War Diary: Lebanon 2006

Just World Publishing, LLC

Contents

War Diary: Lebanon 2006

On July 12, 2006, I was standing on the balcony of my little house in Sinay, my village in South Lebanon, when the bombing started. It came from deep inland, and we could tell it was air raids and field artillery. Suddenly, Israeli fighter jets swarmed the morning skies. The neighbors brought the news: The Resistance had attacked an Israeli patrol near Ayta al Sha`eb, and it had taken two prisoners to swap for the Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails. Israel was in mad furor and was randomly bombing the South. Kids were distributing sweets at the crossroads to celebrate the success of the Resistance, but many people sounded worried, and the bombing was getting closer to my village. Around 2 p.m., we heard that the South had been the target of more than a hundred air strikes. I decided to go back to Beirut.

Very few people were on the road. I drove very fast, and it took me just over 15 minutes to get to the Zahrani overpass. A friend called to inquire about me. I answered that I was nearing Saida. At this moment, there was a huge explosion, and my car swerved from the force of the shock waves. Volutes of smoke billowed behind me.

Back home in Beirut, I watched the news on TV: Tens of villages had been hit, and thousands of people were leaving their homes to seek refuge in Saida or in Beirut. This is how I learned that I had narrowly escaped the air raids. Many people had died, people who, like me, were running away to the safety of the city.

The 33-day Israeli war on Lebanon had begun. I didn't know it was going to change my life.

The next day, I started this diary, which I kept on an almost daily basis. I sent parts of what I wrote to friends abroad and kept some entries for me. I did not write much about everyday news, as these events were covered by hundreds of reporters and beamed in real time all over the world. I wrote about my daily life and my personal reflections, my frustrations, my powerlessness, my anger, and my hopes. This journal evolved later into the Land and People blog.

* * *

July 13, 2006

I got into a fight over the phone with a friend, a rich woman from the Beirut suburb of Ashrafieh. She called yesterday evening to ask about me, as she knows I spend a lot of time in the South. I told her I had gotten back in extremis. She was very nice and I appreciated that she called. I called back this morning and she launched into a violent attack against the Shi`a and accused them of planning to take over the whole country. She kept shouting and shouting until I flipped and started shouting back. It didn't make me feel better.

There are thousands of displaced people from the South, and I'm looking to be of help. I have called a friend who is active in social-political work and offered my services in case they want to organize a relief operation. I'm waiting for an answer, hoping it will come soon. I'm going to fix my bike (as in bicycle). Then I'll be able to move freely in Beirut and in the country should things deteriorate further, as I expect them to do. My in-laws from Jordan are staying with us and they want to leave as soon as possible, before Lebanon is locked up. I'm trying to send my family with them so that I can be alone and able to move as I wish, but Muna is resisting.

The kids have been at home all day today, as we neither had the heart nor the will to leave: we were mesmerized by the news roll on TV and the pictures that were coming to us: burned cars, destroyed houses, and people. Sad people, angry people, poor people, clutching meager belongings and trying to flee the grips of death.

We're expecting raids on the southern suburbs of Beirut, as the Israelis have threatened, and Bush gave them the green light to "defend themselves" by killing us. That makes me laugh. That makes us all laugh. They do not know that life has no sense unless it is lived with pride, head up. And that we are all dead anyway. Dead the moment we are born. So earlier or later, what difference does it make?

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July 14, 2006

My family is not going to Jordan. I tried to convince them but Muna is adamant on staying. This is rather unfortunate, but Muna is like that: fierce and determined when she knows that right is on her side. I hope she will change her mind. Her sister now lives with us as well as her parents who were visiting. I can't describe the atmosphere at home. Four kids, three nannies, two older people, two anxious women and one angry son-of-a-bitch. Ah yes, and two dogs, one of which keeps pissing in the house.

I went out for an early run with the dogs on the beach this morning. It was eerie. There was no one in the streets. Gigantic smoke columns rose from the southeast, from the airport area and the suburbs. Ramlet el Baida was empty, even from the bums who spend the night there during the summer. There was one lone guy towards the northern end of the beach. He sat by the shore, drinking beer and chain smoking. He mustn't have been more than eighteen. Bella went to get a dose of caressing, and he kindly offered me a beer. I briefly considered sitting by him, smoking and drinking instead of trying so hard to keep a healthy envelope to a rotten soul.

Many people here are anxious about Lebanon and they should be. They are concerned about the time it would take to bring business back after this war ends, when it ends. They are worried about schools that will not open, businesses that will go bust, tourists who will fly away never to come back, and about the collapse of the economy. And they are right to be worried.

