If the title sounds biblical, it is because the facts are of biblical vintage.
In Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Middle East, leadership has nothing to do with merit and has everything to do with genes. The genetic transmission of political power is alive and well today as it was during the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages. Leaders always make sure to have male progeny, and invariably have only one or two at the most, because their families are otherwise “modern” (i.e. beget few children), but also wealthy since this hereditary passage of power endows its holders with fortunes acquired in a variety of legitimate and illegitimate ways.
When the leader (in Lebanese jargon, the “zaiim” or boss like in the Italian Mafia) dies, often by assassination, the tribe or the religious sect immediately pledges allegiance to his son. Here I describe one of the best examples of Lebanese genetic transmission of political power: The Jumblatt family, perched high in a medieval castle in the village of Mukhtara in the Shouf Mountains southeast of Beirut, indulges itself in the title of “Bek” granted by the Ottoman occupiers (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_nobility).
Though hailing of authentic feudal vintage, the Jumblatts ironically claim to be progressives and socialists, leading a so-called Progressive Socialist Party composed almost exclusively of their co-religionist Druze members of the sect. The explanation for why socialists in Lebanon are of the Druze religious persuasion and why the reciprocal is also true, namely that virtually all the Druze in Lebanon are socialists: Socialism is a façade, not an ideology. They are “pretend” socialists; they pay lip service to socialist principles. Their leader may have once adopted socialism because it was in fashion, and his followers joined his party out of sectarian-feudal loyalty to the “Bek” without pondering the tenets of socialism. That raises the question of whether there are true socialists anywhere in Lebanon, and where would a Maronite Christian or a Sunni Muslim or a Shiite Muslim with progressive socialist ideas go to find a political home?
I marvel at the naiveté of European socialists who find the Jumblatts’ feudalism-socialism fusion so exotic that they invite the salon bourgeois-socialist Jumblatts to every one of their conferences. They apparently see no contradiction between tribal-religious-feudalism and claims to socialism and progressive politics.
Two years into the 1975 Lebanese-Palestinian War, Kamal Bek Jumblatt had done everything the Syrian regime wanted him to do: Undermine the Lebanese State by allying his Druze militia with the Palestinians of Yasser Arafat and assorted communists and radical left-wing groups into a so-called National Movement. By 1977, the Syrian Baathists could not countenance Arafat and Jumblatt seizing power in Lebanon after defeating the Christians. And as they always do with former collaborators, the Syrian Mukhabaraat Intelligence services planted a roadside bomb that killed Kamal Jumblatt while en route to his Mukhtara castle. For no obvious reason, the Druze retaliated by killing a couple of hundred of their Christian Lebanese neighbors in the Shouf District. Having decapitated the National Movement, the Syrians proceeded to invade Lebanon with their own army in accordance with the 1974 agreement between Assad of Syria and US war criminal Henry Kissinger.
Kamal, thank God, had begotten an only son Walid who was a “modern” feudal: unlike members of his own tribe, he rode a motorcycle and wore jeans; he attended elitist American University of Beirut (AUB) without a “Wasta” (personal connections leading to favors), his family name being sufficient for AUB administrators who always favor the ruling class by educating its often intellectually passable sons and daughters to later claim credit for graduating future rulers.
Walid is rumored to have led a life of a playboy who gave no indication of wanting a career in politics. In fact, in an interview with Playboy magazine published in the mid-1980s (see: https://en.calameo.com/read/0000038542ff9fadb0f33), Walid gave “cool” answers to the reporter’s questions, just as he continues to tweet “cool” commentaries today in his waning years.
It takes an artist to camouflage feudal backwardness under a pseudo-intellectual veneer. When his father Kamal was killed by the Syrians, Walid was immediately “pledged allegiance to” (مبايعة) as chief of the Druze tribe and by extension of the Socialist Progressive Party. No questions asked about merit or ambition. No competing candidates. He had no choice. And even though the Syrians killed his father, he spent much of his political career in a hate-love relationship with the Syrian Baathist regime. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, he kept switching camps between the Americans and the Syrians. Like a master tightrope walker, Walid played the on-off pro-Syrian, anti-Syrian switcheroo game depending on which way the American winds blew. Lucky for him that the Syrians spared his life, because after spewing venom against Assad for some time, he’d go to Damascus and beg the Syrian tyrant for forgiveness. Principle to Walid Jumblatt is like dirty underwear: He changes it every day.
