage with the Lebanese state, then to what end the exclusion of the military from such noblesse oblige?

It did not matter that Hezbollah had (and still has) a myriad of answers for each of these questions. That they were being asked in the first place—and by many—signaled an imminent turning point. Now that the Resistance had no actual land to liberate, applause started to grow more faint. That the fellows (and Syria) clumsily latched on to Shebaa Farms (Israeli occupied 25 square kilometers of previously Syrian but now conveniently Lebanese land) to buy themselves an extension for the Cause only added to suspicions that they were not in the mood to rethink identities or rewrite mission statements. Still, things were not so bad: Syria was still in control, our political class was still beholden to it and Hezbollah was still basking in its shade.
And then, suddenly, Syria was chased out of town. The silent grew rowdy, the meek turned mean, questions developed into accusations and, like a trapeze artist on speed, Hezbollah’s ripostes swung between the perfectly reasonable and the downright nasty. Eloquence itself began to stutter.

Are you with me so far?

This is where friendships come to the rescue. Had Israel been the least bit interested in a peaceful resolution to the problem, had it been keen on depriving Hezbollah of its reasons—or showing them up for the excuses that they are—and undercutting Iranian and Syrian encroachments on the Lebanese state, this would have been the golden moment to strike through creative diplomacy. Neither the Farms nor the landmine maps are of any historical or strategic importance to Israel. It could have handed the two to the UN and released two of the three remaining Lebanese prisoners, leaving Samir Kuntar, who smashed four-year old Einat Hrat’s head against a rock, to rot for another thirty years in his Israeli prison. But as hard as the world’s emissaries tried, Israel just wouldn’t bite because, you see, creative diplomacy is for ninnies, war is for men. For Israel, the Lebanese state is only sovereign enough to take punishment for Hezbollah’s actions, for everything else it might as well keep twiddling its thumb--and, funnily enough, that is exactly what Hezbollah keeps saying.

Every time the Lebanese government broaches the subject of the Farms with the UN, Hezbollah comically accuses it of conspiring against the Movement, not realizing that, in its haste to defend the logic of perpetual resistance, it is tacitly offering us a most embarrassing revelation: By refusing thus far to return the Farms peacefully, Israel can only be serving the Movement’s interests.

But in the end, this is certainly not about a conspiracy of interests or treason, or of Zionism and Islamic currents in active cahoots—as the latter keep accusing their adversaries—this is about a meeting of mindsets, an intimacy of the most disturbing kind between two orientations.

With such like enemies who needs friends. For what fun would there be without a scarecrow with which to scare the children? What’s the point of rooting for the good guys if there are no bad guys to vilify? What’s the use of all that armor if there are no bogeymen to pound every once in a while? How can Israel keep shining if Lebanon stops looking so black? Now switch names in the last sentence, and you get yourself a ditto for Hezbollah.


More to come.

Heart-to-heart with Israel/ cont’d

Of Facts and Truths (Part One)

“Sometimes facts threaten the truth.” Amos Oz told me this two weeks ago in his Tale of Love and Darkness. True, I thought, facts, like the parents of an unwanted child, oftentimes just ignore it. Alas, we have so many unwanted children in these parts.

We can live with facts, however painful they are. We even collect and display them as trophies of grief to console a broken spirit or stoke dimming ire or justify indescribable cruelty. But the truth…the truth is something special. However mild its rebukes they can shatter the heart. If unshackled and allowed to walk free, it can suck the life out of age-old myths and puncture gaping holes into the steeliest pretensions. At its most kind, it can bring light into our night and cajole the humane out of the inhuman.

I know you’re getting antsy but if you stay with me for a few more lines, you will see the light.

