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Despite The Ban, There’s A Plan To Build A Shelter For Separated Migrant Children In The San Fernando Valley

5d150a28ca5dee000ae1b7b2-eight.jpgAn detainee holds his children during a family visitation visit at the Adelanto Detention Facility, California’s largest lock-up for undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers waiting for decisions from immigration courts. (John Moore/Getty)

California has banned new for-profit immigrant detention centers. And local officials have opposed the opening of new child migrant shelters. But this has not stopped private companies and the Trump administration from recently trying to open more of both.

In early October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 32, which starting Jan. 1 bans new contracts for-profit state prisons as well as for privately-run immigrant detention centers in California, like the one operated by the The Geo Group in Adelanto.

A few days later, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a public proposal request seeking bids for “Detention Services in California.” The site of at least one of these facilities would be no more than 100 miles from Los Angeles, according to the documents.

“It’s dripping with irony. ICE is clearly trying everything they can to circumvent California’s ban,” said Assemblymember Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, who wrote AB 32.

The bidding process ended Nov. 4. In an email, ICE spokesperson Lori Haley says the agency is considering bid applications from private contractors in accordance with “federal contract and acquisition regulations,” but could not disclose details like where or who the contractors are.

Haley says ICE’s legal experts are currently reviewing AB 32, but “the idea that a state law can bind the hands of a federal law enforcement agency managing a national network of detention facilities is wrong,” she wrote.

HOW THE FIGHT IS UNFOLDING

  • California has banned private prisons and for-profit detention centers starting Jan. 1, 2020 according to new law.
  • Shortly after Gov. Newsom signed a bill in October banning for-profit prisons and detention centers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement put out a request for proposals for several new ICE detention centers in California.
  • As of early November, ICE was still seeking bids from private companies for new detention centers in California; bidding has since closed.
  • Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles has begun the process of changing city zoning codes to block detention centers.
  • The Trump administration says migrant shelters for unaccompanied minors separated from their parents at the border are not “detention centers.” They say the shelters are “state licensed residential centers” legally administered by the Department of Health and Human Services and their network of private contractors.
  • HHS says they have given a company called VisionQuest millions of dollars to open and run migrant youth shelters “in and near Los Angeles.” One of those shelters is proposed for Arleta in the San Fernando Valley.
  • City Councilwoman Nury Martinez, whose district includes much of the Valley, has introduced a Council motion to try and stop VisionQuest’s plans in Arleta.

The site of a proposed migrant youth shetler in the San Fernando Valley.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE VALLEY PROPOSAL

The proposed shelter in the San Fernando Valley would be for migrant children separated from families at the border and unaccompanied minors.

The Department of Health and Human Services oversees these child migrant shelters though the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the agency.

Patrick Fisher, a spokesperson for HHS, told LAist in an email that the agency awarded a contract to a private company called VisionQuest “to develop a two-shelter grant program and provide these services in and near Los Angeles.”

According to a recent report from Reveal, the two proposed locations are Hemet and Arleta; the latter is a middle-class, predominantly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley near Pacoima.

The Reveal report also underscored VisionQuest’s poor record running shelters in Philadelphia. There, VisionQuest staff members choked, threatened and slapped children, according to state records obtained by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an email to LAist, L.A. City Councilwoman Nury Martinez, whose district includes much of the San Fernando Valley, confirmed the Arleta site is a former assisted living facility. “You should not be able to profit off of the anguish of children,” she wrote. “That has no place in Arleta or anywhere in the City of Los Angeles.”

In July, the City Council adopted a motion to amend the city’s zoning codes to “prohibit the construction and operation of private detention centers.”

Fisher said the proposed shelter is not a detention center and that the agency tries to promptly place children with an adult sponsor, typically a family member. “Our top priority at ORR is to unify children with their parents, family members or other suitable sponsor as swiftly and safely as possible,” he wrote in an email. “While we are working to identify a sponsor, each child is provided a safe and healthy environment that ensures access to nutritious food, clean clothes, education and medical services.”

Martinez said they aren’t shelters or detention centers. “As the daughter of Mexican immigrants, I am vehemently opposed to placing immigrant children in what some call holding facilities or detention centers,” she wrote. “I call them prisons.”

In an effort to stop VisionQuest’s proposal, Martinez introduced a City Council resolution on Tuesday to reconsider “whether a detention facility is a permissible use” of the vacant building. “There is widespread community interest as to its future use given the needs in the surrounding area for economic development and desirable neighborhood enhancing uses,” the motion states.

VisionQuest has not returned our request for comment. In a statement to Reveal, however, the company’s president Mark Contento said, “We understand there is a great deal of emotion tied to the proper care of these children, and there is a lot of misinformation online.”

Martinez said as she sees it, private operators like VisionQuest are “working for a dishonest Federal government that actively engaged in, and then lied about, separating immigrant children from their parents.” That scenario, she said, creates “a recipe for human disaster.”

Assemblyman Bonta said the distinction between ICE detention centers and migrant youth shelters is primarily a semantic one.

“It’s a detention center,” he said. “Maybe it’s young people as opposed to adults. They might not want to call them guards but they have folks who are enforcing the rules and not allowing people to leave. Hopefully they’re being as humane as possible. I mean, that’s the big problem with these facilities. They’re owned literally by shareholders and they’re traded on Wall Street. They’re trying to get their highest quarterly earnings.”

Lebanon: A Revolution against Sectarianism

The following was originally published on Crimethinc on November 13th, 2019.


Crimethinc: Since October 17, Lebanon has experienced countrywide demonstrations that have toppled the prime minister and transformed Lebanese society. These demonstrations are part of a global wave of uprisings including Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Catalunya, in which the exploited and oppressed are challenging the legitimacy of their rulers. In Lebanon, a sectarian power-sharing arrangement dating from the end of the civil war has created a permanent ruling class of warlords who use patronage networks to maintain power by winning elections—confirming our thesis that politics is war by other means. In this thorough account of the events of the past month, an on-the-ground participant describes the Lebanese uprising in detail, exploring how it has undermined patriarchal structures and transcended religious divisions to bring people together against the ruling class.


1Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

How It All Began

For the people of Lebanon, the week of October 17, 2019 was among the most eventful in recent memory.

On the night of October 13-14, wildfires ravaged Lebanon and parts of Syria. We lost up to 3,000,000 trees (1200 hectares) in a country of 10,500 square kilometers (4035 square miles), nearly doubling the annual average of tree loss in just 48 hours. The government’s response was disastrous. Lebanon had only three helicopters, donated by civilians who pitched in, that were just sitting at the airport because they had fallen into disuse as the government had not maintained them. Although the government had allocated money for maintenance, it had “disappeared,” as so many funds do in Lebanon, into the hands of the sectarian upper class. The fires were eventually put out by a combination of volunteer civil servants (civil defense hasn’t been paid in decades) including people from the Palestinian refugee camps, random volunteers, aircraft sent by Jordan, Cyprus, and Greece and, luckily enough, rain. It could have turned out much, much worse.

Not satisfied with their own incompetence, Lebanese politicians started scapegoating Syrians, spreading rumors that Syrians were starting the fires and moving into abandoned Lebanese homes (Syrians are apparently fireproof). Some of them, like Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) politician Mario Aoun, complained that the fires were only affecting Christian areas, ignoring the fact that the Shouf region, where much of the fires happened, is actually a Druze-majority area. (See the Lebanese Politics podcast, episode 59.)

Rather than addressing the repercussions of the fires and preventing the next ones, the state exacerbated the situation. On October 17, the state approved a bill that would tax internet-based phone calls via services like WhatsApp. They framed this as an attempt to bring in additional revenue in order to unlock over $11 billion worth of “aid” promised at the CEDRE conference in Paris:

“The World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa Ferid Belhaj said that if Lebanon wanted to see any CEDRE money soon, it needs to get serious about implementing reforms.”

These “reforms” were essentially measures further punishing the bottom-tier economic majority while excepting the top minority.

“for every tree burned in Lebanon we’re going to burn an MP” #اجا_وقت_نحاسب pic.twitter.com/XXiEvUptnJ

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 18, 2019

Lebanon had already experienced a series of economic crises tied to corruption and national debt—the vast majority of which (approximately 90%) is owed to local banks and the central bank—resulting in several bank runs, fuel shortages, and strikes. Nearly $90 billion is concentrated in only 24,000 bank accounts in Lebanon, which is to say, something between 6000 and 8000 account holders in Lebanon have over eight times the amount of money that the government is hoping to “unlock” with CEDRE. Although many media outlets focused on the so-called “Whatsapp tax,” it was actually the combination of all of these factors and many more that inspired outrage.

On the night of October 17, thousands took to the streets of Lebanon, including Beirut, Tyre, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Saida, and many other places in spontaneous protests. The protests were so overwhelming that the state cancelled the tax immediately. That night, a woman named Malak Alaywe Herz kicked the armed bodyguard of a politician; the video went viral and, as in Sudan, a woman became a revolutionary icon. By October 18, parts of downtown Beirut were on fire and large parts of the country were completely shut down by roadblocks, many of which involved burning tires.

I’m impressed #ثورة_شعب #اجا_وقت_نحاسب pic.twitter.com/hsBrW2ijoP

— Roy 💤 (@AbouchacraRoy) October 17, 2019

I had joined the protests in Beirut by then and have been going nearly every day since. As an organizer of the 2015 protests, who grew up in Lebanon and who has been writing about it since 2012, I could see right away that these protests were going to be different. I wasn’t the only one taken over by that rarest of all feelings: hope. On the contrary, it was everywhere. In this account, I will try to explain why these protests have already created irreversible changes in the country, changes that the ruling warlord-oligarch elites are struggling to reverse.

The Dual Nature of the Uprising

It’s useful to think of the ongoing uprising as having both reformist and revolutionary dimensions. It is an uprising against injustice and corruption and a revolution against sectarianism.

The reformist dimension takes the form of protests against corruption. One common demand, expressed in the chant kellon yaani kellon (“all of them means all of them”), is for the government to resign. On October 20, four ministers associated with the Lebanese Forces (LF), a party led by former warlord Samir Geagea, resigned; since then, the LF has been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to ride the wave of the protests. The first major victory was Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation on Tuesday, October 29, effectively collapsing the government as we had known it—although, as of this writing, he is still caretaker prime minister.

There are no unified demands coming from the streets; in many ways, there is resistance to formulating a list of demands. That said, there are several popular demands, mostly calling for the end of corruption and sectarian politics, which are rightly seen as intertwined. We see these in the street interviews conducted by TV stations, on social media, and between protesters themselves. As Kareem Chehayeb and Abby Sewell wrote, in addition to the government’s resignation, two common demands have been for “early parliamentary elections with a new electoral law for elections that are not based on sectarian proportionality” and “for an independent investigation into stolen and misappropriated public funds.” That last one was succinctly summarized by a man from Arsal: “There is no war. This is about money. You stole the money, return the money.”

