Rasha’s letter from Beirut on 3 Quarks Daily last week floored us. She’s a Lebanese/Palestinian/Syrian/Turkish/Bosnian writer, now living in a suburb of Beirut. “I’m a product of the Ottoman empire,” she says, “and I say it with pride.” She’s generously agreed to string for us now. Here’s her first installment.
I am drafting this entry in this unusual diary at 11:30 pm, I have about half an hour before the generator shuts down. Most of Beirut is in the dark. I dare not imagine what the country is like. Today was a relatively calm day, but like most calm days that come immediately after tumultuous days, it was a sinister day of taking stock of damage, pulling bodies from under destroyed buildings, shuttling injured to hospitals that have the capacity to tend to their wounds more adequately.
The relative calm allowed journalists to visit the sites of shelling and violence. The images from Tyre, and villages in the south are shocking. Images from Haret Hreyk (the neighborhood in the southern suburb that received the most “focused” shelling) are also astounding.
The number of deaths is yet uncertain, it increases by the hour as bodies are pulled from the landscape of destruction. In the southern suburbs, some people may be trapped in underground shelters under the vestiges of their homes and apartment buildings. And yes, there is a problem of space in morgues in the south and the Beqaa, because none of the towns and villages are equipped to handle these numbers of deaths.
Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 20, 2006.
Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport, I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. …For days I have been battling ambivalence towards this war, estranged from the passions it has roused around me and from engagement in a cause. And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing UN Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.
The roads to Damascus are not safe. Its many different ways are shelled everyday. Drivers know what “calculated” risks to take, I am assured, but one never knows. Everyday the way out becomes more difficult. I decided to stay, I don’t know when I will have another opportunity to leave.
Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 20, 2006.
With this relative calm, the sense of impending doom becomes almost palpable, time, space, light and movement are subsumed in an eerie stillness. It feels vaporous and fills the air. As it wafts from room to room, from apartment to apartment, as it turns a corner and moves to another neighborhood, every gesture, every act is a little delayed, slowed, surreptitiously lethargic, every thought lingers too long in the unfinished or inchoate state. This eerie stillness numbs the passage of time and the cognitive perception of things material. Objects seem both familiar and unfamiliar. They are familiar in that they were there the day before and seem not to have moved from their place. They are unfamiliar because they seem to belong to another time, another life. There was another life, I had another life that seems distant and foreign now. The morning is different, noon is different, sunset is different. Another Beirut has emerged. War time Beirut.
Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 20, 2006.
Atrocity photos. Beware:
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
UN role in all this:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_07_16-2006_07_22.shtml#1153523571
United Nations an Accomplice in Hezbollah Kidnapping:
“After Hezbollah’s kidnapping of a pair of Israeli soldiers spurred an Israeli counter-attack, many critics of Israel actions have suggested that the United Nations can serve as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah. To the contrary, the United Nations has a well-established record of collaboration with Hezbollah in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.”
Hezbollah’s Nazi march:
http://www.chretiens-et-juifs.org/article.php?voir%5B%5D=1637&voir%5B%5D=2193
Les enfants nazis du Hezbollah
Rasha writes beautifully about a ghastly situation.
Reading her dispatches I realized how blogs can be the device that mines the humanity of a people from under the packed ground of perception. My mind went back to the Cold War days when my teacher would try to convey to me that the citizens of the Soviet Union were just like us, they were not a cold calculating ruthless “evil empireâ€?, they were a nation of people who yearned for happiness – as we did.
The impression of perception I get from our media and even from our blogs (including some on this site) is one of a resignation to war over there, a resignation to the idea that “those� people only know war. First of all I find that sentiment ironically conveyed in the middle of a war we are now waging, but most of all I find that sentiment shortsighted and sad. How can you read Rasha’s writings of despair and not feel true empathy?
The people of the “axis of evil� are the same people who lived in the “evil empire� during the 80’s, they are us. The hearts and minds of “those� people in the “empire� were changed without force! Have we not learned anything from that?
Last we forget about what real wanton destruction is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/books/review/23margolick.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
‘Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz,’ by Jan T. Gross
Postwar Pogrom
It is unbelievable to me that C. Rice can leave the door open for the Isrealies to bomb Lebanon for just long enough so they can move through a great deal of their stockpiles of weapons that we so eagerly supply them with. American “democracy” is going down the toilet and the handle is flushed by the military industrial corporations that own the congress. How can we ever come to peace this way? Bad Congress!…..Bad!
Palease Dave,
so you don’t like Israel and hope it will be destroyed, we get that. Why though do you have to pretend that you are such a moral person in love with “democracy” a system of government you don’t seem to respect?
Mr. Hemp, the weapons the US is supplying Israel are precision bombs which actually reduce the rate of civilian casualties. For all the bombs dropped on Lebanon it is amazing that only some three hundred people were killed. How many of those were Hezbollah fighters it’s hard to say. However, the number of dead in this war so far is less than the number of casualties in Iraq on any given day.
