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A Question of Faith in Humanity: Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments and
Other Beirut Fragments
Caroline Rooney
I will begin this chapter with a brief reference to a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre
Musique, his Dantesque film on the hell of war, the purgatory of humanity and
heavenly imaginings.1 In the scene referred to, a taxi cruises through the war-scape of
a post-siege Sarajevo, which serves to set in motion thoughts on the effects of civil
war on human nature. One of the observers in the taxi, a man with a markedly hollow-
eyed look, comments:
The atrocity of annihilation is irreversible. The trust in the world that terror
destroys is irretrievable. To see your fellow man turn on you breeds a feeling
of deep-rooted horror. Violence severs the lifeline.
In Beirut Fragments, sub-titled A War Memoir, a work that reflects on the effects of
civil war and states of siege in Beirut, Jean Said Makdisi offers a similar reflection,
stating:
The worst danger of all, in this bloodbath into which we have been plunged, is
not the loss of life, but the loss of faith. I don’t mean loss of faith in God: I
mean loss of faith in humanity and in each other.2
These two statements serve to introduce the question of not only what stands to be
lost through the experience of humanity’s violence against itself but of what it means
to bear witness to this. In his preface to Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk puts forward the
following succinct clarification of journalism’s purpose: ‘watching and witnessing
history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections,
recording it as honestly as we can.’3 Fisk begins his witnessing of Lebanon’s recent
history with, significantly, a journey to Auschwitz followed by an account of the
foundation of the state of Israel and its consequence of forcing of Palestinians into the
predicament of the ‘new refugees’. Following Fisk’s lead, I wish to begin a
consideration of literature treating of Beirut ’82, as well as of Lebanon’s civil war,
with a brief reflection on the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
The fact that Fisk begins his book with a remembrance of Auschwitz indicates
that this is indeed the particularly pertinent place to start in order to come to terms
with the violence experienced by Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.
One reason is, as just touched on, the predicament of Palestinian refugees, where
Lebanon has had to suffer the repeated aggression of Israel against the Palestinian
resistance. Another reason is that the Phalangists, who carried out the massacres of
Sabra and Shatila while aided by the Israeli army, were a militia originally formed
partly through the inspiration of the proto-Nazi youth movement.4 What I wish to add
to such considerations is a certain speculation regarding the effects of the
concentration camps on those who survived them.
Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz, devotes his philosophical work on the
meaning of witnessing to a particular figure, that of ‘the Muselmann’. He writes: ‘The
untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name. In the jargon of the
camp, it is der Muselmann, literally, “the Muslim”’.5 Agamben goes on to quote from
various camp survivor testimonies that serve to introduce ‘the Muselmann’. Those
that go by this designation are described as ‘“staggering corpse[s]”’ and ‘“the living
dead’” (p. 41). They are revealingly positioned both as indifferent and as occasioning
indifference, this being evident in the following: ‘In this phase [of physical decline],
they became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded
themselves from all relations to their environment [...] No one felt compassion for the
Muslim.’ (p. 43)
Agamben retains the term ‘Muselmann’ or ‘Muslim’ throughout his book,
whereas Primo Levi (Agamben’s key source) choses an alternative designation for the
dying Jews, ‘the drowned’ or drowning, as we also use the term ‘sinking’ to speak of
the downward turn of the terminally ill.6 Why did the surviving Jews choose the term
‘Muslim’ for the dying Jews? Primo Levi comments: ‘“Two explanations for it have
been advanced, neither very convincing: fatalism, and the head bandages that could
resemble a turban.’” (quoted by Agamben, p. 77) Agamben also directs our attention
to an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica which reads: ‘Muselmann: “Used mainly at
Auschwitz, the term appears to derive from the typical attitude of certain deportees,
that is, staying crouched on the ground, legs bent in Oriental fashion, faces rigid as
masks.”’ (p. 45)
While we may never know exactly how the term came to be used, where does
this imagery come from? It is clearly consonant with European Orientalist
stereotypes, as analysed by Edward Said.7 It is also central to the German idealist
philosophical tradition, as discussed by Gil Anidjar.8 As Anidjar notes, Hegel
identifies the attributes of Oriental people as ‘their’ fatalism and passivity.9 In
addition to the dying Jews being called ‘Muslim’, they were apparently called
‘camels’ and ‘tired sheiks’, according to Agamben, this reinforcing the diagnosis of
an Orientalist mode of categorisation.
What can be gleaned from the perspectives of the camp survivors is that they
needed decisively to other the dying Jews for two main reasons. The one, mentioned
by Levi, is that the Nazis selected the most unhealthy for each batch of killing;
therefore, inmates were placed in a position of trying to distinguish themselves from
the hard to save as an act that could make all the difference to surviving. The other
perspective, offered by Bettleheim, is that the relatively coping Jews were afraid of
catching the fatalist apathy of those going under.10 A further consideration could be
that the imposed passivity of those witnessing the decline of their fellows may have
prompted designating the most helpless as ‘non-Jews’ or ‘Muslims’ as a means of
coping with the unbearable. Furthermore, regarding the concerns of this essay, there is
the question of why the dying Jews were assigned to another faith where this faith
appears to be aligned with a certain loss of faith, one prompting the speculation of:
whose loss of faith and in what? Do the survivors lose faith in the dying, or do the
dying lose faith in those who have abandoned them? And is it a case of loss of faith in
humanity or in God?
