Siege of Lebanon

2006-09-09T14:05:00.000+03:00

Having recently seen a programme on CNN on the doctoring of photos by Lebanese bloggers and other Arab media, one wonders why the Lebanese side is the only one to be scrutinized on that score. While it is probably true that some photos were doctored to exaggerate the damage done by Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, is it not possible that the same was done on the Israeli side, which, by the admission of all sides concerned, suffered but a fraction of the death and destruction sustained on the Lebanese side? The issue of doctoring treated on your programme made no mention of possible Israeli manipulation of the media, to which much evidence bears witness, both during the latest conflict and indeed since before the inception of the State of Israel in 1948. For example, it was revealed that the Israeli government was actually paying Israeli web surfers to monitor Lebanese blogs and write responses favorable to Israel. That strikes one as reminiscent of the Soviet Union's system of having CPSU commissars to spread party propaganda, or of banana republic dictatorships (including Arab ones) that bribe or blackmail writers and reporters to tow the government line, as we are constantly reminded by such Western news stations as CNN. This is not, of course to condone in anyway the corrupt and ossified regimes that plague the peoples of the Arab World. There have been countless cases in which Israel manipulated the media to its advantage. For example, in 1996 Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said that Palestinian Policemen's firing at Israeli soldiers was "a central breach of the Oslo Accord". He conveniently omitted to mention the fact that it was Israel that had first breached the Oslo Accord by re-occupying territories that it had previously handed over to the PA under the terms of the Oslo Accord signed by the previous Labor government in 1993. Further back in time, in 1967 the Israelis hit an American surveillance ship (the USS Liberty) off the coast of Sinai, claiming they had believed it to be an Egyptian vessel, although they had undertaken several reconnaissance flights and could hardly have been misled. The repertoire of Israeli stratagems in the domain of media manipulation is too vast to be fully documented here, as it might well fill volumes. The upshot of all this is that while media manipulation should not be condoned on either side, the most that can be said about the Arabs is that they have caught on, becoming more astute and media conscious, a fact pointed out by Beirut Bureau Chief Brent Sadler. It has always been one of the Israelis' greatest fears that the Arabs should become equally educated and savvy, an apprehension well illustrated in statements by a number of former Israeli Prime Ministers, including Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and Golda Meir. If a self-respecting station like CNN wishes to report on Arab Media manipulation it must also report on Israeli media manipulation, for if it does otherwise it jeopardizes its reputation for journalistic objectivity and integrity. The ossified media of the west must know that the joke has worn thin.
Amer R. Saidi
Beirut
Lebanon

Siege of Lebanon

2006-09-09T14:04:00.000+03:00

a debate between an israeli and a lebanese - as moderated by BBC

2006-08-31T08:43:00.000+03:00

FYI, here are the links to a debate/discussion organized by the BBC between an Israeli blogger (Lisa Goldman) and a Lebanese blogger (myself)

The BBC began the discussion by posing the question: who won the war? Lisa and I were then left to answer that question, and from there began the discussion. (Just for the record: I did not pose that question.)

in English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldhaveyoursay/2006/08/everyones_a_winner.html

in Arabic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/talking_point/newsid_5265000/5265130.stm

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

What I knew of Dahieh

2006-08-27T11:39:00.000+03:00

What I know, or rather knew, of Beirut’s southern suburbs – the Dahieh – I learned through K.

His family has lived there for 12 years, since the civil war ended and they returned home from France. They didn’t particularly like it there – life in an over-crowded, under-served, traffic-ridden slum leaves much to be desired – but they had family living there, the rent was cheap, it was where all the other poor and lower middle class Shia lived, and after a while it became home.

The first time I went there, with K, I tried to act cool. I had been in the country long enough to know what I was supposed to see: signs commemorating Hizbullah martyrs, life size cut-outs of the various ayatollahs suspended mid-air, lots of wires crossing between apartment buildings, and women fully veiled in black. I wasn’t expecting all the children playing in the streets, stunning young women in skin-tight clothes, so many stores selling so much stuff. I wasn’t expecting the power cuts, which happen daily in Dahieh, and have been for years. I wasn’t expecting the convenience factor, with almost everything you could ever need within walking distance. And of course, I wasn’t expecting the overwhelmingly kind acceptance into K’s family that has kept me coming back for over five years.

After a while, I learned how to navigate Dahieh by myself, the basic location names and landmarks. Hay Madi, Masharrafieh, Mouawad, Haret Hreik, Bier al Abed, Jisr el Mattar, Ghobeireh, Hay el Sellum, Chiah. I learned to look for the clock on Moawad, and the dry water fountain. I learned to look for the Hi-Bye clothing store, for the Domex cloth and lingerie store, for the Club Sport adorned with Rambo paintings, for store next to their house that alternatively sells fruit and vegetables, or pajamas and scarves.

Not all of that is gone now, but much of it is. And what’s left, will never be the same. It was never pretty, or quaint, or charming. But it is home, to thousands of people. And while the political forces propagandize and politicize, Dahieh’s residents have been coming home, sweeping out the glass, washing away the dust, emptying the refrigerators and living.

None of the pictures below will shock you, they’re not new or dramatic, they’re just places that I knew. And all of the pictures were taken after the bulldozers carved roads and paths through the rubble. I should have written this weeks ago. I’ve been trying to.

1) The clock on Moawad Street.

For years this was my main reference point. Every time I got lost, I would ask for the clock, and find my way home from there. The clock has never, ever, told the correct time. The building K’s family first lived in is directly behind the main building in the photo, now surrounded on either side by the rubble of destroyed buildings.

2) The Hi-Bye store

The Hi-Bye clothing store is near the clock, and was another easy reference point. It was bombed, and then caught on fire, so you can’t see the truly scandalous clothing it used to sell.

3) Bier al Abed

Somewhere behind the rubble was a series of long, low buildings. Years ago a good friend left to go back to America, leaving behind a large carpet to be shipped. After looking for an hour, it was in one of these low buildings that K and I found a store which sold nothing but cardboard boxes, cartoneh, of all sizes. That’s all gone now.

4) The DVD and everything else store

Although Lebanon’s pirated CDs and DVDs can’t compare to Syria, it is still possible to find the latest film on sale for $4. On the ground floor of this building was a store that sold DVDs, and electronic trinkets, and pens, and notebooks, and cassettes and CDs, and probably a million other things. K’s sisters had just bought Munich from there a few days before the war began.

5) The Iraqi tailor

I never learned why he was in Beirut, when he arrived or how, but he was known throughout the neighborhood. He could hem pants in minutes, and finish more complication alterations in days. K’s sisters took me there, all of us getting turned around more than once. But everyone knew where the Iraqi tailor was. I don’t know where he is now.

6) Haret Hreik

I walked this street for the first time two months ago, with K’s sisters, looking for curtain rods. We didn’t find what I wanted, although there were a few stores I was planning on going back to. We then walked through Jisr el Mattar and Beir al Abed – two other neighborhoods. When Israel started bombing, they hit this street, Jisr el Mattar and Beir al Abed on the same day. It felt a little surreal. Meanwhile, my curtains still aren’t hung.

7) The spice place

Matahin Bin Jamal, affectionately known as the spice place, was probably my favorite thing in Dahieh – following K’s family. It didn’t belong on the side street from crowded Mouawad, full of traffic and motorcycles all day long. It didn’t really belong in the 21^st century. So narrow two people could barely pass, it was filled ceiling to floor with ancient wooden bureaus, each tiny drawer for a different spice. Three types of sumac, five types of zaatar, various peppers, sage, cumin ground and in seeds. I used to go just to breath in the air, and play with the drawers. Open one, and you see bright green zaatar (dried, crushed thyme) from Jezzine. Next to it, the deep earthy brown of crushed nutmeg. Cardamom, he only sold as seeds, because they lose their flavor so quickly once crushed. And everything was seasonal – you couldn’t buy zaatar or sumac in the spring, because it was already old and losing its flavor.

K and I celebrated finally getting our own apartment by going to the spice place and buying 150 grams of everything we could think of. Each spice you bought was placed in its own small paper bag, carefully weighed on a tiny scale, and stapled shut.

I’ve since run out of sumac and zaatar, but I can’t make myself buy from anywhere else. If I had known they were going to bomb the building next to my spice place, I would have bought a quarter-kilo of everything in every drawer. Then again, if you had told me they were going to bomb so heavily, so recklessly, I would never have believed you.

Sonya Knox

West Beirut

prison. museum. ruin.

2006-08-23T21:22:00.000+03:00

you expect to witness destruction in Khiam. it is there in abundance. nowhere is it more poignant, though, than at the prison.

before 2000 – when the israeli army fled its 18-year-old south lebanon “security zone” – the “Khiam” of popular consciousness was less the town than its notorious detention centre.

run by the south lebanon army, then the israelis’ human sandbags in the zone, Khiam held lebanese suspected of co-operating with the resistance. sometimes that meant resisting the sla policy that gave southerners a choice of paying them extortionate fees or giving up their sons to militia service.

conditions in the prison were squalid, reports of kidnaps and torture commonplace.

in may 2000, then, Khiam was perhaps the most-hated symbol of occupation. one of the emotional highlights of the israeli-sla collapse was the “citizens’ liberation” of the prison on 23 may.

while representatives from the international committee of the red cross were searching for the sla leadership to negotiate the 144 detainees’ release, 500-odd villagers – evidently organised by hizbullah – stormed the facility and freed them. the sla had already abandoned the place.

it’s 19 august, 2006, about a week into the present ceasefire, on the road from Nabatiyyeh to Khiam. traffic is surprisingly sparse, perhaps because of the israeli commando raid near Ba‘lbak the night before.

the sheer volume of destruction visited upon south lebanon in this war is mind-numbing. it’s accentuated by the fact that so much ruin is concentrated in such dense pockets: those villages israel singled out for punishment, and the flashpoints of resistance, are embedded within some of lebanon’s most beautiful and unspoilt country.

several motifs mark the passage. charred petrol stations, burnt fields – presumably the scuffmarks of launched katyushas – improvised roads carved through farmland – so merkavas could avoid roadside bombs – the mangled concrete of apartment blocks and ruined houses, schools and social welfare agencies.

numbness is punctuated by the unexpected appearance of unexploded israeli ordinance – their flanks often projecting from roads they were meant to cut – and dead farm animals, their owners unable to dispose of the corpses.

there is no sign of the israeli equipment hizbullah destroyed. one side or the other has removed it from the field.

Khiam itself is a mess. clumps of collapsed concrete and twisted rebar greet you around every corner. some rubble is adorned with the reminder “made in the usa” – not the brand-style banners draped over former buildings in dahiyyeh, but graffiti quickly dashed off with spray paint.

preliminary clean-up has begun. a bulldozer edges its way through a downed block of flats. shabab with push brooms and surgical masks clean the streets.

in front of one wrecked house, bags of portland cement are stacked hopefully – though they may antedate this war. a grim-faced ogero employee materialises in a sparkling white truck to inspect the public phones.

your party walks up the last kilometre or so to the prison.

over the six years following israel’s withdrawal, hizbullah transformed the facility into a museum, devoted to the cruelty of occupation and the resiliency of the detained.

plaques were erected to describe the routine function of each ward. here were the men’s cells, there the women’s. here was the exercise square. there inmates were “interrogated”. former detainees volunteered to describe their horrid experiences to visitors.

the site was gradually commodified. the prison courtyard was remade as an open-air museum of abandoned sla materiel – troop carriers, jeep, ancient howitzer. a canteen with pool tables sold soft drinks. a shop sold hizbullah memorabilia – tee shirts and flags, key chains and cassette tapes.

historians and museum curators might deride hizbullah’s hitching the Khiam facility, and human suffering it embodied, to the wagon of political rhetoric and public relations. it might be argued, though, that the israel’s leadership have contributed a volume or two to the book of bending history to a politics.

approaching the museum this day, it appears it has been miraculously spared annihilation.

though all the windows are smashed and the roof’s red tiles are scattered like playing cards, it’s still possible, you nod, to recognise the pool tables as “pool tables”. though the door to the drinks cooler swings ajar, there are still some drinks inside.

you glance, then, through the prison entrance and see the sky.

the men’s and women’s barracks immediately behind the canteen are merely shredded by shrapnel. the matériel still squat like iguanas in the sun.

the rest of the complex is powdered concrete. one colleague, who among you has returned to the museum most recently, reckons as much as 80 percent of the complex has been flattened. fragments of walls, concrete held erect by stubborn rebar, point mute to the sky.

you return to the car vaguely aware that you should be formulating some thoughts about how identity is an expression and improvisation upon memory, that the erasure of history, of memory is –

but you're empty of thought. just then, the man whose home is being bulldozed smiles a greeting.

“khalas! it doesn’t matter.” he laughs, gesturing nervously to the smashed concrete. “in another 20 years i’ll be dead anyway.”

Jim Quilty
Beirut

Exchanging Roles?

2006-08-22T18:07:00.000+03:00

There are some challenging questions out of this latest war between Lebanon and Israel. Who won? At what cost? Who was to blame? Is it over or will there be yet another conflict on Lebanese soil? What will happen next? Will Lebanon survive this Israeli aggression economically?

Hizbullah has proven, as a local political party with a military wing, supported financially and militarily by its’ ideological strategic ally, Iran, that it could withstand one of the world’s mightiest and modern military machines through sheer internal organization, by coming from and fighting for the land they are on, by the knowledge of the enemy’s capacities and capabilities, the acquisition of appropriate military hardware (albeit missing the ground to air missiles) to resist, and a faith in God and in fighting on the cause of justice.

In this aspect Hizbullah has come out more or less victorious. The victory is one that is both national in nature and yet more importantly regional. Regional in a sense that it has sent shockwaves across the Arab world whose leaders have all, more or less, been infected by an inferiority complex when it comes to Israel from one angle, and been taken forever captive by economic and commercial interests with the U.S, denying them the ability to maneuver politically to even expel the Israel ambassador. Hizbullah has proven that the Israel army is not an invincible machine, and with strenuous preparation, organization, proper armaments, and faith, it could be put to a stop, although perhaps not defeated.

Hizbullah has stood up to a nation that has flouted almost every UN Council Resolution, undertaken a series of atrocities, and has considered itself above international law and more frighteningly, above all the peace negotiations with the Arabs. The Arabs meanwhile are left to moan about rights, international law, council resolutions and justice. And Israel does whatever it sees fit to ensure that the Arabs, including the Palestinians, stay weak and divided, within the so-called ‘New Middle East’ perhaps – all under the pretext of combating ‘terrorism’ and under their flawed terminology of ‘self defense’.

But the victory of Hizbullah is a victory for the Arabs only to the extent of emotion and semi-retrieved pride, yet is a potential defeat in that its accomplishments, especially of late, stem not from an Arab nation and its institutions as a whole, yet from an almost independently run political party with semi-autonomy from the central government (albeit it represents almost a third of the Lebanese population).

I say potential defeat because though the dichotomy between Hizbullah and the Lebanese central government served well in the past to limit Israel’s disproportionate firepower to Hizbullah and not the whole Lebanese state, it cannot proceed as it is, and as Hizbullah wishes it should, for two primary reasons.

The first reason is that this military achievement and self-confidence boost to the Arab peoples should be invested in the Lebanese government. Strength of nations surrounding Israel should no longer be viewed as a taboo or an impossibility. What harm would it bring if Hizbullah gave its military arsenal to the Lebanese army and trained the army about its historic methods in combating Israel? Why not include a strong regiment (of Hizbullah soldiers) in the army that applies ‘guerrilla’ warfare tactics, especially when a ‘classical’ army is absolutely useless in front of Israel? Why not arm the Lebanese army the same way that it has been armed, and teach it the same perseverance and decentralized command system of the Hizbullah soldiers? Some may say that that would produce an Israeli aggression on all of Lebanon, but that has already happened in this July-August war. If Hizbullah does not give its victory and its assets to the Lebanese army, with an agreed upon time-frame, then it is a failure, nothing more and nothing less. A failure that entails that Hizbullah’s achievements are beyond the scope and ability of any Arab government. This duplicity of resistance and government should be replicated throughout the Arab world in order to defeat Israeli aggressions.

The second reason is economic. Herein perhaps my opinion is a little bias towards the type of class I belong to (a middle class citizen) and the profession category which makes for my living (the Small and Medium Sized Enterprises - SMEs). Yet no business activity in Lebanon has been spared this time around, and the numbers (including myself) who are now lined at embassies for immigration purposes are greater than they were before, and they were abundant before. Who will compensate? Inevitably every house built in the South, South of Beirut, Bekaa… would be given money for reconstruction, yet what about all those SMEs? Can they for example show their past yearly and monthly balance sheets and be compensated for the direct damage caused and compensated for opportunities forgone? These SMEs are after all, the economic backbone of any prospering nation.

On this note as well, it is totally unacceptable that Hizbullah or any other party be allowed to compensate for the damages of this war (through its regional allies) unless Hizbullah accepts to become the government and the government a political party. All aid to the Lebanese people affected by this war must be done through governmental channels or at least through coordination with the central government, of which Hizbullah is a part. No longer should Hizbullah hold a semi-governmental character, and all its assets, both financial and military, should be transferred through the government. Or else why is there a government?

Finally, a further important issue to rise would be seeing Israeli politicians and generals fighting it out in Israel, blaming and criticizing each other for all their failures in this foolish war they initiated, and the expectation that their prime minister will fall. To some in Lebanon, this is seen as a victory, a victory that should ensure that such events do not occur, at least in public, between the Lebanese.

However, I see this as democracy. Israel is practicing democracy were actions are held accountable and though who have not done their jobs correctly, would be penalized by the system in place. In this sense, if the prime minister falls out in Israel, it is not a victory for us as much as a victory for their system of checks and balances.

In Lebanon, no voice should be silenced this way, silenced by blaming him or her of serving the Zionist state. This would be a crime in itself, a stopping of a nation that holds itself high in terms of discourse and harmony between sects and political parties. A crime against free expression of speech and progress.

I can only hope now that Hizbullah, and on whose southern lands they come from would rise to this golden opportunity to reveal its national character, which I always believed in, and play a vital role in strengthening the central government. Otherwise and again, Hizbullah should become the government and the government a political party.

Now the war should be next fought on lands which are still invaded, particularly Syria (as it is continuously in Palestine), and it is a message that Hizbullah takes to those lands that should be listened too and applied, not met by empty speeches praising Hizbullah and Lebanese blood as a model, and even getting political leverage from it, and yet go on in doing nothing for their own dignity, land and people except ensuring the survival of a Machiavellian elite.

Hassan Harajli, Beirut, Lebanon

a ballad of Rana and Ghada

2006-08-15T20:18:00.000+03:00

let’s say you have two women friends. let’s say, for no good reason at all, that their names are Rana and Ghada.

you’re sitting between the two of them in the back row of a beirut cinema, watching the sam peckinpah classic “cross of iron” (1977). it’s about the final weeks in the life of a german soldier [james coburn] during the red army’s second world war rout of the wehrmacht.

it might seem an odd choice for this evening’s entertainment. it’s the evening of the first day of the ceasefire between hizbullah and the israeli army, a night of irritable calm after a month of scourging air strikes and inconclusive ground action – still continuing in a minor key – in south Lebanon.

it might seem an odd choice, but it’s not.

you met Ghada one evening a few years ago and immediately dismissed her as an easily-excitable backpacker – an impression reinforced by her odd tendency to jump up and down in her Birkenstock sandals when enthused. she later took a job at the same rag as you and revealed herself a fine linguist, an intelligent and dedicated political activist, and a preternatural organiser.

Rana is a dancer by preference, a film-lover by passion, and a fundraiser by vocation. as you follow politics and divert yourself writing about cinema, you met her professionally – quite natural as she’s a member of a politically minded film collective. being suspicious by nature, it took some time to resign yourself to the fact that she regarded you as a friend, and not just a useful promotional asset.

Ghada’s not a beirut native but she’s become wedded to the place in a manner you’ve witnessed before. she fell in with a good crowd of like-minded, fun-loving leftists and so quickly sunk a more varied root structure here than the average american expat, say, those who basically work and pal around with other foreigners then go back home when their time’s up.

it’s hardly unusual that in the process of sinking her roots into beirut, Ghada met a guy – let’s call him Ramzi. Somewhat more eccentric – at least amongst your circle of friends – was their decision to get married and so forth. that hasn’t happened just yet for reasons of life.

Ghada left beirut to continue her studies for a year or so. then after a spell of pennilessness, during which time Ramzi was doing his obligatory military service, she landed a job as an administrator at one of the several UN agencies that squatted here before the warplanes came back. seemingly settled into a good gig, the nuptials were further delayed because Ramzi got a scholarship to do some graduate work in europe.

Rana is inexplicably single. the occupants of an alien spacecraft – monitoring her movements from orbit – might assume that she simply has no time for anything but the dozen projects she’s simultaneously scheming at. the week before the Israelis launched their 2006 attack, Rana’s most-recent project had come to fruition.

she opened a cinema that runs non-commercial movies, something that lebanese filmmakers and film-lovers have been talking about – but doing little to accomplish – since before you washed up here.

it’s one of the eccentricities of beirut, and the middle east generally, that you can watch all manner of american schlock but seeing film from anyplace else in the world, including the middle east, is ghettoised within the confines of dvd rental and the odd film festival.

this nicely reflects the general state of the lebanese cultural condition, which involves people getting dolled up to go out to events – festivals, gallery openings, concerts and such. beirutis aren’t accustomed to reliable institutions like a good art-house cinema. beirutis aren’t accustomed to reliable institutions, period.

Rana’s unpretentious about the whole thing. she said she was tired of being able to go to any city in europe and see any film she could imagine – but unable to enjoy the same normalcy in her home town. she said she just wanted to provide a bit of choice.

“what’s on tonight, Rana?” you’d been itching for the comfort of a darkened cinema for a couple of weeks now but been too busy to do anything about it.

“Luis Buñuel,” she’d replied. “‘l’âge d’or’ (1930).”

spanish surrealism. just what the doctor ordered.

“it’s Buñuel tonight at Rana’s” you’d sms-ed Ghada. “?”

a few hours later the phone rang. “it’s not Buñuel tonight,” Rana said apologetically, “i was supposed to screen ‘cross of iron’ last night but we cancelled because it was unsafe. so i’m gonna screen it tonight instead. is that alright?”

“Peckinpah?” your head immediately filled with memories of a skit from monty python’s flying circus. called “Salad Days”, it’s their imagining a Peckinpah treatment of a light-hearted georgian picnic. the panama hats and stripped jackets, accessorised by glasses of champagne and lemonade, are gathered around a piano, singing.

the gaiety is reduced to chaos in short order. the piano player loses his hands when the keyboard lid crashes down on them. the other revellers are reduced to screaming paroxysms of agony by various means – impaled on one unlikely implement or another, gouts of blood shooting forth, geyser-like. for reasons now obscure to you, you always found the skit immensely funny.

“cool,” you’d said. “i haven’t seen Peckinpah in years.”

you didn’t bother informing Ghada about the change. though unlikely to be a Pekinpah fan, you reasoned she probably wouldn’t mind the programme change – just because seeing a film, any film, would be far closer to her pre-war routine than her normal life these days.

banned from doing proper work since the conflict began, Ghada’s been busying herself with refugee relief for the last month. she went about it with the matter-of-fact enthusiasm you’ve come to associate with the inveterate left – which, in its various factions, leapt into the vacuum left by an irresponsible state when displaced people began camping in beirut’s public gardens.

though Ghada’s social life hasn’t exactly withered on the vine, you get the impression she does some things with certain people less – if only because your circle of friends is deeply infiltrated by hacks who’ve spent little of the last month doing anything not connected to working or getting pissed.

Ghada bounces into the cinema two seconds before the film starts.

“hi!” she laughs, assessing the empty cinema.

“it’s not Buñuel,” you gesture to the screen. “it’s Peckinpah.”

“Peckinpah?” the enthusiasm on her face collapses into distaste.

“Sam Peckinpah.”

“having trouble finding a seat? the back row,” Rana gestures graciously, “is most comfortable.”

thanks to late-night television, “cross of iron” must have been visited upon all north americans at some time or another but you don’t recall ever seeing it. it’s immediately obvious why it’s been programmed, though.

the opening credits’ newsreel footage of smiling patriotic german faces c.1944, played out against a soundtrack of children singing nursery rhymes, is all too evocative of the propaganda footage spawned by this present conflict.

repeated images of fictional shelling, themes of patriotism and party loyalty, humanity and inhumanity, are all redolent of contemporary realities.

the bad acting is highly evocative of the rogues’ gallery of politicians and so-called statesmen who have perpetrated this evil month and allowed it to continue for so long.

you have occasion to glance over at Rana and Ghada at various points of the evening. Ghada’s face is a shifting landscape of amusement and bemusement. Rana’s is knotted in a grimace for most of the proceedings – she didn’t programme this particular film.

Coburn erupts into his incongruous – evidently improvised – laugh. the film ends.

Ghada leaps to her feet and makes for the surface. it seems Ramzi’s been trying to reach her for some time. you wait for Rana to collect the dvd from the projection room – it’s hard to lay hands on proper films when you’re in the midst of an ongoing, month-long siege.

“i don’t know how much longer i can do this,” Rana says. “i can’t get any movies. i’m running out of mazout [diesel, for the generator that keeps the electricity going through spells of rationing]. running out of money –”

when her cinema’s opening event – a week of films from cannes – was disrupted by the war, Rana shut for a couple of days. within a few days the madina theatre, the space that houses her cinema, had transformed itself into a refugee-relief centre where ngos and artists have been running programmes for displaced kids and their parents.

Rana reopened the cinema to screen her original programme, augmented now by morning and afternoon programmes for kids and teenagers. she’s been continuing with these and working with some local filmmakers to screen thematically relevant dvds – thus “cross of iron”.

for those aliens observing Rana’s travails from orbit, she’s already demonstrated remarkable resilience over the last month. Rana herself is more sceptical.

“i don’t know if what i’m doing has any value or not,” she said a couple of weeks into the war. “i’m screening films but no one’s coming except a few of the displaced people staying in the theatre. the people who’d usually come are either glued to their televisions or getting drunk someplace.

“a group of muhajiba [veiled, and therefore devout muslim] girls staying here wanted to come to one of the european films we were screening the other night.

“i explained to them that they'd probably see some things they were uncomfortable with – sexual intimacy and so forth. they insisted they wanted to come in. i don’t blame them. i’m sure they’re bored senseless.

“so the movie starts. they sit through it for the first half hour. then one girl’s father comes in, sees what’s on the screen and yells at her to come with him. so all the girls get up and leave.”

you’re standing outside the cinema now. Ghada is nowhere to be seen.

“can i drop you?” Rana invites. “come on. look, the needle is still above the ‘E’!”

when you reach the old airport road, the main artery connecting dahiyyeh to northern beirut, you encounter an ad hoc celebration. cars and mopeds are driving up and down the autostrada, horns blowing, all bearing flags of hizbullah and amal – the country’s two shi‘a political groups. it’s like the evening of a brazilian world cup victory, but with different flags.

“i can’t believe they’re celebrating,” Rana grips the steering wheel more tightly and curses under her breath. “what have we won? the country is in ruins. over 1000 people have been killed. the israelis are still in our country. i wish someone would tell me what we won. i want to celebrate too.”

standing on the terrace of the Qasqas flat with a beer and a fag, you survey the dark spaces of the ruined dahiyyeh.

you’re mapping out the chapter of the book you will never write about this conflict. the chapter struggles with how such a tiny country can generate such a breadth of experience – ranging from utter deprivation to hyper-privilege – and the disparate opinions that this range of experience generates.

born into a family of leftist intellectuals, Rana is hardly to be counted amongst lebanon’s privileged classes. she’s simply a middle class beiruti who wants to make her country more like other places she’s lived.

aside from the million people displaced by israel’s bombing campaign, it’s people like Rana and Ghada who are most torn by this conflict. hizbullah doesn’t speak to them in any way, but the issues of social justice that the party has taken as its own – at the centre of which is the injustice of Palestine – do. the very rich who are indifferent to issues of social justice feel no such ambivalence.

the phone rings.

“hi,” says Ghada. “sorry about the disappearing act. Ramzi’s a bit freaked out because they announced that the new recruits are being deployed in south lebanon.”

the deployment of Lebanese troops in the south alongside a strong european force, is one of the preconditions of the israeli withdrawal from lebanese soil. “i thought they were deploying veterans.”

“nobody knows anything for sure. the defence ministry announced the new recruits are going down. that means Ramzi’s going down. now some cabinet ministers are kicking up a stink. so they made the call before they know for sure.”

“that blows.”

“blows? if Ramzi can’t finish graduate school because of this it’ll be a disaster for him.”

––

Jim Quilty
Beirut

What remains

2006-08-15T00:28:00.000+03:00

The families, those that can, are leaving for their homes.

It should be joyful. The sun should shine and the traffic flow in happy caravans and the families, all united, all healthy, all carrying extra supplies, ought to set off for Beirut’s suburbs, the South and the Bekaa Valley like rosy-faced pioneers reclaiming what is their’s, yet again.

But the sun can’t really shine, because the sky is full of the dust from collapsed buildings. The traffic can’t flow (it never does, anyways), and Israel has refused to lift its air and sea blockade. So there’s increasingly very little gasoline in the market, making transport home difficult and expensive.

Most families still aren’t united – the ICRC did another tour yesterday through Beirut’s schools looking for families from the Bekaa. They’re not healthy – although epidemics have not broken out in the schools – as 33 days of living with 200 other people, with very little fresh fruit or vegetables or meat, wears down the immune system. There are no extra supplies, because aid is delivered daily, and, again, Israel’s blockade has prevented most aid from being delivered at all.

And they’re certainly not rosy-faced. Not when Israel, despite accepting the UN Resolution, has issued warnings against civilians returning to their homes below the Litani River. Not when yet another civilian car was bombed last night, killing a family of five. Not when Israel bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs 30 minutes before the ceasefire took place. Not with over 1,000 Lebanese civilians dead, and entire villages in the South flattened. Not when most families don’t know if they have a house to return to. Not when their only guarantee of safety is a poorly worded, loop-hole infested UN resolution that seems to have been designed to fail.

But they’re going home, to what remains of home, defiantly.

Meanwhile, like some historian in a Marquez novel, I spent the day entering two-week old data from doctors’ visits to the refugee families in the schools.

Fatimeh, 26. Panic attacks.
Samir, 78. Arthritis and diabetes.
Ali, 14. Asthma.
Mariam, 5. Conjunctivitis.
Sawsan, 21. Respiratory difficulties.
Yasser, 33. Panic attacks.
Maya, 4 months. Skin rash
Ahmed, 45. Upper back pain and tension headaches.
Mahmoud, 9. Screaming nightmares.
Khadija, 47. Diabetes, hypertension and foot pain.
Hayat, 16. Panic attacks.
Rami, 13. Skin rash.
Souad, 69. Lower back pain and panic attacks.

The families are going home, to what remains. The other remnants, they will carry with them.

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

So why did Israel launch this war against Lebanon, again?

2006-08-14T18:02:00.000+03:00

"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday met with the parents of
abducted Israel Defense Forces soldiers Eldad Regev and Udi
Goldwasser and told them that Israel will negotiate with
Hezbollah over their release. Defense Minister Amir
Peretz also attended the meeting."

Source: Ha'aretz

-Rania Masri

another reason why this is a US/Israeli war on Lebanon

2006-08-14T16:49:00.000+03:00

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

[...]

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah - and shared it with Bush Administration officials - well before the July 12th kidnappings. "It's not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into," he said, "but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it."

From
Seymour Hersh's article Watching Lebanon in the New Yorker

-Rania Masri

2006-08-14T15:22:00.000+03:00

New Yorker's Seymour Hersh's article

URGENT REQUEST FOR HELP

2006-08-14T11:48:00.000+03:00

Dear Friends
We have received an urgent request from the BirdLife Partner in Lebanon,
SPNL (Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon), asking for
support to help them deal with the humanitarian crisis which is
devastating their country and having a direct impact on both people and
environment alike. Most of you may remember that BirdLife, as part of our "emergency
response procedure", has in the past promoted and co-ordinated similar
relief initiatives from the Partnership. It has been the case for the
Tsunami in South East Asia and the Pakistan earthquake, where social
disruption was also directly impacting the environment, IBAs in
particular. Our slogan is"Together for Birds and People" and there
cannot be clearer situations than these where helping people also means
helping biodiversity. This is definitely also the case for the current
Lebanese crisis. Most notably, some of the IBAs that the Lebanese
Partner has been most actively involved with (Ebel es-Saqi, located near
Marjayoun and Hima Kfar Zabad in the Bekaa) are directly affected by the
displacement of families who are trying to escape from the centres of
the conflict.

The number of displaced families has exceeded 750,000 so far. Kfar
Zabad village alone has received around 120 families so far and the
human situation for all the displaced families is devastating. They
urgently need:

* Blankets.
* Children food (especially milk & water).
* Sanitary detergents.
* Medications.
* Kitchen utensils.
* Electrical Generator.
* Tents.

In response to SPNL's request, we would like to invite you to consider
supporting our Lebanese Partner in helping the communities displaced in
the IBAs, as well as the resident community and local SPNL groups that
have to deal with this crisis while minimizing the environmental impact
on the IBAs. Please send any donation as quickly as possible directly to the Lebanese
Partner, whose details are below. This will make the relief operations
quicker and more effective.

