I wrote the following Q&A as a brief introduction to a study group discussion at an ISO meeting. I don't go too much into the history of the region because the readings covered it, and I was trying to limit my introduction to ten minutes. Because it's just a brief introduction, it's also not footnoted or anything. However, you still may find some of this useful.
Q. The devastation in Lebanon is awful, but isn't Israel just reacting to the kidnappings of its soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon?
A. The short answer is no. It's becoming increasingly clear, even in the Israeli media, that this war isn't about the kidnapped soldiers at all.
On the Lebanese side, even Hezbollah was shocked at Israel's response, because this kidnapping wasn't a particularly unusual event. Hezbollah and Israel routinely make cross-border raids and then exchange prisoners, although Israel usually kidnaps Lebanese civilians rather than Hezbollah fighters. This is routinely the case in Gaza as well; many Palestinian teenagers, as well as a sizable chunk of Hamas's elected leadership, are in Israeli jails. Israel's outrageously disproportionate response indicates that this offensive, particularly in Lebanon, had been in the works for a while. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that this war was planned at least a year ago:
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.
What this, along with Israel's behavior, indicates is that Israel has been looking for a reason to launch this offensive. Just as the US seized the 9/11 attacks as a rationale for the attack they'd long planned on Afghanistan, Israel had business in Lebanon. If they can dismantle Hezbollah and install, with the US's help, a client state in Lebanon, they can stop worrying about one of their borders, use that client state's influence in dealing with other Arab states, and generally expand their power in the region. Israel also faces domestic pressure to increase its "deterrent power," its ability to act as the neighborhood bully. If it strikes as hard and as quickly as possible against any threat at all, no matter how disproportionate the reaction, it can keep its neighbors running scared, and do as it pleases.
Q. But Hezbollah is a terrorist organization taking orders from Syria and Iran. Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself against terrorists who just want to drive the Jews into the sea?
A. First of all, the US Congress designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization despite the fact that they had not carried out a single terrorist attack in over a decade, and when they did it was in response to Israeli occupation. Hezbollah is a major political party in Lebanon. It runs candidates for office and generally wins a respectable minority of seats. It operates schools, charities, ambulance companies and social services, often picking up the slack for Lebanon's weak government. And it operates a relatively small armed wing, which is now, thanks to Israel, undoubtedly growing. Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and it has become a legitimate, organic resistance movement. It is an Islamist party, like many in the region. I could give a whole other talk about the roots of Islamism, but all I'll get into here is that Islamist parties do not spring from some Jew-hating gene that all Arabs are born with, which is what Israel's mythology would have us believe. The reality is that in 1948, during the war that created the state of Israel, the Arabs who had lived for centuries in Palestine were forced from their homes, massacred and "ethnically cleansed" by people who wanted the land for a Jews-only state, and they've been rightfully pissed off about it ever since. That anger has taken the form of secular left-wing resistance groups at some points, and of radical Islamism most recently.
It's also important to note that Islamism is not a monolithic ideology. There are of course major schisms between Sunni and Shia Muslims; there's also plenty of internal politicking. Iran and Syria share a basic ideology with Hezbollah, they'll sell them weapons, they're generally more likely to support Hezbollah if things get out of hand, but each group has its own aims within the region. The recent media reports that liken Iran to the Comintern of the Islamic world fail to take any of those factors into account. It's just not as simple as Hezbollah taking direct orders from Tehran.
Q. So how much support does Hezbollah have among the Lebanese people?
Certainly more than it did before the bombings began. I'm going to broadly oversimplify here for the sake of time. Most of the Lebanese ruling class supported Hariri, the Bush-backed "Cedar Revolution" leader who rebuilt much of Lebanon, revived its tourism industry and began to improve the country's image abroad before he was assassinated last year, most likely by agents of Syria. His supporters, many of whom are part of the country's conservative Maronite Christian minority, are not fans of Hezbollah, and blame it for provoking Israel. This is an attitude that Israel wants to promote, and its bombings, particularly in Beirut, have been strategically planned. Jim Quilty of Middle East Report Online writes,
Israel has blithely played upon Lebanon's sectarian divisions with the patterns of bombing and with leaflets asserting that Nasrallah [the leader of Hezbollah] is beholden to foreign masters... [Some air strikes] are aimed at accentuating domestic antagonism against Hezbollah, indeed the Shi'a generally, without explicitly targeting the constituencies of the Bush administration's Lebanese allies... Through strangulation and anxiety about what will next be targeted, Israel hopes to provoke simmering resentment against Hezbollah rather than shocked nationwide anger at an external enemy.
How well this strategy will work remains an open question. Most Lebanese, particularly among the roughly 60% of the population that is Shi'ite Muslim, have shifted toward support for Hezbollah. That pattern is likely to continue, especially given that much of the food, water, medicine and other relief coming to the more than 700,000 displaced Lebanese is coming not from the Lebanese government, but from social service agencies run by Hezbollah.
If Israel launches a full-scale ground war, and there is a lot of debate right now about whether that is going to happen, it's likely that support for Hezbollah will skyrocket. We learned from Vietnam, and we're learning again from Iraq, that if you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets. And they will have no shortage of volunteers.
Q. So why won't Israel just agree to a prisoner exchange and put an end to this? And why is the US refusing to call for a cease-fire? Why are they so determined to wade deeper into this mess?
Here's what the left-wing Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has to say about this war:
Retaliating to such a low-key operation with a total war and destruction indicates clearly that what matters is the grand design, not the pretext...the wider Israel's military might expands, the easier it is to complete the unfinished business of the 1948 [founding of Israel]: the total de-Arabization of Palestine.
Israel wants dominance in the region. And so does the US. Israel has always demanded the right to re-draw borders, relocate civilian populations, and throw its military weight around as it sees fit-- although it couches its justifications in terms of innocent self-defense, it is the most belligerent state in the Middle East. It wants a client state in Lebanon, the death of Hezbollah, and nothing less than complete submission from the Palestinians. And the US has a larger project going on as well, the one that started in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wants control of the Middle East. It wants to install puppet regimes, quell any uprisings or demands for real democracy or self-determination, drill for oil and lay pipelines anywhere it pleases.
Syria and Lebanon don't have any oil, but they're key players in the region, and it seems somewhat likely that the current offensive is meant to lay the groundwork for an attack by the US and or Israel on Iran as well as Syria. Calling for a prisoner exchange or a cease-fire now would stop that process in its tracks. Israel and the US want to press forward with this war. And other Arab regimes around the region have their own interests at stake-- Egypt wants to strangle any potential for a resistance movement that might affect the Mubarak regime, and the Saudis benefit from the inevitable rise in oil prices.
Q. Is this World War Three?
Not yet, although it's hard to say what will happen. Syria has made it clear that it will jump into the war if Israel gets too close to the Syrian border, particularly if there is a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon. The US is stretched to capacity in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it seems likely that it will continue to support Israel in non-military ways. However, some conservatives in the US are calling for full-scale war. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, for example, calls for immediate massive air strikes by the US on both Syria and Iran, and writes that the West's reaction to any terrorism from now on should be
Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst. Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.
The US is not at a point militarily or politically where strikes on Syria and Iran are a serious option, let alone nuclear war, but another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil could change that. Israel has more to lose from a world war-- it's within easy striking distance of Iran, for starters-- and it is already starting to lose popular support at home for its increasingly bloody war on Lebanon. However, Israel's dependence on the US cannot be overstated-- without American aid, the ultramodern, militarized Israeli state would have approximately the economic power of Guatemala. The US can draw Israel into a major war if it decides that's the best way to pursue American interests in the region.
But that's speculation; so far, it's not World War Three, no matter what Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly have decided. If the US had any desire to stop the conflict and the slaughter of Lebanese civilians, it could do so with a single phone call; so far it has decided that the bloodshed has been worth it, but if the costs become too high or there are unforeseen political consequences, the war could stop now. Our job, then, as socialists in the US, is to raise the political costs of this war to a point where it no longer makes sense for Bush to continue on this insane and bloody path.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Paola's story: Evacuation from Beirut
Hi everyone,
I know this is kind of long...
Our plane landed at Philadelphia International Airport at 7 am on July26th. I have never been so happy to be back in the states. Part of the reason why my heart was filled with so much joy was because we were NOT on a military airbase in turkey (more on that *lovely* ordeal later). I am really looking forward to seeing all of you in the days and weeks to come. Again, I have the best bunch of friends and comrades in the world. I don’t know what we would have done without your love, support, insight, offers for financial help, offers of housing, food, etc. We were really touched and are so glad that we have all of you in our lives. If you ever need the same, we’ll be there.
