Raising support

Despite political deadlock and economic meltdown, Lebanon is set to send in coming days 2,000 tonnes of humanitarian to the Egyptian port of Al-Arish for delivery to war-devastated Gaza. Palestinian activist Nazih Bekai told Lebanon’s L’Orient Today website that during February leading Lebanese and Palestinian activists and religious figures decided Lebanon should launch an aid drive as Israel had allowed more supplies to enter Gaza than earlier due to international pressure.

The Sunni community’s main clerical body, Dar al-Fatwa has played a leading role in raising support for the campaign which was promoted by the Mufti of the Bekaa Sheikh Ali Gezzawi.

Lebanese and Palestinian businessmen and merchants donated generously – some as much as $10,000 – while financially challenged citizens gave $3 or $4 “because the situation in Lebanon is also stark,” Bekai stated.

L’Orient Today quoted Shaikh Ziad Haifa from Dar al-Fatwa who said that Palestinian and Lebanese women “even sold some of their Jewellery to donate to Gaza, and we know what it means for a woman to sell their gold in our culture.” He said people of different religions and backgrounds have contributed.

Shaikh Haifa said there are both religious and humanitarian aspects motivating Dar al-Fatwa. “People across the world are donating and sympathising with Gaza. We are their neighbours, it’s our duty to help in any small way we can. God will ask us what we did for our neighbours they were starving and in need of aid.” He pointed out that Lebanese “know about war, siege and starvation.”

Lebanese have faced Israeli invasion, siege, and occupation from 1978-2000 and in 1982-1985 and 2006. Lebanese suffered civil wars in 1958 and 1975-1990, and acute famine during and after World War I. Around 200,000 residents of Mount Lebanon were estimated to have died during the famine caused by locusts who consumed crops and an Ottoman blockade which prevented food from Syria entering Lebanon.

Since 2019, Lebanon has been afflicted with the worst economic situation of any country since the middle of the 19th century, according to the World Bank. This began with banking collapse, and a shortage of foreign currency to support middle and upper-middle class lifestyles based on imports. These developments caused a dramatic devaluation of the country’s currency, high inflation, regular power outages, radically diminished salaries in both the public and private sectors, soaring unemployment, and a poverty rate of 50 per cent. Between 2019 and 2021, the economy shrank by 53.4 per cent, the highest contraction the world.

The economic crisis has been compounded by mismanagement, corruption, and unceasing wrangling among Lebanon’s sectarian politicians who prevented governments of the day to enact deep economic and financial reforms required to secure billions of dollars in loans and grants to refloat the economy. The May 2022 legislative election infused new blood into parliament but did not halt stasis and change the downward trajectory of the dire politico-economic situation. Since President Michel Aoun retired in October 2022, the chamber of deputies has failed to elect a replacement, leaving the country to be guided by a caretaker cabinet which cannot take major decisions.

To make the situation worse, Beirut has been caught up in Syria’s 2011-2019 civil and proxy wars which have driven 1.5 million Syrians to take refuge in Lebanon, creating additional burdens on the fractured economy and deepening the unstable social situation. Lebanon has also been blocked from its normal trading routes by the conflicts and the subsequent economic crisis in Syria.

Lebanon might have been saved from its internal afflictions if aging politicians and the moneyed elite had agreed to the reforms demanded by the popular protests which filled the streets squares after October 17th, 2019. When the protesters were ignored, they demanded the overthrow of the sectarian power-sharing system of governance which was installed in Lebanon by the French between 1922-1946.

This bestowed the presidency on a Maronite Christian, the premiership on a Sunni, and the speakership of parliament on a Shia and secured other key positions for the mix of sectarian communities. When confronted with the demand for an end to this model — which had led to the two civil wars — the political elite closed ranks. The current parlous situation is the result.

It is fitting that the ship transporting the aid has been named after Syrian Melkite Catholic Archbishop Hilarion Capucci in honour of his services to the Palestinian cause and humanity. In 1974, while he was his church’s prelate in Jerusalem, he was arrested by the Israelis and sentenced to 12 years in prison for using his Mercedes to smuggle arms to the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s armed wing. Although he was not freed during Palestinian-Israeli prisoner swaps, the Vatican obtained his release in 1977.

He did not sit quietly in Rome. In 1979-1980, he visited US diplomats held in the embassy in Tehran and helped secure the release of the bodies of eight US soldiers who died in the failed US helicopter mission to rescue the embassy personnel. He went to Baghdad in 1990 to press for the freedom of Italians held there after Iraq invaded Kuwait and took part in the 2010 voyage of a Turkish ferryboat boarded by Israeli commandos while trying to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Following this episode, the told Al-Jazeera that he wanted “to meet the tortured, persecuted and wronged kinfolk in the strip to assure them that we are with them morally and spiritually.” He said his ultimate aim was “to establish a free, sovereign, independent {Palestinian} state, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Photo: TNS