SPNL bank account for cash donations:

Al-Mawarid Bank, s.a.l.

Address: Hamra Branch, Abdel Aziz Street, Beirut, Lebanon

Tel: 961-01-734040 961-03-330821

SWIFT code: MABALBBE

Account number: 215375 001

Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon-SPNL

Messages, mixed and otherwise

2006-08-14T00:19:00.000+03:00

Israeli jets announced Israel’s official acceptance of UN Security Council
Resolution 1701 – calling for a cessation of hostilities – by bombing Beirut’s
southern suburbs 20 times within two minutes.

The Israeli Cabinet’s decision had just appeared as breaking news on the TV
broadcasts when the bombing started. Over the next few minutes – as the
bombs continued to explode, and as the kids ran inside yelling, and as I flipped
through all the channels trying to figure out where they were hitting – the
breaking news continued with the specifications of who had voted how in the Israeli Cabinet.

“The Israeli (BOMB) Cabinet has announced its accep(BOMB)tance of
Resolution (BOMB) 1701. The ceasefire (BA-BOMB) will take effect (BOMB) as
of 0800 tomorr(BOMB-BOMB)ow morning local time (BOMB). The Israeli
Minis(BOMB)ter of Defense abstained (BOMB BA-BOMB) from voting (BOMB).”

------

The other night, R. tried to talk to an Israeli.

“I figured, the Israeli military is always calling our phone lines with recorded
messages, writing comments on our blogs, dropping flyers onto our streets,
saying they don’t have partners for peace and all that crap… So I decided to
see what they’re like, you know, to talk to them personally.

“So I went onto some of the IRC internet chat rooms and tried to find an
Israeli. But I couldn’t find any Israeli who would agree to chat with me, so
then I entered a chat room called ‘Israel’.

“But I guess the program recognized my internet connection address as coming
from Lebanon, because I didn’t even get a chance to write anything. They
kicked me out, directly.”

“How did they kick you out? The program closed on you?”

“No, they kicked me out, and a box appeared on the screen saying ‘Shit-listed!’”

----

There’s a new joke going around Beirut.

- What does it mean when Hizbullah leader Nasrallah makes the victory sign on TV?
- That there are still two buildings standing in southern Beirut.

----

The other day the Israeli army dropped propaganda fliers over Beirut,
again. The message, like always, was about Hizbullah. But it didn’t really
matter.

The fliers, white pieces of paper, came drifting down slowly. It was one of the
rare sunny days – most days the skies are full of the smoke from collapsed and
burning buildings – and the papers sparkled in the sun as they fell.
Thousands? Hundred of thousands? Without the context of daily bombings,
atrocities and starving families, it was almost beautiful, like a surreal moment
in an Asian art film.

The sky filled, and still they fell. And then the streets filled with children.
Refugees staying in West Beirut, they ran around, skipping and laughing,
grabbing at the falling papers and spinning around.

----

So the big international aid agencies have all arrived by now, their fancy
international crisis staff in tow. A friend, a doctor who’s helping coordinate
medicine distribution between the government and the aid agencies, shows up
to dinner in a foul mood.

“These stupid foreigners. They think we’re completely backwards. Don’t they
know that we’re a developed country?

“They don’t know that you can just ask any Lebanese mother which
medications her son needs, and she’ll know. They don’t know that you don’t
need to go around offering immunizations because everyone’s already had their
shots. They don’t know that they don’t need to bring truck drivers to deliver
their medicines because we know how to drive here!

“Would someone please send them a message before they come next time
telling them that Lebanon is not Djibouti?!”

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

...It is 1984 ...

2006-08-13T20:36:00.000+03:00

Okay... The Israeli government agrees to a ceasefire - to start Monday morning.

And in the days hence, what has the Israeli government done?
Kill.
Kill.
and Kill again.

I don't understand.

Today alone, the Israeli army destroyed 11 buildings - residential buildings - in the southern district of Beirut. Overly optimistic displaced families - hearing the news of the ceasefire - returned to their homes. They were killed. That was not enough. A hospital was attacked. Intense bombardment in the South. The targets? Civilians. Families. Mothers. Fathers.

Today alone, the Israeli army has destroyed a rubber factory, a paper factory, and a wood-products factory. Are these military targets? We add these destroyed factories to the list of other destroyed factories - including a milk factory.

I don't understand.

There is no military reason for these massacres.
There is only the desire for killing and destroying itself.
Why all this hatred against us?

Forgive me if I'm not being coherent today. There is something intensely illogical that when a government declares there will be a ceasefire, it intensifies the fighting against civilians and against the economic infrastructure before that date. (And there is something quite sad that too many people have come to accept this behavior with outrage.)

The targets that Israel has chosen in this day, this (allegedly) last day before the so-called ceasefire, demonstrate quite clearly the purpose of the Israeli war against Lebanon: to kill and terrorize the Lebanese people, and to weaken the Lebanese economy.

What will it take to cause serious outrage in the world? Do the people killed have to be white?

-Rania Masri

on terrorism and virtue

2006-08-13T19:32:00.000+03:00

The last two issues of The London Review of Books have run some excellent pieces on the Israeli aggression against Lebanon. The 3 August issue (Vol. 28 No. 15) has a triptych of articles from Elias Khoury, “Do I see or do I remember?”, Rasha Salti, “Siege Notes” and Karim Makdisi, “How the War Will End” – see: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n15/contents.html.

The 17 August issue has another brace of articles. Particularly impressive is this one from Israeli dissident Yitzhak Laor. It comes to us from our friends at the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel –
http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=332_0_1_0_C.

You are terrorists, we are virtuous
Yitzhak Laor | London Review of Books | August 17, 2006

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the press, the army is assigned the dual role of hero and victim. And the enemy? In Hebrew broadcasts the formulations are always the same: on the one hand ‘we’, ‘ours’, ‘us’; on the other, Nasrallah and Hizbullah. There aren’t, it seems, any Lebanese in this war. So who is dying under Israeli fire? Hizbullah. And if we ask about the Lebanese? The answer is always that Israel has no quarrel with Lebanon. It’s yet another illustration of our unilateralism, the thundering Israeli battle-cry for years: no matter what happens around us, we have the power and therefore we can enforce the logic. If only Israelis could see the damage that’s been done by all these years of unilateral thinking. But we cannot, because the army – which has always been the core of the state – determines the shape of our lives and the nature of our memories, and wars like this one erase everything we thought we knew, creating a new version of history with which we can only concur. If the army wins, its success becomes part of ‘our heritage’. Israelis have assimilated the logic and the language of the IDF – and in the process, they have lost their memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have never learned from history? We have never been a match for the army, whose memory – the official Israeli memory – is hammered into place at the centre of our culture by an intelligentsia in the service of the IDF and the state.

The IDF is the most powerful institution in Israeli society, and one which we are discouraged from criticising. Few have studied the dominant role it plays in the Israeli economy. Even while they are still serving, our generals become friendly with the US companies that sell arms to Israel; they then retire, loaded with money, and become corporate executives. The IDF is the biggest customer for everything and anything in Israel. In addition, our high-tech industries are staffed by a mixture of military and ex-military who work closely with the Western military complex. The current war is the first to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge promotional campaign. Israel’s second biggest bank, Bank Leumi, used inserts in the three largest newspapers to distribute bumper stickers saying: ‘Israel is powerful.’ The military and the universities are intimately linked too, with joint research projects and an array of army scholarships.

There is no institution in Israel that can approach the army’s ability to disseminate images and news or to shape a national political class and an academic elite or to produce memory, history, value, wealth, desire. This is the way identification becomes entrenched: not through dictatorship or draconian legislation, but by virtue of the fact that the country’s most powerful institution gets its hands on every citizen at the age of 18. The majority of Israelis identify with the army and the army reciprocates by consolidating our identity, especially when it is – or we are – waging war.

The IDF didn’t play any role in either of the Gulf wars and may not play a part in Bush’s pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert for the real war that is always just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In July it killed 176 Palestinians, most of them from the same area in Gaza, in a ‘policing’ operation that included the destruction of houses and infrastructure.) They shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and children, and they call it a war, a ‘just war’, vital for our existence. The power of the army to produce meanings, values, desire is perfectly illustrated by its handling of the Palestinians, but it would not be possible without the support of the left in Israel.

The mainstream left has never seriously tried to oppose the military. The notion that we had no alternative but to attack Lebanon and that we cannot stop until we have finished the job: these are army-sponsored truths, decided by the military and articulated by state intellectuals and commentators. So are most other descriptions of the war, such as the Tel Aviv academic Yossef Gorni’s statement in Haaretz, that ‘this is our second war of independence.’ The same sort of nonsense was written by the same kind of people when the 2000 intifada began. That was also a war about our right to exist, our ‘second 1948’. These descriptions would not have stood a chance if Zionist left intellectuals – solemn purveyors of the ‘morality of war’ – hadn’t endorsed them.

Military thinking has become our only thinking. The wish for superiority has become the need to have the upper hand in every aspect of relations with our neighbours. The Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed militarily, and of course they must then appear to us in the degraded state to which we’ve reduced them. Our usual way of looking at them is borrowed from our intelligence corps, who ‘translate’ them and interpret them, but cannot recognise them as human beings. Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chickens or cats. We turn away without much trouble and consider the real issue: the enemy. The Katyusha missiles that have been hitting the north of the country are launched without ‘discrimination’, and in this sense Hizbullah is guilty of a war crime, but the recent volleys of Katyushas were a response to the frenzied assault on Lebanon. To the large majority of Israelis, however, all the Katyushas prove is what a good and necessary thing we have done by destroying our neighbours again: the enemy is indeed dangerous, it’s just as well we went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the prophecies self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: ‘The Middle East is a jungle, where only might speaks.’ See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut.

Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that the US and Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true that Olmert and his colleagues would not have acted so shamelessly if the US had not been behind them. Had Bush told them to hold their fire, they wouldn’t have dared to move a single tank.) But there is a major difference. The US and Britain went to war in Iraq without public opinion behind them. Israel went to war in Lebanon, after a border incident which it exploited in order to destroy a country, with the overwhelming support of Israelis, including the members of what the European press calls the ‘peace camp’.

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was already well underway, wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash Hizbullah wherever it lurks.’ Nothing here is distinguishable from Israeli state pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware of any bombardment in Lebanon: ‘There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.’ We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours. And it’s important to remember that ‘our suffering’ is that of poor people in the north who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. ‘Our suffering’ is not that of the decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that ‘there can be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.’ At that time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: ‘The Israeli peace movement should support Israel’s attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as human sandbags).’

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the right to abduct. You don’t. We have the right to arrest. You don’t. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don’t. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The Lebanese will not remember everything about this war. How many atrocities can a person keep in mind, how much helplessness can he or she admit, how many massacres can people tell their children about, how many terrorised escapes from burning houses, without becoming a slave to memory? Should a child keep a leaflet written by the IDF in Arabic, in which he is told to leave his home before it’s bombed? I cannot urge my Lebanese friends to remember the crimes my state and its army have committed in Lebanon.

Israelis, however, have no right to forget. Too many people here supported the war. It wasn’t just the nationalist religious settlers. It’s always easy to blame the usual suspects for our misdemeanours: the scapegoating of religious fanatics has allowed us to ignore the role of the army and its advocates within the Zionist left. This time we have seen just how strongly the ‘moderates’ are wedded to immoderation, even though they knew, before it even started, that this would be a war against suburbs and crowded areas of cities, small towns and defenceless villages. The model was our army’s recent actions in Gaza: Israeli moderates found these perfectly acceptable.

It was a mistake for those of us who are unhappy with our country’s policies to breathe a sigh of relief after the army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. We thought that the names of Sabra and Shatila would do all the memorial work that needed to be done and that they would stand, metonymically, for the crimes committed in Lebanon by Israel. But, with the withdrawal from Gaza, many Israelis who should be opposing this war started to think of Ariel Sharon, the genius of Sabra and Shatila, as a champion of peace. The logic of unilateralism – of which Sharon was the embodiment – had at last prevailed: Israelis are the only people who count in the Middle East; we are the only ones who deserve to live here.

This time we must try harder to remember. We must remember the crimes of Olmert, and of our minister of justice, Haim Ramon, who championed the destruction of Lebanese villages after the ambush at Bint Jbeil, and of the army chief of staff, Dan Halutz. Their names should be submitted to The Hague so they can be held accountable.

Elections are a wholly inadequate form of accountability in Israel: the people we kill and maim and ruin cannot vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the machine-memory will reassert control and write history for us. It will glide into the vacuum created by our negligence, with the civilised voice of Amos Oz easing its path, and insert its own version. And suddenly we will not be able to explain what we know, even to our own children.

In Israel there is still no proper history of our acts in Lebanon. Israelis in the peace camp used to carry posters with the figure ‘680’ on them – the number of Israelis who died during the 1982 invasion. Six hundred and eighty Israeli soldiers. How many members of that once sizeable peace camp protested about the tens of thousands of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian casualties? Isn’t the failure of the peace camp a result of its inability to speak about the cheapness of Arab blood? General Udi Adam, one of the architects of the current war, has told Israelis that we shouldn’t count the dead. He meant this very seriously and Israelis should take him seriously. We should make it our business to count the dead in Lebanon and in Israel and, to the best of our abilities, to find out their names, all of them.

3 August

Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/print/laor01_.html

Hummers and have-nots

2006-08-11T19:10:00.000+03:00

Before this war began the Lebanese business community were hoping this summer would prove that the country’s economy was back on the road to recovery after the upheavals of last year. Oil cash was flowing into the country and scores of luxury apartments and gated communities were planned. The smart downtown district was packed with flush Arab tourists who come here in their thousands to escape the oppressive summer heat of the Gulf and enjoy the libertine atmosphere of Beirut.

But all that is now gone and understandably there is anger at Hizbullah for dragging the country into a war that has destroyed this. Thousands of Gulf tourists and foreigners have fled the country, downtown Beirut, the showcase of Rafik Hariri’s reconstruction efforts is deserted and cash machines have stopped issuing dollars because people were hoarding hard currency.

Once again the media has portrayed Lebanon as a place of death and destruction, a clichéé that the country has worked so hard to shake off. Although investors in Lebanon have proven themselves to be a hardy bunch it remains to be seen whether they are willing to risk their money in a country that can be plunged into war overnight.

But there is a lesson to be learnt here that has been ignored repeatedly though out Lebanon’s history. Put simply, the country’s laissez faire system has ignored huge sections of the population and while many here have a great deal at stake in the country’s economy there are many more who don’t.

Beirut is a tale of two cities, and although the western media lapped up the pictures of pretty girls demonstrating against the Syrians in last year’s “Cedar revolution”, there is another side to the place that is ignored. Less than three miles from the luxury shops and Sushi restaurants of Downtown lie the southern suburbs, an area made up mostly of Shia, Hizbullah’s support base and the largest and most marginalized community in the country. Before the 1975-1990 civil war this area used to be known as the “belt of misery”” and although conditions have improved since then it is still a deprived place. Power supplies are sporadic, the streets are full of pot holes and government services are lacking. State control is weaker here and during the recent World Cup, tracer fire could be seen weaving up from the area every time Germany or Brazil won. The place is a world away from the corporate internationalism of the Downtown area that is advertised on CNN.

Although the southern suburbs is a diverse area and it would be foolish to speak for all of its inhabitants, one can say that complaints about the loss of tourism dollars were likely lost on many here. They do not own hotels or restaurants in downtown, have stakes in banks or have the wasta (political influence) that would get them a job that pays a decent wage. Many people here live on little more than $200 a month which for a family in Lebanon doesn’t go very far at all.

These people are made to pay for services that they don’t get. There is no income tax in Lebanon and in order to service the country’s $36 billion debt, the government has put 10% VAT on consumer goods as well as tax on other services. While Lebanon’s rich can easily afford to pay these increases and are probably very happy that they don’t pay income tax, for someone who earns $200 a month 10 percent on their shopping bill is a lot.

The debt was incurred during the post-war government in building prestige projects that would put Lebanon back on the international map and much of it was wasted by venal contracting and plain theft. Most of this debt is owed internally to Lebanese banks who have been doing very well out of lending the government money at very good rates. Lebanon has over 60 banks, and if were not for the business that the country’s debt payments brings then there would probably be far fewer.

The whole thing stinks of a scam and unsurprisingly the country’s poor are angry that they paying for something that they don’t benefit from nor have much say in.

In the midst of all this sleaze, Hizbullah stands out as the one party that doesn’t indulge (too much) in corruption and it attaches great importance to this image, acutely aware of how unhappy the Shia, and all of Lebanon’s sects, are with their dirty politicians.

Furthermore, Hizbullah is not only a militia but also a popular political party, and where the government falls short Hizbullah has stepped in and the party runs hospitals and schools in the southern suburbs and Shia areas around the country. When this current conflict comes to an end Hizbullah will likely step in and distribute aid from Iran among the hundreds of thousands of refugees and those who have lost houses in the Israeli bombardment. This will only serve to strengthen the party further.

Most Lebanese agree that this disparity between rich and poor was a reason behind the civil war, which in the beginning was as much about class struggle as it was about sectarianism. But despite this hard learned lesson, the Lebanese government appeared to be make exactly the same mistake in the post-war period. Now the middle class has gradually disappeared and has been replaced by Hummers and have-nots, the ostentatious rich and the invisible poor.

Although it is unrealistic to expect the Lebanese government to overcome the crippling internal divides it must find a way of taking responsibility for all its citizens. If this were to happen then perhaps this country could avoid the kind of incendiary politics that led to the current impasse. The southern suburbs are not the only area of the country that is deprived and much of the rural areas in fact face a lack of services. Protecting the interests of the hoteliers and bankers is not protecting the interests of all Lebanese. If the country’s poor had something at stake in the country’s economy then they might have more interest in safeguarding it.

Christian Henderson, Beirut, Lebanon

Global Lebanon Web Jam - 12aug, 15:00 - 19:00 PM

2006-08-11T14:49:00.000+03:00

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>Mrabba Electroni[c]que: Global Lebanon Web Jam. Stop the war!>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

!!!!please note time change!!!!!!!

Saturday, August 12 2006, 15:00 - 19:00 PM CEST [--> 16:00 - 20:00 EEST]

http://beirut.streamtime.org
http://streamtime.org

Live audio/video streaming transmission from Waag Society in Amsterdam, in direct connection with Beirut and surrounding localities. The event was initiated by Streamtime, a web support campaign for Iraqi bloggers.

After one month of violence and carnage, this Global Web Jam brings together live interviews and conversations, video clips, cartoons and blog blurbs, soundscapes, DJs and VJs, a lively mix of information, art, protest, party and reflection. We feature the voices, images stories, reports and initiatives from Lebanon and beyond, with participation of activists, artists, bloggers, journalists, musicians and many others.

This is a call for an immediate end to the violence and destruction, in defiance of war, and in search for solidarity.

With contributions and participation of: Wahid el-Solh, Mounira el-Solh, Sonya Knox, Naeem Mohaiemen, Kanj Hamadi, Jim Quilty, Randa Mirza, Mazen Kerbaj, Raed Yassin, Charbel Haber, Nathalie Fallaha, Henri Gemayel, Fadi Tufayli, Tariq Shadid, Peter Speetjens, Chalaan Charif, Martin Siepermann, Arjan El Fassed, Ruud Huurman, Kadir van Lohuizen, Thomas Burkhalter and Anna Trechsel, Beirut DC, Tarek Atoui and many others.

This Global Web Jam is an initiative of Jo van der Spek, Geert Lovink and Cecile Landman (from Streamtime), Nat Muller, Paul Keller and Denis Jaromil Rojo in Amsterdam; and Tarek Atoui and Rawya el-Chab in Beirut.

info: http://beirut.streamtime.org | mail: beirut@dischosting.nl

This project is supported by Waag Society, Novib (Dutch Oxfam) and X-Y Solidarity Fund

Broummana Diary

2006-08-10T09:52:00.000+03:00

Now I’m home.
Really home.
I can settle down in my native country, the greatest country the world has ever seen, and follow the news of the war that uprooted me from what had been a cozy little living in Broummana, Lebanon. Actually, it’s a full-time job to figure out what is happening in the land of the cedars, the country I have left temporarily. Here in Central California, the land of grapes and raisins, I’ve become a hard-core news junkie, searching for my hourly fix of the latest developments in the war between Israel and Hizbullah.

Boy, did I have it wrong. First of all, there’s that nasty old al-Jazeera. I can’t believe I wasted 20 fucking years of my life studying and learning Arabic. All I got out of it was the false belief that this fighting had something to do with, well, for example, the promotional spot that al-Jazeera had come up with: “The Sixth War Between Israel and an Arab Side,” if you accept a quasi-literal translation. Over at al-Jazeera they’re fiendishly clever, that’s for sure. They thought they had produced a slick title since it covers all of the major conflicts that have broken out since 1947, when the United Nations stuffed Palestine in a box and told the world, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, watch me saw this lady in half.” They should have just given the whole piece of territory to the Zionists and prevented all these troubles. After all, the Zionist settlers had shown up there, hadn’t they? They did take the trouble of actually going to Palestine, and claiming it, so why shouldn’t they get the whole thing? If the UN had been a bit more courageous and stood up to Kofi Annan, or whoever was in charge then, we could have avoided all of these headaches. The problem was that the UN didn’t have the guts to pass a clear, unambiguous resolution outlawing the Palestinians, and recognizing only Israelis and their right to exist. In fact, if the world community had shown a bit more imagination and foresight, it would have acted before the Zionist movement even showed up. All you had to do was set up a big trap door under Palestine, pull the lever, and whoosh, all the people disappear. And then the Zionist settlers could have arrived safely and we wouldn’t have any refugee or terrorist problems today.

But that’s all water under the bridge, whether or not it’s been bombed. There was the war back in 1948, and then there was
*1956, when the mighty superpower known as Egypt under Gamal Abdel-Nasser was threatening to let loose a storm of blood and fire that would have wiped the UK, France and the junior G-men squad in Israel out of existence. So they had no choice but to attack Egypt. First, of course.
*1967, when Israel launched a surprise self-defense attack, or defense of surprise attack, an attack of not-so-surprise defensiveness, or something like that, in the war to end all wars, at the time.
*1973, when Egypt and Syria tried to recover their occupied territory from Israel, but in a cunning attempt to confuse the Jewish state, decided not to tell each other what they really wanted to do, or how.
*1982, when a bunch of Palestinians who were bored with living in their own country and had taken over Lebanon, where the night-life was better, decided to threaten Israel with total and complete annihilation, with the rest of the world backing their evil plan. But in a big miscalculation by the Palestinians, the World Cup was taking place, so no one ended up helping them out. Israel was forced to kill nearly 20,000 terrorists in Lebanon, to beat back that life-threatening, um, threat.
*And this time, 2006, is War number 6. What a confusing bunch of crap. I’m glad I’m back home, since CNN can just sum it up for me: “Mid-East Crisis.” On Fox News, it’s “Mideast Turmoil.” Now these are ideas we can understand over here. It’s the crazy old Middle East, there’s a crisis or turmoil of some kind, like bad weather or something, and it’s certainly not a case of the Israelis calling everybody in the world a terrorist or aspiring terrorist and shooting people who are much weaker than they are, who can’t fight back in any serious way, in the heads. In the back. In the face. With internationally banned weapons. Nope, that’s not what’s happening. And describing such a thing would require a silly title, like “The Israeli Butchery Show, Thanks to American Self-Delusion, Indulgence and Weapons Technology.” Nope, “Mid-East Crisis” is much more accurate. And it’s also easier to say.

When I was living in Lebanon I wasted so much time looking at all that coverage, all of those photos of dead Lebanese and others who were in the wrong place, etc. They looked like they had been killed in pretty graphic ways, and I saw those images of corpses, and parts of corpses, with the guts and brains hanging out. And then there was that doctored photo, you know, the one with the smoke? Those crafty Lebanese were actually trying to fool the world into sympathizing with them by making the smoke over the southern suburbs of Beirut look a slightly darker shade of gray, or even black! Because if the world had seen very dark gray smoke, and not medium-gray smoke, the outcry would have been enormous and stopped Israel from any further terrorist cleansing operations. Now the shock of war is fading for me, as I recover my wits back home… I’m beginning to remember that earlier this summer, I overheard Lebanese, especially the Hizbullah people I know, whispering things about producing hundreds and hundreds of stuffed humans, basically cloth fixed up and painted up to look like dead people, to be used if the Israelis were to attack. I mean, they were saying, that “when Iran and Syria push the remote control button on the 12th of July and send that robot patrol of Israeli soldiers near the Blue Line, for us to act like we’re capturing it, we’d better have those stuffed people corpses ready to go, because all those gullible international journalists are going to show up.” Of course, it sounded so far-fetched at the time, but if I had reported it then, I could have had a real scoop. If you think about it, the cloth dummies that are supposedly “corpses” are pretty easy to spot: some of them come in these weird shades, not the kind of colors you see when people are killed normally, and they have all these strange spots and markings, like the cloth had been left too close to a kind of, um, chemical fire, for example. It’s an obvious giveaway that they’re not normal dead people.

Marlin Dick, west of the Litani River (near Fresno, California)

Israel "warns" journalists

2006-08-09T16:12:00.000+03:00

To members of the foreign press,

The IDF has announced a limitation on travel in any kind of vehicle in all areas south of the Litani River in Lebanon. The limitation took effect at 22:00 on August 7, 2006, and will remain in effect until further notice.

Information regarding the limitations was communicated to the population in southern Lebanon via media outlets and leaflets as well as through local channels.

Passage of humanitarian convoys continues throughout all of Lebanon in coordination with the IDF.

We would like to stress that these limitations apply to journalists as well.

Please understand that this is a combat zone from which terrorists operate, and as such, we cannot guarantee the safety of journalists in the area.

In fact, we have asked civilians in the area to leave for their own safety.

The IDF will do its utmost to keep civilians, and journalists among them, out of harm's way.

However, we are obligated to remind you that journalists are acting at their own risk and are requested to comply with the recommendations provided to the civilian population.

We urge you also to heed the advice of your own country's consular advisors as to safety during the conflict.

Party for peace

2006-08-08T18:51:00.000+03:00

http://minimalresistance.blogspot.com/

What to do?

2006-08-08T10:12:00.000+03:00

"What to do?" That is the recurring question.
"I feel helpless, what can I do?"
Or,
"What good would any of it do? This war is bigger than any of us."

Perhaps.

What we know for a fact is that doing nothing will result in nothing.
Doing something will result in the possibility of a positive change.
A possibility.
Given the assault, the aggression, given the need, a possibility is a rather large re-assurance.

So, what to do?

Previously, I listed funding options. If any of you want a list of where to send your money to agencies doing necessary work on the ground in taking care of the displaced, email me.

What is most critical in the actions that we do is that we do not decontextualize. The 1 in 4 Lebanese that are displaced are displaced as a direct result of the US/Israeli bombs, the US/Israeli attacks.

And there is more.

See: www.solidaritylebanon.org to read about a civilian convoy that is planned to break the isolation of the south and to demonstrate solidarity. Want to join us?

And see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv4Exy7JT1k for video presentations of protests around the world calling on an immediate ceasefire.

And, above all, believe in the power to change.
Perhaps we won't be able to stop the assault, to stop the war. Perhaps.
Perhaps we will.

Perhaps we won't be able to reach out to the almost one million displaced.
But we can definitely reach out to a few.

-Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org

More of the same

2006-08-08T09:53:00.000+03:00

In the past few days, we've had more of the same. "More of the same."
* More of our roads destroyed. Friday morning, I awoke to the news that the highway from the North to Beirut was bombed in three places, rendering movement from the North to Beirut difficult. The Civil Defense Forces then closed the sea-road (the longer, older path) on Friday due to fears for people's security. I felt trapped. Trapped out of my capital. Trapped out of my city.
The sea-road has since been opened. The 1 hour drive from the North (specifically, the northern point of El Koura) to Beirut (hamra) took 2 hours on Saturday. But there was a road. As I was driving down, I thought of each bridge I was crossing and noted that if the (US-supported) Israelis were to destroy this bridge, movement would really be crippled. What would I rather - be trapped outside Beirut or trapped inside Beirut?
Since then, other roads, other bridges, have been bombed. Their existence rendered too destructive to the Israeli-sense of security.

* More massacres. More massacres. Do not think only of Qana. Remmber, the Qana massacre was not the first massacre in this US/Israeli war on Lebanon. And the aggressors have made sure that it would not be the last massacre. After Qana, the Israelis gave us the Qaa massacre (in el Beka'a). 33 farm workers, 33 laborers, killed. In broad daylight. In two attacks. One after the other. While they were picking fruit amidst a clear fruit orchard. In northern Lebanon. What excuse will the Israelis use now? There were Hezbollah fighters hiding amidst the trees? These fruits may be eaten by someone who supports the national resistance? What rubbish will be given - has been given - and swallowed by the US mainstream press as the truth? And after the Qaa massacre, the Israelis gave us the Hula massacre in the South. 3 residential buidings destroyed. The number of killed is still unknown. The number trapped in the buildings still ranges from 50 to 70. Are they alive? Are they suffocating? Are they dead? And then the Israelis gave us the Shiyah massacre in Beirut. 200 people have fled from their homes in al Shiyah to join the hundreds of others now seeking shelter in a park in Beirut.

What will the Israelis give us today? What will the Israelis give us tomorrow?

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon
(still traveling to Beirut)

Biq‘a diary, 2

2006-08-07T13:24:00.000+03:00

“that’s it. stop here.”

the BMDahiyyeh grinds to a halt. its contents – a theology student from juba and a trio of hacks (dutch, canadian and scots) – look up from their conversation. so do the pair of lebanese army soldiers standing on the side of the road. the theology student reverses the few dozen metres that would put you within walking distance of the ruined carapace that used to be Liban Lait.

you’d never been here before, but you immediately recognise “Candia”, lebanon’s most popular brand of uht milik – the tetrapack stuff that, by some ghoulish cunning that you prefer not to contemplate, has been processed so that it never seems to spoil.

as soon as you climb out of the car, the soldiers ask what you want. you reach for your passports and explain that you’re journalists from beirut, in the biq‘a to look at the bomb sites. you’ll have to get permission from their co, they explain.

“it’s not that we don’t want you to look …” one apologises.

the army is based in a large if nondescript-looking building next door to liban lait. the CO, dressed in fatigues and olive drab tee shirt strides across the parking lot to greet you, smiling broadly. the scot explains why you’re nosing around and the CO bursts into a chorus of “ahalan wa sahalan” [“you are welcome”].

on your way back to liban lait, it occurs to you how odd it is that, with the country at war, a milk factory gets taken out of commission while the army headquarters next door remains untouched.

it’s one of the eccentricities of this country that the lebanese army isn’t really a fighting institution but a political one – one of the few in the country where lebanese mix at a inter-sectarian level.

the army was more or less neutral during the ‘58 troubles, for instance, and sat out most of the 1975-1990 civil war. when it did get involved, in the wake of the israel invasion of 1982, it splintered into sectarian kindling.

the army rarely even really gets involved in repressing civil unrest – if you put aside the odd bit of unfortunate bloodshed, like in the southern suburb of hayy al-silloum a couple of years ago. that job falls to the troops in the internal security forces.

this isn’t the army’s war but hizbullah’s. that’s not to say the army hasn’t been taken some losses in this conflict.

the israelis have killed over a dozen soldiers, often in their barracks. it’s assumed, without hard evidence, that the army positions are hit because they were coordinating with the resistance.

on the other hand, given the patina of psychological warfare that’s tinged so much of this offensive, it may be that israel targeted the army to alienate the army leadership and rank-and-file from hizbullah – which, according to the israeli state’s narrative of this conflict, is responsible for lebanon’s present suffering.

then again, the air attacks have been so indiscriminate outside of beirut that the israeli air force can hardly be expected to care if it takes out a few soldiers as well.

a moustachioed liban lait employee peers out from a guardhouse-like structure to tell the scot that the plant manager will be waiting for you at the factory. he isn’t, but the skeleton crew manning a second security gate eventually let you through anyway.

the most high-profile plant to be bombed in the biq‘a, liban lait’s products can be found in kitchens all over the country. a local concern, it employed 400 people, once you included those involved in distribution.

the place is still burning here and there when you arrive. a couple of you pick your way through a breached wall and stick your nose into the production area. a mass of twisted metal, melted plastic-and-cardboard packaging and ash greets you. the site is thick with flies, feeding off milk spoiled in the intense heat.

a matter-of-fact crater has been sunk deep into the ground where the factory floor used to be. when you lose patience with trying to capture the scale of the hole, you wander through the rubble to examine the back of the factory.

unlike the production floor, the warehouse hasn’t been bombed and you stand there in the midst of an odd incongruity. it’s not unlike standing on your terrace in beirut – so far exempted from israell’s air war on lebanon’s civilians – looking on as the dahiyyeh is systematically destroyed.

reminded of beirut, you recall that the tawwaniyyeh in sabra [the co-op grocery store closest your flat] has been sold out of candia uht milk since the first week of the attacks. it only sells powdered milk now.

you walk outside and the others join you.

“there’s scads of milk here. should we take some with us?”

“that’s war profiteering,” the netherlander says immediately.

“i’m not going to profit from it,” you reply. “i’m going to put it in my coffee.”

“yeah,” says the scot. “go on, then.”