Agamben’s fascinated contemplation of the Musselmann concerns his
understanding of this extreme instance of ‘bare life’, barely alive, in terms of an
aporetic cipher. The philosophical question for Agamben is one of how to bear
witness to humans who have lost their humanity through ‘de-subjectification’ and
therefore constitute the untestifiable. Agamben realises that in his positing of the
Muselmann as inhuman, he risks a complicity with the racism of the Nazis, stating:
‘Simply to deny the Muselmann’s humanity would be to accept the verdict of the SS
and to repeat their gesture.’ (p. 63) He attempts to avoid this complicity through
describing the dying Jews as simultaneously human and inhuman which constitutes
for him a universal condition. Agamben’s notion of the human is predicated on the
subject as divided from himself, and I would suggest that the implicit paradigm at
stake in Agamben’s assumptions is the Gothic one of the döppelganger. That is, the
human here is a Dr Jekyll who is also an inhuman or un-subjectified Mr Hyde.11
Agamben writes: ‘Muselmann and witness, the inhuman and the human are
coextensive and, at the same time, non-coincident; they are divided and nevertheless
inseparable.’ (p. 151)
This implicit paradigm of the double would explain why Agamben’s notion of
the witness seems to rely on a logic of usurpation, one paradoxically predicated in
turn on obligatory singularity. He writes that Primo Levi: ‘is the only one who
consciously sets out to bear witness in place of the Muselmänner, the drowned’ (My
emphasis, p. 59). Agamben treats of survivor’s guilt in terms of living in the place of
others, even though Levi states that this not the case. Levi states, ‘“you did not usurp
anyone’s place.”’ (p. 91), an assertion he repeats more than once. Agamben, however,
argues: ‘In the camps [...] everyone lives and dies in the place of another.’ (p. 104)
What this problematically implies is that human beings are subject to the same logic
of exchange value that commodities are. It is widely agreed that in the camps the
commodification of humanity proved absolute, human beings produced and discarded
as things.12
While Agamben sees inmates as usurping each other’s places, eventually his
theory of the witness undergoes a substitution or crossover for it entails not the
survivor usurping the place of the drowned but the Muselmann appearing in the place
of the survivor. He writes: ‘the one who truly bears witness in the human is the
inhuman; it means that the human is nothing other than the agent of the inhuman [...]
the speechless one makes the speaking one speak’ (p. 120). Just as Jekyll is usurped
by Hyde for Hyde to express himself, the witness would here seem to be possessed by
the other who speaks through him. In what follows, I hope to challenge this uncanny
configuration of the witness as an ultimate paradigm, with respect to what it means to
be a bystander in situations of human atrocity.
Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments begins with the question: ‘How can I
write about Beirut [...] of watching a world collapse while trying to stave off that
collapse?’ (p. 19) Her memoir revolves this question throughout itself, paying
sustained attention to the lexicons of political and religious violence as well as to the
search for a language capable of doing justice to the tragedy of the social and urban
warscape and capable of refusing the triumph of destructiveness. The final section of
the book is entitled ‘Beirut: An Alphabet’ and in it Jean Said Makdisi offers us an A-
Z of the city only written in reverse order as a Z-A, resulting in a contrapuntal
affective mapping of the city that could be called a war poem. Abstract nouns and
descriptive terms such as Weary, War, Words, Violence, Veneer are inflected with
concrete lived experience, so that the abstraction of history into the mechanistic
march of terminology is contrapuntally re-humanised, in the following manner:
Weary of the never ending
War we listen, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger to the empty
Words the endless empty rhetoric which has only brought more
Violence while the
Veneer of fashion glitters like a worthless, forgotten coin in a mound of
rubble as it catches the sun. (p. 250)
This question of ‘endless empty rhetoric’ leading only to the escalation of violence is
one that is widely a preoccupation of writers of conscience. What is at stake here
concerns how jargon and stereotypes facilitate phobic categorisation as a prelude to
dehumanization, treating certain lives as dispensable. In his aptly titled essay
‘Verbicide’, Mourid Barghouti sums this up succinctly: ‘Stick on the labels, then send
in the tanks.’13
One of the particular ways in which language functions to cause divisions that
lead to violence is through a performative literalism of the brand name. This is a
question addressed in Beirut Fragments at some length and it would be helpful to
quote a series of excerpts as follows:
[O]ver the years, a terrible series of forced evictions of whole segments of the
population occurred in Lebanon, and, as a result, the country became more and
more religiously segregated.
In all of this, I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked rather like
the stamp with which cattle are branded [...] so are we all, like it or not,
branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry.
Thus the most atrocious crimes have been committed in the name of
religion. Golden symbols have hung round merciless necks as slaughter was
done [...]
And how does the brand work? [...] How does one feel as it sizzles into the
flesh? (pp. 137-8)
So how does the brand work? One thing that could be said is that it works as the logo
of capitalism works where the brand is not the product but the corporate image. This
would imply that the monotheistic religions referred to seem to function in a political
arena according to a logic of the fetish, the logo, the brand, even as monotheism is
supposed to eschew fetishism. As indicated in the above, it is less the substance of
religion that is at stake in the carrying out of atrocities but the symbols of religion;
what is done according to the insignia of religion and in the name of religion: religion
as a brand name. Therefore, this implies that a commodification of religion has
occurred in order to serve political ends, which is also to say economic ones, and I
think that this commodification of religion is widespread in contemporary forms of
religious fanaticism.14
What though is the nature of the ferocity and hostility that accompanies this
logo-centric branding or extremist identity politics? The image of cattle branding
gives us a clue in that unbranded cattle are referred to as mavericks. In human terms, a
maverick is considered to be a free-floating individual without fixed loyalties, for
instance, a rootless cosmopolitan. The important point to be made here is that the
status of the maverick is considered to be a potentially untrustworthy one. The
resentment of the brand-wielders is therefore against those who are considered to have
no loyalties, a resentment that may be said to be bound up with the sacralization of
family identities and the inflecting of religion with a logic of the family.15
Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, a novel about the civil war in Lebanon, is about
a Lebanese Christian woman who goes over to the side of the Palestinians and who is
persecuted and eventually killed by her Christian ‘brothers’ in an unnamed militia for
her disloyalty. The analysis of the violence is similar to that offered in Beirut
Fragments. Sitt Marie Rose tells her tormentor: ‘In this century no one has fought
with holy medals on so many chests [...] They kill and mutilate with a rosary in their
hands’.16 Again, it is a case of the commodification of religion. Writing of the
conflict between the Christian right and Palestinian refugee militants in 1975, the
narrator comments: ‘Violence is absorbed like a consumer product.’ (p.13) While Sitt
Marie Rose’s tormentor appeals to their common religious filiation, she comments:
‘You’ve forgotten what it means to be human. Hyenas, reptiles, pigs, don’t
harm their own kind the way you know how to do. And all that in the name of
the clan. What am I saying? You’re practicing idolatry towards the group you
belong to.’ (p. 94)
In this light, religions as symbolic systems take the place of the spiritual reality they
supposedly refer to and serve as designs or templates for historical reality. In Adnan’s
novels, the militia call this ‘rebuilding’ Beirut, but the protagonist questions the logic
of this, in a dialogue indirectly reported as follows: ‘Rebuild the country. What
country? [...] Because in this country there were too many factions, too many currents
of ideas, too many individual cases for one theory to contain.’ (p. 75) In such a
situation, so-called ‘rebuilding’ can but be destroying, or the attempt to force a non-
human mechanism or ideal onto a human reality at odds with it.17 What also needs to
be pointed out is that this case of ‘one theory’ concerns the ideal of ‘the singular’ as,
arguably, a theological aberration.
