Orient XXI.– A fortnight after the declaration of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, what is your reading of this war “unlike any other” as you yourself have put it? How has it been a game-changer in Lebanon?
Peter Harling.– I have unfortunately witnessed at first hand several wars in the region, and this one seems different to me - first of all because of the phenomenal disproportion of the forces involved. On the one hand, Hezbollah has carried out missile strikes and drone attacks against Israel, the results of which have always been almost negligible. And on the other hand Israel has made use of totally disproportionate force: Every strike has reduced a whole apartment block to rubble, sometimes burying its residents trapped inside. Israel has especially made lavish use of “bunker busters”, ghastly weapons, theoretically meant only for underground fortified military complexes. Near my home, three of these one ton bombs were used to level an ordinary residential building in the middle of the night, with no forewarning, in the hope of killing a single Hezbollah official. Israel’s complete control of Lebanese airspace also led to the almost continual, haunting presence of huge reconnaissance drones meant to collect information to prepare for the next strikes. Their constant circling over our heads, their incessant irritating buzz invading our homes and minds, was laden with menace.
“A war carried out ostentatiously in our name”
Of course, living life between air-raids, “under the bombs”, is a pretty common wartime experience since WW2. But this high-tech conflict evoked a dystopian universe, where someone, somewhere, has the power to take down whole apartment blocks, one by one, just by pressing a button on a screen. Many Lebanese, faced with such an all-powerful force, experienced an extreme level of powerlessness,a strange sense of nakedness even. This is just one of the aspects of this war which it is difficult to communicate to outsiders.
Another essential element, which I am having a hard time conveying to my relatives and friends abroad, is that this is not “yet another conflict” in a region which has known so many. Seen from France, for example, it is tempting to imagine that this war between Israel and Hezbollah occurred over stakes which really don’t concern us. An obscure and remote war, in short... But Israel is fighting with our weapons. Israel benefits most of the time from the backing of our media, our politicians, and our diplomats, in a struggle which dredges up all the rhetoric of the “war on terror”, the defence of the Western world, and even its “civilizing mission” against barbarism. In short, this war is being fought, very explicitly, in our name.
Now for anyone who is observing such a war close up, it is also a war of atrocities, in which journalists and medics are targeted, mosques and churches are desecrated, graveyards blown to bits among countless other gratuitous and unjustifiable acts of violence. The discrepancy between this intimate experience, on the one hand, and the sanitized account of it provided to the outside world, on the other, has led for many of us in Lebanon to a feeling of isolation and abandonment.
More than that, from here it is easy to see how our governments are using the opportunity provided by Israel’s wars, in Lebanon and in Gaza, to become ever more radicalized themselves, to the point of abandoning the principles of international humanitarian law, one of Europe’s finest contributions to the stability of the world. We are witnessing a kind of letting go, a growing disinhibition : It is as if we were encouraging Israel to do what we don’t yet dare to do ourselves. These warsact reveal and accelerate our own fascism, which is now taking root almost everywhere in Europe. So it is not only in Lebanon that this confict is reshuffling the cards.
“ We are encourging Israel to do what we don’t yet dare to do ourselves ”
In Lebanon itself, Hezbollah has certainly been weakened, but it still has an unshakable social base. It is enough for it to cry victory for its grass-roots constituency to embrace the outcome as such. Hezbollah will continue to defend its place within the Lebanon political system, of which it is an integral part. Indeed, the movement is no stranger to the country’s communitarianism and corruption. As a matter of fact, this war has brought to light a degeneration within Hezbollah which started long before the conflict. If Israel was able to infiltrate and penetrate the movement on a vast scale, that is because it has lost much of its internal solidity. Its arrogance and factionalism have undermined its capacities for poised analysis. And its mundane interests have gained the upper hand. For example, Hezbollah has done little to prevent the country’s economic collapse; instead it has profited by it. Nor has it done anything about the drug dealing which is a blight on its own neighbourhoods. Its future will depend on its willingness to take stock of its own mistakes, rather than scream conspiracy when it doesn’t cry victory, as it has been doing parrot-fashion for the past fifteen years.