The dance between fact and truth in Oz’s memoir first swings onto the page in the death of his grandmother: The fact is that she passed away while scrubbing herself in the bathtub, but the truth is that she died from a life-long obsessiveness with germs. Benign, isn’t it, and yet so seductive to the susceptible mind because from it spring a thousand different beats about this burning Arab-Israeli expanse. For practice, one can set the tone quickly with a couple of very simple ones: The fact is Gamal Abd al Nasser expired from an exhausted heart, but the truth is that he died from a twenty-year friendship between high promise and abysmal failure; the fact is Saddam Hussein was brought down by the US and Britain, but the truth is he perished from a twenty-year antagonism between his brain and sanity.

Once the oppressiveness of conventional wisdom recedes in the mind’s calculus, the trickier blends become easier to make: The fact is Israel and Islamism are real enemies, but the truth is they are good friends; the fact is Hezbollah won last summer’s war, but the truth is it lost; the fact is Hamas won, fair and square, in the last Legislative Council elections, but the truth is it lost. You get the rhythm now? If you are even slightly versed in our realities, the arguments implied in these combinations should not be unfamiliar to you. But stop at the facts and you are just looking in through the peephole, reach for the truth and you are stepping into the room with the door wide open.

To move from Hezbollah’s triumph to its loss, you need to understand the ground rule that delivered the former and chew slowly over the paradox that explains the latter. In the history of Arab-Israeli military face-offs, the ground rule has always been thus: If it is not an absolute, swift and resounding victory for Israel, it is a defeat; and if it is not an absolute, swift and humiliating defeat for the Arabs, it is a victory. Simple. For stamina, this peculiar formula has long depended on an unyielding, deeply entrenched temperament--that of Israeli arrogance and Arab defeatism. Whatever the score is at the end of every contest, it is this attitude that separates the victors from the vanquished.

Not surprisingly, with such a crude yardstick the bar becomes unsustainably high for the mighty and hilariously low for the little guy. Trip up the mindset of a triumphalist Israeli militarism that thinks squashing its Arab enemy is akin to twisting the life out of a spent cigarette and you’ve got yourself a winner. Economies wrecked long after the gunfire has stopped, death tolls, villages wiped off the map, entire neighborhoods flattened, killing fields torched and littered with cluster bombs, a childhood denied its innocence, whole generations heading for the door, are for the history books; for us, a slap on Israel’s red face will do just fine, thank you. You saw it in 1973, when the Arabs rejoiced over a victory that wasn’t; and you saw it last July, when 33 days of combat in Lebanon left Israel tongue-tied and fuming.

Hands down, Hezbollah won because it was never muscle that was going to win the fight, it was psychology. Over a million Israelis forced to hide for weeks on end in shelters, a stubborn barrage of Hezbollah rockets and katyushas that spread panic deep into Northern Israel, Israeli soldiers outwitted on the hills and narrow streets of the Lebanese South, a Hezbollah leadership that stayed alive and remained intact, and, lo and behold, we got ourselves an unqualified champ. Simple. Simple and also uninteresting because this is the least revealing part of the war. The more compelling bit is the one that most pundits—even the best of them—keep glossing over in fits and starts before their analysis finally sputters into a predictable stop.

In the first few days of the war, Ehud Olmert announced to the world that Israel’s objective was to devastate the infrastructure of Hezbollah, disarm it, expel it from the South and return the two abducted soldiers (see his speech before the Knesset on July 17, 2006). That Olmert’s goals, as the Israeli Winograd Commission concluded, were “over-ambitious and not feasible” is patently obvious. Dwell on it and you end up (like so many still are) running in your place. Digest it and then ask yourself this question, Why would Israel publicly set for itself a mission it knew it could not fulfill, and you might just be getting somewhere. After all, Israel was very well aware that Hezbollah, as a powerful and pervasive political presence above the ground but a stealth military force under it, would be far less vulnerable to air strikes that typically bring standing armies down. Of course it could be harmed, but it could not be devastated, nor disarmed, nor expelled, nor forced to return the two Israeli soldiers. Moreover, Hezbollah entered the latest round with a consistently impressive performance against Israel. As a disciplined, highly focused grassroots guerilla movement, it succeeded where Yasser Arafat and his band of pot-bellied, lewd, ersatz revolutionaries had always failed: It wrestled with Israel over Southern Lebanon for eighteen years and won in 2000, when Israel unilaterally ended its occupation of the South.