These people are like me. They fear losing their comfort, which is associated with the vibrant souk Lebanon has become. They can see their dreams shattered, their happiness threatened, their country dilapidated. Many have only recently returned to Lebanon from a long self-imposed exile brought about by the unending wars. They've really started to like it here, after power cuts disappeared, after running water became available, after bridges and highways were built, after clubs and restaurants opened so they could feel as if they were still in Paris, Rome, London or New York; and after private universities opened so that they could pay their way into "achieving their intellectual potential" and be the first in the long line for the few jobs available.

But there are other people in Lebanon. People who are not comfortable. People who cannot afford private education and have to settle for the free local university, and accept the fact that they will never be able to speak, read, or write English, the language of opportunities. People who have electricity just six hours a day. People who have no running water. People who only enter restaurants through the service door. People who have to tolerate the roughness of clients to keep a job and who have to laugh at their stupid jokes for a two dollar tip. People who do not have cars to drive on the new highways and who go to work in a minivan driven by an abusive man wearing a dirty undershirt. People who have never been to nightspots like Monot, Gemmayzeh and Solidaire, Pierre and Friends, La Voile Bleue, Pangea. People whose sister or daughter leave home sometimes in the evening to return the next day, telling them that she is sleeping at her friend's. But if she sleeps at her friend's, why only during the holiday season? And why all the make-up? And where does she get the money she gives her mother?

These people could not care less about the bourgeois Lebanon we live in. Their country is like their houses: ugly, degraded, stinky and windowless. What are we afraid the Israelis will destroy? The city center, the economy, the tourism? All of that means nothing to them. What we are afraid of losing was never theirs. It is ours, although they may have constructed it. And their lives count for very little in today's Lebanon.

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July 15, 2006

Things were relatively calm last night, and the lull is continuing. This is a typical Israeli tactic: bomb civilian areas causing as many casualties as possible, as if to say "we mean business" and then give some time for a few civilians to get out of the target areas with little more than what they can carry in a bag. Then destroy everything. This is what they did during the 1982 invasion.

The problem is: where can all those people go? The Southern suburbs (Dahieh) are heavily populated by poor and lower-middle-class Southerners and Beka'ais. Those from the Beka'a have managed to get out and go back home. The Southerners, those with whom Israel has a score to settle, cannot go back South. They are condemned, like my friend T., to seek asylum in other areas of Lebanon, 'safe' areas because Israel will not bomb Christian or Druze areas (that is an Israeli tactic too, dividing a population by favoring some groups over others).

I say "condemned" because it really is a sentence: T. told me her story, which I also heard from many others. They tried to rent a house or a hotel room in the mountain resort of `Aley. They had to bear the heavy reproachful words, take the blame for all that is happening, as if they were the ones who were doing the destruction, and not the Israelis. They were harangued with political doctrines based on recognizing Israel as a super power and the need to make friends with it and with the Americans so that they "let us live."

This is what is happening with refugees elsewhere. When they arrive to a locality, people take sideways glances at them as they pass, their luggage piled up in the trunk of their bursting cars. They make sarcastic remarks about the large families, and tell them that things would have been easier were there not so many of them. They look at them as if they are dirty or infectious. They imitate their accents in exaggerated fashion, and then laugh at their own joke. Then they ask for exorbitant prices for a single room, or for a tiny flat, which they refuse to rent except by the year. The boldest of them admit it: "You have screwed the tourism season, now you're going to pay for it." The crummiest hotel rooms go for a hundred dollars a night; tiny studios without electricity or water are three thousand dollars for the season. But the insults come for free.

* * *

July 17, 2006

I have started working with the displaced. I don't know which is sadder: that there are so many displaced poor people or that the emergency support is so badly organized.

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July 18, 2006

Yesterday, I met with people who are trying to organize emergency relief for about 10,000 families of refugees from the southern suburbs into West Beirut. I met with the people working on the ground and they confirmed what I had thought: it is mayhem. The displaced lack everything, and the Lebanese government is pussyfooting with the money they have promised to give the Higher Commission for Relief, and are only giving support to those who have sought refuge in Hariri schools. They are using the plight of hundreds of thousands of people to pull cheap political stunts. Anyway, I tried to convince the people I'm working with to start a fundraising campaign, and they have asked me to manage it. I really don't want that, primarily because I have no experience in mass fundraising.

I was called to a coordination meeting in Hayy el Lijaa, one of the poorest areas of Beirut. The office I was in looked as if it had been recently bombed, although the last time the area saw any bombing was in the late 1980s. There were tens of unshaven sweaty men in ill-fitting clothes. The streets were full of displaced families, cooling off in the summer night breeze. And you know what? They were cheerful. It felt as if they were actually having a fine time, socializing, smoking, analyzing, flirting, and showing off. I left to go to Ras Beirut, Beirut's 'intellectual hub.' There was no one in the streets. It was a totally deserted ghost town, people were hiding behind their heavy doors and their pulled curtains shading the 35 degrees Celsius heat. And this is the most secure neighborhood in Beirut. What are they afraid of? Go figure the human mind.