I would think twice about wishing the evacuation on my worst enemy. Never in my life have I seen such ad hoc arrangements and such gross incompetence. We started out on July 25th. Luckily, some of our friends took us to the departure point near Dubayeh. If they weren’t able to do so, it would have cost us probably over 60$ (US!) because the cost of benzene was rising. In addition, cabbies were more reluctant to take customers from Beirut to other areas because of the danger factor involved. Getting to Dubayeh wasby no means a terribly dangerous journey but the risk factor has been multiplied since the Israeli Army started its bombing campaign. At 6 am, we got on line. Or rather, there was just a group of people and a bunch of Lebanese Army soldiers and some Lebanese police officers. We realized that they were letting people pass a checkpoint in batches, at a really slow rate. We finally had our turn to pass them and stand on yet another line closer to embassy personnel. By the looks of it, there were only a handful of embassy workers. It figures; many of them fled after day one or two leaving us to deal with the consequences of war on our own. By the way,the UN folks were just as bad or worse though we expected this of them because of their history in Lebanon. I heard that on day three or so they took all of the jeeps that they could find and fled. They drove like bats out of hell to the Syrian border and never looked back (fearing that they might get turned into a pillar of ashes like those in the South?). Classic, just classic.
Anyhow… This was about two hours into the whole ordeal. We had to put down our bags so several dogs could sniff at them. Then we could go to the porta potties and wait in yet another long line. Luckily, they set up tents so we didn’t have to collapse from heat stroke. However, the tents didn’t cover all areas so there were chunks of time that we were out in the sun, which was absolutely wretched. We were thankful for the water that we received, though it is really sad that we had to cross our fingers and hope for such basic necessities (i.e. food, shelter, bathrooms, water). We were on line for three or more hours. Then we were directed out of that line and onto the next one. We had more shade but less bathroom options and it became really stuffy underneath the tents. A mother and her family were in front of us. They fled the south with garbage bags and nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their house was destroyed.
Our bags were opened up and inspected by customs officials and then we were placed into yet another line. At least we got to sit down this time. Waited probably around an hour and then we had to haul our stuff across part of a beach to get to the military transport vessel. I was glad that the Marines were at least helping people carry their stuff. I had a full hiking pack, a bag full of food and two other bags so it was getting a bit difficult for me. We were loaded onto a small transport ship. It was clearly made to hold tanks, cars, weapons, etc but not people. Everything was metallic and it was hot enough to be one of Dante’s levels of hell. It was nearly unbearable to sit on the floor and they kept on packing more people in. I have a pretty good stomach but the movement of the ship made me a bit nauseous. Then we floated away to meet the USS Trenton out at sea. The Israeli Gov’t had an air and sea blockade on Lebanon but they were making exceptions for evacuees. The USS Trenton was also a transport vessel. They had to import cots, blankets and other supplies that were necessary for giving 1,800 people a place to rest. We sat in the cargo hold on cots for a couple of hours. We ate some food that I cooked the daybefore and drank all the water that they would give us. Then we were escorted row by row to the upper decks of the ship. We saw several helicopters come in, probably with people who were told to meet at the embassy. The ship floated around for ten hours. We saw several explosions. I think that they were cell phone towers and electrical plants though I am not 100% sure. It was a bit surreal; the war was already fading into something abstract. I was ambivalent about taking it all in; I felt even more hopeless and removed. Lebanon was burning and from that ship, there was really nothing I could do. I couldn’t do relief work, it was hard to call my friends, etc. I had to sit down and tear my eyes away from the skyline because it was just a bit much to watch.
Then we tried to find a place to rest. They were handing out cots and blankets but somehow nothing was getting to us. I kept asking and they kept on saying they would look into it. Then one of the officers told me to go downstairs because that was where they were finally handing out somemore supplies. They were doing it Titanic style (i.e. women and children first) and then everything was gone anyway so I went back upstairs, fuming and empty handed. The sun was really hot and we were already out in it all day. The ship floor was hot and metallic so sitting without anything was really quite uncomfortable.
Part of me can understand the reasons why families were taken care of first but I was angry nonetheless. I felt like as a childfree couple we didn’t matter and that we were a non entity that wasn’t even worthy of a thin sheet (I don’t think that there was a plot to convey such a message but it certainly felt that way after waiting for hours on end). Their concept of families of course was limited to the nuclear family (mom-wife, dad-husband and kids) which was became problematic especially later on when they didn’t take into consideration all of the aunts, cousins, grandmas, who would refuse to be separated (more on this later) and shuttled off on different flights. Never mind what it would be like for other families that don’t fit neatly into that schema. After some time I realized that it was pretty much every person for himself or herself so I grabbed up two blankets from a spot that had three because I hadn’t seen the guy return for a long time and he had three blankets (as one person) and we had none.
I went to sleep as soon as I could only to have a terrible wake up call. It was pitch black on the upper deck and windy like you wouldn’t believe. We tried our best to keep the sheets and our some of our lighter belongings from blowing away. I hunted around for a flashlight but seeing didn’t necessarily make the sheet business any better because it was still like wrestling with an octopus. Getting below the deck for water or the bathroom was insane because of the wind, lack of proper light and steep ladders.
We arrived in Turkey early in the morning, only to wait on the ship in the hot sun for five more hours. We didn’t even bother trying to get something to eat in the mess hall; it was always absolutely clogged with people and their screaming children (who drove me absolutely insane! Annoying anklebiters, arrrrrgh!)
I decided to be out cold for the time on the ship because it was simply too hot to be awake. A long line of evacuees who were waiting to get off snaked around the flight deck. We decided to grab a cot and wait it out. We timed our descent to the line just in time. They were still doing it Titanic style but I said that I wasn’t going to leave Rafy on a military ship so we left together about 10 minutes later which approaches the speed of light by their standards.
There were several embassy people shouting promises of a bed, a shower and hot food, saying that “the nightmare was over.” Whatever. I would rather take my chances with the war in a relatively safe neighborhood in Beirut (Hamra). At least I know that I will have a bed, food and will know what I am in for. The nightmare was just in its early stages, actually. We went through yet another line (this time, more customs) and then we were put on buses that were going to Incirlik Airbase which is near the city of Adana. We were given MREs, which are absolutely hilarious and kind of gross (they are highly processed and several steps above airplane food). They had a heating element which told us to prop the device upright using “a rock or something.” Or something, I kid you not. Then other packages talked about how “nutrition was a force multiplier.”
It took us three hours to enter the base. They had us waiting in buses for about two. The AC was terrible and it got unbearably hot. It really sucked but at least we’re young and relatively healthy; I can only imagine how bad it was for the elderly.
Then they took us in and briefed us, which was another two hours. At least the AC was working. Then they had us line up for room assignments and meal cards. They segregated us all by sex (except for children) but at least Rafy and I were in buildings that were next to each other. We tried to use the phone/internet facility. We had to wait for at least an hour because it was overrun with people. At least I got an email or two through and called my parents.
Then we saw what our rooms were like. At least we had real beds this time, which was a plus and real AC. The downside was that each room had 6 or 8 people on bunk beds. Of course, I was in the women’s building and many children were with their mothers so they were all running around and there was always some kid screaming so sleeping was a bit difficult. All of this made me dislike children even more, if you haven’t noticed.
I woke up when soldiers pounded on the door at 5:30am. They wanted us all to look at flight lists in order to see if our names were posted. Ichecked and neither one of us were on them so I went back to sleep. We woke up, checked our email and looked into breakfast. Luckily, things weren’t as crowded. We decided to make Rafy’s room the base because it had fewer children and people were generally quiet. I regretted the trip back to my room to get a few things because it was swarming with children who were building forts and blocking the door with mattresses.
We sat around and read until we were so bored that we couldn’t read anymore. We were confined to a small area of the base and there wasn’tmuch to do except to read, email, pace and get annoyed. I overheard many interesting conversations. Some people assumed that I knew Arabic and others didn’t. One family was basically doing a cost benefit analysis of the evacuation versus trying to get to places in Syria. They decided that doing the latter, as risky as it is, might have been better than sitting around like sheep. Some were thinking that since they were in relatively safe areas, it might have been better taking a chance with the war.
Then we saw that a new flight list was posted. Rafy’s name was on it but mine wasn’t. We agreed that we wouldn’t leave the other at Incirlik, it was just too absurd. We were given the run around for a bit and then were told to talk to the state department. Naturally, they were overwhelmed. Other people had been split up too because they just weren’t all that organized. Parents were separated from children, cousins were split, grandparents, etc. If they were smart, they would realize that splitting up families was just asking for trouble. Then I realized that they hastily posted a standby list with my name on it. They said that if Rafy didn’t want to go, he could be placed on standby with me or we could both wait for a later flight. We agreed that it was the best course of action. We threw our stuff into our bags in less than five minutes and proceeded to yet another line. We were there for at least an hour. Oddly enough, we met another Rutgers student! They’re everywhere!
Rafy and I were the last people to get on a bus to the airfield. Once we were inside the mini military airport, we waited for another five hours for our flight to arrive. We learned that it was a civilian aircraft (a huge ATA plane) that would take us from the airbase to a civilian airport in Ireland (Shannon) to refuel for two hours and then we would land in Philly intn’l. Meanwhile, we were thinking “Ireland?!” Sigh…
I saw that they had phones and called my parents. Once again, I was glad that I knew some Arabic because I had no idea how to use the phones and the woman next to me saw that I was having trouble and she saved the day.
