Hello My Sumerian Friend. This Is Your Phoenician Friend

Joking about issues that caused wars in the past is very prevalent among the educated new generation of Lebanon. A couple of the undying objects of our jokes at the office, for example, are identity and Arabism (or the Arab cause and what derives from it).
As much as the two terms are related in Lebanon, they are equally not related. Also, considering that I come from a family of a Maronite father and an Orthodox Armenian mother, I don’t think that my experience in Lebanese identity can be generalized. Add to it my mingling and close relationships with Druzes, Sunnis, Shiites and numerous non-Lebanese and you’ll get an extremely rare philosophy about identity. I like to think of myself as a “global citizen”. Maybe I am not and I just wish to be. The layered history of the different identities the area of land now known as Lebanon has had, makes the identity of current Lebanon already very complex. This may be one the very few things that make me proud to be Lebanese; it’s amazing to know that one of my grandfathers might have been Ottoman (also ironic considering my mother’s side), his great grandfather might have been a European Crusader, whose wife might have been Byzantine or Roman, who in turn fell in love with an Arab or a Persian before marrying. I should have added Phoenician somewhere between those, or probably at the end, but that idea is already over-suggested. It doesn’t need me to highlight it.
As if this debate and the comprehension of this complex structure needed any more intricate factors, modern media had to kick in. Satellite TV, internet, and open global economy made Lebanon a street in the “global village”. Being a citizen living on this “street”, I can’t but be a citizen of that “village” as well.
Of course, a very big component (or layer, so to speak) in the current Lebanese identity is Arab. Throughout history (being part of the empire back when it started to rise) and now as part of its geographical existence and its dominant (and official) language. But what Arab is exactly more than that is also debatable in itself. There are many who tried to define that and many who adopt different definitions. Among all those who claim to be Arabs, very few show commonalities among each other. A Saudi Arabian is an Arab (it would be very funny if he wasn’t), and a Moroccan is an Arab. Of course, there are other countries in between that also differ but not as much, but I think considering these two “Arab” countries makes my point. Lebanon adopts a certain definition of Arab as well (not considering those very few who don’t and are not very convincing with why not). All this makes me feel that I haven’t really made up my mind yet about what an Arab really is. I definitely know what I would like the Utopia of the Arab Union to be like, though.
By Raffi Feghali

Where “Us” meets “Them”

A Palestinian friend of mine told me that once he was stopped by a Jordanian officer when he arrived to Amman airport coming from Beirut. The officer asked him what he was carrying in his bag. My friend responded “Books, chocolate, and wine! What else can you bring from Beirut?”

I didn’t answer then, but Beirut can be very deceiving with its western outlook and that over whelming hospitality of its educated bi-lingual or even tri-lingual people. I didn’t answer because; I have always believed that the contradictions in this country are absurdly overwhelming that sometimes silence is the best option. Beirut was destroyed and rebuilt seven times in history. Under the city there are seven cities, and seven different personalities. In the Middle East, Beirut is regarded as a liberal place, where you have the freedom of expression, a partially working democratic system that insures a peaceful transition of power, diverse political parties and a strong civil society. Beirut in the collective Arab memory is a leftist city that nurtured the Palestinian revolution and one of the major leftist movements. It was a haven for Arab intellectuals who ran from the dictatorships of the totalitarian parties that ruled the Arab political scene for half a century. Foreigners who live here, wonder how can this city which looks essentially peaceful and life loving explode dramatically into fierce wars and revolutions?

The major fallacy in their thinking is the belief that Beirut is a city whereas Beirut is a meeting place between different ghettos! Thus to understand Beirut you have to enter its back streets and neighborhoods. Only then you understand the fearful reality, which is that everyone is connected in a complicated chain of loyalties and interests. Everyone is a member of a family and every family is a member of an over extended network of interests and loyalties. The innocent intellectual Lebanese are not as innocent as they look and after all are not so free and liberal as they would like to show!

Lebanon possesses a democratic system termed “confessional democracy”. This system which is basically a power sharing system, gives each sect a percentage of representation in the parliament and in all the official governmental body. This power sharing system generates and has generated conflicts periodically. The state is based on the consensus of the different constituents which are the religious and ethnic groups. Whenever there is a major conflict of interest between the different confessions that the system cannot internally absorb, the system crashes. A system crash means in reality the disintegration of the central state as we know it and the immergence of confessional entities that take considerable independence.

