Safe and sound? What ending the Moqdad affair means for Lebanon and the region

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

The images of freed Turkish abductee Aydin Tufan Tekin reuniting with his family on Turkish soil Wednesday morning offered a happy ending to a month-long drama that pitted the Lebanese state against an obscure tribal militia.

Along with 20 Syrian nationals, Tekin was kidnapped in mid-August by the so-called “military wing” of the Moqdads, a Shiite clan based in Beirut’s southern suburbs, also known as “Dahiyeh”. His release was secured on Tuesday night following a series of raids on Moqdad locations by the Lebanese army on Tuesday and Friday. Despite claims by the Moqdads on Tuesday that Tekin was in critical condition after being shot in the chest and shoulder, he appeared unharmed on Wednesday and indeed said he had heard no gunfire during Tuesday’s raid. The Syrian captives were also freed.

The apparent assertion of state authority over turf ordinarily considered a stronghold of Hezbollah raises the question of whether a fundamental shift in the country’s balance of powers is underway. Some Lebanese seem to think so – “Weather is changing on our Republic,” tweeted the Tajaddod Youth party account on Saturday. Others were more cynical. “Am I supposed to believe we suddenly have a state? Give me a break,” wrote the author of the Lebanon Spring blog.

The latter sentiment was echoed by the activist and Dahiyeh resident Lokman Slim, who told NOW Lebanon that, “As an eyewitness from Haret Hreik, when the army arrived with their tanks and Humvees it was for me all a kind of show. They couldn’t have done this without a certain understanding with Hezbollah. In general, all this enthusiasm shown by the army, whether in the Dahiyeh or in Naame where they arrested some people for inciting sectarian tension, is part of a big staging that does not guarantee the security of the country.”

On the other hand, retired Lebanese Army General Elias Hanna commended the army’s action, arguing that it was in the interests of both the state and Hezbollah to see the Moqdad issue resolved. “There are three factions within the Shiites: Hezbollah, Amal and the tribes,” he told NOW. “These tribes are usually out of Hezbollah’s control, and we have witnessed a lot of skirmishes between these factions in the past. Now what happened with the Moqdads was hurting Lebanon, hurting Hezbollah and hurting Amal. Moreover, they are like competitors, so I think that the army took a prior ‘OK’ from Hezbollah as well as maybe practical intelligence about these people’s whereabouts.”

Asked about other ostensible assertions of state authority, such as the arrest of former minister and close Syria ally Michel Samaha, as well as three Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) members, Hanna again said that acute disorder was in no one’s interest. “All the factions in Lebanon are trying to impose a certain level of stability. You can allow a certain degree of instability but only to the point where it doesn’t threaten or endanger the situation. What happened with Samaha was irrefutable. Nobody can say that ‘We are with Samaha.’ Everybody is embarrassed, including pro-Syrian elements. After all, he confessed what he did! So this explains the aggressiveness of the president concerning the sovereignty of Lebanon and so on,” referring to President Sleiman’s unprecedented stances vis-à-vis the Moqdads and on other issues.

Slim, however, is again unconvinced. “These are all part of the same logic. The Moqdad situation, the Makdissi Street situation [with the SSNP members], and the robbing of Samaha by his allies all belong in the same category. Nobody is stupid enough to believe the army can storm the Dahiyeh but cannot do the same in other regions of Lebanon. For the army to prove its seriousness, it has to be able to do the same everywhere, otherwise it is just either a passive observer or an accomplice.”

Lebanese considerations aside, at the international level, Tekin’s ordeal may have consequences for Turkey’s policy on Syria. According to Oytun Orhan, Middle East expert at the Ankara-based ORSAM think tank, the kidnapping led to widespread domestic condemnation of the Turkish government’s support for the Syrian opposition. “There was a lot of criticism within Turkish society because if you deal with the Syrian issue in this way – if you interfere in Syrian affairs, and arm and give safe haven to the Free Syrian Army in Hatay – then you will have these kind of negative implications in the region. Many Turks saw Tekin’s kidnapping as a natural result of our Syria policy,” he told NOW.

Orhan added that Lebanese-Turkish relations were never threatened by the Moqdad affair. “Turkey knew that this was something outside the control of the Lebanese government. Nobody considered this a factor which could deteriorate Turkish-Lebanese relations.”

