Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (26 page)

Americans are hardly the only ones disturbed by him and his party. Secular Tunisians across the political spectrum find Ennahda alarming.

“It is a fascist party,” said Rami Sghayier, a local activist with Amnesty International. “They tried to convince people they’re just defending religion and they won the election that way, but they have a fascist program. They’re protecting the Salafists and other extremists. We don’t only have the Salafists here—we also have Hizb ut-Tahrir. The interior minister did not even move his finger when the Tunisian national flag was attacked at Manouba University by Salafists. They took down our country’s flag and replaced it with their black flag.”

It’s important to note, though, that Ennahda
campaigned
on a moderate platform. Ghannouchi didn’t pimp his creepy ideology during the election season, nor did he serve in the government. (He was an influential party head, but he had no more actual power than Bill Clinton or Sarah Palin in the United States.) Hardly anyone in Tunisia wanted to vote for someone who thinks suicide bombers are healthy role models for their sons and daughters. Hardly anyone in Tunisia wanted to transform their country into the Gaza of Africa. Ennahda was forced by the society and its coalition partners in government to surrender to Tunisianity.

“There is a potential for extremism in Ennahda’s philosophy,” said Ounaies, the former foreign minister. “But they will try to adapt and become pragmatic so they can stay in power and be admitted by the Tunisians and by the world. Any ideology based on religion is extremist, but that is not the Tunisian way.”

Indeed, it is not the Tunisian way. Tunisia, perhaps more than any other country in the Arab world, save Morocco, values moderation and centrism.

“Tunisia has always favored the center and rejected extremism,” says professor Largueche, “and Ennahda has started to grasp that. So they’re changing. Salafism has always been rejected in Tunisia. In the 19th century, Wahabbism was also rejected. Mohammad Abdul Wahhab in Saudi Arabia asked the bey of Tunisia to adopt it, but religious leaders here asked the bey to reject this school of thought. They didn’t want it.”

One of the most important developments after the revolution was Ennahda’s formal announcement that it supports a secular state and not an Islamic one. “That was the one big impediment in the way of a secular constitutional framework,” said professor Dassy. “Fifty percent of the problem is now resolved. But even though Ennahda dropped the Sharia provision, there is no guarantee it will protect individual liberties, political freedoms or women’s rights—that’s the other half.”

The country could still go either way then. Plenty of things can and usually do go wrong after revolutions, especially in countries like Tunisia that, while politically liberal in some ways, have only a little experience with working democracy.

“My feeling is that Tunisia will cross five years of uncertainty,” said Ounaies. “But the trend is toward a strong Arab democratic society. Within five years I think we will stabilize with a new legislative assembly and create a new tradition of democratic rule in the country. We are the ones who are creating this pattern of Arab politics. We are the first.”

Tunisia’s relations with the West after the revolution were better than one might expect, considering the fact that Islamists won almost half the votes in the first election and that the U.S. and Europe tacitly supported the former dictatorship.

Secretary of State Hedi Ben Abbes—who was from a secular liberal party, by the way, not Ennahda—described American-Tunisian relations as “state of the art.”

“The relationship has never been so good,” he said. “It hasn’t always been good, but it’s excellent now because the United States pays great attention to human rights and universal values. We also subscribe to those principles since we are involved in a democratic process. We believe in transparency, good governance, the separation of powers, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on and so forth. These values make Tunisia a model country in the Arab world. I’m crossing my fingers because it’s a very delicate process. What we are sure of, though, is that we will never go back to dictatorship.”

Tunisia’s relations with Israel remained terrible, though. The two countries don’t even
have
diplomatic relations. A loud minority even clamored to forever ban normalization of ties in the new constitution. But even Ennahda went on the record and said that’s not going to happen, that the constitution is no place to regulate relationships between states.

I suspect that Tunisia, once things settle down, may have more in common politically with Turkey than with any Arab system of government. Turkey has plenty of problems, but it’s in much better shape than most Arab states. Islamists and secularists are more or less evenly matched in both places. They scrap with each other ideologically rather than with bullets and car bombs. Neither is able to fully dominate the other.

