Gaza. The Shifting Contours of the Lebanese Political Scene

While European emissaries keep coming to Lebanon hoping to avert a war with Israel, in Beirut life goes on as usual. You could almost forget that since 8 October, the whole south of the country has been aflame. Expatriates are still happy to come home, return flights to Beirut have only decreased by 5% compared with June 2023.

The cafés and bars of Hamra, historic stamping ground for left-wing intellectuals, are as full as ever, even though it has become the custom to pay in dollars. If you want to buy a cup of coffee in Lebanese pounds (LP) better stuff your pockets with bundles of banknotes, since a single green back is now 89,000 worth LP as against 500 before the current crisis. Many local companies now pay wages in dollars, which adds to the illusion of an economic recovery.

All this to the accompaniment of the constant hum of generators at the bottom of every mansion block, alleviating the problems caused by the power cuts. Indeed, Electricité du Liban, the national power company is only just able to supply 4 hours of electricity per day. A return to near normalcy as many city dwellers may be heard to repeat. Not for everybody, to be sure: poverty is omnipresent, very real, especially for those who spend their evenings digging through trash bins to the light of a headband lamp; or those who prefer to walk rather than use a ‘service’, a collective taxi which used to cost 2,000 LP ($1.28), and now costs 200,000 ($2.16); or for those casual workers, paid in pounds, negotiating with coach drivers the price of a trip from Beirut to Tripoli at 100,000 LP ($1.08) instead of the 150,000 ($1.62) displayed, hoping thus to save a tiny share of their meagre wages.

‘The elephant in the room’

In this context, there is not much room for Palestine. True, here and there a flag or a tag reminds us of Lebanese solidarity with the victims of the genocidal war in Gaza. Shops have keffiyehs for sale and clothing embroidered with the easily recognisable Palestinian patterns. But the calls to demonstrate since 7 October, particularly in front of the French or Egyptian embassies, two governments accused of complicity with Israel, did not bring out many Lebanese. ‘People are tired, they’re mired in their daily problems, and they no longer believe in the usefulness of these street protests’, Mohamed explains (pseudonym). This 26-year-old took part in the student revolts in 2019-20. And one would have expected the young people of Martyrs’ Square to be the first to come out in support of the Palestinians.

No political structure came out of those big mobilisations to organise a movement. And many people who were active then have now left the country. Others are just too disillusioned. They don’t have any political activity at all anymore.

As for Walid Charara, editorialist for Al-Akhbar, a daily paper close to Hezbollah, he points to the political situation in Lebanon, a country which hasn’t had a president for almost two years:

Part of the population believes that the real confrontation with Israel is taking place in the South, so that demonstrations in Beirut are of secondary importance. And demonstrate against whom? Lebanon hasn’t got a government that people can demand to come out in support of Gaza.

While this observation is correct, it is important not to forget ‘the elephant in the room’¹ whenever Palestine is discussed in Lebanon: i.e. Hezbollah, indispensable partner in the armed struggle against Israel and the clashes with the Jewish entity in the South. As Mohammed rightly reminds us:

In domestic terms, events in Palestine oblige us to take sides with respect to the Resistance movement and the war. Because if you take a clear, public position on Gaza, you are immediately seen to be supporting Hezbollah.

Reshuffling the deck

Such is the case with Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party and the Druze community. ‘We support the Palestinian cause because it is a just cause. An Arab land was stolen and colonised,’ he declared in Al-Jazira’s Atheer podcast on 3 June 2024, expressing his solidarity with Hamas as a movement of national resistance. The man who intensified his party’s confessional dimension when he became its leader following the 1977 assassination of his father, Kamel Juumblatt, also stresses the importance for his community of putting down roots in the Arab environment and has no problem condemning Israel’s Druzes who are fighting with the colonial army in Gaza. Apropos the situation in South-Lebanon, he goes so far as to express cautious support for Hassan Nasrallah’s party:

Hezbollah has managed to divert part of Israel’s war effort to the North […] But personally I’m still afraid of that front being enlarged. […] Until now, we have kept within the limits of a reasonable intervention. This would cease to be the case were we to allow ourselves to be drawn into an all-out war.

