Monday 2.19.07 – Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi – Lebanon
Comments Off on Monday 2.19.07 – Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi – LebanonMonday 2.19.07 – Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi – Lebanon
1. About This Monday 2.19.07
2. About Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi
3. Lebanon on the Brink
4. THE WOES OF CONFESSIONALISM
5. We the Arabs, the Holocaust, and Palestine
6. links
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1. About This Monday 2.19.07
What: Talk / Discussion
When: Monday 2.19.07
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:30 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This monday we are delighted to have Comrade Fawwaz Taboulsi, one of the leaders of the Lebanese left, discuss the present situation in Lebanon. Fawwaz is also the founder of the Organization for Communist Action, 1970-1985, and has a long history in Lebanese resistance movement.
Many of us read Rasha’s and Walid’s Letters from Beirut …
8 Days of Being Under Siege – Rasha
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001949.php
2 letters from beirut -Walid
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001939.php
Questions did not stop since then. We are grateful to have Fawwaz this monday to unfold and connect more questions.
The evening will be introduced by Syrian writer Suhail Shadoud.
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2. About Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi
Fawwaz Traboulsi is Associate Professor of History and Politics at the Lebanese American University, Beirut-Lebanon. He has written on history, Arab politics, social movements and popular culture and translated works by Karl Marx, John Reed, Antonio Gramsci, Isaac Deutscher, John Berger, Etel Adnan, Sa`di Yusuf and Edward Said.
Fawwaz Traboulsi’s writings include: On an Incurable Hope (a journal of the siege of Beirut, summer 1982, 1984) Guernica-Beirut (a Picasso mural/an Arab city in war, 1987), an anthology of the writings of Ahmad Fâris al-Shidyâq (1995), Sûrat-al-Fata bi-l-Ahmar (a memoir, 1997), Silât Bilâ Wasl (a critique of political thought in Lebanon, 1998), Wu´ûd´Adan (a Yemen diary, 2000) and an Arabic translation of Edward Said’s Out of Place (2000).
His latest is The stranger, the Treasure and the Miracle (2005- a critical reading of the Musical Theatre of the Rahbani Brothers and the Lebanese Diva-Fayrouz) and a translation into Arabic of Edward Said’s posthumous work Humanism and Democratic Critique (2005). His most recent book ‚A History of Modern Lebanon,’ was published this January by Pluto Press, London.
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3. Lebanon on the Brink
by Fawwaz Traboulsi and Assaf Kfoury; January 18, 2007
[Introduction by Assaf Kfoury: The little country is exposed more than ever to the political storms east of the Mediterranean. In the following article, historian and long-time political commentator Fawwaz Traboulsi explains that the dangers faced by Lebanon today are, in part, the result of its “confessional system”. This system did not always exist and Lebanese were not ordained to live in it. Lebanese and other communities of the Levant existed for hundreds of years before this peculiarly factious power-sharing formula based on religious denominations was first introduced in the second half of the 19th Century, partly dictated by the balance in the contest between a declining Ottoman empire and encroaching European colonial powers. The latter sought out local partners (commercial agents, political allies, consular officers) among co-religionists or members of religious minorities, in exchange for special privileges and protection against Ottoman authorities. The arrangement was then adjusted and re-adjusted, but never abandoned, after every political upheaval ever since, always at the prodding if not behest of external actors. By tying the fate of the country to external interests, different for different confessional parties, the confessional system belies lofty proclamations by Lebanese politicians about “national independence” and voids that term of its meaning, as pointed out by Traboulsi.
The most recent version of the confessional setup, in place since the Taif Accord of October 1989 that ended the civil war, is a variation of a formula adopted in 1943 when France was forced to grant Lebanon its formal independence: the president of the republic must be a Maronite Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shia Muslim, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and parliament seats are equally divided between Christians and Muslims, with each of the two blocks divided among various Christian denominations and Muslim denominations in predetermined proportions. Even on the rare occasions when parliamentary candidates representing non-confessional interests are elected, they must fill seats that are allotted to the religious sects to which they belong. This effectively excludes all political parties that are organized on platforms other than confessional. Thus, for example, the Communist Party has never been represented as such in government in any capacity, even though it is the oldest political party in Lebanon (founded in 1924) and has had a strong presence in labor unions throughout its history.
