An Uneasy Feeling
Dr. Joseph Hitti
December 06, 2006
One more victim fell last week in the Lebanese War. I have been trying for days to figure this one out, to find it a place somewhere in the pile of stuff in my brain about the War, but I seem to be running out of space. Or perhaps emotion. I feel nothing. The reservoir of pity, anxiety, fear, apprehension, terror, sadness and sorrow must have run dry, I think to myself, as I try to put the assassination of Pierre Gemayel in some perspective. But there is nothing left to feel and Mr. Gemayel’s insignificance to the big picture won’t budge. It is not that I have no sympathy for him. I do. He was young, not corrupt yet, and with only the potential for corruption, a political rookie freshly hatched out of the tradition of the big political families of Lebanon. It’s just that he is inexperienced, untested, and he gained political power because of his genes and the tradition of political inheritance in Lebanon. He has done nothing to earn his seat in Parliament and in the government, except, of course, to be born a Gemayel, and by the same token, he has very little record behind him to have done the corrupt things that Lebanon’s politicians always end up doing. In this sense, his murder was unfortunate: he really did nothing worth getting killed for.
As a Lebanese contemplating the political landscape of Lebanon from 3,000 miles away, I feel like a sheep being given a choice between two slaughterhouses: The pro-Syrian slaughterhouse and the anti-Syrian slaughterhouse. Both guarantee certain death, albeit with different colors, different henchmen, different paces, and different prophets interceding with God on your behalf. For there is no mercy killing in this business, let alone a pardon or a shelter or some green meadows to escape to. Most of the Lebanese I talk to tell me they are grateful to at least have a choice – they call it Lebanese democracy. And then they hurry, in their proclivity for conspiracy theories that borders on mythomania to attribute the assassination to American hands, or Syrian hands, or Israeli hands, or Iranian hands….behind it all, as though, we the Lebanese have no say in this enterprise other than getting killed or escaping the Goulag.
It really depends on what they are fed by the media and by the Zaiim they follow. If you go to orange-yellow colored media, you will hear that the July War was all cooked up long time ago, and the Americans, with their poodles the Israelis and their false friends the Saudis, were only waiting for an excuse. But why did Nasrallah give them the excuse? I reply. Oh, but they do not need an excuse, they retort. They would have done it anyway. It is all part of a big conspiracy. They are out to get us all, and thank God for Hassan and Michel for holding the fort so well against the barbarians at the gate. Michel talked anti-Syrian to the Americans for close to 15 years, then switched to talking anti-American to the Syrians. Hassan, on the other hand, has been playing the liberation Russian dolls game with the Lebanese people: He always find something new for the Lebanese people to liberate once they complete the liberation he set out to do for them. It never ends. He’s on a liberation rollercoaster: the southern Suburb of Beirut from Lebanese State sovereignty, the Shebaa Farms from Israeli-Syrian occupation, Lebanon from the Lebanese people, the Shiites from Sunni domination, Iraq from the US, Palestine from Israeli occupation, the entire Arab world from imperialist colonialist America, and on and on.
If you go to Hariri-colored, Hariri-paid, media, it is the Syrian and the Persian pimps of the whore Hezbollah who are behind this whole affair to deflect the attention of the world from the nuclear issue on Iran, or from the International Court on Syria.
Suddenly, the Druze and the Sunnis, having cavorted for the Assads of Damascus for close to 30 years and single-handedly ransacked Lebanese prosperity and the Lebanese State to the ground with all manner of corruption and treason, from selling the country to the Saudis and the Syrians to proclaiming the most vicious anti-Western pro-Arab Islamist and nationalist positions, they suddenly have become staunch pro-American, pro-Western liberals who echo Bush on democracy and liberty. Unbelievable, but true.
But we, the Lebanese people, we just don’t get it.
Beyond the pro-Syrian and the anti-Syrian dichotomy of our political world, we are – I am – helpless at the nagging question of our own responsibility in this mess. As I reflect on my own history with the War on Lebanon, I came of age at the pre-War preambles of 1967 – 1975, followed by the official beginning of the War in 1975, as an apolitical observer who despised organized politics, who despised the Palestinian Fedayeen organizations of the PLO as much as I despised the militias of all sides who fought either with the Palestinians or against them, and either on the side of the Syrians or against them, and either with the Israelis or against them.
