From a September 30, 2013 National Interest Commentary:

The Alawites, Ethnic Cleansing, and Syria's Future

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Franck Salameh 

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September 30, 2013

The History of a Name

From a September 23 J-Post Op-Ed

Syria: The history of a name By FRANCK SALAMEH23/09/2013

The Lebanese Exception

Though its current instability is troubling, Lebanon may still provide an example of power sharing in a future Syria. And as refugees from Syria stream into Lebanon, its worth recalling how past movements in the region shaped the present order.

Read the rest in The National Interest...

The Enigma of the Syrian Nation

Much is often said about the artificiality of the modern Middle Eastern state-system, particularly Syria. Often highlighted are the region’s current “republics” as the outcome of Anglo-French colonial fancy: “contrived points on a map” in Fouad Ajami’s telling, joining together disparate peoples, fractious ethnic groups, apprehensive confessional communities and distinct autonomous provinces—into uneasy, compulsory and ultimately unhappy matrimony. This picture of Western intrusions and failed cartography is not entirely off-kilter. Yet this restive Syria protruding out of the sad canvas of the modern Middle East remains an entity that influential pundits insist on defending and preserving in its current form.

Read the rest in The National Interest

“Piss Christ” and the “Innocence of Muslims”

(This post was picked up by the Jerusalem Post on September 23, 2012)

“Innocence of Muslims,” the shoddy production that recently unleashed waves of outrage throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world, was, mildly put, an insult directed at Muslims and non-Muslims alike.  Whether in form, language, or content, the film made a mockery out of basic standards of human decency, good taste, artistic subtlety, and historical discernment.  Its crassness was an affront to its subject matter, its intended audience, those involved in its production, and the community (or communities) that the producers were assumed to represent—in this case American-Copts and by association Christians, and even Christendom and the West in more general terms. 

At best, the “film” in question was a collection of obscene stereotypes, crammed with breathtaking incompetence into a buffoonish production that even by the standards of the Arab world’s most offensive adaptations of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—and other suchlike anti-Semitic fixtures of Syrian, Hezbollah, and Egyptian television—would have been deemed too clumsy and crude, even for captive Muslim audiences.  No serious film-critic, and not the most artless of amateurs, could have kept a straight face referring to this frivolous feature as a "film”—that is, of course, no one except those who went into frenzies of mayhem and murder this past week lambasting the “film” and its country of origin, most of them without even having seen it.  Without the angry mobs, that trivial production, like others of its kind, would have passed unnoticed, desiccated in Western pantheons of indignity, alongside other such samplings of jaundiced primitive screed.

That being said, one would be hard pressed labeling the “Innocence of Muslims” a form of “hate speech,” or an “affront to Islam and monotheistic religions” that “ought to be criminalized by International Law and its perpetrators brought to justice,” as recently clamored Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.  Ironically, Nasrallah, commands a powerful private militia that defies the Lebanese national army and flouts both Lebanon’s national prerogatives and International Law.  Additionally, through a baneful mix of coercion intimidation and violence, Nasrallah conducts himself as Iran’s satrap in the Levant, and has perfected to the hilt the art of offending others and denigrating their religious, national, and cultural symbols.  What’s more, Hezbollah’s private satellite television station Al-Manar (“The Beacon”), designated a “global terrorist entity” by the United States and banned in a number of countries, has normalized portrayal of the creeds and cultures of others as “Evil,” “Satan,” and “Cancers” meriting eradication.

It is all the more farcical in this light that Nasrallah invoke International Law to criminalize offenders of religion.  Yet crudeness and indecency, obvious features of those who made the “Innocence of Muslims,” are character failings worthy of contempt, not a crime warranting Nasrallah’s righteous indignation, or the international community’s punishment.  In point of fact, wouldn’t it be fair to expect those who wish to brandish (and have recourse to) international bodies to be, at a bare minimum, respectful of International Law?  Yet, if anything, Nasrallah’s bombast and bellicosity have for the past twenty years, and as a matter of principle and theology, impugned the will of the international community and willfully flouted international statutes. For the rest, Nasrallah might be better served familiarizing himself with the sanctity of freedom of expression, one of the hallmarks of International Human Rights Law.  Indeed, one of the authors of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was none other than the great Lebanese philosopher and jurist, Charles Malik, a compatriot of Hassan Nasrallah’s. Alas Nasrallah’s ears appear to be less engaged than his mouth these days, and Lebanon’s humane past seems less of the exemplar (or “Beacon”) to him than its belligerent militarized present.  Otherwise, Malik might have revealed to his petulant junior that Man’s freedom to criticize, even lampoon, religious, political, and cultural symbols, is a basic tenet of human rights; that without this freedom to offend, Man would still be languishing in the dark ages paralyzed by superstitions and caged in servitude to sorcerers, soothsayers, and witch-doctors. Would someone dare remind Lebanon’s hallowed Sayyid in which century we live?

