Tag Archives: Lebanon

Blog, Features, Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds

Aaron F. Eldridge: The Palestinian Cause Contra Sectarian Thinking

Image 1: “The Palestinian Cause” from the subtitle of Mahdi Amil’s 1980 book, An Entryway into Overturning Sectarian Thinking. Photo by Aaron F. Eldridge

“History is what hurts,” stated Frederic Jameson; “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (1982, 102). And the situation today in Lebanon is a painful one, indeed. For many, the settler-colonial Zionist efforts to bring about the total obliteration of Palestine and the invasion and bombing of Lebanon can scarcely be spoken of without already appropriating the situation through what the communist thinker Mahdi Amil (1936-1987) critiqued as al-fikr al-ṭā’ifī —“sectarian thinking.” This dominant mode of thinking lays out an (idealist) eternalization of the essence of “sects” and their statist “balance”; that is, their becoming “nature.” In this thinking, what becomes seemingly self-evident is that nothing can change—and from this, the moral injunction emerges: nothing should change. At the same time, Amil averred that it is precisely al-qadiyya al-filastiniyya—“the Palestinian cause” which overturns this thinking.

Committing to Palestine was, for Amil, a question of orienting life in struggle. The bearing of this struggle in Lebanon was occasioned by the Palestinian cause insofar as the latter transgressed, as it still does today, the “natural” order of the Lebanese polity, which subsists in what Amil termed the “colonial relation”—the constellation of forces in the Mashriq that he names as imperialism, reactionism, and Zionism. This conjuncture is evident today where one sees the strong desire to relegate and contain “the Palestinian cause” to an extraneous element, naturally outside of Lebanon’s national situation. The Palestinian cause subsequently appears “within” Lebanon only as the religious fetish of a specific “sect.” This relegation—common today, for example, in the discourse of the anti-communist Kataeb Party and in American-led efforts to enforce UN Resolution 1701—is also practiced in the specific actions of the war by the IDF: the bombing of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon as well as its invasion in the south are seen as merely military actions directed toward “Shi’i” areas—“the South,” the Beqaa, or Dahieh—that are described as Hezbollah “strongholds.” The result is that the war, rather than pivot on the cause of Palestinian liberation, becomes understood as a “sectarian” battle, a metonym of the intractable conflict between East and West, civilization and barbarism, Islam and Christianity, or religion and modernity, for which Zionism is a late vehicle.

Amil was the Lebanese Communist Party’s most prolific writer during the years of Lebanon’s wars (1975-1990), which were in a large part determined by the contours of Palestinian struggle after the defeat of 1967 and the expulsion of 1970. What that “determination” means was (as it remains) a crucial problematic into which Amil consistently intervened. Indeed, Hicham Safieddine (2020: 10) notes that it was one of Amil’s earliest teachers, Shafiq al-Hout—one of the founders of the PLFP and later a prominent member of the PLO—who introduced him to Marx’s writings.

This enjambment of anti-colonial struggle and the class struggle would persist as a problematic in Amil’s theoretical practice. While studying in France and teaching in revolutionary Algeria he developed the concept of the “colonial mode of production” for this overdetermined structure, one characterized by a relation of “dependency” for capitalist domination “in” the colony on imperial capital. The ideological articulation of this structure he termed the “colonial relation,” and it is there, on the question of the matter of that relation, that “sectarianism” and “the Palestinian Cause” collide.

Amil’s return to Lebanon from Algeria was compelled by the defeat of 1967. During the ensuing years the LCP was rearticulating its relationship to anti-colonial struggle and the Soviet Union (a major issue being the latter’s acceptance of the 1948 partition of Palestine). And when in 1975 the fighting began in Lebanon—instigated, we must recall, by the conflict between fishermen in Saida and state organized capitalist expropriation (Traboulsi 2008, 323)—Amil looked to articulate the relationship between “sectarian thinking,” Arab state reactionaries, and Zionism as a question of the class struggle, anticipating the constellation of forces that would eventuate in the Syrian (nominally, the Arab Deterrent Force’s) occupation of Lebanon from 1976 and the Israeli invasion of 1982.

Between these two pivotal military interventions Amil composed and published his 1980 Madkhal ilā naqḍ al-fikr al-ṭā’ifī: al-qaḍiyya al-filastīniyya fī aydiyūlūjiyāt al-burjuwaziyya al-lubnāniyya (An Entryway into Overturning Sectarian Thinking: The Palestinian Cause in the Ideology of the Lebanese Bourgeoisie) in which “the Palestinian cause” occasions the falling away of the spontaneous ideology of the ruling class (sectarianism). It does this not through a ‘critique’ of how one ‘views’ the Palestinian cause, but by allowing sectarian thinking’s own mistaking of the Palestinian cause as a ‘sectarian’ problem to prevail. It is for that reason that the Madkhal is largely made up of a symptomatic reading of the texts of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, from the writings of Michel Chiha (1891–1954), the Mandate-era banker and phalangist politician, to Amil’s contemporary Pierre Gemayel (1905-1984) and other writings of the latter’s Kataeb Party.