In speaking of the logo, an analysis in capitalist terms was offered earlier, but
it is necessary to distinguish a logo-centric understanding of monotheism based on the
concept of God as a single entity from monotheism as alternatively a matter of
unbroken, infinite holistic oneness: monotheism as a case of the interconnected
oneness of being on the level of the real. If this speculation may be briefly
entertained, could this be what underlies our religious wars: an endless and hopeless
battle to force unbounded oneness into the mold of the One and Only? Moreover, the
formal logic of singularity is one that gives rise to doubling (through separation), and
it depends on an analytic of finitude (that is, bounded separateness), or, in effect, the
death of God. In Islam, what I refer to above is a question of tawhid, which is often,
especially in Sufi contexts, translated as God’s ‘oneness’, although in other contexts
tawhid is translated as ‘the one’.18
The singular lends itself to a logic of the sovereign, and loyalty in this case
would be exclusive and dedicated to a concept of the superior, or one above all others,
while immediately inviting disloyalty. However, Beirut Fragments serves to present
an alternative to this kind of necessarily divisive loyalty through attending to a kind of
fidelity that I wish to argue could be conceived rather in horizontal terms.
The cosmopolitanism of a former Beirut is mentioned many times in the text,
not to idealize it but because, as Said Makdisi says, ‘to leave out the wealth of hopeful
possibility in that society would be to deny an aspect of the terrible sadness and sense
of waste at its loss that I feel today’ (p. 132) However, it is also made clear that
something of the spirit of this cosmopolitan world survives, probably because it
concerns precisely ‘that which survives’ as opposed to ‘that which destroys’. Consider
the following testimony referring to the period of the siege:
In the underground shelter, I have sat with people of all religions and
nationalities. We have comforted each other, shared food, water, blankets,
candles.
This has been a single, though diverse community. This has been the
reality. This is what is being threatened: An enormously rich cultural and
human experience is threatened with fragmentation and sterile separation. (p.
142)
This question of that which is single yet diverse concerns a poetic or non-dualist way
of thinking in which the one is the many, the many is the one: oneness as the
togetherness of the many. While cosmopolitanism is often a question of elitism, as
regards access to education and cultural mobility, the cosmopolitan solidarity of the
underground shelter significantly differs from this in that questions of class division
become irrelevant: all are in the same boat of hardship and insecurity. It is here that an
unbreakable common humanity seems really to manifest its undeniability and come
into its own.
This unbreakable bond or solidarity that constitutes resilience is what many
Palestinians have spoken of in terms of sumud or assoumoud,19 and Jean Said Makdisi
refers to this as being of significance in a widely noticeable Lebanese context (in fact,
sumud became the slogan of many Lebanese individuals, media and militant groups
during the 2006 Siege). She writes:
There is an Arabic word that has been used a great deal in Lebanon in recent
years but never so much as in those days: assoumoud. There is no English
sound-and-sense equivalent that I know of; rather it would have to be rendered
by tapping the thesaurus’s rich repository—tenacity, steadfastness, resolution,
endurance, indomitability—all these words together, with their overlapping
shades of meaning, give a sense of that noble word, assoumoud. (p. 173)
This then is the real loyalty or, better, fidelity, this resilience, one that cannot
ultimately be captured in a word, not even assoumoud. This is why the Palestinian
struggle and Lebanon’s being swept up in it may be said to be a turbulence of
universal import; a question for us all. In short, it is a question of the resilience of
resilience: the realization of our being in common, the reality of this against the
abstract idealism of the word; of brand names in the service of possessiveness and of
militancy. This alternative kind of loyalty or fidelity in the face of divisive ideological
conscriptions with their exclusive loyalties/ostracisms perhaps owes its durability to
its ontological non-essence.
In Notre Musique, it is said that ‘violence severs the lifeline’. The violence of
sectarian loyalties is ultimately a violence against what connects life to life,
ontologically speaking. The error with loyalty conceived of in sectarian ways is that it
attempts to put trust and faith on the inside of a bounded, thus singularised, collective:
it aims to make trust and faith secure in this way, through interiorisation: which is to
turn against the necessary risk, openness, vulnerability involved in both trust and
faith. Trust that involves no uncertainty is not trust; faith that is absolutely certain is
not faith. What I am proposing is that the internalisation of trust and faith in the
attempt to secure them is the very thing that seems to destroy them. And this
destruction of trust and faith has the ontological effect of converting sumud (the
external reality of bonds between beings) into a matter of blind hatred, one that targets
those on the outside who bear the oppositional projections of untrustworthiness,
disloyalty and faithlessness. It is, if you like, a war against the unconscious but not
only the unconscious. It could also be a case of the madness of a religious war against
God as compassion, mercy, empathy, love: the feelings that connect us.