This is how many people were in central Beirut today.
.
Are you getting their message? pic.twitter.com/PwTLm2RbFq

— Jad Chaaban د. جاد شعبان (@JadChaaban) October 20, 2019

The protests are anti-sectarian in many different ways. They transcend what we might think of as left/right divides and even include traditional supporters of sectarian political parties. This anger is nearly three decades in the making; the inter-generational traumas are even older. Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s transnational warlord-oligarch class has perfected the rules of the game. The state serves as a vessel through which this class can do business with itself and with primarily Gulf, Iranian, and Western elites; clientalist networks maintain structures of power benefitting this class, keeping segments of the population dependent on them; public infrastructures have been left to rot while rapid privatization limits freedom of movement between regions and regularly paralyzes the whole country; and, more recently, the fear of violence spilling over from Syria have been regularly evoked, three decades after the country’s own civil war, to impose helplessness on the people of Lebanon.

Long story short: while trying to recover from 15 years of civil war, residents of Lebanon have spent the past three decades navigating life in a country whose affairs they have had very little say over. An implosion was inevitable, but the way it has happened is challenging the more cynical interpretations of Lebanese political life, including those of the Lebanese themselves.

Reclaiming Our Streets

When the civil war ended under the “tutelage” (read: occupation) of the Syrian regime, the powers that be scrambled to create a semblance of politics in order to promote the message that the 1990s would be the decade of reconstruction. In Beirut, this involved privatizating virtually everything. The historical downtown, which Arabs throughout the region refer to as Al-Balad (literally “the country”) was transformed into Solidere, the private company founded by the Hariri family. This “actually existing neoliberalism” was sugarcoated in a language of hope: the narrative was that only through business ties could the menace of the civil war be kept at bay. This was the time that our generation was born—the postwar generation that I like to refer to as the “afterthought generation.” We grew up hearing stories of “the good old days” prior to the war, when Beirut had a tramway and people could sell merchandise in public spaces. Needless to say, that rosy picture of the pre-war years glossed over many crises at the regional and national levels, crises that ultimately led to the civil war in 1975.

1“It’s called Al-Balad, not Solidere.” Photo by Joey Ayoub.

But the 1990s also saw other developments. The parliament passed an amnesty law in 1991 forgiving most of the crimes committed during the war, enabling those with established power to get into government. Most of the current political heavyweights were warlords or related to warlords, or else became active in the postwar era either in its first days or after the 2005 Cedar Revolution that expelled the Syrian army.

These political figures include Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement since the 1980s and speaker of parliament since 1992; Michel Aoun, president of the republic, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) who returned from exile in 2005, and father-in-law of Gebran Bassil, who is also a leader of the FPM as well as the foreign minister; Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (LF) since the 1980s, freed from prison in 2005 and historical rival of Aoun; Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992; Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive “Socialist” Party (PSP) since 1977; and Samy Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb party and nephew of Bachir Gemayel, a warlord who was assassinated in 1982 while president-elect. In addition, we can count Future Movement (FM) leader Saad Hariri, repeat prime minister and son of assassinated prime minister Rafik Hariri, as one the most prominent oligarchs of the postwar era, alongside Tammam Salam, former prime minister and the son of Saeb Salam, six-time prime minister before the civil war, and Najib Mikati, also former prime minister and usually cited as the richest man in Lebanon.

In short, Lebanon is ruled by political dynasties that were forged in the fire of the civil war or during its postwar “reconstruction.” This is who protesters in the northern city of Tripoli addressed on November 2 with the chant “we are the popular revolution, you are the civil war.”

Tripoli, Light of the Revolution

Tripoli, Northern Lebanon’s biggest city, has been at the forefront of the uprising. Nearly every day since October 17, thousands of protesters in Tripoli have taken to the streets to demand the fall of the sectarian regime. To quote one 84-year-old participant, “There is so much poverty and deprivation here that, no matter how this turns out, things will be better.” In addition to the spectacular displays of popular mobilization, kellon yaani kellon and “the people want the downfall of the regime” ring out on a daily basis.

Tripoli, a Sunni-majority city, has been openly defying the sectarian narrative by declaring that they stand with Nabatiyeh, Tyre, and Dahieh—all Shia-majority. When Hezbollah and Amal shabbiha (government thugs) attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh on October 23, Tripoli responded “Nabatiyeh, Tripoli is with you until death.” The “popular revolution vs. civil war” chant, quickly adopted in the rest of Lebanon, presents a narrative in which those who still cling to their sectarian identities as relics of the civil war oppose those who are trying to build a future that is inclusive of all regardless of religious sects. Tripoli’s protests indicated early on that this uprising would be different.

Tripoli again, night of Oct 22, singing for all of Lebanon https://t.co/WbcC3yrY2I

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

Tripoli has maintained a distinct momentum because of the organizational structures that have emerged. As in Beirut, protesters in Tripoli have set up people’s hospitals and discussion forums in addition to occupying the municipal building. The mobilizations have been so inclusive that, for the first time I know of, protesters from elsewhere in Lebanon have gone to Tripoli to participate in the protests there, in response to an open invitation. On October 22, just before protesters started chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime,” a man with a megaphone declared “if they [the government] shut down all the squares, you are all welcome in Nour Square [the main square].” For the first time, Tripoli became the center of national Lebanese outrage. Nour means “light” in Arabic; the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury named Tripoli the light of the revolution.

Was sent this video of #Tripoli, Northern #Lebanon, and it’s so damn beautiful.

He’s saying that if they shut down all squares, we are all welcome in Tripoli. They then proceed with: #الشعب_يريد_إسقاط_النظام#لبنان_يتنفض #طرابلس_تنتفض #LebanonProtests pic.twitter.com/nGDY1FqpHz

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 22, 2019

To grasp the significance of this, it is necessary to understand that parts of Tripoli and the Akkar district north of it have historically born the brunt of state violence while being demonized by the public and media as hubs of Sunni extremism. Both the Lebanese state and Hezbollah have adopted their own versions of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” narrative, and the Sunni-majority areas of northern Lebanon, among the poorest of Lebanon and close to Syria, have become scapegoats. Yet despite these attempts by the sectarian parties, the scapegoating of the North has failed to hinder this movement. One can find sectarian comments online, usually mingled with anti-refugee comments, but they have not significantly impacted the momentum on the streets.

This is why the status of Tripoli as the de facto capital of the revolution has made political actors like the FPM very uncomfortable. The FPM television station, OTV, has regularly demonized protesters in Tripoli and Akkar, engaging in a disinformation campaign from the start. One headline claimed that Tripoli was “copying” the Syrian city of Homs (brutally crushed by the Assad regime in 2014), suggesting that militants from Idlib were making their way there. Another pundit on OTV proclaimed “just as we went to Syria and buried their revolution, we will bury this revolution in Lebanon.” (The FPM never militarily participated in Syria, but its ally Hezbollah obviously did). When an activist in Beirut responded to anti-Syrian refugee sentiments by chanting “Bassil out, refugees in,” OTV took that footage and added the headline “American training, Saudi incitement, Syrian infiltration.”

Beirut, day of Oct 20: “Bassil out out, Refugees in in” https://t.co/flG7CRHD46

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

The Syria connection runs deep. Protesters in Tripoli have chanted “Idlib we are with you until death,” in reference to the Syrian city that continues to be bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces; Syrian chants have been adopted and re-purposed throughout Lebanon. As one Syrian activist wrote, “Lebanon’s political establishment, particularly the part of it that is still in power, is increasingly annoyed by Tripoli and going to lengths to paint in a bad light the city and its inhabitants.” The scapegoating of Tripoli could be seen as an extension of the Lebanese government’s response to the Syrian revolution, especially on the part of Hezbollah, Amal, and the FPM. Although officially unaffiliated, the Lebanese government has taken a hardline turn against refugees since Aoun’s election in 2016—not that the government was pro-refugee before. Bassil especially has associated himself with this rhetoric, hence the anti-Bassil pro-refugee chant.

The district of Akkar has arguably been scapegoated by politicians and media outlets even more than Tripoli. Although protests there began alongside the rest of Lebanon, media coverage remains minimal. On October 30, protesters in Akkar, as elsewhere in the country, echoed the famous Syrian chant “yalla erhal ya Bashar” (hurry up, leave Bashar [Assad]), adjusting it to “yalla erhal Michel Aoun,” as first heard in Beirut. That same night, security forces attacked a march in Akkar as protesters tried to block the roads. The violent response by security forces led protesters to contrast the relatively mild response by security forces in Beirut to their response in Akkar.

The South and East Rise

The other part of the story here is set in the South, especially in Nabatiyeh and Tyre (known as Sour in Arabic), as well as the Bekaa Valley in the East.

Protesters in Nabatiyeh were among the first to demonstrate on the night of October 17. By October 18, some were already challenging long-standing taboos. The very suggestion one protester made on live television—that Nabih Berri, whose Amal movement dominates the region politically alongside Hezbollah, has been Speaker of Parliament for too long—terrified the journalist interviewing him; the tweet documenting this has since been deleted. To understand why this occurred and why what is happening in the South and East is so important, we need to discuss the shabbiha.

Protesters in Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon, singing Bella Ciao yesterday (not my video)#لبنان_يتنفض #الشعب_يريد_إسقاط_النظام pic.twitter.com/B9sQZSynJd

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 22, 2019

The shabbiha have historically been a Syrian phenomenon. The word itself comes from “ghost” or “shadow”; it is often associated with black Mercedes S600 cars (called al-shabah) which have been used for kidnapping Syrian dissidents and protesters. Later on, the term took on a more general connotation, describing men willing to be violent on behalf of their zu’ama (singular: za’im)—local warlords or chieftains—who often receive orders from above. This can be anything from beating up protesters to kidnapping, torturing, even killing them. The latter isn’t as common in Lebanon anymore, which is why the term shabbiha now means any pro-government actor willing to inflict violence on protesters.

This image, for example, shows armed pro-Amal shabbiha in Tyre on October 19; a video from that same morning shows these shabbiha attacking protesters. Due to their nature, it is often very difficult to identify shabbiha, and almost impossible to “prove” a chain of command. But for both historical and contemporary reasons, they have become associated with the Amal Movement and Hezbollah (although armed FPM shabbiha have also attacked protesters on at least one occasion).

Although Beirut also experienced two major attacks by shabbiha, it is worth noting here that even the events of October 29, when hundreds of Amal/Hezbollah men went to downtown Beirut to beat protesters and journalists and destroy tents set up by protesters, pale in comparison to what they have been getting away with in the South. On October 23, Amal/Hezbollah shabbiha attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh, injuring over 20 of them. This so shocked protesters that half a dozen municipal council members resigned the next day under pressure. In response to the October 23 attack, October 24 was called “the day of solidarity with Nabatiyeh” and a meme was passed around with the words “Nabatiyeh doesn’t kneel, ask the Zionists.” On the “Sunday of Unity” (November 3), protesters in Kfar Remen, historically known for its communist resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, met with protesters from Nabatiyeh. Some protesters fleeing Nabatiyeh’s Hezbollah-affiliated police went to Kfar Remen to join the protests there.