In the end, the catalyst in these latest Middle Eastern convulsions was a risible, primitive, bigoted, and willfully incendiary home-video.  But the “Innocence of Muslims” was hardly the kind of catalyst warranting the intensity of anger and the span of violence it spawned—at least not in civilized company where mores are offended as a matter of principle, and where Man’s humanity and humanism are tested daily. In a Christian context, the “Innocence of Muslims” might have been placed in the same category as the 1987 "Piss Christ" photograph—an image of a crucifix submerged in a cup of the artist’s urine.  Like its Muslim counterpart of early September 2012, the late 20^th century “Piss Christ” was a crude affront to Christian pieties.  But unlike the “Innocence of Muslims,” the “Piss Christ” photograph was partially funded by a United States government agency; the National Endowment for the Arts.  At the time, its irreverent creator, Andres Serrano, received death threats, and his artistic creation was ultimately vandalized.  Yet Serrano still lives, and his work still arouses strong emotions among both proponents and opponents.  Ironically, among Serrano’s most vocal defenders in 1987 were members of the clergy—most probably Jesuits, invested in ecumenism—who suggested that rather than being “blasphemy,” and a "desecration" of a religious symbol, one might look at “Piss Christ” as a statement on what modern Christians have done with the legacy of Jesus.

There is a moral to this story. If one is looking to be offended—and “pick a bone,” as the saying goes—then both "Piss Christ" and the “Innocence of Muslims” are a crude revolting offense, rigged to inflame.  If, on the other hand, one is willing to engage in civilized intercourse, even with those deemed unworthy of it, then the context of the offense might offer more clarity and more rewarding benefits than actual retribution.  Rather than asking "who is the author of this abomination, and how might revenge be meted out?" Muslims Christians and others, people of good will everywhere, may wish to inquire into why something was deemed blasphemous? why was there blasphemy to begin with? and what can be done to address the apprehensions of both blasphemers and injured parties?  But the acceptance of blasphemy may after all be specific to Christendom, anathema to others; an impulse of those seeking “to scandalize that which scandalized them as children,” writes the author of  “A Hundred Images that Shocked the World.”

As a rebellious teenager eager to offend the codes of my elders, I once told a Jesuit catechist that I was a Devil worshiper, that I wanted out of his class.  This was, by the way, very deeply offensive in a Lebanon of the late-1970s; a country in the throes of war and chaos, but still beholden to tradition.  To my surprise, my catechist did not scold me, did not dismiss me from class, did not send me to the Principal’s office, and did not banish me to eternal hellfire.  He simply smiled and said “that’s interesting; tell me more about your Devil worship!”  I never left catechism.

New Books Network

This is the shameless self-promoting side of me ;)


I wanted to mention a recent New Books Network interview I did in late July.  For the adventurous, it is available at this New Books in Anthropology link. 

The sound quality is not that great--in fact it's awful, as the interview was done long distance from France, and via Skype--but (for the courageous and persevering) there is plenty of useful audible segments in it where NBN describes Language Memory and Identity in the MIddle East as "meticulously researched and intriguingly written [...] invit[ing] the reader to voraciously turn the pages in expedition of a world rarely presented to the western audience."

I also discuss towards the end of the interview my current book project on Charles Corm (1894-1963) and the archives i'm working in this year, in Beirut, Paris, Nantes, and Colmar.

More Cognitive Dissonance on Syria

The continued obsession with Syrian unity is mind boggling.  It reminds me of what the guy with the white staticky hair said about "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"But the breakup of Syria [...] poses a graver threat to the Middle East..." says this recent Vali Nasr op-ed.  But why, really?  If I'm not missing a lot, the main argument of this analysis is preventing the "breakup of Syria."  But the question here is why should there be compunctions about the breakup of Syria if this is what the Syrians (or at least some Syrians) want?  Should people who don't want to live together be forced to remain in an unhappy union?  Is this what happens in real life?  Is this the norm among smart cultured progressive Western liberals? Why this infatuation with a united Syria when its uneasy existence as such (these past 75 years) has been anything but contrived and restive?  Why this infantilization and condescension of the Middle East and Middle Eastern mosaics by ordaining and ossifying their continued unity--as if it's a law of nature?

Can we already stop these lame clichés about "a breakup of Syria [...] spill[ing] into neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey..."  We're still talking about a minor country here projecting a shadow much larger than itself, and punching way above its weight.  Why should it (and why should we admit as a given that it will) "spill into" anywhere?  Can we please stop these unwarranted deifications of Syria, as if it were an exemplar of stability?