However, till this very day, in explaining Israel’s loss, both its critics and supporters skip over motive, as a given, and focus on malfunctions and miscalculations. Both expend all their energies over the nuts and bolts of failure because both have taken Israel’s declared objective at face value. Both believe Hezbollah was combatant and target. And both are wrong. The fact is Israel was fighting Hezbollah, but the truth is it was after Lebanon. Its arrogance was not directed at a well-tested Hezbollah, it was directed at the infinitely more fragile Lebanese polity. It did not think Hezbollah would break in the first few days of the war, it thought Lebanon would. But it did not (and you will be pleased to know that the reasons will make an appearance here soon). Therefore, it was poor, feeble Lebanon—and not majestic Hezbollah--that first tripped up Israel’s mindset.

Interesting? A tad bit over the top? Yes, but you haven’t read the last of it yet. And this is the juncture where you need to cross from the realm of basic ground rules into that of mirrors and paradoxes.

Stay tuned.

Heart-to-heart with Israel/ cont'd

The mad, mad, world of Palestine and Israel!
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Disaster beckons an entire people, and they are all chuckling. Israel chuckles as its parameters burn. Hamas chuckles as it prepares to reign supreme over an oven—or a presto as we call our pressure cookers. And Fatah chuckles as it digs its heels into the glorified prison that is the West Bank.
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Woe to Mahmoud Darwish, every Palestinian’s poet, for taking this so seriously. Lamentations, rebukes, regrets, eloquence teetering on the edge of befuddlement graces the front page of al Hayyat newspaper, and for what? For whom?

“The prisoner, who so wants to inherit his prison, hid the smile of victory from the camera, but he could not suppress the happiness trickling from his eyes, perhaps because the hastily prepared text was stronger than the actor. We have no need of narcissism, so long as we are Palestinian. And so long as we cannot tell the difference between the mosque and the university (al Ja’ami’ wa al Jamia’a) because they come from the same linguistic root, we have no need of a state…” (My translation).
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For the first time ever Darwish declares his Palestine dead and, like a bouquet of white lilies, rests his shattered heart over its remains.

****

If you are in this neighborhood, wherever you are you must be stepping on blame everywhere you look. The blogs, the newspapers, the magazines, the news programs and talk shows, my street corner in Beirut, are throwing it around like sludge in a free-for-all mud fight. As a gesture of goodwill and, I suppose, in the interest of variety, warriors from both camps are graciously indulging a good number of apologetic malcontents. On the American-Israeli side, flanking the devotees who can only conceive of Palestinian violence as a vindication of their own chauvinism, we have a band of so-called free spirits who chide Israel for its naiveté or carelessness in giving license to Islamism in the late eighties as a tamable beast with which to harass Yasser Arafat. On the Palestinian side, running very near the diehards who plunk every mishap on Zionist-American laps, we have a group who, in typical lah-ya-habibi-hatha- al hakki-ma-bisseir (roughly, this won’t do, my brother) form, scold Hamas and Fatah for letting their dirty laundry dangle from the rooftops of Gaza.
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The lines of defense thus secured, the word mistake, on both sides of the embankment, begins to do what it is so good at: recasting deliberate malice as a mere error of judgment. By way of example, we have: It was a mistake for the Americans not to engage an amenable Hamas after the Palestinian elections; and/or it was a mistake for Israel to ignore Mahmud Abbas and inadvertently strengthen Hamas; and/or it was a mistake for Fatah not to have accepted the choice of the people; and/or it was a mistake for Hamas to stoop to the level of a conniving Mahmud Dahlan on the frightened streets of Gaza… In each of these examples and their enumerable spin-offs, every premeditated outcome becomes an unintended consequence; in each of them, every indictment comes with its own built-in pardon. And it is in this way that disturbed psyches are transformed into ill-advised decisions. It is in this way that the sentence for murder is reduced, before the court of public opinion, to that of manslaughter. Now they can all go down in history as blameless victims of at best a bad calculation, at worst rudderless intentions.
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You know that yawning, incomprehensible sound that emits from a scene being replayed for the thousandth time…?