The formation of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a coalition of reformists and revolutionaries that constituted the chief antagonist of the reactionary Lebanese Front (LF), was largely premised on the constitutional reform of the country’s politics. It was oriented, according to Karim Mroué, a Political Bureau Member of the LCP, toward “eliminating the domination of a kind of religious autocracy” (quoted in Ismael and Ismael 1998, 102n8). However, the Madkhal shows such bourgeois “sectarian thinking” to be undone in its own grasping of “the Palestinian cause.” Hence, while Amil was at pains to show that militant support for the PLO and the Rejectionist Front, with whom the LNM was allied, was the miḥwar, the“axis,” of the national and anticolonial class struggle in Lebanon and not an external element, the Madkhal was to effect a change in thinking—to show that the Palestinian cause as it is articulated in the ideology of the dominant class leads to the latter’s ideological armor, sectarian thinking, to fall away, as Marx says, “like rotten touchwood [wie mürber Zunder].” (1976 [1867], 932). Indeed, while naqḍ in modern Arabic gives the strong sense of a juridical interdiction, earlier meaning of the word directly invoked the unravelling of a cord. This work of unravelling, of the falling away of sectarian thinking, Amil showed, is affected in the Palestine cause. Why this is the case can only be briefly adumbrated here, by setting out the axioms that programmatically orient Amil’s theoretical work in answering the inaugural query of the Madkhal: “How do the Lebanese bourgeoisie, from the vantage of their class ideology, view the Palestinian cause?” (Amel 1980: 11). [1]

The Madkhal takes as its first axiom the orientation of class struggle, which bifurcates (rather than pluralizes) into the position of “dominant class” and the “revolutionary class.” The “ideological position of the labouring class” is what enables “seeing” the ideological practice of the Lebanese bourgeoisie as the political necessity of domination—it follows that the question of which“sect” is dominant (“the Maronites,” “the Sunni,” etc.) not only cannot see the class struggle but participates in the very sectarian thinking that obfuscates it. Moreover, the result of the breakdown of this domination in maintaining the colonial relation was the then-ongoing military action: “the bourgeoisie did not find another way to treat this political crisis of theirs but to ignite civil war; it is the logic of the dying bourgeoisie, ever urging them to descend into the abyss of their intractable crisis” (Amil 1980: 23). It is incumbent upon us to note how successful the ‘civil war’ and threat of its return has been in maintaining this domination in Lebanon over the past half-century.

The second axiom of the Madkhal is that this class-ideological position is the adequation of thinking to a real force of negation. Against the theoretical humanism of a mirrored subject/object—wherein “the Palestinian cause” is an object that can be composited properly by collating these different ‘perspectives’ (whether “one-“ or “two-state” solutions, for example)—the “soil” of this “actual field” is the class struggle that is “in the mode of overturning [naq

].” Breaking with this thinking, then, “consists specifically in bringing to presence this, the political that the ideological absents.” In other words, “seeing” the “Lebanese bourgeois ideological-conceptual structure…in its relation with this political necessity,” bears the activity of overturning it.

It is from these axioms that Amil sets up the relationship between the activity of “overturning” the class ideology of the Lebanese bourgeoisie and “the Palestinian cause”:

Viewing the Palestinian cause is not possible—no matter the position from which we view it—apart from the national liberation movement of the Arab peoples. The Palestinian national movement is an inseparable part of this movement; the internal mechanism that governs the common Arab national movement is itself what governs the Palestinian national movement, the mechanism being the liberation from imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reactionism. (Amil 1980, 12)

In this sense the Palestinian cause condenses the “colonial relation,” the specific conjuncture of forces (imperialism, the Arab capitalist class, and Zionism) that ideologically articulates the colonial mode of production in Lebanon. Hence Amil’s thinking is already disabused of the (idealist) tendency to systematize and absolutize the distinction between “post-colonial” and “Marxist” thought in the so-called Global South. The overdetermined structure of the “colonial mode of production” exists in the collision of these forces.