Muna's parents have left this morning to go back to Jordan. Her sister has been evacuated with the United Nations.

* * *

July 19, 2006

Muna now goes everyday to work in a center for displaced people with a group of health specialists from the American University of Beirut (AUB). Yesterday she came back depressed and with a terrible headache while I was holding high-level meetings in air conditioned rooms with the upper management of the disaster, people who couldn't even administer their own asses. This morning, she was ready to hit the street again.

* * *

July 21, 2006

Yesterday I called an old friend who is now in Broummana and he told me that a friend's father had passed away. In the church where they held the funerals I wanted to capture some spirituality while the poor guy who had died from a lightning strike of leukemia slept in his coffin. I tried hard to look for some remnant of faith, whatever faith, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, anything, but found nothing. And when I scraped really deep in my soul to see if it was really empty, I felt I could really tear a hole in it and still find nothing. So I accepted the fact that I am an atheist looking very hard for some religious spirituality because it may make me feel better about the world, but finding nothing. Sometimes, I wish I could be a believer; it would make my life so much better. Especially during this war.

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July 22, 2006

It is at times like these, when everything is collapsing, that I start wondering what is Lebanon and who are its people. I mean this is a place where half the population is rejoicing because Israel is bombing the other half! But then again, this is a place where the streets are still named after the generals who invaded the country and killed its people: Gouraud is one of them, a man who ordered the French army into South Lebanon to quell the insurrection against the French Mandate. The "Colonne Sud" carried out air raids on Bint Jubayl and executed freedom fighters such as Adham Khanjar long before the Israelis did similar things.

In Lebanon, fluency in the culture and the language of the colonizer or the powerful is considered a necessity. For the elites and much of the middle class, speaking Arabic is the exception rather than the norm. How did we internalize colonialism so much, especially since we were never formally colonized? I know that I can't claim to represent the Lebanese, but the story of how the French culturally colonized me may be worth documenting, especially since I was a very unlikely candidate. Or was I?

I was born at the end of the 1950s in a modest family. My father came from a very poor Shi`a family of South Lebanon, and, when he married my mother, he was a sports teacher in a government school. My mum's father was a well-off Sunni Beiruti trader who had divorced his wife leaving his two adolescent daughters and his very young son in the care of an evil stepmother. My mother and her siblings went to the French Lycée. At home, they were terrorized by the evil stepmother who made them toil and entertain their step-brother and sister. Eventually, my mum ran away with my father who had been hired to help her with Arabic for the Baccalaureate exam. My aunt, a couple of years younger, ran away to Ashrafieh where she lived with Christian friends, adopted the French way of life and became a kindergarten teacher in the Lycée. My uncle ran away into mental illness and remained a Muslim Arab. It was he who later on, during the 1975 war, taught me about our Arab culture and our heritage.

Of my entire mother's family, only her cousin who was studying to be a doctor, attended the wedding. Mixed Shi`a-Sunni marriages were still very rare, and marrying into poverty was a cardinal sin. My Frenchization started at babyhood and I am told that I spoke French before I spoke Arabic. I carried both my father's and my mother's chips on my shoulders: By cloning me from the babies in her favorite French magazines, she wanted to make it very clear that I was different from my father's family. For my father, it was as if my capacity to speak French fluently could cover up for his linguistic shortcomings. Of course, both of them wanted to prepare me better for life by giving me a head start, by endowing me with baggage that would distinguish me from the other people in my social class. The result was that I was shown around like a circus freak into our poor relatives' circles, who were awed by my gift for languages.

At age two, I was placed in daycare at the Sisters of Nazareth School in Ashrafieh, where my formation as a young Frenchman became institutionalized. At age four, my aunt enrolled me in the French Lycée. You have to realize that the Lycée was not an expensive school. It was just elitist. To be accepted into the Lycée, you had to be French. Preference went to those whose parents or siblings were studying or had been at the school. This automatically eliminated cross-fertilization and blocked the access to the newly emerging socio-economic classes. The colonial French, you see, are very sensitive to the 'nouveau-riches' whom they greatly despise. These written rules for admission to the Lycée still apply today. As for the unwritten rules, they clearly favored those people who were 'culturally' French. The end result was that, throughout the fourteen years I spent at the Lycée, the distribution was always more or less like that: 15% French, 15% Lebanese Muslims, and 70% Lebanese Christians. And I was as French as any French student in my class. My mother and my aunt made sure of that by keeping a close watch on my accent, my vocabulary, and my choice of friends.