Interview with Gilbert Achcar posted by Richard Seymour

IN GAZA AND BEIRUT, ASYMMETRICAL BARBARISMS

An interview with Gilbert Achcar

By Geraldina Colotti 28 July 2006, Il Manifesto

[An English translation of this interview, with many errors and inaccuracies, has been posted some days ago on the Internet. Here is the translation revised by Gilbert Achcar, and the only one he takes responsibility for.]

Gilbert Achcar, Lebanese political analyst, is a collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique and author of The Clash of Barbarisms, a razor-sharp pamphlet focusing its analysis on the political situation within his own country and the advance of Islamic fundamentalism.

We met with him in Rome, at the end of a series of meetings concerning his book.

Prof. Achcar, according to the North-American media, it has been Hezbollah’s violence—at the center of an Islamic plot of destabilization of the region—that has brought about the Israeli response. Do you agree?

“The military operation by Hezbollah, as Nasrallah himself has declared, had been staged for some time and discussed with the allies, but also the Israeli military offensive—as the press in Hebrew has revealed—has been planned long before. It aimed at destroying Lebanon’s infrastructures, that is to say the population’s means of subsistence. It is meant to apply by force UN Resolution 1559 that was pushed through at the UN Security Council in 2004: Syrian troops’ withdrawal from Lebanon, disarmament of the armed groups in the country, i.e., Hezbollah and the Palestinians in the refugee camps.

When Israel asserts it demands the integral enforcement of Resolution 1559, it shows an incredible impudence: in fact, Israel is still expected after nearly forty years to apply Resolution 242 which demands its withdrawal within the borders existing before the June 1967 War.

US and Israel are driven by the obsession about the main enemy. Formerly it was the Soviet Union, today—in the Middle East—it’s Iran and the alliance supporting it on strong regional foundations: from the Shiites in Iraq to the Syrian regime (a secondary enemy, as well as a minor evil, for Israel which otherwise would have chaos at its borders), to Hezbollah (tied to the Iranian ideology) and to Hamas (a Sunni organization), an alliance which allows Iran to array against the US and Israel a whole Islamic front and not only a Shiite alliance.

In order to turn the public opinion against Hezbollah and Hamas, the regimes which are most submissive to the Americans, such as the Saudi, the Jordanian and the Egyptian ones, are trying to play the sectarian card. Exploiting the Sunni-Shiite antagonism, they argue that Iran wants to involve the Arabs into a war that doesn’t concern them.

Nevertheless, today Hamas and Hezbollah are the heroes to a public opinion disgusted by the ineffectiveness of the Arab countries. Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, is certainly more popular than Bin Laden, who won credit amongst those who nurtured a more radical animosity against the West but who has alienated most of the public opinion on account of his actions, which are terrorist in the true meaning of the term.”

By the word terrorism, which has nearly become a metaphysical category, one is inclined to define almost all the forms of armed opposition: from resistance to the occupying force, to Bin Laden, even to some forms of radical opposition in the West. Instead, you make use of the concept of asymmetrical barbarisms. What does it mean?

“What I mean is that the terrorism of the powerful and that of the victims are both barbarisms, yet asymmetrical ones. They are different in their causes, responsibilities and consequences and therefore they can’t be put on the same level.

Hamas’ suicide attacks—that now have been suspended—are trifling if compared to the violence of the Israeli oppression: in the last conflict, the number of Palestinian or Lebanese dead is 10 times higher than the Israeli one. And, what’s more, in Lebanon it’s about only verified deaths while nobody knows how many further ones might be discovered under the rubbles of the destroyed buildings. More than 90% of the victims provoked by Israel are neither fighters nor militants, but civilians. The capture of an Israeli soldier by the Palestinians has led to the assault on Gaza, whilst Israel detains over 10 thousand Palestinian prisoners, most of whom are civilians who were kidnapped in the territory Israel has been unlawfully occupying since 1967, in violation of international laws. We must not be fooled by the hypocrisy of the dominant discourse in the West.”

By which yardstick are Hamas’s actions against civilians to be judged then?

“In some parts of the world one can’t stand neutral, the priority is to fight occupation and war. And there is a difference of method between organizations such as that Bin Laden’s and others like Hamas and Hezbollah: while the former believes that an armed network, substituting itself to the mass struggles, can force the imperialism to withdraw by resorting to terrorism, the latter are mass organizations which resort to a certain type of armed actions only secondarily. They have structures similar to that of mass parties and offer an alternative social organization to the governmental one.

