The Political and the Humanitarian in Lebanon. Social Responsiveness to Emergency Crisis from the...

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ORIENTEMODERNO

The Political and the Humanitarian in Lebanon. Social Responsiveness to Emergency Crisis from the 2006 War to the Syrian Refugee Influx

Estella CarpiThe University of Sydney – Sydney

[email protected]

Abstract

This paper primarily aims at enlarging qualitative knowledge on how social settings and personal relations change while turning into spaces of humanitarian aid provision. The two major emergencies that Lebanon has faced so far will be taken into analysis: the Israel-Lebanon July War in 2006 and today’s unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees. In this framework, while dealing with the sudden presence of non-state actors replacing the void historically left by the central state, this paper will illustrate how the 2006 dis-placed and now the Syrian refugees have locally developed moral resilience, gratitude or mistrust towards the humanitarian programmes, and cultivated expectations of mutual assistance. In the wake of what has been first applauded—and then discarded—as the “Arab Spring”, a phenomenological analysis of the social changes, engendered by the temporary presence of humanitarian actors in chronically neglected settings, can offer an inner perspective of how people socially respond to emergency crises.

Keywords

Lebanon – Politics of Humanitarianism – Syrian Refugees – 2006 War – Social Responsiveness

…Lebanon’s peace can better be characterizedas a state of emergencykept in check by two occupying forces:Israel and Syria.

Mark Westmoreland, 2010

403The Political and the Humanitarian in Lebanon

Oriente Moderno 94 (2014) 402-427

∵While most of the Arab world was witnessing popular uprisings and political protests, which were aimed at toppling their own regimes, Lebanon seemed not to be caught up in the regional whirlwind of change. Such an apparent calmness—hudūʾ ẓāhir—led the Lebanese to sarcastically name this regional unrest, thirsty for social changes, “the spring of others”.1 In fact, the latter recalls the Lebanese narrative of the “war of others” (Tueni, 1985), a widespread post-civil war theory according to which Lebanon simply stood for a battleground of regional powers and seems to reproduce an eternal return whenever the regional balance needs to be redrawn.2

The Lebanese formally supported the Arab grassroots in their struggle for democracy, as their mostly West-aligned regimes—such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—had publicly rebuked Ḥizb Allāh for having kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and, therefore, caused the Israeli massive destruction of Lebanon in summer 2006 (Sultan, 2008: 10). As a result of this lack of solidarity with the Lebanese predicament, the resentment of an increased number of Lebanese towards US-friendly political coalitions in the region soared. Arab politics has therefore been said to have ceased to be distinctly Arab (Valbiørn and Bank 2012), or, I would rather say, Arab homogenously meant.

A brief illustration of the wavering intraregional relations has served the purpose of shedding further light on the environment in which social changes occur in time of “catastrophization” (Ophir, 2010: 59). The primary aim of this paper is indeed to expand qualitative knowledge on how social settings and personal relations change while evolving into spaces of humanitarian aid pro-vision. To achieve this, the two major emergencies that Lebanon has faced thus far will therefore be taken into analysis: the Israel-Lebanon July War in 2006 (ḥarb tammūz) and today’s unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees, with a particular focus on Beirut’s southern suburbs—called al-Ḍāḥiyyah—and the northern region of ʿAkkār respectively.

Indeed, in wake of what has been first applauded and then discarded as the “Arab Spring”, an in-depth analysis of the social changes—engendered by the temporary presence of humanitarian actors in chronically neglected set-tings—can offer an articulated inner perspective on people’s responsiveness to these so-called “emergency crises”.

1 This expression is used by Fatima el-Issawi in “Lebanon and the ‘Spring’ of Others”. Available online at: http://goo.gl/f3Vqlw accessed 5 June 2014.

2 On this point see the paper of Di Peri in this special issue.

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In a nutshell, I use humanitarianism as a discursive strategy to address the time of conflict, or, so to speak, the way humanitarian assistance induces peo-ple to experience conflict. Thus, local memory and simultaneous everydayness in al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s memory scape and ʿAkkār’s contemporaneity have respec-tively been the two temporal lenses through which I read humanitarianism in action.

By drawing on the debate discussed by Rieff (2002) and Prendergast (1996) around what the humanitarian ideology should be—relieving the immediate suffering of people, or, on the other hand, raising awareness about the root causes of a given conflict and advocating for human rights accordingly— I align myself with a pragmatic acceptance of an unavoidable politicization of aid provision and implementation of the humanitarian principles. Rieff (2002) portrays the dispute as a binary between “politics of humanitarianism”—implying solidarity—and “humanitarianism against politics”, implying neu-trality. In light of Lebanese history, the political has gradually incorporated negative connotations, losing its positivistic potential of being a basis for change.

Humanitarianism and the constant state of emergency in which Lebanon finds itself, moralize domestic and international politics at increasing levels, further blurring the political or apolitical actors’ agendas. Such an attempt at humanizing politics does nothing but feed further into the merely negative aspects of politics in a reality where the phenomenology of socio-political power is inseparable from the former, and, moreover, freezes the possibilities of change. The unsuccessful outcome of some of the Arab revolutionary move-ments—or, from a more optimistic perspective, their incomplete course—have heavily discouraged the regional citizens in foreseeing change through governmental and institutional politics politics. This social discouragement and increased moral mistrust in a generalized notion of politics, in the first instance, have instead led to a social trust enhancement in the humanitarian. Once the unavoidable political diversions were observed, the humanitarian, in turn, has eventually frustrated those who had initially banked on it. Non-partisanship and the refrainment from being deeply enmeshed in politics are ethical ideals typical of the humanitarian industry; which have the ability to construct a metaphysic of morality that freezes further the contemporary social impasse that Lebanon has arrived at.

I will first discuss the humanitarian agenda of the Lebanese state, and, sec-ondly, the way that the humanitarian factor plays alongside—or by replacing role—the political factor in the practices of non-state actors. I will therefore



use the interviews that I conducted between September 2011 and November 2013 in order to illustrate the interplay between the two human dimensions of the political and the humanitarian, and the way that they have been socially constructed in Lebanon, simultaneously with the Arab uprisings abounding in the region.

The Lebanese Government and its Humanitarian Agenda

By de-judicializing the term “government” we can therefore speak of “humani-tarian government”, referring to non-state and state forms of government alto-gether. Such a humanitarian government would also be meant to administer human collectivities in the name of the highest moral principles: preservation of human life and alleviation of suffering (Fassin, 2007).

In the humanitarian space, the Lebanese state, despite its over-discussed tendency to abdicate basic responsibilities towards its citizens, can still be seen as an entity with its own agency, as Max Weber (1946) would put it.3

In this regard, it is worth specifying the state role in the two analyzed scenarios.