Similarities notwithstanding, what happens in Syria is specific to Syria (and "stays in Syria" to use a Vegasism); Lebanon and Iraq could, will (and (sometimes in my opinion) SHOULD) break up because of their own endemic idiosyncrasies, NOT because something from Syria will have spilt into them!  And Turkey?  Really?  The breakup of a police-state ruled by an oppressive party apparatus with medieval worldviews can have an effect on a neighboring democracy with institutions?

In a sense, Professor Nasr is acknowledging the aberrant nature of unitary states in the MIddle East (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc..), yet he insists on maintaining them in their dubious unharmonious harmonies--lest their reversion to their natural antecedents offend our taste for "oneness."  I don't know what it is with the West's conceits about the Middle East; assumptions that continue to lead us into failures of interpretation, failures of analysis, and failures of policy.  Is it cognitive dissonance? separation anxiety? or plain intellectual inertia?

Yeah, Fisk, "Assad's Fate is Sealed," and صحّ النوم on "The State of the Alawites"

I don't know what it is with hack "analysts" incapable of going beyond the obsolete models of Arab nationalism. Is what drives them ignorance, an impulse for omissions, or flat out historical perversions?

Take for instance this gem of unscrupulous dilettante journalism:

... this "frontier" of fire matches almost precisely the "State of the Alawites" temporarily created by the post-First World War French mandate which chopped Syria up into mini-nations partly on sectarian lines.  

Huh? Is Fisk at all capable of sticking to ideologically-innocent history?  Would he care to admit that the 1920 "State of the Alawites" instated by the French was not intended to be "temporary," nor was it the result of a "chopped up Syria."  There was no "Syria" precedent (to this "temporary" entity) to merit "chopp[ing] up." In 1918 the French inherited a bevy of semi-autonomous (ethnically coherent) Ottoman administrative units which they attempted to keep intact until 1936.  Those were the "Pays Alaouite," "Pays Druze," "Etat d'Alep," and "Etat de Damas"; and they actually made more sense than the current Syrian entity.  In fact, prior to 1936 there was no united or unified "Syria," nor was there a coherent cohesive Syrian nation to be racked by French colonial rapacity and end up being "chopped up into mini-nations."  The current, rending, "modern Syria" is a historical anomaly that is simply reverting back to its natural dissected past.  It never needed the French to "chop it up." If anything, the French proceeded with a profound understanding of (and respect for) the multi-ethnic nature of the Levantine mosaic, and attempted to remain faithful to the coherence, soundness, and practicality of the Ottoman administrative precedent.

Today's problems in the Levant (Syria's problems included) are the result of forced and coerced unities, as mandated by the early 20th century British, who, post-1936 had become the effective rulers of French-controlled Grand-Liban, Pays Alaouite, Pays Druze, Etat d'Alep, and Etat de Damas, and which they attempted (against the natural order of things) to bring together in an unholy cantankerous union.  It is high time things went back to the past, and Levantine history got justice.

The [no] Case Against an Alawite State

Here is another speculative wishful-thinking "Syria analysis" by Joshua Landis. 


This is at best an apologetic, brimming with the usual tendentious unconvincing and misleading hagiographic material, by one who made career out of these sorts of shameless panegyrics. Here is a quick sampling of distortions, omissions, and outright historical howlers: 


1- "After the French conquered Syria in 1920..."  Really?  "[T]he French conquered Syria in 1920"? Actually, as in "conquered," conquered Syria? If "conquest" there was, it was one of former Ottoman Provinces in 1918 (not 1920), which were cobbled together by the British in 1936 to form what then became the template of a future Syria.  What the French "conquered" were in fact League of Nations mandated Ottoman Territories, not a coherent cohesive "Syrian" entity, which were actually "conquered" by Hejazi Sherifian forces (Faysal and his gangs.)  The French wrested back (under a League of Nations Mandate) what was conquered by Faysal.  But why bother with trivialities?  


2-  "Bashar married a Sunni Muslim in an attempt at nation-building and to stand as an example of integration..." Really? Whatever happened to marriage for love?  Specially for one long touted as a Westernized (computer-geek) liberal reformer iconoclastic eye-doctor, by this very same analyst? 


3-  "Assad has done nothing to lay the groundwork for an Alawite state.  There is no national infrastructure in the coastal region to sustain a state: no international airport, no electric power plans, no industry of importance, and nothing on which to build a national economy..."  I won't mention Basel al-Assad International Airport, or Syria's only deep water harbors in Lattakieh and Tartous (which Landis himself refers to as "port cities" in his piece), and will let those who have visited Syria recently weigh in on the dishonesty of this statement. 


The rest--like "no country will recognize the Alawite state"--is a big colossal yawn!!  As if when faced with an existential crisis the Alawites are going to fret about international recognition.

