En dos días el parliamento libanés se reune para elegir un ‘candidato de consenso’ y de este modo, en principio, romper el impase político que se lleva viviendo en el Líbano desde hace dos años. O desde hace 30, según como lo mires. Todos andan tensados, esperando lo peor y imaginando lo que podría desencadenarse a partir de esta semana (vease por ejemplo http://www.aboujahjah.com/?p=57#more-57 , en ingles)

aquí he un mini ensayo de una amiga, que transmite el ambiente en las calles de beirut en estos días:

A scene of pedestrians walking quickly through out the streets of Beirut
to their preset destination is a warning sign. As if the arriving horizon
is covering the city with dark promises, bringing back a nightmare that
lasted 35 years.

Their destinations are their homes of safe spaces, but soon when the
flying bullets and the snipers deadly jokes performing a symphony of
sporadic noise to the silent city outside, then these homes will turn into
graveyards, of living bodies waiting in despair.

This is the tension of uncertain memories. In a present resembling stories
told by a former militia soldier, once, while finishing his fourth beer
bottle, in an epiphany of regret, that tragically fades in the next
morning.

What Lebanon is currently undergoing is not limited only to the
presidential elections; it would be foolish to pretend that. An
existential and spatial crisis that generations of the Lebanese people
have been going through cannot be limited and solved only by finding a
suitable president.

Portraying the presidential election as the key knot of all these
never-ending conflicts, means that we are procrastinating again the
inevitable tasks of naming the factual reasons of these conflicts as they
truly are. Thus, we again are creating an imaginary setting to hide the
real reasons that would explain the logic of this steadfastness and
yearning to war.

If some Lebanese believe that the Syrian regime is the foe, and some
others believe it is Israel. How would the presidential election be a step
towards bridging this difference? Could the president determine who is the
vital other for the Lebanese, and by identifying this other the Lebanese
would be able to understand the true meaning of sovereignty. Such a
president must be an instant messenger from god and with holy powers, the
kind of leader that the Lebanese people fall for head over heels.

The vacancy of the presidential seat fools no one; this sort of vacancy
becomes an embarrassment in front of international diplomatic presence. A
president needed for a country’s prestige. As unacceptable as this idea
might be for some, it remains a popular perspective that Lebanese share
among them selves. The Lebanese president has no say in war, or in peace,
the Lebanese president decides no allies or foes. A candidate for the
presidency should be neutral; he must be objective to the extent of
detachment. Who will be seated on the chair in Baabda place? Who will be
representing the dominatrix of the Lebanese inter relationships? Questions
that can be avoided at no cost if we would replace them with different
questions, what should a Lebanese president stand for? How close should
this position be to the actual Lebanese politics?

A magnet is pulling people to war. A magnet of sectarian insecurities and
international loyalties, a broken bridge with the past keeps manifesting
it self in the so-called arbitrary acts of violence. If we have never
admitted that we have killed each other for reasons of antagonism, then we
cannot say we might repeat these killing. All records have been cleared,
and rewritten. A new Lebanese identity created in the post Rafik Al Hariri
Lebanon; pre-produced identities sold through Image consumption.

If this war breaks through, we should not complain. We should not run
around and blame people or increase our xenophobia by enslaving more
Syrian workers, Africans, Asians and Palestinians. This time if the war
breaks through we should accept that this is who we are. A group of lost
zealots with self-hatred issues committing crimes in the name of freedom,
resistance and enlightenment. We are our own fear.

If this war must break through, let it be out in the area of Solidere and
let be destroyed again. Let this war if it must break through; erase all
false visions of any future we fool our self to embrace. If this war must
break through then surely, the resistance true face will fall down, and
the men of god could fight openly the men of capitalism.

Sara Abou Ghazal
November 16th, 2007, Beirut

como habreís visto, una mini-guerra sigue dandose entre militantes islamistas y el ejercito libanés en el campo de refugiados palestinos de nahr al bared en el norte del libano, ocasionando una fuga de civiles palestinos de este campo a otros en todo el país, además de muchos muertos y muchísimos heridos en una situación de abandono total. la situación amanaza con encender todo el polvorín del líbano de nuevo, y mientras todos se fijan en las posibles consequencias políticas, no hay ningun respaldo humanitario para los civiles palestinos, ya doble y triplemente castigados y exiliados.

unas tres amigas muy cercanas se han juntado para organizar dineros y materiales básicos (colchones, mantas, comida, etc) de apoyo a los palestinos fugados. parten de cierta experiencia – también participaron en la red ’samidoun’ el verano pasado, un grupo que se formó para prestar ayuda de urgencia a los que huyeron las bombas en el sur que algunas conoceís (la cena de apoyo que se hizo en el solar era para mandarles dinero…). despues de la crisis del verano samidoun colapsó bajo los desacuerdos políticos de sus participantes, y ahora estas amigas, de modo autonómo, recuperan su modelo organizativo para intervenir en la crisis actual.

