After the crime at the church in the village of Hammoud, in Jordan's Karak Governorate, sincere and serious condemnations were made. Far more numerous, however, were condemnations that could be described as having nationalist and militant conditionality.
Some voices deplored that this act was being committed at a time when "the people and the nation" are waging "a fateful struggle against the Zionist enemy."
The implication, at the very least, is that the crime becomes understandable when "the people and the nation" are not engaged in a "fateful struggle."
Other condemners leaned toward a double generalization. On one hand, the victims were portrayed as the embodiment of Jordanian patriotism and Jordanian unity, both of which had been targeted; on the other, the killers were described as takfiri criminals- and, of course, "we all stand as one, an impregnable wall against the takfiris."
Both assertions are accurate, but stopping there obscures the crime as the killing of particular people who were done away with precisely because they bear that identity. Still others centered their condemnation on the question of merit: it was said, in effect, that the region and the family that produced Therese Halasa do not merit such treatment.
Therese Halasa had been a member of Black September Organization affiliated with Fatah, and in 1972, she took part in hijacking a Belgian airliner to Lod airport. Her comrades have also credited her with shooting Benjamin Netanyahu and wounding him in the shoulder.
Any Christian family and region that has no Therese Halasa had better get themselves a Therese Halasa of some kind. The woman in question becomes something like an offering or a sacrifice offered to warrant a safe life. All the more so since the region Therese came from "has offered intellectual and literary figures who fought with both the word and weapon, such as the novelist and thinker Ghalib Halasa, who the barricades of Beirut during the siege of 1982 bear witness to him and the pan-Arabist scholar Yaqub al-Awdat al-Halasa, while the records of the Arab Army abound with martyrs from among the sons of Hamoud in the wars of 1948 and 1967."
If presenting more and more offerings did not seem enough to merit a safe life, time itself was multiplied, with reminders that these inhabitants’ "historic role in opposing the policies of Turkification, alongside dozens of intellectuals, journalists, and trade unionists who fed the patriotic, leftist, and Arab nationalist movement in Jordan."
Of course, by a kind of automatic free association, the same old conspiratorial condemnation come to the fore: “the act came to strike at [the region's] historic record, rich in patriotism, Arabism, and resistance, which points to the hidden fingerprints and the forces driving these groups, foremost among them the occupation,” and that such acts serve none but the enemies. This narrative sees criminality in "serving our enemies" and "undermining a rich record of Arabism" more than in the killing of innocent civilians regardless of what the killings do for "the enemies" or "the record."
Examples like these, and others, betray the great affliction of our region- one that still governs the question of the right to a safe and equal life. They also betray that what are called "patriotic and national causes" alone grant the license to a safe and acceptable life. Anyone who differs must disown his difference, as well as his opinion when it does not align with the consensus militant narrative. The disownment takes various forms, among them self-negation and the denial of the reality of sects, or downplaying them at the very least, together with insistence on the all-embracing unity of "brothers who have lived together for centuries" before Western capitalism and the Orientalists led them astray and made them sectarian, God forbid.
One finds, in this context, a striking disparity between the open display of class and regional differences, lately of gender differences, and sometimes of ethnic ones, and the perpetual concealment and suppression of sectarian differences.
Further still, Arab Christians are expected, with or without reason, to affirm their "Easter-ness" and distinguish their creed from "Western Christianity." They are to disavow whatever came to us from the "Crusader" and then "imperialist" West, and to never stop reminding us that they produced Faris al-Khoury, Jules Jammal, and Archbishop Capucci- whom Lebanese MP Elias Jradi has just joined. If they are Druze, they must invoke Sultan al-Atrash; Alawites, Saleh al-Ali; and so on and so forth.
In the 1970s, the term "patriotic Christians" was coined to refer to those who sided with the Palestinian resistance and the "National Movement," with their "patriotism" thereby extinguishing the suspicions associated with their Christianity. During the 1967 and 1973 wars, some Egyptian Copts took to wishing that some Coptic soldiers would be killed, which would lift from the Copts the suspicion of lukewarm enthusiasm for fighting and hence of a deficit in a patriotism that was reduced to combat.
If one of the most important functions of serious condemnation is to lead to a genuine review that prevents repetition, however, the first thing to give up is that sickly phrase so often repeated in the prevailing condemnations: that this act has no link to our history (or our morals, or our values). Here, the condemner rushes to exonerate himself and avoid confronting himself, hollowing out values the causes he claims to champion.
All of these are signs of a splendid culture against whose "narrative" and "memory" wars are waged, nothing but its splendor can explain minorities' mounting emigration over decades, and the emptying of this militant region of them.
