A Question of Faith in Humanity: Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments and

Other Beirut Fragments

Caroline Rooney

I will begin this chapter with a brief reference to a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre

Musique, his Dantesque film on the hell of war, the purgatory of humanity and

heavenly imaginings.1 In the scene referred to, a taxi cruises through the war-scape of

a post-siege Sarajevo, which serves to set in motion thoughts on the effects of civil

war on human nature. One of the observers in the taxi, a man with a markedly hollow-

eyed look, comments:

The atrocity of annihilation is irreversible. The trust in the world that terror

destroys is irretrievable. To see your fellow man turn on you breeds a feeling

of deep-rooted horror. Violence severs the lifeline.

In Beirut Fragments, sub-titled A War Memoir, a work that reflects on the effects of

civil war and states of siege in Beirut, Jean Said Makdisi offers a similar reflection,

stating:

The worst danger of all, in this bloodbath into which we have been plunged, is

not the loss of life, but the loss of faith. I don’t mean loss of faith in God: I

mean loss of faith in humanity and in each other.2

These two statements serve to introduce the question of not only what stands to be

lost through the experience of humanity’s violence against itself but of what it means

to bear witness to this. In his preface to Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk puts forward the

following succinct clarification of journalism’s purpose: ‘watching and witnessing

history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections,

recording it as honestly as we can.’3 Fisk begins his witnessing of Lebanon’s recent

history with, significantly, a journey to Auschwitz followed by an account of the

foundation of the state of Israel and its consequence of forcing of Palestinians into the

predicament of the ‘new refugees’. Following Fisk’s lead, I wish to begin a

consideration of literature treating of Beirut ’82, as well as of Lebanon’s civil war,

with a brief reflection on the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The fact that Fisk begins his book with a remembrance of Auschwitz indicates

that this is indeed the particularly pertinent place to start in order to come to terms

with the violence experienced by Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.

One reason is, as just touched on, the predicament of Palestinian refugees, where

Lebanon has had to suffer the repeated aggression of Israel against the Palestinian

resistance. Another reason is that the Phalangists, who carried out the massacres of

Sabra and Shatila while aided by the Israeli army, were a militia originally formed

partly through the inspiration of the proto-Nazi youth movement.4 What I wish to add

to such considerations is a certain speculation regarding the effects of the

concentration camps on those who survived them.

Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz, devotes his philosophical work on the

meaning of witnessing to a particular figure, that of ‘the Muselmann’. He writes: ‘The

untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name. In the jargon of the

camp, it is der Muselmann, literally, “the Muslim”’.5 Agamben goes on to quote from

various camp survivor testimonies that serve to introduce ‘the Muselmann’. Those

that go by this designation are described as ‘“staggering corpse[s]”’ and ‘“the living

dead’” (p. 41). They are revealingly positioned both as indifferent and as occasioning

indifference, this being evident in the following: ‘In this phase [of physical decline],

they became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded

themselves from all relations to their environment [...] No one felt compassion for the

Muslim.’ (p. 43)

Agamben retains the term ‘Muselmann’ or ‘Muslim’ throughout his book,

whereas Primo Levi (Agamben’s key source) choses an alternative designation for the

dying Jews, ‘the drowned’ or drowning, as we also use the term ‘sinking’ to speak of

the downward turn of the terminally ill.6 Why did the surviving Jews choose the term

‘Muslim’ for the dying Jews? Primo Levi comments: ‘“Two explanations for it have

been advanced, neither very convincing: fatalism, and the head bandages that could

resemble a turban.’” (quoted by Agamben, p. 77) Agamben also directs our attention

to an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica which reads: ‘Muselmann: “Used mainly at

Auschwitz, the term appears to derive from the typical attitude of certain deportees,

that is, staying crouched on the ground, legs bent in Oriental fashion, faces rigid as

masks.”’ (p. 45)

While we may never know exactly how the term came to be used, where does

this imagery come from? It is clearly consonant with European Orientalist

stereotypes, as analysed by Edward Said.7 It is also central to the German idealist

philosophical tradition, as discussed by Gil Anidjar.8 As Anidjar notes, Hegel

identifies the attributes of Oriental people as ‘their’ fatalism and passivity.9 In

addition to the dying Jews being called ‘Muslim’, they were apparently called

‘camels’ and ‘tired sheiks’, according to Agamben, this reinforcing the diagnosis of

an Orientalist mode of categorisation.

What can be gleaned from the perspectives of the camp survivors is that they

needed decisively to other the dying Jews for two main reasons. The one, mentioned

by Levi, is that the Nazis selected the most unhealthy for each batch of killing;

therefore, inmates were placed in a position of trying to distinguish themselves from

the hard to save as an act that could make all the difference to surviving. The other

perspective, offered by Bettleheim, is that the relatively coping Jews were afraid of

catching the fatalist apathy of those going under.10 A further consideration could be

that the imposed passivity of those witnessing the decline of their fellows may have

prompted designating the most helpless as ‘non-Jews’ or ‘Muslims’ as a means of

coping with the unbearable. Furthermore, regarding the concerns of this essay, there is

the question of why the dying Jews were assigned to another faith where this faith

appears to be aligned with a certain loss of faith, one prompting the speculation of:

whose loss of faith and in what? Do the survivors lose faith in the dying, or do the

dying lose faith in those who have abandoned them? And is it a case of loss of faith in

humanity or in God?