A Paradigm Shift for Syria

I am traveling through early Fall on a Boston College research grant.  I expect to be in the Middle East for at least part of my grant period.  If this pans out, I hope to revive this blog "from the Levant"--provided I have reliable internet.  In the meantime, and before I get disconnected, here's my latest on Syria, and my commentary to the doubting Thomases who've only now begun considering a "third option" (umm, partition) which I've spoken about since the very early days of the uprisings.

A version of this post (here) ran in the July 10, 2012 issue of the National Interest

Many Middle East commentators have described the Houla massacres of May 2012 as "a turning point" in Syria’s sixteen-month old uprisings.  “This is Syria's Srebrenica” clamored some, speculating sterner international pressures ranging from the imposition of more debilitating sanctions against the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, to further isolating his government (with the prospects of enlisting Chinese and Russian help,) to possibly putting boots on the ground to lend support to the armed opposition and eventually create civilian "safe havens."  Yet the brutal killings continued, an undaunted Assad went on flouting international denunciations, and save for a quasi-universal litany of jeremiads and consternations about the regime's cruelty, precious little has changed on the ground in Syria.  If anything, Assad seemed to have raised the stakes in late June downing a Turkish military jet that had presumably breached Syrian airspace.  Yet, this too, along with news of fresh new massacres in the Damascus neighborhood of Douma, met with international mutism—and curiously enough, with Turkish resignation.

True, there was the recent ballyhooed Geneva conference, and before it the histrionic expulsions of Syria's diplomatic corps from key Western nations—with the Obama administration, true to form, demurring.  But those remained sparse, perfunctory, timorous, and largely ineffective slaps on the wrist.  For, beyond the killings, beyond the world's cacophonous indignation, and beyond the Syrian regime's continued recalcitrance, there lurked a method to Assad's madness that very few observers have deigned address or entertain: namely, that what animates Assad are communal survival concerns and Alawite group contingencies; that the international community’s and the Syrian opposition’s oratory about Syria’s unity and national integrity are the least of the regime’s preoccupations; that it might be too late at this point in the game for the Alawites to abdicate their reign and resign themselves to a subservient future in Syria; that many assumptions about the current shape of the Syrian state are broken beyond repair; and that the Alawites would rather dismantle their existing republic and retreat into a fortified autonomous entity in the Alawite mountains than share power with a brutalized Sunni-Arab majority ill-prepared to granting either democracy or clemency to its cruel erstwhile wardens.

Save for analysis published in The National Interest throughout 2011 and early 2012 (see for instance here, here, and here,) most analysts, diplomats, and policy makers invested in Syrian affairs seem still beholden to spent paradigms about the country; namely that Syria is somehow a single unitary entity that shall remain so whatever the cost and whatever the outcome of the current uprisings, to be ruled in its entirety by a single dynasty beholden to a single ideology and bound to a single political culture. Yet, if anything, the events of the past sixteen months—and more recently the Houla and Douma massacres—have demonstrated that the Alawites, not unlike other Syrian communal and ethnic groups, have yet to overcome their regional, sectarian, and subnational loyalties for the sake of some fancied uniform "Syrian nation."  Historically speaking, there was never anything resembling this vision of a homogenous Syrian entity, and there is precious little today that would justify the constitutive elements of this artificial construct remaining intact.  

The grisly massacres running riot through the Syrian countryside are not mere sectarian outbursts or spasmodic bouts of senseless killings and retaliatory counter-killings; they bear the telltale markings of what became known in Yugoslavia of the 1990's as "ethnic cleansing."  Like their twentieth century Balkan precedent, Syria’s massacres of civilian populations are deliberate, controlled, methodical, and focused, aimed at removing "from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group... in order to render that area ethnically homogenous."  Ironically the parallels don’t end there.  Like the Balkans, geographic Syria—including today’s troubled Syrian Arab Republic—was once part of the Ottoman dominions.  It was and remains at once a crossroads and a rugged mountainous refuge where many linguistic families, multiple ethnic groups, and bevies or religious and sectarian communities—among them Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Shias, Sunnis, Greek-Orthodox, Druze, Syriacs, Alawites, Maronites, Jews and others—have for centuries lead an uneasy existence and a tenuous coexistence.  The conditions that have lead to the twentieth century rending of the Balkan states into multiple ethnic formations may be different from those responsible for Syria’s travails today.  But the ingredients are hardly dissimilar: restless ethnic, religious, and linguistic mosaics forcibly brought together under the banner of a homogenizing authoritarian pan-national idea.

And so, today’s strings of wanton murders, sexual assaults, torture, arbitrary detentions, targeted bombings, and destruction of civilian neighborhoods—and what they entail in terms of displacements, deportations, and population movements—are nothing if not the groundwork of a future Alawite entity; the grafting of new facts on the ground and the drafting of new frontiers.  No longer able to rule in the name of Arab unity, and in the process preserve their own ethnic and sectarian autonomy and specificity, the Alawites deem it salutary to retreat into the Levantine highlands overlooking the Mediterranean.  The area in question is a sanctuary that the Alawites had called home for centuries, and which the French had helped them instate and protect as an autonomous “ethnic state” during the first-half of the twentieth century. 

