Hindu, India
Aug. 13, 2006

Lebanon: How many times 1948?

ANJALI KAMAT

In October 2005, Lebanon saw demonstrations and heady hopes for a new
future. Where are those hopes now?

Qana carries a heavy symbolic weight in Lebanon.

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.

* * *
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."

* * *
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?"