A Turkish lady recently reproached her “Syrian friends,” in a Facebook post, because she had not received “a single message of solidarity” amid the turbulence in Türkiye. She concluded her post by saying that “expressing solidarity is not shameful” but rather “an ethical and political choice.”
This woman has every right to voice her disappointment. She has dedicated a significant portion of her life to the Syrian people's struggle against the Assad regime and defending their cause, as well as striving to improve Syrian refugees’ living conditions in her country.
Refraining from expressing solidarity with the other, even when that other is a friend or ally, is not exclusive to Syrians. We see similar behaviour from the Lebanese, Iraqis, Egyptians, and others who are part of a political culture that does not grant any real space for solidarity with the other. In this culture, we receive support and solidarity but rarely offer support and solidarity ourselves.
The fact is that since the disaster that began with “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the urgency of the need to push our self-criticism to more radical levels has increased. We must go beyond the political surface to reach the cultural and social core, to our fundamental moral values. It is hardly a revelation that the “other” (whom we are called upon to support) is largely absent, if not entirely non-existent, in this core.
Our contemporary culture does not include figures comparable to some of Europe’s most refined intellectuals, those who have put their time into the question of the issue of the “other” and unpacking it. Mentioning a few of them might be enough to sum up a broader inclination shared by too many icons to count.
Emmanuel Levinas, for instance, built his engagement with the “other” on his view that the “self” was the foundation of Western philosophers' and thinkers’ conceptions of the world. That, in his view, is what leads to treating others like mere reflections of this self, which is the ultimate cause of wars, genocides, and enslavement. Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism and loneliness are intimately related, as genuine thinking entails bringing the world into one’s thoughts, whereas evil is synonymous with not thinking with and of others. As for Norbert Elias’ “civilizing process,” it is the result of interdependence, which leads individuals and groups to contain their extreme impulses and reactions. This began with the rise of royal courts, centralized states, and their monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, before it was eventually demanded by an increasingly complex and interconnected economy in which everyone takes part, precipitating the shift from social monologue to dialogue.
While these three thinkers and others were profoundly influenced by the Holocaust and the victimhood that came with it, each of them arrived, taking their own distinct path, at conclusions that went against the nationalist conclusion developed by Zionism. The latter sought to elevate the Holocaust into religion and to compensate for it by demanding more, while to these three thinkers, who were themselves Jewish, it was the grounds for universal ethical positions and for historical narratives that contribute to curbing violence and crime.
Devotion to the other, by definition, entails recognizing their existence before being in solidarity with them. The refusal to deeply engage, acknowledge, or express solidarity with that other is often justified by denying their victimhood or even their existence, thereby monopolizing victimhood, which ultimately serves as a means of monopolizing any visible presence. This exclusive status has a regressive trajectory: the belief that our nation is the only victim among all nations ends up becoming the belief that our sect is the only victim in this nation; the view that religious victimhood is exclusive to our religion eventually leads to the view that our sect is the only victim of this religion.
It seems that raising the alarm about this monopolization of victimhood is not a substitute for identifying the key historical junctures that shaped it; rather, it affirms the need to do so.
One juncture is the foundational narrative of Arab nationalism, which blamed oppression and “decline” on Turks and non-Arab Muslims. While many nationalist movements have made similar generalizations, defining their enemies through certain stereotypes and essential shortcomings, our own nationalist narrative of history has prevailed across time; and it continues to prevail today, through the fundamentalist Islamist narrative of the self and the world. That is, the names, labels, and self-ascribed qualities have changed, but contrarianism regarding the relationship with the other has remained intact. In this sense, we are presented as perpetually surrounded by enemies, now and forever, while Israel has granted us the added satisfaction of having our foremost enemy be an “self-proclaimed” entity.
The militant ideologies that have held sway in the region across different eras took on the task of cementing the conception of the other as the enemy- whether bourgeois, imperialist, Zionist, or a combination of all these negative attributes. Brandishing all of these flaws in our confrontations has only reinforced our propensity for defamatory polemics that not only affirm our hostility but also shut any path to friendship in the future.
This inclination was paralleled by our gender dynamics. Women, seen as the “other” to men, were treated as mere extensions of men, just as the religious, sectarian, and ethnic others were insignificant auxiliaries to the centrality of the Arab man. Meanwhile, cultural elites were mere gatekeepers for the people and the nation.
Accordingly, we are lonely in the Arendtian sense- a loneliness in which separation from the other is synonymous with separation from the world. The world around us changes as we remain committed to political strategies and slogans that are indifferent to its changes. Thus, as we see in the current war, the technological gap continues to widen qualitatively, and it becomes increasingly evident that Arab populations will not join this war and that those who are fighting have no powerful backer anywhere in the world, but the call to battle...persists.
