Letter from Beirut

My Israeli friend Moshe Behar has forwarded this letter from his friend Rasha. She is in Beirut:

Dear All,

I am writing now from a cafe, in West Beirut's Hamra district. It is filled with people who are trying to escape the pull of 24 hour news reporting. Like me. The electricity has been cut off for a while now, and the city has been surviving on generators. The old system that was so familiar at the time of the war, where generators were allowed a lull to rest is back. The cafe is dark, hot and humid. Espresso machines and blenders are silenced. Conversations, rumors, frustrations waft through the room. I am better off here than at home, following the news, live, on the spot documentation of our plight in sound bites. The sound of Israeli warplanes overwhelms the air on occasion. They drop leaflets to conduct a "psychological" war. Yesterday, their sensitivity training urged them to advise inhabitants of the southern suburbs to flee because the night promised to be "hot". Today, the leaflets warn that they plan to bomb all other bridges and tunnels in Beirut. People are flocking to supermarkets to stock up on food. This morning, I wrote in my emails to people inquiring about my well-being that I was safe, and that the targets seem to be strictly Hezbollah sites and their constituencies, now, I regret typing that. They will escalate. Until a few hours ago, they had only bombed the runways of the airport, as if to "limit" the damage. A few hours ago, four shells were dropped on the buildings of our brand new shining airport.

The night was harrowing. The southern suburbs and the airport were bombed, from air and sea. The apartment where I am living has a magnificient view of the bay of Beirut. I could see the Israeli warships firing at their leisure. It is astounding how comfortable they are in our skies, in our waters, they just travel around, and deliver their violence and congratulate themselves.

The cute French-speaking and English-speaking bourgeoisie has fled to the Christian mountains. A long-standing conviction that the Israelis will not target Lebanon's Christian "populated" mountains. Maybe this time they will be proven wrong? The Gulfies, Saudis, Kuwaities and other expatriates have all fled out of the country, in Pullman buses via Damascus, before the road was bombed. They were supposed to be the economic lifeblood of this country. The contrast in their sense of panic as opposed to the defiance of the inhabitants of the southern suburbs was almost comical. This time, however, I have to admit, I am tired of defying whatever for whatever cause. There is no cause really. There are only sinister post-Kissingerian type negotiations. I can almost hear his hateful voice rationalizing laconically as he does the destruction of a country, the deaths of families, people with dreams and ambitions for the Israelis to win something more, always more.

Although I am unable to see it, I am told left, right and center that there is a rhyme and reason, grand design, and strategy. The short-term military strategy seems to be to cripple transport and communications. And power stations. The southern region has now been reconfigured into small enclaves that cannot communicate between one another. Most have enough fuel, food and supplies to last them until tomorrow, but after that the isolation of each enclave will lead to tragedy. Mayors and governors have been screaming for help on the TV.

This is all bringing back echoes of 1982, the Israeli siege of Beirut. My living nightmare, well one of my living nightmares. It was summer then as well. The Israeli army marched through the south and besieged Beirut. For 3 months, the US administration kept dispatching urges for the Israeli military to act with restraint. And the Israelis assured them they were acting appropriately. We had the PLO command in West Beirut then. I felt safe with the handsome fighters. How I miss them. Between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army I don't feel safe. We are exposed, defenseless, pathetic. And I am older, more aware of danger. I am 37 years old and actually scared. The sound of the warplanes scares me. I am not defiant, there is no more fight left in me. And there is no solidarity, no real cause.

I am furthermore pissed off because no one knows how hard the postwar reconstruction was to all of us. Hariri did not make miracles. People work hard and sacrifice a lot and things get done. No one knows except us how expensive, how arduous that reconstruction was. Every single bridge and tunnel and highway, the runways of that airport, all of these things were built from our sweat and brow, at 3 times the real cost of their construction because every member of government, because every character in the ruling Syrian junta, because the big players in the Hariri administration and beyond, were all thieves. We accepted the thievery and banditry just to get things done and get it over with. Everyone one of us had two jobs (I am not referring to the ruling elite, obviously), paid backbreaking taxes and wages to feed the "social covenant". We faught and faught that neoliberal onslaught, the arrogance of economic consultants and the greed of creditors just to have a nice country that functioned at a minimum, where things got done, that stood on its feet, more or less. A thirving Arab civil society. Public schools were sacrificed for roads to service neglected rural areas and a couple Syrian officers to get richer, and we accepted, that road was desperately needed, and there was the "precarious national consensus" to protect. Social safety nets were given up, healthcare for all, unions were broken and coopted, public spaces taken over, and we bowed our heads and agreed. Palestinian refugees were pushed deeper and deeper into forgetting, hidden from sight and consciousness, "for the preservation of their identity" we were told, and we accepted. In exchange we had a secular country where the Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces could co-exist and fight their fights in parliament not with bullets. We bit hard on our tongues and stiffened our upper lip, we protested and were defeated, we took the streets, defied army-imposed curfews, time after time, to protect that modicum of civil rights, that modicum of a semblance of democracy, and it takes one air raid for all our sacrifices and tolls to be blown to smithereens. It's not about the airport, it's what we built during that postwar.

