More than two and a half decades too late, at the memorial service for his longtime comrade George Hawi, Mohsen Ibrahim finally acknowledged the burden that the Palestinian cause had placed on Lebanon. The Secretary General of the Organization of Communist Action and Deputy Head of the Lebanese National Movement seemed to be delivering an act of repentance, albeit one that came when repentance could no longer change anything. He did it only after that movement had become little more than a relic of what it had been in the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, it is only fair to credit the man for doing so. Most likely, he did it as a lesson for others. And those “others” are none other than the heirs to his struggle, always in the name of Palestine. Hezbollah is one of those heirs.
Today, however, there is nothing to suggest that Hezbollah will do the same, nor is it likely to in the future. The bitter irony is that it may only come to such a reckoning once its fate resembles that of the Lebanese National Movement. Hezbollah may acknowledge it only when it, and Lebanon along with it, have become yet another pair of ruins. That outcome no longer seems far-fetched, judging by the consequences of Iran’s support war and the war in Gaza. Gaza itself is but one of Palestine’s “offspring,” a Palestine that political Islam diminished once it came to dominate its leadership.
In the public consciousness, Palestine has become a readily traded asset in the hands of those enamored with war as they make their way toward authoritarianism, whether they are regimes or armed movements.
The romanticization of the Palestinian exodus has long served as one of the most powerful instruments for domesticating a collective consciousness that has yet to recover from its weight. All the more so when that very burden, carried in Palestine’s name, has shattered states, while Lebanon has remained especially fertile ground for bearing it despite countless realities that should have prompted this collective consciousness to distance itself from those who have claimed ownership of its past and present wars.
Mohsen Ibrahim’s expression of regret came decades too late. Today, Lebanon waits for Sheikh Naim Qassem’s remorse before it is inevitably reduced to ruins and elegies. Yet placing the burden of repentance on Hezbollah’s Secretary General may itself reflect our own misplaced hope. Like Sheikh Naim, and like his party, we are merely waiting for remorse that depends on a Supreme Leader and a Revolutionary Guard who have no regard for our expectations. They continue to drive a nihilistic project that is indifferent to the coercion imposed on us, to Qassem’s and Hezbollah’s willing submission to it, and to our shared fate as victims of a simplistic vision: Israel’s disappearance, followed inevitably by Palestine and its people being brought under the guardianship of the wilaya.
Finding any sign that the future will be less bleak than the present is difficult, if not impossible, unless hope is deliberately manufactured. At the height of this tragedy, Qassem continues to hasten our march toward the ruins whenever he speaks. And when he remains silent, he accelerates it still further by leaving us at the mercy of his party’s ideologues. Between speech and silence, there is no room left for the illusion that remorse is simply part of human nature. Ever since the emergence of a party that attached God’s name to its own, we have been forced to witness a sacred hierarchy separating ordinary human beings from those who present themselves as demigods.
Sheikh Naim will not do it. He will not shoulder a remorse he does not possess, or perhaps cannot afford to possess, if we are generous enough to extend him the benefit of the doubt, however excessive that generosity may now seem. He will not repent, nor has any Secretary General of Hezbollah ever done so. Qassem, like the rest of us, knows that the way out of this tragedy, through acknowledging it with remorse, lies in the hands of a Guardian who has also ensured that we remain its victims, while closing the door to repentance itself.
Iran will not do what Mohsen Ibrahim did two decades ago. No one will emerge from its seminaries or from the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to admit that Lebanon, and the Shiite community in particular, have been made to bear more than their very existence can withstand, an existence that is now itself in question. Iran will not do it, even if it wished to. Yet today, we have replaced our distrust of Tehran with forgiveness, as though granting it absolution were the price of our own survival while standing on the edge of the abyss.
The story, almost a parable, tells of a mother clutching her child as they flee a wild beast. Their only chance of survival is to cross a river before the animal reaches them. The mother cannot swim, so she has no choice but to wade across. She does. As the water rises to the level of the child, she lifts him from her arms onto her shoulders. But soon the river engulfs even her head. At that moment, she realizes that survival demands one final, devastating act. She throws her child into the river and uses his body to cross to safety. She survives.
The story was invoked by a Shiite cleric close to Hezbollah in response to a pointed question raised during a private gathering. One attendee asked why the Iranian regime had “abandoned” Hezbollah, from the moment of the assassination of its most prominent Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, until the present, remaining unconvinced that Iran had ever truly shed that abandonment.
The deepest irony in the story, where the mother represents Iran, and the child represents Hezbollah, is that the cleric dispelled any illusion about his own position. Rather than challenging the premise, he reinforced it by invoking Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine that preserving the Islamic Republic is more important than even the reappearance of the Imam Mahdi, the central messianic figure in Shiite belief.
