Destroying the Language of Power
What Elias Khoury (1948-2024) Taught Me
In a 2018 interview with the leftwing Lebanese outlet Megaphone News, the writer and novelist Elias Khoury was asked to describe the Lebanese system.
"It is a system of permanent civil war," he answered, "Lebanon is always on the edge of collapse."
It is difficult to explain the depressed political mood at the time. Years of the same establishment elites postponing their own parliamentary terms, Hezbollah intervening in Syria to bolster Bashar Assad’s regime, assassinations going unpunished. The country was captured by the same ruling elites that had established their reputation during the civil war — and if not them, their sons, nephews, cousins. Their hold on power seemed absolute.
Just days before the October 2019 uprising, I described Lebanon's predicament as "a grim one." Then came the thawra (the revolution) as we called it, and the few months we experienced revealed the endless possibilities of political hope, until the cursed combination of the economic crisis, the crackdown by Hezbollah and Amal, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Beirut port explosion of 2020 crushed it.
That short-lived political hope must have felt like a deja-vu to Khoury.
He was, after all, one of the founders of the Democratic Left Movement (DLM), a small leftist party that split from the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) in 2005 over differences with the LCP's leadership, especially vis-a-vis the latter's refusal to oppose the Assad regime.
After Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in February of that year, the Syrian regime's occupation of Lebanon would come to an end following the 2005 Cedar Revolution. With that, there was a brief period in which everything felt possible. Khoury joined other left-wing intellectuals such as Ziad Majed, Samir Kassir and George Hawi to form the DLM in the hope of taking advantage of the momentum against the Assad regime to push for more progressive politics within what was then the dominant political alliance, March 14.
This came crashing down barely a few months later, in June of that year.
The rest of the piece is behind a paywall although you can claim your free post below.
If you can't afford it, send me an email and I'll mail you a free PDF.
The very first photo of Khoury I saw was on June 2nd 2005 when a photojournalist caught the moment he found out that Kassir, his lifelong friend and comrade, had been assassinated. I turned fourteen years old that day, and distinctly remember the little party organised for me being interrupted by the news of Kassir's death announced on the TV. Kassir had risen to prominence for his vocal opposition to the Assad regime while also being a passionate defender of the Palestinian cause.
That sort of moral consistency was clearly too dangerous, which is why Kassir was the first person to be killed after Hariri. Just nineteen days later, Hawi, the former secretary general of the LCP, would also be assassinated. In a matter of weeks, two of the founders of a small leftist party that had just been created were assassinated by Hezbollah and the Assad regime. In the meantime, March 14 became increasingly captured by warlords and oligarchs who positioned themselves against the Assad regime but who had no interest in even entertaining the sort of social reforms that the DLM was pushing for. It felt like the forces of the status quo were consolidating into two alliances and redefining the terms of politics between them.
Majed, who spoke to me on The Fire These Times for the 15th year commemoration of Kassir’s murder, recounted how March 14's leaders preferred to deal with Hezbollah and Amal, who formed March 8 (later joined by the Free Patriotic Movement, or FPM), as representatives of the Shia community in return for them being treated as representatives of Christians, Druze and Sunnis. In other words, the sectarian establishment preferred to deal with rival elements within it than with smaller independent parties whose very existence signaled alternatives to sectarianism altogether.
Caption: Giselle Khoury1 and Samir Kassir with Elias Khoury
The same would occur during the thawra, when Hezbollah and Amal became the staunchest supporters of the status quo. Both parties sent armed men to beat us up on the streets of Beirut, Dahieh, the south and the Bekaa valley. They also worked hard to make sure that the billionaire prime minister Saad Hariri (son of the previous prime minister) remained in government. They even went so far as to protect the notoriously corrupt governor of the central bank, Riad Salamé. When the alternative was genuine pro-democracy voices, we saw former elements of March 8 come to the aid of former elements of March 14 while other former elements of March 14 tried to co-opt the protests against the March 8-dominated government. Then, in February 2021, Hezbollah assassinated Lokman Slim, the Dahieh-based memory worker who vocally opposed them and the Assad regime while also being pro-Palestine.
It was 2005 all over again.
"Our Damascus is here, and our Palestine is here."
