Breaking the cycle of hatred in the Middle East

L'Orient-Le Jour

2 days ago

I joined the L'Orient-Le Jour's newsroom a little over 11 years ago.
With a few exceptions – brief enchanted interludes we wanted to believe in — I feel that I've written ever since only about crises, wars, massacres and bloody struggles for power and survival, whether on a local, national or regional scale. The actors, contexts and stakes vary, but the dynamics of hatred and violence remain largely the same.
The atrocities committed in Sweida echo those carried out by the Assad regime, by the Islamic State (IS), by Syrian Arab proxies against the Kurds, by the Iranian axis, by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, by Israel and by so many others.
They are part of a continuum of wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and Palestine. From non-state groups to regional powers, each in its own way, for its own reasons, convinces itself that the only solution lies in the expulsion, disappearance or even extermination of the other.
If the story I'm trying to understand and tell already feels like a succession of infernal cycles, interrupted only by brief moments of illusion, how must my colleagues feel, those who have been commenting on and enduring the region's torment for decades now?
How can one not think of the horrors of the Lebanese 1975-90 Civil War while following the tragedy in Sweida? How can we convince ourselves that we are not doomed to the worst?
A simple look back through the archives or history books is enough to grasp the immense paradox that marks the coverage of current events, both Lebanese and regional: Everything can change overnight, owing to the structural fragility of the actors involved; yet, nothing ever truly changes.
Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Middle East has been in constant motion, without ever managing to reinvent itself.
The region is indeed grappling with a series of issues it has been unable to resolve.
First, it has yet to evolve beyond being a battleground for rival powers — a dynamic that has only been reinforced in recent years by the retreat of the one country that truly dominated the Middle East: the United States. Jordan against Egypt, Egypt against Saudi Arabia, Syria against Iraq, Iraq against Iran, Iran against Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia against Turkey — and Israel, in most cases.
The Palestinian question is the second major issue that has long shaped the Middle East. It is unique in that it intersects with all the region's other ailments. While it sometimes seems to push them into the background, it amplifies the effects of each of them.
The third element is arguably the question of Islamism. Whether Sunni or Shiite, whether dressed in the garb of Brotherhood ideology, Salafism, jihadism or Khomeinism, political Islam has left its mark on the region's modern history — within the societies themselves, as a political tool in service of a cause or an axis, and in the Middle East's relations with the rest of the world.
The fourth and final element is perhaps the most underestimated and yet the most important. It is the absence, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, of a political, economic and social model capable of ensuring effective governance while offering space for freedom and preserving the political, communal, ethnic and linguistic pluralism that is the lifeblood of this region.
Pan-Arabism was authoritarian and rigid. Islamism, in all its forms, is reactionary and intolerant. The supposedly secular Baathist regimes delivered the worst in terms of repression and the manipulation of sectarianism. The Lebanese model, despite its flaws and fragility, its ungovernability and its real or latent wars, remains the only one to have managed to preserve both freedoms and pluralism.
But it has become so dysfunctional within the confines of our small country that it would be senseless to try to replicate it on a regional scale.
After more than a century of failures, we must absolutely invent a new model, one that can neutralize identity-based issues without denying them. One that allows us, in the words of Samir Frangieh in his timely and remarkable essay 'Voyage au bout de la violence,' to 'leave our communal prisons without necessarily shedding our communal affiliations.'
This new form of citizenship should be able to transcend our identities without seeking to erase or replace them. It cannot, however, be imposed by decree. It must be nurtured through state institutions, through political debate, which, unlike the proposed model's structure, must be strictly secular, and through a more equitable distribution of wealth.
One could argue that all of this is utopian as long as geopolitical issues remain unresolved. But one could also respond, without denying the absolute necessity of stabilizing the region, that by focusing too much on geopolitical factors, we have largely overlooked the internal dynamics of societies. Yet these dynamics have shaped geopolitics at least as much as they have been shaped by it.
The two battles are, in fact, inseparable and must be fought simultaneously. But it seems — though this is open to debate — that we may have more leverage over one than we have over the other.