latest installment from Beiruit
[Since the NYT has outed the author, I’ll repeat that she’s Rasha
Salti.]
Every day, I have to ask at least twice or three times what day it
is, where we are now in July (Please tell me this war will be a July
affair only). The calendar of the Siege barely sticks in my head.
It’s Day 16 or 17 when I am writing now. I don’t know.
I have also tried to the best of my abilities to keep up to date with
professional commitments from my former life. It’s almost impossible,
but if I stop I know I will fall apart entirely. It is surreal to
write emails following up with work. The world outside is decidedly
distant. The mental image of my apartment in New York is practically
impossible to summon. Avenue A, the deli at the corner and the
Yemenis who own it, all lapsed. This is what happens when you are
under siege. Or these are the first effects of the siege, maybe when
time will pass, my perception of the world will change and my
imagination will be back at work, I will have this imagined geography
of where I once was and people I once knew. I know I am not alone in
this. My friend Christine said to me yesterday that she forces
herself to go to the office to keep from going insane, but she cannot
remember anything about her work before the siege started. The
renowned Lebanese novelist, Elias Khoury, said this morning on al-
Jazeera that he is so reminded of past experience with Israel’s wars
that he feels he is living between a time of memory and the present
time. This war is not exactly a replay of 1982, but we cannot help
recalling 1982. I keep joking that the “veterans” of 1982, those of
us who endured that Israeli murderous folly, should get some sort of
a break, a package of mundane privileges, free internet, free coffee,
parking spots.
Beirut has been spared and life has resumed an almost normal pace.
The sound of Israeli air raids comes every so often just low enough
to spread chills of horror and fright. But the droves of displaced
who arrive here every day have transformed the space of the city.
Their wretchedness is the poignant marker of the war.
We live from day to day. The scenarios for the conclusion of this war
seem very difficult to articulate, even to imagine. The US is intent
on the continuation of the war, Israel has suffered a defeat and the
goals it has set to determine some sort of victory don’t seem
fathomable. The Israeli press was beginning to ask a few intelligent
questions until the IDF suffered losses in an ambush set-up by
Hezbollah. One damn ambush, a mere handful of soldiers, and the
entire press corps went ballistic overnight. They were all about
flattening Lebanon, hurting the government, bringing out the big
guns, more troops. One damn ambush where a mere handful of soldiers
were faced with a reality they were not prepared to contend with:
that Hezbollah guerrillas are well trained and will fight without
blinking to defend the land from a ground invasion. What a funny
army! What a funny society! What do they expect when they go to war
with a guerilla?
One of their pundits (or officials) said that Israel was only using
10% of its military capacity. Imagine, 10% for a mere 3 or 5 kms
squares! The arithmetics in Israel are suddenly emerging. For a very
long time I have wondered what the equation is between the death of
brown people and a single “white” life. There must be some sort of a
secret arithmetic someplace in someone’s drawyer that guides
“outrage” in the western world. Off course Rwanda came to shatter all
notions of an arithmetic. Then came the killing of Rachel Corrie, a
white face with a brown heart. She did not count. Or at least it took
a lot of pull to make her death a reason for outrage in the
mainstream of the western world. In this war, other equations have
emerged, for the still breathing life of a single Israeli soldier,
the deaths in Gaza are enough to crowd a cemetary. And just recently,
we had the famous equation, for every shell in Haifa, 10 buildings go
down in the southern suburbs of Beirut. (This was verified on
Tuesday: 23 shells brought down 10 buildings). But I digress…
It’s a losing battle and they should negotiate a settlement and avoid
more bloodshed and wretchedness for us all. This a time to be smart,
not bloodthirsty.
The shelling in the south has been astounding. People are trapped in
villages for days without anything: no food, no water, no
electricity, no medicines. They were sending out calls for help and
no one could get to them because the Israelis would not let
ambulances come near (two were shelled in the past two days). The UN
has been allowed to deliver some basic rations of food and medicine
but they have been scarce. The Beqaa has been shelled ruthlessly as
well.