Let’s put these things in perspective, shall we?
Behind the Lines: Lebanon through a Londoner’s eyes
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153291961922&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
“Many of the veteran foreign correspondents have a soft spot for Lebanon. Most cut their teeth in Beirut covering the civil war in the 1970s and the Israeli invasion in the 1980s, and they actually had a good time, made many friends and enjoyed returning in recent years to produce nostalgic stories on the revival of the “Paris on the Levant.”
Thus there should have been no surprises that they were blaming Israel for pushing the clocks back, especially as Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz actually said as much. However, after the first few days, it seemed that the British reporters were becoming increasingly inclined towards adopting a more even-handed view. There were no conversions to Zionism here, but a dawning realization that there wasn’t much evidence for the Lebanese government’s hysterical reports of indiscriminate killing of civilians. Even among the thousands of fleeing refugees, there was probably more criticism of Hizbullah than of Israel. The shift in emphasis had more to do with what was happening in Lebanon than the fact that Israeli cities were also coming under fire, though one of the results of the Katyusha volleys was increased reporting from Haifa and Nahariya.
ASIDE FROM the reality on the ground, there are a number of other factors contributing to the emerging more even-handed coverage. The first is a grim sense of proportion deriving from Americans’ and Britons’ daily exposure to the carnage in Iraq. Even the highest estimates of Lebanese casualties don’t come close to the daily body count in Baghdad.
Another recent development is the deepening involvement of British forces fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. It was breathtaking to hear Israeli and British commanders appearing on seemingly unconnected news items, using exactly the same terms to describe the difficulty of fighting an enemy that uses civilians as shields….”
“
Rasha’s writing, her personal view is a glimpse of the reality far more insightful than cold news statistics. The description of her decision to remain when she could leave was moving but her elegant observation of the slowing down of time – how the devastation of war effects perception – what we don’t hear on the news – is an appreciated humanizing of the experience. Thank you for this.
Hi Jdyer, I understand you are passionate about your views on this subject. I was just wondering what you thought about Rasha’s emails, specifically? I do not wish to engage you in the overall politics, just her specific emails.
Nother, I think they hopelessly partisan.
There is another poster from Lebanon by the name of “Faysal” who tends to be a little less so, though he obviously is on the side of his countrymen. He posts on the TNR website and once in a while here.
Partisan? You could call it self-oriented, since she’s explaining the war through her own experiences. But it’s not as if she’s laying out a public policy position.
re: “To the contrary, the United Nations has a well-established record of collaboration with Hezbollah in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.” Interesting story, a must-read, but the very next post on Wolokh qualifies this by explaining that the worst that anyone can accuse the U.N. of doing is collaborating in the cover-up (and only individual corrupt peacekeepers in the kidnapping). And the first comment to that post laments, “Lately, however, this blog seems to have degenerated into a series of rants, partisan snarkery, and overblown rhetoric. Prof. Kopel’s post, about Prof. Kerr writes, is just one example. It seems that a number of posters lately are only interested in advancing a particular agenda, and posting anything vaguely related to it in support.”
Jon,
I call this partisan:
“The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing UN Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.”
As if anyone was trying to “drive her away.”
http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/
On Hezbollah and what it is fighting for!
Radioopensource should invite Professor Weintraub to speak on their program.
I forgot to include the link to the above post:
The conclusion of a NY Times article on Lebanon reads like an old Yiddish joke:
“The challenge of creating a viable international force to secure Israel’s border with Lebanon was captured by Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The European foreign ministers were enthusiastic, he said.
“They only had one small condition for the force to be made up of soldiers from another country,� Mr. Barnea wrote. “The Germans recommended France; the French recommended Egypt, and so on. It is doubtful whether there is a single country in the West currently volunteering to lay down its soldiers on Hezbollah’s fence.�
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/world/middleeast/25force.html?ei=5094&en=64d85c75fabdbc38&hp=&ex=1153886400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
It’s great to be able to hear from people like Rasha. Aren’t blogs (and the internet) wonderful? My blog was just a collection of my random mumblings on politics until in a worried email to my friend in Beirut I asked her if she would mind if I quoted one of her mail on my blog. She said: “why don’t I just write you a report about what I can see?” and with that my blog suddenly had a Beirut correspondent. In the days that followed I added a Jerusalem correspondent – a British guy in that city who happens to post on the same climbing website as I do. Its mad how easy it is. Of course they aren’t going to replace the BBC but they tell stories you won’t hear else where. Try: http://lightfromthenorth.blogspot.com/2006/07/lebanon-dispatch.html where we learn the price of war lemons, or http://lightfromthenorth.blogspot.com/2006/07/monday-in-beirut.html my friend’s first visit to office since the start of the war.