This is an extraordinary turn of events for a region of Lebanon that is often considered Hezbollah and Amal’s unchallenged territory; the same goes for the Bekaa valley. But the challenges to the dominant powers have continued. We’ve heard chants such as “We don’t want an army in Lebanon except the Lebanese army” (a challenge to the actual dominant military power, Hezbollah) as well as in solidarity with Tripoli and the rest of Lebanon. We saw violence by shabbiha in Bint Jbeil, a town on the southern border which suffered greatly under Israeli occupation and then during the 2006 war. Tyre also joined on the first evening, chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime”; by October 19, shabbiha were violently attacking protesters. Journalists were forced to flee the scene as shabbiha were indiscriminately beating anyone in their way. One witness described how the mukhabarat (secret police) were following protesters alongside the shabbiha.

As for the Bekaa valley, media coverage has been relatively low. There have been protests in Zahleh, Baalbek, Taalbaya, Bar Elias, Saadnayel, Chtoura, Majdal Anjar, Al-Fakeha, Hasbaya, Rashaya, and Al-Khyara, among other places.

Baalbek, night of Oct 23 https://t.co/H3MMhMAl0G

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

The Establishment Fights Back

These attacks could be described as the stick part of the government’s carrot and stick strategy. As for the carrot part, it’s been rather confused. The main actors have been struggling to offer a coherent response to the protests, largely because they disagree among themselves and are trying, as usual, to navigate their own politics on a daily basis. The decentralized and horizontal nature of the protests has hampered the state’s attempts to demonize or co-opt them.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, gave a speech on October 19. As of this writing, Nasrallah has spoken four times since the beginning of the uprising already, an unusual phenomenon in itself. Although Nasrallah holds no official position in the Lebanese government, he is seen as a de facto kingmaker due to Hezbollah’s military power. But despite having a reputation among his followers of being relatively sober in his speeches, his first speech was characterized by unadulterated rage, arrogance, and condescension. He directly told protesters that they are wasting their time and that this “mandate” (his choice of words could also be translated as “era” or “covenant”) will not fall, in reference to the 2016 deal that led to Michel Aoun becoming president and Saad Hariri becoming Prime Minister (Remember, Nabih Berri has not left his position of Speaker of Parliament since 1992.) He even accused protesters of being funded by foreign embassies, leading protesters to respond by saying “I am funding the revolution,” which has since become a meme and appeared on street signs as well. One Lebanese videographer responded by posting a video of Nasrallah himself saying that Hezbollah is 100% funded and armed by Iran.

By maintaining support for the government, Nasrallah threw his weight behind two of the most unpopular men in Lebanese politics: the FPM’s Gebran Bassil and the FM’s Saad Hariri. This exposed the establishment as opportunistic and corrupt. Just as the sectarian political parties united in 2016 to defeat Beirut Madinati in the municipal elections, they were now once again uniting to defeat the popular uprising. But Nasrallah made a grave error. By saying that this government will not fall, he added pressure on Hariri to resign. Hariri was already the weakest link in this coalition, as he had to appeal to his rivals the FPM and Hezbollah to stay in power against his own supporters’ wishes. On October 29, Hariri finally resigned, apparently surprising Hezbollah. In thirteen days, protesters had forced the collapse of a government that had taken months and months to be formed. In the weeks since the revolution started, the warlord-oligarch class has been scrambling to address a crisis they never anticipated.

But as mentioned above, other political parties have been trying to ride the wave of the revolution. This has been especially obvious with Geagea and the LF, the FPM’s historical rival—a rivalry that dates back to the bloody Geagea-Aoun battles during the civil war and was rekindled after 2005. The LF saw a golden opportunity when the revolution started: by quitting and leaving an unpopular government, the LF believed it could weaken its rivals, as both groups appeal to the same sectarian votes. There have been LF supporters blocking the roads as well; this has posed a conundrum for anti-government protesters. Following Hariri’s resignation, some protesters prefer to focus on the big players currently in government—Aoun and Berri, respectively president and speaker of parliament—yet the slogan kellon yaani kellon continues to dominate protests. Despite what supporters of the FPM/Amal/Hezbollah want to believe, the LF is not popular among protesters; it has negligible support in most places that have seen protests. There is a strong consensus that no sectarian political party will be supported, no matter how hard they try.

It is still too early to know what the government’s next steps will be. As of this writing, the caretaker government has yet to appoint new ministers and the parliament is planning to discuss a law that would grant a general amnesty covering crimes such as abuse of authority, negligence, and environmental crimes. The situation is developing very quickly.

Creative Energy

The protests in Lebanon have been incredibly creative. Students in Tripoli have used cranes to get other students out of class; sandwiches were handed out in Beirut labeled “funded by Saudi Arabia/France/US” to mock those alleging that the protesters are funded by foreign powers; one of the many roadblocks was turned into a public salon with couches, a refrigerator, and people playing football, and featured on AirBnB (for free); protesters occupied Zaitunay Bay, a private waterfront built on top of Beirut’s stolen coast, and screened the film V for Vendetta (on November 5, obviously); images of sectarian leaders have been taken down and burned; people have banged pots, echoing Chile’s cacerolazos, on the streets and from their homes; volunteers have established soup kitchens in Beirut and Tripoli; a historic abandoned cinema was reclaimed and repurposed as a cinema, classroom, and gathering spot for artists; people formed a human chain from the north to the south; protesters blocking roads sang “baby shark” to a child stuck in traffic; protesters regularly wear masks of Guy Fawkes, Dali, and the Joker; organizers have arranged open forums to bring together protesters from Tripoli, Saida, Nabatieh, Zouk, Aley, and Beirut. Protesters “blocked” a railway station as a joke, to make a point: Lebanon’s railways were destroyed during the civil war and never rebuilt. The privatization of the 1990s came at the expense of public spaces and services, which is why a big part of the protests have sought to reclaim them, engaging in guerilla planting and the like.

The general idea here is that protesters have to re-invent their tactics constantly in order to make it difficult for the state to keep up. For example, there is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of roadblocks. The chief objection is that politicians are not as affected by them as everyday people trying to go to work or send their kids to school. As of now, this tactic is still being used, but it’s no longer the main one. In recent days, protesters have moved to occupy or protest in front of government buildings and other symbols of power: everything from politicians’ houses to national power stations (most of Lebanon still does not have 24/7 electricity), passing the main telecommunications and data operators, banks, municipalities, and so on. There are now dozens of different actions on a daily basis, with most actions announced only a day before. As of this writing, high school and university students—and some even younger students—have been protesting for three days in Saida, Beirut, Jounieh, Tripoli, Koura, Bar Elias/Zahleh, Mansourieh, Hadath, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Al-Khyara, Al-Eyn, Mazraat Yachouh, Furn El Chebbak, Akkar, Tannourine, Batroun, and Byblos/Jbeil, among other places.

There has also been an online effort to counter fake news spread by supporters of the government and the political parties themselves, as well as to help protesters stay informed more generally: el3asas (“the city watch”) is verifying news spread on social media and by official news outlets; a directory called Daleel Thawra (“directory of the revolution”) is keeping track of the various actions, activities and initiatives; TeleThawra (“revolution TV”) offers an alternative to Lebanon’s government-owned Télé Liban; Fawra Media (“Outburst Media”) aims to document “the individuals and groups that are sustaining the Lebanese Revolution”; Sawt Alniswa (“Voice of Women”) is a women-run magazine published weekly; and Megaphone News has been a leading independent media outlet since 2017.

Subterranean Shockwaves

These developments have opened up a space for people and narratives that are usually suppressed at the national or party level.

In addition to the aforementioned, Palestinian and Syrian activists have actively participated in the protests, particularly in the two biggest cities, Beirut and Tripoli. Elements of the sectarian media took advantage of this to reiterate their allegations that the protests are “infiltrated by foreigners.” Aware of this, many Palestinians and Syrians have since learned how to navigate Lebanese politics, chiefly by keeping a low profile. Besides a protest in Ain El Helweh Refugee Camp, where Palestinians directly expressed solidarity with the Lebanese protests, the Palestinians in Saida, Beirut, Tripoli, and elsewhere who have participated so far have been careful to “keep to the sidelines in the Lebanese demonstrations to avoid being accused of instigating or usurping the protest movement.” This, notably, has made it more difficult for the xenophobes to play their usual game, given that it is impossible to differentiate between Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian people unless they wave their respective national flags. (This text offers some background on the scapegoating tactics.)

We’ve also seen, to a lesser extent, chants from protesters in solidarity with Egyptians, Sudanese, and other Arab parts of the Middle East and North Africa region, and there is some awareness, mostly expressed on social media, of ongoing protests and violence in Iraq, Hong Kong, Rojava, and Chile. Although quickly forgotten at the national level, we also saw riots on the first day in Zahle and Roumieh Prisons in solidarity with the protesters, as well as to bring attention to Lebanon’s horrific prison conditions and to repeat calls for a general amnesty law, as many people are arrested for supposed links to jihadi groups, drug possession, and so on.

As of now, there’s been no major participation by migrant domestic workers, who are generally confined to Lebanese family houses or else are languishing in horrific underground prisons with little to no political rights under the country’s notorious Kafala (sponsorship) system. That is unlikely to change in the near future, given the restraints imposed on them, but if the momentum of the protests continues, it could open up enough political space for new political connections to form.

The Revolution Is Feminine

Up to now, the protests have focused on tackling widespread corruption and the sectarian system. But the role of feminists, including LGBTQ+ and/or non-Lebanese activists, suggests an attempt by segments of the protesters to create a more progressive and inclusive movement. Feminists have held separate marches to highlight the patriarchal structures that disproportionately oppress women and LGBTQ+ people—notably, the fact that Lebanese women still cannot pass on their nationality to their spouses and children and the fact that the country’s sectarian laws governing such affairs as marriage, divorce, custody and so on discriminate against women. Both women and men have marched for the right to pass on nationality, in Tyre and Tripoli, and elsewhere.

Women have also used their bodies to protect other protesters from the police and prevent violence from escalating. As Leya Awadat, one participant in these “feminist walls,” put it, “In this chauvinistic society, it is badly seen for men to publicly beat women” (emphasis on publicly)—so they have been using that to their advantage.

LGBTQ+ people have also been the target of homophobic insults. One shabbiha attacking protesters on October 29 was heard on live television yelling, “Men are fucking men!” A guest on OTV claimed that protesters want to destroy sectarianism in the name of some kind of “gay agenda.”

The great feminist wall in Riad al-Solh. No men allowed through so that no problems happen and they are really serious about it. pic.twitter.com/8bfDKSpOzz

— Timour Azhari (@timourazhari) October 19, 2019

The feminist marches always meet up with the main marches. The idea is not to create separate movements but rather to make their presence known within the wider demands for justice and equality. Feminists have led many of the roadblocks and many chants as well as maintaining an active presence in day-to-day activities that help maintain the momentum of this uprising. One way they have accomplished this is by reclaiming chants and songs—both traditional and recent—and removing their sexist connotations. The popular “hela hela” song against Gebran Bassil insulted his mother—it is very common in the Arabic-speaking world to use women or their genitals as insults—so feminists changed it to insult both Gebran and “his uncle” (the president, Michel Aoun) instead, creating a chant that has since caught on. They also reclaimed a traditional song used to send women off to marriage, changing the lyrics to “she went to protest, she went to close the roads, she went to bring down the government.”

What Comes Next?