But this is precisely why it is the question of the overdetermined colonial structure itself that the Palestinian cause occasions for thinking:

Therefore, determining the Lebanese bourgeoisie’s class position on this axial cause (the Palestinian cause) in the struggle of the Arab peoples, required by necessity determining its class position on the Arab liberation movement. For in the light of this position the other position is determined, especially since the Palestinian resistance movement did not manifest, in an actual way, in the Lebanese arena (that is, in the field of the specific class conflict in the Lebanese social structure), and would not become a foundational element therein, until after the defeat of June 1967. (Amil 1980: 12)

The existence of the Palestinian cause as anterior to the anti-colonial class struggle in Lebanon does not mean that it is a genetic outgrowth of the situation, even if it is “determined” by it. Here, Amil is notinterested in instructing a historicism. Rather, he shows how the Palestinian cause’s status as, at once, contingent and axial in Lebanon’s national situation proves to be a decisive obstacle for ‘sectarian’ thinking:

It is an error, then, on the methodological level, not to show the necessary correlative relationship in the Lebanese bourgeois ideology between the position on the Arab liberation movement and the position on the Palestinian cause; as, in truth, this position is a natural, logical consequence of that position that finds, for its part, its explanation in the structure of the existing colonial relations of production in the Lebanese social structure, and in the class relation of dependence that ties the dominant bourgeoisie within it to imperialism. But if we establish a partition between the two positions, not attributing the second to the first, and we do not bring to light that the practice of the outright hostility of the Lebanese bourgeoisie toward the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian cause is a result of the hostile relationship and class warfare that stamps its relationship to the Arab liberation movement, we would at that time fall into the trap of its class ideology, instead of being capable of overturning it. (Amil 1980: 13)

The position of these liberation movements thus turns on the Palestinian cause which articulates with them to become the symptomatic point specific to the national situation of Lebanon. It becomes the axis of a set of contradictions and of political struggle; it carries the force of the real movement of negation. But it is for precisely this reason that it cannot be thought outside the class struggle internal to Lebanon’s national situation. “We will not,” Amil writes succinctly, “overturn ‘sectarian thinking’ through sectarian thinking” (Amil 1980: 17).

In other words, the Palestinian cause, its pain and therefore its history, is one site that makes the overdetermination of the capitalist mode of production in the present, that is, modern colonisation, thinkable as what can be overturned. “The class struggle is the motive power of history; history is not moved in accordance with the dominant class’s system of class control but in the struggle against it” (Amil 1980: 22). Witnessing the current attempts to obliterate Palestine and its present existence-as-cause as well as its covering-over by the ideological practice of sectarian thinking in Lebanon today, the need to articulate the falling away of sectarian thinking is no less pressing.

Aaron F. Eldridge is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He studies collective responses to cultural destruction and social precarity in the Middle Eastern and Muslim/Eastern Christian world.

Notes

[1] We should note here the polysemy of al-qaḍiyya al-filasṭīniyya in Arabic. It is not only “the Palestinian cause” but also “the Palestinian issue” and “the Palestinian question,” terms which, in English, ramify into terrains of political transformation or armed struggle, social antagonism, and juridical dispute respectively. This question of translation is relevant because what is at stake for Amil, following his contemporary Palestinian comrades in their articulation of resistance, is precisely the transformation of a juridical “question” (to be resolved in the future by statist, international law) into a material “cause” that articulates present time, situated in what Omid Mehrgan aptly describes in this feature as “the remnants of life today.”

References

Amil, Mahdi. 2020. Madkhal ilā naqḍ al-fikr al-ṭā’ifī: al-qaḍiyya al-filastīniyya fī aydiyūlūjiyāt al-burjuwaziyya al-lubnāniyya (An Entryway into Overturning Sectarian Thinking: The Palestinian Cause in the Ideology of the Lebanese Bourgeoisie). Beirut: Dar-al Farabi

Ismael, Tareq Y. and Jacqueline S. Ismael. 1998. The Communist Movement in Lebanon and Syria. University Press of Florida.

Jameson, Fredric. 1982. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Symbolically Social Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1976 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Benjamin Fowkes. New York: Vintage.

Safieddine, Hicham. 2020. “Introduction: The Anti-Colonial Intellectual.” In Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel, edited by Hicham Safieddine and translated by Angela Giordani, 3–9. Leiden: Brill.

Traboulsi, Fawwaz. 2008. Tarikh lubnān al-ḥadīth [A History of Modern Lebanon]. Beirut: Dar Riad El-Rayyes.

Cite as: Eldridge, Aaron F. 2025. “The Palestinian Cause Contra Sectarian Thinking” Focaalblog October 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/10/06/aaron-f-eldridge-the-palestinian-cause-contra-sectarian-thinking/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Harry Pettit: Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy

Image 1: Drivers waiting to deposit money at BOB Finance, photo by author

In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000 notes of Lebanese lira that amounted to 12 million (around 130 dollars): “look,” he said despondently, “this is not going to last more than two weeks, the company are thieves.” I asked him how he would survive. Rather than saying out loud, he preceded to sheepishly get his phone out and start typing on the calculator how much money he owed to friends, 42 dollars, 38 dollars, 180 dollars, 72 dollars, he kept going. It came to 500 dollars, but these were only the amounts he remembered at the time.

