I Speak for Lebanon

"This is by the Lebanese socialist leader who was assassinated in 1977 by those in power in Syria. It is not his best book. The book is posthumous, and the editor has done a poor job. But it still holds profound reflections on the deadlocks which Joumblatt fought against all his life, and which we continue to fight against 30 years later: authoritarian Arab states, the distortion and damnation of oil money, the sectarian straitjacket, the structural injustice constituted by the Israeli state, and the brutal rule of Asad’s Syria. After so many other essays on the Lebanese civil wars and Joumblatt’s fight for democracy, the book is most poignant probably in that Joumblatt failed to apply his professed Gandhi ideals in the Middle East, although he did end up assassinated like Gandhi. Ah, well, of course altogether this is about people who think outside the box and eventually force the rest of the planet to listen to them. On Israel, Joumblatt had proposed that it wasn’t a democracy and that until it becomes one, integrating the Palestinians for whom it has forced an existential denial since its inception in 1948, then it can’t be dealt with as a democracy. His answer politically to the lack of democracy was to say: ‘We’ll solve the problem, the conflict, when we fight for Israel to become a democracy.’ This is true for the other ME conflicts, and this is where oil money operates as a terrible distorter: instead of freedom and participation, the Saudis and other rentier governments peddle out favours and money. The reason you can’t fight with or reason with the regimes surrounding Israel is that they are all more authoritarian than Israel, all cursed by oil, and it is this deadlock that you have to understand. Joumblatt supported a democratic solution and that is now the centre of the debate on the Middle East. Unfortunately, despite my presidential campaign, I was unable to carry this through in power, where the vision can be made effective. I’m not optimistic in the sense that we are dealing with horrendous violence and fanaticism and it takes at least a generation to establish democracy. The rulers in the region are all ruthless dinosaurs. But we’d better start now! The violence is staggering. I agree with Kamal Joumblatt that Israel is not a democracy until it shares power with the Palestinian as individuals and as people, and compensates those it has harmed, but I reject violent means to get there. It is in this vein I brought the case against Sharon [Decision of the Belgian Supreme Court on 12 Feb 2003 in favour of Victims of Sabra and Shatila v Ariel Sharon et al, under the law of universal jurisdiction in Belgium]. Together with Sharhabeel al-Zaeem, a leading Gaza lawyer, and Muhammad Aburdeini, a survivor of Sabra and Shatila, we recently wrote a rebuttal of Netanyahu’s demand that we should simply recognise the Jewish state. Against an exclusivist, anti-democratic separation, we need to work towards a Federal Israel, not a two-state solution, and bring that maverick Joumblatt thought on democracy in Palestine-Israel centre-stage. Mind you, I was not opposed to the Oslo process, because any progress is good, but you need wider horizons All my writings and preoccupations in the rule of law are based in a strong belief in the efficacy of non-violent solutions and that politics should be defined not by violence, but by persuasion and words."