Contrary to what some have assumed, the elephant in the room is not sectarianism as of now. While the risk of sectarian tensions will likely remain for the foreseeable future, the more immediate risk is the looming economic crisis. In my opinion, this is why more radical forms of politics are only timidly surfacing. The fear that things will get much worse is both real and realistic; it is very difficult to speak of alternative ways of organizing ourselves, even transcending the petty (and dangerous) Lebanese/non-Lebanese distinctions, when most people’s primary concern is the likelihood of medicine and fuel shortages and possibly even food shortages. While more radical politics may organically develop if the economic situation gets worse, it is also possible that the more nationalistic and sectarian elements of Lebanese politics will be strengthened instead. The latter tendencies have decades of experience in power, whereas the kinder forms of politics are relatively new, just being built on the streets and online.

Consequently, a dominant perception among protesters is that we need to be both angry and careful.

1Banner reading “Economic justice is a feminist cause” with Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in the background—Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

That being said, the soup kitchens, the free healthcare tents, and the reclaiming of privatized historical sites and coastal areas are all initiatives that implicitly affirm what we can call the commons. This is crucial to understand in a country that has had no commons in recent memory, where they dominant “pro-market” ideology predates the establishment of the nation state of Lebanon.

Although the main actors could be argued to be roughly a dozen or so public figures, the reason the clientalist networks have so far worked also has to do with the existence of a subset of the population which benefits from these networks. They place themselves as intermediaries between the oligarchs and those seeking wasta (bribes, nepotism, “who you know”) to receive services not provided by the state. In other words, some people have financial incentives to maintain clientalist networks against the establishment of anything that might be called public institutions. Overhauling and then overthrowing such a system will be difficult. Overthrowing such a system while confronting the state’s brutal potential will be even more difficult.

But if the loose coalition of anti-sectarian progressives doesn’t tackle this issue, it is likely that the state will scapegoat those it has already been targeting: Syrian and Palestinian refugees and workers, migrant domestic workers (mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, and overwhelmingly women), LGBTQ+ people (citizens and non-citizens), sex workers, and the like. Any individual who doesn’t fit the dominant patriarchal-capitalist-sectarian paradigm is at risk of physical, psychological, and symbolic violence.

Finally, and this is related to the previous point, defeating political sectarianism and “the sectarian way of doing things” is seen as an immediate priority. This system, which dates back to the 1860s in one manifestation or another, has been losing its aura of being untouchable with the postwar generations, both Millennials and, especially, Generation Zs—those who have lived their entire lives hearing their parents complain “Where is the government?” when they have to pay two separate bills for electricity (private and public) and three separate bills for water (private and public running water, private bottled drinking water). As the warlords get older—two of the most powerful ones, Aoun and Berri, are 84 and 81 respectively—we will see the inevitable decline of the sectarianism of the civil war era.

But while this might be inevitable, the question is whether anti-sectarian progressives will succeed in building sustainable alternatives that can challenge the old order.

1Protesters in a mock hanging holding signs proclaiming “1975” (the beginning of the civil war) and “Sectarianism”—Riad El Solh street, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

We have many reasons to hope, as Bassel F. Salloukh wrote, because “the October 17 revolution marks the definitive end of the civil war, and a genuine bottom-up reconciliation between one-time warring communities.”

Lebanon: A Revolution against Sectarianism

The following was originally published on Crimethinc on November 13th, 2019.


Crimethinc: Since October 17, Lebanon has experienced countrywide demonstrations that have toppled the prime minister and transformed Lebanese society. These demonstrations are part of a global wave of uprisings including Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Catalunya, in which the exploited and oppressed are challenging the legitimacy of their rulers. In Lebanon, a sectarian power-sharing arrangement dating from the end of the civil war has created a permanent ruling class of warlords who use patronage networks to maintain power by winning elections—confirming our thesis that politics is war by other means. In this thorough account of the events of the past month, an on-the-ground participant describes the Lebanese uprising in detail, exploring how it has undermined patriarchal structures and transcended religious divisions to bring people together against the ruling class.


1Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

How It All Began

For the people of Lebanon, the week of October 17, 2019 was among the most eventful in recent memory.

On the night of October 13-14, wildfires ravaged Lebanon and parts of Syria. We lost up to 3,000,000 trees (1200 hectares) in a country of 10,500 square kilometers (4035 square miles), nearly doubling the annual average of tree loss in just 48 hours. The government’s response was disastrous. Lebanon had only three helicopters, donated by civilians who pitched in, that were just sitting at the airport because they had fallen into disuse as the government had not maintained them. Although the government had allocated money for maintenance, it had “disappeared,” as so many funds do in Lebanon, into the hands of the sectarian upper class. The fires were eventually put out by a combination of volunteer civil servants (civil defense hasn’t been paid in decades) including people from the Palestinian refugee camps, random volunteers, aircraft sent by Jordan, Cyprus, and Greece and, luckily enough, rain. It could have turned out much, much worse.

Not satisfied with their own incompetence, Lebanese politicians started scapegoating Syrians, spreading rumors that Syrians were starting the fires and moving into abandoned Lebanese homes (Syrians are apparently fireproof). Some of them, like Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) politician Mario Aoun, complained that the fires were only affecting Christian areas, ignoring the fact that the Shouf region, where much of the fires happened, is actually a Druze-majority area. (See the Lebanese Politics podcast, episode 59.)

Rather than addressing the repercussions of the fires and preventing the next ones, the state exacerbated the situation. On October 17, the state approved a bill that would tax internet-based phone calls via services like WhatsApp. They framed this as an attempt to bring in additional revenue in order to unlock over $11 billion worth of “aid” promised at the CEDRE conference in Paris:

“The World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa Ferid Belhaj said that if Lebanon wanted to see any CEDRE money soon, it needs to get serious about implementing reforms.”

These “reforms” were essentially measures further punishing the bottom-tier economic majority while excepting the top minority.

“for every tree burned in Lebanon we’re going to burn an MP” #اجا_وقت_نحاسب pic.twitter.com/XXiEvUptnJ

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 18, 2019

Lebanon had already experienced a series of economic crises tied to corruption and national debt—the vast majority of which (approximately 90%) is owed to local banks and the central bank—resulting in several bank runs, fuel shortages, and strikes. Nearly $90 billion is concentrated in only 24,000 bank accounts in Lebanon, which is to say, something between 6000 and 8000 account holders in Lebanon have over eight times the amount of money that the government is hoping to “unlock” with CEDRE. Although many media outlets focused on the so-called “Whatsapp tax,” it was actually the combination of all of these factors and many more that inspired outrage.

On the night of October 17, thousands took to the streets of Lebanon, including Beirut, Tyre, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Saida, and many other places in spontaneous protests. The protests were so overwhelming that the state cancelled the tax immediately. That night, a woman named Malak Alaywe Herz kicked the armed bodyguard of a politician; the video went viral and, as in Sudan, a woman became a revolutionary icon. By October 18, parts of downtown Beirut were on fire and large parts of the country were completely shut down by roadblocks, many of which involved burning tires.

I’m impressed #ثورة_شعب #اجا_وقت_نحاسب pic.twitter.com/hsBrW2ijoP

— Roy 💤 (@AbouchacraRoy) October 17, 2019

I had joined the protests in Beirut by then and have been going nearly every day since. As an organizer of the 2015 protests, who grew up in Lebanon and who has been writing about it since 2012, I could see right away that these protests were going to be different. I wasn’t the only one taken over by that rarest of all feelings: hope. On the contrary, it was everywhere. In this account, I will try to explain why these protests have already created irreversible changes in the country, changes that the ruling warlord-oligarch elites are struggling to reverse.

The Dual Nature of the Uprising

It’s useful to think of the ongoing uprising as having both reformist and revolutionary dimensions. It is an uprising against injustice and corruption and a revolution against sectarianism.

The reformist dimension takes the form of protests against corruption. One common demand, expressed in the chant kellon yaani kellon (“all of them means all of them”), is for the government to resign. On October 20, four ministers associated with the Lebanese Forces (LF), a party led by former warlord Samir Geagea, resigned; since then, the LF has been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to ride the wave of the protests. The first major victory was Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation on Tuesday, October 29, effectively collapsing the government as we had known it—although, as of this writing, he is still caretaker prime minister.

There are no unified demands coming from the streets; in many ways, there is resistance to formulating a list of demands. That said, there are several popular demands, mostly calling for the end of corruption and sectarian politics, which are rightly seen as intertwined. We see these in the street interviews conducted by TV stations, on social media, and between protesters themselves. As Kareem Chehayeb and Abby Sewell wrote, in addition to the government’s resignation, two common demands have been for “early parliamentary elections with a new electoral law for elections that are not based on sectarian proportionality” and “for an independent investigation into stolen and misappropriated public funds.” That last one was succinctly summarized by a man from Arsal: “There is no war. This is about money. You stole the money, return the money.”

This is how many people were in central Beirut today.
.
Are you getting their message? pic.twitter.com/PwTLm2RbFq

— Jad Chaaban د. جاد شعبان (@JadChaaban) October 20, 2019

The protests are anti-sectarian in many different ways. They transcend what we might think of as left/right divides and even include traditional supporters of sectarian political parties. This anger is nearly three decades in the making; the inter-generational traumas are even older. Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s transnational warlord-oligarch class has perfected the rules of the game. The state serves as a vessel through which this class can do business with itself and with primarily Gulf, Iranian, and Western elites; clientalist networks maintain structures of power benefitting this class, keeping segments of the population dependent on them; public infrastructures have been left to rot while rapid privatization limits freedom of movement between regions and regularly paralyzes the whole country; and, more recently, the fear of violence spilling over from Syria have been regularly evoked, three decades after the country’s own civil war, to impose helplessness on the people of Lebanon.

Long story short: while trying to recover from 15 years of civil war, residents of Lebanon have spent the past three decades navigating life in a country whose affairs they have had very little say over. An implosion was inevitable, but the way it has happened is challenging the more cynical interpretations of Lebanese political life, including those of the Lebanese themselves.

Reclaiming Our Streets

When the civil war ended under the “tutelage” (read: occupation) of the Syrian regime, the powers that be scrambled to create a semblance of politics in order to promote the message that the 1990s would be the decade of reconstruction. In Beirut, this involved privatizating virtually everything. The historical downtown, which Arabs throughout the region refer to as Al-Balad (literally “the country”) was transformed into Solidere, the private company founded by the Hariri family. This “actually existing neoliberalism” was sugarcoated in a language of hope: the narrative was that only through business ties could the menace of the civil war be kept at bay. This was the time that our generation was born—the postwar generation that I like to refer to as the “afterthought generation.” We grew up hearing stories of “the good old days” prior to the war, when Beirut had a tramway and people could sell merchandise in public spaces. Needless to say, that rosy picture of the pre-war years glossed over many crises at the regional and national levels, crises that ultimately led to the civil war in 1975.

1“It’s called Al-Balad, not Solidere.” Photo by Joey Ayoub.

But the 1990s also saw other developments. The parliament passed an amnesty law in 1991 forgiving most of the crimes committed during the war, enabling those with established power to get into government. Most of the current political heavyweights were warlords or related to warlords, or else became active in the postwar era either in its first days or after the 2005 Cedar Revolution that expelled the Syrian army.

