The way the Syrian and Palestinian refugees were received in Lebanon, the despicable form of the “hospitality" they were met with, and the poisonous racist discourse that has mired it, all point to how fragmented Lebanon is, and how much the rival sectarian loyalties in it feed on the humanity of its people, reducing their ability to empathize with the suffering of fellow human beings even as they are threatened with death. But the situation in Lebanon reflects – and warns against – a broader Arab condition that may be best symbolized by the miserable example of the Zaatari camp in Jordan, or the border closures in the Iraqi - Jordanian - Syrian triangle in the faces of human beings who are in desperate need of shelter and compassion. Here, one can't help but compare this situation to the conditions of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. While not ideal, they are many orders of magnitude better than the conditions in the “sisterly" Arab countries that are ravaged by snowballing civil and sectarian rivalries. Yet this is nothing new, albeit we rediscover it with every major event, and each time significantly worse than the previous time. Perhaps it is possible to identify the date that this phenomenon began in our modern post-independence history as being the Catastrophe of 1948 in Palestine, which coincided with the independences of the countries of the Arab Levant. Back then, the lack of human compassion and actual brotherhood somehow coexisted with the pompous slogan about “pan-Arab" brotherhood with all sides vying to claim to cling to the “Arabs' principal cause", i.e. Palestine. Then the second Gulf War came, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, bringing an unprecedented peak in the racist exchanges among “brothers": Egyptians were expelled from Iraq, and Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis were expelled from the Gulf, amid mutual jingoistic backbiting whose champions all still vowed that they were the ones who wanted to liberate Palestine! Let us say, here, that the flaw is inherent to broad popular cultures that go beyond political and ideological alignments. We encounter this flaw, for example, in the poisoned goods exchanged between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, and also in the unpleasant frictions between the Free Syrian Army in the Kurdish or urban areas liberated from the control of the Assad regime. It is high time for us to come to the conclusion that – if we put aside the prevailing hypocrisy about brotherhood and pan-Arabism – any contact between two unhealthy bodies (and all our bodies are unhealthy) takes us one step further towards barbarism and undermines our humanity, in addition to further shaking our already shaken national fabrics. As important and necessary denouncing racism is, always, such a denouncement will become mere elitist pontification with little effect if not coupled with another approach in dealing with those bodies, one that attempts to address the essence of their unhealthiness. In Lebanon for example, a serious opportunity was missed to deal with the Christian situation and its fears through the Orthodox plan for the electoral law. This is while the Syrian revolution has squandered a serious opportunity to tackle the Kurdish situation and fears. The fact of the matter is that the fears, here and there, are not something contrived, or undue and unjustifiable self-indulgence, or indeed sectarianism that is lacking in evidence and arguments. For in turn, the path to solving these problems depends on developing another political and cultural vision, in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, that would replace the centralism of today with federalism, and tyrannical homogeneity with ethnic, religious and confessional pluralism. This, in all likelihood, is our last chance to save the homelands that we say we want to save, and to preserve what's left of our humanity.