By no means will the population of this projected state be homogenous; but its Alawite element will be an overwhelming majority that is politically, psychologically, militarily, and economically well-prepared to stand up and be counted.  What’s more, the largely Christian coastal regions of Tartous and Lattakieh have remained “neutral” throughout the uprisings—and have in effect signaled (even if tacitly) their acquiescence in an Alawite-dominated state.  Furthermore, the buffer zones of Masyaf and Cadmus to the East are home to a large Ismaili community, which has thus far remained loyal to the Alawites.  Heading northeastward, beyond the Turko-Syrian border town of Idlib, the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seems to have already begun establishing the foundations of autonomous rule, with Alawite blessings and encouragement.  Though its industrial resources are quite limited, this projected Alawite region benefits from a well developed infrastructure, rich arable highlands, fertile coastal plains, abundant water sources, and more importantly perhaps, Syria’s only deep-water harbors—Tartous and Lattakieh—and an international airport that would make any emerging state in that particular region at once self-sufficient and supremely defensible.

The earth is flat no more when it comes to Syria, and its current shape no longer makes sense to a recently empowered group unwilling to revert back to servility.  It is high time prevalent images of "Syria" and its future—as a cultural, linguistic, historical, and ethnic monolith—also moved away from this sort of cognitive dissonance.  This is not a prescription.  This is a gentle reminder that a model for this future can be found in Syria’s Ottoman and French-Mandatory past, and that a single unitary Syria locked up in its current map is neither sacrosanct nor a law of nature.  Indeed if anything it is an historical anomaly that arose in 1936—a date prior to which conceptually, politically, and geographically speaking, Syria as we know it today was non-extant.  Policy maker, peace processors, diplomats, and those invested in Syrian affairs and the Syrian people’s wellbeing would do well exploring all possible solutions to the current Syrian crisis, not only solutions dictated by prevalent models and comforting ideological predilections.

Might is Right in Syria

For those of you who still bother visiting this site, I've been on a long hiatus preparing for the launch of a new refereed Middle East e-journal at Boston College.  The Levantine Review is now live and still accepting essays for review (until September 30) and possible publication in the Fall 2012 issue.

I also thought, before reactivating this blog, to revisit an essay on Syria from earlier this year.  It seems to me that what is currently happening in Northern Lebanon (the heavy clashes between Sunnis and Alawites/Shi'ites) might fit into the Assad's "re-ordering" of the Eastern Mediterranean, in preparation for the impending Alawite Canton.

The Delusion of an Arab World

My response to Rami Khouri's jaundiced call for "killing the Levant" was recently featured in the National Interest under the title The Delusion of an Arab World.

Does Anyone Speak Arabic?

My latest in the Fall 2011 issue of the Middle East Quarterly (Vol. 18, No. 4)

Killing the Levant, Rekindling the "Arab World"

In 1999, long before the fitful rise and fall of the 2011 “Arab Spring,” former Arab-nationalist author and public intellectual Hazem Saghieh published a scathing critique of Arab dogmas, delusions, and political discourse. He named his book The Swansong of Arabism. It was a work of painful and honest introspection, in which the author called for casting aside the soothing jingles of “Arab Unity” and discarding the assumptions of “Arab Identity,” urging his former comrades-in-arms to let go of, and bid farewell to the corpse Arabism. “Arabism is dead,” wrote Saghieh, and Arab nationalists would do well bringing a healthy dose of realism to their world’s changing realities: “they need relinquish their phantasmagoric delusions about ‘the Arab world’ [… and let go of their] damning and outmoded nomenclatures of unity and uniformity [… in favor of] liberal concepts such as associational and consociational identities.”

Arabism and unitary Arab identity—“philosophies of compulsion, coercion, and exclusion” in Saghieh’s words—have rained disaster on the Middle East of the past hundred years; yet their ideologies persist as lodestar to many an irredeemable nationalist, and their illusive terminologies remain the dominant prism through which some insist on defining the Middle East. Liberal, multi-ethnic, polyglot models such as those of Switzerland, Belgium, or India, complained Saghieh, “elicit nothing but contempt from Arabists still infatuated with overarching domineering pan-identities.” Diversity frightens the Arabists he claimed. To wit, Lebanese militant scholar Omar Farrukh wrote during the second half of the 20th century that it is irrelevant should Iraqis deem themselves a hybrid of Aramaeans, Persians, Kurds, Turks, Indians, and others still: “They still are Arabs, in spite of their racial diversity,” even in spite of themselves, “because the overriding factor in their identity formation is the Arabic language.” Likewise, Farrukh stressed that the inhabitants of today’s Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and elsewhere in Northern Africa, may very well be a mix of Berbers, Black Africans, Spaniards, and Franks; “but by dint of the Arab nation’s realities [sic.?] they all remain Arabs shorn from the same cloth as the Arabs of the Hejaz, Najd, and Yemen.”

