MLEETA resistance tourist landmark:
SITE OF TRANSACTIONS

The Mleeta Resistance Tourist Landmark is a war museum and theme park erected by Hezbollah in 2010 in celebration of the Israeli withdrawal from the south of Lebanon. On site, the pacts forged between Hezbollah and its subjects are played on repeat. “Pact” assumes the existence of two parties coming to a formal agreement but this delineation between the Party and the visitor is, at least in form, dissolved in form at the Landmark. Distinctions between fighter, party member, supporter, and visitor become obsolete as everyone is let into the deepest of the party’s subterranean enclaves. The strategy employed in constructing the user experiencer relies on a rapid succession of spaces that vary greatly in ambience, size, height, sightlines, allowed number of people, and induced user affect. At the start of the tour, the multipurpose hall presents a magnetizing mélange of sermons given by al-Sayyid and a montage of Hezbollah battles and claimed victories in the visiting group’s language of preference. Emerging from the darkness of the hall, you are welcomed into the exhibition where a curated and manicured collection of Hezbollah paramilitary artefacts and paraphernalia, along with their IDF equivalents as spoils of war. The crescendo of spaces passes culminates in a circular promenade ominously dubbed "The Abyss." Here, Party propaganda reaches its peak and IDF objects are demoted from spoils of war to heads on spikes. Merkava and other artillery are shown ravaged by war, upturned and facing their creator, their canons visibly vasectomized. From there users may either delve into the subterranean tunnels of the former war site (where she is reminded that even Hezbollah’s style of war is a performance of the counterhegemonic underdog) or climb a monumental staircase that leads to an observatory of the Landmark and the pastoral landscape beyond. Again the indebted visitor is reminded that the rolling hills only fall on the correct side of the border by grace of the Party's efforts and military. But this effort is now shared and the Party’s battles become inclusive to all. Donation boxes abound on the complex, and the visitor is an active contributor to the conditions underlying the many victories which the captured Merkavas and their knotted phalluses bear testimony to.

The Landmark’s location on a former, pre-2000 border with Israel is a central aspect of the narrative deployed in the architecture. The concept of the borderscape has been applied to Mleeta [1] to try to understand this counter-narrative that stresses Hezbollah’s role in transforming and re-bordering the limits of the Lebanese state, further proof of the Party’s military prowess which has been proven against the Israeli enemy, rivaling that of the state which is historically seen as absent in the South.

Ultimately, the Mleeta Resistance Tourist Landmark exists as more than just a physical embodiment of Hezbollah’s discursive tactics. As a multi-purpose venue erected by the Party, it  qualifies as a cultural and aesthetic extension of its social welfare programs. Subsequently, it is not so farfetched to conceive of Mleeta, a cultural landmark established by a political party, as being not so different from the worldwide host of cultural programs, institutions, and Foundations established by private corporations with their respective architectural gems such as the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris or the Fondazione Prada in Milan. If we disregard the obvious differences in activity, target demographics, aesthetics, contemporaneity, and international relevance, we may discern that both serve to further the expansion of an non-state actor’s interests by means of cultural and architectural production, and this will be further discussed in the section that follows.

COMPARATIVE:
MLEETA AND AISHTI foundation

This section underlines parallels between two instances where art museums/curatorial experiences are used for political ends that may be loosely described as belonging to the extra-state – the Mleeta Resistance Tourist Landmark of Hezbollah and the Aïshti Foundation.. The latter, launched in 2015, is a Lebanese example of the burgeoning typology of the Foundation, a museum or institution initiated by a luxury fashion brand dedicated to contemporary art. [2]

