Lebanon: How many times 1948?
ANJALI KAMAT
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In October 2005, Lebanon saw demonstrations and heady hopes for a new future. Where are those hopes now?
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Qana carries a heavy symbolic weight in Lebanon.
PHOTO: AP
New generation of refugees: Israeli air strikes and ground attacks have left many Lebanese homeless.
I VISITED Lebanon twice this past year; first in October 2005 and then, more recently, in May 2006. During my first trip, the country was consumed by speculations over possible revelations in the first report from the UN inquiry into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al Hariri. It had been eight long months of explosions and mourning — but also of million-strong demonstrations and heady hopes for a new future. The day the report was released, Beirut was practically under curfew. Driving along the former "green line," which had divided the city into the predominantly Christian East and Muslim West during the civil war, Beirut's empty streets seemed stalked by fear, uncertainty, and an aggressive mix of memorialising and amnesia.
As my gracious Armenian friend proudly showed me around her beautiful city, we walked through the reconstructed alleys of central Beirut and followed Hariri's last footsteps — oddly memorialised in Hollywood-style silver footprints — past rows of sunny cafes and overpriced air-conditioned boutiques.
Stark contrast
This area, rebuilt under Hariri, was in stark contrast to the bombed-out buildings that still haunt much of the city. These remnants of the civil war, every remaining surface pockmarked with dozens of bullet holes, stood like defiant reminders of the unspeakable horrors of the war years — and of the lingering poverty and disquiet — that the Lebanese seemed so determined to forget.
Every inch of wall space across the city was covered with glossy pictures of both the "martyrs of the Independence Intifada," the vocal opponents of Syrian influence in Lebanon who had been assassinated in the preceding months, as well as a motley crew of controversial political figures: including former Christian warlords Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun and Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Any remaining space was prominently occupied by English and Arabic stickers demanding "The Truth," in reference to the Hariri-family led campaign to uncover the motives behind the assassinations between February and October 2005 that claimed over two dozen lives.
Next to Hariri himself, the most popular poster was of the charismatic Samir Kassir, a Palestinian-Lebanese leader of the Democratic Left movement and a prominent intellectual who played an active role in the popular and multi-confessional uprising in March and April demanding government accountability and an end to Syrian presence in Lebanon.
He was killed by a car bomb outside his home in the plush Christian neighbourhood of Achrafieh on June 2, 2005. Critical of both repressive Syrian power in Lebanon as well as the brutality of American imperialism, he had become a hero of sorts for the secular, democratic left across the Arab world. On seeing his pictures, my fellow traveller, an outspoken Yemeni feminist, immediately ripped one of them off the wall to take back home with her.
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When I returned half a year later, the UN investigation, though still ongoing, had slipped off the front pages, and the urgency created by the assassinations and the "independence uprising" seemed to have cooled off.
The political class was in the midst of a "national dialogue" and politicians from the left and right, anti- and pro-Syrian, religious and secular, Druze, Maronite, Orthodox, Sunni, and Shiite, many of them once sworn enemies, were all talking to each other.
The rest of the country, it seemed, was trying very hard to put the previous year behind them and concentrate on the World Cup and the summer ahead. Beyond the immediate importance of one's allegiance to three most popular teams, Brazil, Italy, or Germany, people I talked to were planning holidays, weddings, conferences, art shows, film festivals, concerts, and their futures.
I too was content to let politics and history slide as I enjoyed the breathtaking beauty of the Lebanese coastline and hillsides and feasted on the finest seafood in the picturesque old port towns of Jbeil and Saida. But ambling through the bustling alleys of the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra in search of a kuffiyeh — that chequered symbol of Palestine solidarity — even as I entertained fantasies of moving to Beirut, I woke back up to history. It was here, and in the neighbouring camp of Shatila, that in September 1982 the Lebanese Phalangist militias, under the watchful eyes of Ariel Sharon, massacred over 1,500 Palestinians — a people whom, in Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's words, "the waves of forgetfulness had cast upon the shores of Beirut."
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Today, a little over two months since my last visit to Lebanon, the country has been plunged into chaos and in an ironic twist, Palestinians in Sabra, Shatila, and elsewhere — Lebanon's "unwelcome guests" — have opened their camps to shelter a new generation of refugees.
One month of Israeli air strikes, now combined with ground attacks, has meant daily massacres, one million refugees, shattered infrastructure, fears about the possible use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions, and a 15,000-tonne oil spill along Lebanon's coastline that former Greenpeace campaigner Wael Hmaidan describes as the "biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the country."
One of the most outrageous acts of Israeli aggression on Lebanon was the indiscriminate bombing of an apartment building in Qana on July 30, that crushed some 60 civilians to death, over half of them children. They died, under the rubble of a building they had sought refuge in, when it collapsed after two air strikes in the middle of the night.
Symbolic weight
Qana carries a heavy symbolic weight in Lebanon: ten years ago, this mountain village, where Jesus was supposed to have once made water into wine, was shelled by Israel, during its "Operation Grapes of Wrath," killing 106 civilians— again, more than half of them children — seeking refuge at a UN shelter.
In the despairing words of Beiruti artist Mazen Kerbaj: "2,000 years ago, in Qana, Jesus transformed water into wine; today in Qana, the Israeli Air Force transformed children into ashes; today in Beirut, I am unable to transform this page into a drawing."
My Armenian friend asked me if Americans would still support expedited deliveries of bombs to Israel if the US media had shown them the horrifying images from Qana of dozens of dead children being exhumed from the rubble. Like Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent on July 31, she imagined that you had to have a "heart of stone to not feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced." I'm not sure how to convey my cynical sense that for Americans, and to some extent people all over the world, weary of daily tragedies in their inboxes and morning papers, what is happening in Lebanon, as with Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, and Sudan, will soon become quite "normal" — perhaps even rationalised as part of the endless "cycle of violence" in a "naturally" turbulent region, or worse, a necessary cost of the "war on terror."
Powerful statement
Two weeks into the start of the Israeli assault, 70 Lebanese writers, artists, journalists, academics, and filmmakers, circulated a powerful statement against U.S.-supported Israeli impunity and the normalisation of state terror. Building on a growing international campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, they called for marginalising Israel — along the lines of movements against apartheid South Africa — through "boycotting Israeli products and Israeli academic and scientific institutions that do not condemn the Israeli aggression against Lebanon."
But even as people in Lebanon and around the world register their protest, I can't shake Palestinian artist Emily Jacir's unsettling words: "Is this all fodder for entertainment? Something for people to write about, make art about, make films about, cry about, complain about, shout about, and then go home and live while the bombs drop and entire countries are destroyed? How many generations have to live through these Israeli horrors? Watching the generation of my parents having to re-live all this yet again ... how many times 1948?"
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