Agamben’s fascinated contemplation of the Musselmann concerns his

understanding of this extreme instance of ‘bare life’, barely alive, in terms of an

aporetic cipher. The philosophical question for Agamben is one of how to bear

witness to humans who have lost their humanity through ‘de-subjectification’ and

therefore constitute the untestifiable. Agamben realises that in his positing of the

Muselmann as inhuman, he risks a complicity with the racism of the Nazis, stating:

‘Simply to deny the Muselmann’s humanity would be to accept the verdict of the SS

and to repeat their gesture.’ (p. 63) He attempts to avoid this complicity through

describing the dying Jews as simultaneously human and inhuman which constitutes

for him a universal condition. Agamben’s notion of the human is predicated on the

subject as divided from himself, and I would suggest that the implicit paradigm at

stake in Agamben’s assumptions is the Gothic one of the döppelganger. That is, the

human here is a Dr Jekyll who is also an inhuman or un-subjectified Mr Hyde.11

Agamben writes: ‘Muselmann and witness, the inhuman and the human are

coextensive and, at the same time, non-coincident; they are divided and nevertheless

inseparable.’ (p. 151)

This implicit paradigm of the double would explain why Agamben’s notion of

the witness seems to rely on a logic of usurpation, one paradoxically predicated in

turn on obligatory singularity. He writes that Primo Levi: ‘is the only one who

consciously sets out to bear witness in place of the Muselmänner, the drowned’ (My

emphasis, p. 59). Agamben treats of survivor’s guilt in terms of living in the place of

others, even though Levi states that this not the case. Levi states, ‘“you did not usurp

anyone’s place.”’ (p. 91), an assertion he repeats more than once. Agamben, however,

argues: ‘In the camps [...] everyone lives and dies in the place of another.’ (p. 104)

What this problematically implies is that human beings are subject to the same logic

of exchange value that commodities are. It is widely agreed that in the camps the

commodification of humanity proved absolute, human beings produced and discarded

as things.12

While Agamben sees inmates as usurping each other’s places, eventually his

theory of the witness undergoes a substitution or crossover for it entails not the

survivor usurping the place of the drowned but the Muselmann appearing in the place

of the survivor. He writes: ‘the one who truly bears witness in the human is the

inhuman; it means that the human is nothing other than the agent of the inhuman [...]

the speechless one makes the speaking one speak’ (p. 120). Just as Jekyll is usurped

by Hyde for Hyde to express himself, the witness would here seem to be possessed by

the other who speaks through him. In what follows, I hope to challenge this uncanny

configuration of the witness as an ultimate paradigm, with respect to what it means to

be a bystander in situations of human atrocity.

Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments begins with the question: ‘How can I

write about Beirut [...] of watching a world collapse while trying to stave off that

collapse?’ (p. 19) Her memoir revolves this question throughout itself, paying

sustained attention to the lexicons of political and religious violence as well as to the

search for a language capable of doing justice to the tragedy of the social and urban

warscape and capable of refusing the triumph of destructiveness. The final section of

the book is entitled ‘Beirut: An Alphabet’ and in it Jean Said Makdisi offers us an A-

Z of the city only written in reverse order as a Z-A, resulting in a contrapuntal

affective mapping of the city that could be called a war poem. Abstract nouns and

descriptive terms such as Weary, War, Words, Violence, Veneer are inflected with

concrete lived experience, so that the abstraction of history into the mechanistic

march of terminology is contrapuntally re-humanised, in the following manner:

Weary of the never ending

War we listen, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger to the empty

Words the endless empty rhetoric which has only brought more

Violence while the

Veneer of fashion glitters like a worthless, forgotten coin in a mound of

rubble as it catches the sun. (p. 250)

This question of ‘endless empty rhetoric’ leading only to the escalation of violence is

one that is widely a preoccupation of writers of conscience. What is at stake here

concerns how jargon and stereotypes facilitate phobic categorisation as a prelude to

dehumanization, treating certain lives as dispensable. In his aptly titled essay

‘Verbicide’, Mourid Barghouti sums this up succinctly: ‘Stick on the labels, then send

in the tanks.’13

One of the particular ways in which language functions to cause divisions that

lead to violence is through a performative literalism of the brand name. This is a

question addressed in Beirut Fragments at some length and it would be helpful to

quote a series of excerpts as follows:

[O]ver the years, a terrible series of forced evictions of whole segments of the

population occurred in Lebanon, and, as a result, the country became more and

more religiously segregated.

In all of this, I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked rather like

the stamp with which cattle are branded [...] so are we all, like it or not,

branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry.

Thus the most atrocious crimes have been committed in the name of

religion. Golden symbols have hung round merciless necks as slaughter was

done [...]

And how does the brand work? [...] How does one feel as it sizzles into the

flesh? (pp. 137-8)

So how does the brand work? One thing that could be said is that it works as the logo

of capitalism works where the brand is not the product but the corporate image. This

would imply that the monotheistic religions referred to seem to function in a political

arena according to a logic of the fetish, the logo, the brand, even as monotheism is

supposed to eschew fetishism. As indicated in the above, it is less the substance of

religion that is at stake in the carrying out of atrocities but the symbols of religion;

what is done according to the insignia of religion and in the name of religion: religion

as a brand name. Therefore, this implies that a commodification of religion has

occurred in order to serve political ends, which is also to say economic ones, and I

think that this commodification of religion is widespread in contemporary forms of

religious fanaticism.14

What though is the nature of the ferocity and hostility that accompanies this

logo-centric branding or extremist identity politics? The image of cattle branding

gives us a clue in that unbranded cattle are referred to as mavericks. In human terms, a

maverick is considered to be a free-floating individual without fixed loyalties, for

instance, a rootless cosmopolitan. The important point to be made here is that the

status of the maverick is considered to be a potentially untrustworthy one. The

resentment of the brand-wielders is therefore against those who are considered to have

no loyalties, a resentment that may be said to be bound up with the sacralization of

family identities and the inflecting of religion with a logic of the family.15

Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, a novel about the civil war in Lebanon, is about

a Lebanese Christian woman who goes over to the side of the Palestinians and who is

persecuted and eventually killed by her Christian ‘brothers’ in an unnamed militia for

her disloyalty. The analysis of the violence is similar to that offered in Beirut

