After Sheikh Naim Qassem was appointed Hezbollah Secretary-General, some showed an interest in the man's ideas and values in the media and on social media. He has a reputation, because of the things he has written and said, for his exuberant conservatism that places him on the further end of the conservative spectrum in his (extremely conservative) party.
Our colleague Hussam Farran highlighted some of the revealing positions Qassem has expressed in this regard in an article for "Daraj." He quoted Qassem as saying that the party's youth "went to the mountain peaks to fight Israel and the takfiris instead of going to nightclubs and bars," and that we must "keep an eye out" in "in schools that are attended by both girls and boys." Where this abhorrent mixing exists, the Sheikh tells us, women alone bear responsibility.
Presenting the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir as an advocate of "total freedom for women without restrictions," Naim attacks the notion of "women's freedom to dress however they like" and demands that women "submit to the authority of men." He also opposes "employing divorced female teachers," as a divorced woman "is not qualified to shape and educate children."
What our colleague Farran did not mention, which completes the portrait he painted of the world of Qassem's values, is the extent to which he identifies resistance with a particular sect, the Shiites, as fighters are "missiles charged with the love of Hussein." There is also his antisemitism and the total equivalence he draws between Israel and Zionism and "the Jews." This also elevates the Secretary-General's rhetoric to a higher level than the party average, which is quite high.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian and Arab writers and intellectuals (whose opposition to "colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism" is beyond any doubt) had put a lot of effort into building two antithetical claims: Judaism and Zionism are two different things, and "national liberation" concerns the nation as a whole, not just a segment of the population.
However, the rhetorical downgrade reflected in Qassem's words, which crowns a series of downgrades in the leadership of "liberation movements" and setbacks to their awareness, compels us to move beyond broad axioms and cliches that underline the legitimacy of resistance to occupation, which is valid in principle, or those that believe resistance movements have the right to take actions others must not. Doubling down on these broad axioms and courting principles in isolation of tangible material conditions dramatically increases the costs of confrontations, and it sets those seeking military victory up for countless defeats in various aspects of life, even if they achieve their desired military victory.
Because resistance movements are founded on violence by definition, wariness of what their violence engenders is needed, not uncritical glorification (à la Fanon) of this violence. Those who prefer to overlook the "missteps" of these movements because they resist would do well to look deeper into these "missteps" when it becomes clear that they are calamities.
The same applies to time, which we do well not only to see as only the immediate and urgent present, following the pre-Islam poet Imru' al-Qais’s "Today is for drink, and tomorrow is for serious matters," because the poison we swallow today could swallow us tomorrow.
In countries with weak social and national fabrics like ours, allowing groups to maintain an arsenal in the name of resistance can turn into a bridge for one community to intimidate the other communities of "our national family," or it can become, in the event that they attain a military victory, a prelude to one sect’s tyrannical rule over others.
Since violence and bearing arms are associated with masculinity, it creates an ideal environment for armed militants to control unarmed women, even if they are not led by a man like Qassem who sees women as inferior. The experience of the women who participated in the Algerian revolution is well-known; once the revolution succeeded, they were dismissed and sent back home to be mothers, child-bearers, caretakers, and cooks - and nothing else.
Prudence is not something that violence demands, with its mobilization of the community by evoking their irrational heritage, understandable emotional response to pain and suffering, and obsession with thoughts of death and the afterlife, not to mention its occasional appeal to divine miracles and supernatural heroic feats. A reactionary vision of the self and the world develops amid violent conflicts, regardless of the belligerents' political legitimacy - and this vision is exacerbated by spikes in violence and only recedes with the return of civic and peaceful life.
It is nonetheless astonishing, and disheartening, that the most backward ideas, in both Lebanon and Gaza, are adopted by those who seek to liberate others through resistance. This contradiction explains aspects of these proponents of these ideas’ isolation from the more aware and dynamic forces and groups in their societies.
Under Qassem and his consciousness, who have ascended to leadership under the miserable circumstances we are too well aware of, the only reconciliation that can be achieved is that of wretched rhetoric and a wretched battle. This calls for scaling back expectations of victory and reconsidering the bet that such a victory, even if achieved, brings hope.
