Times of Struggle and Cultural Liberation—A Conversation with Elias Khoury

On September 15, 2024, Elias Khoury, a giant of Lebanese political and literary life, died at the age of 76.

Khoury was a renowned novelist and a deeply engaged political writer and thinker on Lebanese and Palestinian politics who contributed to MERIP throughout the years. In light of his passing, MERIP is sharing an unpublished excerpt from a conversation between Ilan Pappé and Elias Khoury that took place on February 17, 2022. Their conversation, which ranges from the Lebanese civil war to the nature of history, resistance and the ongoing Nakba—will be published next month in Palestine in a World on Fire (Haymarket, 2024), co-edited by MERIP’s executive editor, Katie Natanel, and Pappé. The book features a collection of interviews with leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe. 

Ilan Pappé: Thank you for taking the time to be with us, Elias. I would like to begin with a question or two about Lebanon, your home country. The civil war in Lebanon traumatized Lebanese society as it scarred your own biography and life. It seems to be more than just an event with a closure—it appears much more as a structure, almost an unwelcome part of a nation’s DNA, which you can soothe at times, but never totally cure.

Your novel Broken Mirrors is situated in what is allegedly known as “the postwar period,” when fifteen years of civil war in Lebanon seemed to be over. As readers, we get a sense that the war trickles on and on—it does not end in your novels, regardless of whether we are able to identify the period in which they are set. It is a far more cyclic history than a linear one, which is a state of mind that characterizes the biographies of the troubled families and couples in your novels, who uneasily navigate seemingly unbridgeable relationships and yet manage to live together.

It seems for you that war and conflict in general are timeless events: they are dominated by what scholars like to call “temporality,” something the Palestinians know all too well. Is what we see unfolding in Lebanon today part of this cyclic history? Or is it a new chapter, as there are no killing fields of an actual war as such—instead there is an economic and political crisis that seems to wreak disintegration and permanent uncertainty. Or is it still part of the never-ending crisis? Is there any hope for a different future for Lebanon?

Elias Khoury: The question is very difficult for me because Broken Mirrors is a novel. And I want to point out that the civil war, which began in 1975, liberated literature in one way or another. The Lebanese literary scene was dominated by romantic nostalgic poetry and music about a unified, consolidated country that had nothing to do with the present time.

The civil war gave us—gave me and my generation—the opportunity to destroy the dominant language and to open the literary scene on what I call “writing the present.” But when we write the present, the present in itself incarnates the past. And in it, there are elements of the future. You cannot write the present of a civil war, which took place in 1975, without remembering a civil war that happened in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1860. And after that war the embryo of modern Lebanon was created by the seven European powers, which were dominant at that time.

I discovered that the first civil war was never mentioned by the writers of the time or those who came later—who were great writers and the major innovators of Arabic language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And that there was a feeling of shame in going back to an event like the civil war.

But this doesn’t solve the problem! Without facing reality, without facing the present with open eyes, we cannot write. We cannot really produce literature. And the civil war provided for the emergence of the Lebanese novel—this is my theory. Before the civil war, we had novels, of course, but we didn’t have a movement. Poetry was totally dominant. But with the civil war, prose and the stories of the present emerged, and the new literature was in the process of being created. Now, when I spoke about the nineteenth-century civil war, this doesn’t mean we are in a cyclic situation—but also it doesn’t mean we are in a linear situation. You can see this in my novels as well. Cyclic is not an accurate interpretation, nor is linear, where we are always going toward the future or the better. We are in this combination of the demons that were created in special historical circumstances and then recreated in the 1970s in another circumstance. We can speak about a kind of continuity, but there is a rupture between the civil war, as it was in the early 1970s as part of the Palestinian struggle for liberation of Palestine, and a civil war that continued after 1982, which was totally savage, as Marx said. Marx spoke about the Lebanese civil war of the nineteenth century as “the savage tribes of humans.” These savage tribes came back or returned in a new form.

Civil war is not our destiny, but it is our condition now. Because a small country like Lebanon is surrounded by dictatorships. On the one hand, we have Syria and what its regime has done to the Syrian and Lebanese people. And on the other hand, we are bordered by Israel and what it recreated in the region—mainly this idea of identity based upon religion. This idea is new, it’s modern. It is not an old story.

Ilan: For those who may not be familiar, Western perspectives hold a view that the clash in 1860 was between Maronites and Druze communities. But I think there was also a social class issue between landowners and farmers. Looking at such a history that is not cyclic but also not linear, that has continuity but also dramatic ruptures, I’m thinking about the term “sectarianism.”