OXXI.– After 54 years of brutal dictatorship, the Syrian regime has just collapsed. You wrote a description of its great fragility. But your Synaps network has also extensively documented the Syrian people’s capacity to meet the challenges of a post-Assad world. How can we best help them ?
P.H.– Any transition of this kind is extraordinarily complex and risky. Yet in the West, the collapse of an Arab regime, for our media and a part of the public, foreshadows inevitable disaster. This amounts to forgetting that our own revolutions involved suffering, uncertainty, and temporary setbacks. It consists in dismissing the extent to which the situation in Syria was ever more desperate, although the regime claimed it had “won”. It is also implies failing to understand what it means to be able to go home at last, after years of exile, back to one’s house, one’s town, one’s neighbourhood, one’s community. Assuming the worst outcomes is a patronizing reflex typical of our countries, where we tend to think that change for the better simply can’t happen in other regions or cultures.
Instead of indulging such stereotypes, we could offer our sympathy and our assistance. Today, Syria is under attack from Israel, which is taking advantage of the situation to annex more of its territory and destroy what remains of its military capacity. Turkey is doing pretty much the same. The US also is bombing when and where it sees fit. Meanwhile, Europe is fantasizing about the quick return of all Syrian refugees to their exhausted country; it voices concernsonly about the fate of Christians, as if there were no other minorities in danger and populations at risk. For the moment, one searches in vain: There are few constructive contributions coming from the outside world.
Let’s hope that the dynamics will change quickly, for the needs are overwhelming. The country’s entire infrastructure is devastated. Mental health is like a huge crater, as society emerges from an inferno with new circles discovered every day, deeper and darker than one could have imagined. Excavating all that suffering, rolling out transitional justice, overhauling existing institutions all call out for ambitious cooperation projects to be launched. The fight against drug addiction, which has become endemic on account of the war and the collapse of the economy, is another vital priority. And there are so many others! We are spoiled for choice... The local civil society is extremely competent, and the Syrian diaspora has considerable resources. But Syria will need all the help it can get if we want the transition to be a success... And we should want it to succeed, if only the better to allay our own obsessive fears about migration.
Step aside in favour of local figures
OXXI.–Synaps has developed an original analysis, covering societal questions in general, little dealt with by academic specialists, centred around civil society. The brutal war on Gaza which has been raging for 14 months now, with the massive use of advanced technologies, has caused a terrifying number of civilian casualties and population displacements. Is the civilian population doomed to be the great forgotten in that region of the world ?
P.H.– I founded Synaps to get away from the most talked-about subjects: international relations, wars, and what is called “geopolitics”. The popular uprisings of 2010-2011 were a turning point for me in this respect: It was then that I realised we could not keep ignoring the societies of the region any longer. This was all the more obvious as I was no stranger to those societies: I was lucky enough to have had a very ordinary social life in Iraq, where I did a part of my studies, as well as in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. After those uprisings, it seemed essential that foreigners like myself, who appear only too often on TV shows to talk about current events in the area, step aside in favour of local figures who can give their own point of view. Synaps enabled me to contribute to this process by training young researchers who study questions that are of vital concern to them personally.
This transition towards a better-rooted expertise is happening on a large scale. Many local scholarly voices are beginning to have a greater impact in the media and on the social networks. It is becoming unusual to attend a conference where a majority of speakers are not from the region. On the other hand, the subjects dealt with have changed much less than the faces of interviewees and panellists. The region is still approached via categories of violence: wars, massacres, refugees, radicalisation, repression, crises, catastrophes, etc. This perspective tends to dehumanise the local populations, which are reduced to masses in movement and to possible threats, be it through terrorism or emigration.
However, there is a more positive side to the rhetoric on the Middle East today. It derives generally from an economic perspective, which is reductive in its own way: Moroccan attractiveness or competitiveness, Israeli or Emirati innovation, Qatari investments, Saudi “pharaonism” and so forth. Thus emerge two sub-divisions in the region. On the one hand, we have the areas where business is done, and which belong to our world map of globalised exchanges. And on the other, there are the countries where bombs are dropped, where humanitarian aid is supplied, where special envoys are sent - huge regions which are gradually fading away on our mental maps.