The above may be related to an observation in Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation,
as well as to the very title of his book. In a complicated passage, Fisk writes of Beirut:
Its hopelessness relies upon its resilience. There are those who praise the
courage of its people, their valour amid despair, but it is this very capacity for
survival, for eternal renewal, that is Beirut’s tragedy. If the city were allowed
to die—if its airport closed forever, if its imports and exports were frozen, its
currency destroyed, if its people gave up—then its war would end. (p. 94)
This might seem to be at odds with the affirmation of resilience in Beirut Fragments;
however, I wish to argue that a similar perception is at stake in the seemingly different
positions. The resilience that Fisk critiques may be said to be one that has been turned
into an ideology based on a nostalgia that entails a refusal to mourn. In an important
section of Beirut Fragments, Said Makdisi writes of a transformation in her vision of
Beirut. The transformation begins with a confrontation of the spectacle of ‘human
ruin’, the casualties of war on the streets of Hamra. After describing the maimed and
deranged, Said Makdisi writes:
And if these people represent an extreme of human ruin, they have many
companions in misery. They constitute a kind of hideous chorus, one chanting,
one singing, one calling, one trying to sell worthless trifles, one begging, one
silent. Helpless witness to all this agony, I had come to avoid the area,
unwilling to see what I could do nothing about, too aware of the pain not to be
freshly shocked each time I saw it. (p. 85)
What effects a transformation is the arrival of guests who with memories of a
gloriously cosmopolitan former Beirut—Beirut as a glittering Paris of the East—react
with scorn and horror to Beirut in its current state of degradation and try to persuade
Said Makdisi to leave. While, as shown above, she is well aware of the misery she
lives amongst, she rejects the outsiders’ vision of her city. As she quits their company
and returns home, the following is related:
As I moved down the street, I felt a swelling confidence—one might say even
a strange kind of warmth—that grew, I must admit, as I neared the end. This
awful, ugly little street seemed in its abandoned desolation somehow no longer
threatening but pitiful. I felt for it a kind of sympathy that astonished me, so
accustomed was I here to feel revulsion. (my emphasis, p. 89)
So her commitment to staying, this resilience, is the antithesis of an idealized portrait
of the past, that of a gloriously cosmopolitan Beirut. Rather what is at stake requires
an acceptance of reality in order to affirm or, at least, not reject our common
humanity in the worst of circumstances, this being what transforms abjection into
pity. This transformed topography is ‘pity the nation’, and it may be conjectured that
Fisk and Said Makdisi do not quit Beirut, so as to bear witness to it, in a similar way.
In the above, Said Makdisi speaks of initially ‘being unwilling to see what I could do
nothing about’ and of being a ‘helpless witness’. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben
speaks repeatedly of how no one wished to look upon the Muselmann. Agamben
interprets this in terms of resistances to bearing witness to the inhumanity or shameful
de-subjectification of the human. (p. 151) However, I wish to propose that the source
of shame or loss of dignity cannot merely be objectified in terms of the debilitation
which supposedly renders the human inhuman (a term I disagree with here), because
it is also a case of the helplessness, and thereby potential complicity, of the bystander.
We may think that the shame or indignity is just that of the victim, but this needs to be
understood in terms of the spectator’s revulsion and the desire to separate herself or
himself from the victim. May not the real sense of shame be a question of failed
responsibility to others to whom certain things should not have happened? Moreover,
shame can entail the guilt of being forced into complicity with those who cause
suffering, as explored by Levi in his confrontation of the ‘grey zone’.
If human dignity, or karama insaniya, is a matter of sumud, of standing by
each other through the most difficult of times (as manifested in the 2011 Egyptian
revolution), then it stands to reason that shame, as the loss of dignity, entails an
abandonment of our common humanity. Bearing witness, therefore, should be
understood as a matter of keeping faith with humanity. This question will be further
explored with reference to Bahaa Taher’s Love in Exile.20
Taher’s Love in Exile is about a love story that takes place between an
Egyptian journalist who has gone into exile and a young European woman. What
seems to draw them together are respective experiences of failed relationships as well
as their disillusionment with the world of an ugly humanity, ruled by prejudice, self-
interest and political machinations. The journalist, divorced from his wife, has a son
whom he has left behind in Cairo who is increasingly drawn to the cause of the
Islamists. When his son starts to lecture him on the sins of his divorce, the father
advises:
The only books you read now are those that prove to you that you are right and
all the others are wrong. But beware, Khalid! Beware, because all the evils that
I have known in this world came out of that dark cave. It begins with an idea
and ends up an evil: I am right and my opinion is better. I am better therefore
others are wrong. I am better because I am God’s chosen people and the others
are goyim. I am better because I am one of the Lord’s children whose sins are
forgiven and the others are heretics [...] and so on ad infinitum. (p. 210)
As with the other texts considered in this chapter, what is rejected is sovereign
singularity, with its inevitable hierarchical dualisms, as a dangerous matter of
violence through self-righteous exclusivism and branding. While the cosmopolitan
love idyll in Love in Exile serves as a refuge from this, it is also eventually presented
as a potentially dangerous withdrawal from the world. The world that it screens out
returns with a shocking savagery towards the end of the novel as the history that has
been unfolding in Lebanon starts to reach Europe. The protagonist tries to ignore the
news of the siege and consequent retreat of the PLO, but says: ‘I wasn’t able to escape
for long, however.’ (p. 223) He receives a phone call from a journalist friend in Beirut
that awakens him in the night, although what reaches him is an unintelligible and
anguished attempt to communicate: ‘“mountains of corpses and millions of flies”’. (p.