On the one hand, ʿAkkār has been chronically neglected by the state and non-state actors, which used to have little political interest to intervene in this region prior to the Syrian refugee influx. The region—mostly Sunni and repre-sented in the central government since a longer time—has also been largely excluded and in the past has lacked basic means of transport and education services. On the other hand, in al-Ḍāḥiyyah, today predominantly Shiite but also embracing originally Christian districts, and home to thousands of old date economic migrants (Iraqi and Sudanese) and refugees mainly from

3 Lebanese State has often been defined a quasi-democracy as compared with the other Arab states for its longstanding history of public protests and flourishing associationism, which gradually strengthened the dynamism of Lebanese civil society. Lebanon is also said to be on the cutting edge in the national media sphere (whose some protagonists lost their lives for their publicly declared political orientations, therefore reminding us of Lebanon’s highly imperfect democracy). The more skeptical segment of the scholarship has often believed Lebanon to be about to turn into a failed state, usually described by loss of control of its geographical territory, the use of physical force within it, or the internal collapse of law and order. Lebanon, however, has never eventually faced such extreme circumstances, not even during the current Syrian refugee influx. Nevertheless, it would be presently unable to sup-port itself without outside assistance, falling therefore into the category of the “quasi-state” (Potter 2004: 2).

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Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Syria,4 the diversified poverty is not merely about lacking basic infrastructure; rather, the area developed a lack of social esteem due to the political nature of some districts’ deprivation.5 Today’s major public services provider in al-Ḍāḥiyyah is Ḥizb Allāh, main Lebanese Shiite political party that has founded several NGOs throughout the 1980s and 1990s to primar-ily provide social welfare and financial support to the Shiite community in Lebanon.

Additionally, the segment of the residents that no longer suffers from mate-rial deprivation, such as the recently emerged Shiite middle class, has, how-ever, made a token of empowerment from their historical exclusion.

Thus, paradoxically, some Lebanese areas, in facing emergency crises, are more able to obtain international attention and benefit from a larger number of services from countries that are reluctant to become “receiving states” (Kenyon-Lischer, 2005). The constructed need for immediate action, therefore, justifies the global management of domestic issues in nation-states. The weak-ness of state institutions in Lebanon has inevitably been exploited by non-state interventions, since the state of emergency—meant as a military alert—is “not the exception but the rule” in the region, as contended by Walter Benjamin (Aretxaga, 2003).

The institutions, nevertheless, are not necessarily embodied in a centralized authority, as the orthodox notion of state would require.

To place it with Foucault, government and sovereignty are not distinctive modalities of power: in the theoretical analysis of Singer and Weir (2006) they are rather all conveyers of authority. Provided that the concept of sovereignty is distinguishable from that of government, the Lebanese state is still the legiti-mate governing actor through which every humanitarian program or NGO project needs to pass in order to be approved and then implemented, although it seems not to hold authority on its own territories.

Nonetheless, Kosmatopoulos (2011) interestingly highlights how the image of a failed Leviathan state in Lebanon has merely fuelled narratives of state pathologization, alienation and sectarization. The absence of strong state

4 Lebanon has also been home to a sizeable amount of refugees from Sierra Leone and Somalia since the 1990s (Dorai and Clochard, 2006).

5 Districts like Ḥayy al-Sillum and Ḥayy al-Ġarbī still lack basic services and witness wide-spread poverty. Indeed, also in the aftermath of the 2006 reconstruction project led by Waʿad, most of the districts of al-Ḍāḥiyyah that have not directly been hit by the Israeli airplanes have been cut out of the main projects of social development (Conversation of the author with Mona Fawaz, December 1, 2011, American University of Beirut).



institutions coupled with the fact that they do not necessarily need to embody a standardized central entity have actually united Lebanese politicians and led them to desire domestic stability in the regional turmoil—whatever their path is in trying to maintain such a relative stability.6 The chronic representation of Lebanon as a weak and unstable entity, always defined according to its symptomatology, has often blurred the causes of state weakness; which have been traced to the presence of NGOs considered by Kosmatopoulus (2011) the main actors in emergency crises, as a symptom rather than a cause of state weakness.

In emergency crises, the Lebanese state allows the humanitarian sector to thrive and conceives of it in terms of “relief”, in the sense of pre-political char-ity. In doing so, its action purports to counterbalance the communitarian and confessional agendas of some providers, while boasting neutrality and equal provision of services to all areas on a rhetoric level. Hence, although the state accomplishes its super-political functions, it makes the effort of behaving as an a-confessional super-partes, with the ability to be more objective than the sev-eral humanitarian organizations, which are, in turn, registered by the state. To show how humanitarianism is used by state politics, it is worth reporting the words of Nāʾilah Muʿawaḍ, ex Lebanese Minister of Social Affairs, which were issued in a Wikileaks release with reference to July 2006: “I ask the US govern-ment to intercede to permit the establishment of humanitarian corridors, which would show the Lebanese people that the al-Sanyūrah7 government is engaged and effective”.8

More than a state deficit, there is excess of Lebanese statehood: many actors performing as a state. In this sense, NGOs and civil society organizations are enabled to produce the same powerful effects as a state in the sites of everyday life (Aretxaga, 2003: 398).9

The rivalry is no longer between the political and the moral—inherently represented by humanitarian actors—but is rather, between two moralities differently campaigned and politicized.

6 In this regard, also Ḥizb Allāh, militarily active in Syria nowadays, has tried to offer a multiple image by discussing its political actions at a municipality level as though they were totally separable from their own regional agenda. Interview with ḥāǧǧ Aḥmad Ḥāṭūm, Deputy Mayor of Ḥārat Ḥarayk, February 9, 2013. See various paper in this special issue but especially Di Peri, Mazzucotelli, Meier and Trombetta.

7 Fuʾād al-Sanyūrah has been Prime Minister of the Lebanese Republic from 2005 to 2009, when Prime Minister Naǧīb Mīqātī succeeded him.

8 Wikileaks cable, July 21 2006, available at: http://goo.gl/9jo3U2 accessed 11 May 2011.9 See the paper of Fadia Kiwan in this special issue.

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In a context chronically ridden by political crises like Lebanon, Kantian moral universalism has a new face, according to which the political should be constantly escaped and denigrated in order to uphold a humanitarian image. This paradox has been applied by the Lebanese government itself, supposedly representing the political agency par excellence, within the country. In other words, political neutrality in emergency crises is also the—rather grotesque—imperative ideal that the government aims at maintaining. The political is accepted as long as it is blurred in its moral vest, given that, in Lebanon, it has eventually been de-historicized in that it has been a constant source of instability and reified immorality. As such, politics constitutes the historical invariable of the Lebanese arena that aprioristically needs to be fought and defeated, not changed. This public attitude deployed in the humanitarian sphere towards what the political has concretely meant hitherto seems to leak a certain degree of fatalism about the impossibility of a real political change.