Fragments. Sitt Marie Rose tells her tormentor: ‘In this century no one has fought

with holy medals on so many chests [...] They kill and mutilate with a rosary in their

hands’.16 Again, it is a case of the commodification of religion. Writing of the

conflict between the Christian right and Palestinian refugee militants in 1975, the

narrator comments: ‘Violence is absorbed like a consumer product.’ (p.13) While Sitt

Marie Rose’s tormentor appeals to their common religious filiation, she comments:

‘You’ve forgotten what it means to be human. Hyenas, reptiles, pigs, don’t

harm their own kind the way you know how to do. And all that in the name of

the clan. What am I saying? You’re practicing idolatry towards the group you

belong to.’ (p. 94)

In this light, religions as symbolic systems take the place of the spiritual reality they

supposedly refer to and serve as designs or templates for historical reality. In Adnan’s

novels, the militia call this ‘rebuilding’ Beirut, but the protagonist questions the logic

of this, in a dialogue indirectly reported as follows: ‘Rebuild the country. What

country? [...] Because in this country there were too many factions, too many currents

of ideas, too many individual cases for one theory to contain.’ (p. 75) In such a

situation, so-called ‘rebuilding’ can but be destroying, or the attempt to force a non-

human mechanism or ideal onto a human reality at odds with it.17 What also needs to

be pointed out is that this case of ‘one theory’ concerns the ideal of ‘the singular’ as,

arguably, a theological aberration.

In speaking of the logo, an analysis in capitalist terms was offered earlier, but

it is necessary to distinguish a logo-centric understanding of monotheism based on the

concept of God as a single entity from monotheism as alternatively a matter of

unbroken, infinite holistic oneness: monotheism as a case of the interconnected

oneness of being on the level of the real. If this speculation may be briefly

entertained, could this be what underlies our religious wars: an endless and hopeless

battle to force unbounded oneness into the mold of the One and Only? Moreover, the

formal logic of singularity is one that gives rise to doubling (through separation), and

it depends on an analytic of finitude (that is, bounded separateness), or, in effect, the

death of God. In Islam, what I refer to above is a question of tawhid, which is often,

especially in Sufi contexts, translated as God’s ‘oneness’, although in other contexts

tawhid is translated as ‘the one’.18

The singular lends itself to a logic of the sovereign, and loyalty in this case

would be exclusive and dedicated to a concept of the superior, or one above all others,

while immediately inviting disloyalty. However, Beirut Fragments serves to present

an alternative to this kind of necessarily divisive loyalty through attending to a kind of

fidelity that I wish to argue could be conceived rather in horizontal terms.

The cosmopolitanism of a former Beirut is mentioned many times in the text,

not to idealize it but because, as Said Makdisi says, ‘to leave out the wealth of hopeful

possibility in that society would be to deny an aspect of the terrible sadness and sense

of waste at its loss that I feel today’ (p. 132) However, it is also made clear that

something of the spirit of this cosmopolitan world survives, probably because it

concerns precisely ‘that which survives’ as opposed to ‘that which destroys’. Consider

the following testimony referring to the period of the siege:

In the underground shelter, I have sat with people of all religions and

nationalities. We have comforted each other, shared food, water, blankets,

candles.

This has been a single, though diverse community. This has been the

reality. This is what is being threatened: An enormously rich cultural and

human experience is threatened with fragmentation and sterile separation. (p.

142)

This question of that which is single yet diverse concerns a poetic or non-dualist way

of thinking in which the one is the many, the many is the one: oneness as the

togetherness of the many. While cosmopolitanism is often a question of elitism, as

regards access to education and cultural mobility, the cosmopolitan solidarity of the

underground shelter significantly differs from this in that questions of class division

become irrelevant: all are in the same boat of hardship and insecurity. It is here that an

unbreakable common humanity seems really to manifest its undeniability and come

into its own.

This unbreakable bond or solidarity that constitutes resilience is what many

Palestinians have spoken of in terms of sumud or assoumoud,19 and Jean Said Makdisi

refers to this as being of significance in a widely noticeable Lebanese context (in fact,

sumud became the slogan of many Lebanese individuals, media and militant groups

during the 2006 Siege). She writes:

There is an Arabic word that has been used a great deal in Lebanon in recent

years but never so much as in those days: assoumoud. There is no English

sound-and-sense equivalent that I know of; rather it would have to be rendered

by tapping the thesaurus’s rich repository—tenacity, steadfastness, resolution,

endurance, indomitability—all these words together, with their overlapping

shades of meaning, give a sense of that noble word, assoumoud. (p. 173)

This then is the real loyalty or, better, fidelity, this resilience, one that cannot

ultimately be captured in a word, not even assoumoud. This is why the Palestinian

struggle and Lebanon’s being swept up in it may be said to be a turbulence of

universal import; a question for us all. In short, it is a question of the resilience of

resilience: the realization of our being in common, the reality of this against the

abstract idealism of the word; of brand names in the service of possessiveness and of

militancy. This alternative kind of loyalty or fidelity in the face of divisive ideological

conscriptions with their exclusive loyalties/ostracisms perhaps owes its durability to

its ontological non-essence.

In Notre Musique, it is said that ‘violence severs the lifeline’. The violence of

sectarian loyalties is ultimately a violence against what connects life to life,

ontologically speaking. The error with loyalty conceived of in sectarian ways is that it

attempts to put trust and faith on the inside of a bounded, thus singularised, collective:

it aims to make trust and faith secure in this way, through interiorisation: which is to

turn against the necessary risk, openness, vulnerability involved in both trust and

faith. Trust that involves no uncertainty is not trust; faith that is absolutely certain is

not faith. What I am proposing is that the internalisation of trust and faith in the

attempt to secure them is the very thing that seems to destroy them. And this

destruction of trust and faith has the ontological effect of converting sumud (the

external reality of bonds between beings) into a matter of blind hatred, one that targets

those on the outside who bear the oppositional projections of untrustworthiness,

disloyalty and faithlessness. It is, if you like, a war against the unconscious but not

only the unconscious. It could also be a case of the madness of a religious war against

God as compassion, mercy, empathy, love: the feelings that connect us.