These political figures include Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement since the 1980s and speaker of parliament since 1992; Michel Aoun, president of the republic, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) who returned from exile in 2005, and father-in-law of Gebran Bassil, who is also a leader of the FPM as well as the foreign minister; Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (LF) since the 1980s, freed from prison in 2005 and historical rival of Aoun; Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992; Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive “Socialist” Party (PSP) since 1977; and Samy Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb party and nephew of Bachir Gemayel, a warlord who was assassinated in 1982 while president-elect. In addition, we can count Future Movement (FM) leader Saad Hariri, repeat prime minister and son of assassinated prime minister Rafik Hariri, as one the most prominent oligarchs of the postwar era, alongside Tammam Salam, former prime minister and the son of Saeb Salam, six-time prime minister before the civil war, and Najib Mikati, also former prime minister and usually cited as the richest man in Lebanon.

In short, Lebanon is ruled by political dynasties that were forged in the fire of the civil war or during its postwar “reconstruction.” This is who protesters in the northern city of Tripoli addressed on November 2 with the chant “we are the popular revolution, you are the civil war.”

Tripoli, Light of the Revolution

Tripoli, Northern Lebanon’s biggest city, has been at the forefront of the uprising. Nearly every day since October 17, thousands of protesters in Tripoli have taken to the streets to demand the fall of the sectarian regime. To quote one 84-year-old participant, “There is so much poverty and deprivation here that, no matter how this turns out, things will be better.” In addition to the spectacular displays of popular mobilization, kellon yaani kellon and “the people want the downfall of the regime” ring out on a daily basis.

Tripoli, a Sunni-majority city, has been openly defying the sectarian narrative by declaring that they stand with Nabatiyeh, Tyre, and Dahieh—all Shia-majority. When Hezbollah and Amal shabbiha (government thugs) attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh on October 23, Tripoli responded “Nabatiyeh, Tripoli is with you until death.” The “popular revolution vs. civil war” chant, quickly adopted in the rest of Lebanon, presents a narrative in which those who still cling to their sectarian identities as relics of the civil war oppose those who are trying to build a future that is inclusive of all regardless of religious sects. Tripoli’s protests indicated early on that this uprising would be different.

Tripoli again, night of Oct 22, singing for all of Lebanon https://t.co/WbcC3yrY2I

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

Tripoli has maintained a distinct momentum because of the organizational structures that have emerged. As in Beirut, protesters in Tripoli have set up people’s hospitals and discussion forums in addition to occupying the municipal building. The mobilizations have been so inclusive that, for the first time I know of, protesters from elsewhere in Lebanon have gone to Tripoli to participate in the protests there, in response to an open invitation. On October 22, just before protesters started chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime,” a man with a megaphone declared “if they [the government] shut down all the squares, you are all welcome in Nour Square [the main square].” For the first time, Tripoli became the center of national Lebanese outrage. Nour means “light” in Arabic; the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury named Tripoli the light of the revolution.

Was sent this video of #Tripoli, Northern #Lebanon, and it’s so damn beautiful.

He’s saying that if they shut down all squares, we are all welcome in Tripoli. They then proceed with: #الشعب_يريد_إسقاط_النظام#لبنان_يتنفض #طرابلس_تنتفض #LebanonProtests pic.twitter.com/nGDY1FqpHz

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 22, 2019

To grasp the significance of this, it is necessary to understand that parts of Tripoli and the Akkar district north of it have historically born the brunt of state violence while being demonized by the public and media as hubs of Sunni extremism. Both the Lebanese state and Hezbollah have adopted their own versions of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” narrative, and the Sunni-majority areas of northern Lebanon, among the poorest of Lebanon and close to Syria, have become scapegoats. Yet despite these attempts by the sectarian parties, the scapegoating of the North has failed to hinder this movement. One can find sectarian comments online, usually mingled with anti-refugee comments, but they have not significantly impacted the momentum on the streets.

This is why the status of Tripoli as the de facto capital of the revolution has made political actors like the FPM very uncomfortable. The FPM television station, OTV, has regularly demonized protesters in Tripoli and Akkar, engaging in a disinformation campaign from the start. One headline claimed that Tripoli was “copying” the Syrian city of Homs (brutally crushed by the Assad regime in 2014), suggesting that militants from Idlib were making their way there. Another pundit on OTV proclaimed “just as we went to Syria and buried their revolution, we will bury this revolution in Lebanon.” (The FPM never militarily participated in Syria, but its ally Hezbollah obviously did). When an activist in Beirut responded to anti-Syrian refugee sentiments by chanting “Bassil out, refugees in,” OTV took that footage and added the headline “American training, Saudi incitement, Syrian infiltration.”

Beirut, day of Oct 20: “Bassil out out, Refugees in in” https://t.co/flG7CRHD46

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

The Syria connection runs deep. Protesters in Tripoli have chanted “Idlib we are with you until death,” in reference to the Syrian city that continues to be bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces; Syrian chants have been adopted and re-purposed throughout Lebanon. As one Syrian activist wrote, “Lebanon’s political establishment, particularly the part of it that is still in power, is increasingly annoyed by Tripoli and going to lengths to paint in a bad light the city and its inhabitants.” The scapegoating of Tripoli could be seen as an extension of the Lebanese government’s response to the Syrian revolution, especially on the part of Hezbollah, Amal, and the FPM. Although officially unaffiliated, the Lebanese government has taken a hardline turn against refugees since Aoun’s election in 2016—not that the government was pro-refugee before. Bassil especially has associated himself with this rhetoric, hence the anti-Bassil pro-refugee chant.

The district of Akkar has arguably been scapegoated by politicians and media outlets even more than Tripoli. Although protests there began alongside the rest of Lebanon, media coverage remains minimal. On October 30, protesters in Akkar, as elsewhere in the country, echoed the famous Syrian chant “yalla erhal ya Bashar” (hurry up, leave Bashar [Assad]), adjusting it to “yalla erhal Michel Aoun,” as first heard in Beirut. That same night, security forces attacked a march in Akkar as protesters tried to block the roads. The violent response by security forces led protesters to contrast the relatively mild response by security forces in Beirut to their response in Akkar.

The South and East Rise

The other part of the story here is set in the South, especially in Nabatiyeh and Tyre (known as Sour in Arabic), as well as the Bekaa Valley in the East.

Protesters in Nabatiyeh were among the first to demonstrate on the night of October 17. By October 18, some were already challenging long-standing taboos. The very suggestion one protester made on live television—that Nabih Berri, whose Amal movement dominates the region politically alongside Hezbollah, has been Speaker of Parliament for too long—terrified the journalist interviewing him; the tweet documenting this has since been deleted. To understand why this occurred and why what is happening in the South and East is so important, we need to discuss the shabbiha.

Protesters in Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon, singing Bella Ciao yesterday (not my video)#لبنان_يتنفض #الشعب_يريد_إسقاط_النظام pic.twitter.com/B9sQZSynJd

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 22, 2019

The shabbiha have historically been a Syrian phenomenon. The word itself comes from “ghost” or “shadow”; it is often associated with black Mercedes S600 cars (called al-shabah) which have been used for kidnapping Syrian dissidents and protesters. Later on, the term took on a more general connotation, describing men willing to be violent on behalf of their zu’ama (singular: za’im)—local warlords or chieftains—who often receive orders from above. This can be anything from beating up protesters to kidnapping, torturing, even killing them. The latter isn’t as common in Lebanon anymore, which is why the term shabbiha now means any pro-government actor willing to inflict violence on protesters.

This image, for example, shows armed pro-Amal shabbiha in Tyre on October 19; a video from that same morning shows these shabbiha attacking protesters. Due to their nature, it is often very difficult to identify shabbiha, and almost impossible to “prove” a chain of command. But for both historical and contemporary reasons, they have become associated with the Amal Movement and Hezbollah (although armed FPM shabbiha have also attacked protesters on at least one occasion).

Although Beirut also experienced two major attacks by shabbiha, it is worth noting here that even the events of October 29, when hundreds of Amal/Hezbollah men went to downtown Beirut to beat protesters and journalists and destroy tents set up by protesters, pale in comparison to what they have been getting away with in the South. On October 23, Amal/Hezbollah shabbiha attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh, injuring over 20 of them. This so shocked protesters that half a dozen municipal council members resigned the next day under pressure. In response to the October 23 attack, October 24 was called “the day of solidarity with Nabatiyeh” and a meme was passed around with the words “Nabatiyeh doesn’t kneel, ask the Zionists.” On the “Sunday of Unity” (November 3), protesters in Kfar Remen, historically known for its communist resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, met with protesters from Nabatiyeh. Some protesters fleeing Nabatiyeh’s Hezbollah-affiliated police went to Kfar Remen to join the protests there.

This is an extraordinary turn of events for a region of Lebanon that is often considered Hezbollah and Amal’s unchallenged territory; the same goes for the Bekaa valley. But the challenges to the dominant powers have continued. We’ve heard chants such as “We don’t want an army in Lebanon except the Lebanese army” (a challenge to the actual dominant military power, Hezbollah) as well as in solidarity with Tripoli and the rest of Lebanon. We saw violence by shabbiha in Bint Jbeil, a town on the southern border which suffered greatly under Israeli occupation and then during the 2006 war. Tyre also joined on the first evening, chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime”; by October 19, shabbiha were violently attacking protesters. Journalists were forced to flee the scene as shabbiha were indiscriminately beating anyone in their way. One witness described how the mukhabarat (secret police) were following protesters alongside the shabbiha.

As for the Bekaa valley, media coverage has been relatively low. There have been protests in Zahleh, Baalbek, Taalbaya, Bar Elias, Saadnayel, Chtoura, Majdal Anjar, Al-Fakeha, Hasbaya, Rashaya, and Al-Khyara, among other places.

Baalbek, night of Oct 23 https://t.co/H3MMhMAl0G

— ابن بالدوين #لبنان_ينتفض (@joeyayoub) October 26, 2019

The Establishment Fights Back

These attacks could be described as the stick part of the government’s carrot and stick strategy. As for the carrot part, it’s been rather confused. The main actors have been struggling to offer a coherent response to the protests, largely because they disagree among themselves and are trying, as usual, to navigate their own politics on a daily basis. The decentralized and horizontal nature of the protests has hampered the state’s attempts to demonize or co-opt them.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, gave a speech on October 19. As of this writing, Nasrallah has spoken four times since the beginning of the uprising already, an unusual phenomenon in itself. Although Nasrallah holds no official position in the Lebanese government, he is seen as a de facto kingmaker due to Hezbollah’s military power. But despite having a reputation among his followers of being relatively sober in his speeches, his first speech was characterized by unadulterated rage, arrogance, and condescension. He directly told protesters that they are wasting their time and that this “mandate” (his choice of words could also be translated as “era” or “covenant”) will not fall, in reference to the 2016 deal that led to Michel Aoun becoming president and Saad Hariri becoming Prime Minister (Remember, Nabih Berri has not left his position of Speaker of Parliament since 1992.) He even accused protesters of being funded by foreign embassies, leading protesters to respond by saying “I am funding the revolution,” which has since become a meme and appeared on street signs as well. One Lebanese videographer responded by posting a video of Nasrallah himself saying that Hezbollah is 100% funded and armed by Iran.

