Transcend This!

Basra, Iraq, during the electoral festivities

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

  

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

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

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

“Your voice equals your honor.”

“Yes, total respect is correct.”

“Yes, the nation is for everyone.”

“Daughter of the nation, sister of everyone.”

“Authority (al Haibah) is paramount.”

“The Right of Return is sacred.”

“Without slogans.”

“Let your voice boom.”

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

“Yes, yes, and yes, yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Iddi sotak aw matiddihoush,

al-Nabawi Ismail mayhimmoush”

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

Al-Nabawi Ismail cares not.”

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tick Tock!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

What It All Means

On the International Tribunal Investigating Rafiq Hariri’s Assassination

  

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

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

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

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

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

****

But what does it all mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the PA, Hamas and that Matter of Palestinian Resistance

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

 

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

****

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

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

Of Rants and Raves

April post deleted by accident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Collapse of Israel’s Old Narrative

When the Chicken Came Home to Roost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Indeed it is!

The Domestication of Lebanon and Hezbollah?

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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