They all ignored or challenged the State of which I was a citizen. The foreigners – Palestinians and Syrians for the most part – had no other stake in Lebanon but to control it or abuse it, even if that meant burning or destroying it. They could not care less. The Lebanese, on the other hand, I could not understand why they went so far in the plunder of the country under the guise of liberation and defense. The Christian militias (Phalangists, Lebanese Forces, and others), for example, slaughtered, pilfered, killed, raped and robbed for no purpose other than to exercise the power they had on the street in the absence of the State. The Christian militias robbed our own house on Galerie Semaan in the southern suburbs of Beirut of every door knob and every piece of glass they could cut with a diamond knife. I used to go during the lulls and sift through the debris and the broken smashed litter on the floor, looking for a photo or any other lost piece of my life they may have left behind. They were “defending” me, they said.
I could not understand either how the Sunni Prime Minister and the Shiite Speaker of Parliament of Lebanon would side with the PLO against their own country and their own President for years on end, allowing chaos and anarchy to settle in simply because they had the power to deny the Christian President the use of the Army to quell the PLO uprising. Never mind that their own private militias – e.g. Amal and the Murabitun – later fought and killed thousands of Palestinian refugees, once the Christians were out of the way. Theirs was a power grab in the most vulgar of ways, over the corpses of their own people. They are the pro-democracy and pro-America crowd today. I could not understand how Kamal Jumblatt, the father of today’s “anti-Syrian” politician Walid Jumblatt, could sit idly by as the Palestinians and Syrians ravaged the Christian coastal town of Damour in Jumblatt’s own Shouf electoral district – my father used to vote for Jumblatt – and massacred, raped, pillaged and razed it to the ground. They all refused to allow the President – because he was Christian – to use the Army to quell Yasser Arafat’s hordes, like King Hussein of Jordan did in 1970 and ended the Palestinian uprising in one month in September 1970. We could have ended this nightmare 40 years ago.
As the years went by and I ended up, like so many Lebanese, in exile, I continued to regard my identity as a citizen of a State, not of a religious community, not of a political party, not as a blind follower of some political family or clan. When Michel Aoun in 1989 raised the stakes back in favor of restoring the authority of the Lebanese State against all odds, by challenging the policies of Bush Senior, the political families and the militias of Lebanon, I, like many Lebanese, rallied behind him while the world, the political families and the militias rallied against him. He even did the unthinkable: As the Christian leader of the State in 1989, he ordered the Lebanese Army to crush the Christian militias - the Lebanese Forces. Not only was he fighting the illegal drug and arms smuggling and the profiteering and the continued carnage, but he was appealing to what we, as Lebanese, had up to 1975: A strong State. In the process, he also fought his own co-religionists to show that the State stood above any other consideration. The rest is history. Today, Michel Aoun has returned to Lebanon after 15 years in exile, and he is supporting Hezbollah, a Shiite armed militia, against the State. He even is working with Hezbollah to bring down the government with street riots that could, given Hezbollah’s weapons, erupt into a bloodbath. He says he wants to “reform” the State.
The Lebanese today have to choose between the two camps: One camp has the weapons to exert pressure, but is sold out to the Iranian-Syrian camp, and includes a marriage of the absurd between an Islamic fundamentalist Shiite Hezbollah and a secular-but-Christian Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, as well as a horde of residual Baathists, Pan-Syrian Arab Nationalists, and communists of mid-20th century vintage ideologies and persuasions.
This camp may represent a sliver of hope for reform or change in the State structure, primarily because of the Free Patriotic Movement’s wide-eyed naïve optimists, but can you really have reform when Hassan Nasrallah’s model is the regime in Tehran? Do you need to destroy the State in order to reform it? Can you really have reform when Aoun’s FPM is already mutating into a family business and is schizophrenic about its representing the Christians while proclaiming its secularim and opening bridges to the most extremists of Moslems?
On the other side of the fence is another absurd horde of staid traditionalists, big families, big money, former warlords Jumblatt, Geagea and Gemayel, people who govern of the clan, by the clan, for the clan, with cronyism, favoritism, dirty money, and when needed, by the machete. These are the vanguards of the new democracy that the Bush administration has proclaimed our “pro-Western” government, our “Cedars Revolution” heroes, who not even 3 years ago were still bowing and kneeling at the feet of Bashar Assad, who 15 years ago were at each other’s throats killing, pillaging and plundering and making the fortunes they now enjoy while we got killed, maimed or escaped. They also include a newcomer, a neo-traditionalist, Saad Hariri, another young and inexperienced politician, who inherited the mantle from his father, like ancient lords and tribal leaders do, because of the genes, by the grace of God, and because of the money that keeps so many people employed around his feet.
