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Emotional Reaction | ||
Pamela Olson July 27, 2006 | ||
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In the rest of this website, I have attempted to maintain an even and reasoned tone and offer logical arguments backed up by evidence to try to sway rational citizens and decision makers to consider better ways to ensure our security and that of our friends, allies, and neighbors.
But the fact remains that we are all humans, and the impact of this war is not only geopolitical but also very personal and human. Even if I had not had close friends caught under the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, watching Israel blast the weak country, which for the most part had nothing to do with the Hezbollah actions and had no way to defend itself, was like watching a man slowly beating a small child to death with antenna wire. It was a turkey shoot. It made me feel so sick I physically couldn't eat for the three days after I understood the scope of the atrocity, and for days after that I only choked down food with great difficulty. It was the closest thing to a total breakdown I have experienced in my life, and being in the one world capital where outrage ranged between muted and nonexistent made it that much more bitter. Almost worse than the atrocity itself was my country's support of it, and my country's ability to win the day with this execrable stance -- that there should be no ceasefire talks, and that violence and destruction should continue, until Israel was good and ready to stop. That "sometimes it requires tragic situations to help bring clarity in the international community," as Bush said. A Boston Globe reporter noted, "I had thought the idea of violence bringing clarity -- the purifying flame that can sweep away all the rot so that a better world can emerge -- was the purview of 19th-century radicals and anarchists. But that view still lives in today's White House." (Greenway, July 25, 2006) I have only spent ten days in Lebanon myself. Through my Lebanese friends' love of their beautiful country, and through two years of living in Palestine, where the food, people, and landscape are so similar, I feel connected to it more than ten days of visiting would suggest. Lebanon was a symbol of hope, liberalism, and co-existence in a region badly in need of these things. Khalil Gibran was from Lebanon, from the fairy tale north with its graceful mountain churches and ancient cedars. I remember my first view of Beirut in December 2003. I had taken a service taxi from lovely, friendly Damascus to the Lebanon border, and from there to Beirut. We passed along the main highway with its many lovely bridges (now all destroyed) over the mountains, and as we topped the ridge, I saw the breathtaking white city spread out against the shining blue Mediterranean. The days of obscene grey plumes of smoke over this beautiful white city were over. It was rebuilding, renewing, sighing in relief, and moving on. The war was behind, a bright future was ahead. In Beirut I met a young man who was desperately trying to make himself look richer than he actually was, trying not to betray the fact that he was living in an apartment building with a wall still missing between his bedroom and the living room due to a rocket from the war. He invited me to his home in Beirut's southern suburbs, and his charming mother shared a meal with me, and spoke to me in French. I wonder if he has more rocket holes in his home now; if his job as a waiter at an upscale tourist restaurant brought him the money he wanted so he could move out of his mother's house; if his brother, who was a member of Hezbollah, is fighting in the south; if he even has a home anymore, anywhere; if he gave up his Western-looking ways and joined Hezbollah, too, after he saw what the West was capable of. During that trip I also visited the Khiam prison in southern Lebanon, the Abu Ghraib of Israel's 18-year occupation of the south. Hezbollah members had turned it into a museum, with the torture cells on display, and with music and videos and Nasrallah keychains for sale. It reminded me of the KGB museum in Latvia. Israel took its opportunity to destroy this stain on its past in a recent air raid. The Khiam prison museum is no more. The village itself has taken heavy bombardment, too. Israel also repeatedly hit a UN observer base in the area and killed four UN observers despite the fact that Kofi Annan had Olmert's personal promise that the observers would be safe, and despite the fact that the observers had called Israel half a dozen times and asked them to desist the shelling in their area. Annan has called the attack deliberate. After living under Israeli occupation for a year and a half, such a thing would not surprise me in the least. And Qana? Qana is being hit, too. Qana, which suffered Israel's wrath in 1996, when Israel bombed a UN post in the area with anti-personnel shells, killing over 100 civilians, mostly women and children, who had sought refuge there. The UN ruled that this massacre had been deliberate, too. Now Qana is being brutalized again, the ones who are left. And for what? Hezbollah committed