I don't want to talk about politics!

I came here to find out a few things:

• After all these years, what's going on in the country I lived in for five formative years?
• There's something enormous going on in the region generally. What is it, and what's the prognosis?
• What's happening to the Palestinians in Lebanon, with all the new stresses?
• How's the fighting next door in Syria affecting Lebanon?
• If the Syrian fighting continues becoming ever more sectarian, will it spread to Lebanon, which has many of the same communal fissures?
• In the obvious struggle going on in the region between secularism and religious confessionalism, what is Lebanon's role?
• Lebanon has always had the most vibrant civil society in the Mideast. What's its status?

Since I got here, I've added a few more, but that list is long enough to make one thing clear: it's all about politics.

So it's been interesting to discover how my friends and new acquaintances react to my questions. Across the board, the answer is the same: 'I don't want to talk about politics! Khalas! (end of story). Followed by anything up to about 3 hours of impassioned discussion.

Nobody wants to talk politics because politics has totally failed them for the last several decades. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost to politics, millions have left, and most of the rest have seen their lives irredeemably changed for the worse....and after all that Lebanon is still run by the same 6 or 7 families that have run it essentially as a mafia operation forever. In many cases, the sons now rule where the fathers used to be. Incredibly, in a few cases the fathers themselves are still calling the shots (literally).

There's a couple of other reasons. Among them I could mention in passing the fact that Lebanese politics has always been run largely from Damascus, i.e., by an even bigger mafia operation. This is currently hanging in the balance, but for the moment the Syrian influence is still very great.

Even more important, everybody I've talked to so far - young or old - believes that events in this part of the world are not determined here - that the invisible hands of America and Israel (and not always so invisible) control what happens, who rules, who lives, who dies.

People who believe this readily admit that the conspiracy theory of politics has always been a trait of politics here, and that it cripples efforts to change things for the better. As a new friend said at lunch today, 'everybody says things aren't fair, but nobody seems willing to figure out how to make them fair.'

Another friend was telling a friend of his today about my visit and about how I used to teach in the village of Ba'aqline. His friend immediately replied: 'Oh that was the school where all the MI6 Brits were teaching as a cover!'

In fact, there were NO Brits in Ba'aqline during my 4 years there, and therefore no MI6 presence. We were considered by many people, self-evidently, to be CIA spies, however. This almost cost us dearly at one point, something that I might use as an example of this problem in another post. Why the CIA would want spies in a village secondary school is and was never self-evident to me, though I suppose more outlandish covers have been used.

There are, in fact, a number of very good reasons why people in  this part of the world might be suspicious, and driven by a belief in conspiracy. I'll mention a few that come to mind but first I want to point out how extraordinary - and how dysfunctional - the situation is when looked at from the outside. To do that only requires a simple thought experiment: try to imagine another part of the world where this situation occurs. When American or European kids fan out through the world to experience other cultures and land up in villages in Nepal, Uruguay or Kenya, is their presence assumed to be deeply insidious? Whatever day job they may have found in India, Japan or New Zealand, are they assumed to be feverishly communicating with spy agencies at night?

This proclivity can reach absurd heights. New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, in House of Stone, the book he wrote just before his death in Syria, talks about how the residents of the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun, where he was renovating a house, were convinced he was a spy. One person was certain he had been placed in Marjayoun to report back to the CIA on weather patterns. Huh? Yet Shadid was of Lebanese origin, his family came from Marjayoun, and the house he was redoing had belonged to his grandfather!

Another rejoinder I have tried to give - with very limited success - to this is to say something along the lines of: so, ok, let's assume it's all true. In fact, it may well be. Still, if it's true here, then it's certainly true everywhere else. After all, we know for a fact that the hand of the US is active everywhere, from Latin America all the way to east Asia. Yet, other countries and regions have managed to change their economies and politics despite this fact. What about South Korea? India? China? Venezuela? Singapore? Argentina? Chile? (and how much Chile!).

So why would people here be reasonable in the assumption that they are under a form of remote control? In two words: Israel and oil.

There's no other part of the world where those two words are true, where they determine almost everything that happens - or doesn't happen.

The theft of Palestine and the expulsion of 700,000 people from their homes (and here I'm not reporting the opinions of others, I'm stating this as a fact), as bad as it was, isn't even the worst. What most people here would consider even worse is six decades (OK, they exaggerate slightly, the US wasn't supporting Israel under Eisenhower the way we do now) of unquestioning support by the US for the perpetuation of this theft, for its continual enlargement, for Israeli settlements on the little slice of land still considered 'Palestinian', for supporting the building of an 'apartheid' wall (the Israeli term for this wall exactly equates to this word), for turning Gaza into the world's largest open-air prison...and on and on.

Why would the most powerful country in the world, which claims title and copyright to freedom and justice, support a never-ending series of injustices? The answer, according to many here: because they have absolutely no real interest in justice. And when it comes to the Arabs, justice and well-being are absolutely, utterly insignificant to Washington.

Watching the US Congress cravenly kowtow to the Prime Minister of Israel only drives the point home: the tail is now wagging the dog. How can this happen? Answer: the Jewish lobby. As one who has tangled with AIPAC and other such organizations in the US, this is something of a Gordian knot. Zionist organizations try to draw a line leading from phrases like 'Jewish lobby' directly to Kristallnacht. This needs to be rejected. The alternative is to be debarred from examining US policy, which is exactly what these groups are trying to achieve. Perhaps it will help to rephrase: it's not the 'Jewish lobby' that concerns us, it's the 'zionist lobby'. While zionism enjoys majority support today among US Jews, the two things are not synonymous. In fact, for decades before the establishment of Israel, zionists were a tiny minority among American Jews. To have opinion about zionism is not to be pro or anti Jewish (or Arab). It's to have an opinion about the disposition of the piece of land known as Palestine.

The other big thing in the Mideast is oil. Most of the people I talk to have a very cogent argument about the US, the Arab regimes and oil. The argument always ends up in the same place: rich, authoritarian client regimes and poor, desperate populations.

I'm not sure I buy this argument completely. Canada has lots of oil, but the US hasn't turned it into Saudi Arabia, much less Syria. Venezuela is another example, though it kind of cuts both ways. True, we (meaning the Bush/Cheney cabal) tried to force regime change. In fact, we were quite open about it, in line with that administration's fondness for cowboy politics. However, despite 'our' omnipotence, we failed. And Venezuela now has a second leader in the Chavez mold.

It seems to me that this is where the tendency towards conspiracy theories serves people in this area very poorly, making it easier, not harder, for these plots, if they exist, to succeed. For example, as I write this, Egypt is in turmoil, and new, secular, forces are rising and demanding enormous, historic, change. Here, people are telling me the game is rigged, the fix is in, and the outcome predetermined. If this was true, then how did the Arab Spring happen at all? True, the outcome hangs in the balance. And, true, the US, Russia,  China, and the European countries all have enormous interests at stake in the outcome. But it seems to me that the idea that there's one outcome that satisfies all these interests - and, more, that it's necessarily the worst outcome for the people of the region - is an enormous oversimplification.

Another problem is that it denies the influence of Arab society on events. Are there things that need to change in the way things are done? If so, what are they? What about the struggle between secularism and the rising tide of religious fundamentalism? What about family, clan and tribe? A friend and I were talking about this today and he recited a common phrase: 'one clan's loss is the other clan's profit'. This zero-sum approach to politics and social issues is an enormous problem, and the direct cause of the mafia form of governance so prevalent in the region.

All over the Mideast people are demanding more and different. But, if the fix is in, why bother?

In my list of two things I purposely didn't include colonialism. This is a blog, not a book.