We are having this conversation under the auspices of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies [at the University of Exeter], which is one of the most important centers for Middle East studies in the UK. And “sectarianism” is one of the issues we debate academically. We feel that the term is usually employed as a classical Orientalist reductionist framing of Arab history and culture—in the context of Lebanon in particular, but also in Iraq and Syria. This framing produces a brutal political timeline and space where groups are pitted one against each other in constant conflict. And this historical view is used to provide a superficial explanation for the violence in places such as Lebanon, as well as a pretext for colonial and later imperial intervention.

Is there a better way of looking at confessional affiliations and group identities of the Mashreq’s mosaic human map? Maybe as a past legacy with positive human attributes, or as a part of life (but not the whole of life) that can play a positive role today and in the future in Lebanon and beyond.

Elias: I want to tell you a story that is very significant. After the French dominated Lebanon and Syria with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the French mandate, which was typical colonialism, they tried to create five states in Syria. They created a state for the Druze in Jabal, now known as the Mount of the Druze. They created a state for the Alawites in the north and two states for the Sunnis—one in Damascus and one in Aleppo. The fifth state was called Greater Lebanon, though it was very small. The only state that survived was Lebanon—because in Lebanon there was the embryo of a confessional sectarian political structure that was built since the nineteenth century. This structure was not present in Syria. I am not saying that people did not feel affiliation to their different communities, but this affiliation was not part of their national identity. This is why the four states in Syria failed—by the will of the Syrians, not by any force. What we are witnessing now is something modern, which is related to a type of modernism of the colonial, of the political and economic structures, and of the dictatorships that came after the end of colonialism in the Arab east. What we’re witnessing is the structuring of loyalties according to sect or to different confessions—and this is fabricated. When we speak about the nation, it is a fabricated issue. We invent a nation. But this does not mean that we do not have different affiliations, as I said.

This is like anywhere in the world, but here in the Arab east it is much clearer. No one has one single identity. Having one identity means you are a fascist! We have multiple layers of identities, and this is richness, not poorness. This does not automatically lead to civil wars, savagery, and massacres. This can lead there if a structure is pushing it forward. The Syrian dictatorship tried to dominate Syria through using one of the communities against the others, using a minority against the majority. The same thing happened in Iraq, but vice versa through the Ba’ath Party, which is a catastrophe that happened to the Arab world.

So this is invented, what we’re witnessing now. And then it comes to levels of savagery with Iraq—with Da’esh [Islamic State], with what happened to the Yazidis, with what happened to the Christians of Mosul and what happened to the Christian community in Iraq under the Americans. We can go beyond this. This is something very new, it is not eternal. In our history there were factions and civil wars, but we can analyze them in a totally different way, even if it took the shape of ideology or religion. Whereas now we are witnessing something totally new, totally modern, which is threatening our national unities and our personal identities.

Once I was in France and someone introduced me as a Christian; I told them, “Please, please, please. I’m not a Christian—who told you I am Christian? I come from a Christian family, but I’m not Christian.” It’s not my identity. I’m Lebanese, I’m Arab. Everyone thinks I’m Palestinian and I am proud of this. This is how I figure out things and how I write—this is how I see multiple identities in my novels. There is a Muslim who was in the Jihad Muqaddas in the ’30s in Palestine, whose mother is Christian. And, for him, St. Mary is part of his culture. This is how I see our identity, and this can be a great richness on one condition: to become serious about our destinies and to change this bottomless bottom that we are entering.

Ilan: I’m thinking of one passage in your novel Bab al-Shams, or Gate of the Sun, that relates to this. Although it is about an individual’s version of his or her own history, I think it also refers allegorically to what we are talking about. I’m thinking about where Khalil says to Yunis that he’s “scared of a history that has only one version.” He continues,

History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into only one leads only to death. We mustn’t see ourselves only in their mirror, for they’re prisoners of one story, as though that story had abbreviated and ossified them. . . . You mustn’t become just one story. . . . I see you as a man who betrays and repents and loves and fears and dies. This is the only way if we’re not to ossify and die.

This relates to his personal life, of course. But I think it is also a kind of philosophy and your reaction to a reductionist politics of identity, which is not a continuation of the mosaic of the past. It is a modern creation and a deadly one.

