War Is Coming

Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon

Sami Hermez

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780812224887, 9780812248869
• eBook ISBN: 9780812293685
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat.In War Is Coming, Sami Hermez argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest.Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

Chapter 1

In the Meanwhile: Theory and Fieldwork in Protracted Conflict

The Hamra neighborhood of Beirut was a very busy place during ḥarb tammūz (the “July War” in 2006). Many displaced people from the South had made their way to the city, escaping Israel’s incessant bombing of that part of the country in an ineffective attempt to destroy Hizballah, the Lebanese resistance movement against Israel.¹ The displaced were staying with relatives or in school compounds, underground garages, unoccupied apartments, and other vacant spaces in the city. On this particular afternoon, Dima and I decided to take a break from our relief work and have lunch at Roadster Café, a local American-style diner. I came to meet Dima during this period of relief work in the July War, and with her and others I would take part in various forms of humanitarian and political action during the course of my fieldwork. Dima is an architect and grassroots activist originally from a town near Tripoli. She mostly lived abroad during her childhood, though she recalls significant periods when she experienced the 1975–1990 war.

We walked down Hamra Street, busy with people but not so jammed with cars as one would usually expect. We passed the popular fast food restaurant, malek el-baṭāṭa (King of Potatoes), and crossed the cobblestone street to our destination. There, we ordered our food. As we sat lazily at the bar, waiting for our food to arrive, we got into what would be one of our many sad and fervent conversations about war, its future possibilities, and our past memories of it. Although we did not begin by defining “war” (ḥarb), we understood the grammar of our conversation about it in the context of the July 2006 war. It was certainly not an abstract talk of war, for we were living and hearing it. This was the case in many of my conversations with interlocutors: even though we had an idea what war was when we spoke about it, and although it was a concept that had and continues to have meaning for people, the term always seemed to remain somewhat porously defined, contested, ambiguous, and incommensurable in our attempts to represent it. This grayness was reflected in my experiences asking people directly to explain or define war and in their inability to produce clear limits and definitions. Simply to understand the grammar of such conversations about war did not resolve war’s ambiguities, even as it brought meaning and form to the concept. In this book, through conversations and debates, I will reflect on the ambiguities of political violence that complicate any possibility of producing a fixed definition of war.²

Dima and I sat at the bar waiting for our burgers, Dima sipping water and I lemonade. At one point, she turned to me in her intense and heartfelt voice and said, in English: “Our lives are like superhero comic strips. You know how in the comics when there is fighting going on, oftentimes the next slide says ‘In the meanwhile.’ Well, that’s us. We are ‘In the meanwhile’; we live ‘In the meanwhile’.” While the war went on above and around us, while the displaced tended to their lives, “in the meanwhile” we ate at Roadster, had meetings, went out for a drink, worked on humanitarian relief operations, and conducted our everyday lives the way we saw fit.

If “in the meanwhile” was a way people lived through conflict, for me it became a lens through which to think about social life amid political violence and the protracted nature of conflict that has existed in Lebanon. Dima, it seems, meant to say that in the interstices of war, people still live their lives and take their breaks; indeed, war can intensify social life, as she later told me. I, too, lived my life during this war. I spent days and nights in conversations and debates with family, I watched the war live on TV, and I enjoyed nights of drinking with new friends. In this war, I also found time to love. War, whatever war, does not necessarily erase either daily actions or emotions, and it certainly does not erase feelings of love. War re-shifts and reconfigures, but its processes are not very good at total erasure. It tries, but it cannot destroy our human emotions or our connections to the techniques of everyday life that came before the war—and are transferred down generationally.

So people continue to live in the meanwhile of war in ways that can sustain a sense of everyday normalcy, and that may resemble, if only ever so slightly, the way life was lived prior to a given outbreak of war. This meanwhile suggests a temporary state between two longer periods before and after, and as an informant once told the journalist Anthony Shadid, the solutions to war themselves “amount to a meanwhile” (Shadid 2007). This is not surprising if we are to consider that people live these solutions—these meanwhiles—as temporary periods within a longer war.

Death, like life, goes on as well. I mentioned to a friend and filmmaker, days after the end of the July War in mid-August, about the passing away of a friend’s father. He reflected back that many forget people die from non-combat-related deaths during a war. “Life goes on,” he concluded, and so does death. He made me think of the many events and emotions, too many to recount, that go on in their seemingly normal trajectory in times of war: new life, death, laughter, happiness, and sadness. All this goes on, affected in huge ways by the war, while people try to maintain normalcy. Cancer still kills in war; it doesn’t wait, nor does a heart attack, old age, or a car accident.³ Death goes on in its taking of lives away from the bombs and the fighting in South Lebanon.⁴ War is, after all, as much a private affair as it is public and collective,⁵ and we live it through our own personal experiences as much as through the public narrative.