“But, of course, solving the issue was beneficial for those.”

Bashar al-Assad has never been an Arabist

In contemplating the situation in Syria over the last year, few things have left me quite as cold and sick with contempt as those people who have suddenly ‘discovered’, and announced, after a lifetime of confidently assuring us otherwise, that Bashar al-Assad is in fact a liar, a murderer and a tyrant after all. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan, who in recent years went quite out of his way to weave new ties with his fellow Kurd-persecutor in Damascus, now compares him to Hitler and bellows for his ouster as if he were the first man to have arrived at the thought. A number of influential Lebanese politicians such as Walid Jumblatt, who had been perfectly happy to make common cause with Assad’s proxies in that country’s ‘March 8 Alliance’, have overnight become champions of Syrian liberty (though one notices that Hizbullah, the self-styled ‘Islamic Resistance’, has not wavered in its courageous solidarity with the despot). Even Hamas, perhaps Assad’s most notorious ally, appears to be reconsidering its loyalties – what with its fellow Sunni Islamists at the forefront of the Syrian opposition, to say nothing of the thousands of Sunni corpses now decorating Syrian streets – and has begun withdrawing staff from its Damascus headquarters. The Lebanese academic Elias Muhanna, author of the Qifa Nabki blog, wrote in the New York Times last month about the “many Syrian intellectuals, journalists and ordinary citizens [who] have steadily migrated from the pro- to the anti-government camp” in recent months, and I confess it brings me more joy than I can begin to describe to see that all the detestable pseudo-dissidents and laptop-Leninists who for so long were excusing and enabling Assad’s crimes – not to mention the plain suckers who actually bought the Hizbullah rhetoric about standing for the ‘oppressed’ and ‘downtrodden’ – have at last been exposed in the light of broad day as the fools they always were. 

But I’m afraid I can’t find it in me to summon the magnanimity of Muhanna, who writes of the bloggers now changing their mind about Assad that “a number of them have written compelling mea culpas”. How “compelling” can anything like this be? Or, to put the question another way, what exactly has taken them this long? Bashar al-Assad has always been a dictator, and a violent and imperialist one at that (on which more later). Most of the bloggers Muhanna cites claim that it was Assad’s Arabist pedigree that attracted them to him. But Assad has never been an Arabist. In his most recent speech of January 10^th, he began by “salut[ing]” the crowd “in the name of pan-Arabism, which will continue to be a symbol of our identity and our haven in difficult times, as we will continue to be its heart beating with love and affection”. If this is the hand he’s betting on – a pose as the last remaining Arab nationalist; a Nasser with Yitzhak Rabin at the gates – then let’s by all means turn the cards over and see just how much they’re worth. 

“Who, more than Syria, has offered to the Palestinian cause?” he asks us. Never mind that the largest Arab forces in both the 1948 and 1967 wars were the Egyptian ones¹. Never mind that ever since the 1960s Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, had forbidden attacks by the Palestinian feda’iyeen against Israel from Syrian soil (bravely proposing the use of south Lebanon for that purpose). Never mind that in 1976 the Syrian army upheld the spirit of Sykes-Picot by entering Beirut at the request of the Maronites against the Palestinians and their Arabist allies; an intervention that was to lead directly to the Tel al-Zaatar massacre of some 2,000 Palestinian refugees. Never mind that Assad père took every opportunity to divide the Palestinians and thus contain Yasser Arafat: creating and sponsoring, for example, the Syrian-Palestinian al-Sa’iqa militia, perhaps best known for assisting the Lebanese Amal gunmen in their war on the PLO in Lebanon’s refugee camps in the ‘80s. Never mind that the old man implicitly recognised Israel – the ultimate betrayal of the ‘67 Khartoum Resolution – by entering into peace negotiations, first in Madrid in 1991 and then in a series of later bilateral talks, in which he pressed for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights but made no mention of occupied Palestine or Lebanon². Never mind these and innumerable other capitulations - they were, after all, before Bashar’s time. 

