The difficulty of reaching an agreement on an amnesty law has been a prominent news story in Lebanon. The reason for this difficulty lies in the distribution of those prisoners among three sectarian blocs and the insistence of each major sect’s representatives that their sect’s prisoners are the most deserving of amnesty, coupled with a tendency to deny amnesty to the members of the other two.
At around the same time, the International Information Center, a credible institution to people of divergent opinions, published a survey on Lebanese citizens’ position on Israel and relations with it. According to the survey, 92 percent of Shiites reject peace with the Jewish state, while 84 percent of Druze support it, along with 77 percent of Maronites, and 72 percent of Orthodox Christians.
This piece, however, does not seek to identify who is right or wrong about the amnesty law or Israel. Rather, it attempts to probe the question of whether there can even be a “right” or “wrong” on a national scale amid divisions as deep as ours. Debate and distinguishing right from wrong cannot happen in the shadow of a rupture sustained by robust subcultures that stem from particular readings of history, interests, and relationships.
Moreover, the margin for shifts in opinion that could turn a “right-winger” into a “left-winger” or vice versa, where the debates in ideas play a central role, is extremely limited. We are not dealing, here, with a small group of misguided people- not to say sick people or traitors- but “masses” who want “peace” and reject “resistance,” confronted by “masses” who want “resistance” and reject “peace.”
This reality leads us to the conclusion that thinking about strategic policies, be it foreign or judicial policy, automatically entails questions around Lebanon’s plurality and unity, with any choice rendered a victory for certain “masses” and a defeat for others.
The fear, then, is that in Lebanon (but also throughout the Levant), we may have reached a point in which domestic unity and policy decisions cannot be understood as separate matters, especially foreign policy. Disagreements over domestic affairs are easier to manage through the distribution of resources and political offices, whereas foreign policy raises existential questions around how fundamental issues are defined. Among them is the national interest, and consequently, who are the friends and enemies, as well as the extent of our willingness to sacrifice and wage wars.
In light of this saturation of complete and conflicting definitions, debates over “right” and “wrong” become gratuitous petty squabbles, or reflections of alignment behind a foreign narrative, “progressive” or “reformist,” that is to be imposed on a particular domestic reality.
One may rightly reply that this Lebanese conflict is not new. Since the creation of “Greater Lebanon,” some Lebanese constituencies identified with this project, while others aligned themselves with King Faisal I’s state in Damascus. Later on, these divisions continually renewed themselves, with some identifying with Gamal Abdel Nasser and others opposing him, then with the Palestinian resistance and against it. Today, however, the split is far more violent and more intense because, on the one hand, it is the culmination of this conflict-ridden history- in both its repressed and surface-level dimensions- and, on the other hand, coincides with the crystallization of smaller identities, which have become fully consolidated into antithetical impulses that feed on the state of Iran when it was powerful and wealthy.
It should not surprise us that in periods of cold peace that fill the space between two wars, no robust political culture or credible unifying founding myth has ever been successfully formulated. As a result, vapidity and folklore came to prevail, as seen with the traditional narrative of “one” Lebanon. The moment the state is hit with even the slightest setback, the sectarian subcultures and communities immediately reemerge. In reality, Lebanon has always been a state pregnant with smaller statelets; the latest indication was the sanctions Washington imposed on members of the military and security apparatus. Nor is it of no significance that all the settlements to end conflicts in Lebanon’s modern history ultimately relied on and were shaped by foreign actors.
While this state of affairs applies to all the countries of the Levant today, Lebanon has experienced it earlier and for a longer period than the others. Those other countries had had nationalist military regimes that imposed a single outlook and interpretation on their societies by force, blaming shortcomings and flaws on a “conspiracy against the nation.” The moment those regimes collapsed, however, we all became alike regarding explicit social fragmentation and living in its shadow.
In such a jungle, everyone speaks the language of coexistence while secretly harboring the impulse toward elimination. Only a few days ago, a leader in Hezbollah was quoted as saying that 10 percent of his party’s forces had been fighting Israel, while 90 percent stood ready to fight the Lebanese. Without taking this claim seriously, the intentions behind it, and behind other similar rhetoric uttered from all sides, remain extremely serious.
Purely for the sake of measurement, it might be useful to recall a concept developed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume as early as the eighteenth century. He believed that sentiment and sympathies, not pure rational calculation, are the most fundamental building blocks of society, and that without this indispensable element, society disintegrates into isolated individuals pursuing nothing but narrow self-interest or, in the Lebanese iteration, sects with hate for one another in their bones.
