The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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Already author of a history of Jordan, he had a friend in King Hussein’s brother, Prince Hassan. In 1997, when Lebanon was again at peace, then-Crown Prince Hassan invited him to head Jordan’s Inter-Faith Institute. Salibi had lived in Amman since then, although a few years later he would return to Beirut.
His new house was, he said, ‘near the Fifth Circle’. The city’s neighbourhoods were often named for the number of the nearest roundabout. Shepherd’s Hotel was near the First. Salibi’s modern flat did its best to recreate the Ottoman charm of his old Beirut apartment with Persian carpets and mother-of-pearl furniture. As in Beirut, he smoked cigarillos. Also as in Beirut, he offered me whisky. If Usama Khalidy’s house was Palestine, Salibi’s was old Beirut. If Usama had his doubts about Palestinian politicians, Salibi was ashamed of Lebanon’s. He condemned Lebanon for its mistreatment of the Palestinian refugees. From the time the PLO retreated in 1982, Palestinians had been massacred by Christian militias with Israeli support and by the Shiite Muslim Amal militia with Syrian connivance. The Lebanese government excluded them from most employment and denied them state-funded medical care. Lebanon’s establishment, Christian and Muslim, blamed the Palestinians, rather than themselves, for a war that lasted from 1975 to 1991. Salibi was angry that the Lebanese contrived more ways to punish the Palestinians, twenty years after they lost all power in Lebanon. ‘They are now making laws that any Palestinian refugee who owns a house or land in Lebanon cannot pass it on when he dies,’ Salibi said. ‘The bloody Lebanese parliament passed it almost unanimously.’
What should Lebanon do?
‘I think that, in Lebanon, the Palestinians ought to be acknowledged as Lebanese citizens with all social and political rights. Once they become Lebanese, they will do what all Lebanese do and emigrate.’ Lebanon had always refused to make the refugees, who had lived there since 1948, citizens. The only state that had granted citizenship to the refugees was Jordan. With almost 400,000 refugees registered with the United Nations, the Palestinians made up 10 per cent of Lebanon’s population. In Lebanon, Christians feared turning so many Muslims into citizens, and the Shiites resisted being outnumbered by the Sunnis. There were no Palestinian Shiites and not many Palestinian Christians in Lebanon.
‘The idea of Zionism is tribal,’ Salibi said. ‘The idea that something binds you together around the world, that it is more important than any other allegiance and you have to be all together in one place, this is tribal.’
Tribal or not, Israel was a fact. If most Arabs did not accept Israel’s moral right to displace most Palestinian Arabs and put others under military occupation, they recognized its strength. Salibi was one of the few people I knew in the Arab world who did not disparage the Palestinian leadership.
‘What surprises me,’ he said, ‘is the maturity of the Palestinian leadership. There is no more of that “throw the Jews into the sea” nonsense. They are asking to live only on what they have.’ They had the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barely 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine, and they were losing much of that to Israeli settlers. ‘Palestine since my infancy has been socially divided between effendis and peasants. The effendis always despised the peasants and still do. If they hate Arafat, it’s because he’s not from their class. I tell them Palestine is no longer yours. It belongs to those who fought or who tilled the soil. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.’
The 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had allowed the Palestinian leaders to return home and govern under the Israelis. Since then, Israel had doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. Salibi was one of the few who did not see the Oslo accords as a disaster.
‘What’s wrong with the Oslo agreement?’ he asked. ‘For the first time, it gave the Palestinians something.’ Having been to the West Bank and Gaza many times since the accord, I disagreed. Oslo had given the Israelis something: a Palestinian administration that policed the occupied territories while the settlers took more Palestinian land. Salibi believed Oslo was less the problem than Israeli refusal to implement all its provisions on schedule. ‘The Israelis are behaving like savages. They are going to be the losers in the end. They are going to have to accept a settlement, even if it means a Palestinian state on a few metres. It will puncture the Zionist balloon. Zionism is a package deal. It’s Eretz Israel, the Bible land, heritage. They want to get all the Jews from all the world and cram them there. The whole thing is a package deal conceived in a seminar room. The least puncture and the speed with which it will deflate will amaze you.’
He thought the Israelis were ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ over making peace with the Palestinians. The wiser course was to make peace. ‘The more generous they are, the better it is for them,’ Salibi concluded, even if it meant punching a hole in – or setting a limit to – Zionism’s dream.
Did he imagine that the Arabs would accept Israel? Not as a tactic, but as a long-term proposition?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The minute there is a settlement, you cannot imagine what will happen. The Arabs are very forgiving. Think of Lebanon. Twenty years of fighting and the minute the fighting stopped, East Beirut and Jounieh filled with Muslims. The Christians flocked to West Beirut. There were Eid al-Fitr tents in Jounieh.’ East Beirut and the seaside resort of Jounieh were Christian ghettoes, and Eid al-Fitr was the Muslim feast to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. ‘Arab society is very forgiving. Grudges are not borne for long – except by one family against another. The hatred does not last.’ Salibi was from Bhamdoun, a Christian village in the Shouf hills of Mount Lebanon. In 1983, when Israel withdrew its army from the Shouf, the Druze massacred Christians and sent most of them north in an act that Yugoslavia’s wars would later give the term ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘I don’t bear a grudge against the Druze,’ Salibi said. ‘People are going back.’ He thought that Europeans took longer to forget. ‘I was in England in the 1950s. The Dutch students refused to listen to German music.’ During the bloodiest days of Lebanon’s war, Christians swooned to the voice of a Muslim diva, Oum Kalsoum, and Muslims never lost their love of the Christian singer Feyrouz. But the end of the war did not end the Lebanese animosity to the Palestinians. What was Israel to make of that?
Salibi went on, ‘Jordan made peace with Israel. Not one Israeli visitor was hurt. Palestinian refugees over the age of fifty who had shops refused to sell to them, but everywhere else they were accepted. They object to their stealing – not to their being Israelis.’ The only people who objected in principle to Israel, he believed, were the Islamists. But in Jordan, unlike in Egypt, they did nothing to harm Israelis.
‘Listen,’ he urged me. ‘The Jordanian army is on cordial terms with the Israeli Defence Forces. The Palestinian Authority was the same. If there is an agreement, then the whole hatred of the West in the Arab world will vanish. Abracadabra!’
Abracadabra?
‘It’s originally an Aramaic word that means, “vanish like a word”. The wind will be out of the sails of the Islamic movement in the Arab world.’
I reminded him that, in Lebanon many years before, he had told me Syria would never make peace with Israel. Its existence and strength depended upon keeping Israel isolated from the rest of the region. He had told me to think of the map. With Israel excluded from the region, all east – west Arab trade had to pass through Syria. There was no other land route between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. If Israel were accepted, trucks could collect goods at Haifa port and drive them to Iraq and Saudi Arabia through Israel and Jordan. Pipelines and railways would leave Syria out. Acceptance of Israel would deny Syria its leverage and render it insignificant. Having an Israeli enemy also justified Syria’s military dictatorship and police repression, he had said then. Now he believed peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would change that. ‘Syria will lose her blackmail position. It will sign a deal only after the Palestine question closes and only then.’
Problems lingered, I said. I had imagined that, once Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah would end its war against Israeli occupation. Yet Hizballah fought on – for a small area called the Shaba Farms that Israel did not leave. Hizballah said it was Lebanese territory and Syria agreed. Years before, however, Damascus claimed Shaba was part of Syria.
‘Shaba