Let me move to Palestine here. Since you were nineteen years old, you have been deeply involved in the Palestinian liberation movement and Palestinian cultural life. There are currently many efforts and initiatives to either reformulate, repeal, or replace the fragmentation caused by the Nakba and subsequent events that created different Palestinian constituencies with different agendas. And it seems that the younger Palestinian generation is looking for a way forward to be guided out of the present deadlock, hopefully by new democratic and representative leadership. Are you involved in these kinds of contemplations? And even if you are not, what are your views on the future political structure that may have the ability to carry the Palestinian liberation struggle forward in this century?

Elias: I was and I think I still am a militant, but I was never a political politician. So don’t expect a political answer from me in the narrow concept of “politics.” Since you referred to Yunis and Bab al-Shams, I want to remind you that after the defeat of 1967, there’s a scene where Yunis is in the camp and he says to everyone, “From the beginning, we have to begin again.” I think we are now in a moment which is very similar to that moment. We need a new beginning. This is what is vibrating in my eyes, and in my soul. This is what I felt when Bassel al-Araj was assassinated by the Israelis.

This is what I felt last week when three youngsters from Nablus were assassinated. This is what I felt when the six prisoners escaped Gilboa Prison through a tunnel. We need a new beginning. I don’t believe that we can revive something that died. Revival can only be done by gods and we are not gods. We are human beings. In history there is no revival. In history, there are beginnings, and the beginning must be from the base—from the struggle and resistance against the occupation, apartheid, and the closed national identitarian discourse. The struggle for a free and democratic Palestine, where Palestinians have the right to return, where we can hope for a future for the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the refugees who have been through hell for seventy-four years.

So we need a new beginning. In this beginning I try to be part of the debate. And we are old now—we are no longer “fit” for the technical struggle, which I did when I was young. But I think struggle has many forms, and one of its forms is writing and literature. I think Palestine now is literature.

In the artistic pluralistic perspective, Palestine has a special place—I say this not only because I love the Palestinians. Here, you have a situation where there is colonization, there is apartheid, and there are colonies (referred to as “settlements” in a technical error). I do not have any hope in the leadership that dominates the PLO. I do not have any hope in Hamas that is using Gaza. I think we need something totally new.

We need something totally new in a new situation where the Arab dictatorships have shown us their real face—that they are another face of colonialism and Zionism. The Palestinians are not alone. They are alone if they separate their struggle from the struggle of the Arabs for democracy and from the struggle for equality and humanity on the international level. We are not alone. But we need to find ways to rebuild this collective struggle and feeling around Palestine.

Ilan: When you say that we should start from the beginning, I was thinking about your longtime engagement with the events of the Nakba as a writer, as a novelist. And later you added another layer, having a dialectical relationship between the Nakba and the Holocaust in your novels—between Jewish history or the history of persecution of the Jews and the history of the Zionist colonization and oppression of the Palestinians.

I’d like to ask you about this engagement with the Nakba and its denial. One of the features of dealing with the Nakba is the way you and many others would refer to the Nakba as al-Nakba al-mustamirrah—the ongoing Nakba. There’s a certain sense of desperation because it seems that the most common references to the Nakba are its persistence and constant denial. Your novels bring it back, as did the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, as did the work of the historians—just recently we were able to resurface the crime of the massacre that occurred in Tantura in 1948. It is a denial that is forced by the oppressor, but also brought by the victims’ inability and unwillingness to speak, as we learn from Adam Danun’s notebooks in Children of the Ghetto.

How much should this struggle against denial be part of the liberation struggle you are talking about? You highlighted the role that literature should play and I agree with you! How much of it is also a struggle against denial of the Nakba? And to what extent is a struggle against denial part of decolonization—part of the struggle for liberation and not an unhealthy nostalgic adherence to the past?

Is it part of what Edward Said used to call a demand for “permission to narrate,” or is it much more than that? Is it exactly what you talked about: the right of return? Is it not a demand to fight against denial because we want not only acknowledgment of the crime of the Nakba, we also want accountability for the crimes committed by Israel—and we believe they are best rectified through the right of return. Is this something that we should continue to focus on?

And if I can add, how do you see the dialectical connection between the Nakba and the Holocaust? Your involvement is an antidote to what we are experiencing in Britain due to the new IHRA definition, where criticism of Israel can now be framed as denial of the Holocaust. It stifles debate and our ability to pursue constructive criticism.