una pasada como éstas, tan parecidas a nosotras (en su formación y preocupaciones políticas, en sus experiencias organizativas, en sus críticas tanto a las políticas institucionales como las ONGistas…) se encuentran ahora una y otra vez en la encrucijada en la que la única intervención que tiene sentido (en un ambiente tremendamente crispada y cada vez más sectaria) es apostar por la vida humana, la acogida de cuerpos, la sostenibilidad de la vida en su sentido más inmediato por encima de las posiciones políticas y las reivindicaciones. (y esto a pesar del gran esfuerzo que se ha hecho desde EEUU/gobierno libanés a recuperar y adueñarse del eslogan “amo a la vida” – esto lo explico en otro momento, es muy fuerte).

están solicitando donaciones. luego traduzco su hoja de información y os lo mando en castellano. por el momento propongo que pensamos – o individual o colectivamente – en aportar algo. por si acaso, os pego su información bancaria.

BLOM Bank – Raouche branch
Numero de Cuenta: 003.02.300.1121472.1.9
Código SWIFT: BLOMLBBX
Titular: Rasha Ibrahim Moumneh

un analisis muy acertado de la actual campaña pública – y batalla símbolica – en el líbano, que empezó con el lema ‘amo la vida’…

We love life whenever we can
Mayssoun Sukarieh writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 8 January 2007

We love life whenever we can.
We dance and throw up a minaret or raise palm trees for the violets growing between two martyrs.
We love life whenever we can.
We steal a thread from a silk-worm to weave a sky and a fence for our journey.
We open the garden gate for the jasmine to walk into the street as a beautiful day.
We love life whenever we can.
Wherever we settle we grow fast-growing plants, wherever we settle we harvest a murdered man.
We blow into the flute the color of far away, of far away, we draw on the dust in the passage the neighing of a horse.
And we write our names in the form of stones. Lightning brighten the night for us, brighten the night a little.
We love life whenever we can.

Unconsciously, I started to recite this poem, written by Mahmoud Darwish in the eighties, as I first came across the “I love life” and “J’aime la vie” slogans written in red and white letters and carried on billboards around Lebanon. Even before I knew the story of the slogans, the poem came to mind, because the slogans felt cut: We love life whenever we can! But there is so much anger from occupation, imperialism, and injustice around us. The omitted part from the slogan gives a fantasy of a choice of being able to live a life we want in the current state of the world.

The image of the “I Love Life” campaign.
Investigating the meaning of the slogan, written in Arabic, French and English, I learned that “I love life” is a private sector campaign in cooperation with USAID aiming at spreading a “culture of life”, against the “culture of death”, as stated in the website of the campaign. Some Cedar Revolution activists are attempting to counter the current political crisis in Lebanon with this campaign. Elie Khoury, the ad executive and campaign leader, says: “We want to tell the world that, regardless of whatever they see on their TV screens, the Lebanese want to live and move ahead.” By “what the world sees on the TV screen” is meant the ongoing demonstrations against the government in Lebanon.

“Culture of life” against the “culture of death” is another manifestation of the binary thinking through which the imperial war of the Bush administration is being waged. Either you are with us or against us, and if you are against us, an Iraq is your only option. We who represent the culture of life – after we are rid of any sort of resistance – against them – any group trying to resist us – who spread a culture of death. However, the “we” in the Bush administration discourse is inclusive not only of Americans but also of moderate Arab leaders and the new Arab business class, whose interests put them in the same camp with those who love life in the US against their fellow backward traditional citizens who embrace death.

The “I love life” campaign is still in its inception stage. However, it is intended to develop into a grassroots movement – funded by USAID! – aiming at taking actions to fight the culture of death and defeat those “who want us to live in the past!” The campaign started a month ago, when the opposition took to the streets to topple down the pro-US government. But the roots of the campaign go back to this past summer. Under Israeli aerial, marine and land-based shelling, “We want to live” and “Enough wars” were outcries that pro-government and pro-US Lebanese were sending not just against Israel and the US, but also against the Resistance that “ruined their summer, and destroyed Lebanon”. Again, insinuated in these outcries is an illusion of choice, a choice of a life we can live if only we want to. Insinuated in these outcries is a fantasy of an option of a life with Israel, a colonial state with expansionist dreams and an army equipped with the most advanced weapons in the world, right on our borders.

How the campaign will develop, and what life – or whose life – we will be taught to love and embrace is still not clear in Lebanon. However, a look at a similar campaign in Jordan, the “culture of hope” campaign, can shed light on the kind of life these Lebanese campaigners are promising us.

