But in order to make that state economically viable, the Maronites appealed to France to include in it not only their traditional Mt. Lebanon enclave—which was about 80 percent Christian and 20 percent Druse—but also the predominantly Sunni Muslim cities of the coast—Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre—as well as the Shiite Muslim regions of south Lebanon, the Akkar, and the Bekaa Valley. In this “Greater Lebanon,” the Maronites and other Christian sects comprised only slightly more than 51 percent of the population, according to the 1932 census.
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In 1920 the Maronite leadership managed to convince France to set up a Lebanese state which the Maronites and the other smaller Christian sects allied to them would dominate. But in order to make that state economically viable, the Maronites appealed to France to include in it not only their traditional Mt. Lebanon enclave—which was about 80 percent Christian and 20 percent Druse—but also the predominantly Sunni Muslim cities of the coast—Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre—as well as the Shiite Muslim regions of south Lebanon, the Akkar, and the Bekaa Valley. In this “Greater Lebanon,” the Maronites and other Christian sects comprised only slightly more than 51 percent of the population, according to the 1932 census. The Sunni and Shiite Muslims roped into this new state of “Greater Lebanon” were not consulted, and many of them deeply resented it, since they would have preferred to become part of Syria—with its Arab-Muslim majority and orientation.
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Despite the initial reluctance of the Sunnis and Shiites to be drawn into the Maronites’ Greater Lebanon, their leaders eventually reached a political understanding with the Christians in 1943 that enabled the Lebanese republic to become independent of France. The Muslims agreed to abandon their demands for unity with Syria, while the Maronites agreed to sever their ties with France and accept the notion that Lebanon would be an “Arab” country. This unwritten agreement, known as the National Pact, also stipulated that the Lebanese President would always be a Maronite and that the parliament would always have a 6:5 ratio of Christians to Muslims—to ensure Christian predominance—while the Prime Minister would always be a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the Parliament always a Shiite—to ensure the country’s Arab-Muslim character.
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This understanding held up as long as the Maronites and other Christians made up roughly 50 percent of the population. But by the 1970s, rapid demographic growth among Lebanon’s Muslims had turned Lebanon upside down. The Christians had shrunk to a little more than one-third of the population and the Muslims and Druse had grown to roughly two-thirds, with the Shiites becoming the largest single community in the country. When the Muslims demanded that political reforms be instituted to give them a greater share in power by strengthening the role of the Muslim Prime Minister, the Maronites resisted. They wanted Lebanon on its original terms or none at all. In order to support the status quo, the Maronites formed private armies. Most notable among them were the Phalangist militia, originally founded by Pierre Gemayel and later led by his son Bashir, and the Tigers militia founded by former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun and later led by his son Danny; the Lebanese Muslims and Druse established similar private armies to enforce their desire for change.
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Matters came to a head in Jordan in September 1970, when radical Palestinian guerrillas brought to Jordan three hijacked airliners and prevented the Jordanian army from getting near the planes or rescuing the passengers. Recognizing that he was on the verge of losing control over his whole kingdom, King Hussein decided to wipe out Arafat and his men once and for all by launching a full-scale offensive against the PLO-dominated Palestinian refugee camps and neighborhoods in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The PLO guerrillas responded by calling for Hussein’s overthrow and vowing to wrest Jordan from his hands. In the end, King Hussein, who was supported by both Jordan’s Bedouin-dominated army and many East Bank Palestinians who appreciated the order and prosperity the King had brought to their lives, prevailed. Arafat was forced to flee Amman disguised as an Arab woman.
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Arafat and his men, most of whom were Muslims, were welcomed by the Lebanese Muslims and Druse, who identified with their cause and, more important, thought they could use the PLO guerrillas to bring pressure on the Maronite Christians to share more power. The already serious strains between Lebanese Muslims and Lebanese Christians intensified in the early 1970s as the PLO increasingly used Lebanon as a launching pad for operations against Israel, and Israel responded by wreaking havoc on Lebanon. The Lebanese Christians demanded that the Lebanese army be deployed to break the PLO state-within-a-state the way King Hussein had in Jordan. The Christians wanted the PLO out not only because it was disrupting Lebanese life but because without the Palestinian guerrillas, the Lebanese Muslims would be unable to press their demands for more power. The Muslims, in turn, opposed any crackdown on the PLO, which, in effect, had become their biggest private militia
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The visitors who learned to respect the surprises that a place like Beirut could offer did well there; others, like the American Marines or the Israelis, who never really understood the shocks that could greet you around any Beirut street corner, paid heavily.
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After spending nearly five years in Beirut, I eventually developed the imagination the city demanded. I came to think of Beirut as a huge abyss, the darkest corner of human behavior, an urban jungle where not even the law of the jungle applied. Experiencing such an abyss not only left scars but also new muscles. Life can no longer deal you many surprises or shocks after you’ve lived in Beirut. The experience leaves you wearing an emotional bulletproof vest. But like everyone else who lived there, I acquired mine the hard way.
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This instinctive desire to bring order and comfort to one’s life amid chaos is precisely what gave Beirut its distinctive and bizarre flavor—a flavor best captured for me in a single sentence uttered by a Lebanese socialite who had invited an American friend of mine for dinner on Christmas Eve. The elegant holiday banquet was held at her apartment near the Green Line, a swath of gutted and burned-out buildings that formed the no-man’s-land between predominantly Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut. On this particular Christmas Eve in 1983, despite the holiday, rival Christian and Muslim militiamen were trading artillery salvos and machine-gun fire into the early evening, rocking the whole neighborhood. The hostess put off serving dinner, hoping things would settle down, but she could see that her friends were getting hungry, not to mention nervous. Finally, in an overture you won’t find in Emily Post’s book of etiquette, she turned to her guests and asked, “Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?”