Furthermore, the humanitarian space becomes inhabited from different actors who attempt to delegitimize the moral authority of their counterparts.

Either way, both non-state actors10—predominantly faith-based and secu-lar NGOs—and state institutions contribute to the maintenance of a status quo that may be deleterious in the upcoming years: such a common conservativ-ism is observable in the compensation policies pursued by Ḥizb Allāh in the post-war reconstruction of 2006, which were basically aimed at preventing group mobilization against reiterated wars. In a similar vein, the ʿAkkār-located NGOs that attempt to satisfy the temporary needs of local communities and refugees altogether aim at curbing the emergence of new political subjectivi-ties that today share the ʿAkkār space, who may constitute an in fieri civil soci-ety in a territory of intervention.

The Lebanese state is traditionally eager to transfer development to the level of local communities, with the excuse of empowering the local in spite of the global, therefore burdening “localism” with responsibility in a bid to provide greater welfare (Humphrey, 2012: 167). It is worth noting that such communities, in a community-shaped society, do not need to claim political legi timacy in order to be acknowledged victims.

Thus, the Lebanese government is an example of how states have begun predicating their policies under the guise of humanitarianism, describing their governmental practices through the development of a humanitarian rhetoric.

10 It is worth specifying that, even though Ḥizb Allāh is a political party with a sizeable number of seats in the Lebanese parliament and run several municipalities, the NGOs it established still fall into the category of domestic non-state actors.



The Humanitarian Experience in al-Ḍāḥiyyah: The Beneficiaries and the Humanitarian Organizations

As it is widely known, there have been different paths to human rights move-ments in Lebanon (Karam, 2006) that have often historically complied with the agenda of foreign powers. Humanitarianism in this scenario has increas-ingly stood for a new disguised way of doing politics by fostering a political neutral and more human approach, which led the several NGOs existing in the country to take part in the humanitarian market. Such an approach wishes to demonstrate that, despite reality, morality is prioritized to politics.

Not even local organizations with a great knowledge of their territory have proven to be able to avoid what Paulo Freire (2000) called “action with no reflection”: when humanitarianism is a phenomenon of “political masturba-tion” these structures tend to organize themselves and respond to emergencies regardless of the territorial specificities and culture.11 With respect to the inter-national aid industry, ḥarb tammūz (“the July war”) is a blatant example of such a dynamic.

International actors exhibit moral justifications of intervention together with local actors that represent partial strata of Lebanese society, as they are plugged into a foreign network and lead a life embedded within the confines of bourgeoisie standards. The power differentials established between the pro-viders and the recipients show how aid does in fact alter the power balance between social groups. One of the power structures that humanitarianism is said to reproduce is paternalism: as Rony Brauman from Médecins Sans Frontières used to say, paternalism is the slope on which humanitarians are constantly sliding (Barnett, 2011: 233). Similarly, Hannah Arendt (1994: 72) explored the dangerous paternalistic “passion of compassion”.

The analyzed case of ḥarb tammūz in particular, showed who was “with Hezbollah and their people” and who was “against them”. In this binary, the

11 In several cases, local NGOs continued their previously established projects in emergency time, whereas the international tend to develop emergency-driven programs, turning their projects into development purposes in peace time, and abandoning again such pur-poses when emergencies call in other parts of the earth (as it happened in the period of time between the 2006 Lebanon-Israel War and the 2008-2009 Cast Lead Operation in the Gaza Strip, which also proved the emergency-driven logic of the western aid system). Civil associations in Lebanon would therefore fail to be “places of reconstruction of the political”, as Karam (2006: 24) specifies, proposing alternative agendas to the confessional communities and the central state, and presenting themselves as mediators of different and controversial interests, insofar as the civil society actors increasingly view their own job as a professional opportunity and a way of doing career (Ophir, 2010: 77).

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idea that local actors play a positive role that constantly counterbalances the interests of foreign practitioners—complying instead with overseas agen-das and not overtly condemning Israel—seems to reach a major degree of neutrality from local and international perspectives. My analysis of the local responsiveness to humanitarian aid distribution in al-Ḍāḥiyyah, in 2006, will now offer an exemplification of this.

It is essential to recall that neither the UN agencies nor the local organiza-tions showed readiness to face the massive emergency crisis of the summer 2006. It is across the conflict that organizations developed technical skills, and the coordination between the internationals and the locals became much higher.12

In 2006, war hit spaces where politics was already locally moralized through the social ethics of Ḥizb Allāh’s Resistance. In fact, a sort of pan-politicization of aid seemed to permeate the services provided by local actors, and was also attacked by Israel. A-politicization is the paradoxical result of such a pan-polit-icization, where political humanitarianism has become the conveyer of social justice. The traditional international neutral humanitarianism, however, still seemed to play a significant role in maintaining or gaining international cred-ibility, inherent to the international community’s imperative of neutrality. Indeed, ḥarb tammūz constitutes a watershed in the historical relationship between Ḥizb Allāh and the outside political scenario, as it inaugurated an era of a more sizeable cooperation between the local administrators of the war-stricken areas and external aid actors, such as the UN agencies and foreign gov-ernments. While the central state is chronically represented as weak and corrupted, al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s municipalities boast to have a tight control of the ter-ritory and “have upgraded their services after ḥarb tammūz through the inter-nationalization of the welfare system for their citizens”, as Lina Sadeq13 asserts.

Yet, in the 2006 provision of aid, straightforward politics was advised to be removed from public institutions, which are supposedly the official conveyers of the political. For example, Nazīhah Dakrub recalls how often she did not allow Lebanese political parties to offer aid at her center by exhibiting their logo. She refers to politicians in Lebanon as the people that triggered a sense of irreconcilable cultural and religious differences. The political ends up being

12 Interview with Rūlā Ḫūrī, Save the Children-Sweden, November 23, 2011.13 Interview conducted in Ḥārat Ḥarayk, November 29, 2011. Lina Sadeq is a social worker at

the Ḥārat Ḥarayk Municipality Health Center started by UNDP in 2008.



nothing more than an inherently dividing agent. Just the apolitical, and the a-confessional, seem to leave room for what can be considered as “humane”.14

From an endemic perspective, humanitarianism has not merely been a political strategy to turn public compassion into political consent among peo-ple; rather, it has come to form a constitutive part of social assistance. It can be the defence of a village, the building of a school, and any moral fight not neces-sarily conducted against the Israeli occupation, but also poverty and lack of schooling. Uncertainty and openness of the timeline along which the Shiite religious community has developed its own conceptions of life, are inherent to the existential approach to Shi’a humanitarianism, both in wartime and in peacetime.