What then has the ophthalmologist done for Arabism since inheriting the family dictatorship? Not so much as a pebble has been launched at Israel, neither by the Syrian army nor the Palestinians in Syria, the latter of whom continue to be forbidden from doing so. Assad fils has openly continued his father’s pursuit of a peace treaty, the most recent dialogue in 2008 only being interrupted by the election of Benjamin Netanyahu (the same obstacle, incidentally, that thwarted Hafez). At the same time, he has propagated the most rabid and fanatical strains of Islamism in his dealings with Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas – which, again, constitutes a rank betrayal of Arabist principle, of which staunch secularism is supposed to be a sine qua non. As Assad is now discovering to his cost in Hama and half a dozen other cities, that omelette isn’t very easily turned back into an egg. 

Yet Palestinians are by no means the only Arabs viewed by the Assads as expendable subordinates to the Syrian empire. The Syrian occupation of Lebanon lasted seven years longer than the Israeli one, and brought with it not only the daily humiliations of a foreign military presence but a choking apparatus of fascism and intimidation. Bashar sustained this near-annexation of the country (whose legitimacy as a sovereign entity has always been rejected by the Syrian right wing) until as recently as 2005, when over a million Lebanese took to the streets to protest the assassination of their Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, in which Syrian involvement of some kind was and still is almost universally suspected. And in many ways, the consequent Syrian withdrawal (which was accompanied by the equally ‘mysterious’ assassinations of renowned critics of the Assad regime such as the Syrian-Palestinian-Lebanese intellectual, and genuine Arabist, Samir Kassir) was an occurrence in name only. Lebanon’s conspicuous abstention last year in a Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s violence against protestors, as well as its voting against an Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s membership in the organisation, led the Beirut-based journalist Hanin Ghaddar to write that “Now we can officially say that Syria has two governments, the one in Damascus and the one in Beirut” (disclosure: I am soon to become a colleague of Ghaddar’s at NOW Lebanon, of which she is the managing editor). And even if the mukhabarrat, or secret police, have formally left, the streets of Beirut’s bohemian Hamra district are patrolled around the clock by the shabiha, or ‘ghosts’, of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an oafish satellite of the Assad regime that takes criticism of its leader extremely poorly, as these protesters discovered last August (and as Christopher Hitchens did in a different way in 2009). As well as a self-evident threat to Lebanese Arabs, this Damascus client is also anti-Arabist in the technical sense: at the time of its founding in the 1930s by the Syrian ultra-nationalist Antun Sa’adeh, the SSNP was a determined opponent of pan-Arabism on the sub-Hitlerite grounds that the Syrian “race” is not Arabic!³ Zionists, Islamists, tenth-rate racists – with whom else has Assad collaborated in his treason against the Arab nation?

Jihadists, as it turns out. Knowing as all imperialists do that in order to rule one must first divide, and fearful above all of the emergence of a democratic Iraq (what kind of precedent would that set?), when the American-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, Assad was content to grant the use of his lengthy border with his eastern neighbour to the Bin Ladenists of what became known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). According to Time’s Nicholas Blanford, “analysis of al-Qaeda documents seized by American troops in Sinjar in northern Iraq [in 2006] suggested that 90% of foreign fighters entering Iraq came from Syria”. This was of course being done in the full knowledge that his ally in Tehran was financing the other side of the civil war (the Shia ranks of Muqtada al-Sadr’s ‘Mehdi Army’) on the Kissingerian principle that neither party should be permitted to win. In so doing, the great pan-Arabist contributed far more than Bush or Blair ever did to the appalling Iraqi civilian death toll (if it should turn out that it was indeed al-Qaeda behind the recent suicide bombings in Damascus, as the regime claims, it would only be an instance of the famous causal relation between reaping and sowing). 

Yet, as events since 2011 have made plainer than ever, to no Arab people is Assad a greater enemy than to the Syrians themselves. Of course, we didn’t need the ‘Arab Spring’ to tell us this – take the following description of the country by Kassir in 2004:

Suffocated for forty years under a dictatorship that, although less bloodthirsty than Iraq’s, has still brutally run it into the ground, systematically bled dry by powerful mafias, and weakened by a culture of fear, Syria is now in a position almost without equivalent in the Arab world – apart perhaps from Libya, although it doesn’t have Libya’s oil – in that it combines the corruption of the former Soviet republics with a Chinese-style closed police state.⁴

To this abysmal record we can now add the slaughter of well over 5,000 Syrian men, women and children (and counting). What else needs to be said, other than to ask how a mass-murderer of Arabs dares to pose as the bastion and beau idéal of the Arab cause?