More recently, Palestinian public intellectual and journalist Rami Khouri suggested proclaiming “the death of the ‘Levant’ label” as a referent to the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. His rationale was that the “revolts across much of the Arab world capture the fact that Arab citizens are now in the very early stages of rewriting their own history and crafting their own national narratives.” Consequently, those citizens’ physical and geographic space, argued Khouri, deserved nomenclature reflecting the nature of their world and the mood of their revolts. The “Arab world” was a more apt term to describe Egypt, Syria, and their Mediterranean bailiwick claimed Khouri; “Levant,” on the other hand, was a linguistic, perceptual, and geographic throwback to a hated “colonial era,” which the current upheavals seem bent on erasing. Yet Levantines could not disagree more with Khouri's oversimplifications; most see themselves not as colonial inventions, but as sophisticated, urbane, cosmopolitan mongrels, intimately acquainted with multiple cultures, skillfully wielding multiple languages, and elegantly straddling multiple traditions, identities, and civilizations, including those of Khouri’s vaunted Arabs.

Yet, oblivious to the realities of the Levantine Near East as a crossroads and a meeting-place of peoples, histories, languages, and ideas, Khouri seems hellbent on snuffing out diversity in the name of Arab uniformity; as if Arabism’s resentful history of the past hundred years had not yet been sanguinary enough, repressive enough, or negationist enough. “History beckons to the Arabs,” wrote recently Syrian thinker Adonis,

to put an end to their culture of deceit; for, [the] states of the Levant are much greater, much richer, and much grander than to be reduced to slavery for the benefit of Arabism […] and no amount of cruelty and violence emanating from Arab nationalists will change the reality that the Middle East is not the preserve of Arabs alone.

Yet Khouri somehow deems it fitting to slay Adonis’s Levant—the Levant of millions of Adonises—on the altar of a spent ideology and an “Arab world” that no longer obtains. Never mind that in this year’s Middle East uprisings not a single banner was raised in the name of an “Arab world,” not a single candle was lit in the name of an “Arab world,” not a single slogan was intoned in the name of an “Arab world,” and not a single victim (mauled by the cruel killing machines of writhing Arab nationalist regimes,) not a single victim self-immolated for the sake of an “Arab world.” Still, the indecent champions of a moribund “Arab world” have no shame piggybacking on the sacrifices of those seeking freedom from the brutality and servitude of a hackneyed and dessicated ideology.

Nearly a decade before Khouri’s delusional exhortation to rename the Levant, Nizar Qabbani, an Arab nationalist with impeccable credentials, was announcing the death of his Arab world, not the Levant; and he was inviting incorrigible nationalists to join him at the wake. Eulogizing an anthropomorphic “Arab world,” Qabbani wrote:

… This is the end of dialogue […] My language has despaired of you: and I have set fire to my clothes, and I have set fire to your language and your lexicons. I want out of my voice; out of my writings; out of my place of birth. I want out of your cities of salt, your hollow poetry, […] and your tedious language and silly myths and lore. I have had enough already of your hallowed idiots and your lionized impostors. I have despaired of your skins; I have despaired of my nails; I have despaired of your impenetrable wall.

Perhaps Khouri, and those like him, still romancing outmoded delusions about some uniform, unified, reformed “Arab world,” would take heed.

On the "Apartheid" State and Palestinian "Terrorists."

Last night David Makovsky and Gaith al-Omari spoke at the Schusterman Center—Brandeis University—about the upcoming bid for the UN recognition of a Palestinian State this Fall. It was fabulous. The talks were introduced by Brandeis Professor and Schusterman Director Ilan Troen, and moderated by Crown Center Director Shai Feldman. I couldn’t stay for the extended discussion session—which probably turned out to be more interesting than the presentations—but here’s one of the conclusions that I found particularly refreshing:

Pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians around the world (and around US campuses) need to grow up already. The conflict is about lives, not about ideals that whacko extremists brandish on both sides. If Palestinians and Israelis on the ground have come to an understanding (and they have) that both their narratives are valid, and that both their decisions and behaviors affect the lives of people living inside the conflict, then so must their “supporters” who pontificate and posture and wave flags from outside the conflict. There is no solution—and therefore no possibility for a Palestinians state to emerge—outside of the “two-state” solution. Palestinians are only now coming to realize that they made a big booboo in 1947 by rejecting the UN “two-state” partition resolution. Better late than never. Palestinians can no longer deny the Jews’ connection to (what in 1920 became) British Mandatory Palestine; today Israel. Israelis can no longer say “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” That is silly, and both parties recognize the mistakes of their past posturing. They don’t necessarily have to like each other’s narratives—and again, it’s silly to expect them to. But they’re coming to terms with those narratives, and they are learning to respect them. It is time their supporters on the outside—and around US campuses—became responsible adults and followed suit.