The conflict in Lebanon is not religious and shouldn’t be mistaken as conflict between different faiths. Religious groups act as ethno-political groups that have strong identities, social structure and a relative geographic distribution. Each confession is dominated by three or four ruling families, sometimes less. These huge networks of interests are all controlled by the Chief or the Don who insures the interests of the group in the political system. “Mafias” aren’t the exception in Lebanon, they are the norm. They rule the system that looks like a tight family enterprise. The politics is dominated by family politics and nepotism, and the political leaders are judged according to how much they develop the strength of the confession or the “Family” not of the state and the society as a whole.

The political system generates the social structure and strengthens the sectarian division and vise versa. This leads to separate ethno-political minorities with strong identities that possess a different perception to its history in relation to itself and to others. Everyone lives in a ghetto where the past is idealized and the present is lived with a paranoiac attitude of mistrust. It’s the “Us” versus the “Them”. Inside the separate geographical areas, the different confessions explode with the attitudes of mistrust and live the illusion of persecution. Everyone is persecuted in Lebanon to the extent that there are too many victims and very few oppressors. Everyone is fighting for the true Lebanon, and suffers for it. A traitor to this group is a hero to the other and everyone masturbates their own history in a massive hysteria of self-victimization. This is done secretly as if hibernating in the un-conscious of the collective Lebanese memory.

Beirut is a rare place, where a real interaction takes place between the Lebanese who are coming from their different ghetto-backgrounds. In the streets of Beirut, the different truths, myths and what all the grandmothers had spoken, hits the harsh reality! Then the “Us” meets the “Them”, and a clash of histories and perceptions occur. But having to live under one political system, the people have to remedy this real and discovered division so they end up living the duality: they become politically correct, only when they are speaking to the “others”.

Beirut is not the meeting place of Lebanese alone. In this small city, Arab thinkers running from the dictatorships of the Arab totalitarian regimes came to express their thoughts of change and progress. Also, the Palestinians who were searching for their lost home, found Beirut a welcoming place, where no one is judged, and everyone is invited to be what ever they want. In this unique meeting place, all the dreams, nightmares, persecutions and radical revolutions mixed together and formed this schizophrenic place that seems like a giant firecracker.

What next? –you might ask- I believe what the Lebanese need is a social and political change that pushes the country ahead another step towards a democratic, secular state, and abolishes sectarianism or what is termed confessional democracy. This means that a central powerful government must immerge and the power of the traditional political leaders minimized. This is why it’s very important to support civil society initiatives that breaks the sectarian boundaries and issues a dialogue between the Lebanese as individuals, not as members of confessions. Only then the process of healing might start.

Hezbullah for example cannot be understood as a political phenomenon except by understanding the history of the Shiet community in south Lebanon, the consecutive Israeli invasions, and the dynamics of power in the Lebanese system. A solution for Hezbullah’s “state inside the state” cannot be done through utilizing force. The solution should be abolishing the roots of the problem and that is the Lebanese confessional system that lacks a central powerful government and by sustaining a just peace in the region that would stabilize the fragile regimes and states in the area including Lebanon.

What can you bring from Beirut other than chocolate, books and wine? I asked myself while I was writing this article. It occurred to me that Beirut is like a mirror, it gives you back what you wish for. An Australian friend, living in Beirut, said that there is only one conclusion he can take with him back to Sydney and that is the Buddhist wisdom: “All is suffering” It struck me as being so true. My friend had captured some how the soul of the city. I always hear my western friends speaking about their love and fascination to Beirut. I smile because they haven’t understood it yet. But if they ever did, they will have to wear their mask and walk among the people in a big Halloween party and will consciously live the dualities, like me. They will learn to hate Beirut, and only then they would know that the place has already trapped them and that they can’t escape. Then they’ll have two options, either to become saint-dreamers or become Lebanese!!

Repercussions

There seems an absolute order in what follows such an attack of our cozy everydays. A response that seems so natural that it appears to be innate, a biological reaction to the exceptional. An exception however, it isn’t, but this is impossible to admit. Everybody runs to their phones, turns on the TV, as if information from the outside world is the only cure for what is going on inside you. In conjuncture you try to come up with people that might be closest to the blast. You call…the phone is silent. Again and again you try, till the phone relieves your tension with the sound of a free line. In a parallelogram of your outside action, your inside unfolds.