Hameed had come to Beirut from Syria with his family in 2011, after the civil war broke out. He had worked multiple jobs, without a work or residence permit, in Beirut’s service economy. For the last 3 years he had worked as a driver for the Lebanese food delivery app Toters. Toters has grown rapidly in Lebanon in recent years. Its rise has been stimulated by the multiple crises that have crippled the Lebanese economy: the financial crisis of 2019 and subsequent economic downturn led to its competition exiting the market; the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically increased home delivery; and the Syrian war provided an army of cheap, undocumented Syrian labour.

The financial crisis has had other consequences. One has been the dramatic surge in Lebanon’s cash economy, which went from 14 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2022. This has rapidly produced a new set of infrastructures, actors, and practices for storing and circulating money – at a time of rapid currency devaluation and increased dollarization. Companies began operating in cash due to exorbitant bank fees and distrust, money transfer and exchange services with links to political parties have boomed, and new digital wallets (like the company Purpl) are trying to fill the void left by banks.

When I was following the lives of Syrian drivers working for Toters between January and October 2023, I became interested in the ways in which cash was moving around the mini-economy created by Toters, between customers, delivery drivers, team leaders, money storers, and the company itself. What I want to argue is that, by following cash around, we can see how infrastructures of money circulation become a terrain of struggle between different actors (Scott, 2022). In this instance, the circulation of cash became a way for Toters to extract extra value from its racialised workforce and customers. But it also opens up the possibility for fractured forms of resistance and survival for workers.

Theft through depreciation

Between January and April 2023, the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted. It lost 61 per cent of its value to the dollar. Customers ordering food on Toters had to pay in lira – although sometimes drivers accepted dollars and exchanged it themselves for a small extra fee, without the company’s knowledge. Customers paid in cash directly to the drivers as they delivered orders. When a driver collected three million lira, their account was automatically blocked and they could no longer take orders. To reopen it, they had to go to their team leader who waited at the same spot every day to deposit the money, or use BoB, a Lebanese money storage and transfer depository. This took time away from doing more orders. Any missing money – due to theft or miscalculation – always had to be made up by the driver. Once in BoB, this money was converted into dollars and transferred to a bank account in Dubai where Toters’ official headquarters is located.

Image 2: A driver’s account being blocked, photo by author

By doing this, Toters was able to protect itself from the currency devaluation of the lira. However, this was not the case for drivers. Drivers received a basic fee for each order, plus an extra fee based on distance. In addition, when fewer drivers were on the road, delivery competitions were organised by the company: e.g., if a driver did six orders in two hours, they got an additional amount. On a day of no interruptions drivers did 20-25 orders, which produced ten to twelve dollars (500,000-600,000 Lebanese lira) in earnings. The fees were accumulated, recorded on the mobile app and distributed to drivers in Lebanese lira at the end of each month. This delay meant they had to watch helplessly as the value of their labour plummeted over the month – for example in January 2023 drivers lost a third of the value of their earnings. Meanwhile, their expenses such as rent, electricity, internet, food, and petrol were either paid in dollars or went up with the dollar very quickly.

For Hameed, this induced much frustration, as he described while we sat in a café in mid-March 2023:

“I’m tired, I’m tired. The dollar reached 100,000 lira today, it will reach 200,000 as well. [He pointed to his pack of cigarettes] look, 50,000, the coffee 40,000, then petrol is now 400,000 a day, you spend 600,000 easily, and you don’t even make that from orders. I don’t understand why all the expenses like rent and electricity, even coffee goes up straight away when the dollar goes up, but the only thing that doesn’t go up is the salary. The company just makes extra money, the restaurants can raise their prices, but the workers paid in lira are just losing.”

Image 3: A call out on TikTok for drivers to participate in the strike, screenshot sent to author by Hameed

This depreciation was also a problem for restaurants, who had to wait two weeks before getting their revenue from Toters, which at times led to a 20-30 per cent devaluation of the money. As one restaurant owner told me: “[Toters] are worse than Riad Salameh (the former Lebanese Central Bank Governor), all this playing with money, they have an amazing cash flow…you know they told me ‘we are partners’, I said you are my partner in profit only.”