The Shiite Spiritual Guide Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlallāh used to think that human suffering was the main objective of humanitarianism, something that needs to be alleviated and comforted.15 It is however appropriate to obtain a glimpse of the advertising material of the Faḍlallāh-started charity organiza-tion, al-Mabarrāt, to understand that this NGO does not explicitly refer to the Israeli occupation as much as the reconstruction campaigns carried out by Ḥizb Allāh’s NGOs. Humanitarianism, in the Mabarrāt Association’s ideology, means to guide individuals.16

Mindfulness and independence are seen as the key qualities to become complete individuals, showing, thus, the essentially poietic function of human life from a Shiite humanitarian perspective.17 According to Malīhah al-Ṣadr, still upholding a Shiite interpretation of humanitarianism, philanthropy should trigger empowerment, continuous efforts, and equality within Lebanese society.18 She highlights the difference between the Shiite and the western notion of humanitarianism, which is seen instead as sustainability and inter-vention in an emergency state.19

14 Interview with Nazīhah Dakrub, Manager of the Social Development Center, Office of the Ministry of Social Affairs, al-Šiyyah, October 30, 2011.

15 Interview with al-Hādī Association (al-Mabarrāt’s branch), Ṭarīq al-Maṭār, Beirut, Octo-ber 29, 2012.

16 Interview with al-Hādī Association (al-Mabarrāt’s branch), Ṭarīq al-Maṭār, Beirut, Octo-ber 29, 2012.

17 Interview with Fārūq Rizq, al-Mabarrāt headquarter, al-Ġubayrī, Beirut, October 18, 2012.18 Muḥammad Bassām, for instance, says that the Imam as-Sadr Foundation conceives the

use of hišmah at school as obligatory, as it is seen as an efficient tool of equalizing people within society since a young age (the “decent” school uniform used to homologate social classes and discipline the dress code in their institutions).

19 Interview with Malīhah al-Ṣadr, Imām al-Ṣadr Foundation, Ouzai, Beirut, December 4, 2012.

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Ḥizb Allāh instead highlights the endemic spirit behind the post-war recon-struction project and people’s return to their own houses by framing them in terms of completion of “victory”20 carried out by local people and fabricated with their own hands.21

An inner secular perspective on humanitarianism seems instead to focus a great deal on the necessity of cultivating responsibility in Lebanon by charging services’ beneficiaries when possible, in order to neither ensure charity aprioristically nor guide people, as the leader of Lebanese secular association ʿĀmal, Kāmil Muḥannā,22 specifies. It is in this sense that his organization claims to “act to be the feet and not the head of our own society”. Reconciling the secular and the Shiite perspectives, Ẓāhir Ǧalūl23 speaks of a culture of humankind (ṯaqāfat al-insān) in an official meeting between the municipal council and the local citizens. Still absent in Lebanon, such a humanitarian culture should be connected to a concept of humanitarianism that remains anchored, however, to the value of the martyrs’ blood and, thus, to the indi-vidual commitment in the Resistance.

The secular perspective on local humanitarianism, that further developed throughout ḥarb tammūz, seems to refuse the idea of aprioristic charity to the needy. Diversely, the informal proliferation of small organizations set up by local residents—usually al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s businessmen that distribute clothes, furniture accessories and money to the vulnerable locals on a weekly basis—mainly occurs “for the Islamic value of doing charity, as it’s written in the Holy Koran”.24

The temporariness that the international humanitarian assistance has left in al-Ḍāḥiyyah after its departure, stands in huge contrast to the local way of facing misadventure with a spirit of positivistic “normalcy”, in addition to the regular provision of aid in peacetime too. This rift between external and endemic approaches has triggered in al-Ḍāḥiyyah what Fassin25 sees in the social feeling that the line between occupation and humanitarian assistance is

20 Ḥasan Naṣrallāh speech on al-Manar Television, Beirut, 14 Aug 2006.21 The war-stricken residents’ return to their homes has even been criticized as hastened for

political reasons by scholars, since proper living conditions cannot certainly be restored in a short time. Sulfur levels, for instance, were much higher in the air than prior to the reconstruction process (Makkouk, 2008: 72).

22 Wata al-Mossaitbeh, Beirut, October 11, 2011.23 Leader of the Education Committee of Burǧ al-Barāǧnah, Municipality Bulletin 2013.24 Conversation with Ḥasan, Ḥārat Ḥarayk, October 19, 2011.25 Fassin advances this concept at a public lecture delivered at the School of Social Sciences,

Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris (April 26, 2012).



sometimes very thin. In this regard, al-Aḫbār’s26 journalist Rajana Hammiye mentions the fact that foreigners visiting al-Ḍāḥiyyah after Ḥizb Allāh—like the NGOs intervening in the suburbs in the aftermath of the war—were named by local people ʿābir sabīl (“passers-by”).

In al-Ḍāḥiyyah, aid providers dealt with internal displaced caused by the July War. The moral exhibition of disdain against Israel, and followed political actions, have not therefore constituted a social risk as in the case of ʿAkkār-based Syrian refugees.

While the Arendtian absolutist “right to have rights” is recognized within the ethical sphere established by Ḥizb Allāh—insofar as rights were written in the party’s language—the apolitical humanitarian action of local and international NGOs was still expressing its classicalist identity and the core rationale of their action.

As a matter of fact, despite the growing awareness of the humanitarians about the inseparability of their activities from politics (Prendergast, 1996), political neutrality is still an imperative component of their official rhetoric.

The interview I conducted with three members27 of the Lebanese Red Cross,28 as well as with the vast majority of the other humanitarian actors selected for my research, proved that apoliticization is still considered an aprioristic duty and a sine qua non condition for the ethical maintenance of the aid indus-try. If humanitarianism is the eternal synonym with neutrality, actual disen-gagement from political responsibilities is hence justified.

The international approach to aid provision fails in that it does not interpret the July War as an event on a line of historical continuity. Resistance against destruction and humiliation underpins the moral basis of the mainstream Shiite view, which privileges human suffering as an existential status of knowl-edge enhancement. As a result, dealing with the displaced population of al-Ḍāḥiyyah, Biqāʿ Valley and South Lebanon as people hit by war is a very sim-plistic way of victimizing them, from an inner perspective. Nonetheless, such a simplification was necessary to the international NGOs to uphold their sum-mum bonum—as described by Plato in The Republic—that is the external and

26 Daily Lebanese newspaper generally oriented towards the political March 8 coalition led by Ḥizb Allāh. The mentioned article is dated September 6, 2012, Arabic edition.

27 It is worth noting that, in accordance with the ethical clearance obtained for the present research project, NGO workers remain anonymous unless explicitly required.