And so, what can I conclude? Was Gemayel a hero as they say? Or was he an insignificant political rookie who died because that is the price that these greedy and corrupt families – like the Mafia – are willing to pay to keep their grip on power and hold the country hostage. What should the Lebanese people conclude?
They always start their conversations these days with a resigned shake of the head. What can you expect? In July, the pro-Syrian camp dragged them into destroying everything that was rebuilt during – I should say in spite of – 15 years of corruption and sleeping with the Syrians. And now their only hope for change is Hezbollah: a radical Islamic fundamentalist group straight out of 9th century Persia and armed to the teeth. Should I conclude that we must be a people of beggars, Dhimmis, sneaky Mediterranean merchants who would sell their own mothers for a chance at the next bargain with the enemy. Without any sense of shame, self-esteem and pride. For survival. We have become like wounded animals that let you get close to them hoping for help, only to pounce and attack you because in the end they don’t trust anyone, even a helping hand. Lebanon has become one giant Cancer Pavilion where death, deceit and the absurd co-exist in a parallel universe. Ours is not a life behind the Iron Curtain; ours is a life behind the Cloth Curtain – dark, thick, divinely-inspired and medievally harsh.
We may be educated, sophisticated, traveled, rich, multilingual and modern, but we are a self-absorbed and vain people without imagination and hope. We have no more brains than sheep that continue to be herded to the slaughter by treacherous shepherds, and we continue to walk the same path behind self-declared false prophets, generals, sheikhs, doctors, Holy Patriarchs and Mullahs that God elected for us Lebanese democracy-style, Mediterranean-style Mafia bosses from the hills, and money whales from the desert as our political leaders. No wonder then that Khalil Gebran loved the country but could not stand the people: “You have your Lebanon and I have mine,” he told them.
And that is why I have no feelings today for the death of Pierre Gemayel. He was, as I see it, an unknown who was killed, like hundreds of thousands of Lebanese before him. There were no mass demonstrations or sit-ins when the Lebanese people were being killed by the same criminals in the 1970s and 1980s at the rate of a thousand per month between 1975 and 1990. Why?
Because there was no CNN or Al-Jazeera to watch it all live. No one waved thousands of Lebanese flags and no American President mourned the death of our democracy then. And that is why I have come to the conclusion that while Lebanon is a country gifted with the beauty of the land, it remains cursed with the ugliness of its people. To the ugly American I have become, I now proudly add the ugly Lebanese I always was.
As a Lebanese contemplating the political landscape of Lebanon from 3,000 miles away, I feel like a sheep being given a choice between two slaughterhouses: The pro-Syrian slaughterhouse and the anti-Syrian slaughterhouse. Both guarantee certain death, albeit with different colors, different henchmen, different paces, and different prophets interceding with God on your behalf. For there is no mercy killing in this business, let alone a pardon or a shelter or some green meadows to escape to. Most of the Lebanese I talk to tell me they are grateful to at least have a choice – they call it Lebanese democracy. And then they hurry, in their proclivity for conspiracy theories that borders on mythomania to attribute the assassination to American hands, or Syrian hands, or Israeli hands, or Iranian hands….behind it all, as though, we the Lebanese have no say in this enterprise other than getting killed or escaping the Goulag.
It really depends on what they are fed by the media and by the Zaiim they follow. If you go to orange-yellow colored media, you will hear that the July War was all cooked up long time ago, and the Americans, with their poodles the Israelis and their false friends the Saudis, were only waiting for an excuse. But why did Nasrallah give them the excuse? I reply. Oh, but they do not need an excuse, they retort. They would have done it anyway. It is all part of a big conspiracy. They are out to get us all, and thank God for Hassan and Michel for holding the fort so well against the barbarians at the gate. Michel talked anti-Syrian to the Americans for close to 15 years, then switched to talking anti-American to the Syrians. Hassan, on the other hand, has been playing the liberation Russian dolls game with the Lebanese people: He always find something new for the Lebanese people to liberate once they complete the liberation he set out to do for them. It never ends. He’s on a liberation rollercoaster: the southern Suburb of Beirut from Lebanese State sovereignty, the Shebaa Farms from Israeli-Syrian occupation, Lebanon from the Lebanese people, the Shiites from Sunni domination, Iraq from the US, Palestine from Israeli occupation, the entire Arab world from imperialist colonialist America, and on and on.
