Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Brief Reflection on the Double-Bind of the Lebanese Progressive in the Wake of Two Fateful Octobers
Fadi Amer, Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution, Lebanese American University
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October 17th, 2019, seems like a distant past these days, but it was nothing short of a moment of sublime ecstasy. For a mere instant, an ephemeral blip, it seemed as though the chronic conditions that had plagued Greater Lebanon since the end of its horrific civil war, if not its inception, had finally met their end: crippling identitarian politics cloaked in the deceptive language of ‘coexistence’ and ‘national unity’; elite economics and the structural driving of the masses into sectarian clientelism or the gamble of exile; and, of course, the engrained weakness of the state, stripped of its monopoly on violence and relegated to perpetual paralysis.
These dreams were punctured violently by a series of existential setbacks, one rapidly after another. First, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the whole world came to a standstill. Around the same time, the state defaulted on its debts. Then, the traumatic explosion of the Beirut port. Shortly thereafter, the rapid escalation of the economic and financial crisis, as the value of the currency began to evaporate in real-time, and the pauperization of much of the population became an inescapable fact. A new, bitter reality thus emerged, marked by the total failure of the state and its institutions, an accelerated cantonization of the country’s sectarian communities, and a reinvigorated militia-led status quo.
Despite this, by the summer of 2023, it seemed as though we had entered a new equilibrium – ‘we have hit rock bottom,’ some believed, ‘and there is nowhere to go but up.’ The regional dynamic was also reassuring, with China brokering a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, while the G20 Summit unveiled a massive investment project linking India to Europe through the Arabian Peninsula, though the fate of the Levant remained uncertain. Then followed the Hamas attack on October 7th, in response to which the Israeli Occupation Forces unleashed the most brutal attack on civilian life and infrastructure in living memory, threatening to draw the whole region into a war of cataclysmic proportions.
Against this unbearable belligerence, the domestic and regional political fates have become irreversibly and existentially intertwined. On the one hand, the crown jewel of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, Hezbollah, has attempted to reposition itself, after the scathing criticism it has received, rightly so, since the 2006 war, into a locally minded and rational actor, containing Israeli aggression while safeguarding the Lebanese national interest. On the other hand, the leaders of the ‘Free World’, the administration of Joe Biden chief among them, have long attempted to position themselves as the liberal, democratic, and egalitarian counterpart to the Russian and Chinese foil, only to double-down on their support for Israel’s genocidal war.
The Lebanese progressive is thus caught in a double-bind. In the first instance, the hard fight of October 17 proved rather infantile and ineffectual, while the political establishment reaffirmed its resilience and staying power. The status quo is here to stay, and the only option left is to steer it towards a more constructive path ahead. In the second, the apartheid regime across our southern border has reaffirmed its unwavering desire for ‘the whole of Palestine with none of the Palestinians’. Yet how to oppose the unceasing imperialism of the ‘Free World’ without becoming subjugated by the ‘Axis of Resistance’? The middle way has become a tightrope flailing menacingly above the void of certain death.