28 Interview conducted in Spears, Beirut, February 1, 2012. Moreover, it is worth noting that the ICRC has always been staunch to neutral humanitarianism, to the extent of not calling the Rwandan massacre “genocide”. By contrast, in the 1994 Rwandan conflict, Médecins sans Frontières had instead publicly denounced the French government that still had ties with the bloodthirsty Hutu regime.

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generalized perception of the collective needs of displaced bodies, merely requiring protection and assistance.

Is Neutrality Desirable in a Newly Emerged “Humanitarian” ʿAkkār?

I will now discuss the strategies that are adopted by the humanitarian agencies in order to uphold the imperative moral of political impartiality. My empirical analysis will therefore be informed by the in-depth interviews conducted with the several NGOs that are currently providing aid to Syrian refugees in ʿAkkār.

First of all, international aid provision in ʿAkkār is not based upon human rights considerations. My examination of the accounts provided by the benefi-ciaries and the providers illustrates that, although foreign powers hold politi-cal sway in the domestic scenario, they still aim at preserving the neutrality of humanitarian aid. Although such politicization is barely ever reflected in the relief operations of the humanitarian workers, this disguising mechanism wishes to maintain an apolitical image of the foreign humanitarian market, whereas the latter is not marginal at all to local political realities.29

On a pragmatic level, some organizations maintain their own image of neu-trality by refusing to finance projects in which certain political actors are involved. The Norwegian Refugee Council30 (NRC), for instance, does not accept funds from the USA for matters of “political sensitivity”, while it accepts funds from other foreign governments and, in particular, from the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) that works for aid and civil protec-tion, and it is said to look for higher financial independence from the United Nations.31 The paradox lies in the fact that NRC also receives funds from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is, in turn, financed by Australia, Japan, the Gulf countries, USA and EU.

Neutrality is also boasted by NGOs through the opening of branches in dif-ferent politically marked spaces, such as ʿĀmal Association that owns a branch in the Biqāʿ Valley—where supposedly one of the informal bases of the Free

29 For example, several are today the NGOs that look for the central state’s approval to inter-vene in particular Syrian areas, while, outside of Syria, they mostly cooperate with Syrian opposition’s groups.

30 Represented in Lebanon, at the time of writing, by Programme Support Manager Martino Costa.

31 Interview conducted with Martino Costa, Beirut, January 12, 2013.



Syrian Army is (ʿArsāl)32—and, at the same time, a big branch in Ḥārat Ḥarayk, the urban heart of what the media call Ḥizb Allāh’s stronghold.

Neutrality is sometimes searched for by not providing cash directly to the refugees. Thus it is solely the hosting house owners who are financed by NGOs.

Another way of upholding political neutrality in some NGOs’ policy is by being financially independent: for example, Duwayrī, from the Qaṭari Foundation, says: “unlike other NGOs, Qaṭar does not need money from any-one else. This allows Qaṭar to make its own choices”.33

Organizations also boast neutrality by hiring practitioners that are suppos-edly of different political orientations with respect to the crisis they work for. The majority of the international and local organizations I interviewed in ʿAkkār34 have often stated that they were formed by people supporting or opposing the Syrian regime.35

Neutrality would also derive from funds granted by the NGOs of a specific country, rather than from foreign governments’ funding. For example, the Lebanese leader of the Kuwaiti Association asserts their “financial independ-ence from Kuwaiti politics, as finances come from NGOs located in Kuwait City and not from the government”.36

Also, humanitarian practitioners look at neutrality—as shown above, actively searched for—as something concretely feasible and still morally desir-able in the emergency scenario that North Lebanon has evolved into.

32 ʿArsal is a town located in the Lebanese Biqaʿ Valley which has a controversial past in rela-tion to the Syrian and the Lebanese States.

33 Interview conducted by the author in a Tripoli’s restaurant on 18th December, 2012.34 Among others: interview conducted with a worker of Danish Refugee Council (DRC),

al-Qubayāt, February 1th, 2013. Interview with a UNHCR’s practitioner, al-Qubayāt, Decem-ber 11th, 2012. Interview with the Kuwaiti Funds Association in Tripoli, January 14, 2013.

35 Whatever is the political stance of NGO workers, the main agenda must comply with the ideology of their own organisation. This is also highlighted by Ḥizb Allāh’s municipalities in al-Ḍāḥiyyah, which seem to weave a rhetoric of political neutrality intertwined with a humanitarian logic. As the Deputy Mayor of Ḥārat Ḥarayk ḥāǧǧ Ḥāṭūm states (Febru-ary 9, 2013): “The Syrian situation will remain just Syrian, and most of the people that are fleeing are just seeking for safety. Behaving ethically on an administrative level means not to exploit the Syrian situation for our own political interests, as some states are currently doing instead”. De-internationalizing the Syrian conflict is Ḥizb Allāh’s discursive tool to boast attitudinal neutrality on the issue, despite the party’s military intervention. On this specific point see also Di Peri and Trombetta in this special issue.

36 Interview conducted in Tripoli on January 14, 2013.

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Within this framework, on the one side, the refugees perceive the alleged neutrality of the humanitarian actors as hypocritical and as a way to adhere to the legitimacy of the Asad regime. In this regard, the humanitarian action is not really intended to eradicate the source of problems in Syria, and this engenders high levels of social frustration, as I will illustrate later on.

In the humanitarian present, while international organizations struggle to uphold political neutrality, some local organizations, in addition to those funded by the Arab Gulf states, have overtly declared to be established with the purpose of alleviating the suffering of the Syrian refugees flowing into Lebanon. These NGOs generally claim to have been the first to set up systematic assis-tance for the refugees (from May 2011 onwards) and to have provided the same amount of aid during ḥarb tammūz—a conflict mainly viewed as a predicament of Ḥizb Allāh and the March 8 coalition, as already seen. Despite the clearly stated political interest of these NGOs in the Syrian regime’s departure, their prompt emergency response would still prove the neutrality of these NGOs and their very humanitarian intentions.37

The intention of the Arab Gulf states—like Qaṭar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—was to provide relief to the Syrians in order to support the anti-regime political cause, bearing the opponents’ witness. This form of humanitarianism has been considered as openly partisan and, as such, harshly criticized by the international and local community in Lebanon during my fieldwork. Open partisanship implies political realism, where the politicization of aid is simply legitimized by publicly declared good intentionality which underpins philan-thropic acts.38

On the contrary, NGOs practitioners believe that the supposed neutrality of the international actors is a new model of worldwide good governance.

On the other side, the aid recipients openly seek for a politically engaged humanitarianism which transcends the provision of mere medical and social relief.