“i wouldn’t,” rejoins the theology student. “there’s cameras all over the place.”

the theological argument wins the day and you leave liban lait, sans lait, to search out Maliban.

+

Maliban glass factory has been something of a rarity in lebanon. in an economy where the tertiary-sector rules, maliban was an industrial success story - both in the biq‘a and the region.

the region's second-biggest glassworks, it shipped glass products around the region, with customers in egypt, jordan, syria and turkey. servicing a-list companies like coca-cola, the factory worked 24 hours a day, it had so many orders. production, you’re told, came to some 200 tons a day.

“i came back here to work 41 years ago," says Salah Barake, surveying the ruin before him. “they destroyed it in two minutes. millions of dollars wasted." Barake is, or rather was the glassworks’ floor manager.

maliban was one of five biq‘a factories destroyed in the israeli onslaught. the attacks have been at their most ferocious in shia regions, and the biq‘a, with its mixed shia-sunni-christian population hasn't been spared.

it's obvious from a distance that maliban was bombed, but it is only from within that it's possible to see how exacting the attack was. Barake leads you up two flights of stairs to the roof of maliban's offices, where it's possible to gaze down upon the ruined factory floor.

from this vantage, it's impossible to discern what this space was used for. all that's visible is churned-up soil with twisted metal, powdered glass and wrecked machinery. it is possible to discern the cause of the disruption, though: four or five distinct craters have been gouged out of the floor. Barake reckons there may have been as many as six bombs altogether.

"the planes came around 12.45, so most people were at lunch, fortunately. two people were killed, indians, and two injured. if they had come an hour earlier or later it would have been a massacre. you see," he points to the far side of the factory floor, "they even destroyed the workers' residence.

"i don't understand why they bombed this place," he says quietly. "we don't look to anyone. we have christian employees and muslim, sunni and shia. all we did was do good work."

israel claims to be destroying hizbullah infrastructure with its air attacks, but the targeting of lebanese industry betrays a more cynical reasoning: since hizbullah fighters are difficult to find, the israeli military is systematically punishing the shia community, much of which provides hizbullah's constituency. maliban was destroyed because it employed shia.

Barake turns away from the chaos and his eyes fall upon a 15-meter-long steel beam, now resting at his feet. "this piece of metal came from below – "he gestures to the factory floor. "how many tons of explosive did it take to blow this up here?"

maliban was founded by anglo-indian investor Manubhai Madhvani, whose family made its fortune in uganda. the factory employed between 380 and 400 workers – though Barake points out that the knock-on impact of maliban was much greater. "when you include casual labour, drivers, those who provided sand for production ... many more people benefited from this company."

another big-ticket victim of the israeli attack was Dalal industries, a multi-faceted factory whose products include prefabricated homes and which directly employed 400 workers. one of dalal’s biggest customers, amusingly enough, is the american military in iraq and afghanistan.

the impact of this war upon biq‘a's working class has been devastating. one estimate has it that 1,500 biq‘a residents have lost their source of livelihood.

Barake has led you down from the roof to the factory floor.

it's impossible to penetrate far past the wreckage. "you laugh and cry after this," he says. "you laugh because you're alive. you cry because everything is finished."

he reckons the impact of the war goes far beyond industry.

"the people who work in the fields here are in terrible shape," he says. "with the roads bombed, they can't get their produce to market."

the netherlander asks Barake if all this has made him angry at hizbullah.

"i'm angry at myself for being here," he laughs, "and not someplace else."

__

Jim Quilty
Beirut

Two views on Israel's military offensive in Lebanon

2006-08-07T12:52:00.000+03:00

Palestinian historian and activist Bishara Doumani, these days in Nablus, provided these two very interesting analyses on the Israeli military offensive.

Michael Davie is a historical geographer (among other things), who is now in Beirut.

Uri Avnery is the head of a small but most determined and consistent peace movement in Israel. He has been around for a long time, fought in many wars, and knows the players very well. Of course, he has an axe to grind with the political establishment and that can be see from the tone of his essay. Nevertheless, the insider's perspective and the insistence that this war is just as much about ineptness as it is about grand strategies are worth reading.

A view from Beirut

To date, the Israeli strategy in Lebanon has not shown any tactical or strategic surprises or innovations. It is being lead as a classical military operation against regular armed forces, with the destruction of bridges, roads, telecommunication infrastructures, depots, and command centres. The premise is that Hizballah is a “classical”, “normal” enemy, that can be defeated by “classical” and “normal” means: total command of the skies, massive armoured movements, saturation artillery, well-trained infantry. Thus, by destroying the bridges and roads, no supplies or reinforcements can be sent from central depots or barracks to the various fronts. By destroying the telecoms, no orders can be sent to the local commanders. By destroying the deep bunkers of the military HQ, and thus by killing the officers, the chain of command is decapitated.

Also, by destroying Lebanon’s economic capacity (factories, agricultural produce) and by displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians the State would surrender on Israel’s terms, i.e. order Lebanon to forcefully engage Hizballah to disarm it.

However, Hizballah is not a classical army. It is not even organized in the usual pyramid-shaped command structure. It has no central HQ. It has no chief of staff as such. It has no permanent barracks. It has no tanks, no navy, no airforce, no transport trucks, no nuclear capability, no arms of massive destruction; no drones. Its communications are not entirely based on military equipment. Its intelligence does not rely on the myth of constant and omniscient surveillance. Its “soldiers” are neither conscripts nor full-time.

As such, any “classical” tactics are bound to be inadequate: large-scale tank manoeuvres, beach landings, helicopter attacks or paratroop descents would be of little tactical use. The failure of the Golani Brigade to take Bint Jbail using classical tactics is an indication of the problems encountered.

It was only at the end of the first week of aerial bombing and artillery barrages that the Israelis discovered to their surprise that Hizballah was completely intact. Its stock of ground-to-ground missiles was intact, as was the capability of the local commanders to lob them deep into Northern Israel. There could thus be no quick, classical “military” solution, as was the case in 1982, on exactly the same terrain, against the PLO and the Syrian Army.

For the first time, the Israeli Army was confronted by a well-trained armed group, perfectly familiar with the local terrain, with a very clear ideology to which all of its members totally adhered. Its military intelligence is superior to that of most Arab armies, its theoretical and strategic thinking is sophisticated. Its organization and planning is superior and not at all comparable to, say, the PLO’s, or even to Hamas’s or the Al-Aqsa Brigades. In the field, it does not need sophisticated communications equipment (and thus vulnerable to electronic countermeasures). Hizballah has digested the experience of many wars: from the Vietnamese to the Iran-Iraq conflict, for example. But also the Yougoslav conflict, and the Iraqi insurrection. It learnt from the successes and mistakes of the PLO in Lebanon, but also of the Intifadas and the on-going actions in Palestine. It’s fighters have no fear of death, quite the contrary, and their commitment to defending their allotted military position is total.

For these reasons, Israel’s military war against Hizballah (Israel’s political war against the Shias and against the Lebanese power structure is a different point all together) will certainly be bloody and difficult. Their failure to take Bint Jbail can be put forward as an example of the difficulties on the field ; their reliance on massive air strikes to prepare a (failed) raid on Baalbek is also an example. Their very slow progress to occupy villages just one or two kilometers from the frontier, even after massive air strikes and artillery barrages, are other examples. All Hizballah leaders, interviewed by the Lebanese and international media have given the same message: “we are ready and we will resist for a very long time if the Israelis think they can dislodge us quickly”. This, of course, is a psychological problem for the morale of the Israeli civilian population, which has massively abandoned the North of Israel for (up-to-now) safer places in Central or Southern Israel. This surprise and would partially explain some of the completely militarily-useless actions taken by the Israeli forces: the destruction of factories, diaries, wheat silos, medicine depots and transport, well-drilling equipment, etc. The destruction of fuel tanks for an electricity station at Jiyeh was completed by the targetting of its anti-pollution walls, creating the worst ecological disaster in the Eastern Mediterranean (and also militarily counterproductive for any planned amphibious landing). One can only explain these actions, and that of the Cana massacre, as a loss of nerve by the higher-echelon officers, who saw, to their horror, that their well-oiled plan wasn’t working.

Seen from Beirut, the Israeli plan to “finish” the Hizballah in 10 days brings amused smiles to many observers. The Israeli claims that the stockpile of missiles has been reduced to critical levels seems contradicted by even heavier and deeper daily volleys into Northern and Central Israel (Afula, Beisan).

Claims of extensive deaths in Hizballah’s ranks are either unverified by neutral observers, or turn out to be civilians killed in their houses or shelters, as confirmed by the Red Cross. While, undoubtedly, some Hizballah fighters have been killed or wounded (probably on the same ratio as the Israeli military casualties) their numbers are still intact, especially where ground combat has not taken place (between Bint Jbail and the Litani, the coastal plan to the South of Saida, Southern, Central and Northern Bekaa, the suburbs of Beirut). Hisballah has also come out on top of the psychological war in Lebanon itself. The blanket sending of SMS propaganda messages and telephone calls to the Lebanese, or the hacking of al-Manar television for a few minutes, has not changed the Lebanese’s positive attitude towards Hizballah’s military actions.

This, of course, brings us to the point of the missiles sent into Israel. If the Israeli Army can advance further than the few kilometers around Taibe, Houle, Maroun al-Ras, Marouahine, etc. it still has to confront forces deployed further back, either South of the Litani (the general area around Tibnine, the coastal plain, Tyre or the Marjayoun-Ain Ebel-Khiam triangle)or North (Nabatiye, the hills blocking the access to the Bekaa). These are the main advance routes used ever since Pharaonic times, so there can be no strategic surprises; these are also the exact same routes used by the Israelis since 1978. But the problem of the missiles will not be solved by occupying these areas. The option of pushing up to Rayak, Baalbek or Hermel (ie occupying all of the Bekaa, and thus half of Lebanon) seems improbable. Advancing up the Bekaa (in pure “classical” military style, as was the case in 1918, 1943, 1978, 1982 etc.) implies a “classical” war between armies, which is not the case today. It also brings strategic centres such as Damascus and Homs (Syria’s petrochemical and industrial centre) unacceptably close to Israel’s army with the risk of an all-out regional conflict. While the Hizballah missiles might now be out of range of Israel, the Israeli Army would now be in very close range of Syria’s own missiles, whose deployment there are not contravened by the 1974 disengagement agreements over the Joulan/Golan. The Israel itself and the Israeli forces in Lebanon would also be in close range of the Syrian SCUDS.

But of course, one could also suggest that the Israelis should lunge even deeper into Syria (Hama, Aleppo, Soueida) to get rid of the Syrian missile threat… but that would put these forces into an even closer position vis a vis the Iranian missiles. Et cetera, ad infinitum.

Whatever the case, Israel would still have to control the territory it managed to occupy. While it’s troops battle against small, but determined positions in house to house and hand to hand combat, their positions would suffer by roadside attacks, snipers, and possibly even suicide operations, all reminiscences of the previous Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

Several questions emerge. The excuse of the two soldiers abducted on the frontier (the official Israeli excuse for the war) is of course secondary, and only used for internal propaganda. The real reason for the destruction of Lebanon must be sought elsewhere, with C. Rice and G.W. Bush giving tell-tale hints about a ‘New Middle East’ being prepared in Washington with Israel being used as the local military vector. However, “crushing Hizballah’s military capacity” could take months, with no real long-term solution in sight, creating a real internal political, psychological, ideological and economic problem in Israel.

One could of course ask whether it was really worth it: surely the points of contention between Israel and the Hizballah (or between Lebanon and Israel) could have been settled by negotiation. It’s all about Lebanese prisoners still in Israel in spite of decisions by the Israeli High Court to free them; of continual and daily overflights of Lebanon by reconnaissance aircraft or of intrusiuons in its territorial waters; of killing of Lebanese and Palestinian activists in Lebanon; of the question of the Chebaa farms; of details along the Blue Line. The fact that this solution was not chosen by the Israeli power structure (who reject even the notion of a cease-fire even after international condemnation for the Cana massacre) points to a lack of understanding that the type of war has changed. It is not a classical war (as was the case in 1967 and 1973), nore an insurrection (the Intifadas), nor a guerilla war of liberation (the PLO in Jordan or Lebanon before 1982). One side is ready, the other not.

So the game will be played not in the field, but by diplomacy.

Michael Davie
2 August 2006.

--

The Day After the War

The day after the war will be the Day of the Long Knives.

Everybody will blame everybody else. The politicians will blame each other. The generals will blame each other. The politicians will blame the generals. And, most of all, the generals will blame the politicians.

Always, in every country and after every war, when the generals fail, the "knife in the back" legend raises its head. If only the politicians had not stopped the army just when it was on the point of achieving a glorious, crushing, historic victory.

That's what happened in Germany after World War I, when the legend gave birth to the Nazi movement. That's what happened in America after Vietnam. That's what is going to happen here. The first stirrings can already be felt.

The simple truth is that up to now, the 22nd day of the war, not one single military target has been reached. The same army that took just six days to rout three big Arab armies in 1967 has not succeeded in overcoming a small "terrorist organization" in a time span that is already longer than the momentous Yom Kippur War. Then, the army succeeded in just 20 days in turning a stunning defeat at the beginning into a resounding military victory at the end.

In order to create an image of achievement, military spokesmen asserted yesterday that "we have succeeded in killing 200 [or 300, or 400, who is counting?] of the 1,000 fighters of Hezbollah." The assertion that the entire terrifying Hezbollah consisted of one thousand fighters speaks for itself.

According to correspondents, President Bush is frustrated. The Israeli army has not "delivered the goods." Bush sent them into war believing that the powerful army, equipped with the most advanced American arms, would "finish the job" in a few days. It was supposed to eliminate Hezbollah, turn Lebanon over to the stooges of the U.S., weaken Iran, and perhaps also open the way to "regime change" in Syria. No wonder that Bush is angry.

Ehud Olmert is even more furious. He went to war in high spirits and with a light heart, because the air force generals had promised to destroy Hezbollah and their rockets within a few days. Now he is stuck in the mud, no victory in sight.

As usual with us, at the termination of the fighting (and possibly even before) the War of the Generals will start. The front lines are already emerging.

The commanders of the land army blame the chief-of-staff and the power-intoxicated air force, who promised to achieve victory all by themselves. To bomb, bomb, and bomb, destroy roads, bridges, residential quarters and villages, and - finito!

The followers of the chief-of-staff and the other air force generals will blame the land forces, especially Northern Command. Their spokesmen in the media already declare that this command is full of inept officers, who have been shunted there because the North seemed a backwater while the real action was going on in the South (Gaza) and the Center (West Bank).

There are already insinuations that the chief of Northern Command, Gen. Udi Adam, was appointed to his job only in homage to his father, Gen. Kuti Adam, who was killed in the First Lebanon War.

The mutual accusations are all quite right. This war is plastered with military failures - in the air, on land, and on the sea.

They are rooted in the terrible arrogance in which we were brought up and which has become a part of our national character. It is even more typical of the army, and reaches its climax in the air force.

For years we have told each other that we have the most-most-most army in the world. We have convinced not only ourselves, but also Bush and the entire world. After all, we did win an astounding victory in six days in 1967. As a result, when this time the army did not win a huge victory in six days, everybody was astounded. Why, what happened?

One of the declared aims of this war was the rehabilitation of the Israeli army's deterrence power. That really has not happened.

That's because the other side of the coin of arrogance is the profound contempt for Arabs, an attitude that has already led to severe military failures in the past. It's enough to remember the Yom Kippur War. Now our soldiers are learning the hard way that the "terrorists" are highly motivated, tough fighters, not junkies dreaming of "their" virgins in Paradise.

But beyond arrogance and contempt for the opponent, there is a basic military problem: it is just impossible to win a war against guerrillas. We have seen this in our 18-year stay in Lebanon. Then we drew the unavoidable conclusion and got out. True, without good sense, without an agreement with the other side. (We don't speak with terrorists, do we? - even if they are the dominant force on the ground.) But we did get out.

God knows what gave today's generals the unfounded self-confidence to believe that they would win where their predecessors failed so miserably.

And most of all: even the best army in the world cannot win a war that has no clear aims. Karl von Clausewitz, the guru of military science, pronounced that "war is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means." Olmert and Peretz, two complete dilettantes, have turned this inside out: "War is nothing more than the continuation of the lack of policy by other means."

Military experts say that in order to succeed in war, there must be (a) a clear aim, (b) an aim that is achievable, and (c) the means necessary for achieving this aim.

All three conditions are lacking in this war. That is clearly the fault of the political leadership.

Therefore, the main blame will be laid at the feet of the twins, Olmert-Peretz. They have succumbed to the temptation of the moment and dragged the state into a war, in a decision that was hasty, unconsidered, and reckless.

As Nehemia Strassler wrote in Ha'aretz : "They could have stopped after two or three days, when all the world agreed that Hezbollah's provocation justified an Israeli response, when nobody was yet doubting the capabilities of the Israeli army. The operation would have looked sensible, sober, and proportional."

But Olmert and Peretz could not stop. As greenhorns in matters of war, they did not know that the boasts of the generals cannot be relied on, that even the best military plans are not worth the paper on which they are written, that in war the unexpected must be expected, that nothing is more temporary then the glory of war. They were intoxicated by the war's popularity, egged on by a herd of fawning journalists, driven out of their minds by their own glory as War Leaders.

Olmert was roused by his own incredibly kitschy speeches, which he rehearsed with his hangers-on. Peretz, so it seems, stood in front of the mirror and already saw himself as the next prime minister, Mister Security, a second Ben-Gurion.

And so, like two village idiots, to the sound of drums and bugles, they set off at the head of their March of Folly straight toward political and military failure.

It is reasonable to assume that they will pay the price after the war.

What will come out of this whole mess?

No one talks anymore about eliminating Hezbollah or disarming it and destroying all the rockets. That has been forgotten long ago.

At the start of the war, the government furiously rejected the idea of deploying an international force of any kind along the border. The army believed that such a force would not protect Israel, but only restrict its freedom of action. Now, suddenly, the deployment of this force has become the main aim of the campaign. The army is continuing the operation solely in order to "prepare the ground for the international force," and Olmert declares that he will go on fighting until it appears on the ground.

That is, of course, a sorry alibi, a ladder for getting down from the high tree. The international force can be deployed only in agreement with Hezbollah. No country will send its soldiers to a place where they would have to fight the locals. And everywhere in the area, the local Shi'ite inhabitants will return to their villages - including the Hezbollah underground fighters.

Further on, the force will also be totally dependent on the agreement of Hezbollah. If a bomb explodes under a bus full of French soldiers, a cry will go up in Paris: bring our sons home. That is what happened when the U.S. Marines were bombed in Beirut.

The Germans, who shocked the world this week by opposing the call for a cease-fire, certainly will not send soldiers to the Israeli border. That's just what they need, to be obliged to shoot at Israeli soldiers.

And, most importantly, nothing will prevent Hezbollah from launching their rockets over the heads of the international force, any time they want to. What will the international force do then? Conquer all the area up to Beirut? And how will Israel respond?

Olmert wants the force to control the Lebanese-Syrian border. That, too, is illusory. That border goes around the entire West and North of Lebanon. Anybody who wants to smuggle weapons will stay away from the main roads, which will be controlled by the international soldiers. He will find hundreds of places along the border to do this. With the proper bribe, one can do anything in Lebanon.

Therefore, after the war, we will stand more or less in the same place we were before we started this sorry adventure, before the killing of almost a thousand Lebanese and Israelis, before the eviction from their homes of more than a million human beings, Israelis and Lebanese, before the destruction of more than a thousand homes both in Lebanon and Israel.

After the war, the enthusiasm will simmer down, the inhabitants of the North will lick their wounds and the army will start to investigate its failures. Everybody will claim that he or she was against the war from the first day on. Then the Day of Judgment will come.

The conclusion that presents itself is: kick out Olmert, send Peretz packing, and sack Halutz.

In order to embark on a new course, the only one that will solve the problem: negotiations and peace with the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians. And with Hamas and Hezbollah.

Because it's only with enemies that one makes peace.

Uri Avnery
August 4, 2006

--

More tales and encounters

2006-08-06T21:57:00.000+03:00

At the vegetable shop around the corner from my apartment, they’ve run out of moulakhieh, the other greens have all doubled, at least, in price, and the lemons have been thoroughly picked through. With the bombing of the eastern highway, and the continued bombing of all the roads leading South, the vegetable deliveries are becoming more erratic, and the prices reflect not just the lack of supply, but also the cost of the increasingly expensive gasoline.

Fruits, however –watermelons, peaches, plums, grapes, nectarines, melons and bananas – were in abundance, and are being sold at normal prices.

“What’s the deal with the fruit? What’s wrong with it?” I ask.
“Nobody’s buying it.”
“Not even the watermelons?”
“They’re not buying fruit these days. They’re saving their money for the vegetables.”

---

Two nights ago, after Israel announced it was going to start bombing Beirut again, the number of people in the apartment above us doubled. Extended family from Hay el Sellum (a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs) showed up, bringing with them neighbors with nowhere else to go. They had all been staying at a school in Beirut, but once it seemed safe to go back to their homes last week, they did. And now there’s no more room in the schools in Beirut.

“It’s not really that crowded in the apartment,” Imm Faroukh tells me. “We just spread sheets across the whole living room floor and lined up, like we were fish for sale.”

“It’s shit,” her son Hussein tells me. “I got woken up at 4.30 in the morning.”
“Why? From the bombing?”
“No. It was finally my turn to use the shower.”

---

Marie comes from Bikfaya. (Bikfaya, among other things, hosts the official residence of the Maronite Patriarch.) In the last elections, she voted for the Phalange, a right-wing Christian political party and one-time militia. She always votes for the Phalange. Her family has supported the Phalange since Pierre Gemayel founded it in the mid 1930s.

K got to know Marie when they were both studying agriculture outside of Lebanon. “She’s a bit different,” he warned me before introducing us. “She’s not like the Beiruti arty NGO types. She’s from Bikfaya – you know – Gemayel and all that…” When I met her, I was struck both by the size of the cross she wears, and by how genuinely nice she is.

Since the war started, Marie’s called fairly regularly, checking in on us. “You’ll never guess what Marie is doing these days,” K told me yesterday, getting off the phone. “She’s volunteering at a school near her house. She says they have 200 refugees from the South, Shi’ites, and she goes every day to help out.”

---

So we’re having a quick beer with a guy called Angry. No, really – he answers to Ghadban (“angry” in Arabic, or “the angry one”). He’s one of West Beirut’s regulars, a pack of cigarettes and a whiskey on hand at all times. He was a fighter with the Communists during the civil war –when the Communists led the resistance against Israel’s earlier invasions – and speaks casually of the geography of Bint Jbeil and Aitaroun, or how to actually blow up a Merkava tank (apparently it’s much harder than you might think). I’ve never had the courage to find out if Ghadban is his nom de guerre, or if his mother was just really pissed off when she had him.

I open the conversation with the common, cavalier comment everyone’s saying these days: “Khallas, zi’it min hayda harb” (I’m so bored of this war).
Ghadban looks at me, unimpressed. “I was bored of this war before it started,” he says.
“It’s my first one,” I apologize.
“This is my fifth. I’m full. I’ve eaten too many wars and now I’m full.”

---

“Until two weeks ago,” Ghadban tells us, “I hadn’t spoken with my eldest son for 3 years. He left the country to work outside, and I didn’t want him to leave. I told him, ‘I didn’t fight all those years for our home so you could just leave the country and make money,’ but he didn’t listen, and I was upset. So we didn’t speak. For three years.

“Once all this started, he began calling the house everyday. At first, we still didn’t speak. Then, one day, I had enough. Fuck it. I called him up.

“‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I’m sending your younger brother to live with you. He’ll be flying in from Damascus.’

“So now both my children are out of the country. It’s better. This fucking war. They’ve fucked it all up.”

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

From Beirut ... to those who love us

2006-08-05T21:00:00.000+03:00

http://www.beirutletters.org/

[NIDA]: Call for Interventions

2006-08-05T18:03:00.000+03:00

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>> Call for Interventions >>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Global Webcast, Saturday, August 12 2006, 9-11 PM (CET)
URL: http://beirut.dischosting.nl | http://streamtime.org

Outraged at Israel's ongoing aggression on Lebanon - which since July 12
2006 has killed over 900 people (mostly civilians), displaced nearly
one million people (1/4 of Lebanon's entire population), and wrecked
Lebanon's infrastructure and economy - we say: khalas! enough!

We call for an immediate end to the violence and destruction.
We call on the international community to open its eyes - and on you to
make your voice heard.

With our fellow activists, artists and other bloggers in Lebanon - and
input from Iraq - we will produce a collaborative global webcast on
Saturday August 12, from 9 to 11 p.m. Central European Time/10-12
p.m. Lebanon time

This unique free style web jam around 'frequently raised despair' will
be produced at Waag Society in Amsterdam by Streamtime's Cecile
Landman, Jo van der Spek, Geert Lovink and Jaromil in collaboration with Tarek Atoui, Nat Muller, Paul Keller and many others.

The Global Webjam will consist of an audio and video stream, and
feature live interviews and conversations, video clips, cartoons and
blog blurbs, soundscapes, DJs and VJs, a lively mix of information,
art, protest, party and reflection.

Wahid el-Solh, a Lebanese DJ based in the Netherlands, will provide us
with the unrivalled nightlife ambiance of Beirut.

We see this as a precedent for future collaborations - to create a
platform fitting the spirit of Beirut, in defiance of war, and in
search for solidarity.

We shout out for our friends in Lebanon and elsewhere to contact us if
they want to join, share, participate in and contribute with their
recent experiences and productions.

Contact the team in Amsterdam with all your questions, suggestions, contributions at: beirut@dischosting.nl

If you are in Lebanon and you want to contribute you can also contact Tarek in Beirut: atouitarek@yahoo.fr mobile: +961-3-190985

If you have material to contribute please upload it to our ftp server: ftp://dischosting.nl (username: upload password: streamtime)

Web-site: beirut.dischosting.nl
Skype: streamtime-khalas | cileland | jo-streamtime
Chat: freenode #nida
Telephone: +31206279661 (Solidarity Fund X-Y)

This event is funded and facilitated by Solidarity Fund X-Y
http://www.xminy.nl/ and initiated by Streamtime http://streamtime.org/.
Founded in 2004, Streamtime is an international support campaign for Iraqi bloggers and engages with tactical media initiatives of artists and activists throughout the Middle East.

meta-existentialist piecework

2006-08-04T21:59:00.000+03:00

“so i just got a phone call from this friend of mine in disney.”

it’s a long-distance phone call from a european friend. for the uninitiated, ‘disney’ is a euphemism for a place otherwise referred to as ‘israel’ [by the rushed or unimaginative], ‘the zionist entity’ [by ardent arabists], and ‘american-occupied palestine’ [by the sardonic].

“she told me the government is paying people to monitor all the blogs coming out of lebanon and to write pro-israeli remarks.”

“go figure.”

the first thing that occurs to you is the remarkable sum of money the state of american-occupied palestine has to expend on this so-called “existential conflict” with the shia of lebanon.

oh sure, the state of american-occupied palestine may have undertaken this bloody invasion of lebanon in order to secure the release of a couple of soldiers - whose job [like that of soldiers in most countries] is to die for their country.

but if you’re running such a state, you want at all costs to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment of 1982, when israeli civil society rose up to demonstrate against that invasion of lebanon. after the sabra-shatilla massacre that year, israeli holocaust survivors wept that they had not survived auschwitz and treblinka see jews perpetrate such crimes against humanity.

no, if you’re running such a state and you want to ensure that your population backs your remarkable expenditure of american tax dollars, israeli and lebanese lives, it really helps to reduce matters to the existential. “it’s us or them.” “you’re with us or against us.” “we’re good. you’re bad.”

both sides indulge in this nonsense, of course. what’s so irritating is american-occupied palestine’s posture of moral superiority.

that’s what’s so splendid about this news of israel’s assault on lebanon’s blogosphere. taking the moral high ground in an “existential conflict” is all well and good. but it never hurts to slide a few dollars into the pockets of some bored university grads, just to make sure. a few greenbacks go a long way to supplement the moronic leaflets, jammed lebanese media transmissions and mobile telephone calls from "idarat israel”.

during times of existential conflict, you can always count on the cynically self-interested to be in your corner – especially if you have the financial backing of a hyerpower.

the second thing that went through your head when you heard about the assault on lebanon’s blogosphere was, “i wonder how they get paid?”

i mean, is it an hourly wage? is it contract work? is it piecework, with payment delivered on the number of zionist comments dispensed? do they work at home, multi-tasking, sweaty, in their y-fronts, or has ‘idarat israel’ organised their minions into air-conditioned call centres?

today, you got an answer of sorts.

at the workstation across from you is a tasteful, civilised young lebanese reporter who maintains a blog attached to a german newspaper. today he expressed soft-spoken outrage that a gentleman, improbably named “Michael Ahrweiler”, had gone to the trouble of posting the following remarks:

“‘If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
“‘If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel’.

“maqouleh y‘ani?”

“‘christmas comes but once a year!’” intones someone from across the room.

“‘a rolling stone gathers no moss!’” chirps another.

what does it tell you about a war effort when the co-opted “intellectual elite” resorts to such crass aphorisms to try to convince lebanese that they’re the bad guys?

“‘neither a loaner nor a lender be!’”

a little later in the day you surveyed this blog, as you do at the end of most days, and find that a certain ‘rachel’ has posted this remark:

“I think you people would get a lot further by stating truthful comments. Hizbollah started this war by attacking Israel’s civilians. Hizbollah fires rockets at Israeli citizens while hiding behind Lebanese citizens, using them as shields. Hizbollah is responsible for all the deaths on both sides. Israel has every right to defend itself like any other country. Israel has over 1 million people forced from their homes (refuges [sic] as you call them). You should be saving the world from Hizbollah.

“No matter how you feel about it, the truth is:
* If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
* If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”

the comment – whose obvious untruths are pitched so magnificently in the face of the rhetorical stance of “truthfulness” - isn’t posted in response to any entry in particular. it’s been posted in answer to several entries. every comment is more or less identical to the one before.

it’s the lazy man’s propaganda. it’s mind-control meets the mass mail email. it’s a dead giveaway that these clods, drawing on the same stock of aphorisms, are obviously being paid by the hit.

best not ponder those y-fronts.

Jim Quilty
Beirut

Broummana Diary

2006-08-04T11:58:00.000+03:00

“God keep him! May God come to the aid of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah!” the taxi driver told me, as I was closing the door of the car. I’ve been either living in or visiting Syria for the last 20 years, and it was the first time a Syrian taxi driver ever used that as an opening remark to me.

I nodded, and asked about the latest developments.

“They said the (Israeli) invasion was planned a year ago! Did you hear that on the news?” he shouted, as we sped off.

I had spent the first week and a half of the war in Lebanon, worrying about moving around in the Greater Beirut area and avoiding stray ordinance made in my country. Here in Damascus, there are really only two things to do these days: help refugees and follow the war through the media. Actually, there’s a third thing: put up pictures of Hassan Nasrallah and Hizbullah flags to show your support. The last time I was here was at the beginning of July, when Damascus was full of flags for the World Cup. Colors like green, red and blue kept appearing in my line of vision, since there were so many flags of Italy, Brazil and Germany, and even France and England, despite the recent bad vibes over these countries’ policies toward Syria. Those flags are almost all gone now, replaced by the yellow and black of Hizbullah, along with billboards that inform the public about ways to help those displaced by the conflict.

Public transport vehicles, shop windows, and billboards feature Nasrallah’s face, and there are many variations on the Nasrallah theme. Sometimes he’s pictured with Bashar al-Assad, or the late Hafez al-Assad, and sometimes with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. The support seems about as spontaneous as the earlier enthusiasm for the World Cup, although I didn’t bother checking which organization produces which version of poster. It’s enough to know that staunchly Sunni shopkeepers proudly display the photo of staunchly Shi’i Nasrallah, and that street vendors are doing a booming business selling Hizbullah paraphernalia.

Problems can arise, however, when the wrong types of icons try to horn in on the action. At the Information Ministry in Damascus, several reporters and I were sitting in the office of an official responsible for foreign media. As the official fielded a series of phone calls, I saw the face of Ayman Zawahiri of al-Qaida show up on al-Jazeera, for his recent, taped announcement. I caught the attention of the Syrian official and nodded toward the screen.

“What?! What the hell is this guy doing?” the Syrian official gasped, eyeing the television. “Where did he come from?”

Forget about Zawahiri’s poor delivery and vague rhetoric, which I assume won’t stick in the minds of western audiences. Instead, they will deduce that “one of those al-Qaida guys is on the same side as those Hizbullah people.” For people who are fans of Hizbullah, it was like seeing a member of the Ku Klux Klan backing you when you try to drum up support among African-Americans – the last thing you need. In Syria, and I assume many parts of the Arab world, al-Qaida is viewed with extreme disgust, due to the group’s tactics, and suspicion, due to questions about who is actually behind the organization.

