When Theory Falters, or on the Weight of Reality
In 1975, a young and enthusiastic Bachelor’s graduate of Georgetown University travelled to Beirut to join the Palestinian resistance. Shafiq al-Ghabra's family was expelled from Haifa during the Nakba, and he belonged to an emerging Palestinian middle class diaspora in Kuwait. He was awe-struck by the difference between what he read about the resistance and what he encountered on the ground: an emerging bureaucratic structure with offices, research centers, and squabbles between the "left" and "right" of the Palestinian national movement, especially within Fateh itself. This did not deter al-Ghabra, and he eventually came into contact with Mahjoub Omar, a prominent Egyptian communist figure and member of Fateh, for the purposes of military training.
Omar secured training for al-Ghabra within the Eagles of al-Arqub Battalion of Fateh, named after the al-Arqub area in South Lebanon, and known for its exceptional role against Israel in the October War of 1973 among the units of Fateh.1 Within that battalion, al-Ghabra encountered a senior-level commander by the name of Abu Ya’qub. After introducing himself to al-Ghabra by his nom de guerre, Abu Ya’qub added:
“Most likely, you’re here for a few days, and then you’ll go back to where you came from. You intellectuals practice revolutionary tourism and then disappear, leaving the poor and sons of the countryside to bear the responsibility of sacrifice and death for Palestine.”2
Abu Ya’qub’s short but concise assessment of the class mentality underpinning Shafiq al-Ghabra was almost prophetic, as Shafiq rose to the level of a senior commander in the Jarmaq Battalion of Fateh and engaged in defending the Palestinian resistance during the Lebanese Civil War and the 1978 Israeli offensive on South Lebanon, fighting Saad Haddad’s South Lebanon Army, and acting as a mediator to solve the excesses of the cadres of the Palestinian and Lebanese factions in South Lebanon; in essence, he had witnessed the Palestinian resistance firsthand, engaged with its internal disputes, and fought to defend it.
The disparity between what he read and imagined, the Palestinian resistance, and what it was on the ground struck him—he was unable to solve this contradiction. Eventually, and after getting married, he left the Palestinian resistance and went on to complete his master’s degree in the US. in 1981 before settling down in Kuwait for good. Abu Ya’qub, on the other hand, was killed after engaging with Israeli forces and the proxy South Lebanon Army in 1977.
This is not an indictment of al-Ghabra. This is not a court. It is rather a comparative assessment of his own experience and the prophecy of Abu Ya’qub; in an age where revolutionary thought was proliferating around the world, and where the potential of a just and better world was possible, Al-Ghabra went from the field of theory to the complexities of reality — he was unable to reconcile this contradiction, and ultimately gave up on the PLO. It is safe to state that thousands like him experienced the same contradictions and were unable to reconcile them, and the ideology underpinning the Oslo Accords was thus born: we tried armed struggle, let’s try peace dividends. Hundreds, if not thousands, like Abu Ya’qub, too, did not have the luxury of “trying out” peace dividends. They were either martyred or simply sidelined by the PLO/PA.
In his 1990 book, Europe and the Arab Mashriq: From Balkanization to Lebanonization, a History of an Unfulfilled Modernity,3 Lebanese thinker and economist Georges Corm critiques European modernity, as well as its contemporary and historical Orientalist gaze in the Balkans and the Arab Mashriq. Corm then proceeds to track European modernity’s role as the instigator of the modern sectarian and ethno-separatist drives in the Balkan and Arab regions respectively. Corm examines four interlocking regional spheres in which European modernity paved the way for the destruction of social dynamics and of the ever-increasing tightening of the already narrow economic and political potential: the Balkans, Palestine, Lebanon, and the Arabian Peninsula.
The highlight of Corm’s work is a heterodox comparative assessment of both Zionism and Wahhabism, as ideologies born out of the political and socioeconomic marginalization of both Jews of Europe and the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula and whereby the only imagined venue of uprooting this marginalization lay in extreme ideologies that manifest themselves within the modern nation-state with divine providence and appeals to sectarianism. For Wahhabism in particular, Corm critiques it for seeking to abandon modernity wholesale, with no regard to how modernity can be utilized to serve liberation–if it can. Corm makes this assessment, positioning the PLO’s original one democratic secular state stance as the antithesis to the ills of the sectarian and ethno-separatist drives in the Arab region. He also critiques the PLO’s handling of the Lebanese Civil War and the reality on the ground.