I tried to sleep for most of the flight but I couldn’t because I was freezing (as usual!). I wrapped my head in a scarf and blanket, put on two shirts and that didn’t really help. I was also glad that we grabbed some extra MREs because they will always beat airplane food.
We arrived absolutely exhausted (or well… I was because I couldn’t sleep properly!) at around 7am and breezed through customs.
Looking fwd to hearing from all of you and seeing you too! I will start to send replies to your personal emails in a few days. Sorry I couldn’t get to it sooner…
Love, solidarity and SAMIDOUN!
Paola
I know this is kind of long...
Our plane landed at Philadelphia International Airport at 7 am on July26th. I have never been so happy to be back in the states. Part of the reason why my heart was filled with so much joy was because we were NOT on a military airbase in turkey (more on that *lovely* ordeal later). I am really looking forward to seeing all of you in the days and weeks to come. Again, I have the best bunch of friends and comrades in the world. I don’t know what we would have done without your love, support, insight, offers for financial help, offers of housing, food, etc. We were really touched and are so glad that we have all of you in our lives. If you ever need the same, we’ll be there.
I would think twice about wishing the evacuation on my worst enemy. Never in my life have I seen such ad hoc arrangements and such gross incompetence. We started out on July 25th. Luckily, some of our friends took us to the departure point near Dubayeh. If they weren’t able to do so, it would have cost us probably over 60$ (US!) because the cost of benzene was rising. In addition, cabbies were more reluctant to take customers from Beirut to other areas because of the danger factor involved. Getting to Dubayeh wasby no means a terribly dangerous journey but the risk factor has been multiplied since the Israeli Army started its bombing campaign. At 6 am, we got on line. Or rather, there was just a group of people and a bunch of Lebanese Army soldiers and some Lebanese police officers. We realized that they were letting people pass a checkpoint in batches, at a really slow rate. We finally had our turn to pass them and stand on yet another line closer to embassy personnel. By the looks of it, there were only a handful of embassy workers. It figures; many of them fled after day one or two leaving us to deal with the consequences of war on our own. By the way,the UN folks were just as bad or worse though we expected this of them because of their history in Lebanon. I heard that on day three or so they took all of the jeeps that they could find and fled. They drove like bats out of hell to the Syrian border and never looked back (fearing that they might get turned into a pillar of ashes like those in the South?). Classic, just classic.
Anyhow… This was about two hours into the whole ordeal. We had to put down our bags so several dogs could sniff at them. Then we could go to the porta potties and wait in yet another long line. Luckily, they set up tents so we didn’t have to collapse from heat stroke. However, the tents didn’t cover all areas so there were chunks of time that we were out in the sun, which was absolutely wretched. We were thankful for the water that we received, though it is really sad that we had to cross our fingers and hope for such basic necessities (i.e. food, shelter, bathrooms, water). We were on line for three or more hours. Then we were directed out of that line and onto the next one. We had more shade but less bathroom options and it became really stuffy underneath the tents. A mother and her family were in front of us. They fled the south with garbage bags and nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their house was destroyed.
Our bags were opened up and inspected by customs officials and then we were placed into yet another line. At least we got to sit down this time. Waited probably around an hour and then we had to haul our stuff across part of a beach to get to the military transport vessel. I was glad that the Marines were at least helping people carry their stuff. I had a full hiking pack, a bag full of food and two other bags so it was getting a bit difficult for me. We were loaded onto a small transport ship. It was clearly made to hold tanks, cars, weapons, etc but not people. Everything was metallic and it was hot enough to be one of Dante’s levels of hell. It was nearly unbearable to sit on the floor and they kept on packing more people in. I have a pretty good stomach but the movement of the ship made me a bit nauseous. Then we floated away to meet the USS Trenton out at sea. The Israeli Gov’t had an air and sea blockade on Lebanon but they were making exceptions for evacuees. The USS Trenton was also a transport vessel. They had to import cots, blankets and other supplies that were necessary for giving 1,800 people a place to rest. We sat in the cargo hold on cots for a couple of hours. We ate some food that I cooked the daybefore and drank all the water that they would give us. Then we were escorted row by row to the upper decks of the ship. We saw several helicopters come in, probably with people who were told to meet at the embassy. The ship floated around for ten hours. We saw several explosions. I think that they were cell phone towers and electrical plants though I am not 100% sure. It was a bit surreal; the war was already fading into something abstract. I was ambivalent about taking it all in; I felt even more hopeless and removed. Lebanon was burning and from that ship, there was really nothing I could do. I couldn’t do relief work, it was hard to call my friends, etc. I had to sit down and tear my eyes away from the skyline because it was just a bit much to watch.
Then we tried to find a place to rest. They were handing out cots and blankets but somehow nothing was getting to us. I kept asking and they kept on saying they would look into it. Then one of the officers told me to go downstairs because that was where they were finally handing out somemore supplies. They were doing it Titanic style (i.e. women and children first) and then everything was gone anyway so I went back upstairs, fuming and empty handed. The sun was really hot and we were already out in it all day. The ship floor was hot and metallic so sitting without anything was really quite uncomfortable.
Part of me can understand the reasons why families were taken care of first but I was angry nonetheless. I felt like as a childfree couple we didn’t matter and that we were a non entity that wasn’t even worthy of a thin sheet (I don’t think that there was a plot to convey such a message but it certainly felt that way after waiting for hours on end). Their concept of families of course was limited to the nuclear family (mom-wife, dad-husband and kids) which was became problematic especially later on when they didn’t take into consideration all of the aunts, cousins, grandmas, who would refuse to be separated (more on this later) and shuttled off on different flights. Never mind what it would be like for other families that don’t fit neatly into that schema. After some time I realized that it was pretty much every person for himself or herself so I grabbed up two blankets from a spot that had three because I hadn’t seen the guy return for a long time and he had three blankets (as one person) and we had none.
I went to sleep as soon as I could only to have a terrible wake up call. It was pitch black on the upper deck and windy like you wouldn’t believe. We tried our best to keep the sheets and our some of our lighter belongings from blowing away. I hunted around for a flashlight but seeing didn’t necessarily make the sheet business any better because it was still like wrestling with an octopus. Getting below the deck for water or the bathroom was insane because of the wind, lack of proper light and steep ladders.
We arrived in Turkey early in the morning, only to wait on the ship in the hot sun for five more hours. We didn’t even bother trying to get something to eat in the mess hall; it was always absolutely clogged with people and their screaming children (who drove me absolutely insane! Annoying anklebiters, arrrrrgh!)
I decided to be out cold for the time on the ship because it was simply too hot to be awake. A long line of evacuees who were waiting to get off snaked around the flight deck. We decided to grab a cot and wait it out. We timed our descent to the line just in time. They were still doing it Titanic style but I said that I wasn’t going to leave Rafy on a military ship so we left together about 10 minutes later which approaches the speed of light by their standards.
There were several embassy people shouting promises of a bed, a shower and hot food, saying that “the nightmare was over.” Whatever. I would rather take my chances with the war in a relatively safe neighborhood in Beirut (Hamra). At least I know that I will have a bed, food and will know what I am in for. The nightmare was just in its early stages, actually. We went through yet another line (this time, more customs) and then we were put on buses that were going to Incirlik Airbase which is near the city of Adana. We were given MREs, which are absolutely hilarious and kind of gross (they are highly processed and several steps above airplane food). They had a heating element which told us to prop the device upright using “a rock or something.” Or something, I kid you not. Then other packages talked about how “nutrition was a force multiplier.”
It took us three hours to enter the base. They had us waiting in buses for about two. The AC was terrible and it got unbearably hot. It really sucked but at least we’re young and relatively healthy; I can only imagine how bad it was for the elderly.
Then they took us in and briefed us, which was another two hours. At least the AC was working. Then they had us line up for room assignments and meal cards. They segregated us all by sex (except for children) but at least Rafy and I were in buildings that were next to each other. We tried to use the phone/internet facility. We had to wait for at least an hour because it was overrun with people. At least I got an email or two through and called my parents.
Then we saw what our rooms were like. At least we had real beds this time, which was a plus and real AC. The downside was that each room had 6 or 8 people on bunk beds. Of course, I was in the women’s building and many children were with their mothers so they were all running around and there was always some kid screaming so sleeping was a bit difficult. All of this made me dislike children even more, if you haven’t noticed.
I woke up when soldiers pounded on the door at 5:30am. They wanted us all to look at flight lists in order to see if our names were posted. Ichecked and neither one of us were on them so I went back to sleep. We woke up, checked our email and looked into breakfast. Luckily, things weren’t as crowded. We decided to make Rafy’s room the base because it had fewer children and people were generally quiet. I regretted the trip back to my room to get a few things because it was swarming with children who were building forts and blocking the door with mattresses.
We sat around and read until we were so bored that we couldn’t read anymore. We were confined to a small area of the base and there wasn’tmuch to do except to read, email, pace and get annoyed. I overheard many interesting conversations. Some people assumed that I knew Arabic and others didn’t. One family was basically doing a cost benefit analysis of the evacuation versus trying to get to places in Syria. They decided that doing the latter, as risky as it is, might have been better than sitting around like sheep. Some were thinking that since they were in relatively safe areas, it might have been better taking a chance with the war.