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Beirut was the bridge in East Beirut with a sign at its foot which read: NO TANKS ALLOWED.
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When I asked Khaled Saab, the Summerland’s cherubic general manager during my tenure in Beirut, about his well-armed team of bellhops, he demurred, “I wouldn’t call [them] a militia, but let’s just say if ten or fifteen armed men came here and wanted to cause trouble, we could handle them.”
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Even when Beirut was at its most chaotic, the Lebanese figured out a way to profit from the vagaries of their own anarchy. They did this by speculating on their currency, the Lebanese pound.
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Why do people even bother learning to cope with such an environment? To be sure, thousands of Beirutis haven’t bothered; they simply emigrated. But many more have stayed. For some, Beirut is simply home and they cannot imagine living anywhere else, no matter how badly the quality of life in the city deteriorates. Others are captives of their assets. The homes or businesses they have spent lifetimes building are anchored in Beirut, and they simply cannot afford to start over somewhere else. Better, they say, to be rich and terrorized in Beirut than safe and poor in Paris. Still others cannot obtain visas to take up residence in other countries because the quotas for Lebanese have already been filled. So they learn to adapt, because they don’t have any other choice.
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In an attempt to make the anxiety this produced more controllable, the Lebanese would simply invent explanations for the unnatural phenomena happening around them; they would impose an order on the chaos. Their explanations for why someone was killed or why a certain battle broke out were usually the most implausible, wild-eyed conspiracy theories one could imagine. These conspiracies, as the Lebanese painted them, featured either the Israelis, the Syrians, the Americans, the Soviets, or Henry Kissinger—anyone but the Lebanese—in the most elaborate plots to disrupt Lebanon’s naturally tranquil state.
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My associate Ihsan Hijazi once told me, “When the civil war first started, if I heard there was fighting in the Bekaa Valley—fifty miles away—I would get the kids from school and bring them home. That was fourteen years ago. Today, if I hear fighting down the street, I ignore it. If I hear it outside my building, I move away from the windows into a safer room. I only start to worry now if the fighting is outside my own door—literally on my doorstep. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist for me. I just ignore it, and turn up the volume on my television.”
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There is no truth in Beirut, only versions. —Bill Farrell
Middle East correspondent
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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While I aimed to be rigorously objective, and he knew it, he also knew I was not one of the PLO groupies—those members of the press corps, mostly Europeans, who unquestioningly swallowed everything the PLO fed them.
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While I insist that the intimidating atmosphere of Beirut never prevented a major breaking news story from being covered in some way, there were, however, some slightly less immediate—yet important—stories which were deliberately ignored out of fear. Here I will be the first to say “mea culpa.” How many serious stories were written from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the PLO leadership, the misuse of funds, and the way in which the organization had become as much a corporation full of bureaucratic hacks as a guerrilla outfit? These traits were precisely the causes of the rebellion against Arafat after the summer of ’82, but it would be hard to find any hint of them in Beirut reporting before the Israeli invasion. The truth is, the Western press coddled the PLO and never judged it with anywhere near the scrutiny that it judged Israeli, Phalangist, or American behavior. For any Beirut-based correspondent, the name of the game was keeping on good terms with the PLO, because without it you would not get the interview with Arafat you wanted when your foreign editor came to town. The overfocusing by reporters on the PLO and its perception of events also led them to ignore the Lebanese Shiites and their simmering wrath at the Palestinians for turning their villages in south Lebanon into battlefields.
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Moreover, during the summer of ’82 when the Israelis were pummeling West Beirut, and the Palestinian cause was on the line, it should be noted that the first journalists to run out of town were the Arabs: the Kuwaiti, Saudi, Qatari, and other Arab journalists were nowhere to be found at the height of the Israeli siege. It was only the “Zionist Western media” that stuck around in West Beirut to tell the story, and it was the “Zionist” New York Times that ran a four-page reconstruction of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila—more extensive than any other newspaper in the world.
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After the kidnappings began in Beirut, I acquired a healthy respect for how little I had really penetrated the place. I gained an equally healthy respect for the notion that the real story is often found not in the noise but in the silence—and that is why it is so often missed. I now live by an adaptation of Groucho Marx’s famous line that any club that would have me as a member I wouldn’t want to join. My version is that any protagonist in the Middle East who is ready to talk to me cannot be worth talking to; he cannot be at the center of what is happening. It’s the people who won’t talk to me whom I really want to meet.
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I think the best way to understand what happened in Hama is to understand that politics in the Middle East is a combination of three different political traditions all operating at the same time.
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The first and oldest of these traditions is tribe-like politics.
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What you never do in the desert, though, is allow concessions to be arbitrarily imposed on you. If someone steals half your water, you can never say, “Well, this time I will let it go, but don’t ever let me catch you doing it again,” because in this world of lone wolves, anyone who becomes viewed as a sheep is in trouble—a point underscored by the Bedouin legend about the old man and his turkey.
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Rifaat understood that in a world of lone wolves it is much safer—as Machiavelli himself taught—to be feared than to be loved. Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.