****

So let’s reshuffle the deck. Let’s stretch this canvas of facts some and make it less comfortable for conventional wisdoms as they go about planting themselves all over its parched surface.
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Since we are still in the middle of my heart-to-heart with Israel, I want to stay with it before turning to the Arabs and the Palestinians.
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This is what I wrote an American journalist friend of mine towards the end of Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer:

Why…would Israel opt, yet again, for brutal military force when much in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict tells it that, almost always, savagery will deliver plenty of what it presumably does not want and very little of what it allegedly craves? Why squeeze the life out of a whole people when, from this death, mayhem and unbearable distress and blind hate are sure to emerge? Unless—unless, of course—Israel’s declared objectives, more often than not, are only thin cover for an entirely more sinister ambition. Sixty years into this bloodletting, surely you and I can easily glimpse this fractured, devastated, radicalized Arab terrain emptied of its moderate voices and reasonable minds; a distraught, agitated landscape that cares only for those children born and bred in its own deathly image. And surely, on the fringes of this carnage, you and yours are meant to behold that lonesome lotus vibrating with life in our Eastern mud; that marvel of a nation that stands like an impregnable, fearsome military fortress on the outside and thrives like a precious Western democracy on the inside; that bastion of Western civilization in a very cruel, backward neighborhood inhabited by tyrannical halfwits and fundamentalist dimwits, a place and its people who, in their ferocity, explain the very reason for this glittering beauty that is mighty Israel.Creative chaos, whoever its real authors are, promises this: that from the rubble shall rise one of two equally wonderful Middle Easts—a chronically ill beast ravaged by social diseases and debilitated by internecine wars, or a lobotomized creature, stupid, biddable, and permanently silent. I remember the very first question that came to me only hours into this latest war: What have we wrought in this land of ours? I kept mumbling to myself… I shall leave [this country] and search for a shelter that can love me better and which, perhaps, will allow me to love it more. Where have I registered in anybody’s books as the prime casualty of this war? Where am I mentioned? And yet, all along, I have had this nauseous feeling that I am the one Israel was actually after…
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The fire of heedless rage or the stillness of unquestioning submission. Hamas or Fatah. Militancy that derides dignified resistance as cowardly or obsequiousness that masquerades as genuine moderation. Do you see now why Israel chuckles, thinking deliverance at last? To neither adversary does it have to cede dreams, because of neither is it compelled to rewrite raison d’etres, for the sake of neither does it need to offer more than crumbs, yield more than inches.

A Heart-to-heart with Israel

I want to take this Palestinian-Israeli story beyond the mind-numbing chatter about the details of hatred and violence. I am tired of debating the mechanics of malevolence close to a century into this conflict. Facts matter—they will always matter—but, whichever way our convictions choose to read them, they are mere foot soldiers in this bloodletting.

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I want to travel further into the realms of psyche and implication, into those of mindset and devastating aftereffect, because when facts kill, they kill for them.

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Dana Olmert, Yigal Arens, Avraham Burg and Avinadav Begin do not seal my last post as petty taunts. I do not float their names to state the very obvious: that dissent in Israel has reached the progeny of even its fiercest keepers. I am not embracing their rebellion the way I, in my younger college years in the US, latched on to Ahad Ha’am’s reservations about Herzel’s political zeal or marveled at Martin Buber’s spiritualism as evidence of a once tentative, self-questioning Zionism—if not self-questioning of its rights, then self-questioning of their impact on the rights and lives of others.

