In Beirut The City Of The World  Rabee Jaber tells the story of Abed al-Jawad al-Baroudi a 25 year old man who ran away from Damascus, crossed rivers and walked through the valleys and mountains of Beqaa until he settled in an obscure coastal village called Beirut.

 In the three part novel Jaber paints a vivid historical image of Beirut at a time when it was part of the hinterland that formed Greater Syria and beyond. The story begins at the turn of a new century (1800) before the arrival of the European Zionists in Palestine. The novel moves with time, narrating the fast changes that were storming this walled enclave called Beirut. As Jaber elegantly weaves history with fiction the reader delves into visualising how Beirut’s population was composed; how it gradually expanded and grew after each new wave of refugees coming from Aleppo and mount Lebanon. By the time Beirut’s flimsy walls fell the town became a gateway to incoming European imperialism, capitalism, and commodities. The most illuminating aspect of the novel is that it tells a story at a time before the fabrication of the “Lebanese”, a time when people belonged to the  geo-historical reality that surrounded them. It was a time when people moved across this land freely: rolling down the rivers and exchanging their fruits of labour; fishing; swimming; and traveling to Akka and Alexandria, in an open un-besieged sea, looking for fresh opportunities and new beginnings.

 In 2012 when I started reporting on the first waves of Syrian refugees I met people who lived in the northern border region of Wadi Khaled. The more I listened to them talk about their cross-border lives the more I encountered their, and my, loose identification as “Lebanese”. 

 Despite all the attempts to instill the nationalist fabrication of the Lebanese identity in that neglected  border region, peoples’ lives remained entangled with the land beyond the border; one generation after another. I remember how people spoke in regretful tones condemning Lebanese politicians: how they had misled them season in season out, and then reminded them, at the time of elections, that they belong to this sect or that confession. There was an air of unspoken truths hovering over our conversation as we both knew that the system of Lebanese sectarian politics had failed to muster the idea of citizenship within us. Instead, it has created a perception of separate identities based on class, sect, and territorialism. The residents of these border areas expressed how they felt “normal” when they were in Syria. That they were not traveling to a foreign country, but were merely carrying on with their lives as their fathers and great-grandmothers have always done. And when they were back on this side of the border the bitter fact haunted them: that their peripheral existence will always curse them to be neglected by their own State. Rendering them perpetually alienated by the center: Beirut. 

 As international NGOs and foreign journalists poured their (myopic) attention on the Syrian refugees in Wadi Khaled, the residents of these border areas were left with a grudge. Since the war in Syria has affected their livelihoods as well, they viewed themselves as worthy victims. But the bureaucrats of humanitarianism pointed out to them that they were categorised as “undeserving locals”. One could see how they were taken aback in bafflement each time they watched charity trucks arriving in their towns only to be assigned for the “Syrians”. 

A new dawn

 Today, a new historical era was heralded by the coronavirus pandemic, creating a state of emergency that is forcing us to adopt an acute model of change to our lifestyle and habits. In Lebanon we arrive at a historical juncture that shows the end of the road to the colonial role that was assigned for this place one hundred years ago: to be a buffer zone between a Jewish state and the surrounding Muslim countries. The recent charm offensive and normalization agreements by some Arab countries with Israel ended the Lebanese colonial particularity in that regard. Today, there is no need for a buffer zone since many Arab regimes have normalised ties with the occupation in Palestine. 

 The financial and economic meltdown that hit the system of political economy in Lebanon in 2019 ended the myth of the Lebanese banking sector. We can trace how the Lebanese financial bubble was burst in a series of articles published in al-Akhbar’s Mulhaq Ras Almal: Under the cloak of the sect by Alamjad Salameh. There one gets to learn how “the system of the Lebanese political economy was built on three main pillars:

The first pillar: the sects, as institutions that define the social, political, and economic boundaries of sectarian groups, and form the defining interest of the groups.

The second pillar: Western capital, which formed the real motive behind the rotation of the economic wheel in the Lebanese markets, especially the markets of Mount Lebanon, during the past three centuries.

