some guy in lebanon

Waiting waiting waiting – Patience patience patience. This is my new mantra, and I’m not very good at it. Waiting to see what will happen at the Daily Star with my proposal, waiting for other people to make decisions about various other business ventures, waiting waiting waiting.

This weekend I spent Saturday morning finishing Robert Fisk’s book Pity the Nation and I read another book called Children of the Siege by Pauline Cutting. From the first, I wanted to share this excerpt from the last chapter that I read Saturday morning. The chapter discusses the Qana massacre in the early 90′s – A shelling attack by Israeli mortars on a United Nations-run refuge camp for Shi’a and Palestinians. Some of you might remember it making headlines after Israel was forced to admit, thanks to press action by Fisk, that they had lied about there being a flying drone airplane in the area watching what was happening, and thus admitting in a sense that they were aware they were attacking civilians and U.N. soldiers. The attack on the camp occurred almost immediately after Hezbollah took the unusual action of attacking an Israeli position only 100 meters from the camp – Indeed, in Lebanon, though it was usually civilians who suffered during the wars, it was always both sides (out of many) that were complicit in some way. From Pity the Nation:

In the years that followed, Qana would become a place of martyrdom, the mass grave beside the old UN barracks covered now with marble. There are headstones, many of them containing glass boxes with snapshots of children… A signpost tells visitors that this is an Arab ‘Holocaust’, neglecting to point out that 106 dead hardly compares to 6 million…

Yet if these victims had been Israeli – if 106 Israeli civilians had been slaughtered in Israel by Hezbollah gunfire – would not there be a far greater response? Would not every American president pay homage at the site/ Had the victims of Sabra and Chatila been Israeli, would not foreign statesmen be visiting the mass grave? But foreigners do occasionally visit Qana. Years after the massacre, Jennifer Lowenstein, an American Jewish woman who regularly arranges my lectures at a US university, came to Lebanon and wasked me to take her to Qana. I drove her to the mass grave and she took pictures of the shrine. She took a photograph of the insulting sign with its reference to a ‘Holocaust’. She seemed untroubled by it. Then she asked to meet Saadallah Balhas. I though this both a good and a bad idea. As a survivor who had lost 31 members of his family, his experience – on an individual, personal level – was of a holocaust. His loved ones had perished on a scale commensurate with that of many Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide.

I choose to share this passage because I spent Saturday afternoon with children at an educational center at a Palestinian refuge camp, the site of another Israeli and Christian massacre of Palestinians ten years prior. I won’t give too many details out of respect for the privacy of this school, its children, and the people living in this section of Beirut – Indeed, I didn’t go there on some sort of Refuge Safari, to see and feel something I would never know as an American, only to return to the comfort of East Beirut with an inflated sense of sensitivity and worldliness. Still, to read Fisk’s retelling of Qana in the morning and to spend the afternoon with Lebanon’s most vulnerable in the afternoon was something enormous for me, in particular because so many people in both the West and the Middle East discuss the fate of these children in relationship to far larger things than the children could ever hope to comprehend – The Holocaust of the Jews, for example, seems to justify any misdeed of the Israelis, whereas events like Qana and the 2006 war justify Hezbollah, and the plight of the Palestinians and the 1967 war justify any attack by Arabs against Western or Israeli targets or philosophies. This sort of philosophy makes a mockery of the fact that the children I spent time with on Saturday are incapable of commanding much of their destiny, their fate wrapped up in absurd international games of intrigue, violence, and stillborn-realpoitik.

Yet Fisk rightly points out that despite the fact that so many use the abhorrence of the past to justify the abhorrence of the present, they rarely think about the the most real victims, such as Saadallah Balhas, or anyone who lost the vast majority of their family to the violence of war crimes. Though the Holocaust is used to justify the military realities of the Israelis, it is also a fact that 6 million Jews perished in Europe, and that many living today know a similar story line for their family own as Mr. Balhas. As I sat watching these children on Saturday, it was rather heartbreaking to know that they, just like many other children of the Arab and Israeli world, grew up with the daily message that Qana, Sabra, 2006, 1967, or 1944 somehow justify, or are justified, by the extraordinary events of the past perpetrated by evil men who care little for the well being or the futures of 14 Palestinian children. Though it is impossible to make real comparisons between the Holocaust and the Palestinian diaspora because they are two entirely different sorts of things, Fisk is correct in making immediate comparisons between the victims of Qana and the victims of Auschwitz. Israel attacked helpless civilians with high-powered weapons, their shells turning the unprotected UN camp into a place of mangled humans and death. Fisk was there to see the immediate aftermath and his description of the bodies is horrifying. One cannot imagine how he found the words to describe what happens to hundreds of people after a wooden shelter they are hiding in is hit directly, and repeatedly, by modern cannon fire. But he did.

Likewise, children living throughout the Palestinian diaspora are victims of aggression and global foreign policy, but really they are like the victims at Qana in the sense that they do not ask to fight, and they are in no position to take command of their situation. Perhaps this is why some, only a mere 10 years older than the kids I saw on Saturday, chooose to fight back. It is extraordinary how a child’s wonder and peace at 5 can be so perfectly mangled by the weapons and realities of war by 15.

What is perpetrated against the Palestinians both in Lebanon and elsewhere is sanctioned by America, and is most often with the use of American weapons and American money. The inevitable violent response is usually armed and funded by both our allies and our enemies. I was thus held with obvious suspicion by everyone I met at the camp, and I felt shell shocked and complicit in their plight upon my departure.

Karma too, I could tell, was moved by the experience. We decided it would be best to go to the beach. We talked a lot about our pasts and our futures, and how they seemed to rapidly be catching up with our presents. I took a picture of the Mediterranean Sea:

After that we had sushi for lunch, hung around for the afternoon, and then I went home to take a nap. In the evening, I went to Captians Cabin in Hamra to interview the owner, Andre, for a story I’m writing about his bar that will run in Tuesday’s paper. I’ll post it as soon as it is up.

That’s all I got for now – it’s been a strange weekend, but a good one I guess. I spent today sleeping, and I’m looking forward to a productive week.