If you go to Hariri-colored, Hariri-paid, media, it is the Syrian and the Persian pimps of the whore Hezbollah who are behind this whole affair to deflect the attention of the world from the nuclear issue on Iran, or from the International Court on Syria.
Suddenly, the Druze and the Sunnis, having cavorted for the Assads of Damascus for close to 30 years and single-handedly ransacked Lebanese prosperity and the Lebanese State to the ground with all manner of corruption and treason, from selling the country to the Saudis and the Syrians to proclaiming the most vicious anti-Western pro-Arab Islamist and nationalist positions, they suddenly have become staunch pro-American, pro-Western liberals who echo Bush on democracy and liberty. Unbelievable, but true.
But we, the Lebanese people, we just don’t get it.
Beyond the pro-Syrian and the anti-Syrian dichotomy of our political world, we are – I am – helpless at the nagging question of our own responsibility in this mess. As I reflect on my own history with the War on Lebanon, I came of age at the pre-War preambles of 1967 – 1975, followed by the official beginning of the War in 1975, as an apolitical observer who despised organized politics, who despised the Palestinian Fedayeen organizations of the PLO as much as I despised the militias of all sides who fought either with the Palestinians or against them, and either on the side of the Syrians or against them, and either with the Israelis or against them.
They all ignored or challenged the State of which I was a citizen. The foreigners – Palestinians and Syrians for the most part – had no other stake in Lebanon but to control it or abuse it, even if that meant burning or destroying it. They could not care less. The Lebanese, on the other hand, I could not understand why they went so far in the plunder of the country under the guise of liberation and defense. The Christian militias (Phalangists, Lebanese Forces, and others), for example, slaughtered, pilfered, killed, raped and robbed for no purpose other than to exercise the power they had on the street in the absence of the State. The Christian militias robbed our own house on Galerie Semaan in the southern suburbs of Beirut of every door knob and every piece of glass they could cut with a diamond knife. I used to go during the lulls and sift through the debris and the broken smashed litter on the floor, looking for a photo or any other lost piece of my life they may have left behind. They were “defending” me, they said.
I could not understand either how the Sunni Prime Minister and the Shiite Speaker of Parliament of Lebanon would side with the PLO against their own country and their own President for years on end, allowing chaos and anarchy to settle in simply because they had the power to deny the Christian President the use of the Army to quell the PLO uprising. Never mind that their own private militias – e.g. Amal and the Murabitun – later fought and killed thousands of Palestinian refugees, once the Christians were out of the way. Theirs was a power grab in the most vulgar of ways, over the corpses of their own people. They are the pro-democracy and pro-America crowd today. I could not understand how Kamal Jumblatt, the father of today’s “anti-Syrian” politician Walid Jumblatt, could sit idly by as the Palestinians and Syrians ravaged the Christian coastal town of Damour in Jumblatt’s own Shouf electoral district – my father used to vote for Jumblatt – and massacred, raped, pillaged and razed it to the ground. They all refused to allow the President – because he was Christian – to use the Army to quell Yasser Arafat’s hordes, like King Hussein of Jordan did in 1970 and ended the Palestinian uprising in one month in September 1970. We could have ended this nightmare 40 years ago.
As the years went by and I ended up, like so many Lebanese, in exile, I continued to regard my identity as a citizen of a State, not of a religious community, not of a political party, not as a blind follower of some political family or clan. When Michel Aoun in 1989 raised the stakes back in favor of restoring the authority of the Lebanese State against all odds, by challenging the policies of Bush Senior, the political families and the militias of Lebanon, I, like many Lebanese, rallied behind him while the world, the political families and the militias rallied against him. He even did the unthinkable: As the Christian leader of the State in 1989, he ordered the Lebanese Army to crush the Christian militias - the Lebanese Forces. Not only was he fighting the illegal drug and arms smuggling and the profiteering and the continued carnage, but he was appealing to what we, as Lebanese, had up to 1975: A strong State. In the process, he also fought his own co-religionists to show that the State stood above any other consideration. The rest is history. Today, Michel Aoun has returned to Lebanon after 15 years in exile, and he is supporting Hezbollah, a Shiite armed militia, against the State. He even is working with Hezbollah to bring down the government with street riots that could, given Hezbollah’s weapons, erupt into a bloodbath. He says he wants to “reform” the State.
