Representatives of Lebanon's religious communities stand with protesters behind a banner reading "We only have each other" as they take part in a demonstration against the possibility of a civil war outside the National Museum of Beirut on May 31, 2012. AA/ABACA/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Ever since it was created by the French colonial (or mandatory)
authorities in 1920, Lebanon was dotted by all sorts of ideological, social,
and economic contradictions. The
cultural identity of the new polity has always been at the core of these
contradictions.
Two competing ‘visions of Lebanon’[1]
– in Albert Hourani’s memorable words – emerged at the time: Lebanism and
Arabism, associated respectively with the Christian and Muslim communities.
Whereas the former anchored Lebanon’s identity, cultural
orientation, and foreign policy in the west, the latter insisted on the new
country’s Arab origins, culture, and political choices. Ultimately, as Hourani
noted, new visions of Lebanon would emerge, but especially that championed by
Lebanon’s (then) ascending Shia community.
A recent debate suggests that a century later, and after several
civil wars and invasions, not much has changed in how different Lebanese
communities invent and reinvent their national identities, with devastating consequences
for the prospects of living peacefully in a deeply divided society.
It is a classic example of what Julien Benda famously labelled
La Trahison des Clercs, in this case the treason of sectarian entrepreneurs
bent on stirring political discord for purely populist purposes. Its main
protagonists are two MPs: the Sunni Khaled al-Daher and the Maronite
Neamatallah Abi Nasr.
Daher is behind a proposal in Parliament demanding the state
recognize a new official weekend, Friday and Sunday, instead of the commonly
practiced western weekend. After all, Daher contends, Friday is the standard
Islamic holiday in most Muslim countries. He is supported by no other than the
Sunni Mufti of the republic.
In response, Abi Nasr introduced a proposal demanding that 1
September, the date commemorating the French declaration of the founding of Grand
Liban in 1920, also be declared a national holiday.
The first proposal would cut Lebanon off western economies for one
full day, and is bound to be ignored in Christian areas and by many private
schools. The second would add another useless holiday in a national calendar
laden with sectarian vacations. After all, in Lebanon each sect celebrates the
holiday that best fits its own vision of Lebanon and ignores those of other
communities. At least for now, both proposals are buried in barren
parliamentary committees.
Here we have an example of sectarian entrepreneurs deploying
populism callously at the service of mobilizing sectarian votes and electoral
constituencies, always at the expense of the greater national good. It is also
a vivid reminder of how the ‘invented’ foundational visions of what Lebanon is
and should be have changed little since 1920.
For embedded in Daher’s proposal is the insistence that Lebanon is
first and foremost a Muslim Arab country; its Muslim cultural identity supplants
any other mongrel or composite one. By contrast, Abi Nasr’s counter proposal attempts
to celebrate Lebanon’s Christian western orientation. It should be viewed as a
demographic minority’s struggle to defend its own vision of Lebanon and its
political economic role in it, now and in the future, against what it views as an
irreversible Islamisation of the country.
Such binaries do not build an intercultural nation at peace with
its diversity, however; they raise communities ghettoised behind sectarian barricades.
We have a devastating glimpse into the psychological workings of
these barricades in Toni (a diehard supporter of the Maronite Lebanese Forces);
he is one of the main protagonists in Lebanese cinematographer, film director,
and writer Ziad Doueiri’s new film The Insult (2017).
Doueiri’s first, semi-autobiographical, movie West Beirut (1998) took
Lebanon by storm as it followed the lives of two young boys growing up during
the civil war in Beirut. The film ignited debates about the war and Lebanon’s
cultural identity and political divisions. The Insult continues this critical interrogation
of the war and its memory.
A confrontation between Toni and Yasser, a Palestinian engineer working
illegally for a Lebanese contractor over an illegal water pipe blows out of
proportion and divides the country along religious and political lines.
An insult by Yasser enrages Toni, who decides to sue him, a
situation that becomes more complicated after Yasser throws a fist at Toni when
the latter makes a hateful reference to Ariel Sharon and the Palestinians.
Toni is haunted by wartime memories, but especially the massacre
perpetrated against the inhabitants of his southern Christian village, Damour,
by (pro-Syrian) Palestinian guerrillas. He is obsessed by what he takes to be the
marginalisation of the Christians in post-war Lebanon. He feels that, like the
Palestinians, post-war Christians have become ‘the victims of the victims’. He
seeks refuge in assassinated Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel’s wartime speeches berating
the Palestinians as the cause of all of Lebanon’s miseries, and in his
unshakable post-war support of the Lebanese Forces and its leader – who, oddly,
comes out in the film as a bigger than life character.
The spectacle in the courtroom, as the lawyers build their cases
against or in defence of Yasser, reveals a country still divided along mainly
religious lines, and the failure of post-war generations to interrogate
critically the horrors – more precisely, the many massacres – committed during
the war.
This is almost virgin territory in a country where – unlike other post-war
societies, whether in Rwanda, South Africa, or East Timur – no truth and
reconciliation commissions were established after the end of the civil war.
Amnesia was considered a better elixir than truth-telling.
Doueiri seems to suggest that there is no hope for true post-war
reconciliation unless the Lebanese face up to, and seek the truth behind, their
past crimes. At this level, all are war victims: Christian, Muslims, and
Palestinians.
Doueiri’s movie is
not unproblematic, however. It rightly introduces a new generation of Lebanese to
devastating footage of the horrific 1976 Damour massacre, but there is no
mention of the countless other massacres committed on all sides of the
barricades, or of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres perpetrated by
Lebanese Forces militias bent on avenging Bashir’s assassination – this, despite the aforementioned reference to Sharon, one
that prompted Yasser to assault Toni in the first place.
There is also something odd about Doueiri’s insistence on privileging
religious (Muslim-Christian) and national (Lebanese-Palestinian) divisions over
what are currently more powerful sectarian divisions.
This is not to say that religious divisions are not important in post-war
Lebanon, as the aforementioned Daher-Abi Nasr episode suggests. But Toni’s fixations
with the threat of the Palestinian ‘other’ seems to belong to a different time,
and may have been overtaken by what many Christians now consider to be more
dangerous Sunni and Shia ‘others’.
But perhaps this is what irks Toni so much: that his community is
doomed politically and culturally, and has simply replaced one existential
threat by another.
On this view, then, Doueiri wants post-war generations to realise
that nothing has changed in their country; that different generations invent
their own visions of Lebanon, and in the process their own demonized others. A
perfect recipe for perpetual disasters.
[1] Albert Hourani,
“Visions of Lebanon,” in Toward a Viable Lebanon, ed. Halim Barakat
(Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1988).