235)
In a certain tragic respect, the witnessing is too late. In Beirut Fragments,
there is a moment of exasperation expressed at the singling out of the Sabra and
Shatila massacres by the international community (pp. 187-9): for it could be said the
international community had failed to stand by the Palestinians through all the
massacres preceding the atrocities carried out in Sabra and Shatila. Through this,
questions of historical complicity remain unaddressed.
Love in Exile presents us with a rejection of two starkly different yet
inherently interdependent responses to the horror of religious and ethnic persecution.
The first concerns a character called Yusuf who is under the tutelage of a corrupt
Saudi prince who, it is hinted at, is working with the Israelis in shadowy ways. For
Yusuf: ‘“This world, Ustaz, is a jungle, full of fierce animals. The only thing that will
save us is to become strong. And we will never be strong unless we use our minds and
go back to our religion and our roots.”’ (p. 248) This solution of a militant Islam in a
dog-eat-dog world of power politics is firmly declined in the novel through its
protagonist’s views. So too, but sadly, is the retreat into the would-be safe and
innocent world of the love idyll because the novel presents this as eventually aligned
with a death wish based on a desire for ‘total peace’. The journalist’s girlfriend tries to
persuade him to commit suicide with her because: ‘“Who would bear this world?”’ (p.
272) In the face of these rejected alternatives, both of them forged out of a sense of
unbearable vulnerability as well as out of a loss of faith in humanity, the novel implies
a need to live without conclusive solutions to suffering, without turning away from
suffering: a question of bearing witness to it, however imperfectly, and attempting to
intervene against its perpetuation.
In order to explain the complicity between the two positions outlined above,
aspects of a post-traumatic Israel will be briefly considered. On the one hand, Israel
may be said to have adopted Yusuf’s position, that is, a ruthless commitment to a
position of self-reliance based on a return to roots and military strength in a world
seen to consist of dog-eat-dog politics. On the other hand, it seeks to protect an
internal idyll of a European cosmopolitanism purified of European darkness: a Europe
saved from itself.21 These are two sides of the same coin. Seen in this light, the whole
of Israel is like a gated community: a privatized utopia to be militantly defended in a
world seen as corrupt and radically untrustworthy. In considering European anti-
Semitism alongside Israel’s anti-Palestinian violence, Jacqueline Rose importantly
proposes a correlation between psychic partition and the historical, social and political
topographies of partition.22
In Love in Exile, the Sabra and Shatila massacres are discussed in terms of
Auschwitz and Nazi Germany in various ways. The reason why in an international
context the Sabra and Shatila massacres are especially singled out, in relation to other
massacres, seems to concern this. In Love in Exile, it is said that apart from
newspapers in Israel, ‘the editorials [...] all likened what happened in Sabra and
Shatila to the crimes of the Nazis.’ (p. 246) Fisk confirms this (though less blatantly)
writing: ‘After the massacre at Sabra and Chatila, many nations asked themselves
how a people who had suffered so terribly at Hitler’s hands could permit such an
atrocity to take place under their eyes.’ He adds that, ‘Throughout the siege of Beirut,
the PLO accused Israel of employing the same tactics as Hitler used against the Jews.’
(p. 389), while further revealing that Israel’s leader Begin had been caught up in his
own obsessions around Nazi Germany in mounting the siege in the first place. For
instance, Fisk writes: ‘it was Begin, a Holocaust survivor whose own family was
murdered by the Nazis in Poland, who repeatedly—through the long summer weeks
of the Beirut siege—drew comparisons between the Lebanon invasion and the 1939-
45 war. It was he who portrayed himself in a letter to President Reagan that summer
as marching to “Berlin” in order to liquidate Hitler’. (p. 390)
In The Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar importantly, with sensitive
balance, explores the ways in which the Holocaust is used to justify the displacement
of the Palestinians at the same time that Arab resistance to such is construed as ‘Nazi’,
while certain Arab commentators counter-deploy the terminology in question. Achcar
writes: ‘On what grounds can Israeli writers criticize their Arab counterparts (the
great majority of whom are poorly informed about the Holocaust) for comparing
Zionism to Nazism, when the Israeli media and Israeli political leaders (who know a
great deal about it) have never hesitated and still do not hesitate to compare Arab
political forces—from Nasserism to the Baath and the various governments it has
spawned to the Lebanese Hezbollah to Nazism?’23
Arafat was not the first one to draw attention to Begin’s tactics as fascist. In
1948, a letter signed by 26 Jews appeared in the New York Times on the occasion of
Begin’s visit to America.24 The letter sets out to warn America of having dealings
with this leader of the Freedom Party, beginning: ‘Among the most disturbing
political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel
of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its
organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist
parties.’
The writers of the letter go on to identify Begin’s role in anti-British terrorism
as well as in intimidating the Israeli population through gangster methods, and they
reveal his anti-Arab terrorism, as follows:
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin [...]
terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military
objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants, 240 men, women, and
children, and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets
of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the
Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan.
Americans are also warned: ‘It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real
character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the
future.’25 Amongst the letters’ signatories, a number of them rabbis, two names stand
out in particular: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein.