By maintaining support for the government, Nasrallah threw his weight behind two of the most unpopular men in Lebanese politics: the FPM’s Gebran Bassil and the FM’s Saad Hariri. This exposed the establishment as opportunistic and corrupt. Just as the sectarian political parties united in 2016 to defeat Beirut Madinati in the municipal elections, they were now once again uniting to defeat the popular uprising. But Nasrallah made a grave error. By saying that this government will not fall, he added pressure on Hariri to resign. Hariri was already the weakest link in this coalition, as he had to appeal to his rivals the FPM and Hezbollah to stay in power against his own supporters’ wishes. On October 29, Hariri finally resigned, apparently surprising Hezbollah. In thirteen days, protesters had forced the collapse of a government that had taken months and months to be formed. In the weeks since the revolution started, the warlord-oligarch class has been scrambling to address a crisis they never anticipated.

But as mentioned above, other political parties have been trying to ride the wave of the revolution. This has been especially obvious with Geagea and the LF, the FPM’s historical rival—a rivalry that dates back to the bloody Geagea-Aoun battles during the civil war and was rekindled after 2005. The LF saw a golden opportunity when the revolution started: by quitting and leaving an unpopular government, the LF believed it could weaken its rivals, as both groups appeal to the same sectarian votes. There have been LF supporters blocking the roads as well; this has posed a conundrum for anti-government protesters. Following Hariri’s resignation, some protesters prefer to focus on the big players currently in government—Aoun and Berri, respectively president and speaker of parliament—yet the slogan kellon yaani kellon continues to dominate protests. Despite what supporters of the FPM/Amal/Hezbollah want to believe, the LF is not popular among protesters; it has negligible support in most places that have seen protests. There is a strong consensus that no sectarian political party will be supported, no matter how hard they try.

It is still too early to know what the government’s next steps will be. As of this writing, the caretaker government has yet to appoint new ministers and the parliament is planning to discuss a law that would grant a general amnesty covering crimes such as abuse of authority, negligence, and environmental crimes. The situation is developing very quickly.

Creative Energy

The protests in Lebanon have been incredibly creative. Students in Tripoli have used cranes to get other students out of class; sandwiches were handed out in Beirut labeled “funded by Saudi Arabia/France/US” to mock those alleging that the protesters are funded by foreign powers; one of the many roadblocks was turned into a public salon with couches, a refrigerator, and people playing football, and featured on AirBnB (for free); protesters occupied Zaitunay Bay, a private waterfront built on top of Beirut’s stolen coast, and screened the film V for Vendetta (on November 5, obviously); images of sectarian leaders have been taken down and burned; people have banged pots, echoing Chile’s cacerolazos, on the streets and from their homes; volunteers have established soup kitchens in Beirut and Tripoli; a historic abandoned cinema was reclaimed and repurposed as a cinema, classroom, and gathering spot for artists; people formed a human chain from the north to the south; protesters blocking roads sang “baby shark” to a child stuck in traffic; protesters regularly wear masks of Guy Fawkes, Dali, and the Joker; organizers have arranged open forums to bring together protesters from Tripoli, Saida, Nabatieh, Zouk, Aley, and Beirut. Protesters “blocked” a railway station as a joke, to make a point: Lebanon’s railways were destroyed during the civil war and never rebuilt. The privatization of the 1990s came at the expense of public spaces and services, which is why a big part of the protests have sought to reclaim them, engaging in guerilla planting and the like.

The general idea here is that protesters have to re-invent their tactics constantly in order to make it difficult for the state to keep up. For example, there is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of roadblocks. The chief objection is that politicians are not as affected by them as everyday people trying to go to work or send their kids to school. As of now, this tactic is still being used, but it’s no longer the main one. In recent days, protesters have moved to occupy or protest in front of government buildings and other symbols of power: everything from politicians’ houses to national power stations (most of Lebanon still does not have 24/7 electricity), passing the main telecommunications and data operators, banks, municipalities, and so on. There are now dozens of different actions on a daily basis, with most actions announced only a day before. As of this writing, high school and university students—and some even younger students—have been protesting for three days in Saida, Beirut, Jounieh, Tripoli, Koura, Bar Elias/Zahleh, Mansourieh, Hadath, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Al-Khyara, Al-Eyn, Mazraat Yachouh, Furn El Chebbak, Akkar, Tannourine, Batroun, and Byblos/Jbeil, among other places.

There has also been an online effort to counter fake news spread by supporters of the government and the political parties themselves, as well as to help protesters stay informed more generally: el3asas (“the city watch”) is verifying news spread on social media and by official news outlets; a directory called Daleel Thawra (“directory of the revolution”) is keeping track of the various actions, activities and initiatives; TeleThawra (“revolution TV”) offers an alternative to Lebanon’s government-owned Télé Liban; Fawra Media (“Outburst Media”) aims to document “the individuals and groups that are sustaining the Lebanese Revolution”; Sawt Alniswa (“Voice of Women”) is a women-run magazine published weekly; and Megaphone News has been a leading independent media outlet since 2017.

Subterranean Shockwaves

These developments have opened up a space for people and narratives that are usually suppressed at the national or party level.

In addition to the aforementioned, Palestinian and Syrian activists have actively participated in the protests, particularly in the two biggest cities, Beirut and Tripoli. Elements of the sectarian media took advantage of this to reiterate their allegations that the protests are “infiltrated by foreigners.” Aware of this, many Palestinians and Syrians have since learned how to navigate Lebanese politics, chiefly by keeping a low profile. Besides a protest in Ain El Helweh Refugee Camp, where Palestinians directly expressed solidarity with the Lebanese protests, the Palestinians in Saida, Beirut, Tripoli, and elsewhere who have participated so far have been careful to “keep to the sidelines in the Lebanese demonstrations to avoid being accused of instigating or usurping the protest movement.” This, notably, has made it more difficult for the xenophobes to play their usual game, given that it is impossible to differentiate between Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian people unless they wave their respective national flags. (This text offers some background on the scapegoating tactics.)

We’ve also seen, to a lesser extent, chants from protesters in solidarity with Egyptians, Sudanese, and other Arab parts of the Middle East and North Africa region, and there is some awareness, mostly expressed on social media, of ongoing protests and violence in Iraq, Hong Kong, Rojava, and Chile. Although quickly forgotten at the national level, we also saw riots on the first day in Zahle and Roumieh Prisons in solidarity with the protesters, as well as to bring attention to Lebanon’s horrific prison conditions and to repeat calls for a general amnesty law, as many people are arrested for supposed links to jihadi groups, drug possession, and so on.

As of now, there’s been no major participation by migrant domestic workers, who are generally confined to Lebanese family houses or else are languishing in horrific underground prisons with little to no political rights under the country’s notorious Kafala (sponsorship) system. That is unlikely to change in the near future, given the restraints imposed on them, but if the momentum of the protests continues, it could open up enough political space for new political connections to form.

The Revolution Is Feminine

Up to now, the protests have focused on tackling widespread corruption and the sectarian system. But the role of feminists, including LGBTQ+ and/or non-Lebanese activists, suggests an attempt by segments of the protesters to create a more progressive and inclusive movement. Feminists have held separate marches to highlight the patriarchal structures that disproportionately oppress women and LGBTQ+ people—notably, the fact that Lebanese women still cannot pass on their nationality to their spouses and children and the fact that the country’s sectarian laws governing such affairs as marriage, divorce, custody and so on discriminate against women. Both women and men have marched for the right to pass on nationality, in Tyre and Tripoli, and elsewhere.

Women have also used their bodies to protect other protesters from the police and prevent violence from escalating. As Leya Awadat, one participant in these “feminist walls,” put it, “In this chauvinistic society, it is badly seen for men to publicly beat women” (emphasis on publicly)—so they have been using that to their advantage.

LGBTQ+ people have also been the target of homophobic insults. One shabbiha attacking protesters on October 29 was heard on live television yelling, “Men are fucking men!” A guest on OTV claimed that protesters want to destroy sectarianism in the name of some kind of “gay agenda.”

The great feminist wall in Riad al-Solh. No men allowed through so that no problems happen and they are really serious about it. pic.twitter.com/8bfDKSpOzz

— Timour Azhari (@timourazhari) October 19, 2019

The feminist marches always meet up with the main marches. The idea is not to create separate movements but rather to make their presence known within the wider demands for justice and equality. Feminists have led many of the roadblocks and many chants as well as maintaining an active presence in day-to-day activities that help maintain the momentum of this uprising. One way they have accomplished this is by reclaiming chants and songs—both traditional and recent—and removing their sexist connotations. The popular “hela hela” song against Gebran Bassil insulted his mother—it is very common in the Arabic-speaking world to use women or their genitals as insults—so feminists changed it to insult both Gebran and “his uncle” (the president, Michel Aoun) instead, creating a chant that has since caught on. They also reclaimed a traditional song used to send women off to marriage, changing the lyrics to “she went to protest, she went to close the roads, she went to bring down the government.”

What Comes Next?

Contrary to what some have assumed, the elephant in the room is not sectarianism as of now. While the risk of sectarian tensions will likely remain for the foreseeable future, the more immediate risk is the looming economic crisis. In my opinion, this is why more radical forms of politics are only timidly surfacing. The fear that things will get much worse is both real and realistic; it is very difficult to speak of alternative ways of organizing ourselves, even transcending the petty (and dangerous) Lebanese/non-Lebanese distinctions, when most people’s primary concern is the likelihood of medicine and fuel shortages and possibly even food shortages. While more radical politics may organically develop if the economic situation gets worse, it is also possible that the more nationalistic and sectarian elements of Lebanese politics will be strengthened instead. The latter tendencies have decades of experience in power, whereas the kinder forms of politics are relatively new, just being built on the streets and online.

Consequently, a dominant perception among protesters is that we need to be both angry and careful.

1Banner reading “Economic justice is a feminist cause” with Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in the background—Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

That being said, the soup kitchens, the free healthcare tents, and the reclaiming of privatized historical sites and coastal areas are all initiatives that implicitly affirm what we can call the commons. This is crucial to understand in a country that has had no commons in recent memory, where they dominant “pro-market” ideology predates the establishment of the nation state of Lebanon.

Although the main actors could be argued to be roughly a dozen or so public figures, the reason the clientalist networks have so far worked also has to do with the existence of a subset of the population which benefits from these networks. They place themselves as intermediaries between the oligarchs and those seeking wasta (bribes, nepotism, “who you know”) to receive services not provided by the state. In other words, some people have financial incentives to maintain clientalist networks against the establishment of anything that might be called public institutions. Overhauling and then overthrowing such a system will be difficult. Overthrowing such a system while confronting the state’s brutal potential will be even more difficult.

But if the loose coalition of anti-sectarian progressives doesn’t tackle this issue, it is likely that the state will scapegoat those it has already been targeting: Syrian and Palestinian refugees and workers, migrant domestic workers (mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, and overwhelmingly women), LGBTQ+ people (citizens and non-citizens), sex workers, and the like. Any individual who doesn’t fit the dominant patriarchal-capitalist-sectarian paradigm is at risk of physical, psychological, and symbolic violence.