SECTARIAN WELFARE SPACE

A case study of one of the Hariri Health Foundation agencies illustrates the contingencies that these welfare projects are subject to. Information about these institutions is difficult to obtain from formal sources and so one has to resort to unofficial sources and interviews. The case study involves two community health centers belonging to the Hariri Health Foundation in the Ras el-Nabaa and Tariq el-Jdide neighborhoods in Beirut. Ras el-Nabaa is a mixed-religion middle-class neighborhood, home to a sizeable Sunni population; Tariq el-Jdide is a lower-middle to working-class Sunni neighborhood, historically in favor of the Future Movement. Recently, perhaps in large part due to decreased funding linked to worsening financial conditions of the Hariri family, the center in Ras el-Nabaa ceased operations. At the time of writing, a note still available on the ground floor of the center’s building indicates that it has moved to another location in Tariq el-Jdide. What the note’s phrasing conceals is that the Ras el-Nabaa center had in fact closed down rather than merely relocated, as the Tariq el-Jdide center had been operating at the same capacity before the supposed move. The Tariq el-Jdide center is actually part of a larger campus of Hariri welfare institutions including a vocational and technical school conveniently located in a strait between two underprivileged neighborhoods: Tariq el-Jdide itself and the Sabra Palestinian camp. An interview with a Ras el-Nabaa resident who had been a former user of the center reveals that he would not be inclined to seek services from the Hariri Health Foundation at the new location.

This particular case reveals the strategic reasoning and prioritizing employed in the siting and funding of welfare agencies by Lebanese sectarian parties, vis-à-vis the weight of their projected political gains depending on the target neighborhood’s religious and class makeup. In this particular case, the service provided, one related to everyday health consultation and imaging, is one that is a viable alternative to the user only if it is available regularly and in close geographic proximity. It is also one that relates to basic human health and biological necessity. If we extend the limits of what is traditionally considered an ontological project to include welfare programs and organizations such as this one, then we must problematize further the ethics and limitations of ontological politics. Even if we wish to speculate on potential alternatives to state structures, perhaps we must not do so by invoking a target subject’s lack of access to services that guarantee basic human rights, no matter how troubling we may find the rhetoric of the human right. Any isolated ontological project [6] or any “politics of the act” [7] that attempts to premise itself on a lack in such basic services runs the risk of reifying that lack and becoming an enterprise based on exploiting a weakened political subject. This is to say that these politics of the act are not simple alternatives to “politics of demand” that directly address a state’s shortcomings and demand that said shortcomings be corrected, top-down. In cases where sizable chunks of population do not have access to basic infrastructure, a politics of the demand might be more attuned to the urgency involved than a politics of the act whose scope most often remains limited in capital, geographic distance, and resources.
 

One case study foregrounding constructions of national and religious identity at play in death and burial is one belonging to a diaspora community on Lebanese soil: the Anglo-American Cemetery of Beirut. The current cemetery in Furn el Shebbek was founded in 1914 as a joint stock company between the British Consulate, the American Missionary Organization, and the predecessor to the American University of Beirut, the Syrian Protestant College and is a descendant of the “Beirut Burying Ground,” founded around 1826 near the current National Evangelical Church in Downtown Beirut. [9] A subject who is key to this particular case study is the individual asserting or aspiring towards a transnational identity, from either side of the porous membrane encapsulating the space of the British/American identity. Throughout the cemetery’s history, various individuals and families of Lebanese, Arab, and Armenian descent saw in it a postmortem space that conforms to and reaffirms their lived identities, often as an extension of their religious affiliations (Protestant). If we adhere to the idea that the construction of any identity is a repetition of lived performances and acts, then we may see in death a final performance or act that is of high stakes, where that construction might be severely undone or further solidified.

A particularity that is not exclusive to Lebanon but is specifically noticeable in the country is the relationship of the urban dweller with her village of origin and consequently her final resting place. In Beirut, the majority of residents are not registered voters in the Beirut municipality but in villages and towns across the different districts. Although these villages and towns may go unvisited for long stretches of time, standard procedure at death includes an Odyssean return to the land of origin and this usually continues despite several generations of removal since the time of the migration to the city. Place attachment and symbolic weight aside, material reasons such as infeasibility of burial elsewhere, lack of public cemeteries, and familial expectations, prevent individuals, residing both abroad and in the country, from going through the effort of exchanging a burial place/practice that does not reflect their lived identities. A final stroke of family decision-making engraves a tombstone regardless of the deceased individual's wishes.