A pragmatic attitude in the humanitarian system is also observable in the public defence against the criticisms moved against Qatar that had financed the reconstruction of the Ḥizb Allāh-administered areas in South Lebanon in 2006. In this regard, Ḥamīd Zakariyā39 argues: “It is rather Hezbollah that should have refused Qatar’s money in 2006. Thus, where is their supposedly uncompromising nature?” Besides, Muḥammad Naʿmah, Archive Center

37 Interview with the Saudi-funded Ṭayba Association, Ḥalbā, December, 24, 2012.38 See Daniel Meier in this special issue.39 Representative of the Sunni charity association al-Ayād al-Bayḍah, “The White Hands”.

Interview conducted on January 5, 2013, al-Fandayq, ʿAkkār.



Officer of al-Aḫbār,40 highlighted the weaker role that Qaṭar used to have at that time; the provision of humanitarian aid was therefore a valid tool to gain more strategic importance in the region.

Hence, in light of my fieldwork experiences, the current provision of aid to the Syrian refugees in ʿAkkār is a highly blurred scenario: different depoliticiza-tion strategies are not employed in secular, faith-based, international or local environments on the basis of the NGOs’ nature. A clear-cut separation line between such strategies is unidentifiable. Thus, any attempt at sketching out a classification of the discussed depoliticization strategies would simply end up being misleading on an empirical level.

The Politics of Victimization in ʿAkkār-based NGOs

While the Syrians that migrate to Lebanon and resettle throughout the country feel to be, in some ways, the representatives of the holistic Syrian crisis by embodying the signifiers of repression, destruction and fear, the humanitarian agencies tend to deal with them as though they were atomized and traumatized victims, who, therefore, end up engaging as such in the new social environment and do not try instead to engage as active citizens. Therein, many of them refuse to be seen in terms of “refugees” and “victims”, which imply a passive and depo-liticizing connotation, opting instead for the term “survivors” that better con-tains political agency (Feldman, 2004: 179) and the historical nature of their recent forced migration. The pathologization—and passivization—of a popu-lation unquestionably encourage the development of a new mode of interna-tional therapeutic intervention. This needs to deal with the fact that the host reality symbolically denies the possibility of transmitting social memory, typi-cally conveyer of the “rehabilitation of experience” (Feldman, 2004: 182). In some cases, such as the Ǧizzīn municipality in South Lebanon, for instance, public gatherings have entirely been prohibited to Syrian nationals (Alef-act, 2013: 25). Transmission is in fact agency, antithesis of someone that merely suf-fers, dies, and is denied the status of speaking subject, unlike the victims of the July War in 2006—and, in this case, victims of a whole nation more than ever in Lebanese history. Transmission for the refugees becomes instead the priority in a place where agency cannot be materialized into resistance to the violence inside Syria; where social frustration is situated.

If aid providers, on one hand, look at the refugees in ʿAkkār as people chron-ically suffering, that suffering becomes a “cumulative experience that is

40 Lebanese daily newspaper in Verdun, Beirut, November 8 and 9, 2012.

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represented and lived as a sedimented condition” (Humprey, 2002: 114). Ulti-mately, even at a later stage, their work does not aim at dismantling such a sedimented condition.

The presence of the Syrian victims escaping repression has the potential to develop an unprecedented language of human rights around Syria. Lebanon, therefore, now presents itself as the social and linguistic laboratory of an emerging human rights’ apparatus for the neighboring country.

Humanitarianism is in fact the narrative model used to unearth the ways in which calls for compassion—rather than political actions—tend to “depoliti-cize historical processes and portray people as passive and pathetic individual victims as opposed to members of a collective with its own political claims as the previous comment (Weizman, 2011: 113)”. People coming from Syria did express frustration in the impression of being “alleviated” by the burden of their suffering simply in the way that they were provided with survival relief. On the contrary, the international community does not act to uproot the con-flict causes in Syria, and, furthermore, floats the idea of creating camps for displaced Syrians in their motherland today, as is the case with some Lebanese clerics.41

Once the humanitarian actors attempt to evacuate the spaces of interven-tion of any form of politics, a new transformative potential may arise, claiming back the right to politics. In a nutshell, the politics of humanitarianism, at some point, leaves ground for the politics of the displaced (Weizman, 2011: 61), although the humanitarian industry aims at avoiding this for reasons of social order, as conceived by them. Nevertheless, a segment of the Syrian families I conducted participant observation with in ʿAkkār, in some cases, used to refrain from being seen as politically active because they were overtly afraid to render themselves even more vulnerable in front of local authorities and NGOs.

In the attempt to regain political mobilization potential and asserting poli-tical nature as human beings, a more activist segment of my Syrian interlocu-tors in ʿAkkār suggested that only the categorical refusal of aid would be the ultimate possibility of returning to Syria and eradicating the very causes of the outraging violence. The ontological refusal of aid would symbolize self-construction, self-governing and the rehabilitation of their political life, in order to redeem themselves from mere sheltering, ultimate safety and mere survival, all constituting the teleology of the humanitarian industry.

In ʿAkkār, however, the reception of aid workers has certainly not been refused, unlike the case of Ṭālebān in Afghanistan in 2001 (Engler, 2010: 1) or

41 Source available at: http://goo.gl/ZoD7tX accessed 15 June 2014.



Iraq in 2003, where people started conceiving NGOs providing relief as part of the occupying force, and therefore as enemies tout court.

While the people who were pouring into Lebanon were feeling like survi-vors of historical inequalities and injustice, they were beginning to feel that the aid providers were dealing with them as apolitical—or little politically aware—fugitives of a civil war, where nothing is clearly understandable. Aspects that have been increasingly manipulated by the representation of the conflict itself, like the resultant deeper confessional division of Syria, are totally overlooked by the aid providers from the perspective of the Syrian newcomers. Huḍayfah’s words are very meaningful in this regard:

They think I need to heal my mind as a Syrian that lived this war, because my country is ‘naturally’ divided. I didn’t use to hate anyone. I’m from a Sunni family living in Āfāmiyā and we used to have lunch sometimes with an ʿAlawite family based in ʿAyn al-Krom, a village few kilometers away from ours. Since the war started, the regime placed its tanks in these villages to fire rockets on the Sunnis. Since then, my family and our friends from ʿAyn al-Krom have not been able anymore to look into each other’s eyes.42

Indeed, as I have noticed in my research field, the labeling of “civil war” is not well received by many Syrians who are resettled in ʿAkkār. War is seen as a con-venient cover for greed and for suppression of the political opposition, which becomes weakened by defining its actors as “rebels” tout court.43 Such injustice which underlies the representation of the conflict therefore, merges into peo-ple’s frustration about the depoliticizing strategies of the NGOs I am analyzing.

