Watching the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah from the vantage point of this Syrian opens up (at least) two simultaneous screens – both as rolling timelines in my Facebook and Twitter and as rolling narratives in my own head.
On one screen runs the narrative of a Syrian popular uprising brutally repressed at the expense of its mutation into a festering internecine and proxy conflict. One punctuated by untold massacres, collective punishment, urbicide and the exodus of millions of Syrians—a dislocation in the social fabric that will take generations to repair (if ever). A conflict that had (until very recently) seemingly resolved itself into a pyrrhic victory for the Assad regime which survives on the carcass of a failed state: its territory in fragments, its economy in ruins, and its society demolished.
In this narrative, Hezbollah – Hassan Nasrallah in the foreground, its fighters and broader community of supporters in the background – is undoubtedly one of the major perpetrators of this carnage. Its unequivocal support of Assad as it bulldozed through Syria’s rebellious villages, towns, and communities was a necessary condition for the survival of the Assad regime – perhaps only slightly eclipsed by the direct Russian intervention from 2015 onwards. The direct role that Hezbollah fighters played in the brutal warfare unleashed by Assad – most vividly in al-Qusayr and in the starvation siege of Madaya and Zabadani and the subsequent massacres of civilians, population transfer and the sectarian register in which they were coded – and the infamous baklava celebrations of Hezbollah supporters of that role is impossible to bracket out.
Nasrallah in this screen stands, beside Assad perhaps, drenched in Syrian blood and imperious in his small victory over a decapitated and starved society. Many, myself included – whether directly or indirectly brutalized by Hezbollah’s fighting arm – will have watched elements of this narrative race through their minds as the news broke of Nasrallah’s assassination. Some will have even celebrated Nasrallah’s ignominious end with baklava—is there anything more blood-curdling than this resignification of traditional social practices around food for our era of massacres? The most vulgar of such celebrations very quickly blended into broader narratives of hatred and schadenfreude, whether sectarian (anti-Shia) or chauvinistic (anti-Lebanese).
What is conspicuous in its absence from that narrative, of course, is the assassin.
On that second screen, is the immediate and ongoing narrative of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and beyond. A war in which we watch, blow by blow, a 21st century military unleash its vengeance on an impoverished but impudent ghetto, leaving a landscape of annihilation in its wake (whenever that might be) – truly, the stuff of genocidal colonialist nightmares as Ghassan Hage put it. A genocide perpetrated under the watchful and approving gaze of the United States, the global hegemon, and made possible only through its political, legal, and cultural shields as much as through its weapons arsenal. A narrative where the history of Israel’s emergence out of the colonial subjugation of our region, and its own colonial expansion hitherto, bleed into its attempt today to use this moment of total impunity to obliterate any resistance to its regional hegemony once and for all.
Hezbollah, in this narrative, and particularly under the leadership of Nasrallah, is undoubtedly one of the very few genuine thorns in the side of the Israeli war machine. Hezbollah’s fighters forced Israel’s withdrawal from occupied south Lebanon in 2000, and fought its combined army, navy and airforce to a standstill in 2006 at great cost to them and their families’ lives. These were unprecedented moments relative to the collective humiliation and traumatic military histories of the regular armies of Arab states (in particular, Egypt and Syria, whether in 1948, 1967 or even 1973).
Nasrallah in this second screen stands unquestionably as the face of this defiance to the colonial carnage of Israel and the concrete negation of its invulnerability. Famously telling the inhabitants of Beirut, in the midst of the 2006 July war, to look outside their windows out into the sea and watch the Israeli navy’s flagship, INS Hanit, that had been bombarding the city relentlessly, as it burns.
Many, myself included, will have seen Nasrallah’s martyrdom – coming on the heels of an unrelenting genocide in Gaza, and signaling the intensification of the urbicide of Lebanon’s south, Bekaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs – as a crushing blow for regional anti-colonial struggles at a moment of great peril. Some will have mourned him as an epoch-defining leader of Arab stature – as a Nasser, or an even more successful Nasser – in the cause of Arab resistance to, and liberation from, Israeli colonialism. The most vulgar of such outpours of mourning quickly blended into blanket silencing of the Syrian catastrophe in this narrative, and even tried to turn its wrath on Syrian refugees in Lebanon as immediate scapegoats.
Narratives as antagonisms
If you are to look at these two screens then a simple superimposition of one over the other, or of watching them simultaneously, is a practical impossibility. One is reduced to oscillating between these two projections in real time, producing a sort of existential nausea, intellectual muteness, and political paralysis – one is in effect reduced to the simple act of sobbing uncontrollably. The tension at the heart of the act of conjuring these two screens is beyond any cognitive dissonance that they provoke, or the contradictory reality that they describe – indeed, reality per se is not contradictory, it is what it is, as the smoking ruins of Gaza, Beirut and Madaya demonstrate. The unbearable tension is at the level of where one is positioned and fixed in relation to these two narratives.