The way in which cash circulation was set up enabled Toters to extract extra value from the drivers and the restaurants. As Hameed mentioned, restaurants were at least able to raise their prices or start pricing in dollars. The organisation of a percentage fee between 20-25 per cent – with the restaurant paying the costs of VAT and discounts – ensured the platform’s income went up automatically. To keep pace with lira devaluation, drivers’ order fees would have had to increase by 155 per cent between January and April. However, for the month of January the fee did not change despite drivers’ complaints. Drivers demanded their salaries and fees be calculated in dollars. At the end of January, they organised a two-day strike through WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, and TikTok. While impossible to know the scale exactly, at its height 900 people were in the main WhatsApp group, and the Toters app was effectively shut down.

Toters tried to break the strike by punitively firing strike organisers and by sending messages telling drivers they had to do a minimum amount of orders or face firing. But eventually, as Toters’ reputation took a hit on critical media channels, it gave a 38 per cent increase in lira with very modest increases following later as the lira continued to rise. However, to compensate, Toters used its digital infrastructure to rapidly increase the delivery fee charged to customers, the vast majority of which went to the platform. Drivers complained that this had the cruel effect of suppressing tips as customers considered the fee the tip. Furthermore, after the order fee increase, for a while Toters stopped organising competitions for additional income, thus further suppressing driver wages.

Borrowing cash to survive

Amidst devaluing incomes, drivers were constantly pushed into situations where they could not pay expenses. Monthly incomes never reached more than 200 dollars, and were more often around 120-160 dollars. This was just about enough to afford food and rent – but the sickness of a child, a broken or stolen motorbike, or an issue at home, as one driver described, would easily break the delicate balance they were living with. One of the biggest issues they faced were the checkpoints set up by the ‘darak’ (Lebanese internal security forces) which, according to drivers, particularly targeted Toters workers because they were known to be undocumented Syrians – thus making them an easy target for bribes. Officers asked for a work permit, then confiscated the bike, which was only reclaimable upon payment of a fine – anything between 10 and 50 dollars.

Image 4: A driver being stopped by the ‘darak’, photo sent to author by Hameed

In this context, drivers needed to constantly borrow money to sustain their livelihood. I was introduced to this situation when I met Hameed in late-February after his account had been closed. I accompanied him to an online gaming shop. He went up to the man at the desk and took 900,000 lira (15 dollars at the time). Hameed then went straight to the coffee shop across the street where his team leader was waiting and handed over 3 million lira. When he came out, he explained how he had taken money collected from the customers to buy a new gas canister. He therefore needed to borrow from his friend to return the money to his team leader. After getting his account reopened, he would work for an hour and then pay his friend back, again from the customer’s money. When I responded in shock, Hameed shrugged and said: “one borrows from another and then one borrows from another, the money just goes around. That’s how it is here” (this is similar to the circulation of debt found by Isabelle Guérin (2014) in South India).

It was very common for drivers to use the cash from customers to pay for both daily expenses and emergencies. The salary disappeared quickly on rent, electricity costs, and food, while tips were highly unpredictable. As a result, the customer money was an immediate source of cash. If depositing this money in a money transfer service such as BoB, drivers would not have to return the whole amount they owed, just make sure they remained beneath the threshold of three million.

While team leaders were also there to collect customer cash for the company, they sometimes helped drivers out. This could be through raising their cash threshold, or reopening their account, but it also included more personal practices. One described such an occasion to me: “one of my drivers hurt his leg, and needed a gel. He came and gave me the customer’s money, but said he can’t work. I asked why he didn’t buy the gel, he said he has no money. So I gave him 250,000 from my personal money.” This team leader described how his positionality helped him act in this way: “management just think the drivers lie, but I know what they go through, so I can help them out. This was a friend situation, not a work situation, in work I am professional. I understand the company can’t become soft, drivers do lie, they can’t give exceptions to people.”

This practice of survival is directly enabled by the fact that money circulation took the cash form. Another delivery company actually formalised this practice of borrowing by lending money directly to drivers, but taking collateral such as a car, bike, or piece of jewellery in case they did not repay, and deducting directly from future salaries. But borrowing from Toters was not enough to meet monetary needs. On some occasions I heard about drivers who had stolen money from the company when they had just collected a huge order. These drivers earned heroic status among others. However, it was extremely risky as the company could mobilise their close connections with the police to locate drivers. For the most part, drivers relied on a network of communal support. This reflects what others have found especially in communities where formalised banking is not preferred (Wig, 2023). This took multiple forms, from borrowing electricity, internet, or food from neighbours, taking products from shops and paying back later, or borrowing small amounts from friends and other drivers. But it also took the form of taking larger amounts of several hundred or thousands of dollars – often from a relative abroad or a driver who had no dependents.