The third pillar: the agents of Western capital in Lebanon, who formed the first class of major merchants, then came the bankers class.” Salameh further emphasizes that “these monopolistic agents enjoy the protections of sects. And that each sect has a share of the classes formed by the agents, so the share is proportional to the representation or contribution of the members of the sect from the agents of the monopoly of Western capital.” This is how “this system has tightly woven the threads of the financial crisis that the Lebanese are experiencing today.”

 After this invaluable reading one is left with the conclusion that the current wave of financial and economic crisis “lacks the cooperation of Western capital.” And since Western capital forms a major pillar of the Lebanese political economy its absence leads to the collapse of the whole structure.

 It’s vain to expect financial aid to trickle down from Western countries who are suffering the worst economic meltdown for 300 years. Thus, we find ourselves confronted with a historical moment that requires the utmost levels of openness for cross-borders cooperation. This is why it’s crucial to emphasise that a politics that sees no future beyond the idea of “neutrality” is not likely to give much attention to the new norm that we are already living. Such isolationist perceptions that are only able to think, see, and imagine the future through the prism of their short term personal interest cannot be relied upon to produce a future fit for the generations to come. As a result, we are confronted with a discourse of neutrality that translates in practice and materialises an object of blame. Once that object is identified as the source of all misfortunes then the blaming and antagonising begins to blow the winds of civil strife. 

The futile habit of othering

 Blaming the other has always been a symptom of cognitive dissonance that marks Lebanese chauvinism. Today, after one hundred years of mishap, the art of othering in Lebanon has evolved a dogmatic perceptual shortcut; to transcend contextual actualities, and leapfrog towards the “Lebanon first” predicament.

 Recently, there has been a trend of othering a huge section of the Lebanese population. This recent form of scapegoating does not cancel or substitute the permanent others: Syrian and Palestinian refugees. It’s a violent class-based politics of prejudice orchestrated by the same exclusionary force that utilises a bourgeois framing of history. In doing so this chauvinistic framing of the past aims at dehumanizing those, in the present, who refuse to submit to the hegemony of the last military colonialism of our land. As such, this framing works in tandem with the narrative of the Zionists, i.e. that the region is made up from isolated fragments of dehistoricized peoples and geography. So, this misconception aims at severing the hinterlands and blood lines that weaved and quilted our collective memory. Our collective histories, our language, and our cultural composition never stopped transcending the artificial borders that divided Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria). Unfortunately, many of us post-civil war millennials have fallen victim to a colonialist mindset that aims at severing roots and boxing people in half truths and misconceived geo-historical realities.

 As I kept returning to Wadi Khaled in 2012 I noticed how those who have fled from across the border have found themselves at home among their people. The people living in these towns and villages opened their doors and took them in as their kin not as foreigners or strangers. Those Lebanese told me that they felt more belonging to Homs and Syria then they did to Tripoli or Beirut. They used to tell me that “you, people from Beirut, don’t think about us as Lebanese. And when we cross to Syria we are not ashamed of our accents. There we feel at home.” Then one would point their finger and show me where their kids used to go to school across the border. Another man would chime in about the best places to go shopping for clothes and furniture from the market in Homs. An old woman draws lines in the air and would recall a chain of history that shows how most of the families here have intermarried with families there across the border and so on. While I stood on the invisible line in the sand that divided this land, the dry whispery August wind ruffled my hair and summoned a sense of historical discontinuity within me. A discontinuity that was sugarcoated by my “Lebanese particularity”. A phenomena that I had started questioning in Beirut each time I hung out with my Syrian and Palestinian friends. Back then, especially after the Arab uprisings, I started questioning the meaning of the Lebanese nationalist identity. I remember how I was determined to find fundamental differences that made me as a Lebanese different, exseptional, or more special than my Syrian or Palestinian friends. In the end I only found our shared historical experience entangled with our bloodlines in a continuum of cultural identities spanning thousands of years of tradition and cooperation. In this light, I saw my “Lebanese particularity” as a hollow concept blown up by a compulsive urge for hyper consumption, in order to maintain the appearances that defined my Lebaneseness.

Neutrality as an oxymoron 

 The Lebanese westernised bourgeoisie is never capable of achieving a critical distance from their classist self to gain insight into the historical truth or events, but instead they’d rather, lazily, reproduce bubbles of dogmas that fit their individualist short term interests. It’s a personal interest that wants to indulge in a romantic image of Lebanon based on hedonism and luxury consumption without actually producing or owning their independent means of production.