As per the usual of Lebanon, it's not only about Lebanon, the country has paradigmatically been the terrain for regional conflicts to lash out violently. Off course speculations abound. There is rhetoric, and a lot of it, but there are also Theories.

1) Theory Number One.

This is about Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah negotiating an upper hand in the negotiations with Israel. Hezbollah have indicated from the moment they captured the Israeli soldiers that they were willing to negotiate in conjunction with Hamas for the release of all Arab prisoners in Israeli jails. Iran is merely providing a back support for Syria + Hamas.

2) Theory Number Two.

This is not about solidarity with Gaza or strengthening the hand of the Palestinians in negotiating the release of the prisoners in Israeli jails. This is about Iran's nuclear bomb and negotiations with the Europeans/US. The Iranian negotiator left Brussels after the end of negotiations and instead of returning to Tehran, he landed in Damascus. Two days later, Hezbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers. The G8 Meeting is on Saturday, Iran is supposed to have some sort of an answer for the G8 by then. In the meantime, they are showing to the world that they have a wide sphere of control in the region: Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. In Lebanon they pose a real threat to Israel. The "new" longer-reaching missiles that Hezbollah fired on Haifa are the message. The kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia issued statements holding Hezbollah solely responsible for bringing on this escalation, and that is understood as a message to Iran. Iran on the other hand promised to pay for the reconstruction of destroyed homes and infrastructures in the south. And threatened Israel with "hell" if they hit Syria.

3) Theory Number Three.

This is about Lebanon, Hezbollah and 1559 (the UN resolution demanding the disarmement of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese army in the southern territory). It stipulates that this is no more than a secret conspiracy between Syria, Iran and the US to close the Hezbollah file for good, and resolve the pending Lebanese crisis since the assassination of Hariri. Evidence for this conspiracy is Israel leaving Syria so far unharmed. Holders of this theory claim that Israel will deliver a harsh blow to Hezbollah and cripple the Lebanese economy to the brink of creating an internal political crisis. The resolution would then result in Hezbollah giving up arms, and a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon under the control of the Lebanese army in Lebanon and the Israeli army in the north of Galilee. More evidence for this Theory are the Saudi Arabia and Jordan statements condemning Hezbollah and holding them responsible for all the horrors inflicted on the Lebanese people.

There are more theories... There is also the Israeli government reaching an impasse and feeling a little wossied out by Hezbollah and Hamas, and the Israeli military taking the upper hand with Olmert.

The land of conspiracies... Fun? I can't make heads or tails. But I am tired of spending days and nights waiting not to die from a shell, on target or astray. Watching poor people bludgeoned, homeless and preparing to mourn. I am so weary...

Rasha.

Comments

[Robin]

Theory number 2 seems smart and plausible.

[DMS]

"The kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia issued statements holding Hezbollah solely responsible for bringing on this escalation..."

That's meant as a joke. Right?

[KC]

it probably doesn't help to write that there are US hearts who are breaking at the news, who understand that our failed policies have brought decades of suffering in Lebanon as in Palestine.

nonetheless...

[Don McArthur]

Not to be insensitive, but who cares? A murderous lot, whose chickens have come home to roost. And I have no reason to suspect that this will ever end until they're all dead.

I'll save my compassion for the deserving.

[KC]

so glad you don't want to be insensitive...

as in most wars, the ones who will do most of the suffering, dying, and living with the memories of trauma & even atrocity will be the innocent.

unless you believe that whole nations & civilizations can be "undeserving."

[tom merle]

The weariness of the author and all her colleagues is of their own doing. Accept Israel and move on. Yet you cannot because you need a scapegoat to transfer you own failings to. The Arab world is consumed with resentment which keeps it dysfunctional. Meanwhile the Israelis, being superior is every domain, continue to build their fortress and advance the civilization of the world. What a horrible waste for Rasha not to be part of an effort to reach accord.