One of the unquestioned victors in the war thus far is al-Jazeera, which must be the most popular medium for following the war, judging by cafes and stores where televisions are set up. At the coffee shop of the Cham Palace hotel, the patrons fall silent when al-Jazeera begins its top-of-the-hour news broadcast, as everyone strains to hear the first part of the bulletin. This is despite the fact that we have been reading a ticker with these latest items running across the bottom of the screen, right up to the beginning of the broadcast – as if things are moving so quickly, we still entertain the notion that the top of the hour might produce some new bit of information. Al-Jazeera practically corners the market when it comes to professional reporting, although Lebanon’s LBCI and New TV have had their moments, as individual correspondents log good performances. The Arab world’s satellite television stations are finding their unsurprising niches: Go to Hizbullah’s Manar TV if you want the party line, and a bit more on military information. If you want the pro-US and –Saudi regime line, with a dash of defeatism, go to al-Arabiyya or Future TV. For the opposite, i.e. triumphalist rhetoric wall-to-wall, try Syrian State television. The ostrich award goes to stations like Jordan, where you can catch up on any Arab soap operas you’ve been missing, and pretend that nothing’s happening. Forget the Israelis, for the most part. You can get it just as quickly on Manar, which dutifully reports the headlines of the latest things appearing in the Israeli media, without the downside of a military censor who only lets you know about Israeli casualties after Manar has reported them - not always accurately, but at least giving you an indication of where things are headed.

In downtown Damascus I reunited with my Shi’i friend from the southern suburbs of Beirut, who was still in a state of shock – at the hospitality of ordinary Syrians. Around 200,000 Lebanese have streamed across the land borders in the last few weeks, and the number of those in Syria could be much higher, according to officials. Some Lebanese have moved on from Syria to other countries, but the numbers are still huge. My friend and about a dozen extended family members were staying at the home of one of his Syrian college friends; she’s a working mother of two whose husband is out of the country. She took in her old Lebanese friend and his parents, siblings and their children, and wouldn’t have it any other way. My friend told me that he was still in awe of her gesture and was looking for a way to find a house for his family, should the conflict continue, in order to stop being a burden. But the burden he fears becoming has become a mark of honor for many Syrians. “When I went to a hospital here recently, to run some tests on my father, a Syrian doctor took me aside as soon as he heard my (Lebanese) dialect,” my friend recalled. “He tried putting keys in my hand, and telling me it would be an honor if a Lebanese family were to use his empty house during the conflict. It was very tough, but I finally managed to turn down the offer.” Public schools in Syria have taken in tens of thousands of Lebanese, but there are also huge efforts by ordinary people and civil associations, to put needy Lebanese in touch with generous Syrians, who might be offering their second homes, or services as doctors and pharmacists, for example. When you hear story after story like this, the impact of Hassan Nasrallah posters and the quality of media coverage fade in comparison.

Marlin Dick, Damascus, Syria

Biq‘a Diary 1

2006-08-03T19:31:00.000+03:00

the road is cluttered with vehicles whose drivers are acutely aware that the israeli air force has been taking pot shots at random vehicles. and they've taken various measures to prevent being vaporised.

some, like your car, have taken the high road to neutrality, taping “TV” in the trunk, hood and roof. one sample was particularly impressive – a gleaming black suv, taped with duct-tape-width bands of hot pink.

your own variation on the theme is more working-class. the international delegation you’re travelling with – a dutch hack, a scottish hack and a south sudanese theology student – are packed into a sort of ageing bmw, belonging to the class “BMDahiyyeh”. the “TV” has been rendered with narrow lines of black electricians tape.

it’s the morning of 1 august, 19 days into israel’s assault on lebanon, the second day of the israelis’ self-styled cessation of air attacks. the hacks have been shut up in beirut for too long and all hands are nervous about travelling into the bloody chaos of south lebanon. the destination, then, is the biq‘a.

some drivers have no interest in masquerading as press. another approach to avoiding a fiery death, particularly popular among truckers, is to simply concede defeat by flying a white flag. there are other flags as well. germany remains popular, a residue of the mondiale perhaps. a lebanese flag or two can be seen.

“someone should fly an american flag,” someone laughs, “that’d make them think twice.”

“yeah, then you might have to worry about hizbullah though.”

the signage that is clearly most popular on the road, however – and the one likely to be most effective in deterring an israeli attack – is “NESTLE”. the word is ubiquitous on the highway, amusingly so since it isn’t necessarily stencilled on the side of the truck in question. sometimes it’s simply a flatbed truck, a cloth sign draped over its iron railings.

“the us may give israel the green light to kill shia,” laughs the theology student. “but there’s no way they’ll fuck with nestle. that shit’s a multinational corporation, man. you fuck with them, they’ll shut you down like that.”

+

the square adjacent the palmyra hotel was being renovated when the israeli air force struck on 13 july. the charcoal-grey paving stones are scattered where they were left when the labourers stopped work, like islands in an estuary.

the ruins of ancient heliopolis form a vista before the hotel entrance. entering the hotel, you find a lone man who’d prefer not to speak. he suggests you speak to the mukhtar [a district mayor]. “the mukhtar?” says another man. “he left.”

in a few hours time, 200 israeli commandoes will helicopter in, make a sweep through a hizbullah-associated hospital and make off with five men, leaving between 10 and 20 people dead.

israel will say the dead and detained are militants, that the raid demonstrated how they can strike anywhere they want in lebanon. hizbullah will say the israelis were lured to ba‘lbak by leaked information that a politburo member was in town and that the dead and detained are civilians.

“a hizbullah stronghold,” ba‘lbak is a mixture of shia and sunni muslims and christians, thus reflecting the population of the biq‘a generally.

it isn’t exactly bustling the day of the raid. it’s not abandoned either. a pair of young internal security forces men in grey camouflage chat beneath a pink beach umbrella. soon after entering town, an older gentleman asks if you need a room for the night.

“you should get permission from hizbullah if you want to look at the bombsites,” he cautions. indeed, within a few minutes a polite, bearded man in sandals asks how he can help you.

a walkie-talkie appears and you’re led to another fellow who quickly takes down your group’s details – more or less as if you were buying a visa at the border. the second man apologises, but there’s a war on and the party has to take precautions.

an ancient mercedes appears – the sort beirut taxi drivers use to ply their trade – and you’re told to follow in your car. a guide sardines himself into the back seat, alongside two rangy hacks.

when you try to follow mercedes man, though, the isf men charge from beneath their umbrella, brows furrowed.

“monsieur! monsieur! aks al-sayr [you’re driving against traffic]!” one says. after a few minutes mercedes man, who drove past the isf unaccosted, backs up to explain.

“aks al-sayr!” the policeman repeats without a trace of irony – in beirut the police don’t necessarily enforce, or obey, the rules of the road. mercedes man sighs, then, and asks you to follow him into town by a different route.

long passed, it seems, are the days when men claiming hizbullah membership would kidnap foreign journalists. true, since this conflict erupted there’s been at least one reported incident of hizbullah detaining foreign hacks for questioning.

the incident seems to have been provoked by the aggressive questioning of some displaced people in sanayeh garden. ‘being hizbullah supporters,’ a journalist apparently said, ‘you people are the logical target of israeli attacks, no?’ the refugees accused the journalists of being spies and everything deteriorated from there. the detention lasted a few hours.

the party has been a media-savvy organisation for some years now, though it’s far from transparent. one of the reasons it’s so effective militarily is that information is so tightly controlled. such discipline makes an informant’s work very difficult. it also greatly irritates lebanon’s political class – whose foibles are public knowledge and for whom power sometimes lies more in posture than execution.

peacetime tours of hizbullah facilities are, by definition, one-sided affairs. representatives happily show the press their social welfare institutions and allow them to speak with party activists. there is virtually no free-range investigation, though, let alone nosing around military and administrative centers.

“yes, it’s no problem touring the bombsites,” walkie-talkie man says. “operation centers, though, are off limits.”

you know this isn’t the whole picture, but the hizbullah version of the destruction offers a basic narrative that can be interrogated more reliably than the bizarre fictions offered by israel.

on the evening of the most-recent qana massacre, for example, israel’s un ambassador pontificated that, “in israel, houses have bomb shelters to protect people from khizbullah rockets. in lebanon, people die because khizbullah hides rockets in their houses.”

your guide directs you through ba‘lbak’s winding streets to what looks like a ruined apartment block. there’s very little to see, in fact, but shattered breezeblock and concrete, the odd nido [powdered milk] tin, machinery wrecked to anonymity.

“this was a school,” he points to one gap. “this was the tawwaniyyeh [co-op],” he points to a second rubble pile. he says planes destroyed them on successive days in the first week of attacks. “there were no casualties. we evacuated in time.”

walking atop the rubble, the scale of the damage defeats your camera, so you fall to peering into the blasted sitting room of an adjacent flat. from the wall of another exposed room, a portrait of the imam ali stares out over the axel of an upended lorry.

some wary-looking women and children have emerged on the ruined street to inspect the damage across the road.

“we should hurry,” the guide says after a few minutes. “israeli planes are overhead.”

you count at least five ruined gas stations in town. further on is a water-filled hole in the road – a former garage apparently. across the street is another collapsed apartment block.

a blown-out wall reveals a wardrobe overstuffed with clothes – the way wardrobes can get when you can’t bear to throw things away. facing it is shelf, stuffed with plush toys.

from behind his camera someone – acutely aware of the low voyeurism of this – makes a grim joke about how a set designer couldn’t construct such an effective shot.

you drive on, pausing at an intersection long enough for your guide to point out where an islamic benevolent society used to be.

you are directed to another, rather larger, gap in the urban fabric and a more gregarious man materializes. this was a residential area before it was struck by a series of bombs and missiles, he says.

at the back of one building, the walls and floor of an upper-floor flat have collapsed, leaving a child’s coat hanging on a coat peg. more voyeurism.

a sign atop one partially gutted building reads “centre mustafa balouq”. balouq, gregarious man says, is “a businessman who set up a benevolent society. there was a business centre. a place to take out small loans. a charity.”

“over there,” he points across the street. “that’s a husseiniyyeh [shia cultural centre-mosque complex]. the people around it are terrified it’s the next target.”

your guides tell you some 135 people have been killed in the biq‘a since this conflict began. unlike the devastated south, there’s no shortage of food and water yet but there hasn’t been any electricity in the villages in two days. at every site the refrain is the same. “there are only civilians here.”

“we aren’t fighters,” says gregarious man. “all the fighters are in the south. we’re just here to make sure there’s no looting.”

afterwards all hands are struck by how relaxed and polite the hizbullah men are – encounters in dahiyyeh can be more abrupt.

in beirut several hours later, you hear israeli commandos are raiding ba‘lbak. you wonder whether any of your hosts are now dead or detained.

Jim Quilty, Beirut

Fuel Everywhere: Inside of us, outside, in the sea...

2006-08-03T15:23:00.000+03:00

INTERNAL FUEL…
We hear a lot on political TV shows, local and international, the political analysts talking about Hezbollah affiliations. On a side note, it is funny how political analysts in days of wars and conflicts, start to pop up by dozens, on media channels, and giving information without us the crowd watching really knowing these people, their credentials, their professional background, or some proof of their knowledge. Television should channel more carefully the information given to many thousands of people, and should give a space to responsible, credible, and active voices, especially when this information is related to vital elements in our lives… Newspapers seem to be doing a better job than television in that sense, although some question marks could also be raised…
Hezbollah like any other political group/ideology has external relations. It maintains close ties with Syria and Iran, at all levels, political, military, logistics, tactics…. Just like any other party in Lebanon and all over the world. The Lebanese Communist Party had close ties with Mother Russia during the soviet era. The mustaqbal party today is tied to the Saudi Political sphere… This external element is not new to any political party or political ideologies. Most political ideologies travel across countries, frontiers and geography. So why do we have to always emphasize on the Iranian role when we speak about Hezbollah? as if the resistance does not have enough reasons to act on the Southern frontiers, as if Israel does not violate our sovereignty, and it does not hold maps for land mines in the South, and it does not still imprison many Lebanese… so these are not legitimate reasons for a resistance to be active in the South… no the Iranian plan to dominate seems to be more logical at this point….
Iran might have a role, and the political elite of Hezbollah have its own agenda in that matter, and it is affected by regional factors. But when we look on the ground, when we actually think of these young fighters in the South, fighting the Israeli war machines and its continuous attempts to occupy South Lebanon again, when we have guerilla fighters holding back an entire army with the latest and most effective technology of destruction, we need to think about their motivation, and what is fueling them.
Their first considerations are their own land; it is very much an internal matter. Their fight springs from their own collective existence; it is a resistance that has roots in the land, in the culture of the people of the South for many years now, just like in Palestine, just like in Latin America, or once in Vietnam, or in many other regions where people find ways to fight occupation and exploitation… These people know their way in the mountains and the Southern villages because a lot of them were raised there….
These fighters are moved from within, or else they could not be standing still on the ground... so a fat pay check, a villa with a swimming pool in Tehran or in Faraya, or even the dream of a Paradise, a cellular call from God saying “die and I will take care of you up there” are not what make people forget fear and go on an experience with death being near by, and tanks and planes in front … only a cause that involves you directly, your beliefs and your own ground, like fighting occupation, can push you in that way… and you can never fight a war for others that way, never….
So even if at the political level, the situation is somehow different, it cannot be that far apart or else you wouldn’t have a structure with a solid coordination between the ground, and the political elite, and not that penetrated from the outside…
And this is where Israel fails and it will continue to do so, this is where the soldiers of an invading army are motivated by a paycheck, a good housing plan, a nice retirement plan, an army that is not acting in defense when it occupies others… it is an army whose soldiers are shot in the back, because they were fleeing the zone of combat… it is an army protected by a technology and not by a cause… it is not true that they care about their own lives and that is why they retrieve or they are careful… if they cared about lives they wouldn’t be bombing red cross ambulances, underground shelters, factories, and causing so much death and destruction among the civilian population especially when technology should not allow such big mistakes, so many “missed” targets… If they only care about their lives, then it is another proof of the blatant racist policies of a the zionist state…
The Israeli army should admit its defeat, the Israelis need to stamp on their arrogance and accept their losses, just like they are being defeated in Palestine, when people demonstrate when they say NO to occupation, when they call for the Right of Return…. And the myth of an undefeated Israel army should no longer be printed in the mind of people, especially our people, and all people under occupation, under exploitation in the Middle-East, Africa, Latin America…

BURNING FUEL…
The coastal lines are black from the oil spill due to the destruction of the tanks in the electrical plant of Jiyyeh, between Saida and Beirut, who is located directly on the costal front… One of the few remaining coastal beaches in Beirut, “ramlet al baida”, has blocks of black sediments all along its shores as you may have seen on TV… and this environmental disaster is not biodegradable, the oil cannot just disappear in the waters by a dilution reaction, and the sea currents make the oil propagate in the sea… the oil is lighter than water, so it culminates at the top sea level, it is forming a layer as 40cm in some areas, and it only goes away by means of a mechanical suction system to the outside… we don’t have such engineering capabilities in Lebanon, this a work of foreign specialists, with a cost range of 150-200 million dollars, and the sea is still blocked by Israeli ships… May be all the sea lovers and the international organizations for the protection of maritime life have a better chance in pushing Israel to stop its machines of destructions than the United Nations who supposedly protect Human Life… But the Human being seems to be cheap in this part of the world…
Another sad environmental accident in this war is the destruction of the fuel tanks of the Airport in the first days of the war. As you may remember, and it is easy to forget since Israel has destroyed so much in the past three weeks, the fuel tanks at the airport have been hit in the airport of Beirut. There three fuel storage tanks serving the Airport, each one holding up to 6000 m3. The one destroyed by a missile was holding up to 5000m3, or 5 millions liter, or 1.3 millions of gallons of fuel oil. Usually, the fuel farm or each tank is protected by an automatic fire extinguishing system. Of course, the missile took every thing down, and the automatic means for Fire suppression were no longer available… since the other tanks were at proximity and in fear of the fire spreading to the other tanks, all manual extinguishing systems, water and foam, were used to cool down the two remaining tanks… which meant that the fuel was left to combust, to be consumed entirely by the fire in order to stop the fire… so there were 5 millions liter of fuel burnt in the air creating clouds of smoke and pollution for two days…

NO MORE FUEL
Now, there are talks of a fuel shortage in the country, so even the most essential institutions such as the hospitals, the bread bakeries, the gas stations,… so the people are panicking and the waiting lines at the gas stations are pretty scary, and you are only allowed a gallon a car… but some sources say the fuel shortage will happen within a week or ten days, so there is no need to worry… The problem is the lack of centralized sources in this type of crisis for information, and the lack of presence of the government and different ministries… also, the gas stations are the ones deciding to open, when to open, the time range, without a close control from the government…
And the Lebanese citizen is once again left unprotected and exposed, to the Israeli bombs, to the cheap exploitation of merchants, and to the money making institutions that are assessing their own financial interests first without being asked or questioned by any authority….

In solidarity,
Abed Zahzah

Stagnation

2006-08-03T03:37:00.000+03:00

We were standing in the middle of one of those stupidly large supermarkets – trying to decide if, given the increasingly limited electricity, we should buy any dairy products at all, and if so which ones – when a dull sort of recognition clicked in.

Everyone else in the store was suddenly moving more quickly, filling their carts with multiples of everything, talking on their phones and glancing at their watches. K pulled out his phone, which promptly started ringing. And, as was already becoming clear, we were told that Israel had announced it was going to start bombing Beirut, again. The dull panic – West Beirut being rather far from the areas of Beirut Israel had previously bombed – was offset by the absurdity of our surroundings, by the large-haired tantes chucking over-priced vegetables into their carts and scurrying to the cashier, their domestic maids in tow.

Leaving the supermarket, traffic in Beirut was horrific, but not necessarily in response to the news. The past few days have seen most of Beirut slowly return to a semblance of normality – itself a tragic absurdity as only hours away Israel bombs and villages burn.

The timing of Israel’s latest Beirut threat, then, is especially unfortunate, as Lebanon’s capital and main source of employment was just starting to function again, and people were returning to their jobs. Those employed by the government, the military, or large companies and banks will have received their July salaries by now, (assuming they have the means and ability to pick up their cheques.) But Lebanon’s economy is largely service-based, and the sorts of services supplied (luxury goods and beauty services, hotels, travel agents, restaurants, etc) haven’t really been much in demand as of late.

Of the 900,000 displaced thus far, the Lebanese government estimates that at least 700,000 are being housed by relatives. A rough survey would indicate that practically all of these new households have lost at least one July salary, if not more. There is a 22-person household in Karm el-Zeitoun (a poor East Beirut neighborhood) where no one got paid at all this month. Of those living in the schools, especially the families displaced from southern Lebanon or the Bekaa Valley, most worked in agriculture, and thus have lost their entire year’s livelihood (as well as, quite possibly, their homes).

Some of the international and local relief organizations are starting to calculate food distribution for the households swollen with homeless relatives, in addition to the schools housing refugees, and the convoys which, rarely, make it out of Beirut. Certain schools – those known to be well organized and on the receiving end of numerous relief organizations – re-distribute the food and clothing they receive as needy families from the neighborhood pass by.

But most Lebanese, it would seem, are living off their savings – never large in the best of times – and the money sent in from family living abroad. A quick visit to one of the innumerable Western Union offices in West Beirut witnessed a line out the door, and everyone was there to collect.

We, absurdly, had been tasked with sending a relative’s salary to him in Syria. “You’re sending money out?” the young man in a Western Union polo shirt asked us. “No one’s done that all day.”

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

this singular war...

2006-08-02T22:03:00.000+03:00

"I have lived through all the Israeli invasions of Lebanon. I have lived through the entire war in Lebanon.

"There is no March 8, no March 14 anymore. There is only July 12. July 12 - the start of the most brutal, most devastating of the wars against Lebanon. There has not been a war that has destroyed entire neighborhoods in this fashion, entire neighborhoods while the world was silent.

"The plan is to create another Iraq."

- Zahi Webhi, Lebanese poet and media personality from the South, on New TV,
August 2, 2006

burials, kidnappings, and refugees

2006-08-02T20:05:00.000+03:00

There was to be another mass burial today.
90 people were to be buried in Tyre (Sour) today.
The burial had to be postponed to tomorrow. hopefully.
Why?
The Israeli bombardment, the constant threat of Israeli aggression, forced the postponement of the burial.

No comment.

---

The Israeli army invaded Ba'albeck last night.
They kidnapped 5 men. Civilians. From their homes.
They kidnapped 5 men - and took them to Israel.
They kidnapped 5 civilians.

The same night... in Ba'albeck
7 people were killed, 6 from one family. They were hiding under a tree.
"My father. My brother. My cousins." said one woman.

There were other Lebanese fathers, brothers, mothers, and daughters that were killed.
And, more to be killed.
The question: for how many tomorrows will this Israeli terrorism continue?

---

Refugees continue to leave the south, to seek shelter throughout the country.
They are sleeping in schools, in abandoned buildings, in extraordinarily cramped quarters.
The question is: how many months before their homes will be rebuilt?
How many months of forced homeless-ness?

--

Thank you George Bush and company

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

another destroyed bridge... this time in Akkar

2006-08-02T18:54:00.000+03:00

This picture was taken by Anis Abboud, a friend.
This historic, destroyed bridge was a mere 2 km away from his home.

news updates from lebanon

2006-08-02T10:38:00.000+03:00

Check this site for regular updates
http://www.lebanonupdates.blogspot.com/

cityblogging

2006-08-01T11:50:00.000+03:00

after yesterday's extremely depressing and upsetting morning news i went running (which is always a sensible thing when you don't know what to do and/or are angry). during that run i was thinking what to do about the whole situation and finally came up with something that seemed like a sensible idea:

in the last two weeks mazen kerbaj's drawings have been one of the strongest most vivid expressions of the whole mess that is unfolding in lebanon that i came across (to the extend that i am dissapointed every time i wake up and there are no new ones) . now what are drawings if not posters-in-waiting that can easily been printed out and stuck against the walls of the city? clearly one only has to print them out, copy them a couple of times, get wallpaper-glue and head out into the night (ok, first wait some 10 hours for night). so i spend some of sunday night sticking a4 sized mini-posters all over the walls of my neighborhood (the pijp) in amsterdam.

more pictures taken on monday morning before going to work on my flickr account.

yesterday evening i did a second round (around Leidseplein in the center), and i am planning to continue for the next couple of nights. hopefully these relatively small posters will catch some eyeballs and make more people think and start expressing their outrage.

apart from the obvious advantage of making me feel like i am doing something about the situation, i also like this little action on a symbolic level. it feels like translating a blog (something normally contained to the internets) into something that is part of the urban fabric. i like the idea of images leaking from my screen into the streets of amsterdam and would probably be even more beautiful if people in other cities started doing the same... (in case you feel like it here are a4-sized printable versions of some of mazen's drawings)

Paul Keller, Amsterdam

Results after 19 days

2006-07-31T14:21:00.000+03:00

Human Toll in Lebanon

- 600 civilian deaths, a third of which are children (this number might double once rescue workers are able to reach 13 inaccessible villages where bodies are buried underneath destroyed residential buildings)

- 1,600 injured civilians

- 750,000 refugees (representing 12% of the population), of which 100,000 are sleeping in empty schools, parking lots and public gardens

- 65 killed and wounded (mostly women and children, many handicapped) in Qana when an Israeli airstrike leveled a four-story residential building used as a shelter by refugees

- 4 international UN observers killed in an attack on their post in Khiyam even though the UNIFIL had warned the Israeli army several times that they were hitting too close

- 2 Indian UN peacekeepers wounded in an Israeli air raid on their post

- Attempts at creating a humanitarian corridor unsuccessful because of the destroyed bridges and roads that do not allow access to the villages that have the greatest humanitarian needs in the South

- Inability for ambulances and civil defense crews to reach areas with heavy civilian casualties because of intense bombardment

- Only 10% of the humanitarian aid needed has arrived to the country by ship or plane

- Refusal by Israël to allow for a 72-hour truce as requested by Jan Egeland, the UN's top official for humanitarian relief, to evacuate the wounded, the children, the elderly and the disabled from the crossfire

- Bombing of a medical convoy from the Emirates

- Bombing of 2 Red Cross ambulances (Israel claims that Hezballah uses ambulances to move weapons, yet there has been no proof of that and only civilians have died when these ambulances were attacked)

- Bombing of 3 hospitals

- Bombing of fleeing civilian cars and buses

- Over 4500 air attacks mostly on villages where civilians haven't been able to evacuate because of the bombings and destroyed roads

Human Rights and War Crimes implications for Israel

- The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights claims that Israel's actions in Lebanon could lead to the prosecution of its military commanders. A statement was issued suggesting that the failure to spare civilians is a clear violation of international criminal law.

- Human Rights Watch claims that Israel has used artillery-fired cluster munitions in populated areas of Lebanon. Researchers on the ground in Lebanon confirmed that a cluster munitions attack on the village of Blida on July 19 killed one and wounded at least 12 civilians, including seven children. Human Rights Watch researchers also photographed cluster munitions in the arsenal of Israeli artillery teams on the Israel-Lebanon border.

- Human Rights Watch claims that Israel may be guilty of war crimes, citing: the destruction of about 60% of a nine square blocks area of southern Beirut composed mostly of apartment buildings, attacks on the village of Srifa, in which 10 houses were destroyed and at least 42 civilians killed, attacks on a vehicle of villagers fleeing Marwaheen, in which 16 civilians were killed. All these events took place despite the alleged absence of legitimate military target in sight.

- Blackened bodies of children and civilians are showing up in hospitals with no sign of being burnt (hair is still present) indicating that Israel is using weapons with toxic material. Tests indicate the presence of an unidentified chemical substance. The Human Rights Watch is still to verify whether Israel is using phosphorus in their weapons.

- Amnesty International has denounced "blatant" violations of international law and called on the UN to deploy an immediate fact-finding mission to investigate attacks against civilians and other breaches of international law.

- Amnesty International has also called for an arms embargo on Israel and Hezbollah amidst concerns on the transfer of weapons from the US to Israel, via Britain

Lebanese Infrastructure, Economical and Industrial Toll (overall losses valued at more than 2 billion dollars)

- Air, sea and terrestrial blockade

- Bombing of the Beirut International Airport

- Bombing of the Rayak military airport and Qaleiat domestic airport

- Bombing of the ports of Beirut, Jounieh, Tripoli and Tyr

- Bombing of the roads from Beirut to Damascus

- Destruction of at least 5000 private homes and residential buildings in villages in the south of Lebanon, in the south of Beirut and in the Christian center of Beirut, Achrafieh

- Bombing of hundreds of firms and industrial factories (losses valued at more than 150 million dollars)

- Destruction of the main Lebanese milk factory, « Liban LAIT », of a tissue paper factory, a bottle factory, a packaging firm and a wood plant

- Bombing of food and humanitarian trucks

- Destruction of all the main bridges (at least 100 bridges, most of them newly built, including Mdairej bridge, the highest one in the Middle East, which cost an estimated 44 million dollars), dams and overpasses

- Destruction of more than 600km of roads (many in the south, making it impossible for civilians to flee their villages)

- Bombing of religious symbols: Imam Ali mosque (Baalbeck), prayer centers and Greek orthodox church

- Bombing of most power plants, power stations, sewage plants, water facilities, fuel stations and transport trucks

- Bombing of the historical port of Byblos resulting in a huge oil spill

- Destruction of the historical headlight of Manara

- Bombing 300 meters away from the World Heritage site of Baalbeck's ancient Roman temples of Jupiter and Bacchus, the largest ever and best preserved temples which carry the six highest Roman columns in the world.

- Bombing of Lebanese military barracks and radar installations which are not supposed to be weakened or involved in the fight

- Bombing of the telecommunication infrastructure (losses valued at more than 15 million dollars): mobile networks of Faraya, Jounieh, Zghorta (in the Christian areas), radio antennas, TV stations LBC and Manar

- Biggest ecological crisis ever in the Mediterranean resulting from the bombing of the Jiyeh power plant: 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes of oil have spilled into the sea, affecting not only 1/3 of the Lebanese coast, its sea life and marine ecosystem (including the endangered green turtle), but also the coasts of Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Israel. This oil spill is of the size of the Erika oil spill that affected Spain and France but its impact more serious considering that it is not an open ocean as with the Erika oil spill.

I do not want....

2006-07-30T21:25:00.000+03:00

I do not want to talk about massacres
I do not want to talk about what defines a massacre? How many children have to be killed to be counted as a massacre? How many smaller Qana massacres have been forced upon us by the US/Israeli hand in these weeks? in these years? How many more to come? How many larger Qana massacres?

I do not want to talk about massacres
I do not want to talk about children's dreams stolen from them, children being killed while on their mother's breasts.
I do not want to talk about the one-day old baby killed by the Israelis.
I do not want to talk about the father who lost his entire family yesterday. And the fathers who lost their entire families today. And tomorrow? What about tomorrow?

I do not want to talk about self-defense.
How butchered that very word has become.
I do not want to talk about how mainstream western journalists use the term self defense only when referring to Israel and the term terrorist only when referring to Lebanese. Is our life simply less valuable?
When will we be granted the right to "self defense"?
Then again, I don't want that right.
I don't want the right to commit the massacres the Israelis have grown all to fond to commit against us (and against our Palestinian brothers)

I do not want to talk about self-defense
I do not want to talk about how Israeli fighter jets have been hovering intensely, as I write these words, over the skies in
Tripoli
Ba'albeck
and El Koura
Do you know how it feels? To see enemy fighter jets over your cities, your villages, your homes, and to know that they have the ability to destroy your city, your village, your home, to kill you, or worse, to kill your family, and to know, all the while, that you do not have the power to protect yourself against those fighter jets?
And they talk about self-defense.

No. I do not want to talk about any of this.

I want to talk about my mother.
My mother, worried for her daughter's safety.

I remember the words that June Jordan wrote in her poem 'Moving Towards Home,' written after the Sabra and Shatila Massacre

"I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten into
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home."

Born Lebanese. Born Arab.
Naturalized American.

What does it all mean?

Time to make our way home.
To a place where human life is regarded as a life, and not as a calculation for a political end

- Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

Qana Again: Stop this Madness

2006-07-30T15:26:00.000+03:00

It is mid-morning here in Nablus and the sound of bullets are ripping through the air from somewhere very close by. Sirens are wailing in the distance. Yesterday, around midnight, special Israeli forces assassinated two activists near the old city of Nablus. The scattered volleys and the sound signatures of different caliber bullets are tell-tale signs of a funeral procession.

But what I see in front of me on the television screen is much more disturbing. Videos of little boys and girls, all dead, being pulled out from under the rubble of a building. It is much too painful to look for more than a few seconds at a time. The faces are too vivid, too close up, too real. Anyone watching, and I know that tens of millions are watching, cannot help but feel completely devastated and outraged, especially those, like myself, who have children of the same age group as the ones on the screen.

I see the word Qana on the bottom of the screen and, for a very long minute or two, I think that what I am watching is old footage of the Israeli massacre of one-hundred Lebanese civilians in the village of Qana during operation "Grapes of Wrath" in 1996. But wait. Were not those victims burned in a fireball of bombing as they sat in UN shelters? The ones I see now are not burned at all. They are completely intact with just a fine, even coat of dust on their lifeless bodies. Then it suddenly becomes clear: another massacre at the same village, Qana, ten years later. So far, they have pulled fifty-five bodies out of the shelter, thirty of them children.

All the reports from the news agencies and all witnesses on the scene say there is no presence of Hizballah fighters or rocket launchers in the area. Why this mass killing? A case of faulty intelligence? A completely confused pilot? An errant "smart" bomb? Or, more likely, yet another abject lesson to the Lebanese in the south that they should all leave their houses and villages ahead of a scorched earth policy? Indeed, this scenario is a recurrent theme over the past 17 days: Almost everyday a single house in an otherwise peaceful village is suddenly obliterated by a one-ton bomb from an F16. The number of victims from a single family usually ranges between eight and thirteen. Shortly thereafter, there is a mass exodus. The difference this time is that there were tens of people from two families in this large house.

On the face off it, the world has not changed. The only difference between this latest attempt by Israel to resolve festering political problems by military means is the increased intensity and pace of destruction and killing. But something has changed. The 1996 Qana massacre led to world-wide condemnation of Israel, to an early end to the Israeli invasion, and to the political demise of then Prime-minister Shimon Perez who ordered the strike. This time, I suspect, the US will blame the massacre on Hizballah, the Israeli military will intensify it air campaign, the Israeli public will still reamin steadfast in its support its government's war, and the world will watch helplessly as this madness goes on.

In the most fundamental sense, and unless something drastic and unexpected happens, Israel has already lost this war. All the big players know this already, though some parts of the Bush administration and the Olmert government are in denial mode. Yesterday, Nasrallah made what amounted to a victory speech and already the Arab governments and European community are re-configuring their policies to adjust. Just 48 hours after making big threats, Rice is back in the region in an emergency mission to limit the damage to Israel and to try to salvage something from the debacle. Until that happens, Qana will remain a warning to all that military power can exact a very painful price, even in the face of defeat. Ironically, the only possible way for Israel to ensure a political turn around -- to cause a rift in the Lebanese government and public opinion -- has just been buried in Qana, along with the children.

Beshara Doumani
Nablus

--

Beshara Doumani
http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Doumani/

Qana, again

2006-07-30T12:00:00.000+03:00

This is, of course, what we’ve all been expecting. The deadly, dreary, re-enactment of massacres past and those to come. An inevitability, as long as F-16s battle above residential towns and villages against guerilla fighters carrying their rocket launchers on their backs. And now the TV is filled again with pictures of the innocent dead, petrified in their sleep, clutching each other forever, strewn across streets and under buildings, rigor mortis preserving for eternity their last, terrible, seconds.