I will try to post a transcript of the talks when I have time.

Arabism; An Orientalist Trope?

Arab nationalism and the post-WWI order it imposed on the Middle Eastern mosaic is another Orientalist trope says Shlomo Avineri in this recent Haaretz piece.

Not tooting my own horn--okay fine, I am--but this is something to which I have alluded repeatedly earlier this year, when every other Middle East expert and their sister kept tripping over themselves heralding a so-called "Arab Spring," and an "Arab Re-Awakening." Back then I wrote--and today I still believe--that

the dismantlement of the "anciens régimes" in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, point to a defrocking of the Arab nationalist order, not its "rebirth"; [signaling] the emergence of new nation-states, not the mending of an old ideology. Much has been written [...] about the region's turmoil bearing the markings of Eastern-Europe-1989. The comparison is tempting. However, it is not unlikely that future historians might revise this parallel and re-christen this year's momentous events as the early stirrings of a Middle Eastern "Peace of Westphalia"; the breakup of the imperial [and I dare say an imperialist] Arab (dis)order and the birth of new free nations. Eastern-Europe-1989 did not only bring about the fall of the Iron Curtain; it raised a Velvet Curtain to reveal the birthing of new nations. Not Egypt, not Libya, and not Tunisia; Sudan is the glimpse into the future of the Middle East.

Maybe this is wishful thinking--and I admit my analysis is not ideologically innocent, I am sympathetic to minority rights and minority narratives in the Middle East--but all indicators seem to validate the Sudanese model. To wit, Hebrew-U Political Scientist Shlomo Avineri wrote today that "the independence of Southern Sudan [and I would add the impending fragmentation of Libya and Syria] reflect the failure of Arab nationalist ideology to impose solidarity and uniformity upon complex, multiethnic societies."

Avineri, whose work is ordinarily seated snugly to a "left of center" well disposed to "Arabist causes", wrote that in a sanctimonious "international community that sticks to its principles" the Southern Sudanese should have achieved their independence long ago, without the oppression and the blood-tribute exacted by "the Arab and Muslim Sudanese leadership" whose stock in trade remains an unforgiving Aflaquesque Arabism.

But Sudan is only the most obvious (and fashionable) "modern" example. Otherwise, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, among others, are likewise modern creations--mainly the product of flimsy British cartography, heedless of the complex, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, polyglot societies that have defined the Middle East for millennia, even at the height of the more recent Arab and Muslim ascendancy in the region. The modern Arab nationalist order wrote Avineri

which presented these new countries as an integral part of the Arab world [...] reflected reality only in part, but for several decades served as a powerful device for oppressing minorities--Kurds in Iraq and Syria, non-Arabs in Sudan. Even the constant pressure on Lebanon to accept pan-Arab policy, at the expense of maintaining its unique character as a mutiethnic, multireligious society, is part of the attempt to force an Arab national identity on a pluralistic, complex society.

The fledgling republic of Southern Sudan might be signaling the end of the reductive, repressive Arab nationalist order argued Avineri; a prelude to a new map of the Middle East, and the beginnings of the dismantlement of an imperial idea obsessed with enforcing solidarity and uniformity where diversity and multiplicity once reigned. Echoing what I advanced in a series of essays in The National Interest earlier this year, Avineri wrote today that

As can be seen from the experience of Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the communist regimes not only gave rise to democratic alternatives, but also led to a reawakening of national movements once suppressed by communist ideology...

Again, this is the glimpse into the Middle East's future!

A BDS of History in Israel

The longer I stay here, the more I realize how much the Lebanese and Israelis share in common; geographically, culturally, politically, and ethno-religiously. Israel and Lebanon also share much in that those in their societies who are advocating for complex, expansive, spacious identities—recognizing the “otherness” of “the Other”—appear to be on the losing side of history.

In the early 1940s, speaking of the “Lebanese paradox” which, in its cultural and linguistic diversity represented a microcosm of the modern Middle East, Lebanese thinker Michel Chiha wrote that:

Conquerors and their conquests have all come, gone, and faded away; yet the Lebanese have remained. Lebanon [and by association the entire Levantine coastline] is the meeting-place into which peoples flock and assimilate regardless of their origins. It is the crossroads where varied civilizations drop in on one another, and where bevies of beliefs, languages and cultural rituals salute each other in solemn veneration. We are above all a Mediterranean nation, but a nation, like the Mediterranean itself, discerning and sensitive to the stirring music of universal poetry.