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The reason one can still find such tribe-like conflicts at work in the Middle East today is that most peoples in this part of the world, including Israeli Jews, have not fully broken from their primordial identities, even though they live in what appear on the surface to be modern nation-states. Their relatively new nation-states are still abstractions in many ways, for reasons which I will explain shortly. That is why Hafez al-Assad, even though he was the President of Syria, could order the killing of 20,000 of his own citizens. Because on some level Assad did not see the Sunni Muslim residents of Hama as part of his nation, or as fellow citizens. He saw them as members of an alien tribe—strangers in the desert—who were trying to take his turkey.
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The second deeply rooted political tradition of the Middle East one could find at work in Hama is authoritarianism—the concentration of power in a single ruler or elite not bound by any constitutional framework.
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Because primordial, tribe-like loyalties governed men’s identities and political attitudes so deeply, the peoples of the Middle East (as elsewhere in the world for many centuries) rarely created nation-states of their own through which they could rule themselves and be strong enough to withstand foreign invaders. The warring tribes, clans, sects, neighborhoods, cities, and hinterlands could not find a way to balance the intimacy and cohesion of their tribe-like groups with the demands of a nation-state that would be run by certain neutral rules and values to which everyone agreed. Most peoples in the area simply could not achieve the level of consensus needed for such a polity. Rare was the clan or sect that would voluntarily let itself be ruled by another, and rarer still was the town or village that would voluntarily submit to the hinterland or vice versa.
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Precisely because so many brutal authoritarians rose up in the history of the Middle East, an entire body of Islamic political theory developed to justify even their style of rule—despite the fact that this style contravened all the precepts of Islamic political law, which demanded fair and consultative government.
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Middle Eastern societies were primarily merchant societies, which dreaded chaos and feared what might happen if control from above was eliminated and all their tribes and sects went at each other. Therefore, Islamic political thinkers gradually began to argue that obedience to even the cruelest, most illegitimate, non-Islamic despot, who at least kept some order, was preferable to the greater evil of a society left to the depredations of endless internal warfare. Or, as the ancient Arabic proverb put it: “Better sixty years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.”
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In the most homogeneous Arab countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, and in those countries where the rulers have won a high degree of consent from their people, such as in King Hussein’s Jordan, King Hassan’s Morocco, King Fahd’s Saudi Arabia, and all the Gulf sheikdoms, the gentle Ottoman authoritarian tradition is very much in evidence today. To be sure, the sword is always there in these countries, but generally out of sight. These regimes have a good deal of legitimacy in the eyes of their people and hence they can afford to rule with a good deal of restraint: coopting opponents, even sharing a degree of power and allowing for some freedom of the press and expression. This accounts for the generally relaxed atmosphere one can find in these Arab states—provided one doesn’t try to challenge the man in charge.
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However, in those Arab countries where the societies are highly fragmented between different particularistic tribe-like sects, clans, and villages, and where the modern rulers have not been able to achieve much legitimacy—most notably Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and North and South Yemen—the more brutal authoritarian tradition is in evidence. Restraint and magnanimity are luxuries of the self-confident, and the rulers of these countries are anything but secure on their thrones.
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Assad and Saddam Hussein have survived longer than any other modern autocrats in Syria or Iraq—Assad has been in power since 1970, Saddam since 1968—not only because they have been brutal (many of their predecessors were just as brutal), but because they have been brutal and smart. They have no friends, only agents and enemies; they maintain overlapping intelligence agencies that spy on each other, the army, and the people, not just neighboring countries; they use everything that the twentieth century has to offer in the way of surveillance technology in order to extend the government’s grip far and wide, so that no corner of the country is outside their control; they never waste time murdering those whom they hate—such as Jews or Communists—but only those who are dangerous, like those closest to them; and most important, they know not just when to go all the way against their opponents but when to stop before overreaching themselves. Men like Assad and Saddam are dangerous and long-lasting because they are extremists who know when to stop. They are a rare breed. Most extremists don’t know when to stop, which is why they ultimately do themselves in by going too far for too long. But these men know how to insert the knife right through the heart of one opponent, and then invite all the others to dinner.
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But tribalism and authoritarianism together still cannot fully explain Hama or Middle East politics today. There is a third tradition at work, a tradition imposed from abroad in the early twentieth century by the last group of imperial invaders of the region, the British, French, and Italians: the modern nation-state.
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As a result, these states were like lifeboats into which various ethnic and religious communities, each with their own memories and their own rules of the game, were thrown together and in effect told to row in unison, told to become a nation, told to root for the same soccer team and salute the same flag. Instead of the state growing out of the nation, the nation was expected to grow out of the state.
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Whatever mode Assad and Saddam are in, though, I am certain that they never fool themselves about the underlying tribe-like and autocratic natures of their societies. They always understand the difference between the mirage and the oasis, between the world and the word, between what men say they are and what they really are. They always know that when push comes to shove, when the modern veneer of nation-statehood is stripped away, it all still comes down to Hama Rules: Rule or die. One man triumphs, the others weep. The rest is just commentary. I am convinced that there is only one man in Israel Hafez Assad ever feared and that is Ariel Sharon, because Assad knew that Sharon, too, was ready to play by Hama Rules. Assad knew Sharon well; he saw him every morning when he looked in the mirror.
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Life did not imitate art in Beirut; it was art. With a little money and a mimeograph machine, you could buy whatever identity you wanted in Beirut. Just by putting up one checkpoint manned by two teenage thugs on a busy highway in Beirut, you could turn yourself into a four-star general, a political party, a tax collector—hell, you could be a whole liberation movement if you wanted. The law of Lebanese politics was: I have a checkpoint, therefore I exist.
