Plus ça change

Boston, Massachusetts
November 27, 2005

Since its inception in the late 1960s, the Lebanese crisis has evolved through phases and periods with an ever changing array of actors and players, friends and foes, outsiders and insiders, collaborators and heroes, and traitors and patriots. Yet, as we ever so asymptotically reach the end of this long and tiresome tunnel, we also come to realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Just go to one of the Lebanese newspapers that were published 30 years ago and randomly pick a date from, say 1974, and read the headline from South Lebanon. Then, fast forward to 2005, say last week, and read the headline from the South in the same newspaper, and you will see that the basic “formula” for the War remains the same:

 1 - Armed elements affiliated with, and armed and financed by, foreign parties attack Northern Israeli villages for the objective of “liberating” “Arab” land that may or may not be occupied.

2 – Israel retaliates and destroys Lebanese villages and infrastructure with a force that is disproportionately greater than the offending attack. Dozens and occasionally hundreds of Lebanese villagers in the South are killed or injured.

3 – The United Nations condemns (with or without a resolution); the foreign “friends” of Lebanon call for restraint and calm on both sides to prevent an escalation; and the Arab “brothers” of Lebanon condemn Israel for violating Lebanese sovereignty.

4 – The Lebanese government – cognizant of the fact that it is itself violating international law by allowing freelance “resistance” militias to attack a neighboring country and by not sending the Lebanese Army to disarm the “armed elements” and exert the legitimate control of the State over the border zone – refuses or is unable to stop the charade. Instead, it resorts to Arab nationalist slogans of “liberation” from some “enemy” who has some vague “ambitions” over the country, and with whom it categorically refuses to even contemplate negotiating border issues (Shebaa) that were created by a “brotherly” Arab country and not by the “enemy”.

The four-step mechanism described above has been the staple formula for the 30-year long destabilization of Lebanon by friends, brothers and enemies of the country. And, we the Lebanese continue to play along, particularly the successive governments (from Karame to Solh to Hoss, and on to Hariri and Siniora) and the foreign (PLO) and domestic (Hezbollah) militias they have hidden behind. Considering that a horde of “Arabs” ranging from the Palestinians themselves, the Jordanians, Egyptians, Qataris, Tunisians and Mauritanians have all openly and discreetly established ties with the “enemy”, why is Lebanon – arguably the smallest and weakest Arab country, virtually annihilated by 30 years of this masquerade – so asinine in its determination and persistence to sacrifice itself and its interests, when all the other Arabs say there is really nothing left to liberate?

What makes this self-inflicted masochistic behavior so bewildering is that there is one major difference today in 2005 with the past. There are no Arab pressures or boycotts of Lebanon to force it to play the role of the village idiot. There are no occupations: The Israelis have left (unless you still want to believe the Shebaa lie), the Syrians have left, the entire world has finally realized what the charade in the South is really about and has issued resolution after resolution to put an end to this farce. Even the Palestinian government has sent emissaries to Beirut to negotiate the disarming of the camps in accordance with resolution 1559. So why is the Siniora government, and all the feudal progenies of the lords of the past 30 years – from Jumblatt to Hariri, so persistent at defending the indefensible? Why do the jackass fools of the Siniora government in 2005 continue to regurgitate ad nauseam the very same asinine arguments that the Karame government was blathering in 1973? Of course, Siniora claims the mantle of “Anti-Syrian” and “liberator” even as he and his former boss Rafik Harriri, now a “martyr”, worked at the behest of the Syrian occupation for 15 years before he was killed by his own masters for daring to imagine life in Lebanon without the Syrians – truly a first among Lebanon's Sunni Prime Ministers – excepting of course the Independence hero Riyad El-Solh.  

And even as most of the Lebanese people complain to the Siniora government about this irrational and self-destructive policy, they are immediately silenced by cries of “treason” to the Arab Cause, and by claims that the “Resistance” is a natural right, even though there is really nothing to liberate.