No shock, no panic, just numbness and incomprehension. Pressure is lingering in your chest, fed by disgust and sorrow. A disgust fed by the methods that are adopted to steer our politics, sorrow fed by the fact that this is not a novel occurrence to this part of the world. Your head is struck with emptiness; failing to understand the things your eyes see flickers over the TV screen. As time passes, the sorrow turns into anger. The anger creeps from your chest into you neck and shoulders, your muscles tense and it feels like you carrying the physical weight of the lifeless bodies that are left behind by the attack. Your colleague tells a joke to empty the situation of its graveness. Your mouth forms a smile, its corners fighting the very same weight that weights on your shoulders. Your head gains back its control over the world, just to strike your body with more anger and outrage. And then the ultimate feeling of this part of the world strikes you, IMPOTENCE!!!

10:19 Beirut

.... my building was just shook, by a bomb blast.

A Martial People?

When I was born in 1981, my country was at war with Iran, and bombed by Israel. When I was 10, I remember my father constantly occupying the phone, while the television displayed greenish night-vision pictures of Baghdad showered by a firework of cruise missiles. As throughout my lifetime, today my country is at war. Considering the reasons for this, our mess, the media lend an easy explanation. Our condition is somehow innate.

Especially popular western media have a tendency to depict the conflicts of the Arab world as primordial, essentially ‘tribal’ or ‘sectarian’, to use the expression of the day. And increasingly we, the Arabs, seem to agree. Our television sets are sources of great comfort, to us. We turn to them to create artificial order, whenever chaos has visited our doorsteps. Currently Iraq occupies the prime-position in this bloody spectacle of chaos, and we increasingly believe the representations that are shown to us.

Having lived in Syria and Lebanon, our neighbors say, that Iraqis have some kind of warring sentiment, a “lingering passion that has to be satisfied with the blood of our enemies”, as a Syrian friend of mine once put it, talking about the Iraqi tradition of killing our presidents.

It is true that we are a people that hail their warriors and glorify their battles, but so does the rest of the world. The obscene picture of a general parading his medals, won for acts of violence against fellow human beings, can be seen from Baghdad to Berlin, from Warsaw to Washington.

What sets us apart as Arabs, and as Iraqis especially, is the fact that we’re actively and passively essentializing the violent aspects of our culture. In doing so, we aid the depiction of our conflicts as being devoid of history, somehow hanging in a socio-economic vacuum, as perpetual, endless cycles of violence. We are co-directors in the creation of our own self-fulfilling prophecies, historical prisons that don’t allow us to escape.

How important the self-image of a people and its depiction to the outer world can be in the development of a free society, was taught to me by the history of the people that make up another part of my family, that of the German people.

When my grandfather was born in Germany in 1913, his country was at the brink to of the First World War, a conflict that would cost 2000.000 people their lives. When he was 10 years old the Nazi party leaders of the Kampfbund tried their first move to power in the ‘Trinkhallen Putsch’. When he was a young man he went to fight as a soldier on the eastern front of the Second World War. His live and times have been characterized by ongoing conflict, and things would not have looked different if I would depict the lives of any of my ancestors before him.

Thus, German people have in recent history- not unlike most other Europeans at different times - displayed remarkable aggression against ‘enemies’ within and outside of their state. They have quite arguably started, or had a major hand in the start, of the First and Second World War. Yet, despite these minor historical facts, German people today are not known, for their war-mongering tendencies, but for ‘efficiency’, ‘precision’ and their, ‘time-keeping’. These labels are not a mere post-WWII construction, but have long been part of the German stereotype. However post WWII sentiment of renewal, picked them, quite consciously out of the collective psyche. This representation allowed the German nation to reinvent itself as productive, rather than destructive.

Further, Germany was permitted particular historical reasons for it’s wars and not reduced to mere genetics or racial stereotypes, despite its short lived insistence on their importance. Today World war One is being framed as a matter of cause and effect, the so called ‘treaty-alliance system’, while the Second World War was a ‘natural response’ to the countries destitute in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is true that we, the Iraqi people are prone to violence, yet this is not what makes us.
What can be witnessed in present day Iraq is the reaction of an occupied people. A people, that went through the so well known Middle Eastern mix of hyper militarism and extreme nationalism (which itself has not been unknown to Germany). Violence has literally been a major form of governance in Iraq for the past century or so. Despite this we have to remind ourselves of the many positive attributes our culture bears, and have to make them known to the world.