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Whatever one thinks of the former Israeli general and Defense Minister, Sharon did not play games with his enemies. He killed them. After a few years in Beirut, I came to understand a little why the Jews had a state and the Palestinians didn’t. The European Jews who built Israel came out of a culture of sharp edges and right angles. They were cold, hard men who always understood the difference between success and failure, and between words and deeds. Because the Jews were always a nation apart, they developed their own autonomous institutions and had to rely on their own deep tribal sense of solidarity. This gave them a certain single-mindedness of purpose. They would never settle for a substitute homeland; life for them was not just another Mediterranean life cycle or fatalistic shrug.
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The single-mindedness of the European Zionists also had a certain ruthless aspect to it. They emerged from ghettos in which they were never invited by the outside world to drink coffee. They were never part of a Middle Eastern kaleidoscope, like Lebanon, where today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s friend. For the Jews coming out of Europe, today’s enemy was tomorrow’s enemy. The world was divided into two: the Jews and the goyim, or Gentiles. The Arabs, for the Zionists, fell into two subsets of goyim—agents and enemies. Agents you ordered and enemies you killed.
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The rhythm of life in the Arab world was always different. Men in Arab societies always tended to bend more; life there always moved in ambiguous semicircles, never right angles. The religious symbols of the West are the cross and the Jewish star—both of which are full of sharp, angled turns. The symbol of the Muslim East is the crescent moon—a wide, soft, ambiguous arc. In Arab society there was always some way to cushion failure with rhetoric and enable the worst of enemies to sit down and have coffee together, maybe even send each other bouquets.
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Islamic society always threw a web over men that restrained them, but the European Zionists came out of a different culture and faith and they were not shackled by any webs. That was how they made a state. The Sephardim, the Arab Jews, never could have built Israel. They would have had coffee with the Palestinians instead.”
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“I wanted to see the Phalangists at home, to see how they looked there,” Sharon recalled with a whimsical air. “The thing I remember most was coming into their harbor [Juniyah] at night. There were all these lights around. So I asked them, What are all these lights? They said, ‘They are from our ships.’ I said, What ships? They said, ‘Our ships—we are trading. Ships are unloading here, and then the goods are being taken across to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and all over.’ They told me, ‘Arik, war is war and business is business.’ Then we drove all around Beirut. Bashir Gemayel drove me in his own car. We had a few guards, but we were driving around the city ourselves. I saw all these beautiful girls and everything that was going on there. They were in a war, but people were going about their business. Could we conduct our lives the same way? No. In Lebanon everything is a compromise. Compromises, compromises, all the time compromises. The question is, can we, the Jews, live here with a compromise, and I think the answer is no. When a country like Lebanon loses a war, the consequences of military defeat are a number of casualties, loss of prestige, and other things. With the Lebanese nothing ever comes to an end. Nothing is ever final there. Nothing. But with the Jews it can come to an end.” Then pausing for a moment to contemplate his own analysis, Sharon added tersely under his breath, “To a bitter end.”
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I saw them come and I saw them go, and a strange group of invaders they were indeed. They arrived in Beirut like innocents abroad and they left three years later like angry tourists who had been mugged, cheated, and had all their luggage stolen with their traveler’s checks inside.
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Had the Israelis understood that the real Lebanon was two Lebanons, they also never would have entertained the notion that Lebanon could ever be the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state. Lebanon made its living—a very good living at that—being the entrepôt between the West and the Arab world. Goods from the West were dropped off or manufactured in Beirut and then sent by plane or truck to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and as far away as Oman. Lebanese were educated in Western systems and then shipped off to run hotels and businesses in the Arab hinterland. In return, the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Syrians, and other Arabs used the Beirut banking system to handle their finances, its educational institutions to teach their children, and its mountains to relax in during the heat of the summer. With an economy so dependent on the Arab—Muslim world, Lebanon was destined to be the last Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, because only after all the other Arab countries had reconciled themselves to the Jewish state could Lebanon afford to do so.
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But what made Begin even more dangerous was that his fantasies about power were combined with a self-perception of being a victim. Someone who sees himself as a victim will almost never morally evaluate himself or put limits on his own actions. Why should he? He is the victim.
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Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design, or, as Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi liked to say, “Sharon was a realist at the tactical level and both a mythmaker and a man possessed by myths at the strategic level.”
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Unlike Hafez Assad, Sharon did not know when to stop; he did not understand the limits of power in a fragmented, unpredictable place such as Lebanon. Assad was a brutal realist with a very limited agenda—survival. Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design, or, as Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi liked to say, “Sharon was a realist at the tactical level and both a mythmaker and a man possessed by myths at the strategic level.” That is precisely what made him so dangerous in Lebanon. He behaved with a decisiveness and unwavering sense of direction, as though he knew exactly where he was going strategically, when in reality he didn’t have a clue about the world he was charging into.
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Since the Arabs were unwilling to give the Palestinians enough resources or sacrifices to see them through to success, they compensated them instead with money and rhetoric. They adorned all the PLO’s failures, whether in Amman or in Lebanon, with victory bouquets, and indulged them in all their revolutionary bravado, which the Palestinians, as a weak and victimized people, needed as compensation. The one thing the Arabs never did, though, was to take Arafat aside and tell him, “Look, my friend, the power realities are stacked against you. Your people got in the way of a bad storm called the Zionist movement. It could have happened to any of us, but it happened to you. If you really want to help your people, cut the best deal you can now with the Jews. Save whatever land you can and forget the rest.” Instead, as Fouad Ajami put it, “the Arabs walked away from the Palestinian cause while swearing eternal fidelity to the Palestinians.”