Drivers were therefore always in the process of paying someone back. Sometimes lenders were flexible because they were family or long-term friends. But this flexibility was precarious and open to sudden change. For Alaa, a 21-year-old driver who carried financial responsibility for his whole family, this veneer of stability was lost when several events occurred at the same time. It began with a bike accident that left him unable to work. This meant he was unable to pay the rent. Soon after the man from whom he had borrowed to buy his motorbike demanded repayment. To avoid the threat of arrest or violence, Ahmed gave the bike back until he could find the 500 dollars required. During this period, Ahmed complained about how Lebanon’s economic crisis was reducing generosity: “people are holding on tighter to their money nowadays”, he lamented. Eventually he did manage to scrape together the cash needed, only to quickly meet another request for money; this time from the police regarding a bike he had sold two years before but was still registered in his name – which had now accumulated various fines.

Conclusion

The stories described here demonstrate the vastly different means different actors have to control the circulation of cash. In a context of rapid inflation and currency devaluation, Toters was able to arrange this circulation in a way that enabled them to extract extra value from drivers and customers. They used temporal techniques and flexible digital infrastructures to control the flow of cash to their benefit. To counter this, the undocumented Syrian drivers had little room for manoeuvre – other than risky, arduous tactics such as borrowing, theft, and collective action. Instead, their liveability, and therefore the extractive operation of the company, relied on material and social networks of communal support to acquire the cash they needed.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Harry Pettit is an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is interested in researching the new forms of extraction and livability opening up within late-capitalist systems, with a focus on the MENA region.

References

Guérin, I. 2014. ‘Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values: The Everyday Use of Microcredit in Rural South India.’ Current Anthropology, 55 (9), pp. 40-50.

Scott, B. 2022. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. New York: Penguin.

Wig, S. 2023. ‘Infrabanking: Mobilizing capital in communist Cuba.’ Economic Anthropology 11 (1)l, pp. 59-70.

Cite as: Pettit, Harry 2024. “Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/harry-pettit-theft-resistance-and-the-struggle-over-cash-circulation-in-beiruts-platform-economy/

Blog

Susann Kassem: Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon




Israel’s wall and de facto border with southeast Lebanon. Writing reads: “All resistance for the sake of Jerusalem.” Photo taken by author in summer 2023 near Adaysseh, Lebanon. 

“I cannot listen to the sound of the warplanes anymore, it sounds like they are flying over our roofs,” as a resident of a south Lebanese border village described the situation in South Lebanon on October 8. She, her family, and her extended family evacuated their villages of Mais el Jabal and Blida shortly afterwards. Since October 7, Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily increasing hostilities on Lebanon’s southern border, fueling fears among its inhabitants and raising the prospect of a full-on war between the two, which would be devastating for the region. It is imperative that the history of Israel’s bombardments, occupation, invasions of Lebanon, and the repeated forced displacement of its residents, is put at the forefront of our understanding of why the Lebanese front remains an active battleground.

The politics of displacement in South Lebanon

Not long after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel deployed military vehicles northward, and reinforced the militarization of their northern border. War planes were constantly flying over South Lebanon and flare bombs were fired over the villages during the first few nights already. Hezbollah officially entered the battle on October 8, by targeting three Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa farms. Israel responded to this incident, and the violence has been increasing ever since. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and as of January 19, Israel has launched at least 3,600 strikes on South Lebanon. In comparison, there have so far been about 920 strikes launched from Lebanon, mainly by Hezbollah. Most of Israel’s attacks have been focused on the area about 5-10 kilometers from the Israeli border; as a result more than 88,000 residents of this area have vacated their homes in the largest escalation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war. As events unfolded, Israel moved its inhabitants of the northern border into shelters in other areas of the country.

Since the beginning of the hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel on October 8, nearly 200 people have been killed in South Lebanon by Israeli strikes. At least 40 of those killed are civilians and one Lebanese army soldier—the others, at least 144, are mostly Hezbollah members or fighters. Israel has targeted villages and towns throughout the south Lebanese border area. Israel has targeted Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful armed political movement, but their attacks have also struck a wide range of civilians and state infrastructure. Over 34 attacks have been recorded against the Lebanese army, killing one soldier. Israel has attacked and killed civilians, explicitly and repeatedly targeted journalists, and struck houses and residential areas, public roads, mosques, churches, schools as well as a hospital, and health centers.

It is often the most vulnerable segments of the population that are forced to stay behind. The elderly, poor, and disabled are those who are physically unable to flee their homes, and therefore become victims of Israeli shelling and bombs. This is a tragedy all-too-well demonstrated in Aitarun, a village in the southeastern tip of Lebanon, where three young children and their grandmother were killed by an Israeli airstrike as they were evacuating. Their mother survived with critical injuries. Human Rights Watch called this attack an “apparent war crime.” On December 20, a civilian whose car broke down in the Marjayoun district was killed by an Israeli sniper, and a 70-year-old civilian was killed by an Israeli strike.