This is a far cry from the ‘14 March coalition’ formed following the assassination of Rafik Hariri² in 2005, in opposition to the Shi’as of Hezbollah and Amal, and against the Syrian presence in Lebanon, a coalition which included, among other prominent figures, the Druze leader, the Sunnis of the Future Movement as well as the Christians of the Phalanges and the Lebanese Forces (LF).

In the Bikfaya hills, the Gemayel family domain, less than an hour from Beirut, Samy Gemayel, president of the Party of the Lebanese Phalanges, received me in his office, deploring both the Israeli government’s extremism and the absence of a ‘legitimate representation’ on the Palestinian side.

As for Elie Elias, professor of political history at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, near Jounieh, to the North of Beirut, and a member of the LF’s political bureau, he condemns ‘the violence on both sides’ and a conflict which has become ‘religious par excellence, detached from any political logic’ while describing Hamas as ‘an extremist movement, Islamist and Iranian’. Rather than armed resistance, the phalanges, like the LF, prefer to speak of a ‘two-State solution’ and for Lebanon ‘an exclusively diplomatic role’, as if what was going on in Palestine was of absolutely no concern to the land of the Cedar.

Here too it is difficult not to see that coming out in support of Gaza would be tantamount to applauding Hezbollah’s action in the South. ‘Lebanon should not in any way get involved in a military conflict or take sides. The problem now is that it is not Lebanon that is doing this, but Hezbollah, without asking anyone’s advice,’ Samy Gemayel asserts, convinced as he is that ‘Israel has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon, otherwise they would have colonised Southern Lebanon when they occupied it.’ The reader will appreciate – or not – the subtle distinction.

Arabism rather than confessionalism?

While the two main Christian parties confine themselves to deploring the number of civilian deaths in Gaza and dismissing back-to-back the Israeli army and Hamas, the situation is more complicated with the Sunnis, for whom Palestine represents, as for most Arab peoples, the only cause which unites them. But how to get a true picture of what a community with no leader thinks in a country dominated by confessionalism? Since January 2022, former Premier Saad Hariri, leader of the Future Movement, has withdrawn from politics and settled in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), leaving the Sunni community leaderless. During a visit to Beirut in February 2024 to commemorate the 19^th anniversary of his father’s assassination, he declared in an exclusive interview for the Saudi channels Al-Hadath and Al-Arabiya:

As concerns what is being inflicted on the South and on our people over there, Israel, and above all Netanyahu, wants to use various pretexts to redirect the war towards Lebanon. […] But Iran doesn’t want to go to war with Israel. We must all stand in solidarity with Gaza and with the children of Gaza, and not let ourselves be distracted from what is happening there. Because that is exactly what Israel wants.

A clear enough stand while refraining from any criticism of Hezbollah’s actions in the South: it’s what Walid Charara calls ‘the positive neutrality’ of some Sunnis.

While Hariri still carries some weight within his community, the religious fringe is not to be outdone. On Friday 5 July, in the Sunni Mosque of Imam Ali in the modest neighbourhood of Tari’jdidé, Gaza occupies a place of honour in the weekly sermon: ‘There are children starving to death and we hear talk of humanity, civilisation, modernity, human rights and even animal rights! May God curse you for every child that dies of hunger and thirst in Gaza!’

