We may never have drawn adequate conclusions about our region from the key phrases we have been repeating for decades. "The rise of identities, the Cleavage of the nation state, in the age of globalization, between what precedes it and what surpasses it," and "the surge of tribal loyalties in modern times" have saturated the debate without sufficiently concluding what should have been concluded. When many Lebanese say that the primary function of Hezbollah's weapons is domestic, they are doing no more than applying these concepts to their own conditions after pushing it to its armed extreme. The same holds for the transformations of what used to be called "the Arab-Israeli conflict," or, in more ideological language, "the war between the Arab nation and Zionism."
After 1973, the names of specific states were placed where "the Arab nation" had been. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was regions and communities that came to be referred to instead, so much so that "the Gaza Strip" and "the West Bank" became different spheres, while "Palestine" was left a third, more theoretical sphere further removed from the actual course of political events. This fragmentation may well be accompanied by an Islamic, or even a global, transnational dimension to solidarity and liberation that the Arab nationalist dimension had once been ascribed are attributed. Nothing rivals the Houthi movement in Yemen, which combines all these currents and penchants: from its basis in an extended kinship system and its severing of its own country’s bonds, to its threat to regional security and its neighbors; from its eagerness to take on forces immeasurably bigger and stronger than itself and the damage it is doing to international trade, to its spreading of a culture of total darkness, wrapped in a certain faith and piety.
We in the Arab region are perhaps undergoing the second act of the geological and bloody epic that had opened with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In this first act, the crust of the single state and of its national and internationalist bonds cracked all at once; wars erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Georgia-Abkhazia, and Chechnya. In the second came Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian-Albanian wars, but alongside those wars, the former Czechoslovakia witnessed what became known as the "Velvet Divorce” at the start of 1993: a peaceful separation in an immeasurably more European state. This comparison held enough for anyone who cared to reflect on it and draw lessons.
This is said with an eye to everything Lebanon and other Arab countries are experiencing today. Beneath the veneer of state, nation, sovereignty and the other concepts belonging to the horizon of political modernity, religious, sectarian, and ethnic communities are waging wars, concluding treaties, and devising "diplomatic" initiatives of their own. Using this explosive fuel on perturbed societies that are always to translate that unease into open violence, is perhaps the most dangerous and consequential thing Iran has done. As a result, these societies have become shields for Iran by the will of some of their members; however, they were confronted with their own history and forced to pay, all at once and in one go, the exorbitant accumulated unpaid bills.
Hezbollah was born as a party at once religious and sectarian, which in the early 1980s seemed somewhat surprising, given that it surpassed all the religionism and sectarianism that had come before, and the precedents had not been mild to begin with. What one senses today, however, is that the practice of sectarian rituals has become part of every state position, and that communal rituals, having tightened their grip on society, have been ransacking the state with zeal and energy.
And as questions of war and peace with Israel are debated, sects' positions rise to the fore, as though each sect had its own "diplomacy" on these questions on top of possessing "cultural" grounds for allowing peace or forbidding it. Positions thereby become precisely assessed sect by sect. There is a great deal of the communities' repressed histories contained within this eruption- histories of conflict and subordination that include the civil wars over the Palestinian cause, the wars between sects and within sects to establish dominance, and the feelings of marginalization, grievances and the like, that have befallen the communities or that the communities claimed had befallen them.
These separatist impulses, swelling beneath the crust of a cracked state, render "the struggle against normalization" absurd, since anyone can "normalize" in their own way without even passing through the phase of peace. A parallel absurdity is invited by the illusions of those who believe they can drag the state into peace, and society into normalization, merely by making peace and normalizing themselves.
We are, then, a society in which each segment acts as it pleases- a primitive pluralism without agreed upon rules, shared constraints, or a regulating center.
These factional whims, and the subcultures they encompass, are empowered by the conditions of the region and the world. Alongside the "Islamic Republic" in Iran, the weight of religious parties in Israel is growing; state-building is fading as a central policy of the most powerful Western states and their "technological" capitalist economies, and support for oppressed peoples and communities is no longer part of a progressive, enlightened agenda, becoming instead an extension of the defense of an "authenticity" threatened by a "white man" who, according to his prevalent image, never tires of threatening...