The article below combines two columns by Fawwaz Traboulsi, which first appeared in Arabic in the Lebanese daily as-Safir. The first appeared on 24 November 2006, three days after the minister of industry Pierre Amin Gemayel was assassinated in broad daylight in Beirut. Gemayel belonged to the Christian Phalangist Party and was part of the so-called “March 14 coalition”, which supports the current government of Fuad Siniora. The traditional parades on Lebanese Independence Day, which falls on 22 November, were canceled and a state funeral was held for Gemayel on 23 November instead, which turned into a massive anti-Syrian demonstration by several hundreds of thousands in downtown Beirut.
The second column appeared on 7 December 2006, one week after the beginning of an open-ended sit-in in downtown Beirut by the opposition forces, represented by the “March 8 coalition”, which includes Hizbullah, the predominantly Christian Free Patriotic Movement led by former general Michel Aoun, and several extra-parliamentary parties.
The two columns complement each other and can be merged seamlessly, as they explain the many connections between the current crisis and the confessional system, in its external (the first column) and internal dimension (the second). In the combined translation of the two, the first column goes to the end of the first section in the text below, and the second column is rendered into the entire second section after minor omissions.
Who killed Gemayel? Walid Jumblat, a Druze leader in the pro-government March 14 coalition, accuses the Syrian secret services. Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hizbullah and a main party in the anti-government March 8 coalition, points his finger in the opposite direction, observing that the main beneficiaries this time are Israel and the US, not Syria. Political assassinations have been far too common in Lebanon in recent years and usually carried out on orders from the outside. Jumblat and Nasrallah may be short on the whole truth, but both have valid reasons to suspect their external enemies. Jumblat is publicly reported to be on the assassination list of the Syrian government and his own father, Kamal Jumblat, was murdered on Syrian directives. Nasrallah is openly declared to be an assassination target by the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and his predecessor as the head of Hizbullah, Abbas Musawi, was murdered in a raid by Israeli helicopter gunships. In these two cases, as with all other assassinations, the local victim came to represent an obstacle or the “fall guy” for the interests of powerful regional and international state actors. And the Lebanese body politic, instead of rallying to unite and defend itself in times of increased external dangers, is made to expose all its cleavages by the confessional system.
When a majority of the Lebanese unite, as when they overwhelmingly embraced resistance to the Israeli onslaught in July-August 2006, they do so at a spontaneous popular level and across confessional lines, largely ignoring confessional parties and their external sponsors that claim to represent their interests; that is, they do so despite the confessional system and against it.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11892
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4. THE WOES OF CONFESSIONALISM
by Fawwaz Traboulsi
In 1867, at another time of civil strife in Lebanon, a prominent Lebanese leader regretfully observed about the state of his own society that “tribes that are engaged in killing their own members for sectarian reasons deserve to be subjugated by foreign powers that come to the rescue of one faction against another” (Youssif Bey Karam addressing the Algerian emir Abdel Kader, then in exile in Damascus after his defeat by colonial France).
Today, as we watch confessional leaders in Lebanon holding forth on the meaning of national independence, we cannot but smile with sadness and hope for mercy, for ourselves and for those who believe these leaders and vote for them. They hold forth as if there is no connection between independence, or the lack thereof, and the confessional system, the latter remaining the main factor in creating conditions of subservience to external factors in Lebanese political life.
CAUGHT BETWEEN FALSE NOTIONS OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE
From the time when Youssif Bey Karam took notice of the golden rule connecting internal sectarian divisions and external domination, the Lebanese have yet to come to their senses and desist from this odious practice. Confessional leaders keep looking to the outside, for protection against impending marginalization, for maintaining a dominant position, or for keeping a monopoly of wealth and power against other confessional leaders. Seeking external support usually results in blunting internal dialogues and concessions to domestic opponents, which often exacerbates civil conflicts and in turn facilitates further external interference.
