1. I live at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. One can get a tan just by walking around
2. I spent Saturday at “Lazy B,” a wonderful little cabana-style resort south of Beirut.
3. I spent most of Sunday sitting in no-man’s-land at the Syrian border in the sun. For five hours. Just to be in Syria for forty five minutes.

I want to remark on this last point -  “Why did you go to Syria, Will?” Well, dear reader, it’s because my visa was going to expire and they changed the rules in Lebanon requiring an exit stamp to leave at the airport if you’re in your third month of a tourist visa. But I couldn’t get an exit stamp because my visa was going to expire in two days, so they told me ‘just go to Syria – you don’t need an exit stamp.’ Of course, going to Syria means waltzing into one of the most skeptical-of-Americans nation in the world – they purposefully make you wait forever if you’re American to dissuade you from coming back – or something, I’m not really quite sure (they fax the information to Damascus – who knows how long it sits next to a cup of coffee there). Luckily, they let me in after I got a mean tan – I had to be out of the country for “a few minutes” according to Lebanese authorities in order to renew my visa.

Unfortunately, I have renewed my tourist visa too many times, so they confiscated my passport on the way back into Lebanon, and I spent this morning at General Security sorting things out.

But, thankfully, this series of events brought to bare one of those keen little existential moments that sometimes come along and really force an expatriate to come to grips with their experience. This Sartre-ian moment was made extra poignant, I believe, because I am approaching (tomorrow) my eight month anniversary in Beirut, and will be returning to America in two weeks.

So before I go and jump the shark here with some shmrarmy expatriate psychological meandering (although I already have), let me illustrate the situation I faced this morning with the nice Lieutenant in charge of interrogating (that is to say, politely questioning and taking everything I had to say absolutely at face value… seriously) me:

Lieutenant: “What is it you’re doing in Lebanon.”

Me: “How much time do we have?”

Lieutenant: “All the time in the world.”

Me: “Well we’re going to need it…”

But then I drew a blank, as I always do when people ask me what I’m doing here. Because I didn’t know – and I said as much, although I did go through the logistics of it all – who I’d worked for, where I’d quit, etc etc. – I didn’t really think more of it until after things got sorted out and I was told I’d get my passport back tomorrow with the appropriate visa and got in a cab for home.

“What is it you’re doing in Lebanon.” Why am I here? Why is any expatriate in Lebanon, let alone the Middle East – citizens of this region aren’t ignorant; they know the type of press the Middle East gets in the West. They know Americans in particular think that Lebanon is sand dunes, camels and war (when Orlando Bloom lands near Tyre in the movie Kingdom of Heaven which is set during the crusades, he literally lands on rolling Suadi-style sand dunes, and is immediately challenged by a dark-skinned sword-waving mean-toned Arab to a fight to the death).

I admit I didn’t know much about Lebanon before I came, but I knew it wouldn’t be sand dunes and camels (there are neither in Lebanon as far as I can tell). I didn’t know about war, but I assumed it would be relatively safe, an assumption that turned out to be quite true. I knew that most pictures that accompany stories about Lebanon are of the bombed out Holiday Inn – cropped out of that picture are the Lebanese Canadian Bank Headquarters, the Intercontinental Phoenicia Hotel, the Sea, and a new high-rise development under construction.

And then it struck me, on the cab-ride home – Another man had already put the equation into words, and all I had to do was realize where I stood in that equation:

“And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” – Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

When I heard these words five months ago, I and my peers were shocked at the simplicity yet profundity of the image – the statement it made, the weight that it carried, and the challenge it proposed.

Clearly Obama was directing this statement towards the Middle East, where corruption and deceit, so often supported directly through American aid, or indirectly through American acquiescence, is the status quo here, as is blaming the West for nearly everything. His words were straightforward yet poetic – understanding of the legacy of the past, yet pointing towards a future with different rules and different expectations.

Well good for Barack Obama – I read here that his speech writer is 27. I’m sure the kid has never been to the Middle East or the larger Muslim world, although obviously President Obama has.

And this gets me to my point – Sure, it’s nice that Obama said that. Bush said similar things (minus the imagery and skilled oration). Ameriacn foreign policy is supposed to be designed to change closed fists to open and welcoming hands, though we all know that isn’t true.

In fact, Obama and the State Department owes every American living in the Middle East who isn’t a soldier or arms dealer an enormous thank you.

For who will be there to shake unclenched fists? You’d best be sure that it will eventually be some member of the State Department – Eventually. But we – those of us who live here – we’re the ones that will be changing minds and extending hands, even as our State Department issues travel-warnings to places like Lebanon that are equivalent to:

“Traveling to Lebanon will result in your immediate death.”

