Twilight of the Republic of Lebanon

Twilight of the Republic of Lebanon

Twilight of the Republic of Lebanon

By : Bassel F. Salloukh

Anyone who had the misfortune of flying out of Beirut this summer, but especially on that now infamous black Thursday of 6 September 2018, witnessed a whole sordid political economy in full swing, a microcosm of the one operating outside the airport. Bracket the jejune voices that keep complaining about the lack of funds for more expansions and more infrastructural development, or those who do not tire of reminding us that there is something culturally inevitable about the way Lebanese simply cannot follow rules. What was on display that memorable day was how all-too-human choices anchored in narrow clientelist calculations create the mess and indignity that has become, for the many but not the privileged few, everyday life in Lebanon. For what otherwise explains why the same Lebanese who found it impossible to queue in a proper line that day willingly did so when they were boarding their planes from any other airport? Or why more check-in counters were available for fewer passengers in other airports? It is simplistic to blame people for acting lawlessly when they find themselves operating in incentive structures that invite and reward lawless behavior. After all, those inhabiting Thomas Hobbes’ imagined “state of nature” are expected to act selfishly and brutishly, otherwise they perish.
 
Whether it is the spike in the rate of unfathomable but increasingly casual incidents of violence, especially against women and children; the callous disregard for the basic developmental needs of whole regions, and the concomitant predictable backlash this produces in the form of exiting the boundaries of the law and the national economy; the way driving against traffic has become an end in itself rather than an illicit mean to reach one’s destination faster—a fact of Lebanese life dexterously rendered by Ziad Rahbani in that memorable bakery scene in his postwar play bikhsous al-karame wel-sha‘b al-‘anid; or the manner in which the minutest details of public space have become sites for appropriation by individuals, cars, shops, businesses, Vespas, and the indomitable valet—notice how perfect the art of parking and double-parking at road junctions has become. All these normalized acts of lawlessness turn the republic in which we live into one dystopian battleground for personal survival; a veritable state of nature incentivized by public institutions that have suspended their regulatory prerogatives and duties and have become colonized by clientelist interests.
 
This great unravelling of the postwar republic has reached perilous levels. Lebanon is now ranked first among countries in Western Asia in terms of cancer patients per population, proof, if there ever was need for it, of the catastrophic environmental disaster wrought upon the country’s once dreamy and pristine landscape by the inability of state institutions to apply the most basic environmental regulations. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 242 cancer cases per hundred thousand people in Lebanon, with seventeen thousand new cancer cases registered in 2018 alone. A 2017 study by the Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) puts the number of Lebanese living on a meagre four dollars a day at a staggering 1.5 million, this out of a total population of five million, and where the unemployment rate has reached thirty-six percent. These figures take on harrowing proportions when placed in their proper economic and fiscal contexts: A two percent economic growth rate and a fiscal deficit of 8.3 percent of GDP for 2018; a five percent inflation rate for 2017climbing to 7.6 percent in June 2018 in a year-on-year comparison of the consumer price index (CPI); a galloping public debt that reached 81.9 billion dollars in June 2018; and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 152.8 percent for the same period.
 
Yet, despite these miserable socioeconomic conditions and alarming fiscal indicators, the republic’s political elite behave as if time is infinite; as if the war ended yesterday, not some three decades ago. Political vindictiveness and bickering over government quotas and ministerial portfolios expose the usual intra-sectarian divisions and deep inter-confessional disagreements over the postwar political balance of power, for the demons of the war are always lurking in the background. It also serves as a perfect smokescreen to divert attention from any semblance of accountability and responsibility for the economic policies and clientelist practices that produced the present socioeconomic crisis. Not that we should expect anything else from a postwar political elite versed in the art of ignoring the suffering of those they claim to represent, always waiting for an eleventh-hour geopolitical miracle to deliver the country from its economic woes—one that this time around may not come.
 
But if the present socioeconomic crisis is so severe, as the aforementioned indicators suggest, then where have all the protestors gone? Why are those suffering from difficult socioeconomic conditions and abysmal government services not demonstrating in Beirut the way their counterparts are demonstrating in Basra? Have they long decided to exit from the republic and are now languishing in exile? Are they silenced by the disciplinary technologies and ideological hegemony of the sectarian system or coopted by the sectarian system’s clientelist political economy and the state’s nonchalant attitude toward corruption and everyday lawlessness? Of course, it is all of the above reasons. To paraphrase Lenin: Numbness to the devastating socioeconomic disasters besieging us is the highest stage of sectarianism.
 
Perhaps the real lesson of the Basra protests for Lebanon is that only when people liberate themselves from narrow sectarian sentiments and the clientelist political economic bargains they have willingly accepted, prioritizing instead socioeconomic and other trans-sectarian national identities and demands, can they then invoke the civic responsibility that comes with behaving as law-abiding citizens who care about the present and future of the republic. Only then will the political elite consider them more than just docile sectarian subjects who can be whimsically mobilized as fodder in useless political battles, humiliated in long agonizing queues and maddening traffic jams, or silenced via selective populist strategies. Otherwise they—minus the silent minority that insists on following the law—have only themselves to blame for what increasingly looks like the twilight of the Lebanese republic, followed by the inevitable darkness.

[This article was originally posted by Lebanese Center for Policy Studies on October 2018]

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412