The economic and human tolls of the war

While aid organizations and individuals are providing some immediate relief, especially for those in shelters, the overall public awareness of the difficulties of the displaced is slim. The Lebanese government’s emergency plan is inadequate to say the least; it has not helped with evacuating or finding housing for its displaced. It has made some temporary shelters available for only a little over a thousand IDPs. The proportion of IDPs in collective shelters—mostly sections of still operating schools, or unfinished buildings—accounts for only 2 percent. The majority of the displaced are staying with close and extended relatives throughout Lebanon while others are renting a place independently, among other options. The needs of the displaced are less visible to the public. The ones who are renting housing are exposed to exorbitant rents without any oversight. If help is available, it is not advertised properly to people eligible to access it. This situation affects more than just Lebanese citizens: Syrians, both residents and refugees, many of whom have already been forcibly displaced multiple times and have fewer relatives in Lebanon that could host or support them.

The financial, physical, and psychological hardship on the displaced in the midst of Lebanon’s most severe economic crisis cannot be overstated. A great proportion of the southern Lebanese inhabitants are farmers and day laborers. They depend on their land for sustenance. Many find themselves traveling back and forth to the south, amidst heightened danger, especially for work. Some farmers who hold livestock have to stay or visit their property on an almost daily basis to care for their animals, despite ongoing attacks. The current conflict hit in the midst of the olive harvest season, on which many depend for at least part of their livelihoods. Villagers’ careful preparation of their muneh (preserved goods) is what traditionally gets them through the winter. This year, many villagers missed out on harvesting, preserving, and pressing their olives during this time, as well as preparing other kinds of preserves. Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorus bombs in the fields throughout South Lebanonis further taking a vast environmental toll that will likely take years to recover from. Furthermore, December and January mark the season in which tobacco farmers sell their dried and packed up tobacco.

In addition to the war’s economic impact on South Lebanon, 52 schools had to close in the area, many since October 8. Seventeen of these are public schools whose closure impacts more than 6,000 children. An emergency plan by the caretaker Lebanese government to allow public school students to attend schools in their area of displacement, has only accommodated about 1,000 children.

The social impact of the war and displacement

This is not the first time South Lebanon had to face such scenarios, and its plight has still been misunderstood and downplayed by parts of the Lebanese public. The Israel Defense Forces has established a heavy military presence along the Lebanese border, and given the decades-long history of wars, invasions, occupations, and covert military action, the threat of another conflict had always loomed for people living in the area. Even in more “peaceful” times, including before October 7, the Israeli air force had conducted near daily incursions into Lebanese airspace, illegal under international law, sometimes deep into Lebanese territory. A report found that between 2006 and 2021, the Israeli military violated Lebanese airspace over 22,000 times. It used Lebanese airspace to strike Syria, such as on Christmas eve 2020 when fighter jets flew at low altitude over Beirut terrifying residents still reeling from the Beirut port explosion. Israel’s regular military exercises, sometimes conducted during key political moments, such as right before the Lebanese elections in 2009, are another form of intimidation and harassment.

The frequent and loud sound of cluster bombs being demined by the Lebanese army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) further adds to the sound of the threat across the border. Israel dropped an estimated 4 million cluster munitions on Lebanon during the 2006 war, 90 percent of them in just the last three days of the conflict. It is estimated that one fourth of those bombs did not explode. Many farmers risk their lives working in fields contaminated with unexploded bombs.

Decades of continuous displacement

This current war and resulting displacement is yet another episode of wars the inhabitants of the border areas on the Lebanese side have been exposed to since Israel’s creation in 1948, known as “Nakba” or “catastrophe” in the Arab world. During Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, several Lebanese border villages were occupied alongside Palestinian villages and their residents displaced. Thirteen of these villages were returned with the signing of the Lebanese Israeli armistice agreement in 1949. Houses and historic and cultural sites were destroyed during this period and people had to rebuild their homes for the first of many times. For example, in Blida, one of the border villages under attack today, parts of the Ottoman mosque and several houses of people were destroyed in 1948. Residents in this border area have also lost large parts of their agricultural farmlands at the time. After 1948, a period of emigration to Beirut began, as the southern border villages lost their vital economic, social, and kinship ties to Palestine, disrupting social, economic, and trade relationships.

A gradual displacement of border inhabitants also occurred from the late 1960s onward. From 1967, the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanese groups fighting against Israel in South Lebanon began to grow. Israel responded to this mobilization by stepping up its attacks on Lebanese territory. Going beyond military targets, Israel attacked public infrastructure, including the Beirut airport, as well as civilian homes and fields, making livelihoods difficult in the south.