So, President Obama, I would like to issue you a challenge, as you did five months ago to the tyrants, dictators and extremists of the world – don’t build bridges that you and your establishment secretly intend to blow up later, and likewise, don’t rebuild bridges you blew up in the past if you intend to do it agian.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the bridge being constructed on the Damascus highway in Lebanon that I past by on Saturday – It was blown up by the Israelis with American-made weapons in 2006 for the reason that “Hezbollah might use the bridge to send Israeli hostages to Syria” as if this sole bridge was the only passable transit to Syria, and its destruction was instead not obviously a part of an Israeli attempt to punish the Lebanese as a whole by destroying their infrastructure.

The lessons are obvious – The American government has to do more than just shake hands – That’s the easy part. Myself and the many Americans who live here are busy trying to get those fists to unclench:

• Lesson 1: I am here for the simple reason that I like shaking hands, and this is a part of the world where the West needs to be doing more hand-shaking. Our President said as much.
• Lesson 2: The minds that control clenched fists have long memories and short fuses. Rebuilding a bridge that your foreign policy and foreign aid were responsible for blowing up is not a proud moment for a nation.
• Lesson 3: Few foreigners who live in the Middle East have “tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter strong and more united” – But all foreigners who live in the Middle East know that, though old hatreds may someday pass, lines of tribe will never dissolve, and that it will be private expatriate citizens, independent of government, that play the true role in “ushering in a new era of peace.”

For we are the ones that draw suspicion – we are the ones that take the risk to leave everything for foreign shores in a part of the world that our friends and family are convinced is “dangerous” – without our effort and our presence Obama’s words would ring hollow.

I believe that our reasons for leaving America and finding a new home in the Middle East are not so diverse – We knew, before President Obama said it, that we were doing more for our country and for peace with our physical presence here than the building of any bridge by the American government can accomplish.

Especially if that bridge was destroyed by American smart bombs, just three years ago.

…

More Beirut Stories are coming soon.

A friend of mine replied with a lengthy note on Facebook. Though I disagreed with him, it would be ridiculous to just delete his comments. Instead, I feel like some discussion between Americans on Palestine and Israel, though it amounts to nothing and neither of us have a shred of legitimacy to discuss this topic, is in order. As I don’t want to make this solely about what he said, I’m just going to write freely. I know it will come across as disjointed, but this is what I have to say in reply.

First of all, Olmert is obviously an idiot. This is just a matter of fact. Any politician who actually gets caught in the Middle East for taking bribes is an idiot. However, Livni and Barak hardly count as positive changes for Israeli military or domestic policy, and furthermore quite frankly Gaza cannot be a successful operation by any rubric except by body count. As to the former, Livni and Barak seem to believe that Israeli Arabs, much less Palestinians who have legitimate legal claims to much of Israeli territory, and who represent at least 20% of the Israeli population, will just “go away” once there is a “solution” to the “Palestinian problem.” That’s lunacy – Livni and Barak’s insistence on the failed philosophy of Israel as a cohesive Jewish state demonstrates their ineligibility as forward thinking leaders and politicians, much less progressives. As to the latter – Any military operation which seeks to impose upon a largely civilian and entirely urban population its military-will is incapable of being successful – enormous casualties is really the only outcome of such an operation. As the movie says, ideas are bulletproof. If the Israeli rubric of success is just to kill lots of people, well it will likely be successful in this regard. But Hamas represents a political ideology that is likely larger than itself as a political institution – such a thing cannot be vanquished by military might. It can only be vanquished by economic prosperity, something that Israel has kept from Gaza from possessing since the beginning of the siege following their election into power in 2006.

That “this war will end” is a misnomer – this is not a war that can be finished. It is a war instead that will continue to exist as long as the current status quo of de facto occupation continues in Gaza and the West Bank. And as long as this status quo is left as it is, which seems to be the mantra of the ruling elites of both the Israelis and the Arabs, then there will continue to be a need for the Israeli and Palestinian military institutions. This isn’t about calling something terrorism – Using phosphorous on civilian populations is just as terrorist as shooting firecrackers at Israeli towns. These days, both Hamas and the IDF can point to uniforms, standard military capabilities backed by small arms and air support (although I’m giving Hamas quite a lot of credit in referring to their rockets as “air support”), and democratic legitimacy – This isn’t about terrorism, it’s about a nation and a sudo-nation maintaining a constant state of war that cannot be concluded without some semblance of justice. So no matter what the United States does, this war will not be finished until Palestinians enjoy equal rights and freedoms as Israelis.

It isn’t within the power of the United States anymore to get a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty signed. Who can blame Syria for calling of peace talks as soon as the fighting in Gaza began two and a half weeks ago? Syria calls off the talks because Israel goes to war so Syria ends up looking like the offended party. How exactly is America supposed to solve that?

