Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s visit to Beirut just over a week ago created hysterical reactions in nearly every quarter of Lebanese society. While half the country went crazy in adulation for the leader of the country that they consider their closest ally (and has backed that commitment up with billions of dollars in relief, military, and development funds), the other half went just as crazy in over the top denunciations of the one of the most powerful men in the Middle East today.
His drive from the airport to Downtown Beirut made headlines around the world for the tremendous display and number of well-wishers who came out to welcome him, and in a highly symbolic gesture he waved out to the crowds of Palestinian well-wishers who lined the streets along Burj el Barajneh camp in South Beirut, a demographic usually ignored by foreign dignitaries keen on focusing on Lebanese prosperity or sectarian strife. The message was clear- Iran is a friend of the Palestinians, and Iran’s support to the Lebanese Resistance is Iran’s way of struggling to open the path for their Right to Return.
This theme of Iranian support for the struggle against Israel was repeated oft and again, and at various points in Ahmedinejad’s speeches he spoke directly to the Palestinians of Lebanon, reiterating his support for their Resistance and for Palestinian political unity. The crowds in Dahiyeh and the South went wild for “Nejad,” and the feeling of defiance and of strength, of being part of a larger project against imperialism and against colonialism, was infectious.
I had arrived in the Dahiyeh that Wednesday evening determined to observe the speech passively, as an observer, and kept my spirits even even as the Iranian flags and posters of Ayatollah Khamenei’s face were passed out en masse to the boy scouts seated around me, giddy as they were in their matching suits with small portraits of the late Ayatollah Khomeini on their left breast pockets.
But as the video footage of Hezbollah’s bloody victories over Israeli occupation began to play on the screen, and the music lauding the Hezbollah fighters’ bravery in the “Summer of Anger” of 2006 entered full swing, it was hard not to feel my heart racing and to stand up, waving my Iranian flag and shrieking with the masses around me to the representative of the country that had stood alongside the Lebanese Resistance unwaveringly for decades.
The feeling, however, would not last. Even as Iranian money had helped rebuild Lebanon after the 2006 war and was now being pumped into the Lebanese economy and infrastructure like never before (including a $450 million deal signed the week before with the Lebanese Energy Minister), Iran was repressing its own people’s right to speak and right to disagree more than ever before. It was a hard deal for me to swallow, particularly as I myself am an Iranian citizen and I was arrested and beaten up during an opposition rally only a few months before Ahmedinejad’s visit to Beirut. While clamoring against Zionism and imperialism abroad and calling for equal rights for the Palestinians in Lebanon, Ahmedinejad was strangling our freedom back home and souring my friends’ interest or concern with the Palestinian and Lebanese causes.
The love among the Iranian Left for Palestine and the Resistance remains strong, but every day that passes that Ahmedinejad uses the Palestinians and Lebanon as an excuse for his tyranny, and they cheer him on unabashedly, the more worried we become that our compatriots’ compassion will begin to wear thin. The worst part about all of this for me as a progressive Iranian who supports the Palestinian struggle against Zionism, is that Ahmedinejad has disgracefully little to show for all the noise he makes about Palestinian rights.
If it is true that Ahmedinejad supports the Palestinians, why did Iran not get behind the Right to Work campaign organized among the Palestinians in Lebanon in June of this year? Why has Ahmedinejad been completely moot on the issue of the complete lack of social, civil, and economic rights for Palestinians in Lebanon, and why has he not pushed Hezbollah to work on this issue? Why did his predecessors not protest against the 2001 law revision that took the right to property away from the Palestinians?
The problem with Iran’s version of support for Palestine is that it is completely dependent on militarism and from a perspective that places armed resistance and nationalism above everything else. This perspective gives us great sound bites, but just like in Iran, it squeezes out room for an independent civil society which can struggle to attain rights through non-armed confrontation.
As much as Ahmedinejad posits himself as the anti-Zionist hero, the Palestinians must remember that his defense of their cause is through tried and unsuccessful means at best, and is antidemocratic and against the cause of a true national liberation movement at worst.
A recent letter from the former President Khatami’s brother, Seyyed Mohammed Reza Khatami, to Seyyed Nasrollah on the occasion of Ahmedinejad’s visit probably capture my feelings the best:
The expectations of our nation from all those who claim to be fighting against oppression and tyranny is to demand from those who have imprisoned these dear ones [imprisoned Green Movement leaders] to stop their oppression and tyranny and urge them to implement even the slightest of what they wish for the dignified nation […] of Lebanon, for their own people.
I don’t think he would disagree if I added the “dignified nation of Palestine” to that list as well.
Khashayar Safavi is an activist based out of Beirut, Lebanon.