In an attempt to bridge the “Hope Gap” between the West and East, Queen Rania has called for World Economic Forum leaders to work on building a new “culture of hope” in the Middle East. The hope gap is being bridged in Jordan by USAID funds too. Save the Children USA-Jordan, has launched four USAID funded programs which director MacCormack says “are designed to help create the ‘Culture of Hope’ that King Abdullah and Queen Rania are working so hard to realize.”

Najah, Injaz, and School to Career are three of these Save the Children/USAID funded programs, and are designed to help Jordanian youth “become positive, active participants in a civil society and the economy through enhancing their knowledge and skills about the world of work.” This is done through teaching them employability skills in order to prepare them for work in the private sector, and bridge the gap between educational outcomes and market needs. Employability skills, dubbed also soft skills, include “accepting the other”, writing CVs, communication skills, and the culture of Entrepreneurship and “flexibility.” Youth are taught that success is not related to social position, and that work should be respected for its own sake. In other words, the program aims to spread a culture of responsibilization among youth. The market is open, and it is there for everybody, and it is up to you to take the responsibility for yourself. If you can’t make it in the market, it means you lack the skills of employability and you should work on yourself in order to make it in the system. This is the “culture of hope.” This is also quite likely the “culture of life.”

As the 9/11 events were solely caused by the culture of terrorism inherent in Islam, as the Bush administration convinced Americans, the “culture of desperation” and “culture of death” spread among youth in the region has nothing to do with the injustice of the global economy and the relentless greed of the private sector, those who love to live tell us. In other words, the role of these programs that are promoting positive thinking among youth, and spreading a culture of life, is to turn the insecurities of the neoliberal system to the individual himself or herself to be pacified and controlled.

“The US has not done anything abroad without trying it on the Americans themselves first,” I thought of my mentor’s words when thinking of “I love life” and “Bridging the gap of hope”. After all, is not the slogan “don’t worry, be happy”, that the corporations spread in the US, another face of our life and hope slogans? “Do not worry” is another way to tell people not to think of the injustices around, because there is someone thinking for them, as now there is someone who will live for us too! And all are an attempt to depoliticize the masses and indulge them in struggle within themselves.

Tomorrow we will love life,
When tomorrow comes, life will be something to adore,
just as it is, ordinary or tricky
gray or colorful, stripped of judgment day and purgatory

Says also Mahmoud Darwish, in his “State of Siege,” the poem he wrote under siege in Ramallah in 2000 debunking the illusion of a life under occupation and siege.

When tomorrow comes, the tomorrow of freedom from occupation, colonialism, injustice and humiliation, we will love our life – that we will create for ourselves – because unlike what the new elites with USAID money are trying to tell us, we have no choice at the moment. Tomorrow we will love life, because “we love life whenever we can afford it.”

Mayssoun Sukarieh, a native of Beirut, is a frequent contributor to Electronic Lebanon.

of all the things I have read on the July seige, this is the one which rings most true to me. It is a text written by Beirut artist Tony Chakar, excusing himself from the Documenta12 festival in Hong Kong.

To the ends of the earth
Tony Chakar

My non-presence with you is not a coincidence; travelling to Hong Kong would have been difficult in the circumstances that you know very well, but with the lifting of the Israeli siege it wouldn’t have been impossible. And yet, I took the conscious decision not to travel abroad, not to be physically present and instead, to let a text I?ve written represent me. I could try and explain the reasons for my decision, like not wanting to bother with the paperwork process of obtaining the visa, or that after weeks of constant Israeli bombardments I feel too weak to take a long flight, or too weak to explain to anyone, once I arrive, what had happened and why, and especially too weak, or maybe too proud, to see even the faintest hint of pity in anyone?s eyes. All of these are valid enough reasons for a person not to travel, but in fact the deep reason for my non-appearance is elsewhere.

In order for me to try and explain it, I should take a few steps back. During the long weeks of the latest Israeli aggression on my country, which felt more like centuries, I was completely paralysed, and all I managed to write was the following:

Little Hiroshima

I’ve got my own little Hiroshima right here in my pocket.

Sometimes I take it out, I put it on the table, and ponder.

It will take us countless years and several generations to grasp the immensity of the catastrophe that has (and is) struck us- and these women who now wear black, and who become more and more numerous with each passing day- these women are not only mourning their loved ones, but they are mourning hope itself.

Where are God’s angels when you need them? I just want one of them to whisper in my ear that things are going to be ok, maybe then I can breathe again.