If Arabs are ever to ‘unite’ in any meaningful way, it will take a radical political and ideological re-think. The ‘unity’ and ‘liberty’ of the old Ba’athist slogans will not be found in the junk race theories of ethnic chauvinists; nor the petty sectarianisms of mediaeval mythologies; nor indeed the corruption and stagnation of self-interested dictators, monarchs and tribal chieftains. If the ‘Arab Spring’ is able to achieve any approximation of its promise of emancipation, it will not be by emulating but by categorically rejecting the example of Bashar al-Assad.

¹ Bregman, A., El-Tahri, J., The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs (1998), pp. 38, 69

² Ibid., pp. 256-272

³ Kassir, S., Beirut (2010 edition, first published 2003 in French), p. 486

⁴ Kassir, S., Being Arab (2006 edition, first published 2004 in French), p. 20

From Bacchus to the bomb: Disquiet and disagreement in Hizbullah's Lebanon

Whoever came up with the idea that the Arabs are a lazy people cannot have been to Beirut. What’s abundantly apparent to the first time visitor is instead their maniacal hyperactivity. Half past midnight on a Wednesday? A fine time to go for a jog along the corniche, in full athletic attire. Follow it up with a couple of whiskies at a bar twenty minutes across town? What could be more natural? There appears to be no time of day, on any day of the week, at which rest is permissible. The traffic is permanently terrifying: indeed, people do not seem to drive in Beirut; they simply point their vehicles at their destinations and rely on everything in their paths to get out of their way. More baffling than the question of when people sleep is whether anybody in fact can sleep amid the snarling cacophony of car horns; the hawk-like screeching of tyres; the pneumatic diesel exhaust fire and the staccato spitting of two-stroke mopeds; not to mention the orgiastic percussion of the uncountable construction sites. That is, when the perfunctory formality of construction is bothered with at all – many are the warfare-savaged buildings converted directly into hostels or shops or restaurants without so much as cosmetic renovation. The bullet holes will have to stay: there’s no time to fill them in. Time, indeed, is understood by the Lebanese in the Shakespearean sense. It’s as though, having been shown up front for fifteen years just how quickly the facts of existence can be snatched from them, they’ve resolved to snatch as much as they can from his ‘injurious hand’ in return. 

At the same time, the hands of the Lebanese can be injurious enough themselves. Indeed, with her fertile slopes, her mounds, her peaks and her valleys, the land of Lebanon sometimes resembles the body of a beautiful but vulnerable woman, grappled on all sides by the groping fingers of greedy aggressors (as well as one time defenders who, upon feeling her flesh for themselves, grew perverted in turn). While some parts of her body are left comparatively unmolested, there are others where one can plainly see the thumbs and fingers wrestling and slipping; pressing and releasing; and sometimes coming to rest side by side with those of fellow assailants. 

Thus one can drive through the pristine serenity of the Matn district of Mount Lebanon, a place of sweeping greenery galaxies apart from the noise and nuisance of Beirut, taking in the crystalline Mediterranean glistening beneath you, and barely even notice as you enter the town of Bekfaya, hometown and headquarters of the Phalange, whose name is not shared with the party of Francisco Franco by coincidence. Founded in the 1930s by the Hitler-smitten Pierre Gemayel, the Phalangist militiamen were the ironic Christian allies of the Israelis in the civil war, attaining infamy for their ruthless programme of ‘cleansing’ against the Palestinians that reached its nadir in the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Whilst nowadays they are a demilitarised and somewhat legitimised political party, what’s disturbing about their offices is the large photo of Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, the new Maronite Patriarch approved by Rome in March, that can often be seen hanging directly above the main entrance. After all these years, and all these re-brandings and makeovers, it seems the Vatican still can’t help itself... And then what's simply astonishing about the headquarters in Bekfaya is that the building sits literally next door to a major office of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, another spawn of 1930s European fascism, which calls not for the segregation of the Lebanese and the Palestinians but in fact for the amalgamation of the two, along with the rest of the Levant, into a ‘Greater Syrian’ superstate. 