But although it was predicted, expected, and even played-out like a miserable repeat episode in the southern village of Qana – the site of an earlier massacre by the Israeli Air Force in 1996 – it is still awful, it is still wrong, it is still evil, and it is still avoidable.

The facts will come trickling in, preceded by the excuses: the Israeli military will insist the civilians were warned, will insist Hizbullah fired from the village first; Hizbullah will deny firing from houses, will argue the Israeli drones, above the village all day, had recorded the civilians’ presence; the remaining, bereaved family members will say, again, how they had nowhere to go, no way to leave, and that the roads out have been unremittingly bombed for the past week.

But none of it will matter. Not to those who make callous, calculated decisions from their comfortable, removed safety, nor to those who sell and deliver the weapons. The innocents suffer, and only the impotent care.

The families will grieve. The children will grow up without their mothers. The memorial at Qana, already displaying the coffins of 106 civilian deaths, will swell by at least 55 more, at least 20 of them children’s sized. And the atrocities, tacitly and repeatedly permitted, will continue.

We need to find a way to make this stop. Not just in this war, nor just for this region. If justice cannot be served, cannot be used as an effective deterrent, then a new answer is needed. If we, the outraged, cannot offer anything better than official, inarticulate platitudes, then we are also to blame as the cycle of violence swells again. We must be more than pained voyeurs.

For today, an immediate ceasefire is needed. Let the dead be buried, let the families grieve, let food, water and medicines be delivered the isolated villages in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. For tomorrow, we must do something more.

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

Another massacre in the blessed Qana!

2006-07-30T09:25:00.000+03:00

From 1 to 3.30 am this morning, US-funded, US-supplied Israeli bombs were bombing Qana, the same village in which the Israeli committed the 1996 massacre, killing 103 civilians in a UN camp. They bombed, this time, a residential apartment building, far from the road, in a fully residential area, in Qana,

This morning, the Israelis destroyed this 3-story apartment building, in which - at least - 53 civilians were seeking refuge.

26 children. 26 children killed. What was their crime?

No one was able to come to the bombed site until 8 am this morning.

As the Lebanese civil defense forces are attempting to remove the bodies, the Israeli planes continue to hover and continue to bomb the roads.

Among the bodies of the killed that was removed was a woman, martyred, with her child on her arm.

Among the bodies that have been removed was a 2-year-old child.

Because of the bombing, the ongoing bombing, because of the destroyed roads and the consequent lack of necessary equipment, the Lebanese civil defense forces have been forced to leave the bodies, and possibly the wounded, in the rubble, as is the case, all too often, in this terrorist war.

A woman, whose uncles and cousins were killed in this attack, screamed her support to the resistance and her belief in resilience.

....

For 18 days, this village has been besieged. And now this.

Who will the Israelis massacre next?
Will the US press even report this massacre? Will they present this atrocity as an act of 'self defense' on behalf of the Israelis?

....

My tears are dry.

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

how do you rescue your country? ...

2006-07-30T05:25:00.000+03:00

Al-Jazeera released a story entitled, "Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by neocons in June (2006)."

The story reads: "It was done at a June 17 and 18 meeting at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado at which former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky met with US Vice President Dick Cheney [the true president of this "administration".] The purpose was to discuss the planned and impending Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invasions of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Cheney was thoroughly briefed and approved the coming assaults - before Hamas' capture of an IDF soldier on June 25 or Hezbollah's capturing of two others in an exchange first reported as occurring in Israel and now believed to have happened inside Lebanon after IDF forces illegally entered the country."

The Children Refugees...

2006-07-29T20:10:00.000+03:00

Lebanon’s Children – Voices from the War By Ramzi Kysia

On Saturday, July 29th I spoke with several children from South Lebanon at a refugee center in the Chouf region. These are their stories, in their own words...

Hadeel Moussa, age 12, from Dar al-Hamis:
“Israel made us refugees and destroyed our homes, and this is why we came here [to the refugee center] with our families... I saw bombing and I was so afraid...
They are not bombing a certain place, they are bombing everywhere. I want to tell people in America to ask Israel to stop bombing because we didn’t do anything.
We’re not the ones threatening anyone. Stop bombing because it’s not the fault of the children. Why are they bombing and killing children?... They are killing lots of children and they are bombing everywhere.
Hezbollah is just trying to resist, and to defend from what Israel is doing... We need a cease-fire, and some kind of treaty to stop bombing for both sides... Why hasn’t this happened? No one is answering. If America asks Israel to stop bombing, and we will ask Hezbollah to stop bombing, because there are killing too many people.”

Hussein Hamoud, age 15, from Tyre:
“I am a now a refugee because of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, and Israel has tortured us, and destroyed our homes, and killed our children... I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen killing and destruction - everything. We were sitting in our house [in Tyre] when suddenly Israel bombed a factory for manufacturing medicine that is near where we live.
Firths thing, this factory has maybe more than forty workers. This factory helps a lot of people. It isn’t related to war or to weapons. When they bombed, pieces from the bombs came to our home too. At the same time they bombed a building, and in this building there were a lot of killed people and injured, and some were my relatives. One of them killed was my friend... If Hezbollah is destroyed it will be easy for Israel to cross our borders at any time, and there will be no one to resist... Israel crossed our borders, and entered to our towns, and killed a lot, and destroyed a lot. This was not for self-defense... I want to say something to George Bush: Ask Israel to cease-fire and stop destroying our homes. And for the Americans, if they are not believing what is happening here, to come and see for themselves. They will have the proof...”

Aboud Aboud, age 12, from Dar al-Hamis:
“I’m here because of the Israeli bombing. I saw destruction and the killing of people, the voices of the bombings and the planes all around, and the news of what was happening everywhere. I was scared, especially of the voices of their planes. Israel wants to take Hezbollah’s weapons, but they should not take them because if they do then no one will defend Lebanon, and it will be destroyed more than it is...
There should be a prisoner exchange and Israel to go back to their country. Hezbollah will not disarm, and [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah will not give in.
I want to say to the Americans - don’t dream of destroying Hezbollah. They should come to Lebanon and see what is happening. If they don’t feel safe coming here then ask Israel to stop bombing for one day, and then they can come and see. We are children, refugees in schools, and we have the right to go back to our homes.”

Zahra Musa, age 11, from Beirut:
“I live in Beirut. We went [to the South] for summer vacation and Israel started bombing. So we came here and we don’t know if our house is destroyed, or what happened there. There are no roads, they bombed the bridges, and there is no way to go safely to our home in Beirut... Hezbollah took two [Israeli] prisoners.
This is good because Israel took lots of Lebanese prisoners... Hezbollah don’t want to give them back, so Israel started this war and bombing. Maybe in some diplomatic way things could be resolved. They are fighting, and Israel is fighting because the two Israeli prisoners are important to them as human beings. I ask them to make a treaty for Israel to take the two prisoners and Hezbollah to take the three Lebanese prisoners.”

Ali Nasser, age 14, from Shoukeen:
“I’m here because we ran away from the war. Israel bombed all the homes in the South, all the villages, because they want to destroy Lebanon. They don’t have a reason, and the Arab world wants this - they don’t want Hezbollah or Lebanon. The Arab world believes it was Hezbollah who started this war, but it was Israel.
Hezbollah is a resistance force, but they think Hezbollah is a terrorist force. Hezbollah is defending our lands. Hezbollah sent rockets to Israel, but they are responding to Israel’s rockets that they sent to Lebanon. Israel struck first. Hezbollah should respond, because the Israelis are killing innocent people... America should help the Lebanese people in this situation, to protest the killings and ask for a cease-fire.”

Fahtme Nasr, age 14, from Nabatiyeh:
“I’m a refugee because of the war, because of what happened... They start bombing, both Hezbollah and Israel, so we picked up our things and came here. Our house is not destroyed, but there was damage to lots of homes in our neighborhood... Americans should convince Israel to talk to Hezbollah and negotiate so that things can be as they used to be. Why aren’t they doing this? They should at least try.”

-----
Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and peace activist. He spent a year in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, the Chicago-based predecessor to Voices for Creative Nonviolence (http://www.vcnv.org). He is currently living in Lebanon.

the enemy among us

2006-07-29T17:41:00.000+03:00

“you’re going to Qasqas?”

“yeah. even if there’s no cabs it’s only a twenty minute walk.”

you’re standing at the Bishara al-Khoury intersection. Basta and greater west Beirut spread to one side and Nasra and greater east Beirut gather on the other. north the causeway empties into the sparkling, reconstructed downtown. South, the way ascends through Ras al-Nab‘a, Barbir, Qasqas, and beyond that the ruined Dahiyyeh – beirut’s southern suburbs – and points south.

the street is dark but for a lit street lamp every third block or so. there’s no traffic running north or south. overhead, the whine of an unmanned israeli reconnaissance drone sounds like a cross between a student-flown Cessna and an annoying blue-arsed fly. flies. there’s a second drone airborne tonight.

at some point on friday it formed in your head that you wanted to sleep in your own bed that night. the drone will keep you company as you walk.

sleeping in your own bed isn’t as problematic for you as it is for many in this country. for Lebanese who live in dahiyyeh, south Lebanon and parts of the biq‘a valley, sleeping in their own beds is either ill-advised [because the houses they reside in may soon not exist anymore] or impossible [because the houses don’t exist anymore].

in some cases, within those collapsed houses are still the bodies of dead relatives – the living unable to retrieve the dead because, 16 days into the conflict, it still isn’t safe to do so.

your own situation is more modest.

Qasqas is just north of dahiyyeh, which means it’s not threatened by Israeli warplanes or gunboats. this was less certain in the first week or so of the israeli attacks, simply because of the israeli military’s innumerable regrettable hits – or rather the number of hits it should regret – whether unarmed UN truce monitors, ambulances, relief trucks or civilian population centres generally.

but it’s in the cruel and dirty nature of this war that, if you’re a poor Shi‘a Muslim living among other poor Shi‘a, your life, property, and livelihood are more at risk of annihilation.

Qasqas is just close enough to dahiyyeh to make the first days of the attack unbearable. so you and your flatmates migrated a kilometre of two north. you stayed on there for a couple of weeks simply because the building your flat’s in, the ma‘rouf building, has no generator and no internet connection – both necessary for your work.

but the subcontracted international work - which arose in the first couple of weeks because the foreign media couldn’t get anyone into the country at first - has dried up. there’s still international news crews around, covering the conflict by day and taking photos of stylish lebanese women in beirut-area bars by night.

but, as was predicted, interest has slackened in the wake of the last foreign evacuations and will slacken still more as the story grows stale in the european and american public consciousness. arab women mourning the loss of a loved one, arab men, women, and children being killed by Israeli soldiers, or by soldiers dressed the way Israeli soldiers dress, is tragically commonplace in the media.

so you’re walking home, alone with the darkness. every now and then a car will pass, find an empty spot and pull over. at one point, a loaded flatbed truck blows past, obviously destined for dahiyyeh. the israeli drones witness all, though you have no idea exactly what they’re looking at.

+

geographically speaking israel, and therefore israelis, are very close to Beirut, but you rarely see them here. the first time you ever saw an israeli soldier personally was in may of 2000, when the israeli army made a hurried evacuation from its south lebanon occupation zone.

for a surreal few weeks, the only thing standing between the two countries was a few strands of razor wire, so it was possible to stand there and stare at helmeted solders in full kit as they stared at you, m-16s in hand. behind you, outraged and triumphant lebanese stood on the high ground hurtling abuse at the soldiers on the other side, taunting them for the outrages of a decades-long occupation.

now the israelis are back, but via many different media.

by now everyone has heard of the leaflets. dropped from israeli warplanes, they feature cartoons depicting hizbullah secretary-general hassan nasrallah in various unflattering caricatures - whether as a snake dancing to the tune of hamas, damascus and tehran, or an evil jinn rising up out of dahiyyeh to devour Beirut.

there are wide assumptions, too, that there are plenty of israeli mossad and special forces coming into Beirut with the international press corps. some of this is paranoia, of course – a product of having lived too many years in a town where conspiracy theory is both pastime and habit of mind.

but there is solid precedent for such suspicions too. we met several israelis here in 2000, in town to cover israel’s flight from the south and carrying american passports. If you can get in to do journalism, you can get in for something else.

you mention your amusing paranoia to your boss - lets call him Khalil. Khail’s seen a lot. He remembers, as a young man, cutting down a tree to block the road to Saida during lebanon’s 1958 troubles.

“paranoid?” he said. “do you know how many phone calls i’ve received since this thing started? they’re all the same. ‘hello, I’m such-and-such a foreigner in beirut with good Arabic and I wonder if I could get a job with your newspaper.’ ‘i’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but we have no room.’ ‘okay. I hear you have lots of interns. I can just come and do that, right?’ ‘no I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘we have no room.’ ‘okay. can I just come in and sit in the newsroom and watch?’

“ya khayyi,” Khalil says, “they think we’re monkeys.”

during the first couple of weeks - when it was still a hacks’ market as far as selling Lebanon stories was concerned - you’d picked up a gig with a certain international magazine of business. there were parallel stories running from various writers around the region, including israel.

one day, this email materialises:

Dear Jim,

I'm Gideon, the guy in Jerusalem. ….

I have a question that you might be able to answer…
Israel says it is attacking Hizbullah
strongholds (right now the focus is on Bint Jbeil).
Are there several such places, well-identified, and
where are they distributed? I'd like to compare the
Israeli army's claims of what it needs to target
(insofar as it's willing to divulge them) with the
facts on the ground.

Thanks, and best wishes
Gideon

you blink at the message for a second, then call one of your colleagues over.

“is this israeli journalist really expecting me to:
A/ know where hizbullah’s military strongholds are?
and
B/ tell him where they are?”

“and if so,” she smiles, “is he a spy or merely stupid? or does he just think you are?”

you politely informed “gideon” that such information was not generally available and - given israel’s massive air superiority and fondness for assassinating hizbullah leaders - not likely to be publicised.

for some reason the usual “thanks for your help” line didn’t come back.

you’ve reached the rubbish bins in Ras al-Nab‘a now. people have been noticing there’ve been a lot more flies in beirut since the israelis came back. it has the aspect of an old-testament plague about it, they’re so thick. it’s provoked some to wonder what the flies are feeding on.

on the other side of the road you notice a bus and a car parked on the side of the road. families are silently packing suitcases in the vehicles in preparation for leaving.

+

earlier on friday evening, a friend of yours from the paper walked hurriedly into dragonfly, a bar in the gemayzeh quarter, and felt the need to ask the waiter to stand between her and some guy. she’s a gentle, well-educated blue-state american who fled her country when the US supreme court appointed George W Bush president.

“what’s the problem?” you ask.

“oh my god. i just had this awful argument with this american guy. What a bastard.”

you soon see the cause of her problem when a belligerent-looking lebanese-american guy starts tearing into the waiter who’s been tasked with protecting her.

Dragonfly shuts early, so you drift next door to torino express, one of three bars that’s been open throughout the conflict.

You see belligerent man has ended up here as well. in a few seconds he catches sight of you and staggers over. you reckon he’s spoiling for a fight with some foreigners - all of you are hacks but only one, a woman, is lebanese.

“you journalists?” he asks, his lip curling in derision.

“yeah.”

He casts an aspersion or two over the others, who blink back at him quizzically. he walks up to you, then, perhaps because you’re standing.

“you look like the leader around here.”

“what?”

“how long you been ‘covering’ this?”

“covering what?”

“Lebanon! The war!”

“I’ve covered Lebanon for eight years. I live here.”

he blinks at you angrily. “this story. How long have you been covering this story?”

“since day-one. I was here when it started.”

“you gettin’ lucky?”

“what?”

“gettin’ lucky. you gettin’ fucked a lot?”

“no.”

“name’s jimmy.” he sticks out his hand. “what’s yours.”

“jim.”

jimmy blinks at you again, as if surprised. over jimmy’s shoulder you see the concerned-looking face of the gentle, potato-shaped man who was with him earlier in dragonfly. He’s sitting at the bar, looking over his shoulder at you, his eyes radiating silent pleas that you forgive his friend’s rude behaviour.

“you carry a camera,” jimmy accuses

“no. i’m a writer.”

“you’re a photographer.”

“no. i write.”

“‘i write.’ what kinda goddamn touché is that? ‘i write.’”

“what do you do for a living?”

“doesn’t matter -”

“- sure it does. you asked what i do so I can ask you what you do.”

“i have the GM dealership here.” he throws his shoulders back and glowers at you.

“this shit must be hard on business.”

“don’t matter,” he spits. “business was shit before.”

“well, people here seem to prefer german cars.”

“Lebanese are stupid that way. GM is the best cars in the world but they can’t see that ‘cause they think everything European is better. stupid fucking lebanese.”

“how long you live in America?”

“texas. I lived in texas.”

“how long?”

“I left here in 1981. I came back in 2003. you American?”

“Canadian.”

“Sudafed,” he smiles gleefully. “You got Sudafed there.”

You blink at him.

“do I look like a criminal to you?” he asks.

absolutely, you say to yourself, then smile, “You look like a guy in a bar to me.”

“i smuggled Sudafed into the states from canada.”

“why would you have to smuggle Sudafed into the states?”

“it’s illegal,” he fumes triumphantly. “you know why? they use it to make crack cocaine!”

eventually you disentangle yourself from jimmy, and wander over to say hello to a Lebanese filmmaker you know – let’s call him rafiq. Rafiq lived in America for a long time too – studying film in Montana, of all places, before returning to Beirut. he still keeps a house in California and just came back from there a couple of days before the Israelis ruined beirut airport.

Rafiq sips on a shot glass of vodka and explains why he thinks this war is finished. there’s been a lot of such enthusiasm in Beirut for the last couple of days. there’ve been no strikes on dahiyyeh – no concussions to remind beirutis that people are dying in the south.

“did I tell you about my phonecall?” rafiq asks.

you shake your head.

“i got woken up by an international call the other day,” he chuckles. “I thought it was my wife, so I picked it up. Turned out to be from Israel.”

“Israel? How’d you know it was from Israel?”

“this guy said in perfect Arabic:

“‘this is the state of Israel. we want peace for the Lebanese people and we want you to help us battle the devil nasrallah. We urge your compliance for the sake of peace between Lebanon and Israel.’

“But don’t quote me on the exact wording,” he peers through his glasses. “it was early in the morning, and I’m drunk.”

You arrive in Qasqas and are astounded to find the lights in the mar‘ouf building are on. Lights are on in east Beirut at night, so you’d been anticipating an 11-storey-long walk up a darken stairwell to get to the flat.

you turn on the computer and sit down to write for a few minutes before the booze and the weight of the day send you spiralling into your own bed.

the amount of electricity that’s been available throughout this siege has been remarkable. there’s been only nominal rationing since the mess started – odd considering that the power plants run on diesel that’s being kept out of the country by the israeli blockade.

perhaps there’s something to those rumours that Syria, with whom Lebanon shares a regional power grid, has been sending those amps in for free. if so, you wonder how grateful Beirutis will be after it’s all over.

Jim Quilty, Beirut, 29 July

Does anyone STILL believe this Israeli war is over 2 soldiers?

2006-07-29T10:21:00.000+03:00

17th day of attack and the results are…
A report by the Lebanese Higher Relief Council reported that the number of casualties due to Israel’s continuous bombardment has been grossly underestimated. According to paramedics and emergency response crews, the true number of casualties could near 1,000 deaths. “In Tyre alone we had 125 dead and 150 missing or buried under the rubble”, said Sami Yazbek the head of the Red Cross operations.

The Higher Relief Council official reported that a total of 866,780 Lebanese are displaced; 106,780 are sheltered in 652 schools across Lebanon, 550,000 are sheltered with families, friends, churches, mosques, even public parks, and 210,000 have left to neighboring countries such as Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, and the Gulf area.

What can YOU give?Appeal for Funds for Relief Work in Lebanon

2006-07-28T15:44:00.000+03:00

Background:

The humanitarian situation in Lebanon is very difficult. The large numbers of refugees from the South and the Southern suburb of Beirut due to the Israeli aggression pose many challenges on the ground.

The displacement and forced migration is still taking place as I am writing these lines today. In Beirut, the big shelter spaces (mainly public schools) are completely full, and many families are being dispersed throughout the city of Beirut, making the relief efforts, the assessment of needs, the medical assistance of these families, more difficult and challenging.

Many organizations, civil societies, political parties, individuals are working to provide refuge, shelters for the people, as well, as basic food supplies for survival, and medical care when needed.

Israel, is still obtaining the green light from America, European and Arab governments, to continue its destructive war upon the civilians, under the pretext of fighting the resistance which is a legitimate voice for occupied people anywhere in the world. The Israel army, by causing death among the civilians, and causing strong damage to the civil and public Lebanese infrastructure, aims to create a division among the Lebanese population, to divide the Lebanese opinion vis-à-vis the role of the resistance, and to pressure the government. Any violent and bloody pressure put upon any population for certain political aims is the definition of terrorism; in this case state terrorism…

The war profiteers exist among our society, just like every where else, the prices for mattresses and supplies are also increasing.

We are calling on people all over the world to raise funds, and send it to us. If you already know people and organizations, go ahead, if not, I am providing you with a list. I am sorry but the list is of course incomplete, I cannot at this point list, all organizations involved in the relief works.

The money will go to:

Buying mattresses for the refugees. In Beirut, we are in short of THOUSAND of mattresses so far. The families continue to arrive, since the bombing is continuous. Also, the merchants increased their prices as a dirty way to make profits. So one small mattress cost $12…
Buying canned food and bread. Each family receives a bag a day with bread, tuna cans or beef, can of beans, diapers (if infants), milk powder, baby milk (if infants), soap, cleaning products, Kleenex… one portion costs around $10-15.
We are cooking also for the schools that shelter the refugees and we need to buy the basic materials. We found this option as a good one, because it is saves us cost also… cost $700 a week
Implementing a Hygiene unit, with a hygiene kit for each family, with all the necessary products for a proper healthy environment, $10 first kit per family…

This is about a rough list of things we are buying… All basic needs for the refugees. Their number is very large and it continues to increase, especially if this war continues… many families also will need some time to go back since the southern suburb of Beirut is on the ground for many parts of it…

Why donate to Small NGOs?

The big organizations, international and governmental associations, such as Red Cross, High Council for Relief, UNICEF…, Doctors without Borders,… are active among the public spaces opened to welcome big amount of families and displaced. The public schools used as shelters are assisted by the Big associations, with all the basic needs, food, medicine, doctors, mattresses… And the big names have also been receiving a lot of money and donations from around the world.

An important aspect of the displacement, especially within the city of Beirut, is that the lack of opening new public spaces, is pushing the families to be dispersed in a very spontaneous and non-organized matter in the city, basically in any possible found space with a roof; garages, warehouses, old apts in empty buildings, rented apts, old cinemas, roof tops …. These families, and they constitute a big percentage among the displaced (sorry no statistics), also all newly displaced are following this path, so these families are not being assisted by the Big NGOs, but rather by the small ones, within the neighborhoods they usually work around….

Please spread the word… The list is incomplete, and all apologies for that… please provide with other names to add to the list…

List of NGOS

Nasma Center (where I am volunteering as well as T MARBOUTA involvements)… helping over 600 families… food ratios
AL HUDA ASSOCIATION
A/C #: 02 430 20 047 465
BANK MED, MAKDESSI BRANCH
VIA BANK OF NEW YORK
A/C #: 890 0057 343
UID: CH 035 040
SWIFT: MEDLLBBX

SAMIDOUN, SANAYEH RELIEF CENTER Coalition of NGOs, Lebanese and Palestinian Students, Zico house, helping over 12,000 refugees… food ratios, medical teams and medications, shelter
BANK OF KUWAIT AND THE ARAB WORLD
SWIFT CODE: BKAWLBBE
CLIENT: GREENLINE ASSOCIATION, SUB ACCOUNT NAME: SAMIDOUN
A/C #: 618 9003
EMAIL: sanayeh.center@gmail.com

NGOs Platform Saida, I don’t have the number, but Saida has been a big shelter place for many southern villages, over 75,000 refugees are finding shelter in Saida, almost equivalent to the number of the population of Saida… food ratio, medical care, shelter
FIRST NATIONAL BANK, SAIDA BRANCH
A/C# 0017-128 374-002 USB
A/C HOLDER: HAMATTO &/OR CHEAIB
NGO PLATFORM OF SAIDA
SWIFT: SINKLBBE

Najdeh Association, Lebanese NGO and also part of the Palestinian NGO group in Lebanon, providing relief works and assistance in the Palestinian refugee camps for the new refugees …
BANK BEIRUT, MAR ELIAS BRANCH
A/C: 363 95
EMAIL: association@najdeh.org.lb
PHONE: 00 961 1 30 20 79

LADE – Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections – also organizing a relief campaign
SOCIETE GENERALE DE BANQUE AU LIBAN, SASSINE BRANCH, SASSINE ST., ACHRAFIEH, BEYROUTH
A/C NAME: Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections
A/C #: 013 004 360 016454 02 5
SWIFT: SGLILSBX

T MARBOUTA café, not a formal NGO, but we are cooking for 700 people a day, buying and distributing mattresses and covers, providing hygiene kits and units for each family….
ABDUL-RAHMAN ZAHZAH
BANK AUDI SAL – AUDI SARADAR GROUP, VERDUN BRANCH
A/C #: 745324-03
SWIFT CODE: AUDBLBBX

OR SEND DIRECTLTY VIA WESTERN UNION

Salam,
Abdul-Rahman Zahzah

Please read this post...

2006-07-26T21:38:00.000+03:00

Pity the living and the days to come
Hanady Salman writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 25 July 2006

Do read this article.
Do read this eyewitness account.

- Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

50 cent, Paul Van Dyk, the Foreigners, but never the refugees...

2006-07-26T20:59:00.000+03:00

GLOBALIZATION AND THE ROLE OF PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS

The rescue and relief efforts are continuing despite the challenges and the hardships all along. No more big public spaces to shelter the families by big numbers. Now, they are concentrated in very random places and in small numbers. The situation is continuously deteriorating each day, or each hour even. and we are faced with a new problem: The big rescue institutions like red cross, high council for relief, and others are focusing on the big places, the groupings of 600 and more families... Other parties and big institutions are also doing the same, so you can find for example a school provided with 2 meals a day while some families on the roof of a building are paying their own meals and will be out of money very very soon... This is where the role of small NGOs, of solid grassroots work is needed and it is being accomplished but with minimal resources. The important sums of money, the donations, the tools, are going only to the big names. And the challenge is really to find these refugees who are randomly allocated in the city of Beirut. The donations are starting to arrive to the big organizations, but they do not have the human power nor the on-ground experience to use it outside the schools, and unfortunately the link between all groups is not easy to make...

Another important issue to discuss; what is the role of the private sector in this kind of tragic situation? The private schools, most of them, are still shut down, they have not been opened yet to allocate new refugees... The private hospitals are just starting to get involved in the rescue and relief efforts, with the financial administration carefully monitoring spending, and they only want to get involved in the big schools and gatherings... by the way, TV Cameras are only present in the big crowds of refugees anyway, and this where many organizations want to be....

Emergency departments in private hospitals are still charging people... some have provided a small team or space, but nowhere as serious as their means can procure... The private companies don't seem to be donating much money, instead they are worried about their own personnel stuck at home who cannot finish his/her work deadline... For the ones who are giving money and efforts, well, we respect their role and we encourage more to give and to be involved in the relief works… Big private public spaces who usually welcome big concerts, book fairs and exhibitions such as Biel and Forum of Beirut are used as centers to evacuate the foreigners... I am not sure if both of them... But anyway, they are not being used to shelter refugees... The space is big enough to provide a healthy environment... also from a logistic point of view, it will become much easier to provide all the necessary needs, to make all the necessary assessment, humanitarian and medical... BUT NO.. The priorities do not converge at this moment.... The citizens are not as important as teenager consumers dancing to Paul Van Dyk DJ music, or as important as the Foreigners who are evacuating the country…

The private sector needs to be more involved in what the entire country is going thru... The private sector along with the public sector and the civil society constitute the pillars... The government is obviously weak, it cannot absorb all this tragedy, and the civil society is working hand to hand trying to only focus on the humanitarian aspect without losing time in the politics at this point. The Private sector needs to also be responsive to the needs of our society; it needs to mobilize in the Humanitarian operations...

and this is another strong disadvantage and failure of the so-called globalization today, where capital and money/profit become more important than people. Public institutions are more aware and closer to the needs of the people. The capital that floats around the world seems to be very much detached from the workers, the geography, and the environments invested in. Another failure of the American economical system who is trying to be forced in our markets and our countries….

DOWTOWN AND THE MILITARY PROTECTION OF CAPITAL

As you may all know, the newly reconstructed Downtown (15 years ago) is one of the strongest symbol of the Post-civil war era of Lebanon. However, due to the high land prices, it became very hard to buy or rent in the Solidere region… and many renovated buildings, I don’t have exact numbers, but definitely many buildings, are still empty for the past 12-15 years, awaiting for business companies… is it too naïve to think about Solidere company to open these empty apartments to the refugees??? May be it is… but they thought about it from another side of the issue… the Government has deployed many soldiers at every entrance to downtown, every street leading to downtown, in order to protect these entrances and not let in anybody in there… This is the military force needed to protect the capital….

ISRAEL: POLITICAL ACCEPTANCE BY THE WORLD BUT MILITARY FAILURE

Tuesday was a very violent day here in Beirut and the South. In Beirut, many attacks from the war ships took place in the afternoon backed by aerial bombing, and the sound was bouncing off the walls of all the buildings in the city. Tyre was continuously being targeted today including the neighboring villages... The Israeli Offense Forces were trying to enter Bint Jbeil which is very close to the frontiers but they still haven't managed to do so completely. The failed meetings with Condoleezza Rice in Beirut are giving more time to the Israeli aggression to take place.

Anyway, nobody was really optimistic about Rice's arrival to Beirut, and the fact that she came here before Tel Aviv shows that she has nothing really to say, probably the same conditions given early by Israel, the israeli soldiers back, the International forces in the South, and the disarment if Hizbullah... Of course these conditions are not acceptable, and any third party involved in serious cease fire would call for an unconditional one... Israel seems to have a political umbrella these days, just like in Falasteen, however, on the ground, its troops are being stopped by a strong resistance on the Lebanese side. The Lebanese resistance is fighting on its grounds, its is in control of its territory and its military actions, it is defending itself, and it is well prepared for such a situation. The Israelis, the International community, many Arab governments, are underestimating the infrastrutucture of the resistance in the South... They have been focusing on the external alliances and the external Network of Hezbollah and its ties with Syria and Iran, which for some reason meant a weak internal structure and this is not the case... Not at all, Hezbollah, never expected a fair International community, but is well prepared at the ground level…

LEBANESE RESISTANCE

For the people who are stuck in the 80s, the quick and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the South in 2000 has opened the door for a new era... There is no Yasser Aarafat in Beirut today, where many political leaders will come to and convince him to leave Beirut, there is no boat after few weeks of heavy bombings that will take the fighters to Tunisia or another country, it is an Israeli-Lebanese conflict, of course linked to the big Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will remain at the heart of the liberation movement of the Arab world and of the renaissance of the Arab world as free and independent...

I do not personally differentiate between a Lebanese or a Palestinian cause, all causes in the world are related, the exploitation and the bombs do not differentiate between us... But the people who used to talk about the war of "others" on our land, and that Lebanon is used for other conflicts, well this is different, and this argument cannot be used...

This is a war waged by Israel on the Lebanese people. This is very clear when over 500,000 are fleeing their homes, where infrastructures are not being just disabled but completely destroyed... If you want to disable the airport for military logistical reasons you can hit it in a smart way, but when you continuously pound many missiles, many runways, the fuel tanks, this is complete destruction and the aims become the complete destabilization of an entire country, not just a simple strategic military operation...

also, the people who are holding in the South, if they are holding still, if they are stopping one of the strongest technological armies in the world, it means that there is a belief in what they are doing, that for them this a war of existence, their own existence, their own independence, and their own liberation…. There is a point of no return for the resistance in the South of Lebanon… And the resistance is rooted in the culture of the South, in the villages, there is a strong culture of resistance there, and this is where military choices for the Israeli will be limited… The war has a different meaning on the Israeli side, although some politicians claim that this is a war of existence, which is not…. But it is not up to politicians to say so; it is also up to the populations to decide, and the soldiers on the ground and the Israeli people have a different look, their war is an offensive one, and their attachment to the land has also a different nature… Let us not forget that Israel is still the biggest theft project of a land in the 20th century…

DONATIONS SHOULD BE MADE TO THE SMALL NGOs OR ANYBODY WHO IS DOING GROUND WORK....

Abdel Rahman Zahzah
Beirut, Lebanon

The Children of Sarah and of Hagar: An Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice

2006-07-26T20:46:00.000+03:00

Madam Secretary,

Whatever people may have thought of the policies of the Bush administration, many, if not most, have respected you for your meteoric rise from an underprivileged African-American background in the racially segregated American South to the highest corridors of power in Washington DC.