The Social Side Effects of Apolitical Humanitarianism

Politicization of Aid . . . The accountability of all NGOs—even if supposedly apolitical and secular—is gained or maintained through provision of services to potential or staunched beneficiaries. Aid paradoxically has sometimes proven to reinforce community

42 Interview conducted in al-ʿAbdeh, December 23, 2012.43 Political opposition is undoubtedly undercut when it is exclusively labeled as “rebel activ-

ity”. On the wave of such an approach, military regimes are preserved and state of emer-gencies prolonged by providing repressive governments with power to restrict any sort of freedom, as it also used to happen in Mubarak’s Egypt (Keen, 2000: 33).

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identity and social divisions (Belloni, 2005) Indeed, non-beneficiaries of aid in ʿAkkār were often complaining about wasāṭah.44 Thus politics emerge from such a disenchanted common imaginary as a mere negative factor to be avoided.

The July War and the humanitarian assistance provided at that time allowed Ḥizb Allāh to gain even greater accountability in that they have upheld their own protection and provision responsibilities towards the whole nation. The March 14 coalition today cares about being the political entity mostly involved in the aid industry to Syrians because of its greater humanitarian values.

Thereby, aid becomes, once again, a strategy to show the impartial human-ness of political parties or confessional groups, in the attempt to moralize their political agendas.

“Some organizations have no interest though in opening files for the Syrian displaced, and they just don’t do it”, ḥāǧǧ Ḥāṭūm from Ḥizb Allāh,45 states bluntly, arguing that there are exclusively political interests behind engaging in relief provision for Syrians. Ḥizb Allāh, from its side, was obviously providing few services in al-Ḍāḥiyyah for this specific purpose, providing the justification that the refugee influx was much smaller in their areas,46 at the time of my fieldwork.

. . . vs. Forced Depoliticization of Syrian RefugeesRefugees’ perception of being forcedly depoliticized by NGOs stays in stark opposition to politicization of aid. This social effect is closely correlated to the previously explained politics of victimization appropriate to the NGOs operat-ing in ʿAkkār.

Regardless of how empirically grounded all of these expressed feelings actu-ally are, what is still meaningful to grasp is that refugees express discontent about their loss of mobilization and self-reconstruction perspectives, as I will show briefly. Everydayness of the Syrians living in ʿAkkār is therefore implying the constant frustration of being considered homogeneous refugee bodies ready to accept any form of basic help, developing a sense of insecurity and disaffection towards local, international, secular and faith-based providers with no distinction.

44 Wasāṭah, in the Arab world, which literally means “mediation”, generally refers to the net-work of connections that one can benefit from in order to cover a particular professional position or simply get resources and services.

45 Interview conducted at the Municipality of Ḥārat Harayk, February 9, 2013.46 Ḥārat Harayk municipality, February 9, 2013.



Ḥayṯam, 47 years old, engineer from the Hama region,47 expresses that he typically sells the food vouchers received from UNHCR to make donations in financial support of a medical association in South Turkey that fabricates arti-ficial legs for the ex-combatants of the Free Syrian Army. Wāʾil, 38 years old from Bab ʿAmr, highlights the need to create external spaces for them, like agorà, discussion areas.

“NGOs see that we take whatever they give us, and they think they’re address-ing the biggest needs. Should we start refusing to make our real needs emerge? We do need safe space to meet each other, not just a shelter”.48

Nevertheless, most of the Lebanese I interviewed expressed their concerns for local stability and had in fact supported this decision, fearing that Syrian refugees were viewed upon as a political presence, and not just as displaced people that merely need to survive.

Similarly, an international humanitarian worker points out that sometimes donors refuse to finance programmes that involve people connected to armed groups in the Syrian conflict, without realizing that even such refusal is a highly political act.49

The depoliticization of the Syrian targeted subject is part of a self- legitimized apocalyptic Lebanese project of “politicide”, a term provided by Baruch Kim-merling (2006)50 when he speaks of the current elimination of the Palestinian political will.51 Indeed, the forcedly depoliticized nature of humanitarian areas attempts to exclude refugees from politics, as though refugee politics were separable from the domestic politics of the “host” reality.

The action of the humanitarian industry, which aims at replacing the activi-ties of a weak state, is therefore an alternative to western powers’ military intervention, or better, to a de facto non-state intervention.

ʿAkkār became the place where relief is provided as much as the frame through which the story of people’s oppression and daily life destruction are being told and disseminated. In opposition, the depoliticization refugees in

47 Conversation with Ḥayṯam, Bebnīn, December 14, 2012. Also see my paper at: http://goo .gl/LrT1kj accessed 3 October 2014.

48 Conversation with Wāʾil, Ḥalbā, January 28, 2013.49 January 20, 2013, al-Qubayāt.50 Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.51 The Palestinian experience in Lebanon, which has turned into a theatre of the PLO’s

armed performance, has certainly left a certain degree of politico-phobia in the whole country. In fact, the armed action of Palestinians in Lebanon from the 1948 Nakbah on is one of the biggest scapegoats of today’s Lebanese society. Furthermore, their guerrilla against the Israeli attempt of annihilating them on the Lebanese territory was legally approved by the 1969 Cairo Agreement.

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North Lebanon feel that they are undergoing denounces the humanitarian logic of merely taking care of bodies rather than getting civil and political rights protected. This is to foster a humanitarianism that does not make war or peace, development, justice or democracy, but simply aims at pursuing the lesser evil, such as a simple bed for the night, as affirmed by Rieff (2002).

The resultant apoliticization of the targeted subjects coincides with the for-eign states’ political inaction inside the place that is the source of conflict: humanitarian assistance, however, it is not supposed to replace the failed political will of states that ignore the violent crisis (Anderson, 1999: 146). It is here that a tension is likely to emerge: unconditioned emergency relief provi-sion and political inaction in eradicating the root problem. In the view of my interlocutors receiving aid, indeed, NGOs should also raise larger social issues, not limiting themselves to raise organizational funds by intervening in complex emergencies. Nonetheless, some NGOs seem to start addressing larger social issues, but just as long as the beneficiaries remain apolitical. The less political they remain in society, the less politically dangerous they turn out to be.

Narratives similar to those reported here seem to suggest that today’s ʿAkkār inhabitants view the international community as a hypocritical capitalistic entity that boasts absolute neutrality.52 Similar disaffection is developed towards local actors that, although they are renowned for having a fine-grained knowledge of their territories, do not provide sufficient support if the potential beneficiaries lack personal connections with the NGOs (wasāṭah).