Obviously, this was not enough- in spite of the numerous replies I received when I sent this text by email. It is certainly not enough if measured to the immensity of the catastrophe that has come to pass over my country. The space of the catastrophe and its time are very strange formations that can only be grasped if directly experienced and then measured to the ?obvious?, to what we all take for granted, to a normal state of things. The reasons for my non-presence lie precisely in this catastrophic time, and this catastrophic space, that I am yet to leave. As long as I remain in them, I will always be able to say: I am no one. I am no one, and I am legion. I am a million screaming banshees that have no name, roaming about an indefinite space that is all inside, that has no limits, that has no outside (note that the double siege established by both Israel and Syria over the sea, the air and the land transformed Lebanon into an unreachable island, a lost land). I am no one, and yet I am a howling Jezebel that can be everywhere she wishes, when she wishes: I can be in the halls of the United Nations in New York, floating around Dan Gillerman, Israel?s ambassador to the UN, shutting his mouth with my thousand hands, to stop him from saying that Israel is bombarding Lebanon for its own good, or I can haunt the dreams of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, when he dreams of the Lebanese victims who in his eyes are not equal, even in their death, to the Israeli victims, because the first died in ?self-defence?, while the latter were victims of terrorism; I can even go underground, to the Hizballah tunnels, and find the un-findable Hassan Nassrallah, take him by my thousand hands, and give him a thousand shakes, and tell him with my thousand voices that there can be no victory over this field of ruins, and that I am sick of seeing women in black mourning their loved ones, and that all I want is to be able to ?cultivate my garden?.

For these reasons I cannot be in Hong Kong: if I were to travel, I would have to go to embassies and airports, to present papers and documents that state exactly who I am and where is my place in this world-structure that we all share. I will have to regain my pre-catastrophic status of a specific person, with a specific position in a specific society, and I am simply not ready or willing to see that happening, at least for now. I don’t want to ‘forget what happened’ and return to normality. I am not willing and I am not ready to do that. So, in short, you can consider this paper as a message in a bottle, coming to you from across the seas, from a lost island.

[break]

As I said before, the space of the catastrophe is an infinite space that is all inside, and if I were to use a rather facile and reductive analogy (reductive because it concretises what cannot be concretised), I?d say that the closest representation for such a space would be one of Piranese?s prison drawings. In addition to these qualifications, I would say, purely empirically, that catastrophic space and catastrophic time are absolutely irrational, and absolutely logical. I write ?empirically?, and I?ll give some examples: we all regained our war reflexes, and those who were too young to have any, acquired some very quickly; one of those reflexes is to ?hide under?? to hide under anything actually, anything available, and it is known that the safest places are the ones that are well hidden under the ground, like basements or obscure staircases of apartment buildings; but still, many people decided that they wanted to hide on rooftops and tried to inhabit the top floors of apartment buildings. The logical reasons for this irrational behaviour are simple: these people could not stand the idea of dying asphyxiated under the rubbles of an entirely destroyed building, a very probable event with the extensive use by the Israeli army of implosion bombs and bombs that we still need to find a name for; also, choosing top floors means that one is safe enough from the shrapnel of cluster bombs that exploded on the streets. In catastrophic time, Beirut became an Upside-down City. Here?s another example: during the aggression, the Israeli planes targeted bridges, tunnels, trucks, and small motorcycles. One is hardly aware of the abundance of these in normal times, but once they became targeted, moving around Beirut by car became a riddle; how to go from this point to that one without crossing a bridge, or driving behind a truck, or encountering a small motorcycle? In order to do so, each person-driver had to reinvent a mental map of the city, with black gaps for tunnels and bridges, and always taking into account the fact that chaotic variables (trucks, motorcycles, electricity cuts leaving streets in absolute darkness, or the worse variable yet: the shelling) that can never be correctly calculated. And once one gets to where he was going, he will have to calculate again the return trip, taking into account all of these variables, and if the shelling started, superimposing on the original mental map other maps, made through calculating the time between seeing the flash from the blasts and hearing the sound of the impact (thus acquiring some knowledge on the distance of the shelling). In catastrophic times, Beirut became the Kingdom of Unrelated Points and Infinite Calculations. Another example: a friend of mine had a war-dream since she was a child. In her dream, bombs are falling everywhere, but she cannot hear them; she knows the bombs are falling, like one knows in a dream, and yet there are no sounds of explosion. For a moment the bombs stop, she looks under the bed, and BOOM!, a bomb blows up in her face. There is nothing particularly unusual about that dream, except that, during this war, a mutual friend of ours had the exact same dream. Exactly the same, only in her dream, she?s the one in the bed and not the original dreamer. Weeks after that incident was related to us by its protagonists, and in spite of the ceasefire, a third friend had a similar dream- not exactly the same though, but a variation on the same theme: in his dream, he is in his bed sleeping, and the sound of the bombs is deafening, and yet he cannot leave his bed. He jumps out of the bed but remains in it, and the bombs keep on falling. In catastrophic times, Beirut became the City of Borrowed and Inverted Dreams.