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I mention these angry children of Israel because 59 years ago, when political Zionism declared itself triumphant over its spiritual and cultural adversaries and Arab enemies, Israeli euphoria would give in only to the seduction of happy dreams. The naggings of nightmares were for the losers. I mention them because 59 years ago, when Israel became flesh and blood and thought it had finally laid to rest that ageless “Jewish Question,” Palestinian exodus seemed—even for those Zionists who acknowledged the injustice of it--a reasonable sacrifice for “Jewish Return.” There was no room then for qualms and foresight. The horror of the Holocaust was too recent, the righteousness of the Cause was too intoxicating and the opportunity in Palestine too compelling. Fifty-nine years ago the future of a messianic, exultant Zionism was intangible, but now it has become the real past, and on its surface yesterday’s dire predictions have bloomed into these children’s scathing verdicts. That is why I mention them.

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In protesting thus, are they not pleading with their country for more meaningful conversations about the possibilities of salvation for them and for this worn-out Middle East? Have we all not lived in this quagmire long enough to know that the misfortune of one people is not necessarily a windfall for the other?

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But there stands a flummoxed Israel, so mighty and yet so frightened, still hanging on to the promise in hellish scenarios. Shall it be yet another Palestinian transfer, as Avigador Lieberman demands, or shall it be permanent dominion over them? Shall it be 50 little Bantustans or one quadriplegic, deaf and mute, tiny Palestine? Dare we ponder the comeback of the Jordanian flag over a mutilated West Bank and Egyptian care for a destitute and seething Gazan Hammastan?

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Does Israel not see that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, that most fervent of Zionists, was right when he said of the Palestinians, “…they are not a rabble but a living people?” Do the raging fires of the past 60 years not tell it how wrong he was when he found his answer for Palestinian acquiescence written on an “Iron Wall?” Do they not understand that they cannot be in the Middle East but not of it? If a thriving IT sector, a robust economy and a healthy stock exchange brighten up the picture for Israel, don’t the people’s anxieties about the longevity of the state that permeate every poll and the fading sheen of military power as panacea make it a tad bit darker?

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Not a history replete with damning evidence, not the voices within and not the clamor without seem to be making a dent as Israel’s leaders, politicians and generals alike, go about their business of audaciously dressing up bigotry and cruelty as workable solutions for their people and ours.

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I am writing this as news trickles in about the killing of five UNIFEL Spanish soldiers in Southern Lebanon. Here’s one murderous act that exposes the mindsets meeting across divides to bring this country down. In identifying the guilty hands, one is at a loss between an Israel that has been agitating for another round to reclaim for the Israeli military its fading luster and help Lebanon and Hezbollah sink deeper into their morass; extremist Palestinian elements hitting in the South to spread the turmoil in the North; a Syria anxious to make the summer a very hot season for all of us.

Allah Yustur (God shield us). But I doubt he will.

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More conversations with Israel, the Arabs and Palestinians in my next post.

Chapter Three: Finita La Musica

Waddi’, as in Say Goodbye!

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

Batikh Ykassir Ba’ado

Let Watermelons Break Each Other/as in A Plague Upon Both Your Houses

If you are disappointed that the rumpus in Nahr al Bared is settling into a monotonous rhythm, don’t be. We are still in the very early hours of this traggedia, as we like to call our misadventures in Franco-Araab. While information, good and bad, will keep seeping out of “anonymous” sources about Fath al Islam and the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism in our refugee camps, the real show is actually playing somewhere else—in the political arena. And since we all have a strong feeling that we are barely scratching the surface of this morass, it only makes sense to dip our heads a little deeper for a closer look at the evils breeding at the bottom of it.

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The 12 refugee camps in Lebanon teeming with 425,000 of the wretched of Palestinian earth have long been home to every rent-a-cause kiosk conjured by our Arab brethren. For decades, they have been destinations for regional bullies in search of mercurial mercenaries and hideouts for roughnecks looking to change their footprints after every bad act. And why wouldn’t they be? There, people with no claim to any happy dream live in permanent tension with open sewage, overflowing garbage, overcrowded housing, promises unfulfilled, life not lived; there, people live as if on islands of oblivion, not quite visible to our leaders, not quite mattering to theirs.