Then we saw that a new flight list was posted. Rafy’s name was on it but mine wasn’t. We agreed that we wouldn’t leave the other at Incirlik, it was just too absurd. We were given the run around for a bit and then were told to talk to the state department. Naturally, they were overwhelmed. Other people had been split up too because they just weren’t all that organized. Parents were separated from children, cousins were split, grandparents, etc. If they were smart, they would realize that splitting up families was just asking for trouble. Then I realized that they hastily posted a standby list with my name on it. They said that if Rafy didn’t want to go, he could be placed on standby with me or we could both wait for a later flight. We agreed that it was the best course of action. We threw our stuff into our bags in less than five minutes and proceeded to yet another line. We were there for at least an hour. Oddly enough, we met another Rutgers student! They’re everywhere!
Rafy and I were the last people to get on a bus to the airfield. Once we were inside the mini military airport, we waited for another five hours for our flight to arrive. We learned that it was a civilian aircraft (a huge ATA plane) that would take us from the airbase to a civilian airport in Ireland (Shannon) to refuel for two hours and then we would land in Philly intn’l. Meanwhile, we were thinking “Ireland?!” Sigh…
I saw that they had phones and called my parents. Once again, I was glad that I knew some Arabic because I had no idea how to use the phones and the woman next to me saw that I was having trouble and she saved the day.
I tried to sleep for most of the flight but I couldn’t because I was freezing (as usual!). I wrapped my head in a scarf and blanket, put on two shirts and that didn’t really help. I was also glad that we grabbed some extra MREs because they will always beat airplane food.
We arrived absolutely exhausted (or well… I was because I couldn’t sleep properly!) at around 7am and breezed through customs.
Looking fwd to hearing from all of you and seeing you too! I will start to send replies to your personal emails in a few days. Sorry I couldn’t get to it sooner…
Love, solidarity and SAMIDOUN!
Paola
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
More links
Deepa Kumar of Rutgers University, on US Media, Israel, and Lebanese Civilians in Monthly Review:
It is hard to predict when and if the media will stop running images of Lebanese casualties and destruction of Lebanese towns. Unless censored by the state and/or the corporate parents that own them, the 24-hour news channels which constantly need new and sensational images will continue to show them to boost their ratings. And in turn, more of the public is likely to start questioning Israel's actions.
And on the other side of the barricades, Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institute, on What Options Are Left?:
Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile. If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war — not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.
Also, while I'm recommending articles by my friends*, I recommend checking out Pham Binh's article from this April, The Coming War With Iran:
A European diplomat put it this way to [New Yorker writer Seymour] Hersh: “This is about more than just a nuclear issues. That’s just a rallying point. [...]The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next 10 years.” If Iran gets nuclear power, it will be able to counterbalance Israel and make U.S. military attacks on Middle Eastern countries difficult, if not impossible, because the U.S. will have to constantly worry about what Iran will do in response to American aggression.
*I am not friends with Victor Davis Hanson.
It is hard to predict when and if the media will stop running images of Lebanese casualties and destruction of Lebanese towns. Unless censored by the state and/or the corporate parents that own them, the 24-hour news channels which constantly need new and sensational images will continue to show them to boost their ratings. And in turn, more of the public is likely to start questioning Israel's actions.
And on the other side of the barricades, Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institute, on What Options Are Left?:
Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile. If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war — not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.
Also, while I'm recommending articles by my friends*, I recommend checking out Pham Binh's article from this April, The Coming War With Iran:
A European diplomat put it this way to [New Yorker writer Seymour] Hersh: “This is about more than just a nuclear issues. That’s just a rallying point. [...]The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next 10 years.” If Iran gets nuclear power, it will be able to counterbalance Israel and make U.S. military attacks on Middle Eastern countries difficult, if not impossible, because the U.S. will have to constantly worry about what Iran will do in response to American aggression.
*I am not friends with Victor Davis Hanson.
Israel and the future of the antiwar movement
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Israel and the future of the antiwar movement
By Sharon Smith July 28, 2006 Page 9
from Socialist Worker
ISRAEL’S SLAUGHTER of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians should be a moment of truth for the U.S. left. The fact that “about 55 percent of all casualties at the Beirut Government University Hospital are children of 15 years or less,” according to journalist Dahr Jamail, should dispel the myth that Israel’s latest incursions are acts of “self-defense,” as Israel’s many apologists claim.
The Bush administration’s rush shipment of precision bombs to aid Israel’s onslaught last weekend should be a wake-up call for those on the U.S. left who purport to follow antiwar principles, yet until now have failed to take a clear stand against the Israeli manifestations of the U.S.’s so-called “war on terror.”
To do so would require acknowledging that the U.S.’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to be mere stepping-stones in a strategic plan aimed at establishing U.S. dominance over the entire Middle East.
With the U.S. occupation of Iraq rapidly descending into bloody civil war, Israel is providing an alternate route toward achieving those shared goals--for U.S. domination over the Middle East ensures Israel’s domination as well.
Look no further than the mainstream media to verify this revelation. The Washington Post argued on July 16, “For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S. officials say.”
This requires crushing Arab organizations fighting for self-determination in Gaza and Lebanon.
Acknowledging this simple fact, however, also requires admitting the crucial role played by Israel as the U.S.’s historic regional partner in enforcing its Middle East policy.
Yet United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest national antiwar coalition, argued in a July 18 “action alert”: “We condemn Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli civilians, and we condemn the Israeli assault in Gaza and Lebanon.”
The statement repeated the mainstream media’s depiction of Hezbollah’s seizure of Israeli soldiers and firing rockets into Israel as “irresponsible acts.” Echoing liberal commentators, UFPJ criticized Israel for its “disproportionate” response--as if Hezbollah started the conflict and Israel is guilty only of over-reacting.
In reality, the conflict is many decades old and intricately tied to Israel’s historic role as the U.S.’s watchdog/attack dog in the Middle East.
Israel’s ridiculous claim that it attacked Lebanon to get its soldiers back is belied by Hezbollah’s repeated attempts to exchange the two Israeli soldiers for Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel (a common practice in the past). But Israel has no interest in a prisoner exchange because the captured soldiers provide the excuse for using its full military might against Hezbollah.
Israel’s plan to attack Hezbollah has been in place for well over a year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the Chronicle, “In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal...By 2004, the military campaign...had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board.”
Israel’s goal was clearly articulated on July 22--by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who stated that the United States opposes a ceasefire until Hezbollah has been destroyed as a significant fighting force in southern Lebanon. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Rice scoffed.
Democrats have been vocal cheerleaders for Israel, taking turns with Republicans at pro-Israel rallies across the country. At one such rally, Sen. Hillary Clinton condemned the “unwarranted, unprovoked attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsors,” calling them “the new totalitarians of the 21st century.”
These accusations are absurd. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982--the last of its troops pulling out only in 2000. Hezbollah gained its legitimacy as a resistance movement by finally driving Israel out of Lebanon.
The violence of an occupying force cannot be equated with the resistance of an occupied population, as if both sides are equally responsible for the bloodshed.
But over the last two weeks, the antiwar movement has been reviving on a principled basis, despite the gaping absence of its largest national coalition.
Ten thousand came out to protest Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine in Dearborn, Mich. Two thousand came out on a weekday afternoon in New York City. Four thousand came out in Chicago on Saturday. One thousand came out in Boston. In each case, the demonstrators were predominantly Arabs and Muslims.
For these directly affected immigrant communities, no hand-wringing debate was needed to support genuine resistance against U.S. or Israeli war and occupation.
The connection between the U.S. war on Iraq and Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine was repeatedly made clear--at the Chicago protest, for example, with chants such as “Free, free Palestine; free, free Lebanon; free, free Iraq”; “Occupation is a crime, from Iraq to Palestine!” and “No justice, no peace, U.S. out of the Middle East!”
The weakness of the mainstream U.S. antiwar movement toward Israeli war crimes is not a temporary aberration, but a long-standing phenomenon.
As journalist Laura Flanders observed, “On June 12, 1982, American activists massed in New York City to call for peace and nuclear disarmament. But the Central Park rally made no mention of the week’s own bombing--Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had just sent Israeli forces into Lebanon two days earlier.” She continued, “A message sent then might have saved a generation of Palestinians and Israelis from 20 years of occupation, fury and fear.”
There are principles--and thousands of civilian lives--at stake again today.
Israel and the future of the antiwar movement
By Sharon Smith July 28, 2006 Page 9
from Socialist Worker
ISRAEL’S SLAUGHTER of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians should be a moment of truth for the U.S. left. The fact that “about 55 percent of all casualties at the Beirut Government University Hospital are children of 15 years or less,” according to journalist Dahr Jamail, should dispel the myth that Israel’s latest incursions are acts of “self-defense,” as Israel’s many apologists claim.
The Bush administration’s rush shipment of precision bombs to aid Israel’s onslaught last weekend should be a wake-up call for those on the U.S. left who purport to follow antiwar principles, yet until now have failed to take a clear stand against the Israeli manifestations of the U.S.’s so-called “war on terror.”