Tunisia has advantages over Turkey, however, insofar as it’s less culturally self-referential and more open to the world beyond its frontiers.

“Turkey is closed,” said Touiti, the international-relations professor. “They have not a second language. They only speak Turkish. Ataturk taught them that Turkey is the only civilization they should believe in. Habib Bourguiba kept the French language and forged international relations with the European Union. Turkey is more nationalist. We are more open.”

So while the Arab Spring soured in Egypt, Libya and Syria, the place where it was born looked better every year. If Tunisia succeeds—and if it becomes a model for others—for that we can partly thank Carthage and Rome.

Chapter Eleven

Lebanon’s Israel Syndrome

Beirut, 2013

Lebanon has a serious problem with Israel. The country has technically been at war with its southern neighbor since the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. Israeli citizens are banned. Even foreigners are banned if they have Israeli stamps in their passports. Lebanese citizens aren’t allowed to have any communication of any kind with Israelis anywhere in the world. If citizens of the two countries meet, say, on a beach in Cyprus or in a bar in New York, the Lebanese risks prison just for saying hello. Israel doesn’t even exist on Lebanese maps.

At the same time, with the possible exception of Morocco, Lebanon is in important ways the least anti-Israel country in the Arab world. Indeed, decades ago many Israelis assumed it would be among the first Arab countries to sign a peace treaty. It made sense at the time. With its enormous one-third-Christian minority (it used to have an outright Christian majority), it’s the least Muslim and most religiously diverse of all the Arab countries. And since a huge number of its Christians insist they aren’t even Arabs, Lebanon might be the least Arab of the Arabic-speaking countries. Its capital, Beirut, has more in common with Tel Aviv than with any Arab city, including others in Lebanon. Put simply, Lebanon is just about the only Arab country where Israel can find natural allies.

Decades ago, many Israelis believed Lebanon would be the first Arab country to make peace, yet today it’s widely assumed that Lebanon will be the
last
Arab country to make peace with Israel.

It’s a paradox, but that’s Lebanon for you. To say it’s a nation of contradictions is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it is true. It is simultaneously Western and Eastern, Christian and Muslim, modern and feudal, democratic and illiberal, secular and sectarian, cosmopolitan and parochial, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and aggressively hateful. That’s because there is more than one Lebanon.

The country is divided roughly into Christian, Sunni and Shia thirds, with a 10 percent Druze population to make things even more complicated. The Christians have had ties with the West for centuries. Most of the Shias look to Iran for leadership and support. The Sunnis are generally aligned with the more liberal and moderate forces in the Arab world, as well as with the Saudis. Thanks to all of this, as well as Lebanon’s location between Israel and Syria, Lebanon gets sucked into regional conflicts.

And because Lebanon was a vassal state of Syria, and because it’s where Hezbollah lives, even discussing peace and normal relations with Israel can get you imprisoned or killed. That’s been the case since the middle of Lebanon’s civil war, when international peacekeepers withdrew from Beirut and Syria’s ruling Assad family came to dominate Lebanese politics.

Lebanon is more or less a free country that protects freedom of speech, but on the Israeli question it is effectively a police state. Lebanese are afraid to talk to each other about it. They’ll talk to me, though, because I’m an outsider. They’re extremely careful, of course, and much of what they say is strictly in confidence, but once in a while someone will talk to me on the record, knowing perfectly well that I’m going to publish what they have to say.

*  *  *

I’ve been working in Lebanon on and off since 2005, and things changed after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011.

The red line on Israel isn’t as bright as it used to be. Except for the usual warmongering rhetoric from Hezbollah, I sense more moderation and sanity than I used to. It doesn’t surprise me. Peace between Israel and Lebanon is still a long way off, but the possibility is now at least conceivable, mainly because the end of Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad will be the beginning of the end for Hezbollah. And they’re the ones who enforce the red line on Israel.