But there is a third Middle East which is almost completely absent from our worldviews: It consists of the daily lives of our neighbours across the Mediterranean, half a billion human beings no less. Among them there are many who do not resemble our mental stereotypes and from whom we have much to learn: farmers who are adapting to climate change, conservative businesswomen, dense yet unofficial solidarity networks, a very active traditional philanthropy, a rich cultural production, especially in the visual arts, huge diasporas organising local infrastructural projects, and so forth.
These societies, which are just as rich and complex as our own, also have to deal with problems familiar to us, especially the mediocrity of their political elites, the predatory mores of the very rich, and the gradual destruction of public services. Our mutual ignorance of one another deprives us of a foundation of shared experiences on which to build relations that would be less distrustful and more humane, relieved of all the grievances and all the phantasies which go into them today. Orient XXI is in fact one of the rare fora where such mutual discovery can occur.
“An environmental diplomacy”
OXXI.– You have a sharp and disabused perception of French diplomacy and the business of international affairs more generally. What revolution has to take place if we are to to return to a principled diplomacy ?
P.H.– I would call my views outspoken and friendly, rather. Diplomacy is a wonderful legacy that must be cherished, which is also why it must be renovated. Today, embassies are hunkered down with habits that are increasingly out of date. Diplomats spend enormous amounts of time in their offices, with other diplomats, or with local figures who serve as their “sources”, but from whom there is frankly little left to learn.
Their work remains confined to the capital cities and centers on conventional issues: geopolitics in countries in crisis, economic cooperation in countries at peace. As the years go by, the diplomatic corps has developed few new skills in far too many areas. For example, embassies manage information poorly. Their personnel are constantly reinventing the wheel. In unstable situations, they withdraw and close themselves off, which diminishes their capacity for analysis and action.
They communicate superficially, also, through empty statements as well as posts on the social networks that are more vacuous still. They finance all sorts of development projects, many of which wither away almost as soon as they are inaugurated, as if the only thing that mattered was to trumpet progress without ever having to learn from their failures, which are frequent. Embassies are almost completely absent, too, when it comes to the essential thematics of the contemporary world: they rehash generalities about climate change, digitization, mobility, economic inequalities, even international humanitarian law, far more than they actually hone their own skills in these vital areas.
In the end, ours is an event-driven diplomacy, one of futureless projects, of contracts between firms, declamatory posturing, and political stunts. There is little follow-through, strategy, or effort to define long-term French interests. Yet diplomats are intelligent men and women, well-educated, well paid: It is up to them to rethink their profession. It is up to them to start admitting that the means at their disposal are still considerable, even if their budgets have been dwindling for years. It is up them to fight to put those means to good ends. For my part, I hardly ever talk to diplomats any more, simply because our relations have become so impoverished as to no longer mean anything: At best, our exchanges would fuel policies which I would not understand, and with no quid pro quo. This situation saddens me, as it should upset the diplomats themselves.
Of course, most of the sectors I deal with are in crisis. There is nothing exceptional about diplomacy, except the fact that it resists the winds of change even more than others, perhaps for reasons of status. As for the media, they, on the contrary, are perpetually trying to reinvent themselves, for better or worse. The world of science is beginning to concern itself with the general public, to consider it has a social role, to get away from its cosy relationship with the State. The economics of development aid is not evolving in any positive way, but at least it is not ashamed to admit it.
As for Synaps, we are constantly forced to exercise self-criticism. I myself am regularly subjected to a formal evaluation by my colleagues, who point out my mistakes and my limitations, and it’s up to me to find ways to rise above them. In our intellectual professions, it is good to remind ourselves that we have chosen these occupations not for the prestige they confer, but for the responsibility which behoves us to rethink the world and our role in it. If we deserve any respect, it is only because of our determination to identify problems, imagine solutions, and in doing so, call ourselves to account.
Translated fron French by Noël Burch.