Almost no major event anywhere in the world, the French protests being the latest example, fails to split the Lebanese along the lines of their original divisions. There are those who stand against the French establishment - and with it racism, classism, and violent police repression - and celebrate the Palestinian flags raised at the protests. And there are those who stand against the rioting, vandalism, and the "uncivilized" displays that have been associated with the West’s immigration policies.
It is not hard to notice the transnational ideological roots of each position. The first camp speaks in a language that brings together assorted leftist, anarchist, Islamist, and "Third Worldist" currents for which Gaza has, for three years now, been the anchor. The second speaks in the language of salvaging an old European "purity" and the love of stability, even when that stability is guarded by batons and tear gas. While the former, enamored of left-wing populism, claim to be the bridge to a just future, the latter, enamored of right-wing populism, claim to be the guardians of the past and of its continuity, without which there is no future.
Stopping at an examination of these roots alone, however, is misguided when it does not go hand in hand with discerning the other roots from which the two sides of the divide spring.
The former draw a picture of a global crisis that descends from the top to the bottom: from the supposed global struggle over Palestine, capitalism, immigration, Islam, and the rest, down to every country and community, all of which are called upon to stand as one against a single global enemy. The picture drawn by the latter, by contrast, starts from their own countries, their conditions and their rifts, as well as a sense, be it conscious or not, that alliances on a global scale are impossible, for practical reasons if nothing else.
And if the former borrow an "internationalism" and a "condensation of contradictions" to pave the path of an abstract “citizen of the world," the latter, who seem local, even provincial, believe that their cause, which they consider just, could clash with other just causes. Accordingly, the fates of the smaller struggles are, on the first bank, held hostage to the greater struggle and part of a harmonious tableau of contradictions. On the second bank, each cause is painted out to be a great struggle in its own right, one that may intersect with another struggle but may just as well contradict it.
We have seen, and continue to see, ample evidence of a divergence whose components and parties are hard to cast in a single mold, or to see as moving in a single direction. A very broad segment of the population see their country leaving the conflict with Israel behind as a necessary, if insufficient, condition for the country’s recovery. Over the past decade, we felt the sharp collision between the sensibilities of change in some Arab countries, Syria above all, and sensibilities around the Palestinian question.
In the Levant especially, many minorities, religious, sectarian, and ethnic, are deeply apprehensive of those who hold an "internationalist" view of the conflict, because they ignore these minorities' causes or subordinate them to others. These minorities resent having their concerns excluded from militant fashionable agendas- and for some, mind you, their tragedy deepened in perfect alignment with the rise of radical nationalist and religious movements.
It is worth recalling, in this context, how many regimes succeeded in wielding Palestinian rights against those of the Kurds, to bury the latter’s rights- a move that enjoyed clear popular support and was broadly embraced. Recent history and present facts likewise supply us with foundational conflicts that cannot be turned over like a page, as though they were a passing summer cloud, for the sake of the one "internationalist" contradiction.
The conflict pitting elites and broad communities against the Islamists, the bloody struggle Lebanon witnessed between Christians and Palestinians, or that which pitted Sunnis and Shiites against one another in Iraq, and the present conditions of Syria's minorities - all suggest that the "internationalism" of the former approach, which is placed above local questions and sometimes against them, may itself become fuel for civil conflicts that further fragment the parts instead of contributing to the unification of the whole.
Today there is a new factor whose repercussions may exceed all others: Iran's war, direct and indirect, on several of its Arab neighbors. Those who urge us to sharpen the memory of wars against colonialism and Zionism would do well to remember the toxic waste that fills our memories, which are already brimming with acrimony.
Thus, demanding utmost unity on disputed terms, amid maximal divisions and mutual alienation, may betray an unwillingness to see our conditions as they are and hence a wish to avoid paying the steep costs required to leave them behind. Instead of summoning a sense of self-responsibility to confront these questions and try to resolve them, they are incorporated into a cause that resembles the sky as seen from the earth.
Yet, by the same token, those with "smaller causes" need an immunity that shields them from the temptations of reckless reaction in the name of patriotism or loyalties to one community or another that leave little on the horizon. Refusing to be reduced to, and incorporated into, a "great cause" that admits no debate does not necessarily mean being incorporated into the ranks of that "great cause's" opponents, even when they are racists and hardline right-wingers.
Nor are withdrawal from the world and turning a deaf ear to it the only alternative to the mandatory pull toward the great and the massive that presents itself as epic. We can say that much even before discussing the many experiences that teach us that allies of necessity are, necessarily, allies of the moment, especially these days, when caprice competes with open criminality.
