My friend Rouba and I have known each other since childhood. We shared school desks, secrets, heartbreaks, and that peculiar intimacy reserved for people who have witnessed several versions of each other. For years, I considered our political disagreements almost charming, a living proof that the Lebanese people can “agree to disagree,” as the saying goes. We debated passionately, occasionally rolled our eyes at one another, then ordered another glass of wine and moved on. Friendship was larger than ideology.
Or so I believed.
The last war changed something. Not because Rouba suddenly became someone else. Quite the contrary. The problem was that she remained exactly who she had always been, while I had changed: I could no longer continue extending the same indulgence toward a growing accumulation of contradictions in her positions, nor tolerate her approval of Hezbollah’s latest actions despite their catastrophic consequences.
Over the past years, I have watched many people like Rouba occupy a peculiar space within what remains of the Lebanese left. Intelligent, educated, cultured people. Often sincere, too. Yet increasingly detached from the very principles they claim to defend. The inconsistency that finally exhausted me was not a small one. It was the sight of self-proclaimed secular progressives like my friend aligning themselves, once again, with Hezbollah, at a moment when the devastation surrounding us demanded a minimum of political integrity and the courage to say: this time, at least, you got it catastrophically wrong.
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I have argued with Rouba about this for years. The absurdity never ceased to strike me: How can a movement that historically claimed to defend secularism, intellectual freedom, individual liberties, gender equality, democratic pluralism, and resistance to authoritarian structures make endless excuses for an armed religious party whose worldview stands in direct tension with most of those values?
The justification, almost invariably, is Palestine.
For decades, support for the Palestinian cause occupied a central place within the moral and political imagination of the Arab left. Understandably so. The Palestinian tragedy is one of the great injustices of our era. One does not need to belong to the left to recognize this.
Palestine as Sacred Argument
What is far more difficult to understand is how solidarity with Palestinians gradually became a mechanism through which fatal wrongdoings could be ignored and, in some cases, forgiven. Somewhere along the way, a big portion of the Lebanese left stopped treating Palestine as a just cause and began treating it as a sacred argument before which it thought it must kneel. The consequences have been devastating. Questions that would normally be considered legitimate suddenly became suspect. Criticism became betrayal. Disapproval became treason. Complexity became collaboration. A strange inversion occurred: The very people who prided themselves on their critical thinking began demanding intellectual obedience. The very people who correctly denounced clerical influence in politics suddenly discovered endless reserves of nuance when clerical influence served a geopolitical cause they support.
It is difficult not to conclude that what is being defended is not principle but allegiance. A genuine opposition to authoritarianism cannot depend on the identity of the authoritarian.
The argument usually follows a familiar pattern: Yes, Hezbollah may be ultra-religious. Yes, it may be authoritarian. Yes, it may possess an armed apparatus operating outside state institutions. Yes, it may be aligned with a regional power pursuing its own geopolitical interests. Yes, it may exercise forms of political and social control fundamentally incompatible with secular democratic values. But… “But they support Palestine.”
I have two problems (at least two) with the rationale above: First, since when does a single correct position automatically erase every other question? And since when does support for Palestinians transform theological conservatism into progressivism, authoritarian structures into liberation movements, and Iranian influence into anti-imperialism?
Next, how, exactly, has Hezbollah helped Palestinians? By defending the Assad regime while it slaughtered Syrians? By waging another war in Yemen? By displacing hundreds of thousands of people from Southern Lebanon? By helping entrench a regional axis whose priorities and interests have repeatedly proved geopolitical rather than Palestinian? How did any of this bring Jerusalem closer? How did it save Gaza from devastation?
Domination remains domination regardless of the language in which it is articulated. Submission remains submission regardless of the flag under which it marches. Dependence remains dependence regardless of who finances it.
The irony is extraordinary. It is difficult not to conclude that what is being defended is not principle but allegiance. A genuine opposition to authoritarianism cannot depend on the identity of the authoritarian. A genuine opposition to foreign influence cannot depend on the identity of the influencer. And I have always found it perplexing to hear certain Lebanese leftists speak passionately against American influence while becoming strangely uncomfortable whenever Iranian influence is mentioned. The principle appears remarkably simple when applied to one empire and remarkably complicated when applied to another.
The result is an incoherent political landscape in which supposedly radical thinkers spend enormous amounts of energy denouncing domination from Washington while displaying an almost mystical reluctance to discuss domination from Tehran. And yet domination remains domination regardless of the language in which it is articulated. Submission remains submission regardless of the flag under which it marches. Dependence remains dependence regardless of who finances it.
How Oppression Becomes Invisible
This phenomenon is not uniquely Lebanese. Across large segments of the global left, opposition to Western power has gradually become the only moral lens available. At that point, entire categories of oppression become invisible. A dictatorship ceases to be a dictatorship if it opposes Washington. Human rights abuses become regrettable details. Religious authoritarianism becomes culturally contextual. The enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. Then my ally. Then my excuse. Then, eventually, my blind spot.
