The Druze Chameleon Strikes Again

Just like Inspector Clouseau, Walid Jumblatt has always been a clown of Lebanese politics. With looks somewhat reminiscent of Gollum Smeagol of Lord of the Rings fame, Jumblatt is a dangerous clown whose hands are drenched with Christian blood from the massacres and wholesale ethnic cleansing his militia carried out in the Shouf mountains in the 1980s. Naturally, these neanderthal “bosses” of Lebanese politics, Jumblatt and his other fellow criminal warlords, voted themselves a general amnesty after the war. 

Rather than fade into the background of their sordid history, they have the gall to remain in power, adulated by their dumb anencephalic followers of the Lebanese people. Jumblatt in particular is one special warlord. He is not even ambivalent about his own ambivalence. He changes political opinions and stances like he changes his unmentionables, which is every day. Like a master weathercock, he flip-flops between pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian, between pro-Saudi and anti-Saudi, between pro-US and anti-US, between being a primitive feudal lord of 12^th century vintage and being a “progressive socialist”, between being a people’s man to his herd of mountain brutes and being a member of the sophisticated educated Beiruti elite. His son Taymour was educated at American University of Beirut then at the Sorbonne before inheriting his father’s position as feudal lord and chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, whose membership, strangely enough, consists exclusively of the Druze faithful. Can you imagine for instance if the members of the French Socialist Party were exclusively Catholic, AND if ALL the Catholics of France were members of the French Socialist Party? This is the case with the "Socialist Progressives" of Lebanon: They are all members of the Druze sect, and all members of the Druze sect are members of the Socialist Progressive Party. Why doesn't Jumblatt simply call his party,  the "Feudal Druze Party"?

Walid Jumblatt led his “Socialist” Druze thugs into massacring their fellow Christian villagers in the 1980s after his father Kamal was assassinated by the Syrians. He later “reconciled”, twice, with the Maronite Church in 2000 and again in 2023. Yet, Christian villagers refuse to return to their homes in the Shouf mountains out of fear of the notorious treachery of their fellow Druze villagers. After the 2005 Hariri assassination, also by the Syrian dictator Assad, Jumblatt became pro-US and anti-Syrian, hurling insults at the Syrians and their leader. When the dust settled and Syria recouped its influence in Lebanon thanks to the Iranian militia of Hezbollah, Jumblatt went so far as to travel to Damascus and beg the said dictator for forgiveness. Survival might explain this odd duplicitous behavior, but we can all agree there is not a single ounce of principle behind it.

Some might label his behavior as “pragmatic”. But his positions on the presidential vacuum stalemate are all the more weird. Jumblatt’s age might suggest an undiagnosed dementia, doubled by the typical Lebanese megalomania. His recent rants are aimed at Saudi Arabia and the Lebanese Forces Party leader, even though his men are in permanent meetings with both sides. Jumblatt’s MPs in parliament say their candidate is Jihad Azour, backed by a plurality of Christians and some Sunnis and whom Hezbollah rejects. Yet, Jumblatt keeps parroting Hezbollah’s call for so-called “dialogue” to reach a forced consensus over Hezbollah’s candidate, Sleiman Frangiyeh, who is nothing but another feudal warlord from the north and a vassal of Bashar Assad of Syria.

Jumblatt described the constant calls by the Christian parties to go to Parliament and vote in successive sessions to elect a president as “unachievable” and accused these parties of having aborted Speaker Nabih Berri’s initiative for dialogue. "Dialogue" for these people means backroom deals to bypass the constitution, in a new form of government that the Lebanese brag about having invented, "consensual democracy". In this smartass democracy, the dumb Lebanese people vote for candidates appointed by the unelected religious and political Mafia bosses, like Walid Jumblatt. After the election, the bosses meet behind closed doors and make decisions that are then communicated to their "men", the newly elected MPs,  who then vote in the rubber-stamp parliament to approve the bosses' decisions. In other words, elections are a farce and there is no will of the Lebanese people to be gauged and respected. The bosses make the decisions, not the parliament. 

Simultaneously, Jumblatt argues, “let Saudi Arabia tell us what it wants”, when the Saudis are mere mediators who have been keen to remain neutral and call on Lebanese leaders to adhere to their own constitution and find a solution in genuine elections, not through backroom deals. Jumblatt also declared the other day, “there is nothing more stupid or ridiculous or dangerous than those who do not facilitate the solution to the presidential elections stalemate” in an attack on the Christians who refuse the so-called dialogue and insist on voting in a democratically contested ballot. Jumblatt knows Hezbollah is obstructing the election and violating the constitutional order by exiting the chamber after one round of voting, killing the quorum, and postponing the election until the next charade.

One needs a tea-leaf reader to guess where Jumblatt stands on principle, but one thing is certain: He is playing all bases at the same time, hoping that regardless of where the chips fall, his fake "Socialist Progressive" Druze party will be able to claim to have been on the right side. When a political leader appears to be flailing about like a headless chicken, it means he is afraid. Jumblatt is afraid that Iran and Syria, through their Lebanese proxies, Hezbollah and Amal, are preparing something insidious for Lebanon. He is afraid that Syria’s Assad might retaliate in Lebanon for Jumblatt's Druze co-religionists of the southern Syrian region of Sweidah who are leading yet another uprising against the Syrian butcher. Syria killed his father Kamal in 1977 after using him to launch a seditious attack against the Lebanese State in collusion with Yasser Arafat’s PLO. As the noose is tightening around Hezbollah, now unable to impose its will as it used to do for 30 years, Jumblatt fears a reaction by Syria’s Assad and Hezbollah that might include sending Walid off in his father’s footsteps in less than natural proceedings.

A chameleon’s specialization is to change its skin color to match the substrate on which it treads, a defensive strategy called “camouflage”. Jumblatt is the Chameleon-in-Chief of the Lebanese lemon republic. Yet, this chameleon does not know what to do when the substrate itself is variegated or multicolored, so it changes colors haphazardly and randomly in quick succession. He's in panic mode, a politician who doesn’t know what stance to take because he has no principles. I doubt that a biological chameleon has any principles, driven as it is by survival. But so is the political chameleon Walid Jumblatt: No principles, just a basic primitive mercantile opportunism despite the facade of elitism, feudalism, faux patricianism, pseudo-progressivism and salon socialism of the Jumblatt dynasty.