-Analysis-
BEIRUT — They call it the “Shia question,” and it has occupied an ever great space in debates and discussions across Lebanon since Hezbollah began its war against Israel in support of Gaza more than a year ago. Since the pagers attacks against Hezbollah and the start of Israel’s ground offensive in southern Lebanon, the question has grown even more charged.
The Shia people in Lebanon are undoubtedly the most exposed to aggression, harm and demographic transformation. They lost their land as well as communications among themselves.
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And what the Shias experienced will be — sooner or later — inevitably reflected in the political equations that control Lebanon, which are ultimately based on the balances among the different sects and religious groups in the country.
There have been certain leading voices who refuse to even discuss this question in the first place, under the pretext that this approach is sectarian and should be avoided. However, that old tone of “don’t ask/don’t tell” about faith and background simply does not reflect reality.
Lebanon’s essence
The fact is that Lebanon loses much of its meaning — not to mention its stability — when the Shia sect (or any sect) is not able to act and exist freely as itself.
No Lebanese is more Lebanese than another or less so. Lebanese-ness is not a belief or a partisan identity. Its validity increases with its expansion to more beliefs, identities, and tendencies. We must be urged to control the racist obscenities that are directed at the Shias as a whole, and to stop the vile gloating over them or predicting a future in which they will be nothing but humiliated.
However, in order for the talk not to be just useless preaching about “one people” and “brotherhood” that transcends sectarianism, it is necessary to call for massive political transformations that can only be initiated by the Shias themselves to start with.
Martyr or not?
In the end, the “Shia question” is an expression of the entire Lebanese question, naturally in its most severe form. We are not only confronted with the current catastrophe, and the role of Hezbollah to plunge the nation into war, but also what the party has cultivated and developed for decades of a cohesive and solid awareness, and a complex connection with other levels of social existence, from the economy and welfare to education and the judiciary.
This great parallel with Lebanese society (and its opposite at the same time) makes it imperative that the Shia initiative produce an identity outside Hezbollah, and outside the connection of dependence on outside forces, a condition for any national restoration.
Fabricating brotherhood and patriotism again will not be in anyone’s interest.
The task is not simple, of course. There are two elements that increase its urgency: one direct, which is to stop the catastrophe of the Israeli war, and the second more distant, represented by a huge decline in enthusiasm for the principle of coexistence and the resumption of Lebanese nationalism.
It’s hard to deny that the Hezbollah experience has played the most important role in pushing everyone to this abyss. Fabricating brotherhood and patriotism again will not be in anyone’s interest.
Should the Lebanese, for example, to prove their brotherhood and patriotism, agree to call Salim Ayyash, accused of assassinating former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, “a martyr who ascended on the road to Jerusalem” after he was killed in an Israeli strike last week in Syria?
Homeland and freedom
For now, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri may be the one who is qualified to take the first step to move forward in the review. But it is certain that the Shiite sect one day will need to be able to embrace such a project. It is a project that is not only related to its own Lebanese identity and to the Lebanese identity of the nation itself, but also extends to the sect’s very freedom.
A single party was imposed on them.
The slightest knowledge of our recent history tells us that the Shiites have long been the most diverse and pluralistic sect in Lebanon in terms of their many parties, political leaders and ideas, as well as in terms of their dynamic presence in civil society and in cultural and artistic creativity.
But a single party was imposed on them in a parallel and opposing state, through sometimes violent behavior. And like single-party systems elsewhere, a belt of corrupted forces was erected around the waist of that party, which those systems called a “national and progressive front.”
As for the brave individuals among the Lebanese Shiites who have always chosen to confront the single party, combining the battle of Lebanese nationalism with the battle of their freedom, Hezbollah did not recognize them as anything more than that humiliating name: “Shiites of the American Embassy.”
Even today, as is customary in single-party systems, the treason and threats continue, with the aim of preventing the restoration of the moments of homeland and freedom that Lebanon needs to survive.