an act of war. There is no doubt of that. But it was a limited, tactical action with a clear and limited goal perpetrated by a clear and limited sub-section of the Lebanese population, which the greater Lebanese population was powerless to control. Israel responded with unmitigated attacks on the whole of Lebanon, on Sunnis, on Christians, on Druze, on Palestinian refugees, on dairy farmers, shop owners, and families who were simply desperate to get to safety, grilled alive in their cars as they fled, as Israel had ordered them to. Civilians in their cars! Precise hits on minivans full of women and children. If Israel wanted to minimize civilian casualties, they could have given warning to the villages, they could have warned them to flee and then held off for a while to let them flee. Instead, Israel dropped leaflets on villages warning them to flee, then bombed them, scores of them, families, babies, mothers, grandmothers, in their cars as they fled. It was a turkey shoot. It was a massacre. It will not be forgotten, anymore than Qana has ever been or will ever be forgotten. The memories of those horrible years under Israeli occupation, of the even worse years of open war, were just beginning to fade. Lebanon was getting back on its feet, hosting art shows, tourists, family visitors who were delighted that things had calmed down enough that it was safe to come back for a carefree summer visit. I remember walking around Baalbek in 2003, meeting friendly people, hiking among the amazing ruins, and thinking, "It is so nice here. I can't imagine it was ever a place that saw so much violence. I hope to God no one bombs it again. Now I know what and who would be the victims, and I would be beside myself with sorrow and rage." I remember touring the American University of Beirut, which reminded me so much of Stanford, and walking along the world-class beachfront promenade, which was not spared in the Israeli bombardment. I remember sitting on the beach in Jounieh, the upscale port city just north of Beirut, smoking a grape-flavored hookah with the engineer brother of a Lebanese friend from Stanford, telling stories and practicing my Arabic and talking about the future. Jounieh was bombed last week. I remember going out that night with two other Lebanese guys I'd met, two cokehead Maronite Christians, crashing absurdly opulent weddings and bluffing our way into places we couldn't afford.  Jounieh at night  Jounieh during the day Everything seemed so carefree, almost dizzy. The Place de l'Etoile, the glittering centerpiece of the New Beirut, literally sparkled at night with carved white stone and high-tech pinpoint dancing lights, like a stage set of a Paris fantasy. And yet in the back alleys, hole-in-the-wall places still had the gritty, tough but friendly feel of the older Beirut. And in the suburbs that were still standing after the war and hadn't been rebuilt, the rocket holes and bullet marks were almost funny, in a dire kind of way. Like a scar that reminds you of an accident you almost didn't survive. What a relief, people seemed to breathe, to live now and think back on that unthinkable time that, God willing, will never come to us again. What a relief that our neighborhood is not in danger of being destroyed anymore, that we can throw blankets over the rocket holes and build a new business, get a new job, start making money so that we can afford something better some day. What a relief to think we survived, our home survived, our family pictures and grandfather's books survived, and things will get better from now on. Because who is there now who would destroy our homes? There's no reason for anyone to do that. No reason at all. And indeed, the destruction of their lives in the past two weeks was done for no reason at all. There was no clear military purpose for the destruction. Israel gained no tactical advantage by it. Israel certainly didn't increase their security or secure better terms for a future ceasefire because of it. It was gratuitous. It was pointless. Israeli generals on TV say, "That'll show 'em! That'll show 'em what happens when you mess with Israel! They'll never mess with us again!" But they are so desperately, foolishly wrong. Sowing destruction, fueling hatred, is never good for security, not in the modern world, not in a world where a few people with a few thousands dollars and a grudge can kill large numbers of civilians fairly easily. Not in a world where Israeli embassies and community centers are peppered all over the world, where Israel's missiles can't protect them. There is no such thing as absolute security. There is no such thing as dictating peace or bombing people into democracy. These absurd chimeras have been dreamed up by the neo-cons and their Likud / Kadima ideological allies. And they're not doing anyone any good, save the arms manufacturers. We have to learn to play nice in the sandbox. We have to learn that tolerating and supporting atrocities is not good for our security. Every image of a charred baby killed in a turkey shoot only fuels another generation of hopelessness, cynicism, and rage. And that's not the kind of world I want to travel and raise children in. | ||