Phalange office in Beit Chebab with Patriarch's photo above logo

SSNP office next door to Phalange HQ in Bekfaya

Or take Beirut’s Hamra St, where supporters of the same SSNP demonstrated just last Sunday in support not merely of the preservation of the Assad regime - which may have killed as many as 1,600 Syrian civilians since uprisings began earlier this year – but of the extension of the tyranny to Lebanese soil as well. Due to its proximity to the Syrian embassy, Hamra has witnessed a number of similar scenes in recent months: in June, thousands of SSNP sympathisers marched down the street carrying a jumbo jet-sized Syrian flag, and in May the Lebanese army had to be called in to restrain the frenzied brutes from attacking a few hundred courageous men and women demonstrating against Assad’s mass murders. What makes Hamra so invigorating a street, however, is that in addition to being a hotbed for two-bit fascists and Syrian nationalist punks, it is at the same time one of the brightest flames of sophisticated civilisation in the whole country; with its fashion boutiques; its bookstores (of which Antoine is the superlative); and its awning-capped streetside bars full of students, tourists and young professionals that have the feel and buzz of Amsterdam, or perhaps Edinburgh during the Fringe. 

Speaking of students, and not leaving the SSNP just yet, I spent a very pleasant half hour in July strolling through the American University of Beirut off Bliss St, two blocks away from Hamra. Founded by the American Protestant missionary Daniel Bliss in 1866, the extraordinary beauty of the campus, with its forests of dark green and lavender perched over the corniche, prompted a friend to joke that surely now I couldn’t say the religious hadn’t got something right. A point I could almost concede, even if Bliss himself was a bit of a fanatic on the Darwin question (see the ‘Lewis Affair’ of 1882), and even if the whole point of what was originally called the Syrian Protestant College to begin with was to convert the natives to evangelicalism – even if, in other words, AUB could only have become the ‘Harvard of the Middle East’ that it is today by rejecting utterly the theological character that Bliss spent his career trying to impose upon it and by secularising itself to the point where the once-central Department of Religion has disappeared altogether. 

The elevation of spirit this reflection brought on me might well have lasted the rest of the day had I not realised, immediately upon exiting to Bliss St, that hanging directly above my head and in fact stretching the entire width of the street was a banner flying the spinning swastika of the SSNP. Voicing my displeasure to my companions, I was informed that the banner had been there for some time. The sight of students with Che Guevara caps and hammer-and-sickle t-shirts was by no means uncommon on the AUB campus, but one surely didn’t have to be a leftist to take insult at the idea of Damascus claiming such a jewel of Lebanese enlightenment – could it really be that nobody had done anything about this? I hardly needed to ask the question. I already knew what had happened to Christopher Hitchens when he tried to deface a SSNP sign on Hamra St, just as I knew what had happened to the journalist Omar Harqous for the mere act of filming their filthy flags. Suffice to say I myself was not about to tear it down. They hadn’t draped their logo above the entrance to the university by accident: it was a calculated provocation; a boast that Bliss St, like Hamra and an ever-expanding portion of what used to be known as west Beirut, was theirs. That the state can allow them to treat the heart of the capital like a private fiefdom at a time when Assad’s grip on power has never looked more tenuous is a mark of just how much remains to be done before the ‘Cedar Revolution’ of 2005 is completed. 

SSNP banner by the entrance to AUB on Bliss St

But more dispiriting still was my visit to the Roman temple ruins in Baalbek, in the Beqaa valley near the Syrian border. From the idyllic mountain village of Beit Chebab in the mostly Christian area north-east of Beirut, a friend took me on an exhilarating two-hour drive up the winding roads of Mount Lebanon and then down the other side into the Beqaa, where we eventually joined the Beirut-Damascus highway that was the scene of such memorable carnage in Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation*. After half an hour or so on what was quite literally the road to Damascus, we broke off north into Baalbek. And it was here that things started to change.