The above may be related to an observation in Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation,

as well as to the very title of his book. In a complicated passage, Fisk writes of Beirut:

Its hopelessness relies upon its resilience. There are those who praise the

courage of its people, their valour amid despair, but it is this very capacity for

survival, for eternal renewal, that is Beirut’s tragedy. If the city were allowed

to die—if its airport closed forever, if its imports and exports were frozen, its

currency destroyed, if its people gave up—then its war would end. (p. 94)

This might seem to be at odds with the affirmation of resilience in Beirut Fragments;

however, I wish to argue that a similar perception is at stake in the seemingly different

positions. The resilience that Fisk critiques may be said to be one that has been turned

into an ideology based on a nostalgia that entails a refusal to mourn. In an important

section of Beirut Fragments, Said Makdisi writes of a transformation in her vision of

Beirut. The transformation begins with a confrontation of the spectacle of ‘human

ruin’, the casualties of war on the streets of Hamra. After describing the maimed and

deranged, Said Makdisi writes:

And if these people represent an extreme of human ruin, they have many

companions in misery. They constitute a kind of hideous chorus, one chanting,

one singing, one calling, one trying to sell worthless trifles, one begging, one

silent. Helpless witness to all this agony, I had come to avoid the area,

unwilling to see what I could do nothing about, too aware of the pain not to be

freshly shocked each time I saw it. (p. 85)

What effects a transformation is the arrival of guests who with memories of a

gloriously cosmopolitan former Beirut—Beirut as a glittering Paris of the East—react

with scorn and horror to Beirut in its current state of degradation and try to persuade

Said Makdisi to leave. While, as shown above, she is well aware of the misery she

lives amongst, she rejects the outsiders’ vision of her city. As she quits their company

and returns home, the following is related:

As I moved down the street, I felt a swelling confidence—one might say even

a strange kind of warmth—that grew, I must admit, as I neared the end. This

awful, ugly little street seemed in its abandoned desolation somehow no longer

threatening but pitiful. I felt for it a kind of sympathy that astonished me, so

accustomed was I here to feel revulsion. (my emphasis, p. 89)

So her commitment to staying, this resilience, is the antithesis of an idealized portrait

of the past, that of a gloriously cosmopolitan Beirut. Rather what is at stake requires

an acceptance of reality in order to affirm or, at least, not reject our common

humanity in the worst of circumstances, this being what transforms abjection into

pity. This transformed topography is ‘pity the nation’, and it may be conjectured that

Fisk and Said Makdisi do not quit Beirut, so as to bear witness to it, in a similar way.

In the above, Said Makdisi speaks of initially ‘being unwilling to see what I could do

nothing about’ and of being a ‘helpless witness’. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben

speaks repeatedly of how no one wished to look upon the Muselmann. Agamben

interprets this in terms of resistances to bearing witness to the inhumanity or shameful

de-subjectification of the human. (p. 151) However, I wish to propose that the source

of shame or loss of dignity cannot merely be objectified in terms of the debilitation

which supposedly renders the human inhuman (a term I disagree with here), because

it is also a case of the helplessness, and thereby potential complicity, of the bystander.

We may think that the shame or indignity is just that of the victim, but this needs to be

understood in terms of the spectator’s revulsion and the desire to separate herself or

himself from the victim. May not the real sense of shame be a question of failed

responsibility to others to whom certain things should not have happened? Moreover,

shame can entail the guilt of being forced into complicity with those who cause

suffering, as explored by Levi in his confrontation of the ‘grey zone’.

If human dignity, or karama insaniya, is a matter of sumud, of standing by

each other through the most difficult of times (as manifested in the 2011 Egyptian

revolution), then it stands to reason that shame, as the loss of dignity, entails an

abandonment of our common humanity. Bearing witness, therefore, should be

understood as a matter of keeping faith with humanity. This question will be further

explored with reference to Bahaa Taher’s Love in Exile.20

Taher’s Love in Exile is about a love story that takes place between an

Egyptian journalist who has gone into exile and a young European woman. What

seems to draw them together are respective experiences of failed relationships as well

as their disillusionment with the world of an ugly humanity, ruled by prejudice, self-

interest and political machinations. The journalist, divorced from his wife, has a son

whom he has left behind in Cairo who is increasingly drawn to the cause of the

Islamists. When his son starts to lecture him on the sins of his divorce, the father

advises:

The only books you read now are those that prove to you that you are right and

all the others are wrong. But beware, Khalid! Beware, because all the evils that

I have known in this world came out of that dark cave. It begins with an idea

and ends up an evil: I am right and my opinion is better. I am better therefore

others are wrong. I am better because I am God’s chosen people and the others

are goyim. I am better because I am one of the Lord’s children whose sins are

forgiven and the others are heretics [...] and so on ad infinitum. (p. 210)

As with the other texts considered in this chapter, what is rejected is sovereign

singularity, with its inevitable hierarchical dualisms, as a dangerous matter of

violence through self-righteous exclusivism and branding. While the cosmopolitan

love idyll in Love in Exile serves as a refuge from this, it is also eventually presented

as a potentially dangerous withdrawal from the world. The world that it screens out

returns with a shocking savagery towards the end of the novel as the history that has

been unfolding in Lebanon starts to reach Europe. The protagonist tries to ignore the

news of the siege and consequent retreat of the PLO, but says: ‘I wasn’t able to escape

for long, however.’ (p. 223) He receives a phone call from a journalist friend in Beirut

that awakens him in the night, although what reaches him is an unintelligible and

anguished attempt to communicate: ‘“mountains of corpses and millions of flies”’. (p.