Stripped to their bare skeletons — and without suggesting an equivalence at the level of their content — the two narratives describe two ineradicable and homologous antagonisms:
a) an antagonism vis-à-vis Assad’s authoritarian regime, and particularly its rule-of-violence [1] since 2011 and the broader (regional and international) coercive apparatus propping up that rule and where Hezbollah features prominently.
b) an antagonism vis-à-vis Israel’s colonial regime, and particularly its genocidal rule since October 2023, and the broader colonial structure that props it up centered on the US.
The logic of these two antagonisms is as inescapable, as brutal and as nuanced as the barrel bombs and the bunker busters that punctuate and reproduce them on a daily basis. By themselves, the two antagonisms do not need to be contradictory. However, where Hezbollah is concerned, the logics of these two antagonisms interpellate you simultaneously into two contradictory and completely incompatible subject positions:
B places you behind Nasrallah loading his gun, while A stations you in front of him staring at the barrel of that gun.
That is the unbearable tension one feels: the sensation of being torn asunder by these two subject positions.
Now, an analytical redescription as the above is helpful insofar as understanding the quasi-impossibility of making sense of these two antagonisms together or simply next to each other. This, I would argue, can be extended (in different intensities) to any number of cleavages that structure our current Mashreqi, Arab, WANA moment — criss-crossing axes of class, gender, religion, ethnicity, nation, etc. However, to move beyond the political paralysis, we need to come up with a larger screen that can combine these two (and many other) antagonisms in some coherent relationship.
Resolving contradictory antagonisms
I suggest that there are at least two analytically distinct and dominant models that have attempted to provide a way out of this conundrum [2]. Both of which, I would argue, are not only analytically deficient but have also wreaked havoc in our region through the political projects they prescribed:
The first tells us that it is simple. It proposes an essentialist understanding of antagonism: a simple, clear and static cleavage — an opposition to a central node — that can a priori determine and subsume all other antagonisms and cleavages (a form of “in-the-last-instance analysis”). Such essentialist understanding of antagonism can be as broadly conceived as (vulgar) forms of anti-imperialism (where the central antagonism is vis-à-vis the US empire and all other phenomena are an “effect” of that antagonism) or as narrowly as the Syrian antagonism vis-à-vis the Assad regime. In its normative disposition (if not necessarily in praxis) it can be as emancipatory, humanist, and progressive as anti-imperialism or as conservative, anti-humanist, and reactionary as Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.
Such a conception admits no space for contradictions in the first place — and thus admits no space for the very possibility of politics — in favor of facile inferences from that ur-antagonism. Indeed, its political projects — built as they are solely through a narrow logic of opposition to that central node (US empire, Assad regime) — are unable/unwilling to integrate and articulate struggles that do not fully assimilate into that logic, and are thus emptied of any positive content of their own so as to become meaningless. The empty container of the political arm of Syrian revolution is a case in point [3]; or, indeed, an anti-imperialism that is reduced to the defense of a revanchist, ultra-nationalist and reactionary Russian regime.
The second tells us that it’s complicated. It proposes a pluralist understanding of antagonism; an endless multiplication of such antagonisms but eschewing any hierarchy between them, or any normative discrimination (Shia-Sunni, Arab-Kurd, Palestinian-Israeli: all are potentially equally legitimate and equally flattened). Uninterested and unwilling to engage in the interrogation of their interrelations, it also forgoes any question of determination or causality between them. At its best, it is no more than a descriptive catalogue of many different antagonisms without prescribing a project to navigate them. At its worst, and in its concrete political manifestations in our region, it tends towards narrow and opportunistic political projects of the day (anti-Iran today, anti-Shia, anti-fundamentalism, anti-Saddam Hussein, etc…)
Reconstructing contradictory antagonisms
What is needed is a very different sort of screen. One that allows us to see these different antagonisms and to recognise the conditions in which they become contradictory. In essence, what is needed is a screen that opens up — rather than foreclosing — the possibility of reconstructing these different antagonisms (through political and analytical work) within a progressive project.
Needless to say, there is not one simple answer to this — even for a seemingly rudimentary system with two pared-down antagonisms as the two described here. But I would venture a number of (very broad) working principles — hardly comprehensive nor sufficient, a mere starting point — in how we might go about it.
