Reassuring Jumblatt: A Lebanese Necessity

Some tend to interpret Walid Jumblatt and his policies in terms of mood, alleging that it guides his decision-making. Mood might play a role, but there is more to it than just that. As long as it is hard to suppose that inconsistency is hereditary, it is beneficial to remember his late father, Kamal Jumblatt, and his policies.

Kamal Jumblatt started his political life as an ally to Emil Edde, who was marked as an isolationist and a Maronite radical. In the fifties, he became an ally to Nasserism and remained on the Shehabi side in the sixties, to attack Shehabism at the end of the mentioned decade and become the decisive factor that brought Suleiman Franjieh to the presidency. Furthermore, Kamal Jumblatt combined directions and tendencies that are hard to find in one person, from Hinduism to Islam and Christianity, from democratic liberalism to socialist democracy, and from sophist inclinations to Durzi Monotheism. All these trends had their roles in conflicts and assumptions of positions and the respective rationalization.

However, these mood swings, inconsistencies, and the uncommon combinations indicated, in the two Jumblatt cases, a real dilemma: how can a minority make its way between two autocracies? One is Islamic that felt by the Druze when they assess their position in the region, and the other is Christian that is felt when they assess their position in Mount Lebanon. When the big majority gains power, alliances are built with the small majority and terms are borrowed from its "discourse" just as ideas are drawn out to rationalize the alliance and the borrowing. When the small minority wins, the exact opposite happens.

This dilemma, which is tragic in a sense, must be viewed with seriousness and respect, especially that it is the available answer to a widespread culture of tyranny to which those with the dilemma are a party. This becomes even more incessant due to the important role played by Walid Jumblatt in putting Lebanon's second independence on the Agenda and due to the fact that Lebanon loses more than the size of a certain sect when it loses the compact between its different sects. That is besides the obvious, which is that there is no Lebanon without Mount Lebanon, and there is no Mount Lebanon without the Druze who are, at the end, the sect that is the most Lebanese in the sense that they do not relate to the West like many Christians do, or to Arabs like many Sunnis do, or to Iran like many Shiites do.

In conclusion, if it is true to say that the Christian's situation in Lebanon and the region is indicative of the Arab's level of progress and tolerance, it would also be true to say that Druze's situation in Mount Lebanon is also indicative of the Christian's progress and tolerance. In this regard, pushing Jumblatt away or failing to convince him to spearhead the opposition, is a very dangerous thing as it indicates the resurrection of a project that is at least monopolistic if not retaliatory and monopolistic. Needless to say that Lebanon cannot tolerate the repetition of the Bashir Gemayel experience in 1982, or another radical Maronite encroachment that does not respect Mount Lebanon's diversity in particular, and Lebanon's diversity in general. If the intersection with American interests is acceptable to produce the second independence, it is not acceptable to recycle this project into radical and extremist projects designed to serve the interest of a sect or another.

It is worrisome that a disagreement or even a huge discrepancy emerge, today, between Jumblatt and the rest of the opposition, and that the latter, in a defensive stance, move towards halting what he had launched in the beginning. Such a movement means wasting a unique opportunity to ingrain sincere national unity, and consequently to rise to the level of the ambition that has been expressed by the majority of the Lebanese youth.