AUGUST 2006
IN GAZA AND BEIRUT, ASYMMETRICAL
BARBARISMS
An interview with Gilbert Achcar
By Geraldina Colotti 28 July 2006, Il Manifesto
[An English translation of this interview, with many
errors and inaccuracies, has been posted some days ago on
the Internet. Here is the translation revised by Gilbert
Achcar, and the only one he takes responsibility for.]
Gilbert Achcar, Lebanese political analyst, is a
collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique and author of The
Clash of Barbarisms, a razor-sharp pamphlet focusing its
analysis on the political situation within his own
country and the advance of Islamic fundamentalism.
We met with him in Rome, at the end of a series of
meetings concerning his book.
Prof. Achcar, according to the North-American
media, it has been Hezbollah’s violence—at the
center of an Islamic plot of destabilization of the
region—that has brought about the Israeli response.
Do you agree?
“The military operation by Hezbollah, as Nasrallah
himself has declared, had been staged for some time and
discussed with the allies, but also the Israeli military
offensive—as the press in Hebrew has
revealed—has been planned long before. It aimed at
destroying Lebanon’s infrastructures, that is to say
the population’s means of subsistence. It is meant
to apply by force UN Resolution 1559 that was pushed
through at the UN Security Council in 2004: Syrian
troops’ withdrawal from Lebanon, disarmament of the
armed groups in the country, i.e., Hezbollah and the
Palestinians in the refugee camps.
When Israel asserts it demands the integral enforcement
of Resolution 1559, it shows an incredible impudence: in
fact, Israel is still expected after nearly forty years
to apply Resolution 242 which demands its withdrawal
within the borders existing before the June 1967 War.
US and Israel are driven by the obsession about the main
enemy. Formerly it was the Soviet Union, today—in
the Middle East—it’s Iran and the alliance
supporting it on strong regional foundations: from the
Shiites in Iraq to the Syrian regime (a secondary enemy,
as well as a minor evil, for Israel which otherwise would
have chaos at its borders), to Hezbollah (tied to the
Iranian ideology) and to Hamas (a Sunni organization), an
alliance which allows Iran to array against the US and
Israel a whole Islamic front and not only a Shiite
alliance.
In order to turn the public opinion against Hezbollah and
Hamas, the regimes which are most submissive to the
Americans, such as the Saudi, the Jordanian and the
Egyptian ones, are trying to play the sectarian card.
Exploiting the Sunni-Shiite antagonism, they argue that
Iran wants to involve the Arabs into a war that
doesn’t concern them.
Nevertheless, today Hamas and Hezbollah are the heroes to
a public opinion disgusted by the ineffectiveness of the
Arab countries. Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, is
certainly more popular than Bin Laden, who won credit
amongst those who nurtured a more radical animosity
against the West but who has alienated most of the public
opinion on account of his actions, which are terrorist in
the true meaning of the term.”
By the word terrorism, which has nearly become a
metaphysical category, one is inclined to define almost
all the forms of armed opposition: from resistance to the
occupying force, to Bin Laden, even to some forms of
radical opposition in the West. Instead, you make use of
the concept of asymmetrical barbarisms. What does it
mean?
“What I mean is that the terrorism of the powerful
and that of the victims are both barbarisms, yet
asymmetrical ones. They are different in their causes,
responsibilities and consequences and therefore they
can’t be put on the same level.
Hamas’ suicide attacks—that now have been
suspended—are trifling if compared to the violence
of the Israeli oppression: in the last conflict, the
number of Palestinian or Lebanese dead is 10 times higher
than the Israeli one. And, what’s more, in Lebanon
it’s about only verified deaths while nobody knows
how many further ones might be discovered under the
rubbles of the destroyed buildings. More than 90% of the
victims provoked by Israel are neither fighters nor
militants, but civilians. The capture of an Israeli
soldier by the Palestinians has led to the assault on
Gaza, whilst Israel detains over 10 thousand Palestinian
prisoners, most of whom are civilians who were kidnapped
in the territory Israel has been unlawfully occupying
since 1967, in violation of international laws. We must
not be fooled by the hypocrisy of the dominant discourse
in the West.”
By which yardstick are Hamas’s actions
against civilians to be judged then?
“In some parts of the world one can’t stand
neutral, the priority is to fight occupation and war. And
there is a difference of method between organizations
such as that Bin Laden’s and others like Hamas and
Hezbollah: while the former believes that an armed
network, substituting itself to the mass struggles, can
force the imperialism to withdraw by resorting to
terrorism, the latter are mass organizations which resort
to a certain type of armed actions only secondarily. They
have structures similar to that of mass parties and offer
an alternative social organization to the governmental
one.
Their religious and fundamentalist vision of the world,
yet, is substantially similar. Therefore, one can’t
jump from that to painting in red reactionary models and
considering them as allied of the forces striving for the
alternative.