Walid Jumblatt proved his prowess by continuing in his father’s footsteps and cleansing the Shouf District of its Christians. Despite the post-war allocation of funds to entice the Christians to return to their villages and rebuild their ransacked homes and desecrated churches, the Christians never did return completely, despite several “reconciliation” fiestas, as they constantly fear a repeat of the massacres of the 1840s, 1860s, 1920s, and 1980s. What happened to the funds, no one knows. But we later learned, by Walid Jumblatt’s own admission (https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/01/06/the-other-ugly-face-of-lebanon/), that at the onset of the October 17, 2019, popular but failed uprising of the Lebanese people against the ruling class, Walid Jumbatt whisked some 500 million dollars out of the country, just in time before the Lebanese Lira collapsed and the US dollar became scarce. What a charming Socialist.
Now Walid too, thank God, had begotten an only son, Taymour, named in honor of the infamous bloody conqueror Tamerlane (in Arabic Timourlank تيمورلنك). Still a young fellow who may have said once that he wasn’t interested in carrying the mantle of a tribal feudal sectarian leader, Taymour was shoved head-first by the tribe into that very position he apparently dislikes. Taymour was of course also “admitted” to American University of Beirut, and like his father, he couldn’t refuse the feudal lord mantle.
That is why the Jumblatts rarely smile. They always bear a gaze of resignation on their faces. The plebe demands the same genes at the helm, and so Taymour was not asked his opinion when the herd pledged allegiance to him, and for a while was shadowing his father like a sacrificial lamb to political meetings in which he rarely said anything. He trained on the job. In effect, Taymour was made candidate to Parliament, was “elected” in this fallacious Lebanese democracy as a Druze Socialist and Progressive MP, and only recently was made chief of the party after an aging Walid resigned to concentrate himself on tweeting.
As mentioned earlier, this pattern of medieval politics is not unique to the Jumblatts or the Druze. Among the Maronite Catholic and Orthodox Christians, you have the tribes of the Gemayels, the Frangiyehs, the Murrs, the Chamouns, and others, with the latest induction into the club of the parvenu Aoun tribe where sons, nephews, brothers, uncles all inherit the political staff in proportion to the fraction of the original founder’s genome they carry. Sunni Muslims too: Karame, Hariri, Salam, etc. Not quite to their credit, Lebanon’s Shiites have opted out of the genetic conference (they once had illustrious tribal names like Assa’d, Husseini, Hamade, Osseiran, etc.) to join an even more somber conference, a religious one, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Shiites now transfer power laterally from turbaned bearded clergyman to turbaned bearded clergyman.
It is worth noting that the Druze community, whose territory straddles the tri-border region between Lebanon, Israel and Syria, is itself like a collective chameleon, donning the political colors of the substrate on which they tread: Socialists in Lebanon, Zionists in Israel, and Baathists in Syria, all fake loyalties that ensure survival. But it ain’t principled.
Unfortunately for the new inductee into the ruling elite club, former ex-President Michel Aoun begot only three daughters. How sad. Women in tribal societies are deemed inferior beings to their male siblings, and so Aoun’s daughters, whose French names Claudine, Chantal and Mireille do not jibe with the family’s stated anti-Western politics, had to relinquish the political stage to a son-in-law, one Gebran Bassil, whose adherence to the political tribe rests entirely upon his continued consummation of marital obligations.
When parliamentary elections became due in May 2022, there were hopes that the October 2019 revolution and the economic collapse would have jolted the Lebanese people out of their tribal inclinations. Most leaders had smuggled their often ill-acquired fortunes out of the country, just in time. Unfortunately, the few reformists who dared challenge the tribal leaders failed to convince the electorate to abandon their “Zaiims”. Only 12 reformist MPs (out of a total 128 members of parliament) were elected. Not enough to muster any power in parliament.
For now, a new generation of tribal-familial-sectarian-feudal leaders has been enthroned in the political pantheon of the country. These young bosses may vaguely remember the 1975 war, but a good many of them know that their fathers were assassinated, and therefore have every reason to wage another war where they could prove their worth to their tribes. And the bloody circus never ends.
For similar ideas on political and sectarian feudalism in Lebanon, see “https://newsroomnomad.com/2017/03/20/circle-life-lebanon-feudal-rule/“