235)

In a certain tragic respect, the witnessing is too late. In Beirut Fragments,

there is a moment of exasperation expressed at the singling out of the Sabra and

Shatila massacres by the international community (pp. 187-9): for it could be said the

international community had failed to stand by the Palestinians through all the

massacres preceding the atrocities carried out in Sabra and Shatila. Through this,

questions of historical complicity remain unaddressed.

Love in Exile presents us with a rejection of two starkly different yet

inherently interdependent responses to the horror of religious and ethnic persecution.

The first concerns a character called Yusuf who is under the tutelage of a corrupt

Saudi prince who, it is hinted at, is working with the Israelis in shadowy ways. For

Yusuf: ‘“This world, Ustaz, is a jungle, full of fierce animals. The only thing that will

save us is to become strong. And we will never be strong unless we use our minds and

go back to our religion and our roots.”’ (p. 248) This solution of a militant Islam in a

dog-eat-dog world of power politics is firmly declined in the novel through its

protagonist’s views. So too, but sadly, is the retreat into the would-be safe and

innocent world of the love idyll because the novel presents this as eventually aligned

with a death wish based on a desire for ‘total peace’. The journalist’s girlfriend tries to

persuade him to commit suicide with her because: ‘“Who would bear this world?”’ (p.

272) In the face of these rejected alternatives, both of them forged out of a sense of

unbearable vulnerability as well as out of a loss of faith in humanity, the novel implies

a need to live without conclusive solutions to suffering, without turning away from

suffering: a question of bearing witness to it, however imperfectly, and attempting to

intervene against its perpetuation.

In order to explain the complicity between the two positions outlined above,

aspects of a post-traumatic Israel will be briefly considered. On the one hand, Israel

may be said to have adopted Yusuf’s position, that is, a ruthless commitment to a

position of self-reliance based on a return to roots and military strength in a world

seen to consist of dog-eat-dog politics. On the other hand, it seeks to protect an

internal idyll of a European cosmopolitanism purified of European darkness: a Europe

saved from itself.21 These are two sides of the same coin. Seen in this light, the whole

of Israel is like a gated community: a privatized utopia to be militantly defended in a

world seen as corrupt and radically untrustworthy. In considering European anti-

Semitism alongside Israel’s anti-Palestinian violence, Jacqueline Rose importantly

proposes a correlation between psychic partition and the historical, social and political

topographies of partition.22

In Love in Exile, the Sabra and Shatila massacres are discussed in terms of

Auschwitz and Nazi Germany in various ways. The reason why in an international

context the Sabra and Shatila massacres are especially singled out, in relation to other

massacres, seems to concern this. In Love in Exile, it is said that apart from

newspapers in Israel, ‘the editorials [...] all likened what happened in Sabra and

Shatila to the crimes of the Nazis.’ (p. 246) Fisk confirms this (though less blatantly)

writing: ‘After the massacre at Sabra and Chatila, many nations asked themselves

how a people who had suffered so terribly at Hitler’s hands could permit such an

atrocity to take place under their eyes.’ He adds that, ‘Throughout the siege of Beirut,

the PLO accused Israel of employing the same tactics as Hitler used against the Jews.’

(p. 389), while further revealing that Israel’s leader Begin had been caught up in his

own obsessions around Nazi Germany in mounting the siege in the first place. For

instance, Fisk writes: ‘it was Begin, a Holocaust survivor whose own family was

murdered by the Nazis in Poland, who repeatedly—through the long summer weeks

of the Beirut siege—drew comparisons between the Lebanon invasion and the 1939-

45 war. It was he who portrayed himself in a letter to President Reagan that summer

as marching to “Berlin” in order to liquidate Hitler’. (p. 390)

In The Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar importantly, with sensitive

balance, explores the ways in which the Holocaust is used to justify the displacement

of the Palestinians at the same time that Arab resistance to such is construed as ‘Nazi’,

while certain Arab commentators counter-deploy the terminology in question. Achcar

writes: ‘On what grounds can Israeli writers criticize their Arab counterparts (the

great majority of whom are poorly informed about the Holocaust) for comparing

Zionism to Nazism, when the Israeli media and Israeli political leaders (who know a

great deal about it) have never hesitated and still do not hesitate to compare Arab

political forces—from Nasserism to the Baath and the various governments it has

spawned to the Lebanese Hezbollah to Nazism?’23

Arafat was not the first one to draw attention to Begin’s tactics as fascist. In

1948, a letter signed by 26 Jews appeared in the New York Times on the occasion of

Begin’s visit to America.24 The letter sets out to warn America of having dealings

with this leader of the Freedom Party, beginning: ‘Among the most disturbing

political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel

of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its

organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist

parties.’

The writers of the letter go on to identify Begin’s role in anti-British terrorism

as well as in intimidating the Israeli population through gangster methods, and they

reveal his anti-Arab terrorism, as follows:

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin [...]

terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military

objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants, 240 men, women, and

children, and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets

of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the

Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan.

Americans are also warned: ‘It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real

character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the

future.’25 Amongst the letters’ signatories, a number of them rabbis, two names stand

out in particular: Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein.