Because Baalbek, as it happens, is Hizbullah territory: one of several chunks of the country ruled by the totalitarian Shiite Islamist militia formed in the early 1980s to export the Iranian revolution to Lebanon and subordinate the population to the rule of Tehran. Hence we were scarcely thirty seconds inside the district before being confronted by billboards bearing the mirthless smirk of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah Secretary General, along with the furious glare of Khomeini himself. Every single lamppost in the centre of the dual carriageway bore two identical yellow-and-green Hizbullah flags, along with two placards, one bearing generic Islamic imprecations (‘Allah is great’, ‘There is no god but Allah’, etc.) and the other listing in series the ninety-nine names of Allah (the internal inconsistencies of which gave us much presumably unintended amusement: for example, how can God be at once al-muqadim – the expediter – and al-mu’akhir – the delayer? Or the first – al-awwal – and the last – al-akhir? The evident – al-dhahir – and the hidden – al-batin? The avenger – al-muntaqim – and the forgiver – al-‘afou?). Unlike in Beirut, where the Muslim women wore colourful headscarves if they chose to wear them at all, here every female head was uniformly veiled in black, some even sporting the full burqa, which is an eyebrow-raiser even in the Gulf states. After a long silence, my friend said my own thoughts out loud: “This doesn’t feel like my country”.

Hassan Nasrallah poster, just inside Baalbek

Stepping out of the car at the Roman temples site, I recall my first feeling being one of confusion. I knew where I was, and where I had to get to, but there was some sort of pseudo-musical din in the air, a creepy voice chanting something vaguely tribal through a cheap set of loudspeakers. My Arabic is far from great but even I know what “Ya Amrika” and “Ya Israyeel” mean, and the bad sign that they usually portend. And then we turned the corner to the ticket desk and we saw it: a huge, scowling Nasrallah plastered onto a tent next to larger-than-life images of bearded men firing Katyusha rockets and AK-47s. My Lebanese friends, some of whom looked more stunned than I was, informed me that according to the sign, this was some sort of Hizbullah war exhibition. We resolved to go inside, but only after seeing the temples, and only if we didn’t have to pay anything for it.

Mercifully, the Party of God left the temples themselves alone. Thus we ambled freely through the 2,000-year-old Great Court, under the remaining pillars of the Temple of Jupiter and into the magnificently-preserved Temple of Bacchus - the god of wine (the closest I’ll ever get to a religious pilgrimage) – where a local guide explained to us in painstaking detail the significance of every conceivable etch and scrape in the architecture (tour guides in Lebanon, by the way, are always fantastic value for money: at the cedar trees in the remote hamlet of Barrouk, nearly two thousand metres above sea level, we were introduced to the oldest cedar in the world by a naturalist of Attenboroughian omniscience). When we could bear it no longer – there is, after all, only so much the soul can take about the profound symbolism of locusts, or the terrific importance of the mosaic form – we left to face once more Nasrallah and his lugubrious groans of blood and conquest. 

Stepping cautiously inside the tent, we met a grim-faced young man of about thirty sitting at a desk. My friend asked if we could walk around, and without smiling or indeed betraying any emotion he gestured toward the nearest section. Could we take pictures? He nodded in a way that couldn’t have given me less confidence in the idea. Thus we gingerly proceeded to the ‘Made in Israel’ section, which was a series of large and extremely graphic photos of corpses, presumably maimed in the 2006 war. Wondering what exactly these had to do with Islam, I noticed a picture of Khomeini with the following quote appended: “Had each Muslim poured a pail of water on Israel, it would have been shoved away by the floods”. 

Inside the Hizbullah exhibition at Baalbek

Ayatollah Khomeini poster inside the exhibition

Moving on, we came to a kitchen-sized reconstruction of the Israel-Lebanon border, represented by a wire fence, with a felled Israeli ‘body’ (in what may well have been authentic IDF uniform) on the floor and a crude picture of a sunrise emanating from ‘Palestine’. 

