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!!