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.

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