This is what boggles the mind when one contemplates your defense, and indeed, active support of the Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

As is well known, you grew up in Alabama, the cradle of the US Civil Rights Movement, partially started off when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man simply because she was black. This background of racial discrimination is a frequent theme in your speeches. And yet you are prepared to defend Israel when it practices a blatant form of racism, slaughtering innocent Lebanese and Palestinians en masse, quite apart from its perennial hunger for land and water that don’t belong to it. This is besides the fact that it practices a blatant form of apartheid. This word is what first comes to my mind because my mother wrote her MA Thesis on the subject, which was a comparative study between racial discrimination in Israel and that practiced in South Africa, that being in 1967, the year of the Israeli blitzkrieg that occupied an amount of Arab lands nearly ten times the size of Lebanon. . But whereas the Apartheid regime was brought to its knees by sanctions and other international pressures as well as the ANC movement under the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela, the Israeli Zionist regime continues to be nurtured and encouraged in its racist and criminal conduct by the international community.

It must be noted that the Jewish people themselves were, just over half a century ago, exposed to a hideous form of racial genocide. Yet they continue to practice a form of racial cleansing (albeit far smaller and different in scale) against the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples, while they shamelessly exploit the Holocaust to extort money to subsidize their state and to manipulate the Western public to win its sympathy. The German people to this day bear a complex of guilt towards the Jewish people because of what their forebears inflicted upon them, although Jews were by no means the only victims of Hitler’s holocaust, records being quite clear that among its victims were also Slavs, Gypsies, and other races, besides certain segments of society such homosexuals, handicapped people, and others.

The fact is that though there are were, and to some extent, still are, sizeable communities of Jews in many Arab countries who have coexisted with their Moslem and Christian compatriots (despite occasional persecution and discrimination) for centuries, Israel continues to deny the full rights of citizenship to its Arab nationals, a fact perhaps most poignantly illustrated in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, for all intents and purposes the Palestinian national bard.

When the Aqsa Intifada broke out in September 2000, members of the Arab community in Toronto, Canada demonstrated in protest against the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians and the violation of one of Islam’s most sacred sites. They were promptly accused by members of the Canadian Jewish Congress of being “anti-Semitic”. That, for its part, is difficult to comprehend, since we as Arabs are just as Semitic, the Torah and the Koran both teaching that we both spring from the seed of Abraham, they being the children of Sarah, his legitimate wife, and us being the children of Hagar, his concubine, a theme that they have used to put us down since time immemorial. The fact is that they are culpable of “Intra-Anti-Semitism” towards us.

The upshot, Madame Secretary, is that you, whose forbears, after being freed from slavery in 1865, were lynched and raped without mercy for decades, are now condoning even more horrific acts, this time not by a mob or secret society such as the Ku Klux Klan, but by an internationally recognized nation-state that claims to be a functioning democracy, dedicated to peace and justice.

Madam Secretary, how you are able to explain or justify this double standard in your ethical reasoning I must confess is beyond me. You have a great deal of explaining to do, and nobody can do it for you. What do you have to say for yourself?

Amer R. Saidi

Cinematic Resistance

2006-07-26T14:24:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I met up with Wahid. Wahid, originally from Beirut, has been in Holland for about 5 years, inhabits a luxurious squat (a former factory) in the old harbour of Rotterdam, and runs an audio rental company. A few days ago he put up a large banner against the war; the banner seems to fit the building and blends in with the façade of multi-coloured windows. I was wondering how many people would notice it; and if they would, would pause, get off their bikes (this is Holland after all), and contemplate the senseless violence going on a few thousand miles away. Would they shrug off the uneasy feeling that civilians are being killed and the whole infrastructure of a country is being flattened with the approval of big daddy USA? Would they become angry at the injustice, and voice critique, or would they just not care.

It is cruel, though all too human, how the unacceptable and the absurd becomes normalised. The media attention in this part of the world is starting to dwindle: to the casual observer it is just more of the same in the Middle East: the usual generic media image of carnage and destruction. Yes, the front-page headlines started to disappear along with the evacuation of the foreign nationals, and the instant gratification of foreign news crews.

Wahid and I discuss what can possibly be done to raise awareness, capture people’s attention, and make clear that what’s going on is absolutely appalling, knowing very well that every action from our side would amount to be a grain of sand in the desert. Nevertheless, something has to be done.

It seems that media is our curse and our saviour. Every war reported on TV takes on the qualities of a bad Hollywood flick; the war of images is what eventually remains as sticky residue on the spectator’s eye. That is, if we’re lucky. If we manage to convey images that touch, and are visceral and burn and scratch the retina with reality, than maybe…maybe people might wake up.

Every Wednesday the squat hosts a free cinema. We will show Lebanese films, documentaries and artist videos till the cessation of aggression. We want people to get a sense of Lebanon, of Beirut, so it becomes real, not some vague abstract concept. Donations will be transferred to humanitarian relief initiatives in Lebanon.

It is strange, only 10 days ago I reviewed a DVD called Resistances: Experimental films from the Middle East and North Africa. I had questioned the ambition scripted within the claim to call a DVD compilation a resistance, and had wondered whether the curators could actually deliver. Now I find myself using that same terminology, and also faced with the question whether I can deliver.

More info:
http://www.squatdeluxe.com/

Nat Muller, Rotterdam.

Tales of the absurd

2006-07-26T00:46:00.000+03:00

Of towels

A shipment of hundreds of towels arrived today to the Nasra school in Achrafieh. Hundreds of hundreds, bagged-up by the dozen, creating a small multi-colored mountain in one corner of the open yard. No one is quite sure where they came from; apparently some lads arrived in the early hours of the morning, deposited them all from a small hatchback, and left without a word.

“They’re certainly not from the Memory-of-the-Martyr-Rafik-Hariri-Institution,” joked Abu Ali, “or the martyr’s face would have been sewn into each one.”

The population at the Nasra school is fairly small, and the distribution system well entrenched, so the towels just waited there, for Walid or one of the other organizing volunteers to hand them out according to family size. But Walid was late today, and the towels tempting.

“I want to talk to you,” said Imm Hassan, pulling me aside into her family’s corner of one of the larger classrooms. Imm Hassan and I haven’t interacted all that much. She’s from Aitaroun, in southern Lebanon, and seems to spend most of her time yelling at her veiled 10 year-old daughter, and reciting incomprehensible – to me at least – aphorisms a propos of nothing.

“I need the pink towels,” Imm Hassan says.

“We’ll be distributing them very soon,” I reply.

“No, it’s important,” she says, “I need the pink ones.”

“Look, there’s lots of towels,” I say, “I’m sure you’ll all get enough.”

“Listen to me,” she says, gripping my shoulders and speaking louder, so I’ll understand. “I need the pink ones, to match the set I already have back home.”

Of towels, II

A similar impossibly large shipment of towels apparently was also made to the Karm El Zeitoun school down the road. Mahmoud, one of the volunteers, was trying to count them when he was interrupted by Khalil.

“We need them,” Khalil says, his son on one shoulder, two bags on the other.

“Let me finish counting them,” says Mahmoud, “and we’ll pass them out.”

“No,” Khalil says, “we need them now.”

Mahmoud looked around, but everything seemed normal.

“Please,” says Khalil, “I’m begging you.”

“Look, we’ll hand them out in a little while. What’s the rush?” Mahmoud asks.

“We’re leaving,” Khalil says, “up to the village. I want to go now, before they start hitting the road. But my mother-in-law, she says she won’t get in the car until we get our new towels…”

From the Dahieh

Imane is 11, and self-possessed. She tells me when my sneakers don’t match my outfit, and explains that if I veiled, it wouldn’t matter that my hair always looks so untidy.

“We visited home today,” she tells me. Imane’s family lives next to Hart Hreik, Israel’s main target in the Dahieh, Beirut’s southern suburbs.

“We went home to shower, because our bathroom is cleaner. But all the windows are gone. Mama said it’s ok, that everything is safe. So we showered. There’s nothing better than a shower in your own bathroom. But the towels were so full of dust that I got all dirty. Then the Israelis came back. We could hear them because the windows are all gone. So we came back to the school, and Mama made me shower all over again.”

From the Dahieh, II

We have a family staying with us, a mom and dad and two energetic little boys. They’re from southern Lebanon, but spend the winter in Hay el Sellum, another neighborhood in the Dahieh, currently threatened by Israeli bombings.

Our neighborhood is overflowing with refugees and new residents. Their children play on the streets, arguing over football and who’s taller/older/stronger. Our family won’t let their boys outdoors, despite their pleading, because they don’t know the neighborhood. Last night, we convinced them to take a walk on the cornice, by the sea.

Ten minutes later, we had managed to walk approximately one block. I had run into exactly no one that I know; they had met three families they knew from Hay el Sellum.

“You’re here, too?” they asked each time. “Of course. And by the way your neighbor from the fourth floor is staying two buildings down.”

From the Dahieh, III

The Israeli military talks a lot about its precision, its laser-guided explosives, its pin-point targeting. Khalo Ayman just got back from a visit to the Dahieh, where Israel’s precision is potently evident in the numerous buildings collapsed onto the ground.

“I met Fadi today,” he says, “he was walking down the middle of the street.

“‘You’re still here?’ I asked him.

“‘Of course’, Fadi said.

“‘I was asleep at home on the 8^th floor when they bombed. I woke up falling, and landed in my hallway. I stood up, and the doorway was gone. Then I walked outside. The building was gone, under me, so I walked down the hallway from my apartment that had been on the 8^th floor, and directly onto the ground outside’.”

From the Dahieh, IV

Most of the apartment buildings in the Dahieh are completely empty of their residents these days. In the window of a ground floor apartment near the main street of Mouawad, a family left their parakeet behind.

Hanging in its cage, the parakeet squawks if anyone comes near. If you get close enough, apparently, you’ll hear a difference in the squawkings. At first, it’s normal parakeet noises. Then it changes. “Booom! Booom!” the parakeet shouts. “Squawk, squawk, BOOOM, squawk.” And it ducks it head under its wing, hopping around the cage.

Sonya Knox

West Beirut

Lebanese Families Find Shelter at Palestinian Camp

2006-07-25T22:15:00.000+03:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400993.html

Lebanon between Truth and Justice

2006-07-25T18:50:00.000+03:00

by Khatchig Mouradian

ZNet; July 24, 2006

I'm for truth, no matter who tells it.
I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.
Malcolm X

On July 12 2006, fighters from the armed wing of the Lebanese political party Hizbollah launched a cross-border attack on Israel killing and injuring a number of Israeli soldiers and capturing two. The operation was dubbed “True Promise”; months ago, Hizbollah had promised in public to capture Israeli soldiers to exchange them with Lebanese prisoners languishing in Israeli jails, some for more than 25 years.

The very day the soldiers were captured, Sayyed Hassan Nasralla, the secretary-general of Hizbollah, declared that there was no intention on his part to start a full-scale confrontation, and that the only way to free the Israeli soldiers was through indirect negotiations leading to an exchange.

Israel, however, immediately launched a wide-scale military campaign, dubbed “Just Reward,” to free the two soldiers. Hizbollah first retaliated by shelling military positions in Israel’s north and, eventually, as the Israeli Army started bombing Lebanese infrastructure and targeting civilians, Hizbollah started shelling civilian targets as well.

Israel has thus far “justly rewarded” the three runways and fuel depots of Beirut International Airport, all its seaports, most highways and roads connecting various parts of the country as well as those leading to Syria, tens of bridges in Lebanon’s south and east, factories, trucks, ambulances, TV transmission installations, thousands of buildings and houses. More than 360 civilians have been, again, “justly rewarded” by getting slaughtered, and more than a thousand received lesser “rewards” by being sent to hospitals and some 700 thousand (an estimated 15 percent of the country's population) have been “rewarded” with refugee status. President Bush said that Israel had the right to defend itself and, to date, the US has blocked all attempts by the international community to put a ceasefire in place. Hizbollah, in turn, has tried to impose what the Arab media and experts are calling a “balance of terror” by bombing northern Israel --most notably the port city of Haifa-- and causing a number of deaths and injuries among Israeli soldiers and civilians.

While United Nations relief coordinator Jan Egeland was saying that Lebanon was suffering a “major” humanitarian crisis and that Israel was violating “international humanitarian law,” the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, heading to the region on July 23, did not seem to be in a rush. “We have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one,” she said.

What started as an operation to liberate the 2 Israeli soldiers (if one is naïve enough to believe that) is now a US supported war to forge a “new Middle East.” If this renovation is anything in the same breath as the “Greater Middle-East” plans that are being implemented from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Palestinian territories, then Lebanon has just started to walk down the long road that the Bush administration sees as that of freedom, democracy, and security, and, if the country is lucky enough, three years from now, it will be as free, democratic and safe as, say, Iraq and Afghanistan are today.

What needs to be done? Attempts to wipe out, or even defeat Hizbollah, are in all probability doomed to fail. With the degree of “pinpoint accuracy” the Israeli army is displaying, the entire Lebanese people will be cleansed much before the rooting out of Hizbollah.

Implementing UN Security Council resolution 1559 and disarming Hizbollah by force are doomed to fail as well. Whether the US administration, the West in general, some “moderate” Arab states, and even many in Lebanon like it or not, Hizbollah has a broad grassroots support not only among the Shiites, the largest minority in Lebanon, but also among some Christian, Druze, and Sunni Muslim political circles, who are extremely angry at Washington’s overall pro-Israeli bias, and at the fact that the Bush administration is ignoring the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which were declared to be at the core of the international initiative launched in Madrid in 1991.

Any initiative to solve the immediate crisis in Lebanon must involve an exchange of prisoners between Lebanon and Israel (and probably in the Palestinian territories as well), Israel’s handing down of the maps of landmines that the Israeli army had planted in southern Lebanon before its withdrawal in 2000, and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Shebaa farms-- which, according to the Lebanese government and Hizbollah, is Lebanese soil. Even after all that, it is an illusion to believe that a comprehensive and lasting solution can be achieved without finding a true and just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Khatchig Mouradian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer, translator, and journalist. He is an editor of the daily newspaper Aztag, published in Beirut. He can be contacted at khatchigm@gmail.com

Broummana Diary

2006-07-25T17:12:00.000+03:00

After nearly getting sunstroke waiting for the US evacuation at the Port of Dbayyeh, it was a relief to sit in the shade at the Charles Helou bus and taxi terminal, near the Port of Beirut. It wasn’t that the American evacuation was total chaos, or resembled the fall of Saigon, as some people have been quipping. I wish it had been like the fall of Saigon – there would have been a bit of urgency, perhaps. Instead, it was a combination of things that made the whole process so irritating, because they all seemed so unnecessary: the vagueness of the arrangements; the snail’s pace of the lines, when there were lines; the stifling heat and lack of shade (many of the evacuees had small children); nervous breakdowns; vomiting; fights, cursing and arguments over turf as we waited to move forward; Civil Defense personnel lobbing water bottles at the crowd to cool them down but almost splitting open the heads of little kids in the process. We were told we were going to Cyprus, but even that didn’t seem 100 percent ironclad. A rumor spread that the day before, a Canadian or American boat had ended up in Turkey instead, and you can imagine the effect that news had on the Armenians who were waiting next to me.

After giving up on the "organized" evacuation I decided to go to Syria by land, through one of the northern Lebanon border crossings. I showed up at the Charles Helou terminal and declined to take any of the cars headed for Damascus via the Bekaa Valley – there was the danger, and the steep prices of at least $100 a seat. At Charles Helou, there were the usual coffee and food vendors, drivers looking for fares, and people trickling in, until eventually the bus left for Tripoli. Only a handful of us made the entire trip to the border; the rest got off on the way, and others were picked up. We wound our way up the northern coast of Lebanon, which has barely been targeted by the Israelis. The only effects of the war I noticed were an absence of cable cars heading up to the Harissa cathedral near Jounieh, a bombed-out Lebanese Army post just outside Tripoli, a few relief trucks on the other side of the highway, headed south, and absolutely no mobile phone coverage. The bus dropped us off on the Lebanese side of the border. We walked a few hundred meters, did our Lebanese paperwork and ended up on the Syrian side, where several hundred Red Cross workers and other Syrian volunteers were ready and waiting to help people, under tents set up to protect people from the heat. I obtained my Syrian visa after calling the Ministry of Information in Damascus (I’m a journalist) and ended up completing the entire process in about as much time as it takes when there is no war.

After getting past Syrian customs I found an air-conditioned bus headed for Homs, full of refugees from Beirut and South Lebanon, but with some available seats. On the Syrian side of the border I felt some of the tension leave the bus, and me as well. Earlier this summer a friend gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, about the bombing of Dresden in World War II.
I opened it, then stopped at the following lines:

"… there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet?
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

We got off at the Homs terminal and I found another air-conditioned bus, leaving right away for Damascus. I fell asleep and when I woke up we were approaching the capital of Syria. The guy sitting next to me asked where I was from, and I told him Broummana. He said he was from Zahle, and informed me that the Israelis had just completed another series of bombing raids on the Bekaa, including the village of my friend from the southern suburbs of Beirut. What my friend had feared finally took place – his village became a target. "Once upon a time, the place was a Hizbullah office," he later told me. "Once upon a time." The bus arrived in Damascus and I caught a taxi into town. The first bus had cost $6.50, the second $5, and the third cost a dollar, as did the taxi. I asked the driver about the congestion and availability of taxis in Damascus, with around 200,000 displaced persons suddenly showing up from next door. He said that most of them were hanging out in Sitt Zeinab, south of the city, where the Shi’a religious shrines are located. The driver began relating stories about how some of these Lebanese were practically penniless, how they would go into restaurants and order only hummos and salad. "Not like the Iraqis," the driver said, referring to the wave of people fleeing to Syria in the last several years. "Those people have some money." I told the driver that Israel should now hit Syria, so that it could get rid of Lebanese, Iraqis, and Syrians. "Three-for-one, huh?" he asked, smiling and nodding. "What does it matter, 60 percent of the Syrian people are dead already," he continued, in what I took to be a comment on the socio-economic situation. I wondered if any other countries would end up dumping their populations here as the US continues its quest for a new Middle East.

Marlin Dick, Damascus, Syria

2006-07-25T13:06:00.000+03:00

It was just a few days into the war and the battered old Mercedes taxipulled over in Hamra, a formerly splendid commercial district in Beirutwhose heyday had expired many years before.“Cola,” I said, referring to the neighborhood in southern Beirut named for a Coca-Cola bottling plant that had closed some time in the distant past.“Taxi?” came the response, the driver wanting to know whether I wanted thevehicle to myself for 5,000 Lebanese pounds (about $3.33) or was willing toshare with others for 1,000 pounds.Sharing meant the possibility of detours to other passengers’ destinations,and it had been a very long day. I nodded and hopped in the front seat ofthe battered sedan. We rode in silence until we were very near to Cola, whenyet another thunderous explosion went off further south in the Dahiyeh.

The driver inspected me out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge my reaction to the destruction of his country. Was I one of those foreigners who thought the Lebanese were getting what they deserved?I muttered a colorful curse at Israel with a shake of my head. That broke the ice. He asked if I had a family and where they were, and Itold him I had moved them from our flat near Cola to one in Hamra, muchfurther away from the Dahiyeh. Then I asked about his family, which eliciteda deep breath and a clenching of teeth.“Dahiyeh.”My heart sank. I had just been to see my own 4-yeard-old daughters, and thebombs falling on the Dahiyeh had been enough to frighten them from severalkilometers away. This man’s children had a front-row seat.“Get them out of there,” I said, motioning with my hands. Between his broken English and my pathetic Arabic, he managed to make meunderstand that he had no other place to put them and no money to rent one. I told him he didn’t need money because the government had opened all publicschools as shelters for civilians displaced by the Israeli bombing campaign. Apparently unaware of the announcement, he thanked me profusely for theinformation and said he would go straight to his home to evacuate his family.

We had arrived at the corner of my street, so I told him to stop, handed him a 10,000-pound note and held up my hand to indicate that he could keep thechange. He wouldn’t take it – any of it. He insisted that I had saved his children and that he could not accept my money. Honor meaning what is does for many Arabs, it was a delicate moment, but we didn’t have enough language in common for me to argue the point, so I got out but tossed the note back into the car just as he began to pull away. Realizing what I had done, he stopped again. I think my expression told him I wouldn’t be taking no for an answer, so he touched his fist – clenched around the precious cash – to his chest and gave me a look of gratitude that cannot be described. Then he drove off toward the Dahiyeh.The feeling was instantaneous: In all likelihood I would never know if this man reached his family in time. I still feel it now, and I can’t imagine itever going away.

Marc J. Sirois

Rim Shahrur, angry arab baby

2006-07-24T21:19:00.000+03:00

Rim Shahrur. 18 months. Rashidiyyah refugee camp (near Sour(Tyre)).

To all of you who have been writing and attempting to excuse the (US-funded, US-supplied, US-supported) Israeli massacres of Lebanese, see Rim's tears, look at Rim's face... What else can I say?

To all of you who have been writing letters of solidarity, see the resilience in Rim's eyes.

Ah, what a crazy crazy world. The powerful play their vicious games to sieze control, steal resources, get their ego-fill, and always the same people suffer: the weaker ones, the young, the children...

Lest there be any confusion, the powerful that I allude to here are: Israel, US, and all those who offer their complicity.

-Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org
p.s. here is an article I wrote - that was published in a North Carolina (USA) newspaper on Sunday. The article had to be less than 500 words.

internationals to the rescue

2006-07-24T12:54:00.000+03:00

Now that the international press corps has arrived in Lebanon to tell the real story of what’s happening here – and making telephone and internet access that much more difficult for the rest of us – it seems fitting to set down some other international responses to the 2006 siege of Lebanon. Here’s four vignettes.

1/from Iraq

it’s early in the attack and you’re in the midst of crossing the old airport road, down Qasqas way, when our mobile rings. You notice it’s from Syria.

“Hello?”

“Yes I must speak with Jim please!” a voice yells through a poor line.

“Yes, speaking.”

“This is Ahmad [let’s pretend his name is Ahmad]! Ahmad the sculptor!”

Ahmad is a former flatmate of yours from your brief stay in Syria in 2004. You were subletting a room in a house in Salamiyyeh, a district on the side of Mt Qasiyoun with a breathtaking view of Damascus.

Ahmad is the boyfriend of one of the French girls who shared the place with you. he is, in fact, a sculptor, working in bronzes. the running motif of much of his work is human-ish figures, usually striding forward. though winged, they’re always bound to the ground.

“Ahmad! Hi how are you?”

“I’ve been trying to call you for two days!”

“That’s nice,” you smile. “What can I do for you?”

“Habibi jim, you must come while you still can!”

“Come where, Ahmad?”

“To Damascus! Come immediately before it gets any worse.”

Ahmad is a Baghdadi, a refugee from the US liberation of Iraq, or rather the chaos that arose from the liberation. He approves of the American action, a fact that has less to do with his being shi‘a than it does his hatred of saddam hussein. “He wrote novels, you know,” he once confided, grimacing over his beer.

“Ahmad, thank you. but I have some work to do here.”

“Please promise you’ll come if things get too bad, ah?”

“I sure will.”

2/ from Juba

let’s say his name is Hillary. He’s a refugee from Juba. Few people, yourself included, had heard of Juba before. Conventionally people call it “southern Sudan” but he dislikes the term. he comes from a mixed muslim-christian familiy and raised a practicing christian of a vaguely catholic persuasion.

He was studying medicine at the university of juba when the Sudanese government transplanted the university – teachers and students - to khartoum.

“It took a few days before one of us asked the others, ‘what’s the university of juba doing in khartoum?’”

politics made Hillary a refugee. he ended up in the levant, spending a bit of time in Syria with his brother but eventually deciding to stay in beirut. for most of you acquaintance with him, he’s done manual labour, the drudgery accentuated by his unsuccessful efforts to find asylum in another country. Your encounters with him were usually in some bar or another – an environment that allows him to display his wit and intelligence to best advantage.

“as far as I’m concerned,” Hillary said a few days into the siege, “i consider myself fortunate if i get hit by an israeli missile.”

a year or two ago, Hillary made friends with a pastor of some obscure european protestant denomination. the contact got him an “in” with the local protestant theology school, so now he’s studying theology – something you applauded even while finding it amusing.

it’s been a challenging time for him and not because he’s not smart enough to get good grades.

shortly after he started he found that the Lebanese internal security wouldn’t grant him a student visa to study here. it seems washington was putting pressure on beirut to not grant visas to foreigners wanting to study religion in the region. al-Qaida’s influence is assumed to spread through students migrating around the muslim world to continue their education – so Hillary seems to have fallen victim to a wider effort to curb international terrorism. he remains on the case, though, and is still attached to the theology school.

He later had to contend with the racism of some of his Lebanese instructors. Then there was the challenge of the subject itself. “studying the old testament,” he said the other day, “will destroy your faith. it’s a book that justifies one people’s right to annihilate another.”

When you half hear him remark to Angus, a scottish friend, that he’d feel fortunate to be hit by an Israeli missile, you assume the joke hinges on this crisis of faith.

“why do you say that?” asks Angus.

“you know how much they cost,” he asks, “one of these israeli missiles. They cost a million dollars each. my insurance policy says if i die I’m worth $5000 to my family. that means if some Israeli kills me with his missile, my value increases.”

3/ from germany

you’ve known “Wim” for years. he was one of the founding members of the flat in Qasqas you share with another german, you usually call him “Otto”. It was while Wim and Otto were at the helm at Qasqas that the neighbours began calling the place “bayt al-alman” [the house of the germans], a practice that remains among the neighbours even though Otto is now the last german.

When you met Wim, he was a sociologist, who did some journalism on the side. then he abandoned the academy and turned to journalism. then he moved over to ngo work, though his passion remains journalism.

Wim was trapped in Europe, on vacation with his lebanese girlfriend when the israelis started bombarding beirut international airport. one evening, while you were commiserating with Angus over a couple of whiskeys in gemayzeh, Wim bounded into the bar.

“you came back!” smiles Angus.

“of course,” he smiles back. “there’s work to do.”

“how’d you come?”

“from damascus,” he says matter-of-factly.

you and Angus glance at each other, surprised.

“i thought the damascus road was shut.”

“oh it is, but you can still cross the border there. We drove via zahle. The driver didn’t know the way, though, so I had to direct him.”

“how much did you pay?” you ask. the siege had driven up the market price for taxis to damascus, in excess of $500 in some cases. rumours had drifted out that some drivers were trying to raise the rates going the other way as well, and that some gormless international had paid around $800 for a one-way trip.

“well i took a service [a shared taxi],” he said, “it was much more expensive that usual.”

“how much more?”

“over twice the usual sum,” he said. “thirty dollars.”

+

4/ from Palestine

“Miriam” is the friend of a friend who’s adopted you as her own. there was no introduction as such. she just emailed you one day a couple of years ago. she said she was friends with this friend and that friend of yours, all foreigners. Then she asked you how you were and said she looked forward to meeting you.

this went on for a couple of years. sometimes it would be email, sometimes it was a phone call. these communications were always a little disorienting since they would drop out of the blue for no apparent reason and not really go anywhere. your efforts to make your way to bourj al-barajneh for a visit never came to much. though Qasqas itself is right on the border between beirut proper and the southern suburbs, a combination of work obligations and alcoholic social life centres your life in northern beirut.

Miriam would ask how you were and then share some of the happenings in her life. this is how you discovered that she’d suffered an accident of some kind that had left her confined to her house. you learned about her daughter who was nearing the end of her high school.

One day you and Miriam actually met. she rang one Saturday to say she was on her way to Ruth’s house.

“oh?” you reply. you had no idea who Ruth was.

“yes.”

There was an impasse for a few seconds while you wondered how to interpret this information.

“would you like to meet for a cup of tea?” she eventually continued.

“oh. okay, give us a ring when you’re done at your friend’s.”

another long pause as she processed your line of code.

“she lives near bliss street,” she continued.

“okay, close to hamra, then. I’m in hamra now myself”

after a pause, she sighed. “do you want me to give you directions?”

“uh, sure. you’re inviting me to your friend’s house?”

“you don’t want?”

“no no. I’d love to.”

Miriam and her family live in bourj al-barajneh camp, in beirut’s southern suburbs. The suburbs have been particularly badly hit in this offensive because that’s where shi‘a muslims live and shi‘a muslims make up hizbullah’s constituency. that doesn’t mean all shi‘a support hizbullah, of course.

the Palestinians aren’t shi‘a, though they’ve had more than their fair share of problems with the israelis. this is why Miriam and her family live in a beirut-area refugee camp rather than in palestine. this is why her family never had a chance to migrate to a country of their own choosing.

a few days into the bombing, the mobile rang. It was Miriam and you immediately feel ashamed for not having rung her first.

“How are you jim?” she asks cheerfully. “Are you fine?”

“better than some. Where are you? are you still in the bourj?”

“no,” she laughs. “we decided to spend some time around the Arab University.”

The arab university is about 10-15 minutes walk from the flat in Qasqas, not far from shatilla refugee camp. you’d left Qasqas with your girlfriend (visiting from holland) because it was too close to the bombing. no bombs have fallen into your neighbourhood, but the noise when the missiles and shells hit is horrendous.

“how are things there? Do you have everything you need?”

“oh yes. dalia is bored and wants to go home,” she chirps back. “we have everything here. it’s like being in the camp.” There’s a pause while she says something to her daughter. “I have to go now jim. Do you need anything?”

Jim Quilty, Beirut, 24 July

Bringing it all back home

2006-07-23T23:35:00.000+03:00

I’ve known F. for years. A good friend of my fiancé’s, I watched as he transformed himself from a high school failure into a free lance journalist. With no big family connections or monetary backing (his father transports fruit and vegetables from their village to Beirut all summer long, and the family lives in Beirut’s impoverished southern suburbs in the winter), F. is completely self-made.

Until yesterday, his parents and two youngest brothers had been stuck in their village near the border with Israel. When we heard they had finally been able to escape, and needed a place to stay in Beirut, we were glad to help. The three other brothers were already staying with F. in a nearby apartment. Astonishingly, their uncle and his family had already been taken in by our friend who lives one floor above us.

They arrived sleep-deprived and shaken. They had been on the road since 5.30am, and only reached Beirut at 3 in the afternoon. They rode in a microbus with 23 other people. Except for some candy for the children, they hadn’t eaten. They came with a bag full of vegetables from their garden and some clothing.

They came with stories of an unceasing bombing, of buildings exploding around them, of a three-storey apartment building across from their house that was bombed flat. Moussa, who’s 9, keeps talking about the way the glass shards flew over their house into the garden. His mother is pretty sure no one survived.

Our apartment isn’t designed for kids, for more than two people. There’s no tray to serve the tea or coffee, there’s only four large plates, only one ashtray. F.’s mother is slowly taking over the kitchen, with some interesting results. Espresso makes very poor Turkish coffee, we’ve determined, and I’ve given up trying to explain why I buy strange salt with iodine in it. I can’t imagine how foreign everything must be for them here, how difficult to try to accept that both of their apartments may already have been bombed, that they may not have anything to go back to.

F.’s mother worries about her garden. If they can go back in a week, they’ll have only lost the tomatoes. If it’s two weeks, they’ll lose the green beans as well. F.’s father is full of stories about how he can fit 40 watermelons in his car and reach Beirut in two hours, making the trip three or four times a day in high season. Since the Israeli’s started bombing, they’ve lost an entire year’s income.

F. visits twice a day. He’s trying to juggle reporting with organizing the distribution of food and medicine to five schools. When his parents first arrived, he went out to buy food for the house. He came back with enough dry goods to feed the entire building, with his mother’s favorite brand of soap, with toys for his brothers and a carton of his father’s cigarettes. He came back again, later in the day, with mattresses and towels. Today I watched his little brothers leap around in excitement as he delivered new sandals and shorts, and a soccer ball.

We are safe here, we are fed and clothed and loved. We are incomparably lucky.

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

Broummana Diary

2006-07-23T21:49:00.000+03:00

After my Shi’i friend from the southern suburbs of Beirut left the other day, he threw me a curveball. My friend stayed for three nights with me up in Broummana, a Christian resort town in Mount Lebanon. Although my friend has been around much of Lebanon, this was his first time here. His stay ended because he had to get back to work, in Hamra. Commuting such a long distance was to be avoided so he decided to camp out at his office. On the afternoon he left, my friend didn’t want me to drive too far to drop him off on the main road, where he would take public transportation down the mountain and to Beirut. I kept driving, as far as the Beit Mery roundabout, just outside Broummana, as he kept telling me “this is far enough, really, just go back home,” to which I responded that the Israelis wouldn’t hit a place full of tourists, including those from the Gulf. “Yeah, but there are all these trucks,” he responded, then switched to cursing the truck drivers we saw, for supposedly endangering our lives. As we stood on the side of the road, we noticed that there weren’t many services or buses running that day. A Lebanese couple in a Range Rover stopped and asked us the way to Beirut. Before I could point down the road, my friend asked if he could hitch a ride, and guide them in return. The man agreed, and as my friend opened the back door, he turned to me and whispered, “We just go straight ahead, right?” I rolled my eyes and nodded at the new “guide,” who had never traveled down the road before.

I called the next day to ask about how he was doing in Hamra. The response? “Hey, I’m on my way to Syria – I’m in a bus right now, headed for Tripoli.” This is the long way around, but it avoids the Bekaa Valley, where the Israelis have been bombing regularly, including sections of the international highway between Lebanon and Syria. We agreed to keep in touch when I make it to Syria; I would be going to Cyprus in the American evacuation and then catch a flight to Damascus. I had an image of my friend, traveling alone in a bus on the road to Tripoli, abandoning his home in the southern suburbs, and his country. While in Broummana, my friend contacted a Syrian woman, a friend from college days in Damascus, to help his family members get across the border and find temporary housing. Finally, his parents, siblings, nephews and nieces preceded him to Syria. We spent several nerve-wracking hours following their movements by phone and waiting for the confirmation that they had made it across the Bekaa. “It’s just an hour or less of nail-biting, and then they’ll be safe – better than being worried about them every single day, “ he had said. Now he was going to join them.