[break]

For some observers, especially from the outside, and more especially if the observers were observing the events through the insipid and dull screens of televisions, it would be very tempting to say that what happened transformed or reverted a modern city to a pre-modern, primitive space. The readiness to take such hasty conclusions is enhanced by the fact that, for almost 150 years now, the discourse on the ?civilised self? and the ?primitive other?, of the ?good savage?, is well into effect. And in fact, many things that I?ve read emphasize the technological advancements of the Israeli army in the face of the ?primitiveness? of the weapons used against them (an easy-enough analogy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories- but the same can apply to Hizballah?s rockets, which have a very low level of accuracy). Do not fool yourselves: catastrophic space and catastrophic time are absolutely modern; they are modern in their irrationality, and their logical systems; in fact, they are the underside of modernity, the other world that lies behind the mirror traversed by Alice, Lewis Carroll?s character, and yes, during the war we lived in Wonderland. And while the inhabitants of Beirut and its heavily bombarded southern suburb, along with the hundreds of thousands of the displaced from southern Lebanon, whose villages were absolutely erased, lived in universes of allegorical times and allegorical spaces brought forth by the catastrophe, and invented logical but irrational mental maps to guide them through the Kingdom of Unrelated Points, and borrowed each others? dreams- while all of that was happening then, both the Israeli army and Hizballah fighters were using modernist maps made of Cartesian points and precise coordinates, one more efficiently than the other, but still. They both shared the same conception of space: an absolute space of mathematics and geometry, a space with no place for allegorical time or existential memories. In such a space, both are not un-important, they simply have no place to be. The Israeli army and the fighters of Hizballah were both victims of modernity?s biggest project: the geometrisation of the world. What is tragic is that they?re both unaware of how much their mutual conceptions of the world are similar, and of how oppressive and violent their world is.

[break]

To conclude, allow me to return to something I had written before the latest Israeli aggression; I?ve written this for my last installation, ?A Window to the World?:

?Given the right circumstances, the appropriate standpoint (preferably with one?s back against the sea) and the correct angle of vision (preferably looking obliquely), one would have the distinct feeling that all the buildings in Beirut are packed-up and ready to leave; most of them stand on slender columns that would aid them in their journey; their antennas and dish receptors look like fancy hats that one would wear on such a voyage; their balconies are empty suitcases and boxes waiting to be filled by the small histories that unfold in every apartment: long hours of anguish and fleeting moments of excitement. At those times, Beirut would resemble a large horde of escape boats aimlessly fleeing a sinking ship, and it would be the best time to sip a cup of coffee by the sea.?

I want to return to this text to say that I am tired. I am tired of living for the sole purpose of accompanying friends to the airport (or to ports as of late, for them to be evacuated on ships to distant countries) in order for me to bid them goodbye and to wish them safe journeys. And frankly, I cannot imagine my life far from this place; true, this is the only country I have- but mostly, it is here that I learned the meaning of the words ?here? and ?there?, and all my life I?ve been measuring the distance between them, and testing boundaries. My only solace is the firm knowledge that, even after centuries of my death, Beirut will always remain the dim and flickering light that guides all those who are lost in the deserts of the Orient, whether real or imagined. So send us your weak, your marginals, your unwanted, your freaks and monsters. In catastrophic times they shall become kings and queens, from under this cedar tree to the ends of the earth.

Tony Chakar

September 2006

Here is a document compiled by various women under the aegis of “Women for Womens Human Rights,” posing diverse and conversational array of responses to the July war. In pdf format: On war, seige and Lebanon

una radio entrevista en inglés con rasha, de helem (la organización gai y lesbiana de beirut)

no one is illegal – montreal – radio

un articulo de una amiga periodista sobre los liberales y sociodemocratas libaneses, y seguido por una respuesta de un amigo profesor sobre la composición de clase/política en el líbano. todo en inglés, me temo…

Twilight of Lebanon’s liberals
Secular Arabs like Druze leader Walid Jumblatt worry that the Israeli invasion will push Lebanon into the arms of the fanatics.

By Kate Seelye

Aug. 07, 2006 | Walid Jumblatt is in a funk. The leader of Lebanon’s Druze sect was never an upbeat kind of guy at the best of times. Even during the height of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, which he helped to engineer, the Sorbonne-educated Marty Feldman look-alike wore an expression of eternal exasperation. And that was after helping kick the Syrians out of Lebanon.

These days he’s really down. Jumblatt is haunted by dark visions of what Lebanon will become once Israel has finished bombing his country to smithereens.

Seated inside his 18th century palace, hung with portraits of his late father, Kamal, an Arab socialist with a fondness for Buddhist philosophy, Jumblatt junior conceded defeat.

“The fanatics have won the day,” he said gloomily, as we drank sangria in a vaulted stone room lined with Oriental pillows. “The Israelis are arrogant and won’t admit they’ve lost, but they have. Hezbollah can afford this tactic of burnt earth.” “We’re squeezed,” he concluded, “between Karbala and Masada.” Jumblatt allowed himself a slight smile for coining the expression and then sighed heavily. By invoking Karbala, the Iraqi city where the Shiite saint Hussein and his followers were massacred, Jumblatt was referring to the Shiite glorification of martyrdom. Masada, the hilltop fortress where ancient Israelites committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, symbolizes the Israeli penchant for viewing every fight as a fight to the death.