Thinking about life “in the meanwhile” came around the time that I also began to think about the anticipation of political violence. While spending one night in military jail, I had begun to think about anticipation as an affective site of research, and one where political power operates. I had been picked up during the 2006 war by the Lebanese army for taking pictures too close to a military base, and they suspected me of spying for Israel upon finding out that I had been in Palestine only a few days before.⁶ During that night in prison, I was told that other convicts had been evacuated because military locations were in danger of being bombed by the Israelis. I spent the night in my cell, hearing the bombs in the distance, and wondering if the next would hit my cell. Fear struck me as I anticipated the bombs and heard the explosions, followed by the momentary calm of knowing this time my location was not the target. I was exhausted, and soon, despite the fear, I fell asleep on the humid ground, separated from it by a thin, hard, rancid mat. Something about the bombings made them both absent (over there) and present through their sounds and the potential to annihilate me at any moment, an absent presence that I managed to acquaint myself with enough to sleep through much of the night. That night, I felt myself as living “In the meanwhile” and in “anticipation of political violence.” Later, this became an axis to question and critique forms of absent present political violence, and to think about the little nooks and crannies present in war that would bring forth a deeper understanding of people’s lives in such unstable times, and that would deconstruct a homogeneous idea of what war is and isn’t.

This absent presence suggests there is an act of recollection of past violence and imagination of future violence,⁷ and a sense of people living in between past and future violence, remembering one, anticipating the other. Whereas the physicality and perpetration of war is often felt as absent—or in the past or future—talk of war, imagining it, sensing it, being tense and frustrated by it, feeling despair, resignation, fear, and hope by it, these are some of the ways that war remains constantly present (conceptually and not necessarily physically) as a structuring force in social life. In this way, recalling Carl Schmitt, war is solidified as a crucial component of politics, and undergirding political life for people in Lebanon. Yet, unlike Schmitt or even Thomas Hobbes, this is not an ontological statement about the relation between war and politics but rather a statement that war (like peace or peace-making) is one byproduct of politics, and once war emerges as a possibility, politics becomes the mechanism by which to intensify or deescalate war. Contrary to Hobbes, politics (and the Leviathan) is not what keeps the threat of war at bay, but actually, following Michel Foucault, politics establishes and ensures the continuation of the structures and relations of power embedded in war (Foucault 1997).

The July 2006 war lasted thirty-three days. For most of the time after that and during my fieldwork, the bombings, gunfire, and armed confrontations between political groups were seemingly absent. In such times, I was struck by people’s preoccupation with the idea that a war, in its vaguely defined terms, was on the horizon.⁸ El-ḥarb jāye (the war is coming) or raḥ tūlaʿ el-ḥarb (the war is going to ignite), and their various derivatives, were phrases I would regularly hear in a family dining room, around a restaurant table, or at a local political party office. It is the sentiments behind such phrases that affect everyday life in Lebanon, making past and future war very much lived in the present, that I investigate in this book.

In Part I, I look at the anticipation of political violence and how it could be sensed in the meanwhile of physical conflict as well as in its absence. What kind of strategies do people employ in order to live in this meanwhile? How were people in Lebanon living and experiencing the aftermath and in-betweens of war, assassinations, bombings, and the various other acts and events often grouped together as political violence?⁹ How could one rethink this other than in terms of resilience, a recurring theme that seemed to produce forms of Lebanese exceptionalism (that somehow Lebanese were uniquely resilient for the way they conducted their lives during and after war)? People were living in the midst of armed conflict or in the shadow of threats that war might ignite, and I wanted to foreground their experiences. It is one objective of this book, then, to explore how people live in this midst, “in the meanwhile,” of political conflict and instability, and to do so in a way that does not totalize and sensationalize the experience of violence, or make violence and coping with it the only concern of people in a conflict zone (Lubkemann 2008).¹⁰

Moreover, I ask how society is reconfigured in periods of political violence and subsequent calm, and how the possibility of future war inscribes recollections of past civil conflicts into everyday life. Such experiences lead me to study political violence through its “practices of anticipation” to better understand how the memory or expectation of impending political violence shapes social interactions and political relationships with the state. By practices, I mean mundane acts, gestures, conversations, psychological states, and interactions. A focus on practices of anticipation exposes ironies, contradictions, and political antagonisms present in the spaces of daily life.

