A cold breeze smelling of seashells and rice And then of trees arousing me More than city life as I experience it requires Is pushing back the curtains by the bed where I’m lying for a little while longer To dream That I’m a prisoner. But I can’t pretend to sleep while writing this. And if you turn from this to any other didactic poem you will see the contrast Between adventure in the meditations of a woman and imagination in the speculations of a man, The one depending on accumulation, the other on loss and gain Which aren’t the same for everyone, enclosed in different circles And in different skulls And most of them guarded Although things get in or out sometimes—the smell of blankets Hanging in the dark, for example, Or the story of the father who punished his daughter for being lazy because he didn’t understand her kind of work— But those too are ideas. Ideas contend with stories And this is more worthy of consideration than the judgements which separate them into “good” and “bad” Angels. I know the poet is vain who writes of paradise. Experiences run together through transitions Which are long and short at once And so I watch the long leaves at the narrow window of my cell And blink. Perhaps what is most amazing is that with crimes on my conscience I can still kiss the wall. My containment Consists of a series of connections Sustaining my conviction of having done something And every act expresses a necessity To improve. In over half my dreams a moral dilemma figures. There is a grazing horse charred in a grassy corral And a bluejay named ‘Julie’ directing a flotilla of ships through a canal Or a convocation of logicians in striped shirts watching a boxing match In a rural gymnasium owned by my grandfather who is sad And the dilemma emphasizes the parallels Whose shadows shift Through the rationalizing ambitions of the story. My guilt is much like Descartes’ doubt. No—those doubts were certainties, though achieved through “pain And other sensations Which could not have been foreseen” And serve as bars Or gates Or guards of guides. Signifier and signified. They are snapping the distance In a dream with an outward gaze that’s all about a gain Of metaphor and change of shape At this “stopping point” Under the pressure of the senses Which draw from ‘nature’ and develop reality. That’s our reason for acting. Reason is an aid to stories. It’s the ghost out of the cell, Reciting what it remembers, ruling nothing out, Like Clio or Narrator or Anonymous. But if the flesh of the ghost is no longer under pressure Then, like a ghost, it’s gone From its unusual or even downright alien position, Us, Of which it is an imitation, Not knowing where to go, An aporia, Which will allow us to go beyond the limits of any one view point And remain there. Though it may not seem to follow. But I’ve gained weight, my own weight Under my own trusted and selfish senses. My memory is filled with their impressions I write when nothing answers That something appears. A terrible slaughter occurs. As Kwame Anthony Appiah says, technology has not yet rendered slashing and hacking obsolete. A city is a big city or a beautiful city Or a crowed city Or a small progressively-governed university city And so forth. Intellectual systems, speech in dreams, things that change like grass Always end in combat (Definition: action; motivation: lack) Resulting in expulsion (Expulsion here assumes the nature of a certain form of justice) But a lot of things have changed. An anecdotal story is often a span Consisting of separate facts Each tenuously connected to the next. What we respond to are the attractiveness of the facts And the view each one provides. There are even such things as philosophical anecdotes Going around, Beautifully feathered and perfectly circling So as not to diverge even an inch from the truths Thrown among things And lost in the woods. Then along comes a woodcutter wearing blue boots And carrying a bird in a sack over his shoulder To justify his claims To the accuracy of the metaphors of branching and perching He uses To describe both story and storyteller When asked. Where else can one find Justice? The young soldier knocks on the ground and an onion shakes. The story is never universal Though it may repeat And even symbolize, like rocks for good or parts for wobble And music. With what does a story begin? The marvelous is a cold vehicle for ink and paper. The power of Rosa Luxemburg could not be imposed. But here’s an ambitious undertaking; An attempt to account for the Twentieth Century! Goya’s small unfinished sketch of “Time, Truth, and History” Was painted two centuries ago at a comparable time, (1797). It shows Time with its hourglass bringing naked Truth into the light While History writes.
GEN. STERNWOOD Brandy, Norris. How do you like your brandy, sir?
MARLOWE In a glass.
GEN. STERNWOOD I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne cold as Valley Forge and with about three ponies of brandy under it. Oh, come, come, man. Pour a decent one. I like to see people drink. That'll do, Norris. You may take off your coat, sir.
MARLOWE Thank you.
GEN. STERNWOOD It's too hot in here for any men who has blood in his vein. You may smoke, too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Hum, nice state of affair a man who has to indulge his vices by proxy. You're looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life, crippled, paralyzed in both legs, barely I eat and my sleep is so near waking it's hardly worth a name. I seem to exist largely on heat like a new born spider.
MARLOWE Yeah.
GEN. STERNWOOD The orchids are an excuse for the heat. You like orchids?
MARLOWE Not particularly.
GEN. STERNWOOD Nasty things. That flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has a rotten sweetness of corruption. Mmm... Tell me about yourself, Mr. Marlowe.
-- The Big Sleep 1946, MGM, Directed by Howard Hawks Screenplay by William Faulkner
The recent crisis in the Middle East has place the spot light on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. More importantly, grass roots African Americans are calling "Conde" Rice a total "yes woman" for the Bush Administration. Looking back, when Rice was questioned before the Senate, about the bogus reasons for going to war, Rice defended the administration’s now infamous false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Many in African American community now compare Rice’s antics to that of high lord of "uncle tomism" Clarence Thomas.
We are reminded of Martin Luther King’s speech of April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, to a crowd of 3,000, where Dr. King called the Vietnam War as an "enemy of the poor." What an irony! It must be remembered that Dr. King fought against segregation to create avenues for African Americans to attain employment in high places. It is unfortunate that Condoleezza Rice and others are using their position to defend an unjust war. A war that Dr. King would have opposed! We have a new model of oppression in America today. This model accepts African Americans and other minorities as long as they go along with the line laid out by the power structure. Despite the fact that there where no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, "Conde" defended the falsehoods of the Bush Administration. Finding weapons of mass destruction was the stated reason for going to war! We are being fed a new chorus of falsehoods that Dr. Rice seems eager to defend.
According to many African American activists, and many leaders in the NAACP, Condoleezza Rice represents a new generation of "radical uncle toms" that see their role as defenders of the Bush Administration and its morally corrupt methods of disinformation. This disinformation has led to a war in which thousands have lost their lives, and the time honored Geneva conventions on torture being kicked to the curve. Many African Americans are now beginning to question the idea of simply honoring an individual because they are a person of color. Over the years the racist white elite have cashed in on this idea by placing someone of color in an important position only to use that person against the interests of the community from which they come. To see black faces completely surrender to the falsehoods of conservative power is indeed a new blow to the African American community.
Under the Bush administration the technique has been perfected. Progressive white leaders can often be neutralized when they attack the concepts of Condoleezza Rice with false charges of racism by racists themselves! This is why it becomes imperative for African Americans and others to oppose those who stand against the interests of their own people. This problem is evident in the Mexican American community as well, as the Bush Administration has appointed a Mexican American, Alberto Gonzalez, for Attorney General. Alberto Gonzalez is but the new John Ashcroft who supports torturing detainees. It is apparent that the Bush administration is using people of color to support its undemocratic, unjust, superpower formulas. Many Mexican American activists see Alberto Gonzalez has their "uncle tom."
The tactic of using people of color as a cover for unjust policies is nothing new. Throughout the ages unjust systems have sought to use the people that they oppress to do their ideological dirty work. The Bush administration represents one such refinement of that process. This is happening across the United States as minority faces are being used to defend injustice. Minority faces are being used to "parrot" the disinformation that has lead to war, and have become not only the new radical uncle toms but also the new "radical Aunt Jemimas!"
Now, the Secretary is saying that she does not support a "cease fire" between Hezbollah Guerillas in Lebanon and the Israeli defense Forces. With hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians being killed by Israeli bombs many consider this a foolish mistake. Many experts are saying that Israel cannot defeat Hezbollah, and by bombing innocent Lebanese this will increase the radicalization process in the region. Already, the former head of the Christian militias, General Aoun, is saying that Christians may join up with Hezbollah to fight the Israeli’s. There have already been calls for Christians not to support Israel’s excessive force.
If one puts aside the rhetoric, we are left with individuals who use their minority status to project the will of unjust leaders, and play the political game of "selling out" to the highest bidder. The minority community must speak out, and not let the Bush administration decide who our leaders are. Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzalez should be rejected on the basis of their unjust and undemocratic views, not accepted simply because their "color" is being exploited! Condoleezza Rice has shown poor leadership in dealing with the current crisis in the Middle East. By refusing to support a cease fire, many feel that Ms. Rice and the Bush Administration have taken a reckless and irresponsible path.
Never put your personal spoon in the common jelly bowl. Spread your napkin upon your lap. Do not grasp. Eat what meat your fork can get to; the rest of the lobster must be given up for lost. A girl must lay her silver down while still a trifle hungry. She must not eat unchaperoned.
A boy does not take a girl’s arm on the street. The street is no place for devotion. He must not allow his mother to lug the coal up or sift the ashes. If he does, he is a cad. A boy is shiftless, a vulgar bounder. He is not excused. He wears a dark suit, but not in a theater box. In a box a tuxedo is worn. In a box a boy keeps his thoughts to himself. A girl keeps her hat on until she is seated. The theater itself wears no hat.
Snow is a hat worn by mountains, the tallest of which do not remove the hat in summer. Sunlight settles like a shawl upon the hills and dewy berry fields. The sun is not a wag or hail-fellow-well-met. It does not loaf or shirk. It keeps its face funeral-ready, as you should. Away you go in the car. Father and Mother. Puff and Baby Sally. Away you go into the country. Spot and Jane.
Jane is a proper girl. She avoids provincial phrases and slang, as yep and boy friend. She says not yes but yes, Mother, and arranges rosettes in the icing. She wears a high-collared simple dress and tarries amid the lilac, on her head a crown of stars. She may stop dancing when she wishes. A boy must dance until the music ends. He must scold his bold friend.
A boy is clothed in a purple cloak, is brought up on charges, agrees to them with the air of one much pleased. He raises his hat to his father. A girl, in the presence of her father, removes her breasts. She removes the washbowl’s plug so the waste water drains completely. A boy need not detach his hands, but he must not thrust them into his pockets. A clothes brush must be packed for the train, and a plain dressing gown.
Away you go. You are on a train. You are speaking with courtesy and reserve in the dining car. You are slipping off your shoes. You are leaving them for the porter. The porter will pocket his tip discreetly. The porter will polish your shoes in the night.
BEIRUT, Lebanon - The deadliest day yet in the deepening two-front Middle East crisis claimed more than 70 lives Wednesday in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and northern Israel, with no immediate cease-fire in sight. "The country has been torn to shreds," a desperate Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, said at a meeting he had called of foreign diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador.
"Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?" he said in a bitter and emotional speech. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflected on us?"
In the Lebanese capital, bombs and rockets fell throughout the day, including, Israeli military officials said, a wave of aircraft that dropped 23 tons of explosives on a suspected Hezbollah bunker in the south. The attack appeared to be part of the ongoing effort to kill Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
In the first land combat in Lebanon during the current conflict, two Israeli soldiers were killed and nine wounded when they were set upon by Hezbollah guerrillas near Naqura. A tank that came to rescue them met with fierce shelling.
Small groups of Israeli commandos have been slipping in and out of southern Lebanon to assess damage and, presumably, locate targets. At nightfall, Israeli tanks and artillery on their side of the border stepped up their barrages, commanders said, for fear that Hezbollah fighters might mount an incursion into Israel.
Two loud explosions boomed over Beirut even as about a thousand U.S. citizens boarded a chartered cruise ship, the Orient Queen, for Cyprus in the first large stage of an evacuation that has left the Lebanese even gloomier about what might lie ahead.
The Lebanese government, weak and divided, is unable to deal with the crisis. Despite the hopes raised by the so-called Cedar Revolution, which ended nearly three decades of Syrian control, the government remains trapped in the sectarian straitjacket of a system that apportions political offices by religion. Siniora has not spoken directly to Nasrallah since the war broke out nine days ago, and dealings between the government and the Hezbollah chief are through the Shiite speaker of parliament, Nabil Berri, who is loyal to Syria.
At the United Nations, the Americans, who have signaled that they will give Israel more time to continue the bombardment of Lebanon to weaken Hezbollah's military power, opposed a French proposal for a Security Council resolution calling for a lasting cease-fire.