Physically, Jumblatt seems far removed from the current conflict. He fields a steady stream of phone calls, but he has been largely confined to his Chouf mountain redoubt for the past year and a half after receiving assassination threats. Most of the Chouf, which is southeast of Beirut, has been spared Israeli airstrikes. It’s PSP territory — the acronym for Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party — and turbaned mullahs and bearded fighters are not welcome here. But Jumblatt is a political animal and he clearly sees which way the winds are blowing. His Druze stronghold is crawling with displaced Shiites, who have fled the fighting further south. And Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been hinting that leaders like Jumblatt will pay the price for not backing the cleric’s fight against Israel.

“They have taken the whole country hostage,” Jumblatt said, referring to Hezbollah and its allies, Syria and Iran. “They have succeeded in stealing our dreams of a year and a half ago.” That’s when Lebanon’s liberal, independence movement, known as the March 14th forces, demanded a Lebanon free of Syrian occupation. And then the man who helped lead the Beirut Spring went quiet. His phone, for once, went quiet too. The silence grew painful.

March 14, 2005, doesn’t feel that long ago. That day, Jumblatt and his allies rallied a million Lebanese in downtown Beirut with their call for “freedom, sovereignty and independence.” Standing behind a bulletproof shield, Jumblatt, dressed in his usual stovepipe jeans, gave one of the most rousing speeches of the day with his passionate attack against the Syrian “dictator.” It was a heady moment for all.

But largely absent from the crowd that March 14th were Lebanon’s Shiites, who make up some 40 percent of the country. Hezbollah and its hundreds of thousands of followers, mainly the poor and disaffected who have benefited from Hezbollah’s largess, remained clearly in Syria’s camp. Damascus, after all, had been one of Hezbollah’s main patrons, helping to serve as a conduit for the thousands of Iranian missiles now stored in caves, bunkers and basements around Lebanon. That in turn gave the Shiites, who had long borne the brunt of Israel’s many invasions into southern Lebanon, a sense of security. It also gave them a status and clout they had historically been denied by Lebanon’s other large sects, like the Sunnis and the Christians.

After the June 2005 elections, the first elections relatively free of Syrian interference in 30 years, Lebanon’s fragile pro-Western government pondered the challenge of how to deal with Hezbollah. Newly elected Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was under U.S. pressure to disarm the group. Jumblatt himself didn’t seem especially concerned about Hezbollah’s weapons just a year ago. He defended the group’s right to fight for the Shebaa Farms, a disputed piece of land occupied by Israel. But many of his allies were worried. They knew that the presence of an independent armed militia accountable to Tehran and Damascus was going to be a problem for the new Lebanon. But how to disarm a powerful militia, with ties to Iran and Syria, given Lebanon’s weak army and divided government? No one quite knew, but a series of national dialogues ensued.

Later that night, seated on his stone terrace, under the Chouf’s starry skies, Jumblatt claimed he had told Washington to squeeze Syria harder if it wanted Lebanon’s fragile new democracy to survive. But, as always, American officials didn’t listen. Now the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is on the rise, says Jumblatt, thanks to a series of American policy mishaps in Israel, Syria and Iraq. Lebanon is in shambles. And Arab moderates, as always, are the losers.

“Who are the liberals who will stay here now?” he asked morosely. “They will leave. We will have the fanatics ruling, not just in Lebanon, but in the whole Arab world.”

Not everyone here is as pessimistic as Jumblatt, but most Lebanese liberals are angered and bewildered by the recent turn of events. Few can make sense of the U.S.-backed Israeli campaign to destroy a populist guerilla group militarily. “I know Hezbollah started the fight by capturing two Israeli soldiers,” said 30-something business manager Howeida Saad, in her strappy T-shirt, “but did Israel have to go this far? Why not negotiate the return of captured soldiers, as Israel has in the past?”

“If a military solution was in order, why not attack Damascus or Tehran, Hezbollah’s backers?” asked long-haired American University of Beirut graduate Tarek Zeid. “Why destroy Lebanon, the only free, pluralistic, entrepreneurial glimmer of hope in the Middle East?” he added. “Why bomb its glistening new airport, its recently built bridges and roads? … Couldn’t there have been some other way?”

The questions get repeated night after night, at dinner after dinner, in the few Beirut restaurants that dare to open these days. And most of my Lebanese acquaintances come up with the same answer — because Israel hates Lebanon and America doesn’t give a damn.

Oussama Safa heads the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank in a Beirut suburb. He finds the current military campaign tragic and ironic. He said the most likely victims are the Siniora government and its allies like Jumblatt, not Hezbollah.