Finally, we entered a sort of mock-bunker with sandbags, machine guns and mortars arranged on the ground and dozens of photos of young men framed on the walls. Of course: al-shuhada - ‘the martyrs’. No militants love their dead more than Lebanese militants. Every faction, both Muslim and Christian, has its shrines. Even the supposedly secular SSNP gets involved, smothering the walls and lampposts of Hamra St with morbid mugshots of Sana’a Mehaidli, the 18-year-old who blew herself up along with two Israeli soldiers in 1985 in what is thought to have been the first female suicide bomb attack. This fetishisation of the dead is less about paying respects and more about the cynical matters of branding and recruitment. As Zeina Maasri writes in her book Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War:

It is hard for a youth impassioned by the same cause to pass by these posters without being affected and probably, if only for a brief moment, imagining him/herself in the photograph with his/her name praised as the martyr hero [...] On several occasions, the immediate family of a martyr has asked the party’s media office for posters to be made to honour their loved one as a hero, sometimes going so far as specifying the design of the poster to be ‘like the one designed for the martyr of such and such family’. Consequently, even at their basic informative level these posters acquire a different purpose: that of recruiting potential fighters, encouraged by the ‘noble’ example of their friend, neighbour, relative and comrade. (p.88)

Indeed, the whole exhibition was a naked public relations stunt. If only we’d all been Muslims, or better Muslims, we’d never have got into this mess in the first place. But since we have, just hand us over your sovereignty, your rights, your intellect and your culture, and tomorrow we’ll be dining in Jerusalem. And if you happen to get killed on the way, you’ll become a celebrity. ‘Honour’ shall bemedal your family name (when his eldest son was killed by the IDF, Nasrallah himself thanked Allah for “generously [blessing] my family by choosing one of its members for martyrdom and [accepting] me and my family as members in the holy assembly of martyrs’ families”). 

It also eloquently demonstrated the way in which Hizbullah manages to be both Israel’s greatest threat in the region as well as its greatest asset: a threat because, with its sophisticated arsenal and genuine grass-roots popularity (amongst the Shia, at least), it’s the only armed group in the region capable of visiting anything like a military defeat on the Israelis; and an asset because, so long as they make such pornography out of stupid barbarisms like ‘martyrdom’ and Jew-baiting and Islamism, Netanyahu has to waste very little time indeed convincing his friends and patrons in Washington that Israel is the lesser of the two evils. As I wrote in a previous post, it isn’t just the Lebanese but the Palestinians too who deserve better ‘friends’ than these.

*

The conventional wisdom has it that Lebanon is a land of ‘contrasts’ and ‘contradictions’. It would be more accurate to call it a land of irreconcilable disagreements. The Lebanese cannot agree on anything of any cultural or political importance: on what ethnicity they are (Arabs? Phoenicians? Druze?); what language to speak (Arabic? French? English?); whether to fight their neighbours or befriend them; what their modern history is (nothing after 1975 is taught in schools); whether they are even a distinct people at all (the SSNP, along with the pan-Arabs and the pan-Islamists, think otherwise). Most obviously, and most importantly, the Lebanese cannot agree on which god to worship, and indeed many if not all of the above disagreements are derived or in some way determined by this one. 

In God Is Not Great, Hitchens wrote of Lebanon that when he first saw it in the ‘70s, “it suffered from a positive surplus of religions” (p. 19). I know of no country on earth that wouldn’t benefit from a reduction in the number of its religions, and none perhaps more so than Lebanon: the state officially acknowledges the existence of eighteen different religious sects – that’s eighteen different indigenous sects - of which the three most powerful are the Maronite Christians and the Sunni and Shia Muslims. The confessional constitution stipulates that each three must be represented in the executive leadership, by the President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament, respectively. The country is, in other words, not merely a theocracy but what one might call a polytheocracy: try to imagine the Vatican, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards sharing power on a territory the size of Cyprus and you’d still only grasp half the complexity.

So it’s little wonder, perhaps, that it all exploded so spectacularly. The civil war wasn’t only about religion, but as in Northern Ireland, it was no coincidence that co-religionists stuck together - whether in ‘Christian’ east Beirut or ‘Muslim’ west Beirut. The following is just one example from Fisk’s Pity the Nation that illustrates how viciously combustible could be the sectarian dynamite:

In December 1975, on what was ever afterwards to be known as Black Saturday, four Christians were found shot dead in a car outside the electricity company headquarters in east Beirut. Bashir Gemayel [son of Pierre who became President in 1982, to be assassinated three weeks later] was in Damascus when the news was reported to him. Phalangist officers of the time insist that he told them to kill 40 Muslims in reprisal. Christian roadblocks were therefore set up at the eastern end of the Ring motorway and the first 40 Muslim men to arrive at the Christian checkpoint, some of them travelling with their wives and children in their family cars to homes in east Beirut, were taken beneath the overpass and had their throats cut. When this news became known in west Beirut, Muslim militias followed the Christian example. For hours, civilians of both faiths dutifully queued at these terrible checkpoints at each end of the Ring on the innocent assumption that the gunmen there merely wished to look at their identity papers. Only when they saw the hooded men with blood-covered knives approaching their cars did they realise what lay in store for them. At least 300 Muslims were butchered in this way; an equal number of Christians probably met the same fate. (p. 79)

Things have moved on a bit since these dark days - the PLO has left; the Israelis have left; the Syrians have (theoretically) left - but the parties of god are now more of a menace than ever. After the Taif Agreement that brought about the end of the war in 1990, all of the major militias agreed to disband and disarm except for one: Hizbullah. To this day the Iranian-backed Shiite group stands in defiant contravention of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 (adopted in 2004), 1680 (2006) and 1701 (2006), all of which order it to surrender its arsenal to the state. As a result of its unrivalled military might, Hizbullah is able to operate a state-within-a-state in the south of the country where even the Lebanese Army hesitates to venture, and where anyone who has other ideas about vilayat-e faqih is dealt with the hard way. Elsewhere, Hizbullah tramples on Lebanese civil society; storming Beirut with guns blazing and bringing the country to the brink of civil war in 2008; toppling the democratically-elected March 14 government in January of this year and, according to the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon, car-bombing the ex-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. 

Religion is their cause, and it is also the source of their strength. Lebanon desperately needs a powerful and sovereign army that can overpower and suppress Hizbullah’s criminals (and carry out its own ‘resistance’ against Israeli aggression). But such a scenario is made impossible, in large part, by the religious divisions within the Lebanese Army itself. As Michael J. Totten writes in his new book The Road to Fatima Gate:

[There are] fears that the army would break apart along sectarian lines if orders to disarm Hezbollah were given. Parts of the army split off into sectarian militias during the civil war, after all, and could easily do so again. Roughly a third of the soldiers were Shia conscripts. Many were more loyal to Hezbollah than to the legal authorities. (p. 178)

Just like that other, related fight to the death between Hamas and Netanyahu’s Shas-infested coalition, this is something that can never be resolved so long as people are prepared to die and kill for their supernatural beliefs. In no other part of the world is it more obvious that, contrary to the endless fatuous babble of the ‘faith community outreachers’ and the ‘interfaith dialoguers’, what the world needs is not more religion but much, much less of it. Of the sights I saw in Lebanon, there was one above all that stays with me to this day. Overlooking the Temple of Bacchus from the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek, from the right angle one can see the turquoise minaret of a grand Persian-style Shia mosque poking above the wall about half a kilometre beyond the ruins. I had to stare for some time before I could pinpoint what it was that so arrested me about it, and then I realised: it was the stark juxtaposition of the convivial and the austere; the joyous and the anti-joyous. In the foreground, the temple of wine and sex; and in the background, the temple of no wine and no sex. In front, the lovers of life; behind, the lovers of death. Between these two lay all the permutations of the Lebanese character, and everything wrong with it is encapsulated in the repudiation of the former in favour of the latter. Nothing less than the survival of the state depends on the reversal of this decision. 

Shia mosque behind the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek

* “A huge explosion blasted round the corner of the mountainside, from the crossroads at Mdeirej ridge, the intersection marked on the maps that the Israelis had dropped over Beirut. In a dark brown cloud of smoke, we could see pieces of debris hurled hundreds of feet into the air, but [Bill Foley, Associated Press photographer] jammed his foot on the brake when we saw two Syrian army trucks that had been thrown into a sloping field beside the road. Cars lay smashed beside them, either in a series of large bomb craters or smouldering beside the gorge to our left. ‘Bill, they’re being bombed. For Christ’s sake get out of here!’ There was another devastating explosion. Afterwards, we were to recall our exact words. The most mundane expressions become memorable when they are uttered in panic. I kept on shouting to Foley: ‘Turn the car around for Christ’s sake’ and Foley screamed back: ‘What the fuck do you think I’m doing, you asshole?’" (p. 225)