Somewhere along the way, the question ceased to be: Who is exercising power? It became: Which side is exercising power? And the Lebanese left seems to have reproduced, almost faithfully, many of the pathologies currently afflicting the left across large parts of the world. Lebanon is collapsing. The state barely functions. Public institutions are disintegrating. Entire generations are emigrating. Families are selling jewelry to survive. And yet the Lebanese left is engaging in a political discourse that seems imported directly from the cultural wars of American universities, as though Beirut were merely a branch campus of Brooklyn.
One expects more from a political tradition that built its identity around criticism, self-examination, intellectual rigor, and the refusal of dogma.
If this sounds severe, it is because disappointment is always harsher than opposition. I do not expect consistency from the Lebanese right. The right, here as elsewhere, has always worn its contradictions openly. It rarely pretends to possess a universal moral vision. Its sectarian and racist reflexes, class prejudices, selective memories, and periodic flirtations with authoritarianism are hardly secrets.
The left is different. Or at least it is supposed to be. One expects more from a political tradition that built its identity around criticism, self-examination, intellectual rigor, and the refusal of dogma. One expects more from people who insist on presenting themselves as the guardians of nuance.
Another contradiction I find unnerving is how many enthusiasts of the Lebanese left belong to social classes largely insulated from the consequences of romanticizing revolutions gone wrong. Rouba, to cite but one example, comes from a wealthy family. She received an excellent education at the American University of Beirut, travelled widely, speaks the language of privilege with complete fluency, and has enjoyed opportunities that most Lebanese can only fantasize about. There is nothing shameful about any of this, of course. Neither privilege nor poverty are personal achievements. The problem begins when privilege disguises itself as rebellion. When comfort starts speaking in the name of suffering. When political identity becomes less about understanding reality and more about performing virtue.
In fact, some of the most patronizing forms of politics emerge precisely from this posture. The poor become symbols. Workers become abstractions. Entire communities become props in a drama whose true protagonist remains the enlightened activist. The people being defended often seem far less present than the people defending them. The actual working classes of Lebanon have become strangely absent from a movement that historically claimed to represent them. The waiter serving drinks. The public school teacher. The nurse working double shifts. The taxi driver trying to survive on collapsing wages. The retired employee watching a lifetime of savings evaporate. Everyone speaks in their name. Very few seem interested in listening to them.
Politics as Personal Brand
Some of the contemporary manifestations of the Lebanese left feel less like political movements than lifestyle categories. Spend enough time in certain circles and you begin noticing how entire political identities increasingly seem organized around form rather than content. Politics has acquired a dress code, a soundtrack, a vocabulary, and a social geography. The aesthetic is instantly recognizable. There are keffiyehs, tote bags, craft beer, and cultivated casualness. One hears endless discussions about decolonization, intersectionality, neoliberalism, patriarchy, and capitalism (enough political terminology to fill a doctoral thesis). Everybody appears permanently engaged in a revolution that never quite arrives.
The old left wanted to change the world. The new left often seems content curating a personality. The old left produced intellectuals. The new left increasingly produces prosecutors.
Yet one cannot help but sense an undercurrent of guilt beneath the discourse, as though political militancy has become a means of self-absolution. The revolution functions almost like a sacrament through which inherited advantages can be symbolically cleansed. But guilt is not a political program. Self-flagellation is not solidarity.
The old left wanted to change the world. The new left often seems content curating a personality. The old left produced intellectuals. The new left increasingly produces prosecutors. Not people seeking understanding, but people handing out badges of ethical superiority. It has almost stopped asking how power operates and started asking which identities possess the greatest moral authority. Politics has gradually transformed into a competition for victimhood. Suffering became social currency.
Doubt is one of the noblest and most indispensable tools human beings possess.
To be left-wing today often appears less like belonging to a political tradition and more like belonging to a cult. One no longer asks whether an idea is persuasive. One asks whether it signals membership. Political identity becomes a form of social branding. The worst part is that questioning any of it becomes almost impossible. Every question is interpreted as an attack. Every nuance is treated as a betrayal. Every attempt to complicate a narrative is received as an effort to undermine it.
And so, I find myself returning to Rouba. What finally exhausted me during the war was exactly this: the growing impossibility of conversation. At some point I realized that what separated us was no longer a political disagreement. It was a different relationship to doubt itself.
No cause, however principled, should ever be exempt from scrutiny. Because once a political movement becomes incapable of self-criticism, it does not matter whether it calls itself left-wing, right-wing, revolutionary, patriotic, resistant, progressive, religious, secular, nationalist, or internationalist.
Doubt is one of the noblest and most indispensable tools human beings possess. Not cynicism, not relativism, not indecision, but doubt: the willingness to interrogate one’s own certainties with the same rigor one applies to those of one’s opponents, the willingness to remain intellectually vulnerable, the willingness to discover that one may be wrong. Without that vulnerability, politics becomes theology.
Most importantly, I believe that no cause, however principled, should ever be exempt from scrutiny. Because once a political movement becomes incapable of self-criticism, it does not matter whether it calls itself left-wing, right-wing, revolutionary, patriotic, resistant, progressive, religious, secular, nationalist, or internationalist. At that point, it has ceased to be a search for truth. It has become a tribe.
And tribes, unlike ideas, do not ask whether they are right. They only ask who belongs.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