During the thawra, Khoury penned an open letter to Samir Kassir in which he described a people being reborn. Crucially, he insisted on including freedom for Palestinians and Syrians in his retelling of it. This was not common in Lebanon, which is what made Khoury stand out. Most Lebanese protesters did not welcome non-Lebanese among them, leading to a melancholy among Palestinians and Syrians who also opposed the same regime which victimized them even more than it did the Lebanese.
But something happened at that moment in 2019. Khoury later compared it to how literature changed during the civil war. In a 2022 conversation with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, he argued that the civil war opened up the possibility of going beyond the dominant literary form at the time, which was nostalgia-infused poetry often put to music. That genre was past-oriented, often romanticizing some glorious bygone era that never really existed. Khoury, whose first novel came out the year the civil wars began, saw the limits in this version of pan-Arabism, which often seemed to fail to meet the political challenges of the present day. Instead, he advocated for “writing the present.” Admittedly, this could not be done without also integrating the past as "the present in itself incarnates the past," but what changes is a recognition of the need to resolve the past in order to open up the future.
The past, then, maintains a haunting presence on Lebanese politics today. To name what is perhaps the most obvious example: this year’s Israeli aggression and violence cannot be dissociated from the question of Hezbollah's weapons. That question goes back to the specific ways in which the civil wars ended in 1990 with the Ta'if agreement, and it has remained unresolved. This is due to the many reasons that encapsulate Lebanon's crisis to this day, including but not limited to: the ongoing threats posted by Israel against, especially, the people of south Lebanon following its 18-year-long occupation (1982-2000); the role of the Assad dictatorship in crushing the pro-Palestine secular resistance led by the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) which facilitated the rise of Hezbollah; Hezbollah's refusal to be held accountable by either Lebanese or international courts for its role in the assassinations of various anti-Assad Lebanese figures, let alone its war crimes in Syria; the elite dependence on sectarianization as a way to avoid doing structural reforms; that same elite’s capitalist monopoly on power as well as its sizeable ownership of land (while claiming to advocate for a ‘free market’); and the ongoing hold by a regressive patriarchal-religious establishment over constitutionally-protected rights - among others.
This is part of what Khoury identified in the civil war, as our current condition but "not our destiny." In other words, Lebanon's condition has concrete historical roots that ought to be understood, challenged and transcended. It is not, as common orientalist framings would have it, endlessly cursed with primordial identity-based violence.
In fact, as Khoury pointed out time and time again, Israel is one of the most violent promoters of religious-based identities in the region. The Israeli insistence on being a Jewish state first and foremost necessitates regular mass violence to ensure a demographic majority, and has had repercussions throughout our region and in particular Lebanon and Syria, in addition to its primary victims, namely Palestinians. This is an anomaly in our region, a very modern problem.
In that, Israel is joined by authoritarian Arab states which also utilise religious and ethnic divisions to exert and maintain power such as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under Assad and Bahrain under Khalifa - not to mention the sectarian politics of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Lebanon, being bordered by Israel and Syria, has suffered the consequences of these authoritarian states. Our modern history starts just a few years before Zionist forces exiled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to Lebanon and continues with the brutal Assadist crackdown following the 2011 Syrian revolution. Assad's desire to create a 'useful Syria', one which is subservient to him, has led to the exodus of 1.5 million Syrian refugees to Lebanon. As a country of approximately 5 million citizens, then, Lebanon has always been heavily impacted by its two neighbors' supremacist and authoritarian projects. This, in turn, cannot be dissociated from Lebanese sectarianism itself as the arrival of foreign refugees that are mostly Sunnis is used by the country's elites to shore up their own conservative bases through the process of sectarianisation.
At the heart of the problem, Khoury tells us, is a desire to politically enforce single identities in a region that has always been defined by a plurality: “No one has one single identity. Having one identity means you are a fascist! We have multiple layers of identities, and this is richness, not poorness." Contrary to what might be assumed, this does not "automatically lead to civil wars, savagery, and massacres." It "can (his emphasis)" do so "if a structure is pushing it forwards," as is the case with Israeli Zionism and Syrian Assadism. Such structures narrow possibilities of self-identification, usually to religions. This is why Khoury, who comes from a Lebanese Christian family (Khoury just means ‘priest’ in Arabic), preferred to identify as a Lebanese and an Arab. When people confused him for a Palestinian, it made him proud.