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Maybe Arafat was wise to leave Beirut in order to fight another day, as he argued at the time. But the PLO was never quite the same after it quit Lebanon, and neither for that matter was the Arab world. Something in the Arab world died on August 30, 1982, the day Arafat himself boarded the Greek cruise liner Atlantis and sailed for Athens. (He refused to make any Arab country his first stop, so disgusted was he with the Arabs.)
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The abandonment of the Palestinians by the Arab world, the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, coupled with Syrian President Assad’s attempt a few months later to depose Arafat from the PLO leadership, intensified tenfold the bonding between Arafat and the Palestinian people at large.
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For all his failings, Arafat’s mere ability to survive against the forces that wanted to erase him, his ability to constantly bounce back, symbolized for Palestinians their own determination not to be forgotten and not to have their cause erased by the Arab and Israeli forces that were so intent on doing so. The Palestinians would not give these lions Arafat’s head—as much as he might have deserved it—because his head was their head.
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Abu Musa was a professional soldier who found that the PLO army he joined was much more corrupt than the Jordanian army he had left. But he had one problem: he was an honest man in a region that did not reward honesty.
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The Lebanese view of America was a view gleaned from movies and in the movies the cavalry was never late.
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By blindly supporting Amin Gemayel, by allowing Israel a virtually free hand to invade Lebanon with American arms and by not curtailing Israel’s demands for a peace treaty with Beirut, the Reagan Administration had tipped the scales in favor of one Lebanese tribe—the Maronites—and against many others, primarily Muslims.
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People who have never really wielded power always have illusions about how much those who have power can really do. Whenever I would mention some problem that needed addressing in the Middle East, Salam would just shake his head back and forth and say, “America, America, America.”
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Around this time, I went to see my favorite political analyst in Beirut, Riyad Hijal, for a reading on the situation. Hijal never studied political science; in fact, he never studied much of anything. He sold window glass, and in Beirut he was the next best thing to a Gallup Poll. When his business was good, it meant that the Lebanese were optimistic, replacing their bomb-shattered windows with new ones. When his business was bad, it meant that no one had any confidence in the political situation and they were covering their broken windows with plastic wrap better suited for sandwiches—and a lot cheaper than glass. I found Hijal sitting amid stacks of unsold windows. The suicide attacks on the Americans were the turning point, he said. Business had gone downhill fast since then. Only a fool would invest in glass in Beirut now.
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With the destruction of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Levantine idea was gradually choked to death in Smyrna, Basra, Salonika, Alexandria, and Aleppo, by Greek, Turkish, and Arab nationalists who had no patience for, or interest in, heterogeneous cultures and the spirit of tolerance of a bygone era. But in Beirut the idea lived on—primarily among the elite Christian and Muslim classes. These Lebanese Christians and Muslims intermarried, interacted, became business partners, and produced new ideas together, and they were the ones who really made Beirut a cosmopolitan Manhattan of the Arab world—a refuge for the politically radical and a springboard for the Arab avant-garde.
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Beirut was the ideal hothouse for this Levantine spirit to survive, because the near-perfect balance of power between Muslim and Christian sects made it impossible for any one group or nationalist ideology to impose itself and smother the diverse mix of cultures necessary for a Levantine society. Moreover, there was a powerful economic base for the Levantine idea in Beirut. Because it was a city which had no real natural resources other than the cunning of its multilingual inhabitants and their ability to make money serving as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world, Beirutis had to learn to come together peacefully in the city center and to cooperate with one another in order to play the profitable role of middlemen between the Arab East and the Christian West. That role was further enhanced by Beirut’s banking secrecy, casinos, and wild, salacious nightlife, which made it an attractive oasis for an Arab world that had yet to discover London and Marbella.
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Every region of the globe needs one city where the rules don’t apply, where sin is the norm, and where money can buy anything or anyone. Asia had Hong Kong, Europe had Monaco, and the Middle East had Beirut.
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Lebanon really was the Switzerland of the Middle East.” It certainly looked that way on the postcards: snowcapped mountains towering over Beirut, a bank on every corner, and a parliament with all the trappings of a European-style democracy. But how could a city go from being a vision of heaven to a vision of hell practically overnight? Because it was too good to be true, because Beirut in its heyday was a city with a false bottom.
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Yet the fighting along the Green Line between East and West Beirut went on—only sporadically at times, but it went on. At first no one, including myself, could understand why. When I asked my neighbor Dr. Munir Shamma’a, a physician at the American University of Beirut Hospital, he just threw up his hands and said, “This is not a war, this is an earthquake. You can’t learn anything from an earthquake. When you have an earthquake, people just die. That’s what it’s like here. There are no obvious reasons for the fighting anymore. It just happens. Come rain or shine, sea or mountains; it just happens, like an earthquake.”
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What has been happening in Lebanon since 1975 is not just a tribal civil war, argued Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi. “You can also call it a competition to acquire civilization. What the Shiites were saying to the Christians and the other Muslims is ‘We want to be like you. We may be doing it in a clumsy way, because we don’t know how to express ourselves, but we want to be part of the game.’ My family are Christians. In 1866 they were goatherders in the mountains. They had feuds and were constantly killing each other and fighting other tribes. Then they came to Beirut and after three generations they stopped being like this. We thought the same of the Sunnis—that they were boors, but now they are bourgeois … so who can say what the future will bring?”