To do so would require acknowledging that the U.S.’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to be mere stepping-stones in a strategic plan aimed at establishing U.S. dominance over the entire Middle East.
With the U.S. occupation of Iraq rapidly descending into bloody civil war, Israel is providing an alternate route toward achieving those shared goals--for U.S. domination over the Middle East ensures Israel’s domination as well.
Look no further than the mainstream media to verify this revelation. The Washington Post argued on July 16, “For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S. officials say.”
This requires crushing Arab organizations fighting for self-determination in Gaza and Lebanon.
Acknowledging this simple fact, however, also requires admitting the crucial role played by Israel as the U.S.’s historic regional partner in enforcing its Middle East policy.
Yet United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest national antiwar coalition, argued in a July 18 “action alert”: “We condemn Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli civilians, and we condemn the Israeli assault in Gaza and Lebanon.”
The statement repeated the mainstream media’s depiction of Hezbollah’s seizure of Israeli soldiers and firing rockets into Israel as “irresponsible acts.” Echoing liberal commentators, UFPJ criticized Israel for its “disproportionate” response--as if Hezbollah started the conflict and Israel is guilty only of over-reacting.
In reality, the conflict is many decades old and intricately tied to Israel’s historic role as the U.S.’s watchdog/attack dog in the Middle East.
Israel’s ridiculous claim that it attacked Lebanon to get its soldiers back is belied by Hezbollah’s repeated attempts to exchange the two Israeli soldiers for Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel (a common practice in the past). But Israel has no interest in a prisoner exchange because the captured soldiers provide the excuse for using its full military might against Hezbollah.
Israel’s plan to attack Hezbollah has been in place for well over a year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the Chronicle, “In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal...By 2004, the military campaign...had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board.”
Israel’s goal was clearly articulated on July 22--by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who stated that the United States opposes a ceasefire until Hezbollah has been destroyed as a significant fighting force in southern Lebanon. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Rice scoffed.
Democrats have been vocal cheerleaders for Israel, taking turns with Republicans at pro-Israel rallies across the country. At one such rally, Sen. Hillary Clinton condemned the “unwarranted, unprovoked attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsors,” calling them “the new totalitarians of the 21st century.”
These accusations are absurd. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982--the last of its troops pulling out only in 2000. Hezbollah gained its legitimacy as a resistance movement by finally driving Israel out of Lebanon.
The violence of an occupying force cannot be equated with the resistance of an occupied population, as if both sides are equally responsible for the bloodshed.
But over the last two weeks, the antiwar movement has been reviving on a principled basis, despite the gaping absence of its largest national coalition.
Ten thousand came out to protest Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine in Dearborn, Mich. Two thousand came out on a weekday afternoon in New York City. Four thousand came out in Chicago on Saturday. One thousand came out in Boston. In each case, the demonstrators were predominantly Arabs and Muslims.
For these directly affected immigrant communities, no hand-wringing debate was needed to support genuine resistance against U.S. or Israeli war and occupation.
The connection between the U.S. war on Iraq and Israel’s war on Lebanon and Palestine was repeatedly made clear--at the Chicago protest, for example, with chants such as “Free, free Palestine; free, free Lebanon; free, free Iraq”; “Occupation is a crime, from Iraq to Palestine!” and “No justice, no peace, U.S. out of the Middle East!”
The weakness of the mainstream U.S. antiwar movement toward Israeli war crimes is not a temporary aberration, but a long-standing phenomenon.
As journalist Laura Flanders observed, “On June 12, 1982, American activists massed in New York City to call for peace and nuclear disarmament. But the Central Park rally made no mention of the week’s own bombing--Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had just sent Israeli forces into Lebanon two days earlier.” She continued, “A message sent then might have saved a generation of Palestinians and Israelis from 20 years of occupation, fury and fear.”
There are principles--and thousands of civilian lives--at stake again today.
Two more protests in Philadelphia
On Friday, July 28th - at Israeli Consulate, 15th & Locust, support weekly demonstration from noon - 1:30pm; continue protests from 1:30pm - 6:pm on consulate side of street. Bring your own signs, banners, literature. Please respond if your organization can take responsibility for set time slot. Primary demands: Immediate Cease Fire; Open borders for humanitarian aid to Gaza and Lebanon.
On Friday, Aug. 4th (As part of nationally coordinated weekend of local actions) - Protest starting at Federal Building, 6th & Market Sts. at 4:30 to demand U.S. Out of Middle East. Focus on U.S. role in wars in Middle east from Iraq to Lebanon and danger of expansion to Syria and Iran. Focus on profits of oil and weapons manufacturers. March to nearby media outlet to oppose dehumanization of Arabs and Palestinians by media.
Israel deliberately hits UN observation post
How UN Lebanon post was bombed
BBC News
There was fierce fighting in the Khiam area for six hours
Details of the circumstances in which the Israeli air force bombed a United Nations observation post in south Lebanon, killing four UN peacekeepers have begun to emerge.
According to diplomats familiar with the UN's initial report into the incident, the post in the town of Khiam was hit by precision-guided munition, says the BBC's Paul Adams in Jerusalem.
The report says there was fierce fighting in the area for about six hours before the post was hit, during which time UN personnel contacted the Israel military 10 times, urging them to stop firing.
Our correspondent says the UN claims that after each call, it was assured the firing would stop.
The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers in the UN's Unifil peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, placed six warning calls to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) prior to the attack.
"On six separate occasions he was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in South Lebanon," Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed foreign office spokesman as saying.
"He warned: 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost'," the spokesman said.
The Associated Press news agency named the officer as Lt Col John Molloy.
The bomb which killed the unarmed peacekeepers - Canadian, Austrian, Finnish and Chinese soldiers - hit the building and shelter of the observation post, near the eastern end of the Lebanese-Israeli border, UN spokesman Milos Struger said.
Israel has launched an investigation.
The UN post was on high ground, in an area once occupied by Israel.
BBC News
There was fierce fighting in the Khiam area for six hours
Details of the circumstances in which the Israeli air force bombed a United Nations observation post in south Lebanon, killing four UN peacekeepers have begun to emerge.
According to diplomats familiar with the UN's initial report into the incident, the post in the town of Khiam was hit by precision-guided munition, says the BBC's Paul Adams in Jerusalem.
The report says there was fierce fighting in the area for about six hours before the post was hit, during which time UN personnel contacted the Israel military 10 times, urging them to stop firing.
Our correspondent says the UN claims that after each call, it was assured the firing would stop.
The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers in the UN's Unifil peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, placed six warning calls to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) prior to the attack.
"On six separate occasions he was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in South Lebanon," Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed foreign office spokesman as saying.
"He warned: 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost'," the spokesman said.
The Associated Press news agency named the officer as Lt Col John Molloy.
The bomb which killed the unarmed peacekeepers - Canadian, Austrian, Finnish and Chinese soldiers - hit the building and shelter of the observation post, near the eastern end of the Lebanese-Israeli border, UN spokesman Milos Struger said.
Israel has launched an investigation.
The UN post was on high ground, in an area once occupied by Israel.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Robert Fisk: Elegy for Beirut
Note: I linked to this a few days ago, but since it's been moved to a pay section, so I'm reposting the text here.
Paradise Lost:
ROBERT FISK'S ELEGY FOR BEIRUT
In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.
That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive. Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.
An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."
How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.
And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.
The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the faade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.
Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man' and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics' and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves? I
n a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."
I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.
As for the huddled masses southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.
Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.
I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.
And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.
I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
Then, on my balcony - a glance to checkthe location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."
On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.
Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?
'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate'
Paradise Lost:
ROBERT FISK'S ELEGY FOR BEIRUT
In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.
That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive. Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.
An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."
How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.
And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.
The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the faade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.
Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man' and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics' and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves? I
n a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."
I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.
As for the huddled masses southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.
Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.
I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.
And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.
I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
Then, on my balcony - a glance to checkthe location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."
On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.
Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?
'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate'
Antiwar rally in Tel Aviv, and some more useful articles
A few more links:
Another Tikkun grab bag, comprised of several articles from across the spectrum. It ranges from some excellent critiques of the war to absolute racist garbage from David Horowitz. (Horowitz is better known for CampusWatch, the witch-hunt web site that targets professors critical of Israeli policy, as well as the full-page ad he published in college newspapers across the country arguing against paying reparations to African Americans.) I’m hoping to write a longer response to some of these articles as soon as I get a free minute. There’s a fairly surprising one in there from an Israeli who is quite sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but rabidly anti-Lebanese to the point of equating ordinary Lebanese people with Hezbollah. I like Tikkun's approach generally, but I do have a problem with giving right-wing racist viewpoints more of a forum than they already have. You can find "Arabs are evil and deserve to die" all over the mainstream press; it's in giving less ubiquitous and more useful viewpoints a forum that publications like Tikkun really shine. They're particularly good about publishing left-wing Jewish and Israeli critiques of Israel, which I think is incredible valuable.