This became clear to me when I had lunch with Mosbah Ahdab, a Sunni politician and former member of parliament from Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city.

“Lebanon’s post-Assad transition is going to be tough,” he said as we shared a bottle of wine in his living room, “because we have Hezbollah still around. But Hezbollah will be cut down to a more realistic size. They will still have their weapons, but they can’t continue provoking the tens of millions of people who live around here that they’ve been aggressive to all these years.”

Indeed, Hezbollah will be surrounded by enemies. With the Assad family out of power in Syria, Hezbollah will be left exposed as a Shia minority in a Sunni-majority region. Their immediate neighbors are Jews, Christians and Druze, none of whom have the time, patience or tolerance for an Iranian proxy militia in the eastern Mediterranean.

“There will be the real possibility of development,” Ahdab said. “We could have train service all the way down to Cairo. It could be fantastic.”

Michael Young, the opinion-page editor of Beirut’s
Daily Star
newspaper, once said that Lebanon is a place where what isn’t said matters just as much as what is. This was one of those times.

Look at a map. The only way a train can travel from Beirut to Cairo is by passing through Israel. Lebanon and Israel will need an open border and normal relations before something like that could even get started. Yet a former member of parliament—not a Christian, but a Sunni Muslim—is openly, if a little obliquely, discussing it.

But he can’t discuss it with the Israelis. He can’t talk about anything with Israelis or he’ll go to jail. And he isn’t happy about that at all.

“I was once invited to a European Union conference,” he told me. “There was an Israeli guy from the website BitterLemons.net sitting near me and trying to talk to me. There was a camera around and I couldn’t respond. When the session started, he said to the president that he didn’t know why he was invited to a place where people from Arab countries are present and refuse to speak with him. When it was my turn to speak, I addressed the president. I said, ‘The previous gentleman is totally right. It’s ridiculous to be unable to communicate, but the laws in my country forbid me from speaking to him. I’ll go to jail.’”

I’ve heard lots of stories like this over the years from Lebanese and Israelis. Israelis are offended when they run into Lebanese people who refuse to acknowledge them, but Ahdab isn’t kidding when he says he’ll go to prison. He used to be part of the government, but he’s afraid of that government’s laws. And if he had tried to change the law when he was in parliament, he almost certainly would have been killed by Hezbollah or another of Syria’s allies.

I told Ahdab I think that law is insane.

“Absolutely,” he said.

But what if there’s a new regime in Damascus? What if, as he said, Hezbollah gets cut down to size?

Samy Gemayel, in a long-standing family tradition, serves as a member of the Lebanese parliament. He’s the son of former President Amine Gemayel and the nephew of Bashir Gemayel, who was Lebanon’s president-elect in 1982 before he was assassinated. Samy’s brother Pierre was an MP in 2006, when men wielding automatic pistols shot him to death through the windshield of his car.

The Gemayels founded the Kataeb Party, which had a militia best known as the Phalangists during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. It was a hard-right party back then, but like most parties in Lebanon (except Hezbollah) it has mellowed with age. Today, the Kataeb has more in common with European social democratic parties than with its militant and ruthless old self.

I met Samy Gemayel in his office in the mountains above Beirut and asked what he thinks might change in Lebanon without the Assad regime next door, especially if it also means a chastened and weakened Hezbollah. And, I added, “will there be any possibility that people might at least start discussing a Lebanese-Israeli peace track with a new government in Syria? Nobody even talks about it now, even though Israel and Syria have negotiated repeatedly.”

“It’s a syndrome of the Lebanese people,” he said. “For 20 years anyone who even opened his mouth and said we should think about having a peace treaty with Israel went to prison or was killed.”

That was because of the Syrians and Hezbollah.

“People are afraid,” he said. “It’s like someone who has been in prison for 30 years. When he gets out of prison, he’s afraid to walk on the street and talk to people. It’s the same for the Lebanese people. They haven’t gotten over this syndrome. Especially since Hezbollah is here to remind them.”