If Palestine had a functioning government, a system of law and order, jobs, food, water, and electricity, and specifically if it had all these things because they were purchased and built and they were self-sustained institutions, it would represent a threat to Israel that Israel could not accept. Here’s why: If Palestine was a real country, with a real flag and a real seat at the table at the UN, then it could conscript a real army that wasn’t “terrorist,” could legally purchase it’s own “non-terrorist” arms, and could legally engage Israel  in international war tribunals. The United States gives enormous amounts of money, as does Israel, to the Palestinians and to those who maintain their lives, in an effort to keep the Palestinians from achieving self-sustainability. This a rubric that neither Israel nor the current (and likely future) American administration are likely to change.

It is not the up to me or to anybody to label Hezbollah as it is usually labeled (terrorist), nor is it up to or me or to anybody to decide whether it is the prerogative of the Lebanese military to “kick” them “out” of Lebanon. Doing so under the rubric of the West would require a terrorist label to be placed on every country in the world. For there isn’t a single nation that has not engaged in similar behavior as Hezbollah, as far as terrorist-related activities are concerned. Marine bases in Beirut in ’82? Sandanistas in Nicaragua. Agent orange. Who built Sadaam Hussein for Christ’s sake? And these are just American examples – go looking for them, you’ll find them everywhere. Everyone is complicit of terrorism under the Western rubric of terrorism.

The thing is, with Middle Eastern militant groups, it’s usually not so simple as some silly thing like “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But it’s not really that complex either. As far Southern Lebanon was concerned, their attitude was, You cross this line, you come into my side of this line, I fight back. You do so with jets, cruise missiles, chemical weapons? Don’t be surprised when I fire 40,000 Russian and Chinese missiles at you. Hezbollah is a militant force like any other – it happens to be one that is political infatuated with the destruction of the West. Guess what – The West happens to be politically infatuated with the destruction of Hezbollah.

Only the problem is that the people who actually suffer when the rich wage war… are the poor – Thank you Sartre. And both Israel and Hezbollah have very very very rich friends.

But to suggest that they can just be “kicked out” is as absurd as to say that the Palestinians or the Arab Israelis can just be kicked out. That’s not because I do or do not support Hezbollah – That’s because you’re talking about so many people that without the wholesale liquidation of the people of Southern Lebanon, such a feat would be impossible. It doesn’t matter how strong the Lebanese military is – Nor is it necessarily the prerogative or the capacity of the Lebanese military to do such a thing.

It is a correct assessment however that the ’06 war only strengthened Hezbollah, just as the current military adventure into Gaza is likely to only strengthen Hamas.

But how is one to accomplish financial security under the circumstances of apartheid? Such financial security cannot exist under occupation. But while “Israel has been killing terrorists for years,” it has done so, at some times quietly, at some times loudly, by making the term “terrorist” a blanket label, first for Palestinian, then for Arab, then for Muslim in general. And it is under the auspiciousness of Israeli and American policy that the Palestinians became terrorists on the basis of their demand for their ancestral territory.

This is not the worst thing that has happened in history – No doubt about it. But it is still pretty damn horrible. And at least when my ancestors in Ireland, France, and England faced similar circumstances, they had freedom of movement. How can one defend a nation that refuses to allow those under its occupation the right to travel freely. And that goes the same, by the way for those Arab nations that have equally limited the freedom of movement of the Palestinians. But while those Arab nations gladly welcome the problem in order to further their own interests, they did not create the problem, and though they sustain it to a degree, they are not the linchpin of that sustainment.

Whatever the case is, neither Obama nor Clinton are in a position to do anything about it. The reality of the “Palestinian Problem” is ultimately an offshoot of the “American Problem.” In this part of the world, Americans have backed every conceivable power that ultimately exists, in a highly colusionist form, in a way that maintains the Palestinian status quo. If it’s not Israel, it is Egypt. If it isn’t Egypt, it’s Jordan or Syria or Lebanon. If it’s not in the Levant, it’s in the Gulf, where America’s real allies are, and where those allies require Palestine to continue to be a “Problem” as much as their Arab friends in the Levant need them to be. At least in the 70′s the Gulf had backbone to sacrifice their profits for something they supposedly believe in. Although my fair assumption is that America would start blowing people all to hell if there was another embargo.

