A Zionist Starbucks

The 1960s were a period of transitions whereby values that had been reshaped as an outcome of the Second World War had to be reformulated more visibly in public. Thus, values related to gender equality at home and at work, feminism, sexuality and homosexuality, the family, race, generational differences, manners, education, world peace, the end of third world colonialisms, and work ethics, all took shape and were formulated half a century ago. The 1980s were also another period of change, but in contrast to the sixties the changes were less visible, less dramatic, more mundane, as they translated for the most part in the deepening of that introvert selfish culture that the earlier period could barely conceal. In effect, even though the sixties supposedly promoted openness towards “society” and “the public sphere,” and peace with the newly liberated third world cultures from imperialism and colonialism, it failed to promote a genuine interest in anything called “the public good.” The 1980s–1990s saw the democratization of consumerism and the satisfaction that it entailed: anything from Prada to Starbucks, the Internet, the ipod, the iphone and blackberry, the laptops, all made life more interesting, but that didn’t make us more “social,” more political, or more engaged with others. The Iraq war was notoriously unpopular before it even began, but with a jargon that belonged to Vietnam and the culture wars of the sixties, not out of interest in what Iraq is at the moment, and what it could be. We therefore willy-nilly belong to the culture of indifference (narcissism) of the sixties, and we’re only interested in delimiting a “just cause,” without a real involvement in a culture—ours and all the others out there.

So when the two-week war broke out in Ghazza, which is still not over, people all over the world had their hearts for the suffering Palestinians. We’re all now into that discourse of the historical “rights” of the Palestinian people and the bi-national state. Israel is by contrast perceived, at least implicitly, as an imperialist and neocolonialist state with no legitimate rights of its own, having dispossessed the Palestinians of their legitimate territorial rights towards the end of the British mandate in 1947–49. When the Ghazza war broke out “we” were naturally as “leftists” on the side of the weak, the oppressed, and the dispossessed, or in toto, les damnés de la terre, as Franz Fanon famously labeled them. We were therefore, needless to say, on the side of the “Palestinian people.” Such euphemisms, however, prevent us from addressing what is presently urgent: namely, that it wasn’t the “Palestinian people” who was subject for two weeks to shelling and deprivation, but large fractions of the Palestinian lumpenproletariat under Hamas rule. On the other “conservative” “right” side of politics Hamas is unequivocally qualified as a “terrorist organization,” which is too soft a description and beside the point. The truth is that we need to be more articulate, look for details and concepts of value in order to begin thinking anti-state organizations of the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah as a radicalization of politics due precisely to the absence of politics in the Arab world. We’ll be unable to think along those lines as long that everything in politics is translated into cultural wars that belong in both spirit and essence to the sixties. That’s why a radical evaluation of Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t even begun yet, because our concepts are muddled into obsolete cultural notions of imperialism and colonialism, or the rights of individuals and people to bring their own destinies with their own hands and minds.

Which brings me to one of those “cultural” non-political events that attracted my attention on the web the other day. During the two-week Ghazza war, a group of young clueless (unemployed and underemployed) students staged small manifestations in support of the war, one of them in front of the main Starbucks in Hamra Street in Beirut, Lebanon. A sixties hangover: that’s probably the best way to describe the dozen or so of “leftists” who were there that night in front of the Hamra Starbucks to terrorize customers sipping their espressos, cappuccinos, and lattes. The young revolutionaries who were shouting slogans against globalization, Zionism, and Israeli and American imperialisms, came complete with wirelessly connected laptops, urging passersby and customers to join their revolutionary website. As they must have been upset at the sight of bourgeois customers with their Starbucks mugs, and as if indoctrination was not enough, they’ve aggressively begun drawing the Star of David on the tables, accusing Starbucks (and indirectly its customers) of “complicity” with the Israeli aggression in Ghazza. In my time as student—and that was a long time ago—the target used to be Pan Am, and that honor soon shifted to MacDonald in the 1980s, and now we’re into the Starbucks era. Obviously, progress is always somewhere around the corner.