Hezbollah has, for the thousandth time, refused to lay down its arms, as have Hamas and Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujabaa.
It is, of course, easy to demonstrate how Iran’s wishes and its need for the continued armament of our militants contribute to determining their stance. Radical movements in the Arab world had, however, developed a nearly singular fondness for arms before it was ever fostered from without. The poems written to arms, as well as the songs and jingles that praised them, are matched only by the hyperbolic characterizations of the missiles Nasser and Saddam Hussein had acquired long before Khomeini appeared on the horizon.
With hits like "The weapons I keep don’t sleep,The battles persist," and "Now I have a rifle," these movements developed both chaste and raunchy love affairs with these weapons. Some of us still remember the veneration of the Russian Kalashnikov rifles that the Palestinian resistance had armed itself with, and how we renamed it "Klashinkov" before calling it by the pet name "Kalashin".
Ballads to arms and the arguments made in their defense are part of a self-sustaining narrative, and they always have been. Arms enthusiasts sought them so they could resist or liberate. These functions exempt, and have always exempted, those who carry these arms from discussing what they will do after liberation is achieved, and resistance ends. Pursuant to the axiom of "weapons for weapons' sake," politics was thereby impoverished further, losing any independent status beyond the miracle of arms.
As for the state, which is supposed to monopolize armament, it has been portrayed as an aberration resulting from our fragmentation at the hands of colonialists; it was born a colonial lackey. This narrative frames militias as far superior to the state, not only because they are “of the people and the nation," but also because they are, by definition, unconstrained armed movements that pursue unrestrained armament.
The root of the problem is that many tools contributed more than arms to the victory of the Western (and later Israeli) "enemy" whom we point our increasingly sacralized arms at. It gained the upper hand through several transformative revolutions- scientific, religious, industrial, intellectual, and political- with its military superiority merely one of these revolutions’ many results. It appears that Arab consciousness steamrolled these shifts, leading its subjects to disregard everything but arms, and to the conclusion that the answer is to develop weapons that could defeat the weapons of the West.
Depressingly, not a single episode of the region’s modern history supports this reductionist theory; in fact, too many to count point in the opposite direction. The first step along this long trajectory that continues its way- battle by battle and war by war- came in 1798, when French troops led by Bonaparte crushed the Mamluks and the Ottomans at the Battle of the Pyramids. Almost a century later, Ahmed Urabi was routed by the British fleet in 1882. Afterwards, the Ottoman Empire was defeated by the Italians shortly before the First World War, during which it was defeated by the British in Jerusalem and then in Damascus. Yusuf al-Azma and his fighters fared no better against the French in Maysalun than the forces of the Iraqi “Revolution of the 1920s” did against the British, and these defeats were soon followed by that of Sultan al-Atrash and the “Great Syrian Revolt” in 1925. The war of 1948 went the same way, with seven Arab armies defeated by “Zionist gangs” that had brought their Western experience and training with them to Palestine.
That was all essentially a prelude that paved the way for the defeats of the regimes and radical movements that would follow: from Egyptian Nasserism and Syrian Baathism in 1967, to the Palestinian resistance in 1982, to Baathist Iraq's defeat in 1991 and then the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and finally the recent “Al-Aqsa Flood” and “Support” wars.
Every one of them was a foundational defeat. The Mamluks’ defeat led to the French campaign and then the rise of Muhammad Ali, while the subsequent defeats of the Ottomans and local resistance movements molded the region into nation-states. In turn, the defeats to Israel, and the subsequent demise of Nasser and then Saddam Hussein, is largely responsible for the current state of the Arab world. Accordingly, it is fair to say that the modern history of the Middle East is a history of defeats that should have laid the groundwork for a collective consciousness hostile to arms that underpins the emergence of mass peace movements, if not on humanitarian and ethical grounds then for purely pragmatic considerations, especially since nine times out of ten, these weapons are used in civic conflicts. And yet, we have seen the exact opposite: time and again, the infatuation with weapons is reincarnated.
Under the weight of defeats that went so far as to defeat reason itself, this infatuation only grew more combustible as it was coupled with ridiculous threats and rhetoric about how the “enemy understands nothing but the language of force.”
One could argue that we are so taken by weapons because they are all we have. That is sad and pathetic enough in itself, but it does not justify compounding this depressing state of affairs by depressing our reason. What is there to say, then, once we add that much of this arsenal is sourced from this same Western “enemy?”