From Iraq to Palestine it’s the same tragedy: the
total absence of reliable progressive forces and the
hegemony over legitimate popular struggles of
fundamentalist currents which, for instance in Iraq, are
carrying out a legitimate fight against the occupying
force, it’s true, but also a far from legitimate war
against the Shiites and what they call the Iranian
occupation, a religious sectarian and reactionary
concept.
Alternatively, hundreds of thousands of people, who have
marched on the streets many times against the occupation
of Iraq, have shown that an opposition mass movement can
be set up even more effectively than the military one
which, by definition, arouses passivity in the
population.”
According to the historian Samir Kassir,
assassinated in 2005, “the Arab unhappiness”
lies in the failed achievement of modernity. What do you
think about the “Lebanese Spring”, the movement
that has brought on Beirut’s major squares hundreds
of thousands of people in the name of the cultural and
political pluralism?
“It has been a contradictory phenomenon whereby the
rebellion against the unbearable behavior of the Syrian
army converged with the anti-Syrian attitude of political
and sectarian factions that ended up with entering the
imperialist framework.
In order to oppose Syria—forgetting that Lebanon
also belongs to the East—a splinter group of the
left has worked together with ultra-reactionary
characters, it has lost its reference points and stifled
the hopes that were aroused at first.
In Lebanon, as in the rest of the region, leftist and
secular ideas have been overwhelmed by the double
bankruptcy of nationalism on the one hand and of the
Soviet Union on the other, and by the collapse of the
credit of Communist and Marxist ideals.
Today, contrary to what was held by analysts such as
Gilles Kepel, the presence of Islamic fundamentalism is
the dominant expression of the social and political
protest in nearly the entire Muslim world. It’s so
strong that the space for the development of another kind
of alternative is truly narrow.
It’s a part of world where there’s no organized
workers’ movement, as it has been destroyed by
rightist tyrannical governments or oppressed by
nationalist dictatorships that have prevented its
independent development. Furthermore, in the fight
against progressive nationalism and the Soviet Union,
imperialism has used Islamic fundamentalism.
In order for things to change, it’s necessary that
these currents—as happened to Arab nationalism in
the late 60s and at the beginning of the 70s—show
their own incapability to face the problems on the
ground. But another condition is that a new left project,
one that can be trusted by the populations, may
emerge.”
Islamic religious extremism, which presents
itself in its several varieties as a radical alternative
to the oppressed Arab masses, is defined by some as
Islamo-Fascism. Do you agree with such a definition?
“My book, The Clash of Barbarisms, has a chapter
dealing with this issue, which is titled: Neither fascist
nor progressive.
Some sections of religious fundamentalism bear a few
characteristics common to the Fascism that appeared in
Europe between the two world wars: the social base,
partly made up of lower middle classes, and above all the
reactionary character in a real sense, that is to say the
will—as Marx put it—to turn back the wheel of
history. But, apart from this, there are many
differences.
In the first half of the 20th century, Fascism was an
instrument used by big capital in an anti-worker function
whereas, in most of the countries where Islamic
fundamentalism is growing, there’s unfortunately no
fighting workers’ movement.
Islamic fundamentalism is the distorted expression of the
resentment of the populations and masses against foreign
imperialist oppression, against local political despotism
and also against their economic situation.
If, nonetheless, you regard Hamas and Hezbollah as
fascist organizations, you get to the kind of reaction
implemented by Israel or the USA—you should then
explain, however, why they didn’t use the same
standard with Pinochet in Chile or why they don’t
use it towards Saudi Arabia, a regime more reactionary
than the one they would like to attack in Iran—
whereas it concerns a different phenomenon: the
resentment of a population living under unbearable
oppression.
On the contrary, rather than bombing the Palestinian or
Lebanese population and taking them as hostages, as the
US and Israel are doing, what is needed is to uproot the
causes of that resentment.”
Do you think that sending UN forces may settle
the Lebanese crisis?
“Peace must be negotiated together with all the
actors of the conflict, including Hezbollah that demands
of Israel to release political prisoners and to return
the last portion of occupied Lebanese territory. To the
Lebanese Shiite community, today Hezbollah is tantamount
to what the PLO used to be to the Palestinians.
Many observers have stressed that, unlike 1967 when
Israel managed to defeat three Arab armies in 6 days,
things are going on quite differently now.
The resistance in Lebanon is supported by the Shiite
population, that Israel, in order to be victorious, would
have to exterminate, and this is the reason why the
majority forces within the broad coalition that rules
Lebanon have always ruled out the use of force. The UN
intervention would be helpful only if it guaranteed
everyone’s interests, not if it would be a fig leaf
to NATO’s.”
Gilbert Achcar, Lebanese political analyst, is a
collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique and author of The
Clash of Barbarisms, a razor-sharp pamphlet focusing its
analysis on the political situation within his own
country and the advance of Islamic fundamentalism.