Wherever you go it seems, you hear about Palestine. If it’s in America or Israel – They’re terrorists. If it’s somewhere else, they’re freedom fighters or they’re victims or brothers or however they would like to put it. I’ll say one thing I never hear about Palestine though – I never hear them talked about in the terms that a nation is discussed. Palestinians are never referred to as something to be considered on a technical-logistical level of nation-state unless it is as a bargaining chip. Israel’s way of dealing with the problem is to economically bankrupt the Palestinians while denying them their right to their ancestral home. But trust me it is just as politically expedient for the rest of the Arab world to maintain that situation – as long as there is a Palestinian problem, there can be no solutions at home.

And all the while, children are dying. They are dying because of American made weapons. They are dying because those who are in power believe that Israeli lives are apparently infinitely more valuable than Palestinian lives. They are dying because so many lack the will to do what is right, and because those who possess the will to do what is right lack the means to act. And as this war is fought longer into the 21st century, there will surely be more Hamas’s, more Hezbollahs, and more Israeli “operations.” The cycle will continue and the only thing that is assured is that more Palestinian children will die or will grow up around death, despair, and economic incapacitation.

And remember that that economic incapacitation is a creation, not of the Palestinian people, but by those that occupy them, manipulate them, and occasionally kill them either individually or en masse.

So long as the occupation continues, so long as Israel and its allies are under the impression that the solution the Palestinian problem is merely to reshape the status quo of one occupation into another, there can be no “financial security of [Israeli] neighbors.” So long as Israeli’s come up with happy little ways to describe this scenario such as Israelis might someday forgive the Palestinians for killing our children, but Israelis may never forgive Palestinians for causing Israelis to kill theirs, as if that some how justifies the whole bloody thing, there will be nothing but 100% complicity on the part of the West, the Israelis, and the Arab governments, and we shall all burn in hell together as the blood of children is spilled on the streets of Gaza.

Anyways, I don’t mean to take it out on my friend here, but really, to boil the whole thing down to: Olmert’s an idiot, Livni and the “moderates” will solve everything, Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists who need to be pushed out the door as one would shake dust from a rug, and at the end of the day, whatever else happens really isn’t Israeli’s problem… is, to say the least, an unfair characterization of the situation.

And that is especially the case when we consider that, right now, as we speak, as we sit in our homes and drink our God damn Starbucks, tanks and planes are killing people who have nothing to do with it, who’s children have nothing to do with it, who’s parents have nothing to do with it, who’s grand parents had nothing to do with it. That’s a fact.

Because, if you go to war with a whole city on the basis that there are some bad guys in there, you wind up with dead people who you had no right to kill. Don’t blame them if they’re still upset about it when the smoke clears.

Lebanon's Premier English Newspaper

Nick Kimbrell published an excellent article today on the ongoing Salafi-Syrian crisis brewing in Northern Lebanon – an excerpt:

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s leading Salafi cleric, Dai al-Islam al-Shahhal, has warned Syria to stay out of North Lebanon or risk opening “the gates of hell.” In an interview to be published in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anbaa, Shahhal made clear that Syrian intervention in Lebanon would be met with stiff opposition.

A military incursion would open “the gates of hell and lead to what is similar to Iraq and its misery,” he said, according to excerpts received by the Lebanese news outlet Naharnet.

“The Syrian command and its allies in Lebanon,” Shahhal added, “are keen on driving a wedge between the Salafi movement and the Lebanese military establishment in order to drag the whole Sunni community into conflict.”

Following the tenuous intra-Lebanese peace forged in Doha, Qatar, in May, residual tensions simmered between Salafist groups aligned with the Future Movement and opposition-aligned Alawites in Tripoli – where, last year, the militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese Armed Forces fought a brutal 15-week battle in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

Relations between certain hard-line Sunni factions and the army have remained tense.

But Shahhal said that in the event of Syrian intervention, Salafi leaders would coordinate with the army.

“The Salafi movement is not like other factions and would not take decisions to go to war or peace without coordinating its moves with all other factions because they have the right to set the national path,” he said.

The recent violence in Tripoli, a large deployment of Syrian troops to the border and statements by Syrian President Bashar Assad have fueled concerns in Lebanon of a potential Syrian incursion into the North.

On Monday, a car bomb killed four Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) soldiers and at least one civilian in Tripoli, echoing a similar attack in August which left 15 dead. Monday’s blast came only two days after an explosion in Damascus killed 17 people. The official Syrian Arab News Agency blamed the blast on an Islamist suicide bomber from a neighboring Arab country.

Last week, the Lebanese Army reported that 10,000 Syrian special forces had deployed to the Lebanese-Syrian border in what was called an anti-smuggling campaign.

And in early September, Assad told visiting heads of state from France, Turkey and Qatar that the growing threat of extremism in Tripoli must be addressed by the Lebanese Army, drawing sharp criticism from members of the March 14 alliance who labeled the remarks a “flagrant” violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

View whole article here: Senior Salafi cleric issues stark warning to Damascus