The humanitarian tragedy is beyond description. One of the local
television stations airs the cries of help from citizen trapped in
their homes under shelling: so and so has not eaten for a week, so
and so needs diabetic medicine, so and so needs his chemotherapy, so
and so needs to be let out, so and so, so and so… The messages
scroll, and scroll, and that’s all I can see and hear. I can think of
very, very little else. In fact, I obsess over these messages, of
people trapped under shelling, bodies under rubble. I keep having
fantasies of a huge, huge civilian procession of human shields
walking alongisde convoys of food, medicine, ambulances, that defy
Israeli’s military superiority in the air. A similar mass of people
that took to the street when it was aggrieved by former Prime
Minister Hariri’s death that walks fearless and relentless to the
south. A human convoy of hundreds and thousands of people just taking
back the country and lending their bodies to rescue their brethren
trapped in villages. Civility turning the tide on barbarism. A crazy
dream that ought neither be crazy nor a dream. Perhaps one day…
My Palestinian friends are irked again that because Lebanon is
“sexy”, the world watches Lebanon while Gaza is being sliced and
bled. This is due to the ruthlessness and savvyness of the western
media. On the Arab media, there is as much coverage of the Israeli
horrors in Gaza as there is of the dose administered to Lebanon. In
all cases, as Israel is now waging a war on these two fronts (in
addition to its adventures in Nablus), something unexpected has
happened. The two fronts are now inexorably linked. Gaza is nothing
like the entire geography of Lebanon, politically, sociologically,
culturally the two geographies could not be more different, and yet,
as the same shells explode and kill there and here, and the flow of
images from there and here is uninterrupted, the geographies have
merged. The tacit alliance between Hamas and Hezbollah could not have
achieved this proxiness. Their dead are now our own, our siege is
theirs, there is a tandem of solidarity, of tragedy, of resilience,
of defiance.
I have stopped accompanying journalists, I started to hang around the
schools and other sites where the displaced have been relocated. I go
from disappointment to outright rage at the governments’ failure at
responding appropriately to the humanitarian crisis. The other face
of this country’s victory is and will be its handling of the
humanitarian crisis. The challenge is of an unimaginable scale. It is
clear that the government neither has the wherewithalls or the know-
how for handling it (and I would add will because when there’s a
will, there is a way). Closer to a third of the population is
displaced. The Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of the
Interior, the Ministry of Health, and a slew of other public
institutions have been subsumed in the pettiness of internecine
political fighting. Not a single appointed official has had the guts
or displayed the resolution to tend to the problem appropriately. If
a crisis will erupt and I believe it will, they will have to be held
accountable.
They parade on TV and in the streets, with their neat hair and
pressed suits, moving from their air-conditioned meeting rooms to
restaurants for “power lunches” and so-called coordination meetings,
while hundreds and hundreds of volunteers are actually carrying the
burden of this problem. What a shame this political class has proven
to be. To make matters worse, they whimper and nag about how the
Lebanese state has to be “reinforced” to diplomats and foreign
envoys, while their OWN people sleep on mattresses (if they are lucky
to have been given one) and walk around barefoot in circles wondering
how they are expected to make a living.
In wars, there are two fronts: the battlefield and the civilian
front. The critical civilian front in this war is not the unaffected
handsome and well-to-do of Lebanon, but the 800,000 displaced. If
Hezbollah are waging the war on the battlefield, the other field has
been left to be tended to by bands of NGOs and charity organizations.
The NGOs have shouldered the brunt of the burden, but only a handful
charity organizations are not attached to the extremely petty
ambitions of a political figure or group. And the ugliness of their
short-sighted calculations (just as during the parliamentary
elections that followed March 14th) have prevailed as they hand over
sacks of sugar and rice. Some charity organizations have had the
arrogance to force those who receive relief aid to hold up a
photograph of the so-called political figure! Others ask them to
pledge their loyalty or simply pledge their vote! This is how the
political class is “rallying” around the country! This is how they
face Israel’s might!
I spent the afternoon yesterday in Karm el-Zeytoon, a neighborhood in
Ashrafieh (that translates literally to “olive grove”) where some
schools have been opened to house some of the displaced from the
south and from Beirut’s southern suburb. I went to visit friends who
were in charge of the Nazareth Nuns school (a public school). A band
of dashing young men and women, not yet thirty years of age, that
have taken upon themselves the task of ensuring the well-being and
safety of some 120 or so men, women, children and elderly. Some in
that band of volunteers belong to the Democratic Left movement, and
the school, as are two neighboring other schools, are under the
charge of the Samir Kassir Foundation.
Although they have established a schedule of shifts so as not to have
their entire lives taken over by their volunteering, still, their
entire lives are on hold and all they do in effect is tend to the
displaced. The atmosphere inside the school was convivial, slow-paced
but a low-grade tension is impossible to ignore. All throughout my
visit I was smitten by their grace. They have had to organize every
single aspect of everyday survival in that school: spaces where
people sleep, the use of bathrooms, the overall hygiene of the place,
“house-cleaning”, collection of garbage, preparing meals, keeping
stock of supplies, medicines, medical needs of the group, fun and
games for the kids, security of the site, etc. That night, they were
going to have the first attempt at screening a DVD in the school’s
open air courtyard (Finfing Nemo). They are not yet thirty years of
age and yet they have to sort through the everyday problems that
arise between adults their parents’ age.
