There Will Be No Innocents Amongst Us

It is against time that we write these words

Zuhour Mahmoud

“The Nakba of 1948 struck the Palestinians into a state of shock from which they did not recover until the sixties, with the emergence of intellectuals, thinkers, artists, fighters and politicians.
Repeating this means we haven’t learned anything.
If there is ever a question, when is the right time? The answer is always: now”
@eslamsq1

To publish such an issue in the midst of an ongoing extermination campaign against the very subjects of the issue, both Palestinian and Lebanese in their geographic positionalities, is not an easy feat. Over a year into a war that lasted longer than the most pessimistic predictions and devoured more Palestinian lives than any other moment in history, we realized that the “right time” to inject ourselves in the unfoldings of knowledge production as a radical queer platform run by Lebanese and Palestinians, is an absurd consideration. The time is always now. Yet, with every team meeting, every conversation, and every internal monologue that ensued, the question of the very political nature of this labor and its relationship to the global web of material and legal support provided directly and indirectly for the epistemic, legal, and military forces annihilating us, would always resurface. Conversations on what to do and what to say without engaging in mere virtue signaling and slogan regurgitation were always silently muddied by pure rage, despair, and guilt. “No, the war is somewhere else.” This journal, after all, is a place of employment, and its team is well aware of what this means; a place of selling labor in an unregulated, non-unionized global industry of conditional knowledge production is not the place that would lead to the material realizations of a revolutionary momentum that would play a role in our war towards liberation.

And then, there come the brief moments of clarity; of realizations that we do not simply get to salvage ourselves from the economic paths we’ve taken, and the compromises we’ve made by deciding to take a back seat because the seats we have chosen thus far are tainted with the violence of pacification and depoliticization and financial blackmail by those who fund us. That’s when the phrase above assumes its rightful position: a naive excuse to not face our own complicities in the war on the ground, in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in the entire world. Jerking ourselves back into our position as a platform, into our spheres of influence and knowledge, is not an attempt to do something instead of nothing. It’s quite the opposite, it’s exactly what needs to be done. Seizing moments that confirm that feminism, queerness, even decolonial politics, have always been mere tools in our perpetual war, and not the end goals. Tools that sometimes take the forms of love letters, but must most of the time, be employed as weapons that inflict the most brutal violence, both physical and epistemic, against the systems that cause the most pain and misery, the most humiliation and loss, the most anxiety and fear.

Never have we been ready for the wars of today; always shocked into and through them. But as the hundred year-old history of the Palestinian people’s fight for liberation, we work for the wars of tomorrow. So the “right time” for this issue might have passed years, if not decades ago. And based on historical knowledge, if the “right time” was ever to come, it would be trampled and sabotaged by the powers in charge of our time, intentionally and systematically, either through defunding, legal pressures, or massacres. This is even more apparent especially when starting from the questions that we have subliminally posed in this dossier: what is the state, which is at once engaged in a partial yet perpetual war with our enemy and at the same time is besieging our people in highly-securitized enclosures, making sure that the siege is so tight and so consuming that liberation and return from its borders into Palestine remain unfathomable?

It is against time that these words must be written.

This group of writers delved into a history mired with betrayal, dehumanization, and amnesia. Whether trying to understand the meaning and significance of the absence of any solidarity efforts from civil society organizations, progressive politicians, the queer and feminist movement, as well as students, artists, and workers, or peeking into the buried history of the Palestinian defiance in the face of Lebanon’s own perpetual war against them, or the unified destiny of both Southes, and the forgotten histories of unionized rage and resistance and wondering about the void of the left, and a shared history of death and erasure against all refugees in Lebanon, this issue’s central theme is less about the Lebanese entity and more about the inescapable war against it.

Having conversations with pained and tired writers, always questioning the ethics of every message and every follow-up email because of the absurdity of expecting Palestinian and Lebanese writers to engage with a topic so complicated and sensitive at a time when we’re all collectively dragging ourselves through the all-consuming daze of genocide, to the very loss of meaning and sense, was a very laborious task instead. Yet somehow, this special issue came to life, offering scattered, foggy, and unorganized traces of a war somewhere else, somewhere closer. Here. A war as long and as expansive as our war for liberation itself which Palestinians and Lebanese have been fighting, side by side, for decades, losing battles, losing cadres and losing the very language to articulate the war, only to recover from the shock and get busy preparing for the war of tomorrow.