Finally, and this is related to the previous point, defeating political sectarianism and “the sectarian way of doing things” is seen as an immediate priority. This system, which dates back to the 1860s in one manifestation or another, has been losing its aura of being untouchable with the postwar generations, both Millennials and, especially, Generation Zs—those who have lived their entire lives hearing their parents complain “Where is the government?” when they have to pay two separate bills for electricity (private and public) and three separate bills for water (private and public running water, private bottled drinking water). As the warlords get older—two of the most powerful ones, Aoun and Berri, are 84 and 81 respectively—we will see the inevitable decline of the sectarianism of the civil war era.

But while this might be inevitable, the question is whether anti-sectarian progressives will succeed in building sustainable alternatives that can challenge the old order.

1Protesters in a mock hanging holding signs proclaiming “1975” (the beginning of the civil war) and “Sectarianism”—Riad El Solh street, Beirut. Photo by Joey Ayoub.

We have many reasons to hope, as Bassel F. Salloukh wrote, because “the October 17 revolution marks the definitive end of the civil war, and a genuine bottom-up reconciliation between one-time warring communities.”

Johnson & Johnson Loses Vaginal Mesh Class Action Case After Over 1,000 Australian Women Sued

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According to the BBC, Johnson & Johnson has lost a class action lawsuit in Australia’s federal court after more than 1,350 women sued the company’s subsidiary Ethicon for failing to disclose the dangers of vaginal mesh to its consumers. Those patients claimed to have “suffered chronic pain, bleeding and severe…

Read more…

These Photos Capture The Birth Of SoCal Skateboarding In The 1970s

5dd5c6dcc92b3500089d3bf6-eight.jpg“The Top of LA,” Hollywood Hills, 1976 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

Hugh Holland first remembers spotting a wave of skateboarders outside of his custom L.A. furniture finishing store in the mid-1970s.

“At the time, I happened to be photographing anything that was in front of my camera,” Holland said. He wasn’t a pro photographer — but he did have a darkroom.

Holland started following the new movement, and the skaters themselves. What really captures his imagination was what he saw in 1975 in the Hollywood Hills: vertical skating up ramps. He grabbed his camera from his car and started shooting.

“The vertical was really something radical and new,” Holland said.

5dd5c7c3c92b3500089d3c02-eight.jpg“Auto-Ramp,” Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen, 1976 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

He started spending time with the skaters almost daily — after work and on the weekends, for three years. Holland eventually made a name for himself documenting this time, and the latest collection of his ’70s skating photos can be seen in his photography book Silver Skate Seventies.

One of the things that helped fuel the growth of skateboarding at the time: drought. Along with a new kind of wheels, it helped the skateboarding phenomenon to grow.

After a dry winter in ’75-’76, everyone started emptying their pools to save water, according to Holland — but they were quickly filled with skaters looking for more ramps. Dry storm drains were also a good fit.

5dd5c7f8c92b3500089d3c07-eight.jpg“Happy Hollow Congregation,” Hollywood Hills, 1976 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

The drought combined with the creation of the urethane wheel, which allowed boards to have more traction. Together, these conditions helped make higher level skateboarding — including the vertical — possible.

The weather conditions met the creation of the urethane wheel, which allowed boards to have more traction. Together, these conditions helped make a higher level of skateboarding — including the vertical — now possible.

“We had the discovery of all these tools, and I was right there with them,” Holland said. “Everyone was in competition with themselves, and each other to get higher, and get out of the pool, out of the boundaries — how radical they could be.”

Silver Skate Seventies is a followup to Holland’s previous book, Locals Only, but this one features his black-and-white photography. Black and white, he said, allowed him be more raw in his process instead of thinking about the cost of color film.

“I wasn’t formed when the skateboarding started, it was the skateboarding that formed my style,” Holland said.

5dd5cb6fc92b3500089d3c1a-eight.jpgLeft: Bull at Redondo Beach, 1975. Right: Huntington Beach pier, 1975 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

Holland wanted to capture the skaters’ fashion. He described it as surfing style coming on land, cutting up the asphalt with ballet on concrete. Skateboarding has its roots in surfing, and it was a natural outlet for kids in the San Fernando Valley who couldn’t easily make their way out to the ocean, according to Holland.

“Just the way they lived was fascinating — the way they moved around all over L.A. and all over California, just going wherever the action was,” Holland said.

5dd5c97dc92b3500089d3c15-eight.jpgLeft: Los Angeles Street, 1975. Right: Robin Alaway (Lerum) with Alan Scott in the background, at Orange County Fairgrounds, 1975 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

These mostly teenage skaters didn’t need cellphones to stay connected, according to Holland. Word spread person to person, and they were always able to keep each other in the know about the hot places to skate.

“I had a car, so I was able to help them be more mobile — the kids that I hung out with — then I just ended up being all over, everywhere,” Holland said.

Holland moved to California in 1966 from Oklahoma.

“All the young people were coming to California that could get away from anywhere, it seemed like,” Holland said.

One of the skaters from Holland’s books who he’s gotten back in touch with told him the reason many of the kids would go out skating at the time was because of problems at home. They had to get out of the house, he said.

5dd5c919c92b3500089d3c10-eight.jpgContestants at Orange County Fairgrounds, 1977 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

While he loved shooting all of the action, Holland’s favorite photos are the ones with skateboarders just hanging out on the street.

“It’s like a window on the times,” Holland said. “Black and white takes you to a place that’s not objective. When you take away the color, you’re not distracted by the color — you just have black and white, so you just have form.

At the end of 1976 and into 1977, skate parks started to become the thing, according to Holland.

“They would charge admission, and they would have insurance — things start commercializing really quick,” Holland said.

5dd5c735c92b3500089d3bfc-eight.jpg“The Big Tubular,” San Francisco Peninsula, 1977 (Hugh Holland, courtesy Chronicle Books)

Holland had enjoyed shooting the skaters and their carefree, barefoot style, as he put it — he started to lose interest in the late ’70s as the culture became more formalized.

But over the years, people started to take an interest in Holland’s photos. His big break came when one of the few photos he’d sold was seen by the owner of American Apparel, who ended up showing Holland’s work in his stores around the summer of 2005, according to Holland.

Now his photos can be seen in galleries, as well as in bookstores everywhere. Silver Skate Seventies is available now.

التعليم بالقدس.. والقدس.. الى اين؟

التعليم بالقدس.. والقدس.. الى اين؟

مرَّ بعناوين أخبار اليوم، خبرا، بجملة الأخبار السيئة المتعلقة بمدينة القدس، عن اقتحام مكتب مديرية التربية والتعليم، وتعليق أمر إغلاق لمدة ستة أشهر.

خبر آخر كان بعنوان اقتحام مدرسة دار الأيتام في البلدة القديمة، ومنع فعالية بحجة تبعيتها للسلطة الفلسطينية.

أخبار أخرى يمكن ان تعتبر مدوية في صداها الاعتيادي، حدثت اليوم كذلك، وكان جل ما تركته من أثر هو رصدها من قبل النشطاء على المواقع الاجتماعية والاخبارية كأخبار ساخنة، بين ندب وشجب.

حرقة تلسع قلبي عندما أفكر بالتعليم. فإذا ما فقدنا السيطرة على نظام التعليم بكافة مدخلاته ومخرجاته انتهينا، لنكون مخلوقات يمسخها الاحتلال لتمشي بيننا وتعكس هويتنا الثقافية الاجتماعية السياسية الجديدة.

الامر ليس بالجديد، واقتحام هنا، واغلاق هناك، ورفع علم “إسرائيلي” قريب على بناية لن يكون بالأمر الجديد، ولكن قد يكون الخبر الاعتيادي لتاريخ المدينة القادم.

فعقدين من السماح للمنظومة الإسرائيلية بالتغلغل الى قطاع التعليم بالقدس، يترتب عليه ما نعيشه مؤخرا، وسيترتب عليه عواقب وخيمة سيدفع ثمنها الأجيال القادمة والحالية.

في خلال يومين، وجدت نفسي أصفع من أخبار تضرب في وجهي، ولا اعرف ما الذي يمكن أن افعل بها. مصائب حقيقية تمر أمامي، ولا اعرف إن كان هناك من أي داعي للتطرق لها أو حتى ذكرها.

مدير مدرسة تملأ الصحافة الإسرائيلية فضيحة أفعاله الجنسية مع المعلمات، ويتم تداول أفعاله المقيتة المشينة، وكأنه خبر نميمة اخر. فكيف أتذمر من مجموعة طلاب يقطعون الشارع بغوغائية ويتصايحون ويتباطحون ويتنابزون بالمسبات.

ضابط ارتباط سابق، إسرائيلي، يهودي، يعلم في مدرسة خاصة. هل لي أن اعلق في وقت يتم دس المناهج الصهيونية في مناهجنا، وتقدم رام الله كأنها عاصمة فلسطين، وخارطة فلسطين يتعلمها الأطفال بتقسيمات أوسلو؟ هل لي ان اعترض ولقد استقبلت مديرة مدرسة “مقدسية” رئيس بلدية الاحتلال بالدبكة والورود والغناء بالعبرية؟

مدرسة جديدة تستقطب المبدعين من الطلاب يقف أفواج الإسرائيليين امامها يناقشون بالعبرية وكأنها مزار وطني صهيوني. والعنوان الكبير هو تقديم خدمة للفلسطينيين. هل لي ان اعلق استياء ولقد تم التبرع بتراث مدرسة عريقة بالقدس لمتحف جامعة تل ابيب مقابل منح دراسية يتسابق الاهل والطلاب على اخذها؟

مقدسية- مقرَّبة- تتفاخر في نشر صورها مع وزراء إسرائيليين في مباراة الأرجنتين بتل-ابيب.

بناية محورية اخرى تتسرب وسط القدس للمستوطنين، وسط تسريب يومي من بئر السبع الى جنين. أراضي خاصة واراضي دولة سيان.

فهل هذه الأمور بها ما هو مستفز للواقع المعاش؟

فتسريب البيوت والأراضي صار مفخرة. في حديث مسجل لرجل ربما يكون متهما وربما يكون متبلّى عليه يجيب عند سؤاله: كل القدس تم بيعها للمستوطنين!

تسأل المقدسية التي كنت تظن انها وطنية كيف تتصورين مع وزير إسرائيلي وكيف تذهبين الى مباراة كهذه، فتجد جوابك قبل ان ترد هي عليك بالإجابة: إذا ما كان الجواز الإسرائيلي هو عنوان المقدسي الجديد، فما العلة في حضور مباراة والتصوير مع وزير “بالدولة”؟

 تحاول ان تنتفض لخبر اغلاق مكتب وزارة التربية والتعليم وتفكر؟ أليس هذا تحصيل حاصل؟ أليست مدارس القدس اليوم في معظمها مرتبطة بوزارة المعارف الإسرائيلية بشكل أقرب الى ان يقر عن قريب بأنه رسمي؟

ألم تغض وزارة التربية والتعليم على مدار العقدين النظر، عن الانفلات الحاصل في المدارس نحو المعارف الإسرائيلية بحجج شح الموارد؟

ألم تتسرب البنايات المدرسية على مرأى العين للمعارف الإسرائيلية؟

ألا نرى توجه الطلاب الى المؤسسات التعليمية الإسرائيلية المتنامي، وتحول الطلاب الى البجروت؟

فهل غريب ان يغلق مكتب أو أن تعلق فعالية لمدرسة تابعة بطريقة علنية او سرية للمعارف الإسرائيلية؟

حال التعليم كحال المدينة بسائر الخدمات. هدم بيوت لا يتوقف، واستنزاف للموارد واستهلاك الانسان الفلسطيني، ضرائب تمص الدماء، وفيض من انتهاكات لم يعد المرء يعرف كيف يصدها، من الجانب الفلسطيني ام الإسرائيلي.