While we were in Broummana, we caught up with some of our circle of friends. Two of them were from villages in the Bekaa, perhaps the “hidden” front in this war, gauging by the international coverage. One of them lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut and when the fighting started, took his wife and three children to his home village, near Baalbek. When we spoke on the phone, he sounded weary, with the kind of voice you usually hear at funerals. “Fleeing” to the Bekaa didn’t seem to make much sense when so much of it was being bombed by the Israelis. “And there are those damned (unintelligible) all the time,” he added. When I asked about the word he had used in Arabic, I made my latest vocabulary addition, “em-kah,” or MK, the type of Israeli spy plane that has been hovering around so much. “It’s really irritating, with those MKs flying around. They’re wearing us out,” my friend went on. When we called the next day, he surprised us by telling us he and his family were now in Beirut, staying with friends. I didn’t bother asking about my friend’s work, as a dentist, because the answer might be too depressing. There’s nothing going on in the suburbs, where his home and office are, and no reason to go there. No check-ups these days. Our other friend is also a dentist, who lives and works in Saudi Arabia. We talked to him as he sat in his village in the Bekaa Valley, pinned down by the bombing, and tantalizingly close to the Syrian border. “Man, we came home for a summer vacation, and we get stuck here,” he complained, and told us about how he would try to get to Damascus and catch his re-directed flight back to Riyadh. Hizbullah’s headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut and the proximity of the south to Israel means these areas often grab the headlines, but the Bekaa, all of the Bekaa, from top to bottom, also seems like it’s being taken apart piece by piece, the more that roads and other places are hit, and people flee.

When I dropped off my car at a repair garage in a Christian suburb of Beirut, I found few people worried about leaving. Although the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafieh in Beirut was hit once, with no casualties, the Christian suburbs have escaped practically all of the onslaught. Some of the people I know through this garage are considering leaving the country for the US, where they have citizenship, probably due to a mix of concerns about security and the economy. But most are staying put. When I went upstairs to get a coffee, an Egyptian worker at the garage followed me upstairs, to do the same.

“You’re leaving?” he asked me.

“Yeah, getting out with the Americans.”

Since I was in the middle of hearing things about the arrangements made by various foreign embassies, I decided to gauge the Egyptian situation.

“I’m leaving too, you know,” he said.

“Oh yeah? How?”

“The embassy is organizing some buses, to go to Syria, and then we’ll probably fly back home. Didn’t you hear our president? He promised to send buses and planes and make sure that the Egyptian workers here got out… the Mubarak Tourism and Travel Company!” he said, cackling.

I learned there was a nominal fee, and that the plane tickets would be half price. I asked if my friend really needed to go, because the area in Greater Beirut where he lived and worked had been safe up to now.

“Well, I don’t want to get stuck here. And there’s no work.”

I thought of my Lebanese friend alone on his bus going to Tripoli, and the Egyptian worker’s organized, yet costly trip back home and temporary loss of his job.

I showed up at 6.30am at the port of Dbayyeh, north of Beirut, for the evacuation of US citizens. The signs were not good. Several hundred people (overwhelmingly Lebanese in origin) were there in the early morning for a first-come, first-serve situation, but every single other aspect of the process was vague, at best. After a brisk eight hours standing in the sun, nearly motionless in a tightly-spaced, yet jostling crowd, I made it past the first gate to a second, nearby series of waiting areas. Many rules, regulations and arrangements were announced for both the wait and the evacuation trip, but the set-up was hampered by a deficiency in a key area – boats – which come in handy when you need to go to Cyprus and don’t have a functioning airport. When I asked a Lebanese embassy employee about the evacuation contingency plan as it existed prior to 12 July, he just grinned at me. The long wait for boats kept getting longer, to the point that I had no chance of making my flight the next morning, so I abandoned my fellow refugees and citizens to their fate. In the crowd of US citizens there were some who had fled the south, where they had been visiting relatives. But few seemed to be talking about the war, even when we got to the second area, where there was space to sit down and socialize. I called a Lebanese journalist in Tyre to find out what was going on in the south, and specifically with the Israelis’ incursions into several villages. Those around me at Dbayyeh were, it seemed, mainly interested in the fact that Israeli had bombed the country and ruined their vacations, and not the war itself. One man I talked to expressed the line that “you cannot have a state within a state,” to which I responded that a military solution to this issue didn’t seem particularly feasible. “Look, it’s bigger than Lebanon,” he said, “it’s connected to Syria, to Iran, to what’s happening in Iraq…” After it took 12 hours to move a whopping 200 yards toward safety, I wondered about the war here, and how the evacuation was happening as if we had all the time in the world to leave, implying that Lebanon, as a country, really wasn’t at war. If they’re not going to take this seriously, I thought, I won’t either. I’ve begun making calls to see about taking a bus to Tripoli.

Marlin Dick, Broummana, Lebanon

From Abdul Rahman, in Beirut

2006-07-23T19:23:00.000+03:00

From Abdul Rahman, my good friend who is in Beirut

Of course I am not Slavoj Zizek, using movies to create political and social analogies and link them to reality. But my brother sent me an sms saying “did you see the Last Samurai, doesn’t Nasrallah remind you of Kasimoto?”

So I was thinking about it, and in a way my brother was right. Amid the total silence of the Arab world and of blind acceptance of a status quo dictated by the West, the people who are still resisting, who are still using words like “self determination of the people”, “independence”, “struggle”, “cause”, are being viewed as last Samurais.

I don’t want to romanticize or poeticize the current situation, but when I hear the new Arab Liberal Pro-Western rhetoric (and there are a lot these days) or the mainstream street, it really may seem that resistance, independence are old words that have no use these days, outdated, not the fashion anymore. And people talk about new means and new ways/instruments/tools to resolve these problems. Hold on a minute, I agree that any conflict is fought on many fronts, with a diversity of means, but the resistance of occupation cannot be fought differently.

Why should people resist differently?

Why are the occupied pushed to find new ways of resistance, when the tools and methods of exploitation have never changed, the bombs are more lethal, that is about it. The causes have not changed, the problems are the same, and occupation is occupation whether it happened in the 19th or in the 21st, the fact that we have internet these days does not replace the armed struggle when an army invades, when an army occupies, and when an army violates all rules and regulations towards another one. Just because technology has advanced and is providing us with new invented needs, these do not replace the basic rights, the basic needs, of groups and individuals, these do not change.

BEIRUT

In Beirut, yesterday, I felt that we are living a war. I was walking through the streets of Hamra, usually pretty quiet and empty at night, except for the restaurants and pubs. But last night, the streets were a little crowded with people taking walks. Most of them were the refugees who flee their homes. Since the forced migration is big in numbers (over 500,000 all over the country), and since many of the public schools, originally used as shelters, are packed and full to the maximum, people are being sheltered in very random locations, all over the city, underground parking structures, garages, small homes or old destroyed empty buildings, old closed cinemas, roofs, family friends.

Their situation is very hard, and the fact that they are displaced in a non-organized manner, it is even harder to assess, to do proper relief work, and organize everything. Finding these new shelters becomes harder, and usually by chance or by words of mouth. So at night, when the small rooms become hot and humid, the people are out in the streets breathing some air, and you feel that the city has changed in that way, in its social character.

The displacement is still taking place. The places we usually go to (outside the schools) are increasing in numbers. So we arrive to a building to give the food portions, only to find out that the number of familes has increased, or to tell us that the building next door is sheltering new families. The ideal situation is to call a centralized organism responsible for coordinating relief and emergency efforts, such as the high council for relief works, but unfortunately they are not as productive or effective as needed.

The challenges are very big on the ground. The food supplies, the mattresses, the medication are not really in shortage in the capital yet. The blockade is not total here, but people are talking about a week to 10 days time frame where things could start to be missing since the containers at sea cannot enter the ports as well as the planes.

However the problem we are facing is the exploitation of the prices from the suppliers and the merchants. They are abusing the situation, they know that they are essential to the relief efforts, and many of them are increasing their prices. The mattress (with a cover) that usually costs $7 is now costing $11 without a cover; in other places the price is as high as $20. The banks are holding the dollars, the merchants only want dollars and if you are stuck with Lebanese currency they exchange it at a higher rate.

So again, not in this time of hardship, the citizen is the one paying all the prices, his/her house is destroyed, he is paying more money for food, more money for public transportation, and the government again is incapable of protecting the citizen in these times.

The big institutions are profiting or the worst case balancing cost and profits and few are losing. So we also spend a lot of time looking for these institutions decent enough to keep their prices as low as possible and splitting also the cost between them and the consumer.

WAR AND RELIEF

I never lived this situation before. The changes are happening at a fast pace, too fast to absorb everything at once. The people are leaving, most of the foreigners have left, a lot of Lebanese also left, family members, friends, colleagues at work, or they found refuge in the mountains. You find yourself alone, in a city full of new people who arrived from the South and the Southern suburb of Beirut, where many Ground Zeros have taken place. The people are leaving.

The foreign workers are leaving. And you ask a question these days or you realize that the foreign workers are really important and in huge numbers in Lebanon. I mean you read about it, but once they start to leave you live these facts. These are the people working in homes, in gas stations, cleaning the streets. And they are slowly disappearing, and the garbage is piling up in the streets, a lot of gas stations are shut down.

I am sure many Lebanese people are looking for a job, in the same time, I never understood why such a poor and small country like Lebanon needs that many foreign workers, when its people have trouble finding jobs. This is not Dubai.

During war, also for some reason, the people become more transparent. Maybe it is because of the fear that washes away of the superficial layers, or because we are all exposed, our homes are exposed and unprotected, the streets, the lives of people, may be because when rockets come form the sky you stop seeing the sky as a protective envelope. Eeverything becomes open and exposed even the inside of us.

To be honest, Beirut is still safe compared to the South, to Saida, Tyre. There is a certain freedom to travel around the city, the entrances to the city are not blocked completely, the electricity is present not 24 hours, but still, and we are trying to help and support the people.

The relief works, are little bit disorganized, due mainly to the increasing and constantly changing problems and challenges. The lack of coordination between different groups is clear, and this is due to the lack of centralization. The Government, the ministry of social affairs, is not strongly present in the streets; they are more talking on TV.

And the problem is not political, really, it is not because of the fact that they are politically in disagreement with Hezbollah, but the Israeli aggression is devastating. The Israelis are experts in waging wars on populations. They arrived to the shores of Palestine in the early 20th century wearing military fatigues and they still didn’t take them off. This is a war on the people, and the war is very methodical, with a plan, it is not spontaneous at all. We feel it here on the ground.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND YOUTH

Civil society and the NGOs these days are doing a really good job in providing the structure and the organization for the relief and emergency works. They are at the heart of the relief work. Just like in past conflicts, embargoes, and occupations. They are active on the ground, very active, and they constitute the spinal cord of the humanitarian work in Lebanon. They learn to separate the humanitarian needs from the political issues. And they are focusing on the people. So despite all the difficulties faced here, the Youth, the University organizations, the NGOs, are responsive to the needs and they are trying to create a strong support here in Beirut, in Saida, and all over the country.

The people helping on streets are united, despite their political differences, their sects, their classes, and focused on the humanitarian aid. So for the raised funds, for the donations and we are in need of help in that way, please send to the NGOs on the ground.

SOUTH

This is where many of the Israeli massacres are taking place; these are the villages the refugees are fleeing. The South is closed off, no food, no medicine, no water can enter. Last night, around 10pm, while tuning the radio channels, we heard an Israeli message to the Southern villagers to leave their homes heading North. They were menacing the trucks and cars going to the South. They said they were going to hit any moving vehicle in the direction of the South. Yesterday, they had a mass grave in Tyre, where they buried over 80 civilians. Also, Tyre and Saida are embargoed and the basic needs are slowly decreasing, and the entrances to the city are blocked since the bridges were destroyed.

WHAT CAN YOU DO

RAISE FUNDS AND HELP US THRU THIS HARD SITUATION TO BE ABLE TO PROVIDE THE PROPER RELEIF AND EMERGENCY WORKS TO THE DISPLACED PEOPLE. Money would be the easiest way these days, thru Western Union, or via banks, since food supplies and medicine are hard to get to different areas due to the blockade. I will write an appeal to explain to you where the money is exactly going to, the different organizations.

DEMONSTRATE FOR PALESTINE AND LEBANON. If you are in the Arab countries, your own governments have responsibility towards the situation. The Arab silence is intolerable…. The Arab governments are providing a certain green light, and they need to be exposed. Prayers at this point are not enough, and we cannot just sit and watch and we have been doing for long long time. if you are in America or Europe, especially in America, part of your tax money is actually in use these days by the Israeli Offense Forces.

More on Giving Money Later

[posted originally on kabobfest]

Ah - the logic!

2006-07-23T10:35:00.000+03:00

Terry Roed Larson, the special envoy of the UN to implement 1559 which states that 425 has been implemented, has now acknowledged that there is occupied Lebanese lands.

In other words, the special envoy of the UN to implement UN Resolution 1559 which is based on the full liberation of Lebanese lands from Israeli occupation, now states that there is occupied Lebanese lands.

Do you follow?

UN Resolution 425 (passed 1978) demanded the immediate end to Israeli occupation of Lebanese lands. Due to the resistance (i.e. primarily Hezbollah), Israel withdrew from the majority of the Lebanese lands it had occupied in May 2000. The UN declared - incorrectly - that Israel had withdrawn from all Lebanese lands. False: Israel was still - and remains - occupying the Lebanese Cheba'a Farms. Using the excuse of an end to Israeli occupation in Lebanon, after lobbying by numerous right-wing forces, the UN then passed Resolution 1559 demanding, among other things, the disarmament of all "militias" in Lebanon. Some have interpreted this to mean the disarmament of Hezbollah. Now, the special envoy of the UN to Lebanon - sent to implement 1559 - has stated, acknowledged, that no, Israel continues to occupy Lebanese lands. So, the very basis of a resolution has been acknowledged to be false by the very institution that passed the resolution. Get it?

-Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org

This is not simply Israel's war on Lebanon...

2006-07-23T10:24:00.000+03:00

... this assault is also US's war on Lebanon.

An assistant to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert responded to a journalist saying: "If Olmert dares to notify Rice of his decision of a ceasefire, Rice would reply with the decision to stop US annual aids to Israel."

No comment.

-Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org

(Conservative) Map of Israeli Assaults

2006-07-23T09:21:00.000+03:00

This is a *conservative* map of Israeli assaults on the people and country of Lebanon.

- Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org

The Lines Are Down - in some places in Lebanon

2006-07-22T13:31:00.000+03:00

Report from northern Lebanon:

The Israelis have bombed the communication towers in Terbel in the North. Mobile phones are no longer operational here. (I just spoke - via msn - with a friend in the southern district of Beirut. His mobile is still operational)

The television signals are also down here. Specifically, the ECONET cable is down, so all of us with ECONET cable can't get access to TV.

The LBC communication signals have also been bombed.

So: mobile phone lines are no longer operational. TV news can no longer be followed.
We are left with radio. And newspapers.

The lucky homes in the area still have operational land/home lines. (We do here, at the University of Balamand. Some of my friends in Tripoli have operational land lines. Some do not.)

Some how, the internet is still working. Who knows for how long.

Thank you US/France/EU/England for supporting Israel's campaign of destruction. Thank you, most especially, to Rice and company for their refusal to have a ceasefire, for their never-ending hunger for further control, further domination, further imposition of their destructive (to all) policy.

-Rania Masri
El Koura (northern Lebanon), Lebanon
rania@ourwords.org

p.s.: Here is the major worry: Now that the Israelis have begun to cut communication lines - now they will really begin (continue) their terrorist assault on the innocents in the South, in Beirut, and in Ba'albeck. Most especially in the South. Scream your outrage to (try to) protect them.

Why else would the Israelis want to cut phone lines and destroy TV lines if not to isolate and create a black-out? And why would they - or anyone - want to create a black-out if not to commit (more) massacres?

p.p.s.: Any one still think this Israeli campaign of desruction is over 2 soldiers? If so, I have ocean-front property in Kansas to sell you.

-------

Update:
* I just spoke to someone in the southern disrict of Beirut via msm messenger. He has electricity. He has operational land lines and mobile phones. Quite inspiring, eh? I spoke to Tony, a friend in Bikfaya, and all is operational there as well.

"Enduring commitment to Lebanon?"

2006-07-22T09:56:00.000+03:00

The US State Department writes, in its evacuation letter to its citizens, "The U.S. Embassy reaffirms the firm, enduring and non-negotiable commitment of the United States to Lebanon and the Lebanese people."

Simultaneously, Condoleezza Rica declares - again and again - that no, the US does not want a ceasefire. The US instead wants to continue its work on building "democracy" in the Middle East. (ah - Iraq-style-democracy?)

Simultaneously, the US "Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis" (as reported in the NYT today) "The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration ... The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed ...Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike."

Simultaneously, the US is shipping bombs to Israel that destroy up to 40 meters of cement.

Simultaneously, Israel declares that in the past 24 hours Israel has hit more than 140 "targets" in Lebanon - with US weaponry.

It is clear. It is exceedingly clear.
This isn't simply Israel's war of choosing on Lebanon, the country and the people.
This is the US/Israel's war of choosing on Lebanon, the country and the people.

I would rather the US not have an 'enduring commitment' to Lebanon.

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

The calm before the storm

2006-07-22T09:33:00.000+03:00

Today, we tried to buy clothing.

At the Nasra School in Achrafieh, (currently housing 22 families) both a 1 1/2 month-old baby and a 7-month pregnant mother of three are in dire need of pajamas, and of the 10 boys only 3 have more than one pair of shorts. It’s July in Beirut – meaning hot and sticky – and only so many families can hand-wash their laundry per day. People are donating clothing, but somehow we keep ending up with bags full of plaid business suits dating back to some winter in the mid-80s.

Gasoline, like everything else in Lebanon, is becoming scarce – and expensive – and we didn’t want to have to drive very far. It’s also hard to predict what stores will be open where. The last few days in Beirut we’ve experienced very little bombing – Israel is not going to bomb Beirut while the foreigners are being evacuated on prime time TV – so a semblance of life has briefly returned to the city. There was even a traffic jam in Hamra, in West Beirut.

After two hours, we had driven through almost every commercial area of Beirut, and still hadn’t located affordable PJs or shorts. Clothing in Lebanon is over-priced at the best of times, a reflection of the lack of local industry here. Now most of the shopkeepers say that their suppliers can’t make deliveries, that they have more clothing, etc, in warehouses but can’t get to them. What's left is absurdly expensive.

A sickly miasma of the calm before the storm is settling everywhere. The price of powdered milk has sky-rocketed, up to $12 per 3 kilo bag. There are no more candles on the market. At the Sabra Coop (a supermarket chain in a low income neighborhood) I saw women sweeping entire shelves of tomato paste into their carts, then moving on to the pasta and doing the same. The pharmacies’ cabinets are empty. The lines at the gas stations are impossible. Pampers for babies, cleaning detergents, rice, salt… everything is becoming more expensive as supplies dwindle.

As for fresh fruits and vegetables – what’s left is for the rich. Lemons are 5 times more expensive than normal. All the roads leading from Lebanon’s farmlands (the Bekaa valley, the South) to Beirut are being bombed. And of course, all those ships coming in to evacuate the foreigners can’t manage to bring with them food or medicine.

Regardless of whatever the Israelis do to most of Lebanon (carpet bombing, land invasion, etc), Lebanon will be a humanitarian crisis. One that could have been avoided: had Israel not blockaded Lebanon and destroyed the country’s entire infrastructure; And one that could have been mitigated: had any country or international NGO refused to respect the blockade and brought in supplies.

Over 600,000 people have already been displaced, with hundreds of thousands stuck in the South trying to leave and too scared by the Israeli jets overhead to risk the roads. Lebanon’s population is only 4 million, so easily 25% of the Lebanese may end up refugees. Beirut doesn’t have the supplies or ability to help. There are rumors that the big international NGOs have sent in relief crews with insane budgets ($1 million for food, etc) and are unable to spend it. There’s very little left to buy.

Meanwhile, back at Nasra School, Imane the infant is sleeping in a t-shirt knotted at the bottom, pregnant Oum Hassan is wearing her husband’s clothing and not leaving their classroom at night, and the boys are getting filthy.

Back at my calm apartment, I stand in my kitchen, and worry.

Sonya Knox
West Beirut

2006-07-22T05:20:00.000+03:00

21 July 2006

Dear Mr Blair,

Since July 12th, Israel has flown 3000 air sorties into
Lebanon and has decimated the civilian infrastructure in
the name of "fighting terrorism".

The BBC is currently showing bombing of the south of
Lebanon, with bodies everywhere, rows of coffins, 100
people brought to one hospital, mass graves, and many,
many refugees.

Mr Blair, watching you and half of the Labour MPs in
Parliament stand by and refuse to call for a ceasefire --
while Israel massacres innocent civilians and creates
hundreds of thousands of new refugees -- is one of the
most profoundly ugly and utterly amoral things I have ever
had to watch a British Prime Minister do.

Prior to that, the most profoundly ugly and utterly amoral
thing I have ever had to watch a British Prime Minister
do took place two weeks ago, when you stood by and did
nothing as Israel did exactly the same thing in Gaza.

You have not just failed your voters and cast a stain on
the British people as a whole, you have negated humanity
itself.

Pick up the phone. Call Olmert. Tell him to stop. And then
distance yourself and your country from this genocidal
Middle Eastern reincarnation of Apartheid that calls
itself "Israel".

Nigel Parry
British Citizen
New York, NY

excerpts...

2006-07-21T16:04:00.000+03:00

I have lost track of the days. Lost track of the hours.

I take a break from the televised news, from the Lebanese newspapers, from the press calls, and from the all important calls to friends and family throughout the country... and scour the english news. (yes, this is the 'break')

here is an excerpt of the news. it also gives a glimpse of the horror we are suffering, some more than others, and the outrage we all feel against the silence of the majority outside of Lebanon

-Rania Masri

Third of Lebanon casualties are children, says UN

Irish Examiner
20 July 2007

Nearly one third of all casualties in the Lebanon-Israel
conflict have been children, according to the United
Nations' emergency relief co-ordinator, Jan Egeland.

Beirut suburbs reduced to rubble

By Charles Levinson
Agence France-Presse
21 July 2006

http://jordantimes.com/fri/news/news8.htm

BEIRUT -- Shoes, photo albums, teddy bears and a cash
register poke through the debris. What were once
eight-storey residential blocks are now rubble. The
devastation in Beirut's southern suburbs is complete, and
disturbing.

Nightmare in South grows worse

By Adnan El-Ghoul
The Daily Star
21 July 2006

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&
categ_id=2&article_id=74125

TYRE: A Lebanese family of five and two UN personnel
remained buried under the rubble of a two-story building
on Thursday after an Israeli strike Tuesday evening in the
eastern Tyre suburb of al-Hosh. [...]

A UNIFIL rescue team has so far been unable to come to the
aid of the family and the two UN workers, both from Ghana.

In addition, local UN officials said they had yet to
receive confirmation from the Israeli military regarding
assurances of safe passage from their Naquora
headquarters.

Battered Lebanon counts the cost of Israeli onslaught;
Infrastructure damage will cost 'billions of dollars to
repair'

By Brian Whitaker in Beirut
The Guardian
21 July 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1825670,00.html

The catastrophic scale of destruction inflicted on
Lebanon's infrastructure and economy by the Israeli
bombardment was becoming apparent yesterday as government
officials released details to the Guardian of the damage
so far. With countless homes wrecked, 55 bridges destroyed
and numerous roads made impassable, factories, hospitals
and airports hit and fuel storage facilities destroyed,
estimates of the reconstruction cost already run into
billions of dollars.

"We are asking for a humanitarian corridor to link Lebanon
with the rest of the world - and a corridor within Lebanon
to bring assistance to most of the villages in the south
which are cut off from the rest of the country," Ms [Nayla]
Mouawad [Social Affairs Minister] said. "They are poor villages and they are lacking
everything."

Israel preparing Lebanon ground offensive

By LEE KEATH
Associated Press
21 July 2006

[...]The U.N. estimated that about a half-million people have
been displaced in Lebanon, with 130,000 fleeing to Syria
and about 45,000 believed to be in need of assistance.

Invaders test ground defenses in South

By Leila Hatoum and Mohammed Zaatari
The Daily Star
21 July 2006

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=74137

BEIRUT: Israel has opened a 60-kilometer front along the
southern Lebanese border, from Naqoura to Majidiyeh, a
Lebanese security source said on Thursday. "This front is
to estimate Hizbullah's retaliation strength on the
ground," the source said. "The fighting zone is inside
Lebanese territory, which the UN itself has marked and
which Israel agrees is Lebanese."

----

"I want to go home"

2006-07-21T13:49:00.000+03:00

Conversations with refugees in Baysour, Mount Lebanon
Malak Khaled
July 19, 2006
rania@ourwords.org

Baysour is a small village in Mount Lebanon. Its area is around 6 square-km, just 20 km away from Beirut. The village is not considered to be touristic, but this July, unusually, it is over loaded with 2000 visitors. Yet, this number is not of tourists, it is of the refugees coming from the South and the southern suburb of Beirut.

The village has only 1800 houses for its 9000 dwellers, and it has opened all its doors to host the refugees that increase daily. The secondary school of the village, the center of the popular cultural and sportive committee of Baysour, and another newly opened center have all opened to absorb the growing number of refugees. The municipality itself is a center to register the refugees and distribute them into hosting homes. A very touching decision was made since the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon: No one in the village is allowed to rent their property to the refugees. All the refugees shall be hosted, and none will pay a penny. The head of the municipality, Amin Mlaayeb tells us, “We are not blackmailing our people; we are supporting their sommoud (fortitude) in the way we can.”

But this is not the only way this municipality is helping. Daily, 200 bread packages are being bought from “el Mrayjieh” and water is distributed to the three refugees centers in the village.

“Just today,” said Esmat Mlaayeb, a member in the municipality, “200 mattresses were bought to be distributed among the refugees.” He explains to us that the municipality is cooperating with the Communist Party, the Syrian Nationalist Social Party, and the Progressive Socialists Party to provide the refugees with their essential needs. A medical committee has been established to check on the refugees’ medical needs, especially the ones with chronic diseases. All cleaning materials are brought to them daily to prevent the spread of diseases.

As we leave the municipality building, a vehicle filled with mattresses stops at the entrance to begin the distribution to the needed families.

Fifty-five refugees are in the center of the popular cultural and sportive committee of Baysour. We visit them. At the door, we see an old woman, Nayfee Hassoun from the southern suburb of Beirut, sitting and crying. We ask her about her house.

“Before you ask me of my house, ask me about my family. I know nothing about my family. I had been visiting my brother’s house when the Israeli attack started. They had to leave and took me with them. Since then, I know nothing about the safety of my children and family.”

Halima Younes from Kfar Hatta in the south tells us that she came with her husband, her two sons and their families. She still has 4 children with their families living in the southern suburb of Beirut, in the area that has been totally destroyed by the Israeli bombings in the last five days.

Halima says she wouldn’t be so sad if her children were killed. “I know they would be martyrs for the freedom of our country.” But the mother’s heart overcomes her belief, and she starts crying loudly.

Her husband interferes with a tear in his eye. “We want Hezbollah to go on. We have no more to lose but our dignity, and this is something we won’t let anyone take from us.”

Their grand daughter, Marwa, looks at us with sad eyes.
“Why are you sad,” I ask her.
“I want to go home.”
“Why aren’t you home?”
“Israel is bombing a lot.”
“What do you feel when you hear the bombing,” I ask her.
“I feel so afraid. The sound is very very very loud.”
“And what do you do when you feel afraid?
“I cry, and I go to Mama”
“Do you feel afraid here?”
“No. Here, I am not afraid, but I was afraid at home.”
“You know, there are kids being bombed in Israel now, you know who bombs at them?
“Yes, the moqawamee (the national resistance)”
“Do you want the moqawamee to stop? They might be feeling afraid too?
“I want Israel to stop bombing at us first”
“You don’t want their kids to feel afraid like you?”
“No, being afraid is so bad. I feel like my heart is so big that it is coming out of my mouth. I don’t want anyone to feel this wary. Fear is bad, so bad, tell them to stop making us afraid.”
“Whom do you want me to tell?”
“Tell Israel, if they bomb at us. HezbAllah will defend us by attacking them. If Israel stops, HezbAllah stops, right?”

I don’t know what to answer this purity of logic, of viewing things with such accuracy from this 8 year-old girl.

I run to another question
“What shall you do first when you go back home?”
“I want to help mama, and I want to go back to school”

We go into the center. The rooms there are divided by pieces of clothes. Approximately 12 families are there. They are all using one bathroom.

We enter one “room.” The family is eating potato and bread. A woman, from Bourj Al Barajnee, a neighborhood within the southern suburb of Beirut, says, “We are ten here. We came on Thursday [a week ago]. We don’t know anything about our homes. We can’t call anyone to know. Ever since we came, [the volunteers] are trying to provide us everything we need, may God bless them, but we want to go back. We are most welcomed here, but a person doesn’t feel relief except at home.”

We leave her wishing that these bad times will end soon.

The refugees tell us that Ali, a 9-year old boy, from Bent Jbeil in the South has just stopped crying.

I ask Ali, “why were you crying?”
“I wanted to go with my dad.”
“Where is your dad?”
“He went to Sour [Tyre] to bring my uncle’s wife and her kids.”
“Are you afraid, ya Ali?”
“Yes. I don’t want my dad to die. They are killing people on the roads.”
“Were you afraid when you were at home?”
“No, I wasn’t. I used to go up the roof to see where the planes go to bomb and then we would see the fire, but dad was with us.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Yes, I want to go home with my dad. I won’t be afraid from the bombing when he is with us.”
“Do you know why there is so much bombing?”
“Yes, Israel is crazy for its two soldiers that Hassan Nasrallah [secretary general of Hizballah] took to exchange them with our prisoners in Israel.”
I look at Ali in the eye. I tell him that I came from Sour yesterday. The road will be long, but your dad will come back, I promised.
His grandmother heard this, and she started asking about the road: how long it would take? Is it dangerous? Is there any bombing?

Later that night, I was told Ali’s Dad was back, safe and sound with the rest of his family.

There are also refugees from Sryfa, the village to the east of Sour, a village that was bombed severely and in which a new massacre was committed by the Israeli Army this morning. Almost 35 people from one family in this village are in Baysour’s secondary school with almost another 350 people from other villages in the south.

A member of the Sayed family speaks the words between her tears: “We have been thrown back 20 years. We see the bombing on our homes and we don’t know if there will be a ceiling to shelter us when we go back home. We have left every thing behind: our planting is gone this year; we don’t eat if we don’t sell the seasonal harvest.”

She stops to release her tears. She suddenly stops crying and sends her regards to Hassan Nasrallah. “Don’t stop the resistance until you get to all you want. We have lost so much and we don’t have much anymore.”

A lot of the people around make supportive gestures. A man asks me if I believe the “Sayed” and I can’t but agree with them that Hassan Nasrallah is a person whose word is trusted.

Fatima is from Kaferkella, the village just across the “blue line” that marks the borders with occupied Palestine. She speaks to us with a very sure tone: “We weren’t able to visit our village for more than 20 years, but the moqawamee made it possible for us to go back. Now Israel wants to take our lands back, but the moqawamee won’t let that happen.”

Her whole family came on Thursday, but they know nothing about her brother who lives in the southern suburb of Beirut.

As we go on to interview more people, we hear the refugees talking about the political solution. We come closer to them to listen. They ask for our opinion, but we prefer to listen, telling them we are interested to know their points of view to tell the world.

“We can’t accept the disarming of the moqawamee. It defends us against Israel. It is our dignity and our freedom. We can’t think of ourselves without the moqawamee”

“Even if Israel left [the occupied Sheba’a Farms] and released all our prisoners, we would still want the moqawamee because Israel doesn’t stick to any word or decision; only the moqawamee frightens Israel and stops it from interfering in Lebanon.”

“This war is no more about the two soldiers that the strongest army in the Middle East couldn’t protect, though Nasrallah had always been threatening to kidnap from this army to exchange with the rest of our prisoners still in Israel. It is about the glory of this coward army and all the lies of the state of Israel.”

As we leave, a young man comes by to tell us: “Tell the world. We are here because we want to be here, not because we are out of choices. I just came from Germany for the summer vacation and all this started.” I ask if he has the German nationality. He says he does and he could have left, but neither he, nor his German wife want to leave this country that they love in such circumstances. His voice was so proud when he told us that he asked his wife to leave to her country, but she refused preferring to stay with “our family in Lebanon that is now my country too”

We great them and say goodbye, hoping that the next time we see them will be in their villages in the free, strong Lebanon, protected by the resistance.

-------

Broummana Diary

2006-07-21T04:49:00.000+03:00

My Lebanese friend and I spent our final day together in Broummana playing a number of roles: amateur military experts, relief convoy coordinators (for his relatives), analysts of the regional political dynamic, examiners of the country’s domestic political situation, and monitors of the television coverage of the war. We also checked up on our circle of friends, who were in various places. A lot of the conversation focused on Hizbullah, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and the Shi’a community in Lebanon. When this war is summed up on the news, in 30 or fewer seconds, you hear a lot about “terror” and crap like that. The war’s real political repercussions, however, involve the Lebanese state and the country’s sects, if you want the use the standard lexicon of politics here. Many wonder about the implications for the political regime and the ease with which sectarian conflict could erupt once again.