The least that could be said about the unheeded warning of these witnesses is
that it would not be anti-Semitic to call Begin’s politics fascist in that this allegation is
first made by prominent Jews themselves (while Achcar, drawing on Tom Segev,
notes that Ben-Gurion also described Begin as fascist)26. But, what of Begin’s reverse
attempt to cast the Palestinians as the Nazis? Fisk, trying to puzzle out Begin’s
perception of the Palestinians as Nazis, establishes that Begin’s contorted reasoning
was that since Begin believed Israel to be promised to the Jews by God, the six
million Jews killed in the Holocaust should have had Israel as their homeland, and so
Arafat in resisting the displacement of the Palestinians was to be seen as a Nazi
collaborator. (p. 392)
Begin, as Fisk points out, was a Holocaust survivor while his father, mother
and brother were killed by the Nazis. Might Begin’s contorted switching around of
labels and his transferential obsession, that of liquidating a ‘Palestinian Hitler’, derive
from some form of survivor’s guilt or shame? If so, it would clearly be a sense of
shame that Begin was unable to confront, unlike Levi. Levi, in writing about
Auschwitz, is in a different position from when he was actually there, a consideration
not really broached by Agamben. What is especially interesting to note in this regard
is that while Levi speaks of how it was not possible to sympathize with the dying
Jews in the camp, cordoned off as Muslim, his post-Auschwitz writing seems to be
particularly motivated by pity and sympathy for the drowned in their abandonment;
simply, he does not turn away when he is finally able to approach the drowned.
Moreover, when the massacres of Sabra and Shatila occurred, Levi mounted a public
protest, calling for the resignation of Sharon and Begin.
One of the reasons that Sabra and Shatila are said to be so distressing as
massacres is that they were overseen by the Israeli soldiers who witnessed the
atrocities while doing nothing to prevent them: even playing a role in facilitating
them.27 It seems that what is at stake is the perversion of the role of the witness.
Unlike the Jews in the concentration camps, who were truly helpless witnesses in
relation to the suffering of the dying, the Israelis were witnesses to a catastrophe they
certainly were in a position to prevent and had, as the occupying army, an ethical
responsibility to do so.
It is instructive, however, to juxtapose the above observation with an account
of the Sabra massacre of 1982 written in 2001 by a Palestinian witness called Hasan
Khiti (mentioned also in the introduction to this volume). He speaks of an occasion
when he once disavowed the Sabra massacre to a woman who visited Sabra camp in
order to find out what had happened there. Khiti states:
We were slaughtered, but our dignity and pride forbade us from becoming
subjects of pity. Maybe that is why I used to be relieved by reports saying that
the victims were no more than a few dozen and hated officials who reported
that the death toll reached three thousand. Maybe I was ashamed. I apologize
to that woman.28
When the massacre first occurred, his account makes clear that he experienced what
happened as a young, helpless bystander, and I think that the sense of stigma that he
eventually confronts concerns reaching an acceptance of the fact that he can no longer
absent himself from what happened.
Bahaa Taher in his novel writes: ‘Traditional journalistic rivalries disappeared;
everyone who learned a news story or who made contact with a source shared the
information with the rest of us. Journalists those days had sullen faces, struggling with
some kind sense of shame, as if they also had taken part in the massacre, or were
responsible for it; as if they had to atone for their sin by finally speaking out and
telling the whole truth that they knew.’ (p. 246) Taher’s point is that we are all
potentially implicated in the question of turning a blind eye, and that no one can turn
away from suffering because of their nationality or religion or the nationality or
religion of those who suffer.
Coming back to Agamben, his descriptions of the starving Musselmann Jews
closely invoke the images of severely malnourished famine victims that we
sometimes see on our television screens: the same listlessness, glazed expressions,
abnormal postures, and so on. Less extremely, Said Makdisi writes of the strain of
living through siege as follows: ‘Eventually, exhaustion filtered insiduously through
the stoicism. I remember the haggard look on every face, the circles under the eyes,
the weight everyone lost. We were living among the dead and dying, never knowing
when we would be called on to join their ranks.’ (p 180)
Does this pertain to what Agamben posits as ‘the inhuman’, the witness as
bearer of the no longer human? In my view, there are no ‘inhuman humans’; there are,
in living reality, no döppelgangers; and ‘the inhuman human’ is only a category.
While Agamben interprets the inhuman in terms of de-subjectification, it could be
alternatively proposed that the inhuman is the category, especially when humans are
reduced to nothing but that. More specifically, it could be a category for that which,
for various reasons, we find it hard to assume human responsibility for.
At the end of his book, Agamben produces some Muselmann testimonies of
those who managed to come back from the brink of death and survive. ‘I was a
Muselmann’. What is interesting is that those testifying remember what it was like to
be in the state of debilitation given that name. This shows that, contrary to Agamben’s
positing of inhuman beings erased of all thought and subjectivity, there was a degree
of self-consciousness retained in their weakness. They were the helpless witnesses of
their own demise. What is also instructive is that those classified as Muselmänner
offer quite different accounts of what this condition is like. For example, one says:
‘“You just waited for peace in death’”, and another offers the opposite ‘“I just wanted
to survive another day”’; one describes his existence as ‘“atrocious”’ and another
speaks of a ‘“strange sweetness”’. They are not even self-consistent in their own
accounts, one speaking of both having given up all hope as well as of hoping for a
miracle. As in normal life, there are similarities and dissimilarities in their
experiences, one commenting: ‘“I think many Muselmänner didn’t realise they
belonged to that category [...] In many cases, whether or not an inmate was a
Muselmann depended on his appearance.”’ However, there is certainly a strong sense
that those going by the name ‘Muslim’ were conscious of their set apart or abandoned
status, recalling the following lyrics from a concentration camp song: ‘Among people,
how horribly I die’; ‘watching me, watching me, people’.29
Agamben’s uncanny logic of the witness, in which the near-dead and even the
dead speak through the living, ventriloquising them, resembles that of the dybbuk, a
figure in Jewish folklore of demonic possession. S. Ansky’s famous play The Dybbuk,
is about a young male student of the Kabbalah (Channon) who, when he cannot marry
the woman he desires (Leah), dies so that he can then take possession of her in
demonic form.30 Channon literally usurps Leah’s being with his own living-dead
spirit, speaking through her. This occurs half way through the play, the second half of
the play concerning the exorcism of Channon from Leah. When he is finally
persuaded to leave her, she then yearns for him herself and calls for him to join her in
a union that this time is mystical rather than demonic: the ‘death-in-life’ usurpation
turning into a ‘love-in-death’ joining of the lovers. Ansky’s mystical play could be
read as a comment on the ‘oneness’ of being. In the first instance, the dynamic of
usurpation constitutes the attempt to appropriate the being of another for the self; a far
too literal union. In the second, corrective instance, the union of the lovers is possible
as a real or authentic phenomenon on a spiritual level through mutual love. The logic
of doubling, based on the will-to-singularity, is displaced by one of non-dualism.