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“All the myths are gone now,” said Salam, “but maybe that is the beginning of wisdom. That is what keeps people like me going. We now know that the democracy we had was not a democracy at all but a sectarian balance of power. Liberty was not real liberty, but a kind of organized anarchy, and the diversity of press was largely a cacophony of voices subsidized by the Arab world. But even with everything having fallen apart a certain open society still exists. A united Lebanon is still the first choice of the Maronites, not a separate state, and a united Lebanon is still the first choice of the Shiites, not an Islamic republic. With no water, no electricity, and no police, we still enjoy a certain quality of life that you cannot find in any other country in the Arab world. There are still more books published today in Beirut than anywhere else in the Arab world. There is still more of a free press today in Beirut than anywhere else in the Arab world. Even today I will take the American University of Beirut over Amman University. I will take An-Nahar newspaper over [the Syrian daily] Al-Baath. Even with everything destroyed, the idea of Beirut is still there. The challenge now is to rebuild it on real foundations, not phony ones.”
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The logic was that Lebanon no longer was caught in the grip of a single civil war. It was caught in the grip of three simultaneous civil wars, which no one could keep straight—including the combatants.
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The first and largest of these wars was the one that began in 1975 and culminated in the Shouf in 1984: the civil war over who should control the Lebanese government, which was fought out between the Christian and Muslim militias. It was this confrontation which had broken Beirut and Lebanon in half.
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The second civil war began in the late 1970s within the two halves of the country. It involved Muslims fighting against Muslims and Christians fighting Christians to decide which Muslims and which Christians would control their respective halves of Lebanon. In this second civil war one could find Druse fighting Shiites for control of a particular West Beirut street on Monday, and Shiites fighting Sunnis for control of a neighboring street on Tuesday. Across the Green Line in East Beirut the same sort of confrontation was going on between the Christian Phalangist militia and the Christian-led Lebanese army, as well as a host of smaller Christian factions.
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The third civil war was a silent civil war, the one that always intrigued me the most. It began in the early 1980s and engendered as many passions as the first two, for it pitted all the Christian and Muslim militiamen who benefited from Lebanon’s chaos on one side and all the Lebanese civilians who suffered from that chaos on the other.
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If there is one thing I have learned in the Middle East, it is that the so-called extremists or religious zealots, whether in Jewish or Muslim society, are not as extreme as we might think. The reason they are both tolerated and successful is that they are almost always acting on the basis of widely shared feelings or yearnings.
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As Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak rightly put it, these so-called extremists are usually just the tip of an iceberg that is connected in a deep and fundamental way to the bases of their respective societies.
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The 1967 war was an Auschwitz waiting to happen. That it didn’t happen, Israelis decided, was all just a miracle.” This sudden passing from vulnerability to omnipotence produced an “intoxication,” according to Abba Eban, who was Israel’s Foreign Minister at the time. The 1967 victory, he explained, while it was a “military salvation, with enormous political gains … was a total psychological failure, because the victory was interpreted providentially and messianically. Once it became a messianic thing, the government and the parliament were no longer sovereign … . We lost sight of the fact that the Arab regimes, while defeated, were still intact. Our victory was not total. All of our statements, though, were in the imperative: ‘We shall, we will, we demand.’”
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The truth is that as much as Israelis expected and even hoped that the Arabs would come forward and negotiate land for peace in June 1967, few Israelis were really in a hurry to give the West Bank and Gaza back, and Israel did not exactly go out of its way to encourage Palestinians, or the PLO, to pop the question. The reason is that both the Labor Party and the Herut Party, which forms the backbone of today’s right-wing Likud bloc, fell in love with these territories. After all, the Old City of Jerusalem, Jericho, Hebron, Nablus, and all the other West Bank towns were the real heartland of historical Jewish consciousness and the stage where the drama of the Bible was actually played out—not the coastal plain of Tel Aviv and Haifa. They were the core of the land of Israel the Zionist founding fathers came to reclaim, and the mere mention of their names touched something deep in the Israeli soul, both among Likudniks and Laborites.
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In a speech on August 7, 1937, to the 20th Zionist Congress in Zurich, Ben-Gurion declared: “I say from the point of view of realizing Zionism it is better to have immediately a Jewish state, even if it would only be in a part of the western land of Israel [Palestine west of the river Jordan]. I prefer this to a continuation of the British Mandate … in the whole of the western land of Israel. But before clarifying my reasoning, I have to make a remark about principle. If we were offered a Jewish state in the western land of Israel in return for our relinquishing our historical right over the whole land of Israel, then I would postpone the state. No Jew has the right to relinquish the right of the Jewish people over the whole land of Israel. It is beyond the powers of any Jewish body. It is even beyond the power of the whole of the Jewish people living today to give up any part of the land of Israel.”
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A consensus, said Eban, means that “everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.”
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This feeling that many Israelis have of living on borrowed time accounts for some of the more unpleasant aspects of daily life in Israel—everything from the way drivers honk at each other if the car in front of them does not move within a nanosecond of the traffic light turning green, to the way so many people cut corners in their business and personal dealings. There’s no sense worrying about politesse or whether or not a customer will come back tomorrow if you don’t really believe in tomorrow.