We must recognize that Lebanese parties have sought arms or external help, or both, in order to impose themselves on a rigid and factious political (and socio-economic) system that treats citizens differently, with different rights and privileges. In recent decades, major components of Lebanese society have thus achieved political and socio-economic ascendancy by force of arms and reliance on outside powers. In this way, for example, we can view the bloody events of 1958, pitting the Christian-dominated government of the Lebanese president Camille Chamoun against a coalition of parties mostly representing Sunni (and, to a certain extent, Druze) elites, which resulted in the empowerment of the latter within the confessional power-sharing system. Similarly, we can view the civil war of 1975-1990 as the means by which Shia elites acquired greater participation in the system, leading to a more equitable overall balance between Christians and Muslims in government institutions.
The question of Lebanese independence can never be separated from the three-way interaction of regional and international forces in which Lebanon has been caught since the colonial fragmentation of the Levant in 1920. Time and again in this history, two main regional actors reach an understanding of sorts, usually facilitated by a third international actor, which in turn imposes a settlement on the Lebanese. An accord between two major regional parties, coupled with international sanction, then allows for finalizing a new local arrangement and providing it with guarantees.
Thus, in 1943, Egypt under prime minister Mustafa Nahas Pasha, supported by Britain eager to evict France regionally, reached an understanding with the Syrian national movement which had sought independence from France and union with Lebanon. In this context, an agreement was reached between Lebanon and Syria, and also between Bechara al-Khoury and Riad al-Solh — soon to be the president and the prime minister of Lebanon, respectively, after independence from France — which came to be known as the Lebanese National Pact. And again, in 1958, an understanding between the United States and the United Arab Republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser permitted an end to the civil war in Lebanon and the selection of general Fuad Chehab as president in succession to Camille Chamoun, together with a renewal of the National Pact and an adjusted confessional setup.
So long as the logic of the confessional system prevails, when conditions are lacking for an agreement between regional and international actors, as was the case after the October 1973 war, the Lebanese proxies fail to reach a settlement among themselves and then resort to armed confrontation. Such was the explosion of 1975-1990. They then failed because some of their leaders continued to rely on the outside to extricate their parties from the internal stalemate or because they were under the illusion that the external party to which they were connected would likely prevail in the regional or international balance of forces.
There is no need to dwell at length on the different discourses on national independence emanating from different Lebanese parties, all couched in absolutes and expressing inflexible ultimate goals. In an increasingly interdependent world where far larger countries, such as the Russian Federation for example with its enormous natural resources and industrial potential, still struggle to achieve a margin of independence via-a-vis the American empire, there are politicians in tiny Lebanon who will not accept anything short of an absolute notion of independence. They talk about complete independence in a country whose economy is almost entirely dependent on the outside, engaged as it is in exporting most of its labor force and importing virtually all material goods, whose national debt is nearly three times its annual gross domestic product (the highest ratio for any country in the world), and where confessional parties are increasingly made to rely on, and do the bidding of, their respective external allies.
Let us, more concretely, consider the question of Lebanon’s independence in the context of current regional circumstances. The United States, now bogged down in a bloody occupation in Iraq, is scrambling for new options to realign its policies in the region and cut its losses, especially after the setbacks of the Republican Party in the most recent midterm elections. American policies are now less predictable and will continue to shift in coming months. Some in Washington still suggest a more aggressive approach to Iran, including bombing of its nuclear installations, but others counsel engaging Iran and prodding it to play a special regional role that will help extricate US troops from the Iraqi quagmire. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a complex diplomatic dance between Washington and Damascus, at times aiming at distancing Syria from Iran and encouraging it to play a “positive” role in Iraq, but at other times accusing Syria of terrorism and threatening to bring it to accounts in the International Tribunal set up to pursue Rafiq Hariri’s killers.