In the midst of this sharp analysis, however, Corm falls into the pitfall of simplification: he treats political Islam as one continuity of the same drive of rejection of modernity and sectarianism. As such, he treats the nascent Hezbollah and Hamas as reactionary forces, questioning the former’s emphasis on fighting the South Lebanon Army instead of the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, and alluding to both organizations being Israeli-backed. This claim sounds ludicrous to the modern reader. Corm’s position on Hezbollah and Hamas, however, was that of many Arab thinkers and writers who later had to re-assess their theoretical positions in light of Hezbollah and Hamas’s resistance; Hezbollah’s later participation in the Lebanese political system; the liberation of South Lebanon; and the 2006 war on Lebanon. In his latter years, Georges Corm re-contextualized both actors as national resistance movements struggling against Zionism. Theory, here too, struggled to find its own grounding with the complexities of reality. Political Islam was, in the case of Hezbollah and Hamas, not an American-backed Islam whose purpose was to destroy social formations and to completely negate modernity. Corm’s reassessment of his own theories points to this ever-lasting dialectic between theory and practice.
Today, in the midst of the genocide of Gaza and due to it, many people describe themselves as being “shocked” by the brazen nature of Zionist settler colonialism and Israel’s genocidal tendencies. Such “shock” is not due to people expecting Israel to act “better” and for it not to kill Palestinians en-masse and starve them –although, one can make the argument for that too for certain liberal Zionists, this is not the place for such an argument– it is down to the fact that theories and long-standing statements have hit the wall of reality.
We have read about the settler colonial calculus, the logic of elimination inherent in settler colonialism—its own drive to commit genocides in the name of civilization and modernity. Some of us have lectured about how Zionist settler colonialism is exterminatory in nature, and we have repeated Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall essay ad nauseam. To witness genocide—to see Israel trying to erect its own Iron Wall over the bodies of dead Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian children—is something else entirely. While such actions have proven theory correct, they have also put us in the face of a new reality: an extremely belligerent and genocidal Israel. This is not to say that Israel had any redeeming qualities beforehand; we know that it is an entity built on death and destruction. But to witness theory being proven correct through death is just as shocking as to witness it being in direct opposition to reality, as in the first two cases of this essay. More precisely, to witness theory being correct through death proves that theory in and of itself is insufficient as a motivator for change
Theory should not be proven right through genocide—this is a moral stance, not an academic or analytical one. It is a testament to our collective failure as human beings that we have allowed theory to be correct. This, in of itself, casts doubt upon theory as a tool to describe and change reality: we have the theory, it has been proven to be right. What now? Theory is not a substitute for action, nor can it be lauded as being a value-neutral object in the face of over-reliance on it; liberatory epistemologies can only become liberatory if they elicit change in the everyday and bind someone to an overarching political project. In the West, as well as here in Palestine, theory has been proven impotent on both personal and collective levels.
Discussions surrounding the relationship between Israel and the US have undergone a flurry of confused scrutiny: on one side, you see people describing Israel as the advanced base of the US, and on the other side, you see people articulating theories of the US being controlled by Zionist lobby groups. The debate still rages on in the midst of genocide, with no conclusion in sight. I believe that part of this debate stems from theory itself colliding with reality. We have often been told either argument and have stuck to it, but became “shocked” to see how far the US would go to support Israel. The differing reactions to the US-Israel relationship, with people jumping from one camp to another, highlight how theory is an abstraction of reality, while reality itself can render this abstraction true or false. In both cases, confusion and shock are the primary constants.
This was not intended to be an organized essay, nor a piece of writing filled with unnecessary fluff. My primary concern here is to highlight how theory often falters in the face of reality, whether it is right or wrong. I concede that theory gives us a correct or incorrect interpretation of reality, but I do believe that the genocide in Gaza has proven to be an indictment of the use of theory itself as an end; it is a means to an end.
The overall role of the PLO factions, and especially Fateh, during the October War of 1973 was limited by a political decision of Yasser Arafat but also by overall weakness of factions after Black September. See: Elias Shoufani, Marthiyya al-Safa’a [Elegy for Purity] (Damascus: Dar al-Hasad, 2009).
Shafiq al-Ghabra, Hayat Ghair Amina: Jeel al-Ahlam Wal Ikhfaqat [An Unsafe Life: A Generation of Dreams and Shortcomings] (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2012), 129.
See for French Edition: Georges Corm, L'Europe et l'Orient: De la Balkanisation à la Libanisation, Histoire d'une Modernité Inaccomplie [Europe and the Orient: From Balkanization to Lebanonization, a History of an Unfulfilled Modernity] (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2005); For Arabic Edition: Georges Corm. Europa Wal Mashriq Al-Arabi: Min al Balqana Ila al-Labnana, Tarikhu Hadathaten Ghayri Munjaza [Europe and the Arab Mashriq: From Balkanization to Lebanonization, a History of an Unfulfilled Modernity] (Beirut: Dar al-Tale’a, 1990).