The least that could be said about the unheeded warning of these witnesses is

that it would not be anti-Semitic to call Begin’s politics fascist in that this allegation is

first made by prominent Jews themselves (while Achcar, drawing on Tom Segev,

notes that Ben-Gurion also described Begin as fascist)26. But, what of Begin’s reverse

attempt to cast the Palestinians as the Nazis? Fisk, trying to puzzle out Begin’s

perception of the Palestinians as Nazis, establishes that Begin’s contorted reasoning

was that since Begin believed Israel to be promised to the Jews by God, the six

million Jews killed in the Holocaust should have had Israel as their homeland, and so

Arafat in resisting the displacement of the Palestinians was to be seen as a Nazi

collaborator. (p. 392)

Begin, as Fisk points out, was a Holocaust survivor while his father, mother

and brother were killed by the Nazis. Might Begin’s contorted switching around of

labels and his transferential obsession, that of liquidating a ‘Palestinian Hitler’, derive

from some form of survivor’s guilt or shame? If so, it would clearly be a sense of

shame that Begin was unable to confront, unlike Levi. Levi, in writing about

Auschwitz, is in a different position from when he was actually there, a consideration

not really broached by Agamben. What is especially interesting to note in this regard

is that while Levi speaks of how it was not possible to sympathize with the dying

Jews in the camp, cordoned off as Muslim, his post-Auschwitz writing seems to be

particularly motivated by pity and sympathy for the drowned in their abandonment;

simply, he does not turn away when he is finally able to approach the drowned.

Moreover, when the massacres of Sabra and Shatila occurred, Levi mounted a public

protest, calling for the resignation of Sharon and Begin.

One of the reasons that Sabra and Shatila are said to be so distressing as

massacres is that they were overseen by the Israeli soldiers who witnessed the

atrocities while doing nothing to prevent them: even playing a role in facilitating

them.27 It seems that what is at stake is the perversion of the role of the witness.

Unlike the Jews in the concentration camps, who were truly helpless witnesses in

relation to the suffering of the dying, the Israelis were witnesses to a catastrophe they

certainly were in a position to prevent and had, as the occupying army, an ethical

responsibility to do so.

It is instructive, however, to juxtapose the above observation with an account

of the Sabra massacre of 1982 written in 2001 by a Palestinian witness called Hasan

Khiti (mentioned also in the introduction to this volume). He speaks of an occasion

when he once disavowed the Sabra massacre to a woman who visited Sabra camp in

order to find out what had happened there. Khiti states:

We were slaughtered, but our dignity and pride forbade us from becoming

subjects of pity. Maybe that is why I used to be relieved by reports saying that

the victims were no more than a few dozen and hated officials who reported

that the death toll reached three thousand. Maybe I was ashamed. I apologize

to that woman.28

When the massacre first occurred, his account makes clear that he experienced what

happened as a young, helpless bystander, and I think that the sense of stigma that he

eventually confronts concerns reaching an acceptance of the fact that he can no longer

absent himself from what happened.

Bahaa Taher in his novel writes: ‘Traditional journalistic rivalries disappeared;

everyone who learned a news story or who made contact with a source shared the

information with the rest of us. Journalists those days had sullen faces, struggling with

some kind sense of shame, as if they also had taken part in the massacre, or were

responsible for it; as if they had to atone for their sin by finally speaking out and

telling the whole truth that they knew.’ (p. 246) Taher’s point is that we are all

potentially implicated in the question of turning a blind eye, and that no one can turn

away from suffering because of their nationality or religion or the nationality or

religion of those who suffer.

Coming back to Agamben, his descriptions of the starving Musselmann Jews

closely invoke the images of severely malnourished famine victims that we

sometimes see on our television screens: the same listlessness, glazed expressions,

abnormal postures, and so on. Less extremely, Said Makdisi writes of the strain of

living through siege as follows: ‘Eventually, exhaustion filtered insiduously through

the stoicism. I remember the haggard look on every face, the circles under the eyes,

the weight everyone lost. We were living among the dead and dying, never knowing

when we would be called on to join their ranks.’ (p 180)

Does this pertain to what Agamben posits as ‘the inhuman’, the witness as

bearer of the no longer human? In my view, there are no ‘inhuman humans’; there are,

in living reality, no döppelgangers; and ‘the inhuman human’ is only a category.

While Agamben interprets the inhuman in terms of de-subjectification, it could be

alternatively proposed that the inhuman is the category, especially when humans are

reduced to nothing but that. More specifically, it could be a category for that which,

for various reasons, we find it hard to assume human responsibility for.

At the end of his book, Agamben produces some Muselmann testimonies of

those who managed to come back from the brink of death and survive. ‘I was a

Muselmann’. What is interesting is that those testifying remember what it was like to

be in the state of debilitation given that name. This shows that, contrary to Agamben’s

positing of inhuman beings erased of all thought and subjectivity, there was a degree

of self-consciousness retained in their weakness. They were the helpless witnesses of

their own demise. What is also instructive is that those classified as Muselmänner

offer quite different accounts of what this condition is like. For example, one says:

‘“You just waited for peace in death’”, and another offers the opposite ‘“I just wanted

to survive another day”’; one describes his existence as ‘“atrocious”’ and another

speaks of a ‘“strange sweetness”’. They are not even self-consistent in their own

accounts, one speaking of both having given up all hope as well as of hoping for a

miracle. As in normal life, there are similarities and dissimilarities in their

experiences, one commenting: ‘“I think many Muselmänner didn’t realise they

belonged to that category [...] In many cases, whether or not an inmate was a

Muselmann depended on his appearance.”’ However, there is certainly a strong sense

that those going by the name ‘Muslim’ were conscious of their set apart or abandoned

status, recalling the following lyrics from a concentration camp song: ‘Among people,

how horribly I die’; ‘watching me, watching me, people’.29

Agamben’s uncanny logic of the witness, in which the near-dead and even the

dead speak through the living, ventriloquising them, resembles that of the dybbuk, a

figure in Jewish folklore of demonic possession. S. Ansky’s famous play The Dybbuk,

is about a young male student of the Kabbalah (Channon) who, when he cannot marry

the woman he desires (Leah), dies so that he can then take possession of her in

demonic form.30 Channon literally usurps Leah’s being with his own living-dead

spirit, speaking through her. This occurs half way through the play, the second half of

the play concerning the exorcism of Channon from Leah. When he is finally

persuaded to leave her, she then yearns for him herself and calls for him to join her in

a union that this time is mystical rather than demonic: the ‘death-in-life’ usurpation

turning into a ‘love-in-death’ joining of the lovers. Ansky’s mystical play could be

read as a comment on the ‘oneness’ of being. In the first instance, the dynamic of

usurpation constitutes the attempt to appropriate the being of another for the self; a far

too literal union. In the second, corrective instance, the union of the lovers is possible

as a real or authentic phenomenon on a spiritual level through mutual love. The logic

of doubling, based on the will-to-singularity, is displaced by one of non-dualism.