Except of course the monumental task of liberating the Lebanese people from the shackles of feudalism, the enslavement of religion (church and mosque), the tribal mindset that makes the Lebanese vote on the basis of genetics rather than economics, the virulent individualism of the Lebanese people that is our single most destructive attribute, the anachronistically patriarchal structure of Lebanese society that grants citizenship to a child born of a Lebanese father but not to one born of a Lebanese mother, the abject neglect of the potential of women to contribute to Lebanese society, the continued rape of our environment – which is ultimately our only resource – by such things as unbridled, unplanned urbanism, the quarries that are open wounds in our mountainsides and our forests, the construction of luxury hotels and resorts (owned by the feudal lords in government and Parliament) right smack along the beach fronts thereby denying the average Lebanese the most basic of rights, namely to enjoy one’s own country’s beaches. There is a dire need to “liberate” the Lebanese refugees and displaced by the 30-year war, including those who remain inside the country and cannot return to their villages and towns, those who are refugees in Israel, those who continue to live in forced exile by a Syrian-style repressive brand of Lebanese justice (Etienne Sacre and the Guardians of the Cedars, and many others against whom there are standing arrest warrants for having fought the Syrian occupation), and all of us willing exiles who want to, but cannot, return for a myriad of reasons. The list of “occupations” that are in dire need of liberation is long, but the point has been made.

The focus on the Shebaa Farms and the anomaly of Hezbollah’s hallucinations are legacies of a past that the Siniora government is unable to put behind Lebanon. The country has so many more real and tangible needs to worry about than the monstrosity of a pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian hallucinating Islamic ideologue such as Nasrallah and his death-smitten, self-immolating, and hate-mongering cohorts. It is treason itself to hold the country hostage to this moribund ideology that, truth be told, wants to ultimately establish an Islamic State modeled on the Iranian regime in Lebanon. Otherwise, what is Hezbollah’s raison d’etre? What purpose will Hezbollah serve once the pretext of “liberation” is removed from under its feet? What purpose will Hezbollah serve once the legitimate government of Lebanon sends its regular army and its social services back to the South from which it was evicted by Hezbollah itself? The answer to these questions is: Nothing. For there can never be an Islamic State in a country whose population is half Christian, and worse yet, in a country whose people have had enough of religion – both Christian and Moslem – chocking their lives and aspirations, keeping them shackled by antiquated beliefs, holding back their development into the modern world.

Take the “occupation” card from the hands of Hezbollah, and it becomes a fanatic Islamic fundamentalist militia whose goal is to create an Islamic Republic in Lebanon. Go a step further: Take away from Hezbollah their dream of an Islamic State in Lebanon, take away their exploitation of the Palestinian cause to achieve that purpose, and take away their hypocritical pretense to providing social services in the south of the country (when they deny the true provider of those services, namely the Lebanese government, access to the south), and Hezbollah decomposes rapidly into the putrid cesspool from which it was created. We have had enough hypocrisy about all the mantles of nationalism that Hezbollah claims to wear: Consider that Hezbollah is all of these things: Arab, Islamic, Shiite, Iranian, anti-Jewish, anti-Western, more Palestinian than the Palestinians, for the poor and downtrodden and oppressed, etc...When will it simply become Lebanese? How can this deviant chameleon be believable any longer?

As the noose tightens around Damascus, another noose is rapidly forming around the neck of Nasrallah. But the solution for the people of Lebanon on the more important issues confronting them – their livelihoods, economy, rebuilding, women’s rights, access to political power, health care, the environment, education, reform of the massive corruption in government institutions, basic services (water, telephone, Internet access, electricity….) – resides in the Lebanese people making the right choices at elections and throwing in the trash bin of history the feudal and tribal leaders they continue to bring to power and who continue to keep them chained by antiquated and obsolescent traditions. We need more statesmen and fewer politicians; we need leaders whose claim to leadership is not their fathers’ chromosomes or a few crumbs of credibility from the table of former traitors and collaborators now parading themselves as liberators and patriots. Nothing short of a revolution in the hearts and minds of the Lebanese people will take Lebanon out of the cesspool in which it has been lying for decades. Only then will change really become change, and the view from the looking glass will become clear.