[DMS]

KC,
Please don't take on the burdens of the world and blame everything on the USA. The peoples of the Middle East have sufficient free will to influence their own lives. Yes, it is all indeed tragic. But it doesn't revolve entirely around America, much as GW Bush and you would like us to think.

[Bild]

"We had the PLO command in West Beirut then. I felt safe with the handsome fighters. How I miss them."

I'm sure the author also appreciates the long-term security that the hijackings, mortar attacks, rockets, assassination attempts and kidnappings launched by those handsome fighters against Israel brought her country.

[Ran]

I feel for you.
I, too, am sitting in a shelter in Haifa.
You shut down Hezbollah and friends, I shut down our extremists, and we will have coffee together, my treat!

[KC]

how curious. I do not agree with any of GWB's policies, and am overwhelmingly in favor of letting sovereign nations work out their own destinies--so it's good for me to be reminded that even an expression of regret for the past can be taken as an expression of intervention when it comes from "one of us"

I am properly humbled.

[ks]

What is the fighing for? Once, the entire Middle East was known as Syria. The nations of the Middle East are all INVENTED - Paris 1919 and afterwards.
This is not the way to happiness. But it is the way to profit for the oil and munitions industries.

[walterra]

ks, I think all nations are INVENTED.

[AKLS1]

blame USA and ISRAEL ofcourse with corrupt fuckheads like bush, dont blame USA yeah right!

[innocent]

http://war.ignorelist.com

[kev]

AKLS1 You're such an idiot. The conflict in the middle east has been around for over 2000 years. waaaay before the US and Bush. Your over simplification of the situation proves your ignorance. AKLS1 that's the problem with you Americans, you think it's always all about America. This time it is not! get your head out of your ass and open a history book fool.

The real problem now is the arrogance of France, Russia and China who are all providing arms and assistance to Iran while America, UK, Italy and Germany are behind Israel. That's the problem now and that's labeling this as WWIII.

[KC]

There's no question that on this side of the Atlantic, we tend to see the world as revolving around us. And it's hard not to feel a certain shame when our elected leader is heard to tell Tony Blair--at a meeting of world leaders-- that all we need to do is get Syria to attack Lebanon and all will be well...

On the other hand, to say that "the conflict in the middle east has been around for over 2000 years" is equally oversimplified. The current conflicts have very specific, traceable 20th century roots--including the outcomes of WWI and WWII. So on one point Kev may be right... we may be looking at the start of the next WW.

Inshallah, we will find the wisdom and the sanity to avoid that path--as a world, not as "Americans" and "others."

[Dick Cheney]

BOYCOTT ISRAELI AND AMERICAN GOODS AND SERVICES.

and any other nation that'll take sides with the murdering zionist dogs

[Wisco]

"Not to be insensitive, but who cares? A murderous lot, whose chickens have come home to roost. And I have no reason to suspect that this will ever end until they're all dead.

"I'll save my compassion for the deserving."

What a colossal ass you must be.

[urig]

Rasha, it is sad to hear how passive the Lebanese people are. How they are, yet again, victims of exteral powers.

Is it possible that biting your lips all these years has brought this mayhem upon you?

Having let Syria and Hizballah have their way with your country has now, once more, put it in the flame of Israeli retribution.

Maybe if the Lebanese people had been less obedient to dictators and less tolerant of terrorists, you might have paid a smaller price and have been able to achieve more in terms of democracy and peace?

[bla]

rasha and ran, you are the kind of people that need to be in charge of your countries and this would never happen.the extremists would kill you both before that could happen. im sorry for all of you. keep your head down and do the right thing when you can.

[christine]

how can most of you be so cynical! there is a war going on, well far beyond, but nevertheless in an area where most of all was needed was freedom or something near it. And it is no newsletter you are reading or reuters but a personal statement of somebody who lives that situtation right now. shame on you!
christine

[persian]

why do you think Iranian Foreign Minister and President has asked for cease fire and exchange of prisoners. Because they just can’t believe how stupid Hezbollah could have acted.

If Israel would have cared at all for peace they would have negotiated as they did in 2004 (Back in 2004, Hezbollah took in Prisoners of War and exchanged them for captives inside the Israeli jails. You didn't see a war happen then did you? ) and they would give more time to Lebanese government to become stronger and take care of Hezbollah. It is unfair to accuse people of Lebanon for letting Hezbollah to grow. They showed their true interest by backing the government recently and rallying behind government and push Syrian out. They just needed a bit more time and Hezbollah would be disarmed too.