The mystical complexities of the play aside, Ansky appears also to intend the

meaning of his play in terms of an historical allegory31 where Channon could

represent a Russian Judaism that has no home and can but be a wandering soul. Two

possible readings will be offered. Firstly, Leah—the possessed bride—could be read

as Palestine, with Israel then as a dybbuk nation.32 Or, at least, this would be Begin’s

Israel, regarding his demand that Palestinians make way for the dead souls of the

victims of the camps, the demands of the dead usurping the living. Secondly, closer to

Ansky’s own preoccupations is the split between pariah Jews and assimilated Jews, to

use Lazare’s terminology,33 where in Ansky’s play Channon’s poverty and lowly

status disqualify him from marrying Leah. Here it becomes relevant to note that

behind the figure of the ‘Muslim’ Jew is that of another figure, the mauschel or ‘Yid’.

In particular, Theodore Herzl distinguishes between European Jews and the mauschel

or ‘ethnic’ Jew (for instance, persecuted Russian or Eastern European Jews seeking

refuge in Western Europe)34 in terms of who counts as properly human, stating:

We have known him for a long time [...] A type, my dear friends [...] the

dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have

always been mistaken for one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any

other [...] the Yid on the other hand is a hideous distortion of the human

character, something unspeakably low and repulsive.35

It could be Jekyll and Hyde (the terminology matches precisely with that of the

novella), with the inferior ‘non-self’ of the double substituting as the Yid/ the Muslim/

the Palestinian. And if this projection falls to ‘the Palestinian’, this may concern what

Bowman has identified as the Zionist policy of attempting to counter splits and

antagonisms within Jewish identity through the very maintaining of an externalized

anti-Semitic other as opposed to self.36

Eventually, it is possible to be a Muslim Jew or a Christian Muslim. Jean Said

Makdisi writes: ‘I am the child in equal measure of Christianity and Islam’. And

‘there is a mixture of peoples, and it is the mixture that is beautiful and holy’. (p. 140)

If co-existence is what is sacred, this may be because it is the oneness as togetherness

of humanity that is holy: not humanity as a single entity but humanity as an effect of

an inter-subjective awareness of each other.

Ghada Al Samman’s poetic and absurdist Beirut Nightmares shares the

concerns of Beirut Fragments, its translator Nancy Roberts stating: ‘The author

exposes the absurdity of allowing religious affiliation to become a basis for mutual

enmity, especially at a time when those fighting each other should see that they are

united by a common plight: their humanity and shared experience of poverty and

oppression [...Samman] seeks to disabuse the reader of the notion that: “Beirut was

living through a kind of ‘golden age’ prior to the war, which brought it abruptly to an

end.”’37 Accordingly Al Samman writes:

The neon-lit boulevards filled with raucous, drunken laughter and the frenzied

beat of rock-and-roll music represented little more than 5 per cent of all the

streets in Beirut, while on the remaining 95 per cent—streets paved with the

dust of hunger and starvation, ignorance and disease, defeatism and privation

—copious tears of despair were watering the seeds of bitterness and hatred [...]

people had been perishing by the thousands prior to the bloodshed [...] And

they had been dying in silence, in the secrecy of anonymity. At the same time,

the streets were teeming with people who were still technically alive, although

inside something had broken or perished. (pp. 325-6)

This is the severed lifeline, while Samman yet affirms a conscious pariahdom or

solidarity with the city’s outcasts (as does Khoury in The Journey of Little Gandhi38),

over nostalgia for its lost golden age, writing of the attempt to clean up Hamra and

restore its cosmopolitan golden aura:

But...would it really be possible for anything to go back to the way it had been

‘before’? No never [...] The misery of those who had once taken up residence

on the streets of Hamra Street couldn’t be so easily swept away from the

pavements of our memories. (p. 327)

While this novel contains many episodes of fanatical branding—‘[H]e took his knife

and engraved the symbol of my religion on my arm. The pain was excruciating’ (p.

34)—it still engages the utopian imagination against such. We are introduced to a man

who loves to worship God in mosques and churches, but especially by the sea. He is

captured by fanatics who want to use him as a scapegoat for a revenge killing,

depending on whether his religion fits the bill, whereby he is asked to identify

himself. He gives his first name as Lebanon, his family name as Arab, and says he is

of the party of life, affirming: ‘“My name is ‘Arab Lebanon’, and I don’t want to

die.”’ (p. 27) Beirut Nightmares also offers the following, implicitly anti-Hegelian

message: ‘Lovers [...] feel no need to establish their existence by making material

reality into a kind of outward material embodiment of their souls.’ (p. 289) Love is

decolonizing, as in The Dybbuk, for: ‘Those who seek to replace love with the desire

to possess are the very people who make wars.’ (p. 289)

Agamben quotes Isaiah: ‘The remnant shall be saved’. And he writes: ‘The

Messianic Kingdom is neither the future (the millenium) nor the past (the golden age):

it is, instead, a remaining time.’ Agamben interestingly reverses the notion of

dialectical progress (Aryan usurping Jew, as he explicitly indicates), through the

counter-dialectical return-of-the-surpassed, or ‘the Muselmann’/’Muslim’. However, I

would suggest that what is at stake is not really a temporal phenomenon at all. Rather,

the so-called ‘remnant’ concerns the being of that which persists or is steadfast. In

other words, it is the collective and horizontal ontology of sumud. Trauma, as the

wounding of connective lifelines, testifies to this oneness precisely through its painful

moment of rupture, where trauma intersects with the timelessness of the real.