A nine-year old boy came nagging to T. (one of the main volunteers),
as he and I chatted in the makeshift “salon” (a broken table and
school bench at the side of the gateway to the school). He wanted T’s
permission to go to a printer’s shop where he had heard he could find
work on a day to day basis. He implored him. T. promised he would
talk to the boy’s father that night and they would see. The boy told
him that some man in the group assured him that he would find him
work. T did not have the heart to lecture him about the ills of child
labor. The boy was in turmoil over the humiliating state of his
family and was eager to share the burden with his father (a taxi
driver whose earnings have gone extremely low).
At the opposite end of the open courtyard, R. (another volunteer) was
trying to settle a dispute between two women. Khadijeh was upset with
Hanadi because Hanadi had gotten all uppety and defiant that day and
reneged on her duty to clean the bathroom and her sleep area.
Khadijeh had cleaned in her place just to avoid a clash with other
people in the group. Hanadi and her were related by marriage, Hanadi
had provoked her. She had gotten uppety because her husband Ali, who
works as a mechanic somewhere in the southern suburbs had gone back
the day before and opened shop and earned some hard-needed cash. He
claimed to have come back with 1,000$ in his pocket, bragged about
not needing hand-outs and charity. It was probably a lie, but his
wife was so tired of the brunt of humiliation she no longer felt
obliged to abide by the rules that regulated their lives in that
shelter. The women’s screams got loud at some point, until Khadijeh
walked away. It took some time for them to cool down. The other
residents looked away, a discreet gesture to give the two women space
for privacy. That’s all the privacy afforded to people there, a gaze
turned away. Otherwise, strangers have had to live with each other,
their privacy shattered, their intimacy stripped.
Half an hour later, R. went to the back of the school building, I saw
her, Khadijeh and Hanadi sit around a pot of freshly brewed coffee
and cigarettes, sorting things out in gentler tone.
Another volunteer walked in carrying medicines for the group. He held
a list in his hand and the bag of prescription drugs in the other. He
went looking for each one, he knew them one by one. An hour later, a
volunteer doctor came in, and that same volunteer went over the cases
with him. He knew them one by one, who was allergic to what, who was
breastfeeding and could not take that particular prescription, who
had not reacted well to that medicine… I was in awe.
R. finished her seance with the two women and came back to sit with
me. I played cards with a six year old with one elbow in a cast and
eyes sparkling with humor. An elderly overweight woman came over and
asked R. to find her and her sister a room. She could not tolerate
the heat or the mosquitoes in her old age and health conditions. She
begged her. She wanted to die in dignity, not like that, on a
mattress in a school. She could barely hold back her tears.
I left them reluctantly. I was worried about the volunteers as much
as the displaced. Until when could they go on on like that? Civil
society is not equipped to supplant the government in that daunting
task.
Two days ago, a TV station caught Walid Eido (a parliamentarian from
Beirut, and one of the particularly mentally challenged from Hariri’s
al-Mustaqbal movement –God forgive Hariri for plaguing us with his
own band of court-jesters), lounging on the beach, playing cards.
They split their screen and aired images of the hapless displaced.
The contrast was sinister. The next day, this illustruous
representative of Beirut rushed on television to seem busy and
babbled on as if he were in the “know”. I hope that this war will be
the end of his ability to walk the streets of Beirut. Do you
understand my rage?
In my last siege note, I ranted about the Arab political class.
Yesterday morning Hosni Moubarak served me with another stellar
illsutration of his mugnificence. On his way back from Saudi Arabia
to Egypt, he stated publicaly that Egypt would never go to war with
Israel for Lebanon. Egypt is a country that is currently struggling
with its development and was negotiating growth and could not put all
this at risk for the sake of Lebanon. That same morning, the Egyptian
government raised the price of gas by 30%!
Dignified! Contrast that sense of dignity with the Lebanese injured
who refused to be flown over to Jordan for treatment because of the
King’s support of the Israeli war on Lebanon.
On a final note I would like to correct something I wrote from my
last “siege note”. I said that the Arab League is complicit in the
destruction of Lebanon. I need to ammend that and say that the Arab
League is complicit in the destruction of Gaza, in the increase of
settlements in Palestine, in the construction of the apartheid wall
and in the genocide in Darfur. These are its 2005-2006 achievements
that linger in my memory. There could be more.