My friend described his trip to my apartment, which he made by catching several shared taxis (services), from (Muslim) west Beirut to (Christian) east Beirut and then up to (Christian) Broummana. Of course, they’re not pure sectarian-ethnic neighborhoods and towns, but those are the majorities. My friend noted bitterly that the tension of the war got progressively lighter as he left behind one side and went to the other. “In Hamra, people were subdued as they walked around. Then you move through Ashrafieh, and things get more relaxed. Then the (Christian) suburbs, and people seem to be a little animated even, and then you come up here, where all these people are walking around outside.” Before the fighting, tourists from everywhere had flooded Broummana; many left and many more, mainly displaced or fleeing Lebanese, have taken their places in the resort town’s many hotels and furnished apartments. Of course, members of all sects have left or lost their homes this month, but I am assuming that the Shi’a form the overwhelming majority of the displaced in the country.

Some friends of mine and I have recently joked about what we call the “neo-Shi’a.” (my profound apologies to Leo Strauss). By this we mean those Shi’a in Lebanon who, after the political tension resulting from Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination, feel threatened by the anti-Shi’a climate among other groups. Hence, such people identify more strongly as Shi’a, or have become more inclined to support Hizbullah’s policies than those of other Lebanese groups. This climate of anti-Shi’a feeling has grown sharply, although it predates recent problems, and has several sources. My friend from Beirut’s southern suburbs is not a partisan of Hizbullah, but the Maronite- and Sunni-dominated political class of the pre-civil war period, and their heirs today, don’t provide any guide for the future, as far as he’s concerned. “All of those idiots, ever since 1943, were so famous for believing in the saying ‘Lebanon’s strength lies in its weakness’,” as if opting out of the Arab-Israeli conflict was the guarantee of security and prosperity. “What a joke. That’s been proven so wrong.”

“Air defense – it’s air defense,” my friend concluded. “Look at Hizbullah. It’s been a week so far and Israel can’t beat them on the ground. Unless there’s a big invasion, but that will be costly for them. So they rely on air power, and even then the missiles keep heading toward Israel. If only we had a proper missile defense system, we wouldn’t be in the condition we are today, totally open to attack. After the civil war, Rafiq al-Hariri’s reconstruction involved a foundation of tourism, Gulf tourism, cabarets and all that. Fine, but don’t you want to protect these tourists?”

“This kind of policy is great if you’re an island in the Pacific Ocean,” I said.

“Or Monte Carlo,” my friend responded. “But not here. We need air defense. We have a $40 billion debt, because of all that waste from reconstruction. If we had taken $4 billion of that and gone to the black market, the whores’ market, whatever, and just bought some second- or third-rank air defense system, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. This means you need to have a strong state.”

I wondered what the country’s other sects would think about the idea of building a strong state, one that might limit their influence as socio-political institutions, and see the Shi’a possibly gain pre-eminence, as the biggest sect.

After my friend finally made it back to Hamra, his new refuge, I prepared for my departure via the US Embassy’s mysterious evacuation process. On my way to the port, I dropped off my car for safekeeping at a repair garage owned by friends of mine, Christian Lebanese. I spend a lot of time at this garage, in a Christian suburb of Beirut, talking politics and other matters with a group of guys who hang out there. With very few exceptions, they are Maronite Christians, and are around my age, the generation that came of age during the second, nastier, post-1982 phase of the civil war. They were much too late to catch Lebanon’s golden age. I am particularly close to one member of this “garage group,” a union leader. He was leaving for an urgent appointment with the prime minister in Beirut, so we rushed through our goodbyes and assessed the situation. I told my Maronite friend that as I expected, my Shi’i friend from the southern suburbs ended up staying with me, for three nights at it turned out. Since this war began, I have encountered more than one comment, in Christian areas of Lebanon, of tacit support for Israel’s attacks and the need to “clean up” aspects of this country, whether it’s Hizbullah, the southern suburbs, or the Shi’a.

My Maronite friend asked what my Shi’i friend thought about the conflict. I told him, summing it up as a disagreement over tactics, that the war was proving that Lebanon needed to have a functioning air defense system. I repeated the part about spending $4 billion of the $40 of debt on decent weaponry. My Maronite friend’s eyes lit up, as he nearly shouted his agreement. He began talking about the need for a strong state, and telling me about his days in the Lebanese Forces militia, when the Lebanese Air Force was an active ally in bombing the other side’s positions. This demonstrated the value of having a state, a functioning army, an air force, an air defense system, little details like that. His next statement made my hair stand on end. “The whole problem is this ridiculous saying that ‘Lebanon’s strength lies in its weakness’.” I asked him to repeat himself, I was that stunned, and told him how my Shi’i friend felt the same way. “But if you’re going to have this strong, and stronger state,” I asked, “what’s going to be the role of the Shi’a?” My friend began rocking back and forth, as if to prepare an answer, and then was reminded that the prime minister was waiting. “We’ll have to talk about this further,” he said as he raced off. I sat down with another member of the garage group, another “typical” Maronite Christian, who began to describe Israel’s military failures during the first week; he said that all this bombing of trucks and certain other places had demonstrated that their intelligence was bad. “They’re lost,” he said. “They can’t even get across the border on land against Hizbullah, unless they have a real invasion, and this is going to be costly for them.”

Marlin Dick, Broummana, Lebanon

Out of Beirut: Exit Stamp July 17 2006

2006-07-20T18:12:00.000+03:00

My Lebanese exit stamp reads July 17th; it was supposed to read August 4th. It wasn’t till the next day, Tuesday July 18th that I arrived with the second flight of the Dutch evacuation convoy via Aleppo at the military airbase in Eindhoven. My friends and family were relieved to see me “out of Beirut”, and escaping the violence. The flurry of smses with these 3 simple words “are you out?” keep coming in till today, July 20th. It is strange how an exit can take on different connotations, what is deemed a lucky escape in one context, is an artistic export product in another: “Out of Beirut” is the name of an exhibition recently held at the museum of Modern Art in Oxford. I had made a mental note to ask my artist friends in Beirut to borrow the catalogue from them. There was no time. Nor was there time to say goodbye to friends; it all happened so quickly.

I had only registered with the Dutch embassy on Friday July 14th; noone was picking up the phone so J. and I decided to go there. Very few people there, just one obviously distressed Dutchman of Lebanese origin. “I haven’t been back since 26 years, and now this”, he tells me. The lady at the counter copies my passport and asks me for phone numbers. She reassures me that now we have only reached “Phase I”, and that no evacuation plans are being made. She advises me to stay in Beirut, and not attempt to go to Syria by myself, since the embassy cannot vouch for my safety. Fine, I wasn’t thinking of leaving to Syria, despite the many phone calls of Swiss friends urging me to join them just across the border in Tartus.

In the meanwhile the situation keeps escalating, and bombs keep pounding infrastructure, the South, and the Dahiyeh; the casualties mount. We move from Qasqas to a friend’s place in Achrafieh. By now electricity is on and off. We see the first refugees wandering around bewildered in the streets of well-to do Achrafieh. Whenever electricity is on, we are glued to the TV. I joke that the only new Arabic word I learned this time around is “khabar ajil” (breaking news). One wonders when news stops being news, how long it will take the world this time to turn its head away with bored media saturation; how many more atrocities have to be committed before something can be viewed as “news”. There’s a paralysing silence on the part of the international community, especially the EU: no official or strong condemnation of the disproportionate use of force, absolutely nothing.

I am in the middle of an interview with Belgian national radio Sunday night, fulminating at how biased the media coverage is, when an sms of the Dutch embassy shows up on my phone: “Evacuation at 5.30 am at the Dutch embassy; bring money, passport, food, one piece of luggage.” I panic: to stay/to go; how can I say goodbye to my friends? I only have hours. In the middle of my panic someone from Foreign Affairs in The Hague calls me. His voice is so calm and friendly, as if he rehearsed the words and tone to perfection. He inquires whether I had received the sms, whether I was fine and had any additional questions. “Is the crossing to Syria safe”, I ask him. It takes him a few – obviously very composed moments of silence to answer me. “ Well, we cannot guarantee that.” “So the only thing safeguarding us, are a few flags attached to the buses?” “Well, yes, but don’t worry. Do you have any further questions, Ma’am?”

July 17th, 5.30am. J. and I make it to the Dutch embassy. The scene is surprisingly orderly. This has certainly changed over the past few days, as more and more foreign nationals are trying get out of the country. While queuing up to register I meet my friend Raed, an artist and musician, but now free-lancing as a cameraman for foreign TV stations. I break down in sobs; he tries to calm me down…to no avail. “We will meet again soon, Nat, in Amsterdam or in Beirut, inshallah.” I wish I could believe him. Later on, I chide myself for crying: I don’t have a right to tears, with people’s lives being torn apart, their houses and businesses destroyed, their loved ones gone. Where on earth do I get the arrogance to weep? My goodbye to J. is very short. “See you soon”, he says as he kisses me. I feel a pang; time has become suspended. Who knows when “soon” will be. We were supposed to leave together on August 4th for a holiday in Holland, now my travel companions are about 250 other Dutch nationals, many of them carrying dual citizenship.

We only manage to leave around 7.45 a.m. The coordinators had decided last minute that probably it would be a better idea to attach the Dutch flags on the roofs of the busses, rather than have them in front. Well yes, the roof is definitely a better idea for aerial vision than the windscreen. The whole flag operation takes about an hour. The irony of it all: only a week before had we smiled upon the Lebanese passion for football during the World Cup, and the exuberant flag parade in the city of favourite teams (Italy, Brazil, Germany, you name it). We had joked how easy and playful the bearing of a flag was: if your team loses, then you just pick another. How exclusive and devoid of choice the bearing of a flag has become now: it can mean your ticket out, and your only guarantee of safety, or it means you cannot get out and are fully exposed to the spoils of war.

We slowly make our way out of Beirut, passing familiar places. Many people weep; it’s heart-breaking. Once in the bus, I start hearing stories. One Dutch woman, fluent in Arabic, had come to the embassy with absolutely nothing…just the clothes she was wearing. She had fled her house in Dahiyeh with her kids, not knowing whether it was still standing. Another family had been living in Lebanon for over 5 years; doing relief work in the Palestinian camps. The decision to leave was extremely hard, but they just didn’t want their kids to go through the trauma. And then of course the Lebanese-Dutch, who leave family and friends behind. But there are also a bunch of back-packers and tourists who are pragmatically sober and unaffected about it: they aren’t leaving anyone behind. My neighbour turns out to be something of a distant colleague; he’s an art professor teaching at the art academy in Enschede where I did a few guest lectures. He just left his Lebanese girlfriend behind; they only managed to have one day together before she moved out of the Southern suburbs, to the safety of mountains. The trip takes ages, in Tripoli we see the bombed out police station or army HQ, I cannot remember. At the border we hear Tripoli was bombed again, moments after we passed it. We get held up 5 hours at the border, which seems nothing in comparison with the 9 hours of the Italians, the previous day. I see refugees pushing wheelbarrows filled with suitcases over the border; people just clutching flimsy plastic bags, with no possessions whatsoever. The line of busses and cars keeps getting longer and longer, the Lebanese as the Syrian officials have no way of coping with this. How can bureaucracy matter in times like these? At the Dutch embassy in Beirut they had distributed copies of the exit forms to us. The Lebanese officials didn't accept the copies; they wanted us to fill in the proper forms. More delay and agitation in the heat of the midday sun. Then the Syrians make a fuss about the transit visa…I become exasperated: it was better in Beirut. We finally make it to Aleppo around 8.30pm. More bureaucracy, this time Dutch. They flew in an evacuation team. The boys of the Dutch “Koninklijke Marechaussee” (the Royal Constabulary) look fresh and cleanly-shaven. We on the other hand, are exhausted, hungry and dirty. At 3.30am, I am finally allowed to board the second plane to the military base of Eindhoven. The first plane took the elderly, families with small children and pregnant women. The Dutch have chartered a Turkish charter with a Turkish crew, since it was impossible to get a Dutch carrier on such sort notice due to the holiday season. The hostesses are made up and dressed impeccably; they smell of expensive French perfume. It seems so absurd to me. They beam benevolent smiles upon us as we scramble for seats. 4,5 hours later we land in Eindhoven. “Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Eindhoven. Thank you for flying Freebird Airlines; we wish you a pleasant stay.” The protocols of decorum seem absolutely grotesque when thinking about what’s happening in Lebanon. Everything seems trivial and meaningless, and even words have become reduced to rubble.

Nat Muller

check this out...

2006-07-20T17:52:00.000+03:00

Excellent article

* Lebanon... What I pity. By Samah Idriss, Editor in Chief of Al Adab Magazine.

-Rania Masri
rania@ourwords.org

Short conversations

2006-07-20T12:55:00.000+03:00

Besieged

I have received word from an Australian-Lebanese family in Rmayleih. They are trapped. So it seems. There is no evacuation ship from the southern ports of Tyre (Sour) or Saida. The main road to Beirut has been destroyed in two places. Where can they go?

[Update #1: they are now on the road. To Beirut. Taking a very long way.]
[Update #2: The French are evacuating their citizens from Sour. What about the Australians? ... Come to think of it: what about the millions of Lebanese whose only citizenship is to this besieged country?]

"We were at peace"

A colleague stopped by yesterday (to give me the cat of an American who is evacuating - a refugee cat). We talked, naturally, about politics. She said that we were at peace before, we were doing fine before.

Who is the we, I asked her. The south has never been at peace. Since 1948, the city of Nabatiyeh has not had one week of rest from Israeli assault. Not one week of peace since 1948. We in Lebanon have to decide: is the south a part of this country or not? Do we only celebrate the victory of liberation in the south, and turn our eye to the regular Israeli attacks on the south?

We have not been at peace.

This is a not a war of our choosing. This is not a war of Lebanon's choosing. This is a war of Israel's choosing. This is Israel's war on Lebanon - all of Lebanon, Christian and Muslim, city and rural communities, roadways and hospitals, homes and factories, mosques and churches. All of Lebanon.

"We are not targeting civilians!"

In a debate with an Israeli blindly supportive of the Israeli government yesterday, he said that Israel is not killing civilians. It is not intending to kill civilians. It is all a matter of intention.

So, all these hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed -- they have been killed "accidentally." Their homes must have been destroyed by accident, their schools, their hospitals, their churches and mosques, their cars as they try to escape on the roads -- all of these attacks have been unintentional.

hmm..

So, if with all the military precision that Israel has, if with all the most up-to-date military weaponry supplied (with US taxpayer money) by the country with the most advanced weaponry (US), Israel still continues to "accidentally" kill civilians, hundreds and counting, then perhaps we should all be demanding a disarmament of the state of the Israel. They seem not to know how to use military weapons.

Let’s disarm both sides.
No one-way disarmament should be allowed.

The chicken and the fish in Lebanon are Hezbollah fighters

A fish farm in Hermel has been destroyed.
A chicken farm in Zahle has been targeted and destroyed.

It seems the Israeli army is frightened of Lebanese chicken and Lebanese fish.

They have also attacked a milk factory in Zahle. Yes, Lebanese milk can be quite dangerous as well.

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon
rania@ourwords.org

Attention: All Australians!

2006-07-20T10:35:00.000+03:00

Attention All Australians!

The Israeli government has stated that it will not guarantee the safe evacuation of Australians.

Australian families are besieged in Lebanon.
Stuck in villages that are being bombed - with destroyed roads all around them.

What is the Australian government doing?

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon
rania@ourwords.org

Tales and Encounters

2006-07-19T23:44:00.000+03:00

Barbar Take-Out on Spears Street

“Yesterday, this guy ordered a falafel sandwich. I was just about to roll up the sandwich when he makes me stop. ‘Wait, wait! I don’t want any parsley with it!’ he says. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘there’s no more parsley left in Beirut.’

“Is there really somebody who chooses to eat their falafel without parsely?”

Fatima in Nasra School, Achrafieh

Fatima is 10. Her head is shaved, because the whole family got lice at the first school they stayed in, coming up from the South.

“Hello, what’s the situation?” Fatima asks, holding my phone upside down to her ear.

“This is Fatima Hashem, reporting live from Beirut. We have one hundred people here in the school. They’re sleeping on the floor, on mattresses. Last night I couldn’t sleep because it was hot. So I went outside. Then Mama came out and told me not to go outside anymore at night. So tonight I get to sleep next to the window.”

Walid, volunteer at Nasra School in Achrafieh

“My uncle is staying with us. He had a building in Tyre, and three stores in the same center in Dahieh. First they bombed his building in Tyre, then the same day they bombed the building in Dahieh, and it collapsed. ‘It’s ok,’ he told me, ‘I still have all the keys’.”

Oum Walid in Nasra School, Achrafieh

I’m sorting donated clothing. Of 15 bags of clothing, half isn’t usable. Oum Walid, mother of four, is heavily veiled.

Oum Walid: “Do you have anything long?”
I hold up a woman’s business suit.
“No, something I would wear.”
I find tracksuit pants and matching top.
“No, something suitable for me, like a jalibaya” she says.
We search and search. Finally, Oum Walid asks, “all these clothes, where are they from?”
“From the neighborhood,” I say. (Achrafieh is a Christian part of town.)
“Nevermind,” says Oum Walid. “We’re lucky they didn’t give us all their miniskirts, as well.”

Hassan in Nasra School, Achrafieh, talking to volunteer Yehyia

Yehyia: “We’re going to get some toys. What do you want?”
Hassan: “Get a soccer ball. And tennis. And dolls for the girls. And a rifle.”
Yehyia: “A rifle? Why?”
Hassan: “Because Baba is worried because he left his behind.”

Mahmoud, volunteer at Karm el Zeitoun School, Achrafieh

“There’s this little girl, Zeinab. She acts like the boss of everyone, always dragging her little sister around. So I was leaving yesterday, and I told her to take care of herself, and to take care of her sister.

“She tells me: ‘No, you take care of us and I take care of my sister’.”

Hussein in Nasra School, Achrafieh

“My fiancé just called. It’s the first time since three days ago. Her parents took her with them to the Bekaa. We were only engaged for 2 months. They left the same day the Israelis bombed the road in Chtaura. I spent three days not knowing anything. And now she calls. And after 2 minutes, her uncle takes the phone. He wants to know if there are any dollars left in Beirut.”

Ali in West Beirut

Ali is 4. He just moved in next door. We met for the first time in front of the elevator. “I’m going downstairs!” he announced.
“Really? Me, too,” I said.
“Baba said not to use the elevator!” So we walk the stairs together.
“Are you going outside?” I ask.
“Baba said not to use the elevator, not to play on the balcony, and not to go outside,” he says.
“So what are you doing now?”
“I’m going up and down the stairs!”

Fatima in Nasra School, Achrafieh

“I’m going to call Baba,” she says. She takes my phone, and dials randomly on the back of the it. “Five, five, six, one, seven, two – That’s his real number,” she tells me.

“Hallo, Baba, this is your daughter Fatima.

“Is the store still open in Shebaa? Are you coming to Beirut soon? Make sure you stay on the small roads.

“And Baba! The government called. They’re getting us a new apartment. It has four balconies, so you don’t have to go outside to smoke anymore.”

Sonya Knox
July 18 - 19, 2006

2006-07-19T12:28:00.000+03:00

After the fighting began the other day, I called a friend of mine, a Lebanese Shi’i, who lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut. As I expected, his situation wasn’t that good, so he’s up here staying with me now, up in Broummana, in the mountains. On the evening I realized that my friend was actually going to stay with me, I panicked and ran to the store, to get one essential item that I would need, a bottle of arak. Yes, Virginia, there is a non-Hizbullah Shi’i population in the southern suburbs, which have been getting blasted to shit the last few days by the Israeli air force. I picked up my friend in Broummana, the summer resort town where I live, a place that until now has been free of the bombing. Of course, we hear the Israeli warplanes go by from time to time. I asked him if there was anything special we needed to pick up before going to my apartment. I told him I had food and stuff like that. “Well,” he ventured, “do we need a bottle of anything?”

“Like what?” I responded.

“Like, whiskey?”

“Arak?”

“Good enough.”

My friend and I are the same age, just over 40. We poured two big glasses of arak and sat in the living room, with the tv news on in the background. For him, Hizbullah miscalculated, and should have thought long and hard before getting the entire country involved in such an event, with potentially or already disastrous consequences. On the other hand, he continued, most of Lebanon’s other politicians are a bunch of clowns, or worse… the ones who might gain domestically if Hizbullah is eliminated politically. As we talked, a friend of his called, and told him, jokingly, “Hey, you’re a journalist, spread the word that Hassan Nasrallah is hiding in Solidere (downtown Beirut). That way, the Israelis will bomb it.” The late Rafiq al-Hariri and the other groups who oversaw the country’s post-civil war reconstruction, with the downtown area as its centerpiece, were not universally respected, due to corruption, waste and massive public debt, among other things.

When the fighting began, my friend took turns sleeping at his home in the suburbs and at his office in the Beirut neighborhood of Hamra, where he works at a newspaper (not on the local desk). His original plan was to go to his village in the Bekaa on Monday, but we woke up late and then heard the news that the Israelis were bombing villages that are adjacent to his. We took turns on my computer, checking the internet, and then switched to watching tv news when there was electricity. He changed his plans, and will head back to Hamra soon; it’s one of the places that hasn’t been bombed, although the nearby lighthouse and port of Beirut have been struck.

We joke about the “club of the displaced” that we’ve formed. I might be evacuated soon, but the US embassy hasn’t made the official announcement about time and place. Of course, the two of us are in better shape than the casualties, or those who have been directly exposed to bombing. Along Lebanon’s coastline are mountain ranges, and those who can have literally headed for the hills, even though it doesn’t guarantee protection. Few places are truly safe. The capital and its suburbs have been targeted, along with other major cities, second-rank towns, and villages. And the roads between them. And the cars traveling on them. And so on and so on. Gas stations. Milk factories. Trucks carrying flour. Religious centers. Whatever.

The two of us are in a mountain resort town, trying to use a bunch of Gulf Arabs, perhaps unbeknownst to them, as “human shields.” The Israelis wouldn’t dare hit this town, which has some Saudi, Kuwaiti and other tourists, would they? My friend and I went to a local outdoor restaurant for lunch, relaxing as we sat among a bunch of well-to-do locals, Lebanese fleeing from the fighting, and Arab and foreign tourists. We wouldn’t get hit here, right? It’s not that civilians aren’t getting killed. It’s that for now, you’d have to be in the southern suburbs, the south, the Bekaa, or on a major road or facility like a port, to really up your chances. Did I mention gas stations? Then again, you could be told to leave your home in two hours and then get shot down on the road because no one, including the United Nations, gives you shelter. But being surrounded by tourists does make you feel better.

We were watching al-Jazeera when it began running footage of what was originally thought to be an Israeli plane shot down over Beirut (it wasn’t, although I hear different versions of what the object was). Someone at another table remarked, “That can’t be a plane,” as if to negate the possibility. “It’s only half a plane.” Then where the hell’s the other half, I wondered. I called another journalist friend of mine, who works for Hizbullah’s television station, al-Manar, and asked how he was doing. He said that he was just taking it day by day, trying to cover his two jobs – the other one is at a local newspaper. He’s not a member of Hizbullah, either. Yes, Virginia… “That’s my building, where I live,” my friend at the restaurant pointed and told me, when the television showed smoke rising in his part of the southern suburbs.

My friend has been calling his relatives throughout the day to see how they’re doing, up in the Baalbek area. We have been coordinating, by phone, various ways to get his nephews and nieces, along with mothers, over to Syria, where it’s safe for now. He tells his friends and relatives he’s staying with an American, which elicits various reactions. His parents, who know me, told him, “That’s the safest thing! Good work!” A female Syrian friend, who doesn’t know me, and who offered to arrange housing for the family members if they make it to Damascus, had a similar positive reaction, and then giggled, “Kill him and then get yourself over here!”

“Okay, okay!” he shouted as told me the story and we broke into laughter.

This violence could be stopped, in a second, if the White House, and the larger Washington establishment, acted on the basis of the reality of the region, and not cartoonish notions. Start with the idea that people here do not wake up and the morning and start screaming “death to Israel.” During days like these, the first thing they might do is ask “Where is Israel bombing today?” Israel can bomb much of Lebanon, to put pressure on Hizbullah, as if the entire population is a bunch of hostages to the party. The mass public will reject the resistance, the thinking goes, rising up against their evil jailors. The problem is that these “hostages” feel differently – it’s not a bunch of thieves holed up with the employees of a bank like in a movie, for Christ’s sake. Some support Hizbullah, others don’t like Hizbullah but dislike Israel much more, some want another strategy of resistance to be used, and others have no sympathy for the party, or resistance in general. But this tactic of waiting for anti-Hizbullah intifada will create division, and not consensus.

In today’s Devils’ Dictionary, an “enemy of peace” is someone who doesn’t like the terms set down by Israel and/or the US for a regional settlement. They’re also called “hard-liners,” whatever that means. If someone wants to take your house, and not pay you a fair sum, you’re a hard-liner if you refuse, I guess. Elsewhere, it’s called defending your interests. A century ago, Ambrose Bierce defined a democracy as a country where the newspapers are pro-American. The US might get such a democracy in Lebanon, and sweep the real problems under the rug, until the next explosion. My friend is over 40, and an ex-communist who is probably not going to be radicalized by this experience and join some armed group. But we’re not hanging out with young men in their 20s, who aren’t members of Hizbullah, and have been displaced, or know people who have killed during this onslaught. Their turn will come later, I suppose. Perhaps my friend’s even younger nephews and nieces will grow up remembering that when Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers to trade for Lebanese and Palestinian detainees and prisoners, Israel responded by bombing, almost exclusively, civilian targets in Lebanon. Probably several thousand by now. And the Israelis have killed more than two hundred civilians, supposedly for a bungled outing by a military patrol.

My friend and I talked about our extended circle of friends, and what they were doing these days, whether inside or outside the country. I sent an email to one of them, a Syrian who lives in New York City. We all studied in Damascus together, in the 1980s, when I was learning Arabic. In the email, I told our Syrian friend in New York that the refugee situation here was getting bad, and that our Lebanese friend was now staying with us, adding, “Wish you were here.” He thought it was a joke. When my Syrian friend called, I handed the phone to our Lebanese friend. After cursing me for supposedly misleading him in my email, my Syrian friend told us that in his Manhattan apartment building, an Israeli neighbor had repeatedly tried to “explain his point of view to me.”

“He finished talking, and I just smiled,” my Syrian friend said.

“Don’t you have a comment?” the Israeli asked.

“I just smiled at him,” my Syrian friend told me. “He explained his point of view to me once again, and then I smiled at him. He asked me again, if I had a comment… and I just smiled at him.”

Marlin Dick, Broummana, Lebanon

Need help?

2006-07-18T18:15:00.000+03:00

Note to all: If you have - or know of - any humanitarian stories, any families that need assistance or rescuing, let me know. AL Jazeera has announced that it is trying/working to assist those in need. So, email me at rania@ourwords.org or give me a call at ++ 961 (0)3 135279.

-Rania Masri
El Koura, Lebanon

Israeli school kids autograph artillery shells

2006-07-18T15:06:00.000+03:00

The sounds at night

2006-07-18T09:14:00.000+03:00

Last night we didn’t have electricity. Sitting in the darkness, in safe West Beirut, this is what I heard:

First, there’s the new voices in the neighborhood, the refugees that were lucky enough to escape from Southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs before Israeli started bombing.

Then, there’s the whine of the generators – Israel’s land and sea blockade of Lebanon means not enough fuel can get into the country, so the government is rationing hours of electricity across the country. Generators are surprisingly loud.

Then there’s the semi-constant drone of an Israeli F-16 overhead. With the Beirut airport bombed, if you can hear a plane, that means it’s Israeli and, thus, dangerous. Which means you have to wonder: scoping mission, on the way to an attack, or just back from one?

Then there are the booms themselves. In West Beirut, the loudest, the ones that shake your windows and make the CDs topple over, are those from Israeli gunboats, shooting their shells over your head into the port or the southern suburbs.

Less loud, but more frequent, are the bombs from the F-16s, which can happen at any time. Sometimes at 10.30am, when you’re finishing a late breakfast. Sometimes at 4 pm, when you’re driving back from visiting a friend, watching her try to help her parents, grandmother and sister leave a small village in Southern Lebanon. Often at night, waking you up at 1.30am, and then again at 2.10am, and then again at 2.20am, and so on. And then a final shot at dawn, in case you had actually managed to sleep.

And then, of course, there’s the crying. No constant, but devastating. Over 150 Lebanese civilians have been killed in the past 6 days, and thousands more are in immediate danger. Anywhere you go, so someone’s in tears.

Sonya Knox
West Beirut, Lebanon

Dry Tears

2006-07-17T23:37:00.000+03:00

Sunday evening, July 16, 2006

It was getting late. The Econet TV cable wasn't working so I couldn't see the news. I might as well sleep. I decided to call a friend (Tony) to see how he's doing before going to sleep. In the conversation he spoke of the latest news -- which included bombings "near Zahle." My family, I told him. Damn Econet.

I tried to call my family. The lines wouldn't connect. I tried again. Still busy. Tony called me. Call their land line, he suggested. Ah, yes, in the small panic of the moment I had forgotten about the land line and was focusing only on the mobile number. I called and got through. They told me of the bombings in Jalala. More bombings on the main roadway. A construction facility was bombed -- leading to lots of fire due to the bombardment of paints. They bombed Ali Nahri, close to Ri'yaq. And intensive bombardment on Ba'albeck. They are not sure of the number of martyrs or the number of wounded. As she spoke, I thought of my young nephew who gets so scared from the sound of the bombings. As she spoke, I cursed the moment I decided to leave El Mreijat and come to my apartment in El Koura in the North.

I couldn't sleep. It sounds like planes overhead.

Monday July 17

7 am
I wake up to news that the port in Tripoli has been bombed.
I wake up to news that bombing in El Beqaa had continued until 4 am. My family opened their windows all night, to prevent the windows from being broken by the intensity of the blast, and stayed up listening, helplessly, to the bombardment.

9.15 am
I receive an email from a Lebanese woman in Australia. She is frantic about her family (Lebanese-Australians) in Aytaroun, beside Bint J'beil in the South. Her father, mother, and sister. She writes, "They are petrified and tense and are desperate for help. I don't know what to do for them and becoming extremely desperate myself. This is a hurtful, sad and dreadful situation and would be very grateful if you could give me any advice/suggestions on how I may be able to assist them. Any advice to them would be appreciated more than you know. Should they be doing anything? Calling anyone to let them know they want to be rescued? I'm extremely lost and pray you can help me help them. My mother is blind and requires additional care and solace at this time. My sister is her primary carer and she is in a very shaken, unstable and desperate state herself."

What can I do? I call the UN. “How can they leave Aytaroun?” I ask. “Difficult question,” he responds. “Call UNIFIL.”

I call UNIFIL. I am led from one person to another to another, repeating the story to each of them. The third individual to states calmly that Aytaroun is one of the areas that Israel has specifically warned about; Israel has specifically stated that all vehicular movement in this area will be regarded as hostile. Tell them to stay home, he says. Tell them to stay home. Close the windows and stay home. But, their home isn't safe, I ask. Yes, but the roads are more dangerous, he replies.

I call the besieged family.
"How are you," I ask. "Your sister is worried about you."
"We are on the road, we are moving."
"No. No. Stay home. Go back home. The roads are not safe. The roads are not safe."
"Too late," she says in hysterical tears. "Too late. We are on the road. We're going to a Christian village. My mobile is running out of batteries."

I hang up and cry dry tears.

Christian village. Muslim village. There is no difference for Israel. The terrorist army has been bombing all villages, Christian and Muslim.

I watch the minutes pass, and hope and hope.

10.30 am:
New TV reports: Southern Saidi is under bombardment. The Israeli planes have not left the skies in the South for one moment.
"How can these families leave the area?" the anchor asks the correspondent in the South.
"They take side roads, agricultural roads," he responds. "Nevertheless, you can easily see the horror and fear on their faces. They have seen a lot of bombardment and direct hits on ambulances. They are all worried of direct hits on their cars. Some of them are flying white flags on their cars"

A commentator on the TV says that when Israel was not punished for the massacre in Qana, and for the other numerous massacres, Israel got emboldened.

We all worry over that emboldenment

11.06 am:
I finally reach the Australian family. They are safe. Actually, they are safer. They’ve reached Sour/Tyre. They are on a road with thousands of other cars. They are being directed to side roads, away from the main roads.

As I write these words, the Israeli Offensive Army is renewing its bombardment of the southern district of Beirut.
As I write these words, hundreds of thousands of families are fleeing north.

I wish I could cry.

---

The time now is 11.39 pm on this Monday evening. I've lost track of the days and the hours.

I bave been interviewed several times by US radio stations (WBAI, Democracy Now, and Uprising - for the readers in the US) and by the Associated Press today. I want to stress again: To stop this violence, to stop this aggression, the Israeli Army needs to stop its attacks on Lebanon.

- Rania Masri, El Koura, Lebanon

rania@ourwords.org