The many questions regarding the Lebanese situation have faded away and been reduced to a single crude question: dollars or Hezbollah?
Those who choose dollars seem to speak an economy-focused rhetoric that is affected by the regional and international balances of power; then, their rhetoric became focused on the declining living standards and the pressing need to resolve them: the people are going hungry and being humiliated. In both cases, they speak a universal language. The whole world, including Iran, wants dollars, and the whole world fears famines and tries to prevent them.
Those who choose Hezbollah adopt a populist and accusatory rhetoric directed at “the dollars’ agents” and “the dollars’ slaves”, accompanied by contrasting “baseness” of the “dollarlists” to the “divinity” of fate and the cause. The conclusion always takes the form of “we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees”.
The job of central bank governor Riad Salameh, the central bank and the banks is precisely to draw a curtain over this question and conceal it. Those aforementioned are guilty, no doubt about it, but their crime is closer to that of carrying out orders than giving them.
In fact, the Lebanese have never been faced with this question, and with such sharpness, before. In the past, they had the luxury of enjoying a supply of dollars as declamations were being made about the struggle against imperialism or something equivalent to this. Today, this reconciliation is all but impossible.
With the first wave of radicalism that independent Lebanon faced and confronted, i.e Nasserism of the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanon was the Arabs’ bank and the home to the headquarters of the Western companies in the Middle East. As for Nasserism itself, it was satisfied in 1958 with sending some rifles and machine guns to Lebanon, without possessing an armed military organization whose strength exceeded that of the Lebanese army. In the meantime, Egyptian-American relations were not severed until 1967. In the last year of Dwight Eisenhower’s term (1959), "wheat diplomacy" between Washington and Cairo began.
In Lebanon in particular, the two capitals managed to reach a settlement that placed the army chief, Fuad Chihab, at the helm. With John Kennedy, things improved further, especially since both sides wanted to fight communism and Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq. 9.04 million tons of wheat were shipped to Egypt under preferential arrangements between 1960 and 1965, worth $731 million. Cairo paid for them in Egyptian pounds without being required to provide a hard currency. Reliance on American wheat, which amounted to half of Egyptian domestic consumption, did not prevent the escalation of verbal attacks against the United States. Thus, the dollar and the struggle against it managed to coexist in Lebanon, with a degree of mutual reassurance, side by side.
With the Palestinian resistance which represented the second wave of radicalism, huge sums of money were poured into Lebanon. Because the Palestinian resistance was obsessed with getting the US to engage in dialogue, it made sure not to go too far in its tampering with Lebanese affairs. When it went too far in 1976, Hafez al-Assad, in the only useful action that he carried out throughout his life, deterred it. Before all of this, the Palestine Liberation Organization facilitated the evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon after the outbreak of the war in 1975. It provided guards for the American citizens who remained in it. It exchanged intelligence, through Ali Hassan Salameh and others, with the CIA. On the whole, relations were positive during Jimmy Carter’s era (1976-1980), as his Foreign Minister Cyrus Vance seemed very enthusiastic about the PLO issuing a statement that enables it to participate in the Geneva Conference for peace (it was not issued at the time. It was issued later).
The Palestinian resistance and the dollar were and continued to be two peas in a pod. With Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the PLO’s support for him, dollars supply stopped and, subsequently, the resistance itself stopped.
“Reactionary” Lebanon did not present any exception to this “revolutionary” formula.
The third radical wave, with Hezbollah, resembled the previous two waves during the 1989-2005 period between the Taif Agreement and the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The reconstruction and resistance duo secured accommodation for both the dollar and Hezbollah. The late prime minister, counting on the magic of money, was gripped with a fantasy that partly contributed to his killing: Lebanon would be for Syria what Hong Kong was to China.
Since the 2005 crime, things have gradually been moving in a direction of the dollar and the resistance being pulled further and further apart. This peaked with the economic collapse of the party's regional sponsors, the Iranian and Syrian regimes. Scarcity hindered the former's ability to send dollars to Lebanon, and the latter is, it seems, withdrawing some of the small amounts left from Lebanon. On top of that, Donald Trump, who looks down on Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Carter's approach, endowed the dollar with military powers, thinking that this is the only kind of weapon that the soldiers of resistance understand. The dollar is his instrument that his enemies, in Tehran, Syria and Hezbollah, are not allowed to put their hands on. This is the principle of absolute war, and he is applying this principle to the letter.
Regardless of the results, which are likely to be painful for all of us, the Lebanese may find themselves, for the first time in their modern history, before a burning question: Do we eat or fight?