As Hussein Ayoub, once a journalist with Asafir and now editor in chief of the website 180post, reminds us:

For the first time since the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) left Beirut in 1982, we have an Islamic Sunni group of armed resistance which has carried the conflict to the heart of Israel, thus outdoing those mainly Shi’ia movements which have existed since the emergence of Islamic Resistance in Lebanon in 1982. A large share of Sunni Arab populations identify with this phenomenon which has even succeeded in bridging the gulf between Sunnis and Shi’as caused by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A shot in the arm for Jama’a islamiya? This offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood has only a tenuous foothold in Lebanon but its armed group, ‘The Forces of Dawn’ are involved in the fighting in the South. And while the organisation’s war effort is not very sizeable, it does not go unnoticed. On the funeral of Ayman Gomeh, one of the movement’s leaders, shot to death in the Beqaa Valley by the Israelis on 22 June 2024 the dead man was praised by the region’s mufti over a public address system:

"We will not throw flowers to our enemy. Either they leave or it will be this’ he declared, holding up the automatic weapon he was carrying. Since then, the image has gone viral on the social networks and has been printed on banners flying over villages in the Beqaa Valley.

The waning shadow of the war in Syria

While there is no proof that a majority of Sunni Lebanese, for whom the Constitution guarantees the office of Prime Minister, are happy to be represented by a religious armed group, the gulf between them and the Shi’a community has appeared to diminish as the on-going genocide in Gaza grows more dramatic. It must also be said that Saudi Arabia’s reconciliation with Iran has played a significant role. Moreover, during a visit to Beirut on 29 June 2024, the assistant General Secretary of the Arab League, Hossam Zaki, began by declaring that the pan-Arab organisation ‘no longer considered Hezbollah a terrorist group’, before he backtracked, claiming his statement had been ‘taken out of context’. But while its reservations vis-à-vis the Shi’a party may still be relevant for the Arab League under Saudi influence, this kerfuffle hints at a forthcoming detente.

On the same day as Zaki’s visit to Beirut, a photo appeared of a three-hour meeting between the Hezbollah general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, and his Jama’a islamiya counterpart, Mohamed Takouche. It was said to have dealt with ‘the importance of cooperation between resistance forces in the battle to support the valiant resistance of Gaza and its resilient people’, to quote the joint press release. An unthinkable image in the days when Hezbollah helped put down the Syrian uprising in collaboration with the Bachar Al-Assad regime.

That involvement, which tarnished the party’s image in the Arab world, seems a thing of the past today, what with Syria’s reintegration into the Arab League in 2023. And considering Lebanon’s economic crisis, the presence of thousands of Syrian refugees³ has given rise to xenophobic prejudices beyond the usual nationalistic milieus and pitted poor against poor. Finally, the Palestinian situation and the Israeli threat has made many people more pragmatic, as Mohamed readily admits:

We have a history with Hezbollah […] and one of the slogans heard during the 2019 street protests was ‘Those who repress the Syrians can’t liberate the Palestinians’. But that idea is not so present these days. In the past, when there was talk of setting the Palestinians free, it didn’t seem realistic. Not now.

Personally, I’ve rethought all that since 7 October. The stakes are different now and my perception of Hezbollah has changed a lot. […] I used to think that party was exploiting the cause of resistance solely for purposes of local politics. […] But it has shown itself to be an intelligent party, capable of doing things that nobody has been able to do since 1948, such as forcing so many inhabitants [of northern Israel] to flee their homes. At the same time, we know that the Israeli have always coveted the land south of the Litani River.

To what extent will this revised perception hold in the event of all-out war? What is sure is that Hezbollah has absolutely no desire for such a scenario, even if it insists, in the name of resistance, on linking the termination of its operations in the South to a cease-fire in Gaza, as it repeated early in July to the German emissaries come to negotiate a cease-fire.

In the meantime, the Shi’a movement is still looking after a good share of the more than 100,000 displaced persons from Southern Lebanon. Yet we may suppose that if it has not called for mass demonstrations in Beirut, except for the one that took place on 18 October 2023 after the bombing of the Al-Ahli Arabi hospital in Gaza City which caused over 500 casualties, it is to dissuade its grass-roots supporters from calling for an intensification of its confrontations with Israel. A shrewd balancing act which has lasted for nine months now, and which Hassan Nasrallah’s party intends to prolong, while knowing full well that it doesn’t hold all the cards and that the Israeli government can always start a full-scale war with an eye to ending the very real threat which Hezbollah represents.