In such circumstances, which are bound to affect the entire region in ways that are difficult to foresee, should Lebanese parties not call for a truce in their internal show of force and take note of the surrounding storms? Should they not take pause and stop betting on illusory victories against each other? Should the little wounded country that is Lebanon not be navigated cautiously through these regional storms? Is it not utter foolishness on the part of some Lebanese players to presume there are two sides — one American-Israeli and one Iranian-Syrian — and one of the two must be joined? Should they not recognize that, in order to prepare themselves for external dangers, there is only one thing that they can truly control: their own internal affairs?
Till now we have lost the battle for independence twice, or more precisely, we have lost two battles for independence in little more than a year. On the one hand, the leaders of the 2005 independence movement against Syrian domination have forgotten the continuing Israeli threat and decided to put their trust in what appears to them the juggernaut of the American empire after September 11. On the other hand, the leaders of the May 2000 liberation of southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation and the July 2006 resistance to Israeli aggression have failed to convince the rest of the Lebanese that they can act independently of Syrian priorities. The negotiations for a government of national unity broke down because each of the two camps sought to block the dictates of the other camp’s external ally. The two camps thus acted as if Lebanese policy and decision are fated to follow external dictates. And both camps demonstrated that their “independence” is a total sham.
THE INTERNAL CRISIS
The current polarization in Lebanon cannot be limited to the proclaimed political disagreements — be they on the international tribunal pursuing the Hariri assassination, or on the makeup of a national unity government, or on the extent to which local parties are goaded by external and regional forces. These should all be read as a cipher, for us to decode the underlying socio-economic conflicts in relation to the various confessional communities. Not only because politics in Lebanon has become inextricably tied to the confessional system, but also because the two opposite camps have markedly different confessional compositions.
Whereas the weight of the Maronite community is about equal in both camps, the vast majority of the Shia community (represented by Hizbullah and Amal) support the March 8 coalition, and the vast majority of the Sunni and Druze communities support the March 14 coalition.
The March 8 coalition wants changes in government and national policies, the March 14 coalition is opposed. The side demanding changes include two mass movements that are relative newcomers to the fray of Lebanese politics: Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement (the latter led by former army general Michel Aoun). Both of these movements were marginalized or kept away from politics during the time of Syrian domination in Lebanon, in the years following the Taif Accord of 1989. During that time, while the FPM was excluded from politics by the forced exile of its leaders or by internal repression, Hizbullah was almost entirely engaged in resisting the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. This marginalization had similar implications on the social makeup of both movements, as they both drew their support from segments of an emerging middle class and from inhabitants of disfavored suburbs surrounding the capital. Both parties thus drew closer as their constituencies had been largely kept away from government institutions and the civil service, and both had mostly drawn their livelihood from the private sector of the economy.
This has been the foundation of the alliance between Hizbullah and the FPM, which are now united in their demand for a bigger role in national affairs, as they both call for a national unity government in which they together control a blocking third of the ministerial seats. This demand from the FPM for a larger share in power responds to a profound desire among many Christian sectors to reverse the marginalization they have endured since the years of Syrian domination. The same demand from Hizbullah is a means to shield itself from various political plans to disarm it and diminish it after Israel’s massive military onslaught in July-August 2006 failed to achieve the same goals. Both the FPM and Hizbullah now insist on their right to be at the center of the executive branch, as the latter will determine in coming months conditions under which a new electoral law will be enacted and a new president of the republic elected.
The Taif Accord of 1989 redistributed power among the three top positions in the confessional setup, namely, those of the president of the republic (Maronite), the prime minister (Sunni) and the speaker of parliament (Shiite). While restoring some of what the presidency lost after the Taif Accord, and with it a sense of Christian empowerment, will have to await a new electoral law and the next presidential elections in November 2007, the current contest on the distribution of ministerial posts between the two opposite camps will affect immediately the balance between the three centers of power in the confessional setup. The issue of the “blocking third” did not raise much of a debate before the May 2005 parliamentary elections; consisting of ministers allied to the presidency, the “blocking third” was considered a measure accorded to the president to compensate for his curtailed power after the Taif Accord, as the council of ministers practically became the main framework within which he could exercise his prerogatives. In the current crisis, however, granting a “blocking third” to Hizbullah and its allies may introduce a new element in the confessional power-sharing formula, namely, it will give more weight to the Shia community within the council of ministers, hitherto considered a preserve for Sunni political influence.