Such a disaffection is also expressed by Aḥmad, living in Bellanet al-Ḥayṣā, whose words convey thoughts that undermine the cornerstones of humanitar-ian neutrality and alleviation of suffering and their implementation as a suc-cessful strategy:53 “We don’t want food and shelters to survive in Lebanon, we want you to help us to stop all this”.54

Refugees convey that they feel used to render the humanitarian market via-ble, while humanitarians care about reaffirming their neutrality in doing their job. The frustration of some refugees in feeling passivized is a key emotional

52 The fact that the majority of the aid providers do not have personal relationships with the beneficiaries enhanced the diffidence of the latter towards the former. R., international practitioner working for an NGO in al-Qubayāt, says in fact: “We all work in the same building: NRC, DRC, UNHCR, UNICEF and Save the Children. I mean . . . it sounds like an ivory tower, honestly we’re totally out of touch with the people”.

53 As is well known, the alleviation of suffering principles totally dominate the humanitar-ian deontological code of the emergency relief structure.

54 Interview conducted on January 22, 2013.



factor that stems from such a brand-new proliferation of humanitarian pro-grams in North Lebanon, although some programs aim at integration and self-empowerment. Refugees are in fact developing anger towards a detached international community, described in terms of betrayal (ḫayānah).55

To conclude, by utilizing people’s accounts, I have shown how the humani-tarian intervention in ʿAkkār is able to change the addressed social setting. Also, local solidarity, nowadays, is sensitively linked to humanitarian aid provi-sion and its distribution. The precariousness of such assistance coming from outside, just as connected to an emergency state, renders this link socially dan-gerous. Empirical evidence of this comes from Nadia, who showed me the new heater in her house on the evening of December 2012 in Wādī Ḫālid, and who explained that she was not actually happy that she had finally been given it for the first time ever in her life: “I received this heater as I’m hosting a Syrian fam-ily. I mean . . . that’s still hard to accept!”

Aid providers have thus proven to disregard or remain unaware of the local capacities for peace, reminding people of historical separations of subgroups: most of them do not generally know what values, interests, common experi-ences and symbols unite the residents of the ʿAkkār region. Instead, they guess what used to divide them and they build their development programs on this basis only. Aid is often provided according to the divisions in a specific society rather than focusing on the connecting factors, cultivating a previously blurred separation line between Syrians and North Lebanese in ʿAkkār. Thereby, aid risks serve the reinforcement of conflict (Belloni, 2005), and reproduce the spectrum of the political, which already carries a negative connotation in the Lebanese scenario due to dated inter-community conflicts.

ʿAkkār, once the Syrian emergency crisis will be over, will not go back to how it was: the Syrian experience proved how big the regional needs are—and that are not all merely associable to the refugee crisis—and that social requests can be advanced. Such an unprecedented mobilization potential is being experi-enced in this region, although the local political inputs are kept hostage by the anti-politics machine56 of the humanitarian assistance, covering social and political problems with food aid (Prendergast, 1996).

55 Also Farāh, from Ḥimṣ, interviewed in al-Bahsa on December 2, 2012: “The West and a part of Syrian society have betrayed, that’s the only reason why we are still dying everywhere!”.

56 Ferguson (1990) defines the anti-politics machine in Lesotho as a contestable orthodoxy of development in areas of intervention. He specifically focuses on the ways in which development programs seek to depoliticize political issues like daily livelihoods, national economy and central government.

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Thereby, the Syrian refugee crisis in North Lebanon paradoxically paved the way to a new construction of Syrian and Lebanese human rights’ conscious-ness, going far beyond their requests of basic services, and that is scarcely definable today as still ongoing. The victimized Syrian citizens in ʿAkkār—and, paradoxically, Lebanese at a later stage—carry the potentiality of evolving into human rights subjects within a region where civil society—social activists, small independent NGOs, journalists and local intellectuals—has long been stifled by local patrons, or, otherwise, has flown into the vitality of the Lebanese capital by centralizing, in vain, territories of claims and, as a result, depleting their own region of any genuine social change potential.

The social frustration I have surfaced through my interlocutors’ words dem-onstrates the existence of such embryonic potentialities.

Conclusion: The Two Humanitarian Experiences and the Role of the Political

On the one side, aid actors uphold ideals of neutrality, regardless of its empiri-cal feasibility, for gaining international credibility and, at the same time, ensur-ing safety for themselves. On the other, the beneficiaries call for solidarity rather than politically neutralized relief. The two trends have found a merging point in ḥarb tammūz, when Ḥizb Allāh made the locally shaped rights phi-losophy and the rhetoric of the Resistance coincide with their humanitarian efforts for the displaced. This tends to occur just where rights are written in the grammar of the ruling power, even when that power does not totally epitomize the central state.

In the ʿAkkār context, where the line between human rights advocacy and humanitarianism as alleviation of suffering currently struggles to remain clear-cut, international neutrality has been condemned from the aid recipients on a moral level as well as in ḥarb tammūz. The politicization of domestic aid is instead more highly condemned nowadays, with respect to the July War. This has confirmed the still embryonic social ethics that is being weaved by the March 14 coalition supporting the variegated Syrian opposition, unlike the longstanding Ḥizb Allāh’s ethos in al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s public spaces, which simply showed consistency between the party’s rhetoric and practice in time of war.57

57 If the 2006 humanitarian assistance provision is by now undistinguishable from the human experience of al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s reconstruction that followed, Ḥizb Allāh—like the March 14 coalition does now with the assistance to the Syrian refugees—used humanitarianism



That said, humanitarianism is not “in crisis”, as argued by Rieff (2002), but is able to proliferate with numerous parallel models of implementation. Despite the increasing disaffection of the Lebanese and the refugees in Lebanon towards the humanitarian non-state agencies, the domestic political parties still attempt to humanize and moralize their political moves.

In short, in both ʿAkkār and al-Ḍāḥiyyah’s case, humanitarianism has proven to be a political strategy that feeds the moral image of political parties and NGOs while allowing all of them to neutralize their rhetoric on the surface, and make their programs appear as accountable, human and internationally legiti-mate. The Lebanese political is ruled out and ranks the lowest in the moral hierarchy set by the international community, which, in turn, meets with local chronic anguish.

In this respect, the present research confirms that humanitarianism main-tains its ethical credibility as long as it is able to hide its high political potential at a regional level. The scholarly contribution of this research to the already existing literature lies in providing empirical evidence of the social frustration that such top-down strategies engender.

While in ḥarb tammūz human rights bearers had already developed a fully-fledged local vision of social justice—largely affirmed in the public space of the urbicided al-Ḍāḥiyyah—today’s Syrian refugees that are flowing into Lebanon are not generally conceived and dealt with as human rights violation subjects. Rather, they are tackled as mere humanitarian subjects, as long as their politicide—committed first in Syria on the protesters since March 2011—serves the common interest of domestic relative stability in Lebanon, a per-petual receiving state of regional transitions’ spillovers.

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