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Fath al Islam may be the criminal of the month but it is only one of many groups most of whose time is spent thinking up ever grislier interpretations of and commands by the Quran. With an al Qaeda-like obsessiveness with the sinfulness of others that is constantly itching for spilt blood, their willingness to unleash terror throughout Lebanon is as certain as the waywardness of their faith. Whether they have the capacity—the sleeper cells, the backup, the mobility underground—to do so is not quite as evident.

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Hence even if the Lebanese army kills Fath al Islam’s ring leader Shaker Abbsi and every single one of his foot soldiers, Pandora might still be standing there with her box about to crack open. These largely foreign fighters may have been alien to Nahr al Bared but their appearance in it says much about both the Lebanese government (and Syrian efforts) that helped ease their way in and the Hobbsian conditions that tolerated their presence there. The question of the Palestinians in Lebanon—the destitution in which they live, the Palestinian Authority’s deteriorating influence over them, the mountain of arms in the hands of a sea of “liberators” of every non-religious persuasion or Jihadist motivation--has raced to the fore and the answers to it have become ever more pressing. Fath al Islam, as urgent as its specific case is now, is symptomatic of a festering malignancy that will not respond to our state’s favorite remedy: bazzi w lazzi’, spit and stick (remember that one from a very early Thinking Fits post?).

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Moreover, just as this extremist group blew the lid off the indefensible autonomous status of the refugee camps, it made Hezbollah’s unilateral disarmament practically unachievable. For the Sunni fanaticism that breeds in these places is as grave a threat to the interests of Hezbollah and the safety of the Shiite community as it is to the authority and stability of the state—or so Hezbollah shall argue with much credibility. It makes absolutely no sense anymore to speak of Hezbollah’s arms when conditions inside these camps have grown from very inconvenient to out-and-out perilous.

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It has thus become startlingly clear that whatever fixes the Lebanese government has in its bag they cannot be short term, they cannot be cosmetic, they cannot only involve firepower and they necessarily have to string together some mighty intelligence fieldwork and bold political moves.

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And this is just the easy part.

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This Lebanese crisis, like all the previous ones, is as much about regional intrigues as it is about internal maladies. The Rafiq Hariri international tribunal that has just passed in the UN’s Security Council under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, as critical as it is for the Syrians, does not swim alone in this region’s pool of peace-threatening problems. Although this country’s immediate quandary has its roots in Syria’s furious and bloody reaction to the loss of the only jewel in its crown, the exit from it will not necessarily lead us to salvation. The files in the hands of the powers which collectively, but very often competitively, preside over us are many and the issues packing them are complicated and thorny.

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The short of it is that Lebanon is meeting this latest test at a time when those who hate it and those who could care less about it far outnumber and outmuscle those who feel sorry for it. Mind you, the players manning the first two fronts are the peripatetic type. Depending on the stakes, they switch sides without even a pause. They may hate each other but towards us—subhan al Allah (Goodness Lord!)--their feelings are disturbingly chummy.

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Not coincidently, of course, the unkindness of those on the outside is playing footsie yet again with the feebleness of those on the inside: The near-paralyzed Lebanese government (whether it admits it or not) is grappling with the ramifications of breathtakingly irresponsible tactics that are making the plots against it easier to realize; the people are utterly demoralized; our educated youth is jumping this sinking ship; the state’s intelligence apparatus is less amenable to its orders than it is to the Syrians’; and our political class—the opposition and March 14th combined—has shown itself scandalously blasé about this country’s daunting challenges.

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Are you depressed yet, or do you just hate me?

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I cannot deny that this pretty much reads like a you-might-as-well-shoot-me-in-the-head scenario, but all I have done is set up the atmosphere for you; it is up to you to adjust the lights to your liking. For a happy thought, you might want to start with a Syrian-American deal that delivers to the tribunal two or three Syrian intelligence hoods, all arranged courtesy of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This deal is both conceivable and possible now that the court has been approved. Beyond this generous gesture, for a brighter picture you had better bring in those neon lights.