The mystical complexities of the play aside, Ansky appears also to intend the
meaning of his play in terms of an historical allegory31 where Channon could
represent a Russian Judaism that has no home and can but be a wandering soul. Two
possible readings will be offered. Firstly, Leah—the possessed bride—could be read
as Palestine, with Israel then as a dybbuk nation.32 Or, at least, this would be Begin’s
Israel, regarding his demand that Palestinians make way for the dead souls of the
victims of the camps, the demands of the dead usurping the living. Secondly, closer to
Ansky’s own preoccupations is the split between pariah Jews and assimilated Jews, to
use Lazare’s terminology,33 where in Ansky’s play Channon’s poverty and lowly
status disqualify him from marrying Leah. Here it becomes relevant to note that
behind the figure of the ‘Muslim’ Jew is that of another figure, the mauschel or ‘Yid’.
In particular, Theodore Herzl distinguishes between European Jews and the mauschel
or ‘ethnic’ Jew (for instance, persecuted Russian or Eastern European Jews seeking
refuge in Western Europe)34 in terms of who counts as properly human, stating:
We have known him for a long time [...] A type, my dear friends [...] the
dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have
always been mistaken for one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any
other [...] the Yid on the other hand is a hideous distortion of the human
character, something unspeakably low and repulsive.35
It could be Jekyll and Hyde (the terminology matches precisely with that of the
novella), with the inferior ‘non-self’ of the double substituting as the Yid/ the Muslim/
the Palestinian. And if this projection falls to ‘the Palestinian’, this may concern what
Bowman has identified as the Zionist policy of attempting to counter splits and
antagonisms within Jewish identity through the very maintaining of an externalized
anti-Semitic other as opposed to self.36
Eventually, it is possible to be a Muslim Jew or a Christian Muslim. Jean Said
Makdisi writes: ‘I am the child in equal measure of Christianity and Islam’. And
‘there is a mixture of peoples, and it is the mixture that is beautiful and holy’. (p. 140)
If co-existence is what is sacred, this may be because it is the oneness as togetherness
of humanity that is holy: not humanity as a single entity but humanity as an effect of
an inter-subjective awareness of each other.
Ghada Al Samman’s poetic and absurdist Beirut Nightmares shares the
concerns of Beirut Fragments, its translator Nancy Roberts stating: ‘The author
exposes the absurdity of allowing religious affiliation to become a basis for mutual
enmity, especially at a time when those fighting each other should see that they are
united by a common plight: their humanity and shared experience of poverty and
oppression [...Samman] seeks to disabuse the reader of the notion that: “Beirut was
living through a kind of ‘golden age’ prior to the war, which brought it abruptly to an
end.”’37 Accordingly Al Samman writes:
The neon-lit boulevards filled with raucous, drunken laughter and the frenzied
beat of rock-and-roll music represented little more than 5 per cent of all the
streets in Beirut, while on the remaining 95 per cent—streets paved with the
dust of hunger and starvation, ignorance and disease, defeatism and privation
—copious tears of despair were watering the seeds of bitterness and hatred [...]
people had been perishing by the thousands prior to the bloodshed [...] And
they had been dying in silence, in the secrecy of anonymity. At the same time,
the streets were teeming with people who were still technically alive, although
inside something had broken or perished. (pp. 325-6)
This is the severed lifeline, while Samman yet affirms a conscious pariahdom or
solidarity with the city’s outcasts (as does Khoury in The Journey of Little Gandhi38),
over nostalgia for its lost golden age, writing of the attempt to clean up Hamra and
restore its cosmopolitan golden aura:
But...would it really be possible for anything to go back to the way it had been
‘before’? No never [...] The misery of those who had once taken up residence
on the streets of Hamra Street couldn’t be so easily swept away from the
pavements of our memories. (p. 327)
While this novel contains many episodes of fanatical branding—‘[H]e took his knife
and engraved the symbol of my religion on my arm. The pain was excruciating’ (p.
34)—it still engages the utopian imagination against such. We are introduced to a man
who loves to worship God in mosques and churches, but especially by the sea. He is
captured by fanatics who want to use him as a scapegoat for a revenge killing,
depending on whether his religion fits the bill, whereby he is asked to identify
himself. He gives his first name as Lebanon, his family name as Arab, and says he is
of the party of life, affirming: ‘“My name is ‘Arab Lebanon’, and I don’t want to
die.”’ (p. 27) Beirut Nightmares also offers the following, implicitly anti-Hegelian
message: ‘Lovers [...] feel no need to establish their existence by making material
reality into a kind of outward material embodiment of their souls.’ (p. 289) Love is
decolonizing, as in The Dybbuk, for: ‘Those who seek to replace love with the desire
to possess are the very people who make wars.’ (p. 289)
Agamben quotes Isaiah: ‘The remnant shall be saved’. And he writes: ‘The
Messianic Kingdom is neither the future (the millenium) nor the past (the golden age):
it is, instead, a remaining time.’ Agamben interestingly reverses the notion of
dialectical progress (Aryan usurping Jew, as he explicitly indicates), through the
counter-dialectical return-of-the-surpassed, or ‘the Muselmann’/’Muslim’. However, I
would suggest that what is at stake is not really a temporal phenomenon at all. Rather,
the so-called ‘remnant’ concerns the being of that which persists or is steadfast. In
other words, it is the collective and horizontal ontology of sumud. Trauma, as the
wounding of connective lifelines, testifies to this oneness precisely through its painful
moment of rupture, where trauma intersects with the timelessness of the real.