This most significantly culminated in Israel invading South Lebanon in 1978, in an attempt to destroy the PLO and its supporters. The consequences of this war were yet another major displacement of about 200,000 of southern Lebanese residents. In this campaign, Israel killed 1,000 to 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and leveled several towns and Palestinian refugee camps. Israel occupied South Lebanon from 1978 until 2000, during which many inhabitants of this border area lived through daily insecurity and indignity.

Between 1982-1985, the Israeli army occupied about half of the country reaching up to Beirut, laying siege to the capital in the summer of 1982. Israel is estimated to have killed more than 19,000 people that year alone. After this siege, many southern families living in Beirut returned to their villages, since the brunt of Israeli force was focused on the capital.

There were several additional Israeli military operations during the occupation of South Lebanon, such as Israel’s “Operation Accountability,” known in Lebanon as the 1993 Seven Day War. In this conflict, Israel killed about 120 Lebanese civilians and injured nearly 500 in what Human Rights Watch referred it as “a ferocious Israeli assault on population centers in southern Lebanon […] which also temporarily displaced some 300,000 Lebanese villagers and Palestinian refugees.” Operation “Grapes of Wrath” in 1996, known by the Lebanese as the “April Aggression,” displaced up to half a million residents in the south, and killed about 150 civilians, through the targeting of hospitals and UN shelters like during the Qana massacre on April 18.

Israel finally withdrew from most of South Lebanon in 2000, after attacks by local resistance groups, eventually led by Hezbollah, made its continued presence in Lebanon untenable. For much of the following six years, a fleeting period of stability reigned, in stark contrast to what preceded it.

During the 33-day 2006 war, residents of the southern border area as well as those in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were displaced—about one million in total. About 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed. Israel severely damaged Lebanese infrastructure across the country and destroyed many homes in the targeted areas. Israel’s aim in the 2006 war was to substantially weaken or destroy Hezbollah, in which it was decisively unsuccessful. The war ended with the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which foresees the full respect of the Blue line, a temporary boundary demarcation in the absence of a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel. It also calls for the Lebanese government to deploy its troops along the Lebanese border to replace Hezbollah’s presence, which was left to the government that is highly divided on the matter.

War and displacement in 2023

Since the 2006 war, there had been mutual deterrence between Hezbollah and Israel. Unlike previous wars where it felt unrestrained to strike with impunity, in the current war, Israel is calculating its strikes more carefully. Hezbollah’s stated rationale is to impose a cost on Israel for its assault on Gaza, and to keep part of Israel’s military forces tied down in the north. There is a tit for tat response for Israeli attacks by Hezbollah. Over the past few weeks, however, the attacks from both sides have become more intense, with Israel seemingly leading the scope of the attacks to which Hezbollah responds. So far however, Hezbollah, has reiterated that it is not interested in an escalation into a full scale war, but is prepared for such an event.

The current genocidal war on Gaza, sets an alarming precedent for what Israel’s military operations can get away with without being held accountable and for the nature of armed conflict in future. The current war between Lebanon and Israel seems to be only a teaser of what could potentially happen in the region if the war on Gaza continues. Several Israeli ministers have continuously threatened to turn Lebanon into Gaza. As this war of attrition continues, South Lebanon has been enduring daily strikes at an increased pace, with Israel striking villages further north, going deeper into the territory and targeting new places and villages by the day. Before long, it may reach the point of no return.

A longer version of this text was first published by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and it is republished here with the permission of the author and publisher. 

Susann Kassem is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford. Her current research project explores the formation of political subjectivities during the multiple reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages.

Cite as: Kassem, Susann. 2024. “Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon” Focaalblog 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/22/susann-kassem-israels-looming-threat-death-war-and-displacement-in-lebanon/

Blog

Philip Proudfoot: Interventions, Conspiracy, and the (Un)making of the Islamic State in Syria

Introduction
With the rise of the Islamic State—ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah (“Da’ish”)—senior figures in the American and British establishment reportedly considered working with the Syrian government to “fight this threat.” As of 23 September 2014, such debates are academic—US bombs are falling over Aleppo and Raqqa. It’s unknown if the regime clandestinely offered its approval; what we do know is that—aside from stressing the need to respect international law, to cooperate with the Iraqi government, and to protect the lives of civilians—no official condemnation has been issued.1 In one year we’ve transitioned from debating strikes against the Syrian regime to a Western-led alliance now bombing the regime’s enemies. To some this might appear surprising, but for many opposition fighters engaged in the revolutionary struggle, these events were a long time coming. This post2 tries to explain why.
Continue reading →