Witnessing, in this account, is an act of faith in a togetherness that cannot be

surpassed.

In juxtaposing the above drawing by David Olère39 with the drawings below, the

intention is not to suggest an equivalence between traumatic histories, especially

given the attempt in this essay to contest a logic of substitution. Rather it concerns the

universality of witnessing, as a question of standing by, in a faithful as opposed to idle

sense. Hedy Epstein, a pro-Palestinian activist whose parents perished at Auschwitz,

expresses this universality as follows: ‘By traveling to Gaza, I hope to fulfill one of

Judaism’s most basic values, as stated in Leviticus 19:16: “Do not stand idly by when

your neighbour’s blood is shed” […] To me, “never again” means never to anyone’.

In these drawings by Naji Al Ali,40 the position of the witness is seemingly with his

back to us, the characteristic posture of Handala, the young witness in Al Ali’s

cartoons. However, this positioning of Handala produces the effect of us standing

beside him, looking with him at what he sees. The witness offers in this view, not so

much Levinas’s face-to-face relationship of irreducible otherness, but a side-by-side

one of sympathy and pity, capable of dignifying the humiliated and revealing the

indignity of the perpetrators. It is this horizontal dimension of what is outside of time,

as we position ourselves alongside the witness right now, entrusted with their

testimony, that constitutes the fragile timelessness of human conscience. I say

‘fragile’ because the honesty of the above drawings is that they manage to bring

together into one space both the potential for standing by resiliently and a sense of

extreme abandonment.

1 Notre Musique, dir. Jean Luc Godard, 2004.2 Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (New York: Persea Books, 1990), p. 142. All further references to this work will appear in the text.3 Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. x. All further references to this work will appear in the text.4 See Fisk, p. 65. Gilbert Achcar also notes that, despite this, the significant model was a Spanish Francoist one. See Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. M. G. Goshgarian (London: Saqi Books, 2011), p. 78.5 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (1999; New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 41. All further references to this work will appear in the text.6 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Sphere Books, 1991).7 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin Books, 2003).8 Gil Anidjar, The Jew and the Arab (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 129.9 Anidjar emphasizes a symmetry in the characterization of Jews and Muslims here;however, it could be argued that Hegel regards Judaism as more developed in being less servile.10 See Agamben, p. 44, p. 56.11 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (1886; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).12 Agamben speaks of the camps as factories of death, pointing out that the Nazis spoke of the corpses as Figuren or dolls (p. 51), while I have discussed the ‘doll’ form of the commodity in Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 194-5. 13 Mourid Barghouti, ‘Verbicide’ M. Barghouti, ‘Verbicide’, New Internationalist Magazine, issue 359, http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2003/08/01/14 See Caroline Rooney, ‘Islamism, Capitalism and Mimetic Desire in the Capitalism Novel’ in Islamism and Arab Cultural Expression, ed. Abir Hamdar and Lyndsey Moore (London: Routledge, 2013).15 See Julia Borossa and Caroline Rooney, ‘Pourquoi la loyauté?’ in Guerre finie, guerre infinie’, ed. Chawki Azouri (forthcoming).16 Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, trans. Georgina Kleege (1978; Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1982), p. 96.17 Miriam Cooke serves to show how Arab women’s writing on the dailiness of war enables a critique of masculine idealism. See War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988).18 For renditions of tawhid as both ‘One’ and ‘Oneness’, see Shaik Walī Raslān Ad-Dimashqī, Concerning the Affirmation of Divine Oneness, trans. Muhtar Holland (Hollywood, Florida: Al-Baz Publishing, 1997).19 ‘as-’ is the definite article.20 Bahaa Taher, Love in Exile, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (1995; London: Arabia Books, 2008).21 See Caroline Rooney, ‘The Disappointed of the Earth’ in Psychoanalysis and History, Special double issue on Psychoanalysis, Fascism and Fundamentalism, Vol. 11 (July 2009): 159-74.22 Jacqueline Rose, Proust Amongst the Nations: Dreyfus in the Middle East (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).23 Achcar, pp. 207-8.24 Letter to The New York Times, 4 December 1948, ‘Books’ section, p.12.25 A PLO member in Love in Exile, speaking of Begin, links the tactics of Sabra and Shatila to Dir Yassin, Qibya and Ain El Helweh.26 Achcar, p. 209.27 See Fisk, p. 388-98.28 Hassan Khiti, in ‘Sabra and Shatila: Thirty Years On’, Al Akhbar, 14/09/2012 http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/sabra-and-shatila-thirty-years

29 www.reelingwrithing.com/holocaust/pack/116-121.pd ‘Muselmann—Cigarette Butt Collector’, lyrics. 30 S. Ansky, The Dybbuk, trans. Henry A. Alsberg and Winifred Katzin (1918; New York: Liveright, 1971).31 For a wider context, see Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstien, The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).32 For Palestine as a bride, see Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2007).33 See Gabriel Piterberg,The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 1-50.34 Regarding Anski’s documentation of the massacre of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, see The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neurogoschel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).35 Theodore Herzl, ‘Mauschel’, Die Welt, 15 October 1897, quoted by Pawel ?36 Glenn Bowman, ‘A Place for Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, anti-Semitism and the Jewish State’, in Surveillane and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, ed. Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmin Abu-Laban (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).37 Nancy Roberts, Translator’s Introduction, Ghada Samman, Beirut Nightmares (London: Quartet Books, 1997).38 Elias Khoury, The Journey of Little Gandhi, trans. Paula Haydar (1989; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).39 David Olère, ‘Admission in Mauthausen’, 1945. Reproduced by kind permission of Beate Klarsfield.40 Naji Al Ali, cartoons of 1982. Reproduced by kind permission of the Naji Al Ali family.