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.

Hezbollah in the Larger Scheming of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

The Only Way is Civil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can take it like a man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bewildering (or Is It Delirious?) Lebanon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August is a mother, ain’t it?

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

From this Side of the Fence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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