Their religious and fundamentalist vision of the world, yet, is substantially similar. Therefore, one can’t jump from that to painting in red reactionary models and considering them as allied of the forces striving for the alternative.

From Iraq to Palestine it’s the same tragedy: the total absence of reliable progressive forces and the hegemony over legitimate popular struggles of fundamentalist currents which, for instance in Iraq, are carrying out a legitimate fight against the occupying force, it’s true, but also a far from legitimate war against the Shiites and what they call the Iranian occupation, a religious sectarian and reactionary concept.

Alternatively, hundreds of thousands of people, who have marched on the streets many times against the occupation of Iraq, have shown that an opposition mass movement can be set up even more effectively than the military one which, by definition, arouses passivity in the population.”

According to the historian Samir Kassir, assassinated in 2005, “the Arab unhappiness” lies in the failed achievement of modernity. What do you think about the “Lebanese Spring”, the movement that has brought on Beirut’s major squares hundreds of thousands of people in the name of the cultural and political pluralism?

“It has been a contradictory phenomenon whereby the rebellion against the unbearable behavior of the Syrian army converged with the anti-Syrian attitude of political and sectarian factions that ended up with entering the imperialist framework.

In order to oppose Syria—forgetting that Lebanon also belongs to the East—a splinter group of the left has worked together with ultra-reactionary characters, it has lost its reference points and stifled the hopes that were aroused at first.

In Lebanon, as in the rest of the region, leftist and secular ideas have been overwhelmed by the double bankruptcy of nationalism on the one hand and of the Soviet Union on the other, and by the collapse of the credit of Communist and Marxist ideals.

Today, contrary to what was held by analysts such as Gilles Kepel, the presence of Islamic fundamentalism is the dominant expression of the social and political protest in nearly the entire Muslim world. It’s so strong that the space for the development of another kind of alternative is truly narrow.

It’s a part of world where there’s no organized workers’ movement, as it has been destroyed by rightist tyrannical governments or oppressed by nationalist dictatorships that have prevented its independent development. Furthermore, in the fight against progressive nationalism and the Soviet Union, imperialism has used Islamic fundamentalism.

In order for things to change, it’s necessary that these currents—as happened to Arab nationalism in the late 60s and at the beginning of the 70s—show their own incapability to face the problems on the ground. But another condition is that a new left project, one that can be trusted by the populations, may emerge.”

Islamic religious extremism, which presents itself in its several varieties as a radical alternative to the oppressed Arab masses, is defined by some as Islamo-Fascism. Do you agree with such a definition?

“My book, The Clash of Barbarisms, has a chapter dealing with this issue, which is titled: Neither fascist nor progressive.

Some sections of religious fundamentalism bear a few characteristics common to the Fascism that appeared in Europe between the two world wars: the social base, partly made up of lower middle classes, and above all the reactionary character in a real sense, that is to say the will—as Marx put it—to turn back the wheel of history. But, apart from this, there are many differences.

In the first half of the 20th century, Fascism was an instrument used by big capital in an anti-worker function whereas, in most of the countries where Islamic fundamentalism is growing, there’s unfortunately no fighting workers’ movement.

Islamic fundamentalism is the distorted expression of the resentment of the populations and masses against foreign imperialist oppression, against local political despotism and also against their economic situation.

If, nonetheless, you regard Hamas and Hezbollah as fascist organizations, you get to the kind of reaction implemented by Israel or the USA—you should then explain, however, why they didn’t use the same standard with Pinochet in Chile or why they don’t use it towards Saudi Arabia, a regime more reactionary than the one they would like to attack in Iran— whereas it concerns a different phenomenon: the resentment of a population living under unbearable oppression.

On the contrary, rather than bombing the Palestinian or Lebanese population and taking them as hostages, as the US and Israel are doing, what is needed is to uproot the causes of that resentment.”

Do you think that sending UN forces may settle the Lebanese crisis?

“Peace must be negotiated together with all the actors of the conflict, including Hezbollah that demands of Israel to release political prisoners and to return the last portion of occupied Lebanese territory. To the Lebanese Shiite community, today Hezbollah is tantamount to what the PLO used to be to the Palestinians.

Many observers have stressed that, unlike 1967 when Israel managed to defeat three Arab armies in 6 days, things are going on quite differently now.

The resistance in Lebanon is supported by the Shiite population, that Israel, in order to be victorious, would have to exterminate, and this is the reason why the majority forces within the broad coalition that rules Lebanon have always ruled out the use of force. The UN intervention would be helpful only if it guaranteed everyone’s interests, not if it would be a fig leaf to NATO’s.”