Khoury was a storyteller first and foremost. He understood that new political realities do not get birthed by limiting ourselves to what seems predetermined, what feels most 'realistic.' This is precisely why he insisted that his novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam be first translated from Arabic to Hebrew before any other language. This is also why, unlike so many Arab intellectuals today, Khoury's engagement with Hebrew literature and Jewish thinking was deep, as his Hebrew translator Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani testified on 972mag: "No Hebrew writers today possess a depth of understanding of the Arab world comparable to Khoury’s immense knowledge of Hebrew literature and the Jewish world."
Here was a Lebanese writer born the year of the Nakba and the establishment of the State of Israel, 1948, who fought alongside the Palestinian fedayeen in Jordan and the Lebanese-Palestinian coalition in Lebanon and who made Palestine the center of his world. And yet, somehow, he also had the strength of mind and heart to try and understand the Israeli 'other.' He allowed himself to understand Israel on a much deeper level than most people I know have ever tried, and this is what made him such a formidable critical thinker. Contrary to what might be assumed, his understanding of Israeli culture only strengthened his dedication to the Palestinian cause.2
Khoury saw another opportunity in the 2019 thawra to breakaway from old political ghosts. "This is our Lebanon, male and female demonstrators chanting for Palestine and Syria, and regaining the most beautiful moments of the Arab Spring," he wrote in his open letter to Kassir: "Our Damascus is here, and our Palestine is here." This was undoubtedly a reference to one of Kassir's last articles before his assassination in 2005 in which he wrote that "when the Arab Spring blooms in Beirut, it announces the time of roses in Damascus."3
To Khoury, the thawra was a continuation of the Arab Spring's destruction of "the language of power" of regimes that are now left "without language." Furthermore, by insisting on linking Lebanon to Syria and Palestine, Khoury joined Kassir in going against the grain of what was considered acceptable speech. Right-wingers associate the Palestinian cause with the Lebanese and Palestinians who fought right-wing forces during the civil war. As for the Left, many continue to romanticize the Iran-led 'axis of resistance,' including Hezbollah and the Assad regime, and by extension throw anti-Assad Syrians under the bus. Khoury and Kassir were such exceptions to the norm that a Syrian artist in Idlib drew a mural of Kassir during the Lebanese thawra. We saw this intersectional spirit in a bombed out school in Syria's Daraya where the Palestinian icon Handala, a prominent symbol against Zionism, was drawn as a symbol against the Assad regime. It brought Khoury joy to see attempts by the Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians to link up our respective struggles.4
Looking at it through this lens, one can draw a straight line between the Israeli assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani and the Syrian assassination of Samir Kassir, both occurring in Beirut four decades apart. The potential embodied by both writers threatened Lebanon's two mighty neighbors to such an extent as to necessitate their deaths.
As Khoury would have it, both events are part of "the ongoing Nakba," the catastrophe first and best symbolised by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for the state of Israel. These initial acts of mass violence first deployed against Palestinians would then be replicated throughout our region with, for example, the Sabra and Shatila massacres by Israel-backed Lebanese Phalangist forces occurring mere months after the Hama massacre by Assadist forces in Syria.
Khoury, who was a decade older than Kassir and called him "my little brother," would outlive him by nearly two more decades. Their relationship was a model for those of us who reject the cynicism at the heart of the Lebanese establishment. To support justice in both Palestine and Syria, therefore, is to reject entire mechanisms put in place to separate these two struggles. To do so in Lebanon is to also recognize that freedom for the Lebanese is not possible without freedom for Palestinians and Syrians as neither the Israeli establishment nor the Syrian one have ever tolerated having free neighbors.
Giselle was the co-founder of SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom in honor of her husband Samir Kassir. Her family name comes from a previous marriage (to an Elie Khoury, not to be confused with Elias Khoury).
This is no different than Refaat Al-Areer including “Israeli Poetry on Palestine” in his syllabus at the Islamic University of Gaza, which Israel destroyed on October 10th 2023. Israel also killed IUG’s president Sufian Tayeh in December of 2023
As it happens, the Assad regime collapsed while I was finishing this very article. Khoury, who was 22 years old when the Assad dynasty started, died merely 3 months before it ended.
This reminds me of what Banah Ghadbian described as “shamiya (the feminized Bilad al-Sham) feminist consciousness” in “Give Us Our Land Back.” Leila Al-Shami and I interviewed Banah recently on The Fire These Times.