Memory emerges as another fundamental part of this story and is the focus of Part II. The anticipation of political violence cannot be extricated from recollections of past war, and we should see the passage from past to future in Lebanon as a seamless duration where recollection and anticipation are simultaneous processes that meld into each other (Bergson, 1946). The flow of memory between past and future, how people experience this, and what they do with it is crucial to our understanding of how political violence is experienced, especially in its invisible forms. In Part II, I am especially concerned with how people in Lebanon consciously forget (tanāsī) past war, how their spontaneously lived memory works as a strategy for dealing with everyday life, and how this memory connects the past to the future.¹¹

No Victor, No Vanquished

To a large extent, the politics of “No Victor, No Vanquished” (lā ghāleb, lā maghlūb),¹² which was first invoked by former prime minister Saeb Salam after the 1958 civil war,¹³ forms the undercurrent for this book. In its basic form, and reemphasized after every conflict, this politics implies that no political party or sect in Lebanon can eliminate any other party or sect, and that all political groupings must be represented in the political system. This is to ensure al-ʿaysh al-mushtarak (coexistence) and al-waḥda al-waṭaniyya (national unity), and to preserve Lebanon as a place that is tolerant of diverse religions (al-tasāmuḥ bayn al-adyān). The sense that no winners or losers emerge from any single conflict contributes to the idea that causes remain unresolved. I argue that this lack of resolution practically guarantees that past political violence remains a central concern in the present and facilitates the feeling of its reemergence in the future.

The politics of “No Victor, No Vanquished” and its implications on life in Lebanon have not been seriously interrogated or analyzed. Some have taken this policy as promoting a state-sponsored politics of forgetting, but like Volk (2010), I call for us to think of this policy as one way “culturally plural societies may work toward reconciliation after periods of violence” (2010:23). Here, political elites lead the process of reconciliation and can “publically appropriate, narrate, and circulate violent pasts for the benefit of present and future generation” (23). Volk pushes us to question the meaning and process behind this coming together of political elites. In this book, I consider the everyday life that is set into motion by this type of supposed elite reconciliation process, and the way such a “No Victor, No Vanquished” politics can facilitate the melding of past and future violence in the present.

Robert Meister describes a relation to past war when he says that evil in the age of human rights is no longer understood “to be a system of social injustice that can have ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is dismantled. Rather, evil is described as a time of cyclical violence that is past—or can be put in the past by defining the present as another time in which the evil is remembered rather than repeated” (2012: 37). In Lebanon, there has been an attempt to think of war in a similar way, as something in the past, without ongoing structural effects, and should be remembered as past so as not to be repeated in the future. The problem is that it is not past: not physically as its presence is felt continually, nor in the structural outcomes as they manifest persistently in the present.

To a large extent, the discourse and actions of political elites, in advocating a consensual politics represented in “No Victor, No Vanquished,” and in forgiving their wartime opponents for their supposed crimes, are working in the spirit of liberal transitional justice, which is primarily concerned with whether the demands of victims will “return society to the logic of revolution and civil war” (29) or bring society to civil peace. This reconciliation among the political elite, a “justice-as-reconciliation,” is a process whereby the rest of society is asked to reconcile with continuing inequality as a morally acceptable alternative in the aftermath of violence. In this justice-as-reconciliation, the ultimate fear is the idea that distributive justice will lead to a retributive component in societies emerging from (or still embedded within) protracted conflict, and the process of transition “presents itself as a period of grace in which redistributive claims in the name of victims are indefinitely deferred” (29). In this way, through the power-sharing function of a policy of “No Victor, No Vanquished,” violence is averted in favor of al-silm al-ahlī (civil peace). The politics of fear that emerges leads to a politics of compromise. It is an essentially liberal politics motivated by a Hobbesian project of keeping violence at bay, whereby politicians seek ways to prevent the always (according to them) inevitable war that will destroy the country, instead of practicing an ethical politics of seeking good for victims.¹⁴

In Lebanon, this Hobbesian view dominates how politics is perceived. This produces a kind of zero-sum game where politicians announce that any act destabilizing the status quo, their power, or the current structure of power sharing embodied in the policy of “No Victor, No Vanquished,” will inevitably produce war, thereby, in one and the same breath, reminding people of the devastation of past war and the possibility of a future one. Thus, society is faced with an ultimatum: either it accepts the compromise where past perpetrators are given amnesty or it faces war (or threat of war). However, rather than this zero-sum game, it might be more effective to think of politics as a dialectic between threat and mediation (Caton 2006). Processes of mediation and negotiation are always taking place alongside possible threats of war, but it is when these processes lose intensity that the possibility for political violence might appear. This differs from the Hobbesian view in that it is political mediation, negotiation, and forms of diplomacy that, when they lose intensity, produce the conditions f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Translation
• Timeline of Key Historical Moments
• Major Political Parties and Political Blocs
• List of Characters
• Chapter 1. In the Meanwhile: Theory and Fieldwork in Protracted Conflict
• Chapter 2. War, Politics, and Lunch: Conversations of Everyday Life
• Part I. Anticipation
• Part II. Recollection
• Continuations. The Anticipation of War in 2009–2014
• Appendix 1. The Cairo Agreement
• Appendix 2. The Doha Agreement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments