The news from Afghanistan is genuinely heartbreaking; it is an affront to everything human in contemporary human beings. Loaves of bread are, in the literal sense, lacking. Hoards of people are flocking to embassies as they search for a way out of their country. However, only four and a half months ago, it was said that Afghanistan had attained a resounding victory, humiliating the Americans who withdrew from the country like mice.
This victory resembles a joke that has become a cliche: the surgery was successful; unfortunately, however, the patient has died.
Something similar is demanded in Lebanon: Western ambassadors and diplomatic missions are not wanted in Beirut. The multinational forces in the south are undesirable as well. NGOs are not wanted anywhere in the country. All of them are condemned and threatened on a daily basis.
The factions that want them all to disappear, threatening them after condemning them, are those who offer the Lebanese the Afghan or perhaps North Korean option: the West, in all its forms, should not come close to us. Why? Because this is among the prerequisites for attaining victory similar to that attained by Afghans and the one under whose shadow the North Koreans live.
Of course, they do not speak in these exact terms, but that is literally what they are saying: closing our country off from most of the Arab world but also most of the world as a whole, especially Western countries, and putting out every source of illumination in the country, its economy, culture, educational institutions, and so on.
The fact is that the West, whose expulsion is demanded, is not just political. The dollar, which, amid our economic crisis, we need like a desert needs rain, will also be undesirable. That is because the dollar being in a place where all of those are banned is unimaginable.
Those who oppose it forget that the West now extends to encompass everything from particular ways of eating, appearing, and dressing to all forms of technology to producing images, be it through cinema or any of the many other mediums. And all of this, with the sensitivities they refined and the imaginations they sharpened, has no competition, neither in China, Russia, or - of course - in Iran.
What is demanded is taking us back to where we had been before coming in contact with the West and learning from it. That is, they want us to go back to the isolated and crumbling model adopted by regimes of one party, one opinion, and one group placed above a weak people. In fact, we have already gone a long way along this path.
The truth is that the majority of the Lebanese, maybe the overwhelming majority, do want this model even if it were a requisite for the total, uncompromised liberation of Palestine. This majority may be sectarian, and its leaders may be corrupt; nonetheless, it has chosen a life of freedom for itself, one that is open to the world and welcomes its influences. As for dragging it to this cemetery in the name of fighting America or pushing back against Israel, all that remains is to hollow Lebanon out and issue a death sentence for the ambitions of its people.
Let us say that it is the first time that the Lebanese’ disputes are so imbued with an ideological position that has implications for how to understand developments worldwide, from here to Ukraine and Taiwan. Today’s dispute concerns just about everything: the Arabs versus Iran. The West versus Russia and China, as well as Iran. Freedom versus tyranny, prosperity versus starvation...
In each side of this dispute is an affiliation that has never been this clear and unequivocal: the majority of the Lebanese, who may quarrel among themselves over an array of issues, want Western embassies to stay in their country, they want to feel safe and secure in it, and they want the multinational forces to stay in the south. They want these forces to remain an impediment to another war, which this majority opposes. They want Western educational institutions to take root and educate greater numbers of students and for NGOs to provide what is one of the very few sources of income for the Lebanese, in addition to their role, however modest, in creating small development projects and expanding freedom of expression.
On the other hand, is the isolationist model, which is concerned only with politics in the narrowest sense of the world- politics that bring destruction, isolation and self-imposed bareness regardless of whether those behind this politics are victorious or vanquished.
As for the call to defend the model that the majority of Lebanese have clung to, it is fair and just; heeding it is urgently needed if we are to avoid seeing one of us write what the German priest and poet Martin Niemoller had once written:
‘‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’’
