What happened this past week had only ever existed in the minds of Syria’s dreamers, the children of the revolution and their forefathers who had condemned themselves to hope. It is also the stuff of nightmares for the former rulers of the Levant.
The monster that was let out of the cage is back on its leash: Hezbollah is tamed, expelled from Syria, besieged in Lebanon. Bashar al-Assad’s reign has ended (it still feels surreal to write that almost a week later). Hezbollah, and the people empowered by its arms, lost; their role as a transnational elite military force ended. They would be lucky to keep their weapons in Lebanon at this point.
Throughout my life, I have heard members of my community repeat the same list of excuses for the lanky tyrant Assad that they had bestowed on our own sectarian grifters, who emerged from Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.
When demonstrations in Syria broke out in 2011, these same lies-turned-talking points were resurrected and projected onto Assad’s rule.
Some of them went like this:
“He is good, the ones around him are bad.”
“These sorts of countries deserve these types of rulers.”
“Something is happening that is bigger than you or me.”
I absolutely revile that last one, blasphemy to my secular ears. Often stated with smugness, it was a form of intellectual chauvinism, the clincher of any discussion or argument with a die-hard Hezbollah supporter or Assadist.
“You think Syrians woke up one day and demanded freedom in 2011? Syrians don’t want freedom, stupid; they have a functioning government. Something is happening that is bigger than you and me.”
“The 2019 Lebanese civil society demonstrations were not spontaneous, you idiot; the movement was orchestrated by nongovernmental organizations funded by America. Something is happening that is bigger than you and me.”
“The Lebanese pound’s value didn’t fall against the dollar and blow up the economy because we backed crooks and thieves to formulate our monetary policy. The U.S. controls the dollar; you are smart, you should know that. Something is happening that is bigger than you or me.”
Now these voices are quiet. Some of them are even distancing themselves from the regime’s crimes. Assad, once the center of the “Axis of Resistance,” has now transformed into a former ally, one with whom an alliance was only pragmatic. We had nothing to do with the atrocities — we were only in it to shore up the resistance. That is the line being shouted by Hezbollah’s mouthpieces.
The Shiites are being swept away by something bigger than them. World powers are converging and delineating interests, and Hezbollah’s space on the map is growing ever smaller.
As the losers in the latest geopolitical reshuffle, Hezbollah’s people cannot just be happy for Syrians: happy to see people happy, happy to see hope where a week ago there was none.
For too long Lebanon’s Shiites have been fed a rhetorical diet filled with hate; maybe we don’t know hope when we see it? The former head of the community, Hassan Nasrallah, had promised a sort of forever war for his people, who it seemed were destined to constantly be defending distant fronts in Syria and beyond to ensure the resistance could fight Israel.
I don’t need to tell you how that turned out.
If hate is all you know, all that has powered you, then how can you understand hope when you see it?
A visceral hatred of Israel has defined Lebanon’s Shiites. It has made them ignorant of all other pain. Only theirs mattered. Only their suffering was just. Only the battle of Israel was righteous. Nothing else mattered. No one else mattered.
And if you are not with us, you are with them, against us.
Lebanon’s Shiites have a lot in common with those Western leftists who supported Assad’s rule, the “tankies” who saw him as the defense against their homegrown imperialism. To these people, and to my people, the people of the region could only ever be ruled by dictators or extremists. Anything else was beyond us.
It was internalized Orientalism: Democracy is the prerogative solely of the white man in the West, it seems. I mean, just look at Egypt; as soon as they had elections, they brought in the Muslim Brotherhood. See how that turned out, the thinking went.
The way the tankies and pro-Assad Shiites say the word betrays a lot: “Ikhwanji” — of the brotherhood — vile; bearded, with a shaved moustache; disgusting. A singular word capturing, for its enemies in Lebanon, the entire diverse makeup of the Syrian revolution.
They cannot see what we have in common. They do not see that the husks of humans released from the pits of Sednaya resemble their own kin.
They do not recognize the parallels of joy, the parallels of hope. The reality is that the footage of prisoners being released from Sednaya is not too different from the footage of Lebanese prisoners being released from the infamous Israeli Khiam jail following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
That victory made Hezbollah arrogant. made its people see themselves as a notch higher than the rest.
Like a bad joke, a Shiite friend once told a Palestinian, “We are going to take Jerusalem for you. You are not up for it.”
It was a tease, an invitation for a counter, but my Palestinian friend could give none. This was happening at the pinnacle of Hezbollah’s power, when its troops were marching around Syria, seizing land for Assad. He kept his mouth shut instead.
The jest was telling of the sentiment in the community: We are in charge of liberating Palestine, no matter which roads we have to take to get there. Syrians themselves have no say in this; neither do Palestinians. We know better, after all. Funny how that turned out.
Hezbollah’s gains in Syria imbued the Shiite community with jubilation and pride: We liberated the south. We won the 2006 war with Israel. We liberated the shrines. We are better than you.
The Shiites of Lebanon are apprehensive, waiting for what is to come. They feel bested by enemies and lacking the means to push them back. They worry that the Sunni Islamist powers will try to pressure them in Lebanon and awaken the dormant frustrations with the “Party of God.”
“Now, we can’t even get a can of tuna through the border” was the sentiment in bombed-out Beirut’s southern suburb, Hezbollah’s beating heart and soul, the epicenter of its command-and-control network.
But the Shiite community — contrary to popular sentiment — is not a monolith. Some of us are celebrating Assad’s demise.
We too have suffered at the hands of the Assad regime. One of the few times my mother was mean to me was at a Syrian checkpoint during a family trip to Ehden in the Bekaa Valley. A child of 10, I had asked her why there were Syrian soldiers in Lebanon. She told me to keep my mouth shut and not speak of these things again.
Now imagine going to Hamra in Ras Beirut and not worrying about the Syrian Social Nationalist Party thugs on every corner. Imagine driving to Damascus and then on to Aleppo.
I couldn’t two weeks ago.
Our minds have expanded, the mental barriers between us and a people we have shared the entirety of our history with have broken.
It is a chance for us to renew.
The Shiites of Lebanon see themselves as historically downtrodden. They put their faith in a leadership that lifted them up. We seem to have gone back to being downtrodden. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently advised against giving into despair and that losing is a part of life.
But maybe from the dirt, we can muster some tools for ourselves.
Even before Oct. 7, 2023, cracks in Hezbollah’s control over the country were surfacing. The group had stopped living up to its social bargain, and the scale of its services diminished.
The Shiites were among the first to demonstrate against Lebanon’s sectarian system in 2019, before Hezbollah’s counterrevolutionary tactics pulled them out of the field. Members of the community tried to resist the group’s monopoly of control and representation during elections.
Some members of Hezbollah even spoke out against their group backing Assad. They were sidelined and outcast.
Perhaps they can find their voice again? Maybe they can draw inspiration from a democratic process that might unfold next door.
Maybe not, and those damn Orientalists will be proven right.
But maybe the current masters of Syria will shock us all and fulfill our dim hopes of a liberal, secular, democratic Arab state. A model we can all emulate and use to topple our very own micro-Bashars.
Maybe democracy and fair representation really are for us, and we are worthy of it. Maybe we are not doomed to corruption, but to hope.
We shall wait and see.
In the meantime, can’t we all just get along?
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