The Lebanese today have to choose between the two camps: One camp has the weapons to exert pressure, but is sold out to the Iranian-Syrian camp, and includes a marriage of the absurd between an Islamic fundamentalist Shiite Hezbollah and a secular-but-Christian Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, as well as a horde of residual Baathists, Pan-Syrian Arab Nationalists, and communists of mid-20th century vintage ideologies and persuasions.
This camp may represent a sliver of hope for reform or change in the State structure, primarily because of the Free Patriotic Movement’s wide-eyed naïve optimists, but can you really have reform when Hassan Nasrallah’s model is the regime in Tehran? Do you need to destroy the State in order to reform it? Can you really have reform when Aoun’s FPM is already mutating into a family business and is schizophrenic about its representing the Christians while proclaiming its secularim and opening bridges to the most extremists of Moslems?
On the other side of the fence is another absurd horde of staid traditionalists, big families, big money, former warlords Jumblatt, Geagea and Gemayel, people who govern of the clan, by the clan, for the clan, with cronyism, favoritism, dirty money, and when needed, by the machete. These are the vanguards of the new democracy that the Bush administration has proclaimed our “pro-Western” government, our “Cedars Revolution” heroes, who not even 3 years ago were still bowing and kneeling at the feet of Bashar Assad, who 15 years ago were at each other’s throats killing, pillaging and plundering and making the fortunes they now enjoy while we got killed, maimed or escaped. They also include a newcomer, a neo-traditionalist, Saad Hariri, another young and inexperienced politician, who inherited the mantle from his father, like ancient lords and tribal leaders do, because of the genes, by the grace of God, and because of the money that keeps so many people employed around his feet.
And so, what can I conclude? Was Gemayel a hero as they say? Or was he an insignificant political rookie who died because that is the price that these greedy and corrupt families – like the Mafia – are willing to pay to keep their grip on power and hold the country hostage. What should the Lebanese people conclude?
They always start their conversations these days with a resigned shake of the head. What can you expect? In July, the pro-Syrian camp dragged them into destroying everything that was rebuilt during – I should say in spite of – 15 years of corruption and sleeping with the Syrians. And now their only hope for change is Hezbollah: a radical Islamic fundamentalist group straight out of 9th century Persia and armed to the teeth. Should I conclude that we must be a people of beggars, Dhimmis, sneaky Mediterranean merchants who would sell their own mothers for a chance at the next bargain with the enemy. Without any sense of shame, self-esteem and pride. For survival. We have become like wounded animals that let you get close to them hoping for help, only to pounce and attack you because in the end they don’t trust anyone, even a helping hand. Lebanon has become one giant Cancer Pavilion where death, deceit and the absurd co-exist in a parallel universe. Ours is not a life behind the Iron Curtain; ours is a life behind the Cloth Curtain – dark, thick, divinely-inspired and medievally harsh.
We may be educated, sophisticated, traveled, rich, multilingual and modern, but we are a self-absorbed and vain people without imagination and hope. We have no more brains than sheep that continue to be herded to the slaughter by treacherous shepherds, and we continue to walk the same path behind self-declared false prophets, generals, sheikhs, doctors, Holy Patriarchs and Mullahs that God elected for us Lebanese democracy-style, Mediterranean-style Mafia bosses from the hills, and money whales from the desert as our political leaders. No wonder then that Khalil Gebran loved the country but could not stand the people: “You have your Lebanon and I have mine,” he told them.
And that is why I have no feelings today for the death of Pierre Gemayel. He was, as I see it, an unknown who was killed, like hundreds of thousands of Lebanese before him. There were no mass demonstrations or sit-ins when the Lebanese people were being killed by the same criminals in the 1970s and 1980s at the rate of a thousand per month between 1975 and 1990. Why?
Because there was no CNN or Al-Jazeera to watch it all live. No one waved thousands of Lebanese flags and no American President mourned the death of our democracy then. And that is why I have come to the conclusion that while Lebanon is a country gifted with the beauty of the land, it remains cursed with the ugliness of its people. To the ugly American I have become, I now proudly add the ugly Lebanese I always was.