The articles included in this issue do not offer any answers or lessons to understand why we’re witnessing the complete annihilation of Gaza. They do, however, raise many questions, and within those questions, if you listen closely enough, you could hear the war and know exactly what to do. It would be redundant to draw comparisons between the Beirut of yesterday and the Beirut of today, but redundancy is crucial at times like these, of complete nihilism and apathy that have overtaken a population which once marched 500,000 strong in the streets of Beirut following the assassination of three Palestinian fighters. Instead, we must look into the thin web that spins inwards towards the point of rupture.

We are not innocent

Maya Zebdawi

It was only a matter of time before the war, expansive in breadth and scope, brought about a new balance of power and a framework for “reconstruction” – backed by German-French/Turkish-Iranian/Qatari-Saudi/Russian-American funding. It is as if a new Taif Agreement is looming over us, and with it, what is framed as an “opportunity” for Lebanon to redefine its role in the region.

We will not venture down an analytical path, for neither does today’s war exonerate the Lebanese state from its function in maintaining a regional status quo, nor does it predict the fall of Zionism. With the fervor of political Islam on the one hand and the fading of communist resistance on the other, Lebanon is to blame for discouraging discursively, and delaying materially, the escalation of resistance.

The conditions for bringing an end to the Zionist colonial project will not be met from within the “Israeli” state itself; it is not merely a matter of waiting for internal contradictions to make it implode. The forces capable of dismantling this colonial abomination are to be found in the surrounding Arab states and within global diasporas.

Thus, the war on Lebanon does not absolve it from the history that today materializes in a long list of genocide victims. This is not a tale of oppression endured by two or more peoples. It is irrefutable proof that the battle rages on, while political readings falter. The responsibility is historic, and yet, despite the abundance of academic voices, no solid, unified analysis of this war of extermination has been woven, even as it now bears down on us – the Palestinians, the workers, the farmers, the fishermen – and them – the so-called “model citizens.”

To refuse our position of support from the sidelines, we must become a front of fierce escalation. To those who carry weapons in today’s burning world, to our academics who wield influence from within European and North American institutions, to those who are still clinging to the remains of an Arab civil society: let your voice echo the raw fury of Gaza’s streets; let your grip be driven by the unyielding force of Jenin’s working hands and of Jabalia’s anonymous strength.

Let there be no half-measures – for the outcome, and its consequences, are one and the same.

We must exact our revenge

I write because writing is a lifeline, an essential sustenance, and I write out of a deep, consuming fear that if I don’t, another’s pen will tell the story of Palestine and Lebanon in my stead. The Palestinian-Lebanese woman that I am today was shaped by those who stood fiercely against Lebanese fascism, with all its colorful, tangled sects. This “I” of mine is but a part of a larger, resonant plural that infuses it with meaning and that has been reduced to oblivion. I write to assert that we are not innocent. I bear witness to those who told me bedtime stories woven with duty and trained me in the art of dark humor – those were the very people who sought to split off Lebanon from its state, the refugee from their legal identity, the camp from a national significance. They called this split liberation – and they were not wrong.

We Palestinians are not innocent. That fighter, resolute and unwavering on the Sodeco frontline, was my father. That man who was martyred while training civil defense units on the eve of the Zionist siege of Beirut was my uncle. Those hands blistered by the handling of onion bags and weapons belonged to my grandmother. That young girl whose life was tragically ended by the bullets of the Lebanese army before the camp massacres was my neighbor’s daughter. That body that vanished at the edge of the so-called East Beirut is a name etched deeply into the collective memory of my comrades. That severed leg, that shattered hip are the daily reality of a friend of mine in the Beqaa (and that of many in my Beiruti neighborhood), realities that continue to be dismissed by the leftist factions of a civil society too often preoccupied with its own heroism and fake humility. And that torn eye is a haunting chapter in my aunt’s life in the South, who in her youthful fervor once trained with the PFLP.

These are the stories of Lebanon’s silenced identity, confined to the shadows amid the chaos of today’s media and intellectual landscape, condemned to obscurity by the very courts that profess the ideals of international law. And yet, we, the Palestinians of Lebanon, bear the weight of our truth: we are not innocent, and I hope we never will be.

I am daughter to the atrocities and massacres, and a progeny to the epic tales that predate them. I am a witness of the gunfire that resonated in Tal al-Zaatar, and of the haunting whispers of goat herders smuggled by Lebanese communist vehicles through the narrow alleys of Borj al-Barajneh in defiance of the suffocating grip of the camps’ siege. A devoted student of the Faculty of Science at the Lebanese University, I fought battles in order to unearth the truths of the clashes at the Arab University. I translated the publications of the Palestinian Research Center, year after year, three decades after it was silenced; I did so to bear witness, once again, against collective erasure – like the memory of a Lebanese house hidden in the winding alleys of Sassine, where one or two resistance fighters sought refuge from a sectarian narrative and the hegemony of political Maronism. In every story, I find a thread of our shared struggle, weaving together the past and the present in a fabric of resilience and defiance.