The United States in Lebanon: A Meddlesome History. This article from Foreign Policy In Focus is one of the most useful I’ve found in terms of clearly laying out the history of American (and, of course, Israeli) intervention in Lebanon. It’s fairly long, but well worth reading.
And from Ha’aretz (though other reports indicate closer to 10,000):
First major anti-war rally draws 2,500 in Tel Aviv
By Lily Galili
More than 2,500 people yesterday attended the first major demonstration against the war, marching from Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to a rally at the Cinemateque plaza. The rally differed from protests that accompanied previous wars. This is the first time that major Arab organizations in Israel - among them Hadash and Balad - arrived in large numbers from the Galilee for a demonstration in Tel Aviv in the midst of a war. They were joined by the left flank of the Zionist Left - former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni and Prof. Galia Golan, alongside the radical left of Gush Shalom, the refusal to serve movement Yesh Gvul, Anarchists Against the Wall, Coalition of Women for Peace, Taayush and others. These Jewish and Arab groups ordinarily shy away from joint activity. They couldn't come up with a unifying slogan this time either, except for the call to stop the war and start talking. However, protest veterans noted that in the Lebanon War of 1982 it took more than 10 days of warfare to bring out this many protesters, marking the first crack in the consensus. The protest drew some new faces, like Tehiya Regev of Carmiel, whose two neighbors were killed in a Katyusha attack on the city. "This war is not headed in the right direction," she told Haaretz; "the captured soldiers have long since been forgotten, so I came to call for an immediate stop to this foolish and cruel war." The rally, which received wide international press coverage, had an unfamiliar theme. Beside the usual calls for the prime minister and defense minister to resign, this was a distinctly anti-American protest. Alongside chants of "We will not kill, we will not die in the name of Zionism" there were chants of "We will not die and will not kill in the service of the United States," and slogans condemning President George W. Bush.
You can see pictures here.Sunday, July 23, 2006
Some Sunday morning updates: will Syria jump in the ring?
Syria issues a statement that it will intervene if the conflict continues: "If Israel invades Lebanon over ground and comes near to us, Syria will not sit tight. She will join the conflict. We have cooperation forces on alert. If Israeli troops provoke us, Damascus will act to guarantee the national security of Syrian territory."
"But It's Israel!" A Fox News reporter in the Gaza Strip was shot at by Israel. Check out the footage-- and the anchors' reaction. By the way, Electronic Intifada and Electronic Lebanon are great resources-- both bring together news analysis and on-the-ground reports with an emphasis on the voices of Palestinian and Lebanese people.
And the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Israel's extensive advanced planned for this operation and explains why Hezbollah's kidnappings were an excuse.
"But It's Israel!" A Fox News reporter in the Gaza Strip was shot at by Israel. Check out the footage-- and the anchors' reaction. By the way, Electronic Intifada and Electronic Lebanon are great resources-- both bring together news analysis and on-the-ground reports with an emphasis on the voices of Palestinian and Lebanese people.
And the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Israel's extensive advanced planned for this operation and explains why Hezbollah's kidnappings were an excuse.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
US rushing bombs to Israel, and other "surprises"
I found Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut in the London Independent incredibly moving.
Tikkun Magazine's site has some interesting stuff, including this very mixed, but informative, grab bag of four reactions to the war by left-wing Jews. Gila Sversky, an Israeli peace activist, writes about antiwar demonstrations in Israel being forced to have the same sort of police protection in Nahariya that racist groups get from the police here. (Same reasoning-- the vast majority would bash their heads in otherwise. The war has 95% support in Israel.)
Here's a fun article from the NY Times about how the US is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel.
...the appearance that the US is actively aiding the bombing campaign?
...it could be compared to Iran's efforts?
Um. About that... where exactly does the ambiguity come in here? If any other country did the same thing, I really doubt the Times would hesitate to delete the qualifiers that pepper that sentence. And why not compare it to Iran? After all, we know for sure that the US continues to rush arms to Israel, and we don't know if Iran has gotten, or is attempting to get, arms to Hebollah yet.
This brings up another question. Clearly, the US wants to avoid having to put its own troops into play in this mess, given the other messes it's currently trying to contain. Iraq continues to heat up-- the death toll has now risen to over 100 Iraqis a day in a cycle of violence the US is powerless to stop. And remember Afghanistan? I know, I know, we're not supposed to have thought about Afghanistan since 2002, but US troops are still there, and Afghans and Americans are still dying. And the National Guard couldn't do much during Hurricane Katrina because so many of its helicopters, amphibious vehicles and people were overseas. It's hurricane season again, and the National Guard has already been called out to assist in mass power outages in Missouri and New York. The military is desperately trying to recruit more soldiers. Despite its threats against Iran, the US military is, as Bilbo Baggins would have it, "stretched thin-- like butter scraped over too much bread."
So the US is going to do everything in its power to help Israel finish what it started without committing troops. This is no surprise-- Germany and Russia have indicated that they'd at least be willing to send troops as part of an "international peacekeeping force" after a cease-fire, but Condoleeza Rice said the US was "unlikely to." They'll use other tactics if possible. So far that's meant arms shipments, a sharp increase in the pro-Israel tilt the US encourages in its media, and of course lots of stalling and equivocation on the diplomatic front. What next? Sanctions on Syria, maybe? Veiled economic threats against Arab nations that don't cooperate in pressuring Hezbollah, Syria and Iran? It may eventually be the case, if this starts looking like World War III (like, if Iran gets actively involved) that the US will have to get involved militarily. But in the meantime, it'll keep claiming to be evenhanded while doing everything it can to aid and abet this crime against the Lebanese people and (as always) the Palestinians.
Tikkun Magazine's site has some interesting stuff, including this very mixed, but informative, grab bag of four reactions to the war by left-wing Jews. Gila Sversky, an Israeli peace activist, writes about antiwar demonstrations in Israel being forced to have the same sort of police protection in Nahariya that racist groups get from the police here. (Same reasoning-- the vast majority would bash their heads in otherwise. The war has 95% support in Israel.)
Here's a fun article from the NY Times about how the US is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel.
Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.
...the appearance that the US is actively aiding the bombing campaign?
...it could be compared to Iran's efforts?
Um. About that... where exactly does the ambiguity come in here? If any other country did the same thing, I really doubt the Times would hesitate to delete the qualifiers that pepper that sentence. And why not compare it to Iran? After all, we know for sure that the US continues to rush arms to Israel, and we don't know if Iran has gotten, or is attempting to get, arms to Hebollah yet.
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.
This brings up another question. Clearly, the US wants to avoid having to put its own troops into play in this mess, given the other messes it's currently trying to contain. Iraq continues to heat up-- the death toll has now risen to over 100 Iraqis a day in a cycle of violence the US is powerless to stop. And remember Afghanistan? I know, I know, we're not supposed to have thought about Afghanistan since 2002, but US troops are still there, and Afghans and Americans are still dying. And the National Guard couldn't do much during Hurricane Katrina because so many of its helicopters, amphibious vehicles and people were overseas. It's hurricane season again, and the National Guard has already been called out to assist in mass power outages in Missouri and New York. The military is desperately trying to recruit more soldiers. Despite its threats against Iran, the US military is, as Bilbo Baggins would have it, "stretched thin-- like butter scraped over too much bread."
So the US is going to do everything in its power to help Israel finish what it started without committing troops. This is no surprise-- Germany and Russia have indicated that they'd at least be willing to send troops as part of an "international peacekeeping force" after a cease-fire, but Condoleeza Rice said the US was "unlikely to." They'll use other tactics if possible. So far that's meant arms shipments, a sharp increase in the pro-Israel tilt the US encourages in its media, and of course lots of stalling and equivocation on the diplomatic front. What next? Sanctions on Syria, maybe? Veiled economic threats against Arab nations that don't cooperate in pressuring Hezbollah, Syria and Iran? It may eventually be the case, if this starts looking like World War III (like, if Iran gets actively involved) that the US will have to get involved militarily. But in the meantime, it'll keep claiming to be evenhanded while doing everything it can to aid and abet this crime against the Lebanese people and (as always) the Palestinians.
Emergency meeting for Philadelphia activists
Help form a network of groups and individuals in the Philadelphia area to organize against Israel's war against Lebanon and Gaza, and the U.S. government support for this offensive.
Emergency Meeting: Tuesday, July 25th, 7pm.
Basement - Calvary Church, 48th &Baltimore (in Phila)
Parking in area, easy to reach on #34
Subway Surface line from Center City
Since calling for the emergency response demonstration last Friday, the Phila. International Action Center has heard from a number of people interested in forming a network to be able to respond to the growing crisis in the Middle East brought on by U.S. and Israeli offensives. Some of the suggestions are to have round-the-clock vigils and to build locally for the August 12th demonstration in Washington. The July 25th meeting would take up these ideas and more. Please pass on this information.
Friday, July 21, 2006
More useful links
Democracy Now! has been providing excellent, excellent coverage this week. Check out today's issue for a debate between an Israeli refusenik and a member of the Israeli Peace Party, Meretz.
And for those in the Philly area, Bubbes and Zaydes (Grandparents) for Peace are holding weekly vigils.