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“What really holds this place together at bottom,” explained Chafets, as other customers in the bar shouted their greetings to him, not all of which were fit to print, “is not democracy. It’s not Zionism. It’s not any ideology or any system. It is that tribal Jewish sense of solidarity. For two thousand years, all these people have been crying and pleading and begging God to give them a country. I wanted to see it, but when I came here I found out that Israel resonated for me. I quickly realized I felt at home here, even though these people were not like people I had grown up with.
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“Of course,” said Schiller. “When the Jewish people stood before God at Mount Sinai, they were commissioned to fulfill their genius as a nation in this land. The Jews are not just a collection of individuals, they are a nation, and every nation must have its ball park, its field. It is as if this is Yankee Stadium for the Jewish people, and we are the Yankees. You just can’t play without a ball park. You can’t play all your games on the road and hope to be a successful team—otherwise you never get to bat last. You cannot have the ideal fulfillment of Torah without living in this land.
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“Anyone within our community who does not recognize the importance of what the secular Israeli is doing to protect us is an ingrate,” answered Schiller. “But anyone who doesn’t recognize the contribution of yeshiva boys is ignorant. I think it is legitimate to postpone serving in the army as long as someone is productive and learning in a yeshiva, because I think there are too few people who are aware and learned enough to fight the enemy of assimilation. Our survival in the next generation will depend on that, too. It is not like our young men are going to the beach each day instead of serving in the army. The rigid intellectual discipline and life-style of a yeshiva boy is not a casual conscientious objection. It is not like going to Canada. There are much easier ways to get out of the army.”
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“The Jews never would have made it here to these shores,” began Schiller, who first came to Israel himself in 1961 as a twenty-four-year-old student, “if it were not for the learning that went on in the yeshivas of Eastern Europe and for the fact that the grandfathers of the secular Zionists who founded this country lived the way I do. The Israelis are still here as Jews only because of the Orthodox life-style their grandfathers led. It is as though their grandfathers deposited money in the bank, and now this generation is writing checks on it. So secular Jews have a debt to that life-style. Therefore, when we are presented as retrogressive, primitive madmen, it is simply not true. We are just saying, Let us live the way we want to live. I am not asking you to live like me, but I am asking you to appreciate that there is a certain sanity and consistency rooted in Jewish history in my position and that you have a debt to that position, and that debt may allow me to ask you to make certain compromises that we can negotiate together. There is in the code of Jewish law a case in which the rabbis were asked what happens if two ships are coming through a narrow strait at the same time from opposite directions. One ship is laden with cargo and the other is empty. Who has to give way? One of Israel’s first great rabbis, Reb Avram Yeshayau Krelitz, used this case when arguing with Ben-Gurion for greater sensitivity to the needs of the Haredi community. Krelitz told Ben-Gurion that the rabbis decided that the empty ship must give way to the one laden with cargo. He then went on to tell Ben-Gurion: ‘Look, we are carrying a few thousand years of cargo with us; you are still an empty ship. You have to give way for us.’”
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“A Torah society always comes before a specific territory,” answered Schiller, explaining where his Haredim part company with many religious Zionists. “It is only through a return to Torah—not a specific place—that there can be a redemptive process. Redemption comes when we earn the privilege, not because we sit in a certain location. Being in Israel is part of earning that privilege, but there is no urgency today to institute the ideal biblical boundaries. That will happen at a time when it is supposed to happen, and I don’t have to precipitate the process at the cost of Jewish lives. We need the courage of humility, and Gush Emunim lack that. If I can secure the continuity of this state by giving back some land to the Arabs, then it is my responsibility to do so. Some people are fighting for the land and some people are fighting to ensure that the land is worth protecting.
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When the waitress came by to take our orders, I was anxious to see what the bar mitzvah boy would choose on this special occasion. A sirloin steak? Fried chicken heaped with french fries? Maybe a pizza with all the toppings? Giora would have none of these. He knew what he wanted, and when the waitress turned his way he did not hesitate over the menu. “I want white steak,” he declared, using the Hebrew euphemism for pork chops. I couldn’t help but chuckle.
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Instead of organizing real and significant communal resistance on their own, some of the most articulate Palestinian leaders and community spokesmen in the West Bank and Gaza became professional complainers, ready to be interviewed at any hour of the day on American television about their suffering under the “brutal” Israelis.
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The West Bank and Gaza Palestinians were never the most brutalized Arabs in the Middle East—the Israeli occupation was mild compared to some other regimes in the area. They were, however, the most humiliated.
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Whenever I probed Palestinian youths as to why they threw stones, they did not respond by quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. They simply said, “Because we don’t want to face Israeli tanks.” With good reason. Prime Minister Shamir was once asked what would happen to the Palestinians if they began to use firearms widely in their intifada. He answered tersely, “There will not be even a memory of them left.”
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The same paratrooper also was on duty at the gate of Shati one evening after Israel had clamped a curfew on the whole area, beginning at 6:00 p.m. “At around 8:00 p.m. this old Palestinian man shows up at the gate,” said the Israeli soldier. “I asked him where he had been. He said he had come from Israel, so I said, ‘What were you doing there?’ and he started singing to me in Hebrew the song ‘Mi Yivne Bayit.’ I just laughed and let him go.” The main verse to the song “Mi Yivne Bayit” is: “Who will build a house in Israel? We are the pioneers. We will build Israel, come along with us.”
