The news just passed us by. It drew neither our attention nor our commentary:
Vietnam announced that it would sign a free trade deal with Israel. This happened after seven years of negotiations between the two countries.
The details of the reports on this development are no less interesting than the headline: bilateral trade between the two countries increased by 18 percent last year, rising to $2.2 billion. Israel exports electronics and fertilizers to Vietnam, and it imports smartphones, shoes, and seafood.
As for the bilateral and multilateral agreements signed between them since the 1990s, their number exceeds 15. More importantly, Vietnam - which fears the power of its Chinese neighbor - is among the most prominent importers of Israeli military equipment. Only Russia exports more arms to Vietnam than the Jewish state, which is also seeking to sell the Vietnamese a satellite.
It is worth noting that, in 2011, the two countries signed an agreement to keep their security ties secret, which has reportedly “accelerated the development of these relations” according to news agencies.
The talk about Vietnam is not an irrelevant detail. The actual significance of those developments is immense, but their symbolic value is greater. We are talking here about the country that the political culture prevailing in the Arab world considered “closely allied with the Palestinian cause in its battle against imperialism and Zionism.” It was the example that many, in the 1960s and 1970s, called on us to imitate, as it managed to inflict a “crushing defeat on imperialism,” which is, of course, Israel’s “objective ally.”
Indeed, the popular Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Najm had reassured the Palestinians:
“Vietnam heralds a sacred Annunciation
Victorious, it arises
From under a hundred thousand raids”.
The sacred Annunciation, it now seems, does not inspire reassurance. It has become more of an omen than a promise.
The fact is that a political culture more dynamic than ours would have chosen to reconsider rather than disregard: reconsidering what has happened in Vietnam and why, as well as reevaluating what we have said about it in our analysis, rhetoric, and poetry. This task is made more pressing by the fact that Vietnam witnessed neither a military coup, nor the emergence of an alternative administration elected by the people.
Nevertheless, it has witnessed a generational and intellectual shift that unfolded in parallel with its transition from prioritizing the cause to prioritizing the country and what Vietnam’s rulers believed to be its interests.
And if we had opted to reconsider instead of disregard, this is certainly among the issues we would have had to contend with: how can we ensure that our friends remain friends after they go from prioritizing the cause to prioritizing their country and interests? The countries of our friends are bound to undergo this shift sooner or later, unless, God forbid, we assume that the people of the world will live in their trenches forever or we want this for them.
More important, and this partly explains our failure to revise, is the contrast between the path taken in the Arab Levant and that of the Vietnamese. Our exaltation of this “resisting” country continued into the mid-1970s, and with the liberation and subsequent unification of Vietnam, mention of it continued to decline until it eventually almost disappeared from our discourse. At present, Vietnam seems in Arab writings like a country that no longer fits on the map and has resigned itself to nonexistence.
A few days ago, as missiles were fired at Israel from Lebanon, some Lebanese and Arab commentators claimed the incident marked a “return to the 1970s,” that is, to the decade that Vietnam has walked away from, leaving the trench it had dug itself into behind with it.
In Lebanon, there is talk of “the resistance forces’ joint operation room” and “the unity of battlegrounds”. as well as the country becoming more and more implicated if the Israeli fanatics continue to violate the sanctity of the holy Muslim sites in Palestine…
If the widespread narrative that Hamas fired the missiles is accurate, the resemblance with 1975 - the year that the Lebanese civil war broke out - would be very strong indeed. Hamas stands in for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Hezbollah stands in for the Lebanese National Movement, though there is a marked difference in strength between the two forces of the latter pair.
What does this mean? It means more broken-down borders, economic frustrations, scorched earth, the exacerbation of sectarian and ethnic schisms in the countries concerned, and, of course, stretching the path to consolidated national sovereignty in Lebanon, Syria and the Arab Levant in general.
Accordingly, the difference between the Vietnamese and us seems to apply to time as well. They chose to forgo the rifle and trench for the sake of their state and interests. They have thus chosen an approach we might not agree with, but that is another matter.
As for us, who perpetually reside in the cause rather than a particular country, forgoing the present day for the 1970s, and if we were evacuated from it, we would have probably turned to the 60s or even 50s. The decades of the past are ahead of us, so long as the trench is always there. The only ones who have outdone us in this regard are the Jewish religious settlers, whose leaps to the past are measured in centuries rather than decades. We should make sure to catch up!