Maybe Hezbollah realised that and started this crisis but Israel could be wiser and smarter than that to play along.

[S Lovatt]

Theres a fine amount of rationale here. Everything from "youse had it coming " blame the victim, to mass murder made palitable by the rightousness of nations. The raw story here is that men, armed and uniformed are running riot earth wide, murdering and raping women and children. The abusive male, fed and watered, with a license to kill, rewarded with a paycheck.
Fabulous!
You can rationalise all you want, it dosent change anything. If anything is being proven in our time it is that without a doubt, men are incapable of rulership.
S. Lovatt

[ZapperGirl]

Great site! Keep up the good work.

http://sexy-technology-geeks.blogspot.com/

[mj]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7828123714384920696>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7828123714384920696

[JihadNow]

What does the Arabic word jihad mean?

One answer came last week, when Saddam Hussein had his Islamic leaders appeal to Muslims worldwide to join his jihad to defeat the "wicked Americans" should they attack Iraq; then he himself threatened the United States with jihad.

As this suggests, jihad is "holy war." Or, more precisely: It means the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims.

The purpose of jihad, in other words, is not directly to spread the Islamic faith but to extend sovereign Muslim power (faith, of course, often follows the flag). Jihad is thus unabashedly offensive in nature, with the eventual goal of achieving Muslim dominion over the entire globe.

Jihad did have two variant meanings through the centuries, one more radical, one less so. The first holds that Muslims who interpret their faith differently are infidels and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. (This is why Algerians, Egyptians and Afghans have found themselves, like Americans and Israelis, so often the victims of jihadist aggression.) The second meaning, associated with mystics, rejects the legal definition of jihad as armed conflict and tells Muslims to withdraw from the worldly concerns to achieve spiritual depth.

Jihad in the sense of territorial expansion has always been a central aspect of Muslim life. That's how Muslims came to rule much of the Arabian Peninsula by the time of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632. It's how, a century later, Muslims had conquered a region from Afghanistan to Spain. Subsequently, jihad spurred and justified Muslim conquests of such territories as India, Sudan, Anatolia, and the Balkans.

Today, jihad is the world's foremost source of terrorism, inspiring a worldwide campaign of violence by self-proclaimed jihadist groups:

The International Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders: Osama bin Laden's organization;
Laskar Jihad: responsible for the murder of more than 10,000 Christians in Indonesia;
Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami: a leading cause of violence in Kashmir;
Palestinian Islamic Jihad: the most vicious anti-Israel terrorist group of them all;
Egyptian Islamic Jihad: killed Anwar El-Sadat in 1981, many others since, and
Yemeni Islamic Jihad: killed three American missionaries on Monday.
But jihad's most ghastly present reality is in Sudan, where until recently the ruling party bore the slogan "Jihad, Victory and Martyrdom." For two decades, under government auspices, jihadists there have physically attacked non-Muslims, looted their belongings and killed their males.

Jihadists then enslaved tens of thousands of females and children, forced them to convert to Islam, sent them on forced marches, beat them and set them to hard labor. The women and older girls also suffered ritual gang-rape, genital mutilation and a life of sexual servitude.

Sudan's state-sponsored jihad has caused about 2 million deaths and the displacement of another 4 million - making it the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our era.

[Bob]

It is very sad, yet expected that so many of us who live in 'safe' countries with our ignorance of other countries in other regions don't feel compassion for the Lebanese and Palestinian people alike. The only way i take it is this: If this was happening to your country, how would you feel? Could you bare seeing everything you contributed in helping grow just disappear and your life thrown away?..what would you feel towards those who 'did' this to you, and what about those who defended the persecutors' campaign against you?..
I guess some people just don't care, because as George Galloway has pointed out ''Israeli blood is more precious to you than Lebanese or Palestinian blood'' and i believe that is the case most times as well, just because they are 'of you'. .We are all people, we all feel and we all believe in same things and other different things! . .However, when we see wrong, we cant force ourselves to believe its okay, or enable mass media to plant that belief in us. .If someone you loved died, im pretty sure you'd want to bash the crap out of anyone who would publically display hatred towards your deceased beloved one, or said something like: oh well, too bad..he/she brought it upon himself/herself!

[Sean]

That's how Muslims came to rule much of the Arabian Peninsula by the time of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632. It's how, a century later, Muslims had conquered a region from Afghanistan to Spain. Subsequently, jihad spurred and justified Muslim conquests of such territories as India, Sudan, Anatolia, and the Balkans.