Regardless of how much the preceding is a factor in causing it, the current political crisis cannot be resolved by simply inviting ministers affiliated with the March 8 coalition to rejoin their posts — and then insisting that it will be “business as usual” in government affairs. While the two sides raise the stakes in their declarations and denunciations of each other, they naturally compete in repudiating any hint of civil strife and inviting everyone to bury the idea, as if it is merely a contest of slogans and public pronouncements.
What is particularly worrisome in all of this is that the confessional system has reasserted itself anew as a regime of obstruction and gridlock. It has frustrated the different confessional groups partaking in it, thus encouraging them to bypass or finagle the Taif Accord and the constitution, while they all proclaim their commitment to both and compete in denying the need for any changes in either.
The confessional system has shown once more the extent to which it is divorced from ordinary people’s concerns. It forces people to squeeze out their rights — if it accords them such rights at all — through the pinholes of their confessional affiliations. It is a system where confessional leaders, whose function in times past was to distribute benefits and services to their respective communities, are now in effect left to distribute the debts of a stagnant and heavily indebted national economy.
Something has to give. The deadlock has to be broken. In the past, the Lebanese polity solved its crises by removing people through internal killing or forced emigration, or else by having besieged internal parties impose themselves through force of arms and recourse to their external allies. Will the current crisis be resolved in the same way? Do we change the system of government or do we change the people it governs? This is the fundamental question. And only by addressing it squarely can a dialogue between Lebanese parties prevent the catastrophe.
Assaf Kfoury is a mathematician, computer scientist, and political activist. An Arab American who grew up in Beirut and Cairo, he is currently Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. This essay will appear in a forthcoming anthology, The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, with a foreword by Rashid Khalidi. Interlink Publishing, Spring 2007. An earlier version, based on the first section in the article, was posted on CounterPunch.
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5. We the Arabs, the Holocaust, and Palestine
by Fawwaz Traboulsi; December 18, 2006
[Translator’s note: The following article first appeared in the Beirut daily as-Safir of 14 December 2006. Its author, Fawwaz Traboulsi, is a historian, long-time political commentator, and weekly columnist for as-Safir. In this piece Traboulsi is addressing an Arab audience. The original title in Arabic “We, the Holocaust, and Palestine” was thus rendered into “We the Arabs, the Holocaust, and Palestine.” — Assaf Kfoury]
The two-day Tehran conference on the Holocaust, on December 11 and 12, was attended by an assortment of well-known Holocaust deniers from Europe and Australia, by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, by anti-Zionist orthodox rabbis, and by many others. In a speech to the conference, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad predicted that Israel would disappear just as the Soviet Union did. The majority of the participants vied in denying the Holocaust, maintaining it is a myth, or putting in doubt the number of its victims. Nevertheless, the conference concluded with the announcement of the formation of an international committee to investigate the facts about the Holocaust.
The Tehran conference epitomizes a kind of discourse on the Holocaust, Zionism and the state of Israel in general, which is in vogue among certain Arab (and Iranian) elites. At one time, such conferences and this kind of discourse were a specialty of the Libyan regime of Colonel Gaddafi. Today, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran that has taken over the role. The discourse in question is fraught with delusions, a form of hallucination which is at once obsessed with the West and incapable of breaking away from it.
One side of this discourse is the urge to engage the West. More specifically, they want to do this on terms understood by Western democrats opposed to Nazism. They thus make analogies between Zionism and Nazism as a way to explain the hideous crimes perpetrated by Israel’s aggressive policies. “Just as you fought Nazism in the past, we too fight Zionism today,” declared a Lebanese legislator from Hizbullah to visiting Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, a few days ago. The comparison triggered a political storm in France, still blowing unabated and fanned by right-wing French politicians trying to score points against Royal.