“There used to be a joke that this is the ‘Condi Rice government,’” he told me in his book-lined office. “It was born with very strong Arab and U.S. pressure.”

But today, the “Condi Rice government” is under siege, by sea, land and air. It’s set to run out of fuel to run its power stations in just under a week. There’s almost no gasoline for cars or generators. The fuel crisis is so dire that the prestigious American University of Beirut hospital, which never closed during the 15-year civil war, is talking about the possibility of starting to discharge its patients.

Safa says the U.S. and Israel are destroying Lebanon in order to rebuild it, free of Hezbollah. But that’s not going to work, said Safa. “I don’t think we can recover.”

And while Lebanon’s weakened government staggers under the weight of the current assault, Hezbollah seems to flourish. Its rockets continue to rain down on Israel; its fighters keep Israel’s crack army bogged down along the border; and its ever-present Al Manar TV station continues to beam speeches by Hassan Nasrallah, despite Israeli efforts to smash both the leader and his propaganda arm.

Around the Arab world, Hassan Nasrallah is being hailed as the new Saladin, the Muslim fighter who took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. For hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese Shiites, deprived of their homes and possessions, traumatized by war and death, Hezbollah is the answer to their pain.

In Sidon, a wheelchair-bound refugee from the southern town of Srifa recounted how her convoy was strafed by the Israelis — after the Israelis had ordered civilians to flee. Seven of her relatives died, she claimed.

“We were waving white flags,” Zeinab Aita cried, “and they still shot us. They’re barbarians. They have no respect for humanity.” Aita then cursed the U.S. for supplying Israel with its bombs, pledged her two young sons to Hezbollah, and vowed she would fight with her own hands against the forces of evil.

For many Lebanese, these stories of grief and extremism are familiar ones. “Don’t the Israelis and the Americans remember 1982?” asked a Lebanese colleague. That summer, Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to smash the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed and a year later Hezbollah was born in response to Israel’s ongoing occupation. “It’s like they never read their history,” he said.

On a recent weekend, wealthy Lebanese who haven’t yet fled the country did what the Lebanese have learned to do so well after years of civil war — escape. At a private swimming club some five miles north of Beirut, women in gold lamé bikinis lounged on deck chairs, working on their tans, while their partners lazily crawled the length of the club’s 100-meter pool. Waiters served cold bottles of Corona beer and chilled arugula salad. The war seemed very far away, until the sound of helicopter blades filled the air.

Two enormous choppers appeared on the horizon out at sea and flew straight over the beach club, as in a scene from “Apocalypse Now.” One peeled away back out to sea and the second landed on the grounds of the American Embassy in the hills just above the club. Everyone in the pool stopped to watch the spectacle for just a moment and then returned to swimming laps. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch had just landed in Beirut on a diplomatic mission. But no one seemed to care. It’s not like it would make a difference anyway. Lebanon’s liberals know they’re very much on their own.

– By Kate Seelye

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What think you? I was struck by the extent to which it paints Lebanese liberals as privileged elites. What about professionals and intellectuals, small businesses, labor? While I assume these classes lead much more comfortable lives than farmers or low-skilled labor, surely Lebanese liberals are not limited to the old aristocracy?

Thanks for your continuiing updates; stay safe,

Gary S
Thailand

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Re: surely Lebanese liberals are not limited to the old aristocracy?

Dear Gary, Greetings from Beirut to Bangkok! I finally got around to reading the article you sent me and please allow me to send my response to a few others as well.

I think the key sentence in the article below, with respect to your question about the class base of politics is the following sentence: “Why destroy Lebanon, the only free, pluralistic, entrepreneurial glimmer of hope in the Middle East?”

What one must realise when looking at Lebanon from the outside is that concepts of “Left” and “Right”, as they are understood both by classical liberal and Marxist thinkers, just don’t work here. Jumblatt is not a socialist, or social democrat for that matter, I don’t know what his PSP is doing in the Socialist International in the first place. They say all politics is local, in Lebanon, all politics is tribal, i.e. based on family-clan and confessional affiliations, loyalties and patronage networks. This holds true for people whose thinking one would call in the West liberal, leftist or conservative.

There simply is no Left in Lebanon in the traditional European sense of the word.

Liberals, e.g. those supporting globalisation WTO-style or backing the introduction of secularism and the abandonment of the religious courts, which rule the private lives of everyone living in Lebanon (family status law) – “get the government and organised religion out of the bedroom and the boardroom” – are to be found in most confessional camps, including the Shi’ia. In any extended family like my own, the relatively liberal, traditional Ras Beiruti, middle class Dabbous clan, you will find many liberals, along with conservatives, perhaps a few religious fanatics and even a sprinkling of leftists. But when it gets right down to it, the only thing that matters is first and foremost, family loyalty, and second, confessionalism! The handful of exceptions confirm the rule.