 These reactionary projections are summed up today in their last ditch effort, the so-called “Neutrality”. Their argument relies entirely on the inconsistent Declaration of Baabda. They slap the declaration on the table as if it was a royal flush that assumed the sovereignty of the Lebanese State. They then deployed a tunnel vision technique to point out that Hizballah (HA) never implemented disassociation from Syria and as a result further contributed to Lebanon’s “political paralysis-turned-collapse.” This tunnel vision approach deliberately ignores the fact that almost all the political parties in Lebanon had gone to Syria with their various agendas before HA were, officially, involved. The difference was, that when HA decided to go to Syria, the Party’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nassrallah made a public declaration explaining their objectives and why they had decided to get involved in the war in Syria.

 While writing this I was talking to a Western anti imperialist NGO worker who has been working on Syria for years. I asked them about the extent of involvement by political parties from Lebanon other than HA, and if they could sum up the scope of involvement in Syria how would they put it. They had this to say: “At the first smell of weakness, as if smelling blood, sharks from the region and the world descended upon the fringes of Syria, biting into it, bleeding it, tearing off pieces on a feeding frenzy. This included March14 political parties in Lebanon, the Jordanian monarchy, the Turkish government, all tore apart the border, violated Syria’s sovereignty and allowed the flow of weapons and fighters not to help Syria but to kill it. HA intervened to preserve the country, along with other allies of the Syrian state, knowing that nothing is more dangerous for the region than state collapse.”

 As a result, the more we hear about disassociation the more we see that this call for neutrality is a political ploy directed towards only one element of the Lebanese socio-political equation. Furthermore, when I asked the Western NGO worker what they conceived of the politics of “neutrality” today. They emphasized that: “There is no neutrality when you’re in a region that has been facing an onslaught from colonialism and imperialism for two centuries.” And on the question of sovereignty they added that, “there is only a struggle to protect or restore your sovereignty, not as Lebanon, but as the people of the region. It’s like asking a seal to be neutral in a sea of great white sharks. The West does not want your neutrality, they want your capitulation and subservience.”

 We also ought to take into consideration the fact that this call for neutrality was recently hyped by an unneutral Lebanese figure. The Maronite Patriarch, whose loyalty is dedicated to Pope Francis and the Vatican, called for neutrality from his position as the religious figure of one group among 18 other sectarian groups. In this sense he only spoke about himself and represented members of his parish at best. In contrast, if one gauges the fervour, enthusiasm, and lust for the liberation of Palestine that was expressed by so many people in Lebanon during the Sword of Jerusalem battle, one can easily deduce that at least the Muslims (among others) in Lebanon who form the vast majority of the population are not concerned with the call for “neutrality”. We can even go further to prove the unfeasibility of such an idea and take into consideration all the border towns and villages with Syria. If we engage peoples’ opinions living in these border areas about “neutrality” from the stretch of land across the border, that forms a massive part of their socio-economic/historic reality, then we are able to sense the futility of such a proposition. 

 Moreover, how come the trumpets for “neutrality” were muffled when the Lebanese Armenians went to join the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan last year? Did the Maronite Patriarch sound the same patriarchal calls for “neutrality” while Lebanese Armenians took up arms and joined their brethren on the front in Armenia? Of course he didn’t. Then, it goes without saying that these calls for neutrality read as a stratagem for submission of the Lebanese Resistance against the israeli occupation.

 Evidently, it’s no longer viable to talk about neutrality as long as this neutrality only targets the Lebanese Resistance. As such, these calls for neutrality against the most successful, the most efficient mode of self reliance and owning the means of production, against the best organized resistance movement that this region has ever witnessed, are akin to calls of Fitna. It’s a sinister way to prey over peoples’ grievances and take advantage of their despair, a despair caused by the sectarian backed and protected Oligarchy, in order to mislead our attention towards the new Other among us as the source of all our ills in this notoriously dysfunctional consumerist entity. 