For example until today, I have not met one Iraqi of school age who could not recite dozens of poems. Our poets, like our warriors have started revolutions. In Iraq artist, if painters, writers or filmmakers hold a social prestige, unknown to their European counterparts. Among the Arabs we are still hailed for our levels of higher education.
We are a civilized people, a people that have a history that we can build on. This, however, doesn’t mean that we can rest on the laurels of days gone by, or cry over past glories, but that we have to reclaim our history and recognize today’s continuity with the past.

I hope that someday, in the not too far future, we will say with pride “We are Iraqi, we are passionate about life, we love the arts, are proud of our history and above all have hope for our future”

Gaza Under Siege

The siege of Gaza has reached new levels of intensity. Israel has imposed an embargo that effectively blocks the delivery of fuel oil supplies to the strip. Despite the crossing of two lorries carrying cooking gas and three carrying diesel at Israel’s Nahal Oz border, on Tuesday, a humanitarian crisis unfolds. Thousands of homes in the territory have been left without power. People live without light or heating in a bitter cold and wet winter. Bakers haven’t been able to bake bread in the absence of fuel to fire their ovens. Unicef stated that the effect on Gaza city’s main pumping station results in 600,000 Palestinians not having access to safe drinking water. Hospitals are short of medical supplies and paralysed by the power cuts. Medical infrastructure is on the verge of breakdown. If not enough the very habitat of the Palestinians is being destroyed. 30.000 cubic metres of sewage have been dumped in the Mediterranean untreated as a direct result of the embargo.

However it comes just as the latest addition to the already horrendous living conditions that Gaza citizens have to endure. 35% of Gazans live on less than two dollars a day; unemployment is by 50% and 80% receive humanitarian assistance. But the ultimate suffering for Gazans is that they are locked inn in this tragedy. Gaza’s border closures are without example. Palestinian are effectively prisoners to their misery, just that prisoners would receive a more humane treatment.

The Israeli government denies creating a humanitarian crisis, and calls the disaster a plot by the Gazan authorities. However Israel is not trying to obscure the rationale behind the blockade. It is intended to pressure Hamas into stopping the rocket attacks, launched from the Gaza strip onto Israeli territory. There has been a stark increase in the number of these attacks, 200 rockets and mortar bombs have plummet on southern Israel in the past week alone. Although the Israeli government has a right to stop the attacks on its civilian population it can’t do so by all means.

The collective punishment of civilian populations is specifically forbidden by International law. The Geneva Convention clearly spells out that occupying powers have the absolute obligation to supply capture territories with utilities such as fuel or water.

We should aim for the nonviolent settlement of conflicts in the Arab world, if through nonviolent struggle or negotiation. In this respect we urge the leaders of the world to take action against collective traumatisation of a people, the breaking of international treaties and undignified treatment of human beings. The world has become too used to the suffering of the Palestinian people. This is an outcry to remind it of their humanity.

More pragmatically the siege of Gaza undermines peace talks launched with the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas, and drives a further wedge between an already divided county. It is very likely that in the absence of a ceasefire with Hamas and the deficiency of peace talks in general, the rockets will soon fall again in Israel. Peace cannot be build by bringing suffering and destitute to 1.5 million people.

If the cycle of violence is to be broken, serious efforts for peace have to be accompanied by social justice. It is impossible to foster moderation and compromise, or build confidence in peaceful means of conflict resolution among Palestinians in the face of such brutal suppression. The intensity of the siege will again play in the hands of radicals.

What we the Israeli state and the international community should be doing, is treating the Palestinians with dignity and compassion in order to foster moderation and to empowering those people that believe Palestine’s future lies in peaceful resolution of their conflict. Efforts to reinitiate the peace process, the building of civic institutions and the reviving of the Palestinian economy are being emptied of any meaning and effect by the current situation in Gaza.

There has never been a more acute time to change the status quo in Gaza. Suppressed, hungry, unhealthy, traumatized and angry people don’t make good partners in a peace process.