إنسان فلسطيني متمزق بين هوية تقدم خدمات، وبين قضية يأخذ منها اولوا السلطة امتيازات. انسان فلسطيني متمزق بين انتماء وانقسام. بين تزمت وانفتاح. بين تديّن وعولمة. بين تطبيع وتطويع. بين مقاومة ومساومة.

ووطن صار فيه حلم الدولة، سلطة بمقاطعة ووزارات. والمطار الدولي صار معبرا. والعودة صارت تخفيف شروط حصار.

فهل للقدس طريق آخر للخلاص؟

Sze-yuen Ming


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The Chinese studio Sze Yuen Ming & Co was known in Chinese as Yao Hua studio (Shangyang Yaohua zhaoxiang 上洋耀華照相). This studio based in Shanghai and active between 1892 and the 1920s was directed by Shi Dezhi 施德之 (1861-1935). Sze’s production ranged from portraits (notably popular hand-tinted photographs of courtesans) and news pictures, to topographical scenes that suited the tastes of both Chinese and Western communities. Sze’s landscape photographs received official recognition at the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900 with the jury awarding the studio a honourable grant. It became then the only studio in the late Qing dynasty period to be awarded an international prize.


More information: www.virtualshanghai.net

How the Wiyot Tribe Won Back a Sacred California Island

On February 26, 1860, the people of the Wiyot Tribe had gathered on Duluwat Island in what is now Humboldt Bay, California, for a sacred, annual ceremony meant to last seven to 10 days. The dance had finished, but there was more yet to do—completion of the ceremony the next day, the Wiyot believe, would bring balance and healing to the world. The next morning, a group of white ranchers encircled the Wiyot and massacred more than a hundred of them. The few survivors either fled the island on canoes or were taken to a nearby fort as forced labor.

“When the massacre happened on the island, we were not able to complete that ceremony and bring the world back to balance,” says Wiyot tribal chair Ted Hernandez. “We were not able to heal.”

Three days before the massacre, a man named Robert Gunther had purchased all 280 acres of the island. Soon white settlers built dikes and drained the land for cattle grazing and lumber mills. On the northernmost part of the island, they built a boatyard on top of an ancient shell mound dating back to the year 900. The Wiyot population, which hovered around 3,000 in 1850, had dropped to just 100 in 1910.

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For the Wiyot, Duluwat is more than an ancestral homeland. It is the spiritual center of the universe, a place of great power, and the tribe has fought for its return for more than a century, according to Michelle Vassel, a tribal administrator. On October 21, 2019, it finally happened. The city of Eureka voted unanimously to return Duluwat to the Wiyot Tribe. The vote, many years in the making, marks the first time a local municipality has voluntarily given land back to the indigenous people who lived there originally. “It’s unprecedented,” Vassel says. “The island was a missing piece for hundreds of years.”


The tribe had long hoped for the return of Duluwat, but didn’t officially ask for it until the 1970s, with a phone call to the government of Eureka, the city of 27,000 that then owned most of what was officially called “Indian Island.” They heard only laughter, writes Thadeus Greenson in the North Coast Journal. When Cheryl Seidner, a Wiyot tribal elder and former chair, called again decades later, she heard stammering instead.

In 1992, Seidner and her sister, Leona Wilkinson, held a vigil on the last Saturday in February to memorialize the land and those who died in the massacre. It became a yearly tradition on the west side of Woodley Island, a smaller plot between Duluwat and the mainland. “You’d start with a fire and people would sing their songs and talk about healing,” Hernandez says. “It was an opportunity for people to tell their stories and remember our ancestors.” Over time the vigils attracted as many as 300 people from the greater Eureka community.

In 1996, Seidner spotted a real-estate listing for a 1.5-acre plot of on Duluwat, the site of the former boatyard. The tribe began fundraising any way it could—benefit concerts with Native artists such as Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and selling T-shirts, tacos, and fry bread. “You name it, we did it,” Hernandez chuckles. Neighboring tribes donated thousands of dollars, and the Wiyot eventually raised the $106,000 they needed.

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What they found there was a disaster. Rusted boat parts and an enormous diesel-powered winch poked through the ground. Years of toxins, sludge, and debris capped the shell mound like sedimentary rock. And the midden itself was visibly pockmarked by pot-hunters, Vassel says. “You could not walk on the property, what with the metal debris, lead paint, and big barrels of liquid of undetermined origin.” The shell midden, having eroded over the years, was held up by a makeshift retaining wall of old marine batteries.

So the work began, with a team of dedicated volunteers working weekends. They removed the rusty debris, including the huge winch, which they got off the island and onto a barge using traditional methods—a bed of rolling logs. As they cleaned up the shell mound, volunteers sometimes found bones, which they believe belonged to victims of the Wiyot massacred in 1860, according to Hernandez. “This is where our ancestors are and this is where their blood was shed,” he says, “and yet they’re covered in chemicals.”

In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency provided a Targeted Brownfields Assessment grant to clean the site more thoroughly. Testers found hazardous levels of pentachlorophenol, dioxins, and furans, and high levels of arsenic, according to an EPA report. “People were shocked to see people in hazmat suits digging up the soil,” Vassel says. The agency worked with the tribe to remove as little soil as possible, and screen what they excavated for artifacts and remains. The battery wall was replaced by shells donated by a local oyster company.

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In 2004, Eureka donated an additional 40 acres of land of the northern tip of Duluwat to the Wiyot, including the tribe’s former burial grounds and the rest of the shell midden. There, volunteers cut back invasive cord grass to allow native eelgrass to recover, and planted cuttings of native willows from a neighboring island. They tore down buildings, repainted a metal shed, and capped the remaining contaminated soil with sheets of fabric covered with soil, crushed shells, and native grass seed, according to the EPA report. The island received an official clean bill of health from the EPA in 2014. After 13 years, 70 tons of scrap metal, and 26 tons of soil, Duluwat was ready to be danced on.


In spring 2014, one month after the Wiyot’s last vigil and 154 years after the massacre, the tribe returned to Duluwat to hold their World Renewal Ceremony. The Wiyot’s religious beliefs are interconnected with those of four other tribes in the area: the Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa (the Chilula was another former, connected tribe), according to Vassel. The five tribes all celebrated the ceremony, but without the Wiyot, “the circle was broken,” Hernandez says. “But our four cousin tribes have kept the ceremony going for us.”

The tribe dove into preparations. After the massacre, the surviving, splintered members of the Wiyot Tribe had lost precise knowledge of the ceremonial dance. They had to reconstruct it from the related dances of the other tribes, Seidner told the North Coast Journal. “The Yurok and Hupa helped us bring back the ceremony we lost,” Hernandez says, noting that the Yurok Tribe lent dugout canoes to transport people to the island. Before the dances started, Hernandez spoke with with a Yurok elder who had come to see the ceremony to fruition. “He said he’s always been waiting for us. And that he was happy to see us back in the circle.”

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The dancers also needed something to wear. Most of the Wiyot’s traditional regalia now resides in museums or private collections, Hernandez says. Here the cousin tribes helped again by lending some items, while others were crafted anew, with condor feathers donated by Sía, the Comanche Nation Ethno-Ornithological Initiative, according to the North Coast Journal. “We’re building up our collection again,” he says.

To prepare for the ceremony, dancers fasted for seven days. People slept on the island, in tents, in the repainted metal shed, and even outside in the nippy March air. Younger members listened to elders tell stories of the island over the sounds of lapping ocean waves. Hernandez says the island’s stillness and isolation made him forget that there was a freeway running over the southern tip of the island and another society just miles across the bay in Eureka. “We were in our own little world,” Hernandez says. “It felt like we were back at home.”

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The final three days of the ceremony were devoted to dance. “Our youngest boy who danced was maybe nine, and the oldest was 70,” Hernandez says. “To have so many generations was an amazing feeling.” On the last day, sea lions came up and sat on the beach to watch. When they completed the final dance, it began to rain heavily. “It cleansed the land that we were dancing on, and we knew the ceremony was complete.”


Duluwat’s ceremony was private, but the true return of the island was markedly public. On October 21, 2019, hundreds poured into Eureka’s Adorni Center at 10 a.m. on a workday. The joy in the room was tangible, according to Cutcha Risling Baldy, department chair of Native American studies at Humboldt State University, who is Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk. “There were times when you could have heard a pin drop,” says Kim Bergel, a Eureka City Councilmember.

At the ceremony, Seidner set up two chairs beside the podium: one adorned in a quilt donated by the people who helped raise funds for the initial purchase of 1.5 acres, and the other left empty to remember the victims of the massacre. A group of Wiyot people performed the healing Bush Dance. Hernandez was so moved that he left the podium to join them.

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Though Eureka City Council first voted to return the island in 2015, legal hangups delayed the process until 2019. “This should have happened 100 years ago,” Bergel says. A fourth-generation Eurekan, Bergel first ran for the council because she wanted to help return Duluwat. “I had to practice my speech before the ceremony so I wouldn’t be crying the whole time,” she says.

Eureka’s decision marks one of the first times a U.S. municipality has given back any Native American land freely. For most tribes, the only way to regain ceremonial land outside of a reservation is to wait for the tract to go up for sale, and then find the money to purchase it. Hernandez hopes the decision could spark a chain reaction for other sacred lands. “It’s not a bad thing to give something back,” he says.

According to Risling Baldy, Duluwat’s return conjures a vision of the future in which land return is a common, grassroots practice. “We have never been asked to imagine what is possible,” she says. “I believe what is possible is anything we can imagine to be possible.” Risling Baldy suggests national parks as a logical place to start large-scale land return, pointing to recent studies that suggest that indigenous-managed lands boast more biodiversity. And it’s not just governmental bodies that have the ability to do this. In October, forest management company Green Diamond returned 50,000 acres near the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe. “I’m not trying to pretend like this is an easy process,” Risling Baldy says. “But this is an opportunity to ask what a future could look like that respects and engages with indigenous peoples, and that builds toward a lasting future for all people.”

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Around 10 percent of Duluwat is still privately owned. But Seidner has made it clear that, though the tribe is open to buying those plots of land, it wants to coexist with its neighbors for as long as they’d like to stay. “We know what that feels like,” Seidner told the North Coast Journal. “We know how it feels to be taken away from our land.”

Though the return of Duluwat represents the culmination of decades of activism, physical labor, and mourning, this is just the beginning for the Wiyot Tribe. They have plans to rebuild a village, and maybe even build a dance center. For now, they just want to continue to restore the island. And they’re partly there. When Hernandez walks on the shell mound now, he can hear the crackle of old oysters and clams shifting beneath his shoes, almost touching the work of his ancestors.