But there is a second side of the same discourse, contradicting the first. This is the desire of some Arabs (and Iranians) to emulate the Nazis and identify with them. Their unstated premise is: “Too bad he didn’t finish them off”. The “he” is Hitler and the “them” is of course the Jews. To these Arabs (and Iranians) we can apply the saying “the suspect nearly asked to be indicted” — in that they can barely veil their genocidal intentions. They wish to be associated with the Nazi crime or to complete a crime left unfinished by the Nazis!
What business do the Arabs have in all of this? The crime occurred in Europe, committed by Europeans against other Europeans. Nevertheless, in internal European debates on the Holocaust, many Arabs find it opportune to intervene and take sides — on the wrong side! Thus, a number of Arab intellectuals hurried to vent their support for Günter Grass this past August, when his confession, that he had served in the Waffen SS as a 17-year-old at the end of WW2, unleashed a fierce controversy in Germany. This should not diminish in any way our concern for the human tragedy resulting from the Nazi crimes, and its implications for the rest of us, in particular Arabs. Between 1942 and 1945, the Nazi regime organized the genocidal extermination of the Jews and the Gypsies, in a massive campaign that also went after anti-Nazi resisters in occupied territories, after Catholics and after communists, of various nationalities and political orientations. But just to recall: While Nazi theories of the master race ranked the Jews among the lowest racial groups, one group they considered still inferior to the Jews were … the Arabs!
Although the Zionist movement started several decades earlier, the Holocaust was the main event that contributed to the success of its project for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The Holocaust supplied Jewish emigration to Palestine with hundreds of thousands of refugees running away from the Nazi inferno, just as it aroused an enormous sympathy for the victims of Nazism that Zionism succeeded in mobilizing to its advantage in pursuit of its project in Palestine.
Yes, Zionism and Israel have exploited the Holocaust to justify their policies in Palestine. Serious critics of Zionism, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, have shown how the exploitation of the Holocaust was turned into an “industry” after the June 1967 war. Note carefully: The focus on Israel as a refuge for the remnants of the Nazi genocide came after, not before, the Israeli victory in that war! This has become by now a familiar tactic of Zionist propaganda: Claiming the role of the victim while acting as the executioner.
How can we ever hope to make a convincing contribution to the unmasking of the “Holocaust industry” if we deny Nazi crimes against the Jews? How can we ever hope to draw attention to the crimes of the “new Nazis” against the Palestinian people if we decrease the number of victims of the historical Nazis? What is the significance of making comparisons between Nazism and Zionism, in order to denounce the latter, if we also exonerate the Nazis of their greatest historical crime, which is the Holocaust? And is this not the mirror image of what the Zionists have done when they appropriate the role of victims and deny the Palestinians of even claiming they are victims?
Two further remarks must be added.
First, in saying that Israel will disappear just as the Soviet Union disappeared, President Ahmadinejad seemed to draw inspiration from a time-honored practice of the European and American far right, which conflates Judaism with communism and spreads the canard of a “Jewish-communist conspiracy” to control the world. If Iran’s president cared for the cause of the Palestinian people, he would know that the “disappearance” of the Soviet Union contributed to the strengthening, not weakening, of the state of Israel in pursuit of its aggressive policies. But closer to home, if President Ahmadinejad had reviewed the reports of the Iranian embassy in Beirut, he would have discovered that, in the most recent international conference in support of the Lebanese resistance and Hizbullah, held in Beirut at the end of November 2006, the majority of the participants belonged to the secular left, including Marxist and communists of different orientations.
Second, would it not be more appropriate for the Islamic Republic of Iran to help instead organize an international commission of inquiry into the crimes committed by the state of Israel against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples? And into the use of forbidden weapons by the Israeli army in its war on Lebanon in July and August 2006?
This writer is on record for supporting the right of the Islamic Republic of Iran to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and even to possess a nuclear option until there is an agreement to ban all nuclear arms in the region. But this should not prevent us from criticizing policies pursued by the Iranian regime, both internal and external, and from strongly condemning some of its practices, including its recent campaign against secular activists, among which are now clerics calling for the separation of religion and state. This critique is not just a right, but a duty for all of us.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=11665
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6. links
in french
http://www.111101.net/Writings/Author/Fawwaz_Traboulsi/
other
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11892