- The colonial context of the region — in its historical formations, their legacies, as well as their multiple contemporary manifestations, uneven and contradictory as they are — is a necessary starting point for any such effort. It was, and remains, the single most detrimental factor in structuring, maintaining, and reproducing seemingly never-ending cleavages along national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other fault lines. Without taking into account that context, it would be impossible to understand how and why we are continuously compelled to stand in these interminably contradictory subject positions. But it can only ever be a starting point. For, colonial hegemony, by itself, cannot determine the content nor outcomes of these antagonisms that proliferate in its wake, nor does it determine how they are articulated relative to each other in specific moments [4]. Colonial legacies and interests can help draw the outlines of the political and ideological (e.g., sectarian, national, regional) structures in which the strategies of the Assad regime and the anti-Assad opposition in the Syrian uprising were/are enacted. However, these structures do not (on their own) determine the strategies themselves, the alliances that are forged, how they are coded (and/or decoded) ideologically, and how they are (dis)articulated with/from other struggles (e.g., Kurdish struggle for autonomy or independence; Palestinian struggle for independence). These questions, among others, constitute the (relatively) open space of political work and analysis.
- The empirical answers to the questions above can help us understand and describe the array of different antagonisms that structure our politics and position us differently, i.e., by recourse to the past. But any political project that aims at transforming that state (i.e., by, inter alia, rearranging, reinterpreting, and re-articulating these antagonisms) needs a future temporality. That is to say, a future-oriented political vision that guides us in the political work of the present, in constructing relations between these different antagonisms and struggles in ways that can move us closer to that future. This, of course, opens up a panoply of difficult questions around immediate tactics and future-oriented strategies. But all in function of some sort of an answer to the question: where do we want to be in 20 years?
- Any such future-oriented project, I believe, requires a radical, concerted and consistent re-alignment of our scope of thinking and action to encompass the whole region again. The postcolonial nation-state system of the region (and the Mashreq in particular, in all its different permutations) has failed to deliver either stability, security or prosperity for the vast majority of the region’s peoples – in effect, its only rationale has been to buttress the political elites of these different polities and fragment any opposition to (neo)colonial hegemony.
The decade of uprisings from 2011 as a moment of dislocation is instructive in this regard. Even if the uprisings did not directly and explicitly challenge the foundation of that nation-state system, their cascading dynamics, repertoires of contention, and transnational solidarities implicitly did. In response, the counter-revolutionary reaction has been one long attempt to invariably re-nationalise the crises of 2011 (ironically, only possible through a network of repression that is itself transnational).
Such a realignment also opens up difficult but necessary questions: What is “the region”? How do we blur the hardened material and discursive boundaries of what we understand as “the region” (within and without) whether at the level of geography or identity? How do we re-imagine broader collective political identities that do not erase the specificities of their constituent, and necessarily plural, national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other identities? Who sits outside of these collective formations, and what are their logics of inclusion and exclusion? How can we re-imagine notions of collective living and political organising on the basis of such broader and blurred lines — what forms of sovereignties, states, communities, emerge out of this?
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The outcome is not a contrived framework where these antagonisms can be explained away, but rather a condition in which they are actively naturalised as co-determining to each other. So that a struggle against Assad’s violence comes to presuppose and to prescribe a struggle against Israel’s genocide and vice versa.
It needs to be stressed that such outcomes are not a forgone/objective/natural conclusion. There is no reason why the antagonism first outlined in the early months of the Syrian uprisings should find itself 13 years later in an impossible impasse vis-a-vis the anti-colonial struggle against Israeli genocide. It is the result of concrete choices and alliances, of the construction of dominant discourses and narratives by actors within the movement and by its enemies (including sections of the anti-imperialist left, lest we forget). Nor is it a question that we can afford to ignore. Is there any doubt about the deleterious effect that the embrace of Assad by a variety of anti-imperialist groups, and regional anti-colonial actors had on the trajectory of the Syrian uprising? Or about the disastrous impact that the current sidelining and demobilisation of Syria as a regional actor and its exhausted and fragmented populace, has had on the prospects of regional resistance to Israeli hegemony?
Constructing a relationship of co-determination between different (and thus, relatively autonomous) struggles requires both the intellectual work to understand, analyse, critique and theorize (and by definition, to listen), and the groundwork to establish the modalities, movements, spaces, and conditions through which that co-determination becomes a natural outcome. A critical understanding, for instance, of the deep embeddedness of Assad’s brutal repression within a broader colonial/civilisational discourse and modalities of the “war on terror” (in its most islamophobic and urbicidal renditions) can help us begin to re-articulate resistance to that logic as a shared project. A critical understanding of sectarian antagonisms and how they are mobilised to stand for debased political identities in different contexts can also help us complicate the sectarian cleavages that undercut both the opposition to the Assad regime and the resistance axis, and to begin the necessary work of re-articulating both these projects. A critical understanding of the concurrent struggles within different regional contexts (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Egypt and beyond; around issues from gender rights, to social, political and cultural rights) and how they interact with these actors’ regional politics, can help us begin a process of re-articulating diverse struggles together in ways that go beyond narrow and short-term opportunistic alliances and/or regressive political logics (e.g., jingoism, sectarianism).