Endtheoccupation.org is also a site worth visiting, as is coverage from the British Socialist Worker.
And from Counterpunch:
Alexander Cockburn on Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
Paul Craig Roberts (Asst Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan) on The Unfolding Horror Show: Will Americans Join Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians as Neocon Victims?
And for those in the Philly area, Bubbes and Zaydes (Grandparents) for Peace are holding weekly vigils.
Endtheoccupation.org is also a site worth visiting, as is coverage from the British Socialist Worker.
And from Counterpunch:
Alexander Cockburn on Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
Paul Craig Roberts (Asst Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan) on The Unfolding Horror Show: Will Americans Join Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians as Neocon Victims?
Everything else is noise and propaganda...
Taxi drivers in the south were charging up to $400 per person for rides to Beirut — more than 40 times the usual price. In remote villages of the south, cut off by strikes, residents made their way out over the mountains by foot. The price of food, medical supplies and gasoline rose as much as 500 percent in parts of Lebanon as the bombardment cut supply routes. The World Food Program said estimates of basic food supplies ranged from one to three months. The U.N. estimated that a half-million people have been displaced, with 130,000 fleeing to Syria and 45,000 believed to be in need of assistance. -Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press
How do you mess with a civilian population, I mean really mess with them? Israel has an idea: bomb their supply routes, their airports, bridges, ports and highways, their food factories and hospitals and water mains, and then issue a warning for them to get out. Then watch the fun: will they try to drive on bombed-out highways? Will they attempt to walk through the mountains with their children, their grandparents and whatever belongings they can carry? If they're trying to transport their families in trucks or vans, you can bomb those as they leave their villages, since the IDF has declared all civilian trucks to be legitimate targets.
It's also worth noting that if the attempt is to rout Hezbollah entirely from the region, this is beyond counterproductive. Israel may be succeeding in destroying much of Hezbollah's stash of rockets (which also dwindles rapidly as Hezbollah launches them at Israeli civilians). But think London in the Blitz, think of Tokyo, think of the Iraqi resistance: aerial bombardment brings the citizens of the bombed area together. Hezbollah already had a great deal of support in Lebanon, largely because of its many non-terror-related activities, like the wide-ranging charities, ambulance services, and other social services that provide the sort of support the weak Lebanese government doesn't supply. Now the Lebanese people are under attack, a bloody and indiscriminate attack, and their government is doing nothing-- not fighting Israel, not bringing food and water to the shelters, nothing. Who's doing something? Hezbollah.
There's certainly a large chunk of the Lebanese population that blames Hezbollah for bringing this bombing onto their heads, but there's little doubt that Hezbollah's support is wide and growing. And now Israel is launching a ground invasion. Have they learned nothing from Vietnam and Iraq and for that matter the British Empire? If you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets (despite the publicity about getting them from Iran, many of Hezbollah's rockets have turned out to be from China). And they will have no shortage of volunteers.
So yeah, this war's clearly not about rescuing two kidnapping soldiers. (Incidentally, isn't anyone worried that if the soldiers are being hidden in Lebanon, they might die in the bombing raids? If this were a movie, that would be a continuity error.) It's not about getting rid of Hezbollah. So what is it about? Tariq Ali argues that "[Israel and Washington] want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model." Israeli activist Uri Avnery agrees: "The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government... That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda."
Where does that take us? What would that mean for the region? Would Iran take it lying down? Will the US, which at the moment appears confused and directionless, attempt to step in? Is this World War Three, or will it stay localized the way it did when the Israelis pulled the same damn thing in Lebanon in 1982? Stay tuned...
How do you mess with a civilian population, I mean really mess with them? Israel has an idea: bomb their supply routes, their airports, bridges, ports and highways, their food factories and hospitals and water mains, and then issue a warning for them to get out. Then watch the fun: will they try to drive on bombed-out highways? Will they attempt to walk through the mountains with their children, their grandparents and whatever belongings they can carry? If they're trying to transport their families in trucks or vans, you can bomb those as they leave their villages, since the IDF has declared all civilian trucks to be legitimate targets.
It's also worth noting that if the attempt is to rout Hezbollah entirely from the region, this is beyond counterproductive. Israel may be succeeding in destroying much of Hezbollah's stash of rockets (which also dwindles rapidly as Hezbollah launches them at Israeli civilians). But think London in the Blitz, think of Tokyo, think of the Iraqi resistance: aerial bombardment brings the citizens of the bombed area together. Hezbollah already had a great deal of support in Lebanon, largely because of its many non-terror-related activities, like the wide-ranging charities, ambulance services, and other social services that provide the sort of support the weak Lebanese government doesn't supply. Now the Lebanese people are under attack, a bloody and indiscriminate attack, and their government is doing nothing-- not fighting Israel, not bringing food and water to the shelters, nothing. Who's doing something? Hezbollah.
There's certainly a large chunk of the Lebanese population that blames Hezbollah for bringing this bombing onto their heads, but there's little doubt that Hezbollah's support is wide and growing. And now Israel is launching a ground invasion. Have they learned nothing from Vietnam and Iraq and for that matter the British Empire? If you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets (despite the publicity about getting them from Iran, many of Hezbollah's rockets have turned out to be from China). And they will have no shortage of volunteers.
So yeah, this war's clearly not about rescuing two kidnapping soldiers. (Incidentally, isn't anyone worried that if the soldiers are being hidden in Lebanon, they might die in the bombing raids? If this were a movie, that would be a continuity error.) It's not about getting rid of Hezbollah. So what is it about? Tariq Ali argues that "[Israel and Washington] want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model." Israeli activist Uri Avnery agrees: "The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government... That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda."
Where does that take us? What would that mean for the region? Would Iran take it lying down? Will the US, which at the moment appears confused and directionless, attempt to step in? Is this World War Three, or will it stay localized the way it did when the Israelis pulled the same damn thing in Lebanon in 1982? Stay tuned...
Dispatch from Saida, Lebanon
The following was sent to me by my friend in Beirut who is still awaiting evacuation. She received this from her friend Darine Zaatari in Saida, Lebanon, who requested that she circulate it. I've edited a bit for typos.
Thursday, July 20th
Jumped out of bed at 2:00 am Thursday morning to an airstrike right here in Saida. Great explosion shaking the whole building. It was close, but we could not figure out where exactly. Another airstrike shortly after. Now it sounds a bit further. We rush out onto the balcony. The glass door to the balcony, like every glass window and door at home, slightly left open to prevent them from shattering due to explosion pressure. We cannot see much.
We sit out for a while. It is completely quiet. Even bats are too scared to fly around. Then a noisy buzzing sound in the air. This time it is an MK, a pilotless spy jet, usually smaller in size and flies low, takes photos. It is not to be feared in itself, but what usually follows it does, a new airstrike. It takes photos and explores locations to target. Twenty minutes later, an airstrike. Later we go to bed.
We wake up around 4:30, yet another attack. This time it is a gas station. Anythingto deplete resources and people's will to strife. At 5:00 am, the phone rang. I raced to the phone contemplating every single possibility of who might have gotten hurt from the family and friends in the raid. I hear an automated recording, a voice speaking formal Arabic, "To the residents of south Lebanon, you have to evacuate thesouth. The State of Israel." I was stunned, lost my ability to move or feel anything. Of all the different kinds of direct and indirect threats I have received throughout my life from the Israelis, this is the first time I get it right in my home.Two days ago, they threw flyers with the same text. But, do you think people care? Do you think people respond to these threats? A phone call, a very ersonalized terrorizing message right in my ear and in Arabic, yet insufficient to drive me out of my home. I am only one of many. But I am not a mother and I do not live further south.
According to government estimates Tuesday night, half a million Lebanese have been displaced. Most are staying with relatives or friends or in rented apartments. Over 70 thousand in Beirut and north registered in government centers, particularly public schools. Over eight thousand in Saida are distributed over 30 centers.They are turning abandoned government buildings into refugee centers. They continue to destroy the country's infrastructure and cutting off villages from one another. The two biggest cheese and Labneh factories in the Beqaa bombed to the ground. Hundreds of cows and sheep farms in Beirut attacked from the sky. Trucks with red cross signs on it or not, carrying first aid supplies and food essentials to refugees bombed by jets killing drivers and other people around. Continuous bombing of houses and residential buildings. If the war ends today, 60, 000 people will be homeless.
Yesterday we visited two refugee centers. One had 150 and the other had 310 and was expecting at least 40 more. Resources are scarce, medication, infant formula, food. We rang door bells looking for an extra pillow, sheet, mattress, extra anything. There are 100 mattresses for 310 people in the center. My heart turns into a raging fist as we drive around the city. People looking for their relatives. They know they fled together, but now no word from the other car. Same stories come outof southern Beirut. People leaving their bombed homes and cannot find a child, a husband. In Saida, refugees are sitting on the streets or in street roundabouts, with nowhere to go. Nowhere. Barely made it safe to Saida and then nowhere to go. A family, a mother and four children, surviving one airstrike killing twenty five people right there in the same house they were staying, got attacked by sky shortly before reaching Saida. Nowhere to escape; we are all targets.