I would like you to talk about the Nakba and its connection to the Holocaust through the quote from Adam Danun, who says in Children of the Ghetto, “I did not conceal my Palestinian identity, but I hid it in the Palestinian ghetto [in al-Lid, Lod] in which I was born. I was a son of the ghetto and it bestowed upon me the immunity of the Warsaw Ghetto.” To those who are not familiar with the term “ghetto” in this context, let me explain that the Palestinians who remained in the destroyed towns of Palestine after the Nakba were cordoned in areas and circled with barbed wire, which the Israelis themselves called “the ghetto.”

What you are doing, if I understood correctly, is providing immunity through a certain mode of resistance in the past that persecuted Jews were using, and shielding yourself by almost appropriating the term “ghetto,” which the Israelis invoked. And you create an interesting relationship as part of a literary attempt—and not a political attempt—to explain the importance of not denying the Nakba, of commemorating it and examining its relevance for the present.

Elias: I first used the term “the ongoing Nakba” in a lecture I gave at the annual lecture for the Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. I don’t know why they chose me, but the hall was full of German professors and German heads of universities. It was very prestigious. And I read a long text, which was republished afterward in English and Arabic. To my astonishment, the reaction was . . . first of all, nobody clapped for ten seconds. And then everybody did.

But the reaction and real anger was, “You are speaking about the Nakba now and the Nakba happened in ’48—khalas!” There was no denying of the Nakba. They couldn’t deny it. But they wanted to deny that what we are living through now is the Nakba, that this is the Nakba taking different forms. This is what makes it different from the Holocaust—I do not say the Holocaust and the Nakba are the same thing. One of the differences is that the Holocaust happened. The Nakba is happening. This is the present of Palestine and this is the present of the Arabs. It’s happening now—in Sheikh Jarrah, in Nablus, everywhere in Palestine and historic Palestine. In all of Palestine in ’48 and ’67, in all of Gaza the Nakba is happening. What we are witnessing is the same project, which is continuing. When [historian] Benny Morris republished his book after the second intifada, he said that Ben-Gurion committed a big error when he did not continue. The first declaration by Ariel Sharon at the beginning of the second intifada was, “We are in a new war of independence,” which means we are in the Nakba. The war of independence is not finished. There is a continuous process which is still taking place and our struggle is to stop this process. The moment we stop this process, everything will change.

In this sense, the Nakba is not a memory. It is the present, and memory comes from the present. You mentioned the ghetto of Lydda—there were many ghettos: Lydda, Ramle, Haifa, Jaffa. The Palestinians in the ghetto heard the term for the first time from Israeli soldiers. And to my astonishment many people told me, “Isn’t it the name of the Arab quarter, of the Arab neighborhood?” They thought this is the name Israel gave to the Arab neighborhood—“ghetto.”

It was not by accident that the Israeli soldiers called them ghettos—in their subconscious they knew what they were doing. We are revisiting Tantura and just witnessing it with the film (Tantura, 2022). I think these criminals were aware of their criminality. There is a beautiful Israeli novel, Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar. S. Yizhar was a Zionist, but I taught his novel. And for those doing comparative literature, it’s interesting to compare Khirbet Khizeh to Palestinian literature.

The novel was published in 1949, during the war of the Nakba, during the war of independence. Yizhar describes the Palestinians who are expelled from this village—he called it “Khirbet Khizeh,” but we later learned it was the actual village Khirbet al-Khisas—as if they are Jews. He uses the same terms that the antisemites use to describe the Jews, which makes them “the Jews of the Jews.”

The Nakba and the Holocaust are related through this concept, the Jews and “the Jews of the Jews.” And it seems all societies and all types of racism need Jews, as a figure. If you don’t have Jews, you invent your Jews! The same thing is taking place now in Europe: they are inventing their Jews from the Muslims. So practically it is no longer possible to understand the Holocaust without understanding the Nakba, or to understand the Nakba without understanding the Holocaust.

This doesn’t mean that one crime and another crime make us equal. The Holocaust is a crime that we must condemn, and the Nakba is a crime that we must condemn. But the Nakba is still taking place and we must be accountable. Otherwise, we cannot escape this vicious circle. I know this will not sound realistic, but I am not realistic.

You need a dream. You need a dream to write books. You need a dream to make a revolution. You need a dream to teach deep from your heart. Otherwise, it’s meaningless.

This relationship between the Nakba and the Holocaust will open a horizon for reconciliation. Not in the way that the Oslo agreements framed reconciliation, because it was a surrender, which the Israelis refused. We need a deep reconciliation of accepting the other and trying to build a new democratic place—a place where our religious identity is not the dominant identity. The dominant identity is our human identity. This is how I dream.

