Contrary to the claims of those who are fond of generalizing, it is not true that "Arabs do not acknowledge defeat when they are defeated." In 1948, and especially in 1967, there was a broad spectrum of opinions on everything linked to the defeat: there was disagreement about its scale and nature, as well as a variety of divergent proposals for how to overcome it.
Some, for instance, saw "our atheism" as the reason for our defeat, while others believed it was the result of "our faith." Some blamed it on Nasserism and Baathism’s socialism, while others argued that the problem had been that their socialism was not socialism but "bureaucratic state capitalism." Some critics chose to satirize "our culture," others "our dictatorial regimes" or "our armies"...
Nonetheless, almost everyone acknowledged that we had been defeated. Even the military regimes, which circumvented its implications and insisted on its deliberate interpretation, acknowledged that it occurred.
We have not seen any acknowledgement of this kind today. We find even those who use terms like "tragedy" and "nakba" to characterize what is happening, speaking of our shining victory, just a sentence or two later, as they point to a missile that landed on Tel Aviv or the killing of Israeli soldiers in a direct clash. Such developments could help slow the invaders' advance, or increase the costs of this advance, but it unequivocally does not change a broad trajectory for which there is an abundance of painful evidence.
This stance, which goes further than denying defeat to insist on victory, begs a question that comprehensive and extremely harmful cultural collusion avoids: when should a party to a conflict admit that it has been defeated? Or, to put it another way: Is there a criterion by which we can assess whether an armed force has been defeated? Is it the number of casualties? The scale of destruction? Whether cities and villages have been ravaged to the ground? Whether land has been occupied? The magnitude of displacement? Factors that determine our economic resilience? The strengths and weaknesses of foreign allies? The degree of social cohesion that fighters rely on? Whether military and political leaders live or die? The technological tools of war? Supply lines, weapons depots, and arms manufacturing plants?...
In reality, adopting any one of these criteria, or some or all of them, would lead us to conclude that the forces fighting the wars in Gaza and Lebanon have been defeated. Saying so isn’t "defeatist propaganda" or "an attempt to spread despair." Nothing is easier than making accusations and setting slanderers loose to silence debate and obscure developments that make themselves known organically.
At this point, confronting the truth is not driven by the love of the truth, nor even a desire to stop the defeat from going any further. Although these two impulses are virtuous in themselves, the risk of having our land (whether in Lebanon or Gaza) occupied takes precedence over both, as do the people being killed, starved, displaced, impoverished, and humiliated, who are bearing the costs of this silence that perpetuates their suffering. This matter should concern those who claim to care about "our people," and they should be doing everything in their power to put an end to the immense pain being inflicted upon them by a merciless and undeterred army.
The content we are being bombarded with, on the other hand, reflects nothing less than an absolute insensitivity to the wellbeing of civilians, who are not factored into calculations of gains and losses, as victory and resilience are the only focus. This focus is not underpinned by facts but by cliches, some are religious ones taken out of their historical context, and others are remnants of "national liberation" and "protracted people's war" literature.
Thus, we hear things like: "You’re not defeated so long as you’re resisting," whereas our lived experience refutes such simplistic and naive absolutist claims about abstract concepts, including resistance. Under certain circumstances, resistance can, in fact, lead to defeat. That was true, to give one of many examples, for Che Guevara, the emperor of resistance militants, in Congo and Bolivia.
This shift from announcing defeats to totally denying them has emerged in parallel with the shift from a culture of statehood (with all its shortcomings and deficiencies) to a militia culture. A state does not just carry and use arms, it also has other unrelated functions and institutions, and it provides services that do not vanish following the defeat of its arms.
In contrast, militias' raison d’etre, by definition, is to build and use their arsenal, while all the other roles it may or may not play are dependent on this arsenal and the control it enables the militia to exercise. This means that announcing defeat - announcing that its weapons have been defeated - entails announcing the death of everything else and confronting a bitter truth, that normal life continues to flow after the weapons are gone.
Militia groups must feel a profound sense of inadequacy in the knowledge that the "legitimacy of resistance" does not suffice to compensate for losing all legitimacy in a normal world. Accordingly, what the slogan "the era of defeats is over" actually means is that the era of acknowledging defeats is over, as there is no longer anything that can be known, documented, or publicly stated that violates the rules of their underground world.
In militia culture, and in the world of liberating war from the shackles of both its laws and the knowledge of its events, the universe fades, behind militia subjectivity, into either glory or annihilation. Thus, this lexicon brims with terms and phrases like "shame,manhood,honor,dignity,we dragged them down into shelters," and "we forced them to impose military censorship..." And while human beings are nothing but future corpses, announcing defeat is presented as an intolerable breach of these standards. And this is before the silence of graves adorns the graves of our silence.