I take pride in the popular war fought by Palestinian communist rifles, defeated yet unyielding, a narrative long-forgotten despite the promises of liberation. I/we, the bearers of the Palestinian liberation narrative, are not innocent. It is in this repetition that I believe that Gaza will not become a second Beirut. The story of our struggle will neither be lost to the moral dualities of innocence and guilt, nor will it be diminished by institutional solutions offered by regional or comprador authorities. We, the descendants of the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon, stand resolute, bridging every chapter of extermination – from Safad and Hula (1948) to Jabalia (1987), passing through Beirut (1982) – undeterred by the cacophony of reductive humanitarian narratives and the clamor of academic awakenings, undaunted by the maze that is the recognition of a Palestinian state. We are the descendants of a revolution that fearlessly challenged the very foundations of the Arab nation-state. We are the very pulse of the security state’s relentless hunt, and the fierce embodiment of its rationale for existence.

The “Second Bureau” was the crowning pride of Lebanon’s early institutions, the first institutional pillar of the state following independence. They decided that an intelligence security network across towns and villages would protect the “fragile young nation” from the “threats” and “enemies” of the state: the communists, the Palestinians, and those who dared to challenge Zionism’s colonial expansion and the movements, systems, languages, and geographies that fortified it. For seventy-five years, Palestinians have lived within this nascent Lebanese state as a political community in its own right – whether openly or in the shadows, in alignment or in opposition to the shifting currents of the Lebanese socio-political spheres. With time, the dual symbolisms of our camps became more and more polarized. Today, they are at once hubs of organized resistance and alienation, ideological strongholds for liberation and enclaves of exclusion. In every sense, they became the physical embodiment of a body locked in an unending struggle against the state, forever estranged from its intended purpose.

In the geographies of isolation drawn by the laws of this state, our bodies bear witness to a relentless project of erasure, one that has persisted since the era of the Second Bureau. Our role as the Palestinians of Lebanon has shifted from active resistance to a mere demographic unit, a statistical entry in a relentless campaign of ideological and biological eradication. Even as the drums of war intensify and the martyred rise in numbers from the West Bank to Gaza, the quiet machinery of elimination is unstoppable.

Lebanon itself stands as both an extension of the Iron Dome and the last bastion of the spirit of resistance – a non-paradoxical contradiction, reproduced in no less than 22 states from the Gulf to the Atlantic. To truly confront this genocide requires a political reading that digs deep into its evolution and explores every layer of its form – a reading that does not exceptionalize the present, but that is motivated by thinking towards liberation. We revisit our Lebanon in light of this annihilation – a Lebanon that is, at once, a tool of containment and a battleground.

The Lebanese entity was designed to quell the resistance against the Zionist project and the brutality of its fascist ideology. In response, Palestinians resist the tools of occupation wherever they may be, and define themselves in antagonism to militarization and oppression. We are this living counter-force, from our youngest to our eldest – the living memories of the struggle. There is not a single innocent body amongst us.

In this issue, our writers offer different readings of this Palestinian history of Lebanon. Some contributors focus on distinct elements within the Lebanese landscape, uncovering layers of Palestinian literature to dismantle and understand its intricate components. Others chart cities like Tripoli, showing how its streets and skyline were imprinted by the national liberation struggle. Some journey through the literary legacy of revolution and resistance, crafted by organized Palestinian armed groups within the Lebanese milieu, while others explore the economic forces that sought to subdue the Palestinian movement, ensnaring it within the constraints of the Lebanese state apparatus. Another group of essays revives the memory of an ideological movement that once wove Palestinian and Lebanese identities into a single fabric, at a time when sectarianism still struggled to assert itself as the divisive doctrine through which Lebanon could be understood. Meanwhile, other pieces turn to the present Palestinian conditions from a gender perspective in order to probe the question of Lebanese national identity.

We will write, then, even as the writing of history itself becomes a mechanism of erasure, because we are still unable to leave our positionalities behind. It seems that as writers, researchers, university students, and professors, we will remain where we are. If these are the places we have been assigned, let us make use of our language and craft so that we may buy time for those who follow in our footsteps. Perhaps they will forgive our shortcomings if we succeed in equipping them with the tools to argue, critique, and strategize to confront the ever-evolving forms of this fascist enemy and its regime. We will write, and those who survive the rubble and the camps might read themselves in our words. We will write about a genocide against a group that has survived, for there is no innocence in survival – only resistance and revenge for the lives stolen from us.