And I think this is what gave me the potential to write a novel like Children of the Ghetto. This dream enabled me to go through this very dark history, which is as if you are going inside your dark selves—this is the heart of darkness. This is the real heart of darkness that literature can help us to understand. Not to solve, but to understand. How to solve it is up to the new generation, who must teach us.

Ilan: I have a final question for you, Elias. At the beginning of our conversation, you said the civil war, in a way, liberated a certain generation of Lebanese writers, and you connected to past and present events. That reminded me of Isabel Allende once saying that, unlike in the West, audiences in Latin America anticipate their writers to have a certain message—ideological, moral, political. She had the sense that even with a romance story, the audience anticipates a reference to political, ideological, and moral issues.

When you look toward the next generation of writers in the Arab world, do you think there is a sense that writing or the novel, with all its multilayered objectives, is part of the liberation struggle? You once said that you want to make people feel the joy of the novel, to make people happy, interested, or moved. But there is also the wish not to solve or offer a solution, but to illuminate a question, to expand on it. Do you feel that the current generation of writers on Palestine or Lebanon see themselves as part of liberation, fighting against injustice? Or is there more an escape, to say “this is so horrible or insoluble that we don’t want to be there”? Can you provide a final statement of the role of literature in a part of the world that needs decolonization, especially de-Zionization, and a better record of human and civil rights?

Elias: When we were speaking about translation, we said that translators must be poets and they must not consider the audience at all. When I write, I don’t think about the audience. I think about what I am trying to discover, what I am trying to go through, what I am trying to experience. Because every novel is like a journey. Every novel presents something to learn about, discover, and then to come back and to read. In One Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad used to travel to far places actually in order to tell—because he was a storyteller. So he came back to tell. I go in order to tell, and I tell what I’ve seen. I don’t tell what I think is good.

To go back to Bab al-Shams, the plan was to write a love story—I swear it was. The initial plan had nothing to do with Palestine. The initial plan was that Yunis is living in Lebanon, he has a wife who is in the Galilee, and he wants to cross the border. To go and meet, because he was in love her. And I said to myself, “This is the first story.” Because normally the story of love in literature is the story of separation. And you never love your wife! You love someone else. Here I thought we are going toward a new approach about love. And then when I put Yunis in his context, all of Palestine, I was obliged. Instead of writing a novel in one year—a small, short novel about love—I spent seven, eight years in order to build the whole story. But the whole story was around love.

So you discover and you witness what you are discovering. I think this is what literature is all about. And now reading it in the situation I am and the situation the text is, of course this is part of decolonization—because I am part of decolonization. But I do not push the text to follow me. I follow the text. I do not teach the heroes what to say, they teach me how to speak.

It’s a very complex relationship, but practically my heroes are marginals. This is a choice, because I feel I’m a margin. Strangers, because I feel I am a stranger. The way Adam Danun is, or the way Khalil Ayub is. This is how I feel. This is who I identify with. I think that now in the Mashreq we are witnessing something. For example, there is a huge innovation with the Syrian novel that has happened over twelve years, since the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring. It’s amazing how the Syrian novel became so central in Syrian culture! How the Iraqi novel traveled the same road that the Lebanese novel took fifty years ago.

I’m a reader and I learn from these young, new writers. I do not teach them. When I read them, I’m so happy! Now, many of them feel that it’s too much, that you have to go aside. I think you cannot. Wherever you are, we are witnessing. At the beginning you asked me personally about Beirut. This is the first time in my life I feel that I am in exile when I’m in Beirut.

The exile became an interior part of our lives, whether we are in Beirut, or in Baghdad, or in Damascus, or in Paris, or in London, or in Berlin. Wherever we are, we are in exile. And I think this experience of the literature, of exile, will give something new. I don’t know what. But there is something profoundly new, which is beginning. I’m very enthusiastic to read because practically, who is the writer? The writer is the reader. You read the reality and you translate it. When you read a novel or a poem, when I go back to my great friend and personal poet Mahmoud Darwish, I feel as if I am taking all the languages. Not only Arabic! I’m taking all the languages.

In one language, you feel all the languages. You feel the ancient languages, which were dominant in our part of the world—especially the Aramaic, the Syriac, the Hebrew, and so on. And you take the modern languages. In one poem, you can incarnate the whole world. In one novel, the whole world will come, and you’ll be part of it.