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“Just call me Abu Visa”—Howard smiled up at me as I entered his office and found him flipping through a stack of visa applications. “I don’t know about the intifada; all I know is that I’ve got what they want. Palestinians who have the right to immigrant visas come here any way they can to pick them up. It doesn’t matter if they are supposed to be on strike or whatever. They come. Our no-show rate for people granted visas is zero. Those who come and get turned down are really upset—especially males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. There is that moment when you tell them, ‘No, I’m sorry,’ and some of them get this anxiety reaction. It’s very sad. Those who can get out are leaving. You don’t have a sense when talking to them that they feel like they are on the verge of liberation. There is no euphoria. If we opened the gates and said any Palestinian who wants to come to America can come, well … Arafat and their love of this land notwithstanding, I don’t think too many of them would be left here. That’s true for plenty of Israelis, too. In our sitting room upstairs, Jews and Arabs wait together for their visas, and when it comes to that, they are all brothers. As soon as they each know they can go to America, all the anger between them disappears.”
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It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians simply are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose don’t, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathies of the West the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews, no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they suffer.
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… handsome, Western-looking figure with perfect English and an M.I.T. education, Netanyahu was in the same Washington studio with the Arab ambassador, but they were divided on air by a split screen. They had the usual debate about the Palestine question and each said
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A handsome, Western-looking figure with perfect English and an M.I.T. education, Netanyahu was in the same Washington studio with the Arab ambassador, but they were divided on air by a split screen. They had the usual debate about the Palestine question and each said the usual things. “After it was over,” recalled Netanyahu, “I got up from my seat to leave the studio and one of the cameramen came up to me and said, ‘You won.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘You won even before you started.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Look, you both have funny last names, but your first name is Benjamin and his is Abdullah. He didn’t have a chance.’”
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Israel is not a Jewish summer camp, where you come for a weekend and see that your kid is eating okay and then go home; Israel also isn’t a coffee-table book with an introduction by Abba Eban that you keep out in the living room and never read. Israel is the most difficult, outlandish experiment in Jewish history—an attempt to build a Jewish nation out of Jews who have never lived together. Yes, they dreamed about living together. Yes, they prayed about living together. But in the real world radical Russian Jews and primitive Moroccan Jews and wealthy South African Jews and hot-blooded Argentinian Jews never actually lived together in the same space, let alone in the harsh environment of the Middle East. Taking Jews from so many diverse cultures and moral backgrounds and asking them to form a society that will be the carrier of Jewish history in the modern era is no easy task. When American Jews relate to Israel as a heroic symbol, they are in effect saying that the task of building this nation is over. The statue is complete. It is not. It is an unfinished work.
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Indeed, the Lebanese, having dabbled with modern democracy and Western-style political parties, slipped back into tribal wars as bloody and unrestrained as those fought between Druse and Maronite peasants in 1860. The Israelis and Palestinians completed the same circle.
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Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi always liked to tell me that the most important thing an American friend can offer Arabs and Israelis is American optimism—exactly the kind of innocent can-do optimism that the Marines brought to Beirut. The Marines’ almost childlike belief that every problem has a solution, that people will respond to reason, and that the future can triumph over the past is a wonderful thing, Yaron would remind me. It is a trait which Americans should never be ashamed of. Even though Arabs and Israelis sometimes make fun of our naive optimism, the truth is, deep down they welcome it. They envy us our optimism, because theirs are deeply pessimistic societies, deeply scarred societies—societies hemmed in by ancient tribal and religious boundaries, where the most frequently heard political statement is “No, you can’t.”
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Shultz knew how to play the friend, at least vis-à-vis the Israelis. He understood better than any diplomat I have ever watched that when dealing with the Israelis the most effective way to pressure them is never through a head-on confrontation in public. This only gives their most recalcitrant leaders an opportunity to dig in their heels and exploit the open confrontation with Washington to look strong before their own people. In the Middle East, some politicians have made whole careers by defying Great Powers—Nasser, Khomeini, Begin, and Assad have all played this game at one time or another. They all knew that anyone who could say no to a superpower is himself a superpower.
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Because the prevailing political culture in the Arab world and Israel is a merchant culture, where men have traditionally lived by trading, bargaining, and negotiating with their wits. Fouad Ajami always likes to say that there are basically two political types in Middle East history: the messiah and the merchant.
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What this means is that any statesman dealing in the Middle East has to learn to look beyond the banners and the ideology and see the merchant in every man there. And when he does, he must remember that there are two things that every good Middle Eastern merchant understands. One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn’t mean he isn’t buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal.
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In the Middle East, and particularly in Israel, there is a basic contentiousness to social and political discourse that is foreign, and perhaps distasteful, to most Americans. A friendly discussion between two Israelis sounds like four Americans having an argument.
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In the political culture of the Middle East, people simply won’t take you seriously unless you show them that you are ready to break a little of their furniture for your ideas.
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While ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism may no longer play the seemingly all-pervasive roles they once did in guiding the actions of certain political elites in the Middle East, they still have an important hold on some of the young urban poor in countries such as Iran or Lebanon. These ideologies are the cheap currency, in fact, with which Middle Eastern regimes purchase the lives of the young men who actually carry out the suicide car bombings or guard the hostages or walk through the minefields. These young, urban poor are economically, socially, and psychologically vulnerable to promises of the millennium, to the intoxication of sacred religious texts or to the illusion of a quick fix. But they are nothing more than carry-out boys at the grocery store. One must always look beyond them to the real retailers of violence—the intelligence professionals of Iran, Syria, and Libya—and their subcontractors, such as the infamous Palestinian terrorist-for-hire Abu Nidal.