I think it would be worth our while to redefine the categories “Liberal”, “Conservative”, “Leftist”, even “Fascist” and “Fundamentalist” for that matter, for use in Lebanon and the greater Middle East. I have the feeling the Condi Rice is applying her Cold War training and experience to the conflict with the radical Muslim right; this really can’t work.

I have taught a 300 level (uni undergrad juniors, i.e. students in their c. 3rd to 5th semester) course at Notre Dame University (www.ndu.edu.lb) for five years now, titled “Political Ideologies.” What I have noticed is that students just don’t get it. We use Andrew Heywood’s “ideologies”, which is excellent. But I have the feeling that there remains a huge gap between what they read and what we talk about in class and the reality on the ground. I even created an additional module of the Catholic social movement, imagine Rerum Novarum is practically unknown in Lebanon.

As far as the term “Liberal” is concerned, perhaps it would be best to go item-by-item: e.g. women’s rights, minority and immigrant’s rights (NB: many “Leftists” & “Liberals” in Lebanon aren’t even abolitionists, e.g. they hold Asian maids in their homes under conditions termed by the ILO to be modern slavery), cultural pluralism, environmentalism, and now the big one, social justice for the poor.

There is not one single political party in Lebanon that is willing to take up the challenge of Hizbollah and organise the working poor and lower middle class into secular, progressive self-help organisations, along the lines of the Social Democrats in Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

Hizbollah is a state-within-a-state because the Leftist and Liberals just don’t care about their classical progressive constituencies, when seen from a class perspective. This is something that the international NGOs here also don’t get, or don’t care about. Most of what we have here is either charity or chic posturing, to impress foreign donors, with no real substance or sustainability.

The reconstruction phase that (InShallah) is up and coming with the end of the war will only make matters worse, much worse! because:

1) the Conservatives, Liberals and Leftists will steal between 1/3 and 50% of the international funds to service their patronage networks;
2) most of the real work in the secular camp will be done by a handful of well meaning, idealist charity workers;
3) Hisbollah will shoulder the brunt of the work in the trenches, doing what really counts for the poor and endangered middle classes in the south, southern suburbs and Bekaa, where most of the lower income people live.

I agree, Lebanon is lost, but having admitted that, why give up!

Hope this was of help, Eugene

y despues del frenesí de noticias y rabia algunas amigas me preguntan por información más a fondo sobre el líbano: historia, historias.

hay tantísimas historias.

la página 111101 con mucha elegancia ha recopilado textos, ensayos, fragmentos de libros y obras artisticas sobre beirut. quizás un buen punto de partida para quien se atreve a pasar del momento de la indignación militante a un acercamiento más… íntimo?

el proyecto arteeast también tiene algunas joyas.

Domingo, 27 de agosto de 2006.
20.30 horas de la tarde. Lugar, plaza de Lavapiés
Exposición en la calle, imprevista, como la guerra.
Un día de guerra, un dibujo.

Mazen Kerbaj, Beirut, Líbano. Una forma de expresar lo inexpresable. De
narrar lo imposible, de dibujar los trazos de un horror tan próximo.
Desde que el Estado de Israel comenzó la abierta ofensiva y guerra no
declarada en el Líbano, Mazen se ha dedicado a expresar, día a día,
igual que otro montón de gente con lo que ha tenido a mano, lo que
estaba viviendo. La experiencia encarnada de la guerra. La lucidez de
una mirada que no ha perdido la extrañeza ante tanta atrocidad.

Desde aquí, no tenemos palabras para decir lo que no queremos, “no a la
guerra” deseamos que siga siendo parte de nuestro sentir, pero sabemos
que se queda corto, que no vale con el fin del bombardeo, que la
determinación de la vida cotidiana está atravesada por una historia muy
larga en la que la cuestión palestina y la instauración del Estado de
Israel son la piedra de toque de un conflicto que nos negamos a que sea
eterno.

Sacar a la calle el conflicto pensamos entonces que no pasa por
eslóganes reduccionistas ni simplistas; expresar el conflicto con esta
exposición no es más que una forma de decir no, una
diminuta forma de decir no, de hacernos eco de las palabras, de los
dibujos, de las líneas que nos llegan desde allá y que siguen
atravesando con fuerza las fronteras.

El diario, en dibujos, completo, aquí: http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/
Difunde.

para los que estabais siguiendo este blog: perdona la interrupcion de noticias, no es que me haya desaparecido sino que se me ha muerto el ordenador y se hace imposible estar encima de las noticias con una coneccion tan precaria y tan ocasional.

y justo en este momento, cuando estar conectada parece tan importante, no? sin internet una esta expuesta a todos los horrores de la tele y los comentarios cotidianos, sin mediacion…