Witnessing, in this account, is an act of faith in a togetherness that cannot be
surpassed.
In juxtaposing the above drawing by David Olère39 with the drawings below, the
intention is not to suggest an equivalence between traumatic histories, especially
given the attempt in this essay to contest a logic of substitution. Rather it concerns the
universality of witnessing, as a question of standing by, in a faithful as opposed to idle
sense. Hedy Epstein, a pro-Palestinian activist whose parents perished at Auschwitz,
expresses this universality as follows: ‘By traveling to Gaza, I hope to fulfill one of
Judaism’s most basic values, as stated in Leviticus 19:16: “Do not stand idly by when
your neighbour’s blood is shed” […] To me, “never again” means never to anyone’.
In these drawings by Naji Al Ali,40 the position of the witness is seemingly with his
back to us, the characteristic posture of Handala, the young witness in Al Ali’s
cartoons. However, this positioning of Handala produces the effect of us standing
beside him, looking with him at what he sees. The witness offers in this view, not so
much Levinas’s face-to-face relationship of irreducible otherness, but a side-by-side
one of sympathy and pity, capable of dignifying the humiliated and revealing the
indignity of the perpetrators. It is this horizontal dimension of what is outside of time,
as we position ourselves alongside the witness right now, entrusted with their
testimony, that constitutes the fragile timelessness of human conscience. I say
‘fragile’ because the honesty of the above drawings is that they manage to bring
together into one space both the potential for standing by resiliently and a sense of
extreme abandonment.
1 Notre Musique, dir. Jean Luc Godard, 2004.2 Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (New York: Persea Books, 1990), p. 142. All further references to this work will appear in the text.3 Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. x. All further references to this work will appear in the text.4 See Fisk, p. 65. Gilbert Achcar also notes that, despite this, the significant model was a Spanish Francoist one. See Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. M. G. Goshgarian (London: Saqi Books, 2011), p. 78.5 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (1999; New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 41. All further references to this work will appear in the text.6 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Sphere Books, 1991).7 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin Books, 2003).8 Gil Anidjar, The Jew and the Arab (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 129.9 Anidjar emphasizes a symmetry in the characterization of Jews and Muslims here;however, it could be argued that Hegel regards Judaism as more developed in being less servile.10 See Agamben, p. 44, p. 56.11 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (1886; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).12 Agamben speaks of the camps as factories of death, pointing out that the Nazis spoke of the corpses as Figuren or dolls (p. 51), while I have discussed the ‘doll’ form of the commodity in Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 194-5. 13 Mourid Barghouti, ‘Verbicide’ M. Barghouti, ‘Verbicide’, New Internationalist Magazine, issue 359, http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2003/08/01/14 See Caroline Rooney, ‘Islamism, Capitalism and Mimetic Desire in the Capitalism Novel’ in Islamism and Arab Cultural Expression, ed. Abir Hamdar and Lyndsey Moore (London: Routledge, 2013).15 See Julia Borossa and Caroline Rooney, ‘Pourquoi la loyauté?’ in Guerre finie, guerre infinie’, ed. Chawki Azouri (forthcoming).16 Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, trans. Georgina Kleege (1978; Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1982), p. 96.17 Miriam Cooke serves to show how Arab women’s writing on the dailiness of war enables a critique of masculine idealism. See War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988).18 For renditions of tawhid as both ‘One’ and ‘Oneness’, see Shaik Walī Raslān Ad-Dimashqī, Concerning the Affirmation of Divine Oneness, trans. Muhtar Holland (Hollywood, Florida: Al-Baz Publishing, 1997).19 ‘as-’ is the definite article.20 Bahaa Taher, Love in Exile, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (1995; London: Arabia Books, 2008).21 See Caroline Rooney, ‘The Disappointed of the Earth’ in Psychoanalysis and History, Special double issue on Psychoanalysis, Fascism and Fundamentalism, Vol. 11 (July 2009): 159-74.22 Jacqueline Rose, Proust Amongst the Nations: Dreyfus in the Middle East (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).23 Achcar, pp. 207-8.24 Letter to The New York Times, 4 December 1948, ‘Books’ section, p.12.25 A PLO member in Love in Exile, speaking of Begin, links the tactics of Sabra and Shatila to Dir Yassin, Qibya and Ain El Helweh.26 Achcar, p. 209.27 See Fisk, p. 388-98.28 Hassan Khiti, in ‘Sabra and Shatila: Thirty Years On’, Al Akhbar, 14/09/2012 http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/sabra-and-shatila-thirty-years
29 www.reelingwrithing.com/holocaust/pack/116-121.pd ‘Muselmann—Cigarette Butt Collector’, lyrics. 30 S. Ansky, The Dybbuk, trans. Henry A. Alsberg and Winifred Katzin (1918; New York: Liveright, 1971).31 For a wider context, see Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstien, The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).32 For Palestine as a bride, see Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2007).33 See Gabriel Piterberg,The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 1-50.34 Regarding Anski’s documentation of the massacre of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, see The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neurogoschel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).35 Theodore Herzl, ‘Mauschel’, Die Welt, 15 October 1897, quoted by Pawel ?36 Glenn Bowman, ‘A Place for Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, anti-Semitism and the Jewish State’, in Surveillane and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, ed. Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmin Abu-Laban (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).37 Nancy Roberts, Translator’s Introduction, Ghada Samman, Beirut Nightmares (London: Quartet Books, 1997).38 Elias Khoury, The Journey of Little Gandhi, trans. Paula Haydar (1989; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).39 David Olère, ‘Admission in Mauthausen’, 1945. Reproduced by kind permission of Beate Klarsfield.40 Naji Al Ali, cartoons of 1982. Reproduced by kind permission of the Naji Al Ali family.