More cars with white rags tied on radio antennas. Some cars had flags. Flags, of the many supporters of the German soccer teams, now come to use. They are tied to cars, huge flags, implying someone in the car carries the German nationality and hoping being German is worth something in this war. How ironically tragic, these flags were carried around by people every time Germans won a game, flying up in the air, with horns blowing and people cheering. Flags of victory and joy. So many Brazilian Lebanese around, so many supporters of the Brazilian soccer team, yet no Brazilian flags on any car to be seen. People's values vary with nationality.
At least sixty-one people died yesterday in different areas in Lebanon,the biggest death toll per day since the start of this war. Only one fighter and the rest arecivilians. Families all together killed. Many people believed to be still under destroyed houses. The situation is getting worse by the day. We fear that once the foreigners are evacuated, things will get even worse. According to the media, this is the biggest evacuation in the world since WWI. There are 20,000 Americans being evacuated. Not only with nationality, people's value also varies with place of birth. The US embassy is openly setting evacuation priorities of 20,000 Americans according to place of birth. There is one position lower in the hierarchy to being born in Lebanon and that is Palestine.
So many battles on so many fronts. The battle to survive, the battle to survive strong, the battle with the enemy, the battle with dispelling all the lies from the western media, the battle to stay unified, the battle to hold on to anger, the battle to stay focused and help out, the battle to get out of bed in the morning not just to an airstrike. So many battles. One battle we have won so far, the battle to survive strong. You hear it in people's voices: we do not care about the destruction, we persist and we resist.
Thursday, July 20th
Jumped out of bed at 2:00 am Thursday morning to an airstrike right here in Saida. Great explosion shaking the whole building. It was close, but we could not figure out where exactly. Another airstrike shortly after. Now it sounds a bit further. We rush out onto the balcony. The glass door to the balcony, like every glass window and door at home, slightly left open to prevent them from shattering due to explosion pressure. We cannot see much.
We sit out for a while. It is completely quiet. Even bats are too scared to fly around. Then a noisy buzzing sound in the air. This time it is an MK, a pilotless spy jet, usually smaller in size and flies low, takes photos. It is not to be feared in itself, but what usually follows it does, a new airstrike. It takes photos and explores locations to target. Twenty minutes later, an airstrike. Later we go to bed.
We wake up around 4:30, yet another attack. This time it is a gas station. Anythingto deplete resources and people's will to strife. At 5:00 am, the phone rang. I raced to the phone contemplating every single possibility of who might have gotten hurt from the family and friends in the raid. I hear an automated recording, a voice speaking formal Arabic, "To the residents of south Lebanon, you have to evacuate thesouth. The State of Israel." I was stunned, lost my ability to move or feel anything. Of all the different kinds of direct and indirect threats I have received throughout my life from the Israelis, this is the first time I get it right in my home.Two days ago, they threw flyers with the same text. But, do you think people care? Do you think people respond to these threats? A phone call, a very ersonalized terrorizing message right in my ear and in Arabic, yet insufficient to drive me out of my home. I am only one of many. But I am not a mother and I do not live further south.
According to government estimates Tuesday night, half a million Lebanese have been displaced. Most are staying with relatives or friends or in rented apartments. Over 70 thousand in Beirut and north registered in government centers, particularly public schools. Over eight thousand in Saida are distributed over 30 centers.They are turning abandoned government buildings into refugee centers. They continue to destroy the country's infrastructure and cutting off villages from one another. The two biggest cheese and Labneh factories in the Beqaa bombed to the ground. Hundreds of cows and sheep farms in Beirut attacked from the sky. Trucks with red cross signs on it or not, carrying first aid supplies and food essentials to refugees bombed by jets killing drivers and other people around. Continuous bombing of houses and residential buildings. If the war ends today, 60, 000 people will be homeless.
Yesterday we visited two refugee centers. One had 150 and the other had 310 and was expecting at least 40 more. Resources are scarce, medication, infant formula, food. We rang door bells looking for an extra pillow, sheet, mattress, extra anything. There are 100 mattresses for 310 people in the center. My heart turns into a raging fist as we drive around the city. People looking for their relatives. They know they fled together, but now no word from the other car. Same stories come outof southern Beirut. People leaving their bombed homes and cannot find a child, a husband. In Saida, refugees are sitting on the streets or in street roundabouts, with nowhere to go. Nowhere. Barely made it safe to Saida and then nowhere to go. A family, a mother and four children, surviving one airstrike killing twenty five people right there in the same house they were staying, got attacked by sky shortly before reaching Saida. Nowhere to escape; we are all targets.
More cars with white rags tied on radio antennas. Some cars had flags. Flags, of the many supporters of the German soccer teams, now come to use. They are tied to cars, huge flags, implying someone in the car carries the German nationality and hoping being German is worth something in this war. How ironically tragic, these flags were carried around by people every time Germans won a game, flying up in the air, with horns blowing and people cheering. Flags of victory and joy. So many Brazilian Lebanese around, so many supporters of the Brazilian soccer team, yet no Brazilian flags on any car to be seen. People's values vary with nationality.
At least sixty-one people died yesterday in different areas in Lebanon,the biggest death toll per day since the start of this war. Only one fighter and the rest arecivilians. Families all together killed. Many people believed to be still under destroyed houses. The situation is getting worse by the day. We fear that once the foreigners are evacuated, things will get even worse. According to the media, this is the biggest evacuation in the world since WWI. There are 20,000 Americans being evacuated. Not only with nationality, people's value also varies with place of birth. The US embassy is openly setting evacuation priorities of 20,000 Americans according to place of birth. There is one position lower in the hierarchy to being born in Lebanon and that is Palestine.
So many battles on so many fronts. The battle to survive, the battle to survive strong, the battle with the enemy, the battle with dispelling all the lies from the western media, the battle to stay unified, the battle to hold on to anger, the battle to stay focused and help out, the battle to get out of bed in the morning not just to an airstrike. So many battles. One battle we have won so far, the battle to survive strong. You hear it in people's voices: we do not care about the destruction, we persist and we resist.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
A sampling platter of useful articles.
Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now!, interviews Beirut-based independent journalist Robert Fisk.
"If Israel has the right to use force in self defence, so do its neighbours": Ahmad Khalidi in the Guardian.
Israel as an extension of American empire: from Tikkun Magazine's blog.
What Does Israel Want? Israeli professor Ilan Pappe on the goals of this war.
Why Is Israel Back in Gaza? Ramsy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
The Angry Arab News Service
US Middle East Policy: Democratic Illusions: Lance Selfa in the International Socialist Review-- from 2005, but a useful tour of the Middle East.
"If Israel has the right to use force in self defence, so do its neighbours": Ahmad Khalidi in the Guardian.
Israel as an extension of American empire: from Tikkun Magazine's blog.
What Does Israel Want? Israeli professor Ilan Pappe on the goals of this war.
Why Is Israel Back in Gaza? Ramsy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
The Angry Arab News Service
US Middle East Policy: Democratic Illusions: Lance Selfa in the International Socialist Review-- from 2005, but a useful tour of the Middle East.
like a mini-Katrina...
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid cosigned a letter expressing anger at the US's glacial pace at evacuating citizens from Beirut. "This is being treated like a mini-Katrina," he commented in the Washington Times. The Marines landed in Beirut today to help evacuate US citizens, some of whom spent the day sipping free cocktails on the deck of the rented luxury liner Orient Queen.
The comparison is striking. Yes, several thousand US citizens, including two of my dearest friends, are trapped in hotels, dorms and apartments around Beirut as I write this. It's a terrifying situation for them, particularly if the US decides to force them to pay thousands of dollars for their transport, and my sympathies are certainly with them. Reid compares their position to Hurricane Katrina, when many more thousands of US citizens were left to die on their rooftops as the fetid floodwaters rose. There is a Katrina comparison to be made here, but it's not about stranded Americans this time. A more apt comparison would be the Katrina-like displacement of over half a million Lebanese now taking place.
With roadways destroyed, and Israel's planes bombing milk bottling plants and medical convoys, Lebanon's already weak and inept government relief effort would be a joke, if there were any humor to be found in the situation. Beirutis are crowding into makeshift shelters in schools and parks, and attempting to stretch what food and water supplies they have, since no food and water is forthcoming from the government. Volunteers (including my stranded friends) and Lebanese left-wing organizations are working frantically to raise money and deliver supplies to the ordinary people who have suddenly become refugees. (For more information, or to donate to their relief effort, click here.) The groups' requests are telling: they are asking for sanitary supplies and anti-diarrheal medicines, as Israel's indiscriminate bombings turn polished, metropolitan Beirut back into the war zone of two decades ago. Like Londoners during the Blitz, Lebanese families are taking one another in and remaining in resolutely high spirits. But the world is watching, quietly and unapologetically, as Israel responds to the kidnapping of two soldiers by obliterating a city of millions. Will they step in and make an attempt to stop the assault? Will dispossessed Beirutis, like their brothers and sisters in New Orleans, be forgotten and left to fend for themselves?
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