While the Lebanese were recalling the 15th anniversary of the murder of Samir Kassir, the young professor and brave writer, the ''Communist Action Organization'' Secretary-General, Mohsen Ibrahim, took his last breathes at 85 years of age. For a second, it may seem that linking those two events is abrupt, but it is not.
Behind Kassir and Ibrahim are two life journeys of divergent lengths, each starting in a period that is distinguished from the other by a few details, but both journeys came to an end on the same stop in what could be considered the same time.
Mohsen Ibrahim entered public life with the ''Arab Nationalist Movement'', whose raison d’etre was “revenging” Palestine. After a while, under Nassrism’s shadow, the Movement merged into the broader Nasserite wave. In 1961, when Mohsen was 26 years old, this line of thinking had a major setback after the United Arab Republic collapsed because of Syria’s secession from the union with Egypt. In 1967, when he was 32, the defeat was a more pivotal and bitter setback.
Ibrahim and a few of his comrades responded to this continuous decline with more radicalism and extremism. The solution, as they saw it, was to move from the “leadership of the petite bourgeoisie” to the “leadership of the proletariat”. From “state capitalism” to “socialism”. From classical military warfare to a “war of popular liberation”… These theoretical responses to real problems faced tough tests in the next few decades. The next phase, which ran until the early nineties, gave birth to the following: A civil war in Jordan. A civil war in Lebanon. An Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Kamal Jumblatt’s murder at the hands of his allies, who had been Mohsen’s allies as well until short period before. The Iranian Revolution and the explosion of religious consciousness and sectarian identities prevailing as they never had before. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its uprooting of the Palestinian resistance. The Syrian hegemony over Lebanon and its eradication of what had been left of that resistance. The “Lebanese National Resistance” that he had a hand in establishing was taken over by Hezbollah. A destructive Iranian-Iraqi war. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and its war with the whole world. The collapse of the socialist camp. The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s shift to searching for a compromise that would end the conflict, which culminated in the 1993 Oslo Agreement. A Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. The strengthening of Assad’s grip on Lebanon. A series of assassinations that his friend George Hawi was one of their victims... Meanwhile, between 1967 and 1989, Mohsen's comrades and his disciples established a regime in South Yemen, one of the worst of the Arab regimes, if not the worst and bloodiest.
Ibrahim, in his seventies and eighties, found out that the solutions he adopted in his twenties and thirties were not so. He discovered that generational consciousness could not be generalized and spill over perpetually. The secession of 61 and the defeat of 67 became jokes when compared to the disintegration and defeats that followed. The ideas that he had considered to be alternatives withered away. Only exhaustion prevented him from erasing “Communist” from ''Communist Action Organization''. True, “Abo Khaled” continued to believe in justice for Palestine and the need for the emergence of a Palestinian state and strengthened his ties with the Palestinian leadership, but, at some point, he decided to move from residing in a cause to residing in a country. In all likelihood, he realized, and he was extremely attentive, that this cause had been robbed from its owners in its totality and that it had been transformed into a puppet show whose strings were controlled by cruel and fanatical rulers in Damascus and Tehran. Accordingly, he condemned the contentment with violence and appetite for civil war in Lebanon, and he apologized for “permitting the Palestinian resistance act as it pleased and burdening Lebanon with more than it could take", which led to its "splitting into warring halves.”
Samir Kassir, like Mohsen Ibrahim, maintained his enthusiasm for Palestinians’ rights until the last day of his life, but, like Ibrahim, he moved from living inside a cause that was meant to be a replacement for concrete homelands, to residing in a tangible country. When he returned to Beirut from Paris, he realized, and he was also very attentive, that the primary enemy in Lebanon, and in Syria obviously, had been the Assad regime and its local proxies; who obviously paid lip service to Palestine boisterously and frequently. His priorities changed, and nine out of every ten of his articles became about this issue. He wrote a history of Beirut and was among the founders of the ''Democratic Left Movement''. On the day of February 14 2005, he had only the independence of Lebanon and the democratization of Syria on his mind.
The journeys of Ibrahim and Kassir made their last stops in lived reality. The first chose silence and seclusion. The second was blown to pieces in a criminal assassination.
Let us imagine for a second that the pair chose to keep living a fantasy, strolling between the salons of Ghazi Kanaan, Rustum Ghazali and Jamil Al-Sayyid ... Imagine if Mohsen Ibrahim turned into an Axis of Resistance figure, endorsing the phrase "the time of defeats has passed" ... if Samir Kassir turned into a writer defending "Bashar al-Assad’s anti-imperialist fort "... Had this happened, Mohsen would not have retired so long ago and Samir would not have been killed, especially since those who killed him are the only ones who kill. Isolation and assassination were the natural consequences of their costly choices.
Indeed, to live in reality, in our world which is enchanted with myths, is costly. The same is true for being patriotic.