This is not to pretend that it is a simple process, nor to suggest that there are any guarantees for any eventual success — for we are struggling with structures and actors whose very existence rests on denying such conditions, and on creating conditions in which these articulations are a theoretical as well as a practical impossibility.
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Addendum
In the days since I finished writing this text, the empty husk of the Assad regime finally imploded in response to one well-timed blow from the Islamist rebels forces in Idlib — after a 54-year reign of iron and blood. It is patently clear that this implosion is in no small part a consequence (and a clear signal) of the near-fatal blow received by Hezbollah over the past months and the weakening of Iran’s axis in the region. It remains far too early to ascertain the nature and prospects of the new regime in Damascus. In the best case scenario (i.e., barring further conflict and chaos) whatever Syrian state emerges from the rubble will face an uphill battle to establish any semblance of sovereignty or autonomy: its civic infrastructure in tatters, its economy broken, its political class inexistent, and its military hollowed out (indeed, essentially demilitarised by a triumphant and raging Israel). It will be completely dependent on international and regional deep pockets for reconstruction, and on neighbouring countries’ “goodwill” for its security for the foreseeable future. Its political orientation will be deeply inflected by these demands: i.e. moving primarily within the strategic orbit of a Turkish-Qatari axis (and thus creating a direct frontier between this axis and Israel), while Saudi Arabia and other regional and international actors would compete for a secondary position.
This profound dislocation entails a new proposition in terms of the strategic map of the region as well as new and emerging questions that we have to contend with. The project of Syria’s reconstruction and of rebuilding its economic, political, and civic institutions (not to mention mending its broken social fabric) will be the most immediate and most important space of contestation. Early signs indicate that Syria’s direction will be buttressed by a power bloc of socially conservative and economically (neo)liberal forces. The first and immediate challenge then will be to organise and enlarge the political space in which other forces in society can participate in and influence this project and resist its most pernicious tendencies. Our work there has to also articulate emerging (strategic) questions that will have to be asked at a regional level once the dust settles on the longtail aftermath of October 7. Where does the emerging Turkey-Qatar axis sit vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinian question? What tools can we start developing within this new context to contain Israel’s impunity and to re-articulate a new regional resistance paradigm in the face of its genocidal ethno-nationalist paradigm?
In other words, how can we arrive at a condition in which a struggle for a democratic, inclusive and open Syrian polity and society comes to presuppose and to prescribe a struggle against Israel’s genocidal ethno-nationalism and vice versa.
Acknowledgments:
This essay originates in a number of recent short interactions with the always thoughtful, if ever provocative, friend Amr Saed Eddin. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues, Benjamin De Cleen, Enrico De Angelis, and Rasha Chatta for their generous feedback and contributions to the reflections here.
Notes:
[1] See, Salwa Ismail, 2018, Rule of Violence. Cambridge University Press.
[2] I am following here Stuart Hall’s heuristic in critiquing dominant understandings, at the time, of class and race in colonial societies which also closely correspond to (particularly as political strategies) what Laclau and Mouffe later identify as “logics of equivalence and difference”. See, Stuart Hall, 1980, Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance; Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
[3] The memoires of Bourhan Ghalioun, the first president of the Syrian National Council, is a good indicator of both the unimaginative rigidity as well as emptiness of the political organs that represented the Syrian opposition including the SNC, the Syrian Coalition and the Coordination Committee. See, برهان غليون، ٢٠١٩، عطب الذات: وقائع ثورة لم تكتمل. الشبكة العربية للأبحاث والنشر، بيروت.
[4] An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is to consider Hall’s inversion of “economic determinancy” over ideology into one that operates “in the first instance” rather than “in the last instance”: “The economic provides the repertoire of categories which will be used, in thought. What the economic cannot do is (a) to provide the contents of the particular thoughts of particular social classes or groups at any specific time; (b) to fix or guarantee for all time which ideas will be made use of by which classes. The determinancy of the economic for the ideological can, therefore, be only in terms of the former setting the limits for defining the terrain of operations, establishing the ‘raw materials’ of thought.” See, Stuart Hall, 1986, The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2).
