My friends,
The other day at work I was sat among four Lebanese colleagues, who happened to be discussing the current state of their failed state and the best possible way to fix it (as per their own beliefs).
There was something very attractive about the discussion I had witnessed. The four of them come from three different backgrounds, the very ones that make up the demographics of Lebanon today. Two Shia (one of whom is also an American citizen), a Maronite, and a Sunni from Beirut. How can such a discussion ever dissatisfy the curious mind?
By the end of it, this is what I had deduced their views to be:
- The American was completely pro-Hezbollah and anti-Zionist, seeing the militia as the buffer standing between Israel and an all-out occupation of Lebanon.
- The other Shia did not give a fuck about either and just wanted a peaceful Lebanese state.
- The Sunni from Beirut expressed a similar view but drew the line at ever normalizing relations with Israel.
- The Maronite, to me, was a borderline Zionist who did not seem to mind the occupation of the South, so long as both Hezbollah and Israel were gone from it by the end. He clung to the naïve belief that the Zionists would fold up their tents and leave the South the moment "the operation is complete."
I kept coming back to the Maronite. Not because he was the loudest, he wasn't, but because his was the one position I could not build in my own head no matter how I turned it over. A man watching a foreign army sit on his soil and finding in it a kind of relief, because the enemy he feared more had carried the same passport as his?
It just could not click for me.
He had done the calculation in his head and decided the Israeli was a guest eventually to leave, whilst Hezbollah a tenant who never would, even though, in the case of the former, history had proven otherwise time and time again.
The complexity of the Arab political spectrum can never be overstated. This extends across the entirety of the Middle East. Thirty years ago you could have sat a Syrian and an Iraqi side by side, both Ba'athists, and both would still hate each other, each convinced his own version of Ba'ath was the true one.
In Jordan you can find a pro-monarchist Palestinian, and yet a purebred Jordanian who himself is also a pro-monarchist will always see that Palestinian as nothing more than revolutionary "Belgian" scum.
Yet, place two Palestinians in the same room, both of whom would surrender their lives without hesitation for the liberation of the very same land, and watch them loathe one another on sight as one flies the flag of Fatah and the other of Hamas.
I can only deduce one thing from all of this: that in our part of the world, a political belief can never be a principle the way it can in the West. It is a costume, one the Arab man wears proudly until his blood or his honour is called upon, at which point he takes it off without a second thought and reveals the true skin underneath: his sect, his nation, his name.
Take the liberal who supports Hamas. He will lecture you for an hour about human rights, about the dignity of the individual, about a woman's freedom to wear what she wants and love who she wants, and he means every word of it.
Then Hamas raises its rifle in the name of Palestine and the same man goes quiet about everything he claimed was sacred, because Hamas is fighting for the cause, and the cause will always outrank the principle.
He knows Hamas would strip him of every freedom he lives by. He knows Hamas will never allow a Boiler Room to take place. He knows that under Hamas, he will never be able to embrace and indulge in the fruits of his creativity.
He knows they are, in every sense that matters, his ideological enemy.
Yet he will support them anyway, because, simply put, being Palestinian sits deeper in him than being liberal, and when the two collide the Palestinian wins every single time.
Pan-Arabism dominated the region from the mid-1950s to the turn of the century. You would find millions of Arab men demanding that the borders be dismantled and the people be identified simply as "Arab" rather than "Egyptian," "Syrian," or "Saudi" -men who dreamed of a single Arab nation stretching from the Ocean to the Gulf. And yet that same man would sooner die than let his sister marry across the sect.
And I will not pretend my own people are clean of it. The Kurd has been crushed, gassed, denied, and betrayed by nearly every flag that ever flew over him, and he is right to want his own.
But sit with him long enough and you will find that the freedom he demands for himself he is in no rush to extend to the Turkmen, the Yazidi, or the Assyrian living on the land he now calls his.
I am Iraqi myself. I love to define myself as an Iraqi. And yet my father is a Kurd and my mother is a Sunni Arab from Baghdad. If I go to the Kurds, they see me as an Arab and not as one of their own. If I sit next to an Arab, he will likely insult me by calling me a Kurd. Then who am I? I call myself an "Iraqi," but to the Arab I am nothing more than a dumb Kurd, and to the Kurd I am a traitor whose blood has been infiltrated by inferior Arab blood. What?
My maternal grandmother is, to this day, a staunch Ba'athist who believes Saddam did what was necessary to keep the Iraqi state stable - a conviction only hardened by the corruption and the insurgency that consumed Iraq from 2003 to 2019. My father is a Kurd. How does that even make sense?
And on top of all this, my name is Omar. In 2006 my family was forced to leave Baghdad and never return, solely because the Shia militants were killing people based on their names, so the half-Kurd, half-Arab Sunni little boy named Omar from Baghdad never really stood a chance.
Perhaps my grandmother was right. How would you govern a place like Iraq without an iron fist like Saddam's overseeing the whole apparatus? I think about it more than I should. How do you lead a people, half of whom would refuse to claim you the moment they heard your father's tongue or read your first name? How can there ever be a version of myself accepted by all Iraqis alike? Or even all Arabs alike? Such a version does not exist. There will never be a perfect me who is Iraqi and neither will a perfect Iraqi ever exist. He simply does not exist. What is left is the contradiction itself worn openly the same way you wear a name you did not choose.
The little boy from Baghdad was an Arab to the Kurds, a Kurd to the Arabs, and a dead man to the militias will sadly never be seen as what he wants to be seen as, an Iraqi. The Arabs, Kurds and Iraqis alike are damned.