This is the essence of the Israel that I have come to know these past few years; a state of the Jewish people to be sure, but a diverse human and cultural space composed of Jews, Arabs, Christians, and others; a mix unparalleled anywhere in the Middle East; a space with topologies, climate-systems, histories, languages, and geographies favorable to diverse cultural and human compositions, synthesizing centuries of intellectual, linguistic, and ethno-national intercourse and traffic.

Alas, this diverse, pluralist—and yes, democratic—Israel is losing ground to a rigid, reductive, exclusivist Arabist interpretation of history. The model here is one not unlike that of the “association of minorities” that was pre-1975 Lebanon. What’s more, the scenario that has led to the dismantlement of the Lebanese “federation of ethnicities” might very well be lurking in Israel’s future. It is a discourse that—to use the language of Syrian thinker Adonis—is constructed upon a negationist ethos; an instinct that rejects the non-Arab “other” and refuses to “reflect on the other” in language, history, temperament, and social habits.

Here is how Israel is validating the Arabist interpretation of history—and I’m not dramatizing here; this is serious stuff!

The municipality of Rahat, a Bedouin township in the Negev, boasts a rich public library featuring thousands of Arabic-language volumes treating topics ranging from linguistics, to Koranic studies, Arabic literature, history, sociology, and culinary arts. So far so good, yes? No! Strolling down the “Arab History” aisles, I picked up Muhammad Muhammad Hassan Sharraab’s “Dictionary of the Counties of Palestine ” (Second Edition, Amman, Jordan: Al-Ahliyya Publications, 2000.) Flipping through the pages, I come to Chapter Three (p. 31), titled “The Ancient Inhabitants of Palestine.” The title itself was tantalizing—given that in my neck of the woods “Ancient” ordinarily referred to a pre-AD70 Era, when “Palestine” had not yet come into being—let alone had the term “Palestine” been invented. But the anachronistic terminology was fascinating enough, so I read through the chapter, and I provide a translation of its most notable passages below:

The Canaanite Arabs were history’s first people to have inhabited Palestine. This is attested to by a prominent historian [no name or reference are provided, of course] who said that ‘the opinions of the gifted jurists from among the luminaries of practice and knowledge are unanimous in that the Arabic-speaking peasants of Palestine are the descendants of the Pagan tribes inhabiting that land prior to the Israelite conquest.’ Their feet are deeply rooted in the soil of Palestine, since the remotest history. Indeed, since the very dawn of time peoples of the Semitic Race have inhabited Southern Syria—that is, Palestine—following a series of migrations issuing out of the Arabian Peninsula and beginning around the year 3500BC. Based on this, we can confirm that the Arabs had been present in Palestine for at least 5000 years.

Now, aside from the fact that the so-called “[Semitic] migrations issuing out of the Arabian Peninsula […ca.] 3500BC” are corroborated by no known archaeological or historical record—they are in fact based on the more recent 7th century Muslim conquests of the Levant, retrojected into an unknown past—the text exudes ideological puffery (in the garb of a serious etymological dictionary.) For one, the Semites are not a race, and the term “Semitic” refers not to peoplehood, but to a group of languages (including Arabic and Hebrew) that are as “related” to and as “distinct” from one another as French is “related” to and “distinct” from English and Rumanian. Secondly, despite the modern Arab nationalist cant, not all of the tribes emerging out of the Arabian Peninsula were necessarily Arabs. Furthermore, Arabs and Canaanites are two distinct peoples, making use of “related” but “mutually incomprehensible” languages—that is to say distinctly Arabic and Canaanite languages—that no serious “gifted luminary” can subsume into a single label. And finally, it is surprising that “the Arabs had been present in Palestine for at least 5000 years,” and yet left us no written or archaeological record of their presence. Indeed, the peoples of the Levant—“Palestine” included—had been “literate” since at least the 13th century BC; the Hebrew Bible tells us so; so do Ugaritic literature and Phoenician records. Yet the Arabs who “had been present in Palestine for at least 5000 years” seem to have bucked the Canaanite and Hebrew Alphabets despite Sharrab’s claim that “the Canaanites were a Semitic race of Arabs.”

I’m not going to bore you with the rest of the translation. For those interested, I've included an image of the Arabic text below, and I’ll post the rest of the translation once I'm back in Boston and have more reliable internet. For now, it’s interesting to note that this narrative is reminiscent of the great Edmond Rabbath—one of the chief intellectuals of Arab nationalism—who, with much swagger and gravitas (ahem, and with a straight face) advanced the claim that “Canaanite and Hebrew were dialects of Arabic,” and by inference, that both “Canaanites and Hebrews were lapsed Arabs that should be brought back to the fold.” Very Aflaqesque, no? But more importantly, this is the history that the "racist intolerant apartheid Jewish state" is allowing in the Bedouin School System. A BDS from within.