In this light the Lebanese neutrality canard is nothing but a narcissistic illusion augmented by those who would rather have “France recolonise us” or the American ambassador decide who is an “authentic” Lebanese and who’s not. How do you talk about “sovereignty” and “neutrality” while Israeli fighter jets are literally toying with your sovereignty and buzzing over your air conditioned loft?

Heads in the sand

 In light of the above one can visualise the latest othering of HA as a double othering that precludes the othering of the Shia as a social group. The trend of othering the Shia in this sense tends to point fingers and lay the responsibility for the failure of this country, at this tough juncture, solely on this one group among the many other social groups and bubbles. I had noticed signs of this double layered othering half-way through the uprising that swept over Lebanon. Then, I suddenly noticed an interesting feature increasingly present among curtain bubbles of middle-upper class theatrical activists who found it difficult to detach from their privileged narcissistic self. The pattern emerged after each setback to achieve any dent in the Lebanese political equation.

 Suddenly, one started spotting conversations on whatsapp groups sharing articles about “the need for the annihilation of HA as the only way for this revolution to succeed”. Themes like “the need to liberate the Shia” became a trend among some social media bubbles. And by the time coronavirus hit, the framing of Shia as an object of blame and the responsible group for this pandemic, exploded an avalanche of prejudice and racism. One found himself continually refuting and debunking sectarian classist myths that hijacked the public discourse for a minute. 

 One day I was walking towards Concord cinema from Hamra and two female friends bumped into each other in front of me, but suddenly one snapped and told the other: “Wait, don’t kiss me. They are saying that the Shia brought the Corona to the country.” Then, she instantly excused herself when she saw her friend’s perplexed face and pounced on her hugging and kissing. That passing scene that happened in a matter of a few seconds jumbled my stomach and hit me hard as it was compounded with the myths and rumors that were spreading and vibrating in my pocket. Even some of the middle-upper class hyper woke chumps started fluttering the not so subtle but casual hint that it (Corona) all came from Najaf. 

 This was another sign of how the politics of blaming the other had hijacked many perceptions during the economic collapse and was gradually targeting an integral part of the Lebanese population. The narcissist Lebanese pseudo-secular activist who parrots civil society and NGO cliches never checks his or her own privileges that enable them to indulge in deflecting criticism of their failure and instead points towards those who are dissimilar in their lifestyle and consumption habits.

 To keep on insisting on othering and dehumanizing the history of Palestinian resistance from Lebanon is to say that we have always been bystanders on the pages of history while others simply helped themselves into ruining our country. As a result, this discourse of dehumanisation translates in practice as a permission for violence; so that the chauvinist Lebanese male can vent his anger against those vilified bodies of the Palestinians and Syrians living amongst us. 

 To keep on insisting on othering those who gallantly evolved the means of resistance in our anti-colonial struggle is a typical isolationist move, one that lacks any foresight or insight to the new norm that has struck the whole world in 2020. 

 With the new norm that was ushered last May by the Sword of Jerusalem I find myself, as someone who was born in Beirut, imagining and visualising a new form of identity. I have been thinking, reading, writing and talking about Bilad el-Sham as a geo-historial stretch and the full representation of our roots. The other day I looked at the map and put my finger on the coastline from Beirut, then I slid to Gaza; then I suddenly found myself in Egypt. This made me think about how our ancestors, not a long time ago, were roaming freely across this homeland. As a result, today, I find myself repulsed by the myth of an “independent” or “neutral” Lebanon disjointed from its main body. Thus, my alienation at home will not be remedied unless this Lebanon is an organic integral part of historical Syria and Palestine.  

 The historical crossroad we are at right now does not feature a sign for isolationism. The sirens that exploded all over historical Palestine last May are the alarm sound of the times and a call to arms to learn from those, amongst us, who have perfected the organizational means of deterrence and survival. It’s the time to contemplate this: if the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine happened in the dark back in 1948, today the liberation of Palestine will be under the eye of the whole world. We need  to pay attention because this time around we mustn’t turn our face and abandon the Palestinians as they take down the last colonial trench in our land. The best place to be for the people of Greater Syria and the rest of the Arab world right now is where we always should be: behind our brethren in Palestine and on their side, so we could all partake in ending the source of our ills that have stunted our natural growth and disconnected us from our roots.