"It is very hard to understand from the people calling for a cease-fire how you have a cease-fire with a terrorist organization like Hezbollah," John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador, told reporters.
In Washington, U.S. officials said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice might travel to the Middle East on Sunday, dropping off a team of diplomats to hold talks before continuing to Asia on Thursday on a previously scheduled trip. But she has canceled stops in South Korea, Japan and China, and could return to the Middle East after Asia, the officials said. That schedule could give Israel additional time to shell Hezbollah before having to negotiate a cease-fire.
Before heading to the region, Rice will travel to New York to the United Nations to discuss with Secretary-General Kofi Annan what could happen once there is a cease-fire. The discussions will include Israeli demands for a 12-mile buffer zone in southern Lebanon. There is some talk about placing international troops in that zone and along the Syrian border to prevent the import of more rockets from Syria and Iran.
Sounding an alarm about humanitarian conditions in southern Lebanon - where Israeli bombs, rockets and shells have pounded villages, roads and bridges, much of the population has fled and supplies are running short - Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the fighting could amount to war crimes.
"The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," said Arbour, the former war crimes prosecutor at the World Court.
The violence Wednesday sprawled over both sides of the border, even killing two Israeli Arab brothers, ages 3 and 9, as they played outside in the Galilee town of Nazareth, by one of roughly 120 rockets Hezbollah launched into Israel.
Israeli weaponry rained down on Lebanon throughout the day and into the night, according to Lebanese authorities, killing 63 people, most of them said to be civilians and one known Hezbollah fighter, apparently in the Naqura firefight.
Southern Lebanon, the heartland of Shiite villages dominated by Hezbollah, was particularly hard hit.
In the village of Serifa, a neighborhood was wiped out - 15 houses flattened, 21 people killed and 30 wounded - in an airstrike. The town's mayor, Afif Najdi, called it "a massacre."
A convoy escaping the town was later bombed by warplanes, killing several people and injuring many others.
"I'm all alone and there's no one to save me," said Fatmeh Ashqar, 27 years old. She had severe neck wounds and burns, while a passenger riding with her, Alia Aladeen, had severe head injuries that left her in a coma.
"Maybe she will live, maybe she will not," said Dr. Abdullah Shihab at Jebel al Amel Hospital where at least 18 of the wounded were taken. "But she is ultimately in God's hands." Further north in Ghaziyeh, one person was killed and two were wounded when an Israeli missile struck a building housing a Hezbollah social institution and a neighboring home. And in the village of Salaa, an airstrike destroyed several houses. Six people were killed in an airstrike in the southern town of Nabitiyeh.
In the Bekaa region, another Shiite and Hezbollah stronghold, 11 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a four-story building in Nabi Sheet, near the ancient city of Baalbek.
The Israelis also bombed two bases of the pro-Syrian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, in Sultan Yaacub.
Homes in southern Lebanon received taped phone calls in classical Arabic, warning that they needed to evacuate because strikes would hit home by home. The recording ended by saying it came from the Israeli army.
The Israelis also used a radio station near the border to broadcast warnings into southern Lebanon for residents to leave.
The radio warning also stressed that any truck, including pickups traveling south of the Litani River would be suspected of transporting weapons or rockets and would therefore be a potential target.
While much of bombardment was directed at poor Shiite areas, the Israeli's new emphasis on trucks - they have hit several carrying medical and relief supplies and even cement in the past few days - brought the war home to one of Beirut's most wealthy Maronite Christian areas Wednesday morning.
Warplanes fired rockets into two dirty red trucks carrying water-drilling equipment - apparently mistaken for rocket tubes - parked in a vacant lot, sending the well-to-do neighbors scrambling to their balconies and then, in several cases, loading their cars and heading for the mountains.
An Israeli army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, told The Associated Press that Israel had hit "1,000 targets in the last eight days - 20 percent missile launching sites, control and command centers, missiles and so forth."
He refused to rule out a land invasion. "There is a possibility - all our options are open," Dallal said. "At the moment it's a very limited, specific incursion but all options remain open."
Brig. Gen. Alon Friedman, a senior army commander, told Israeli army radio: "It will take us time to destroy what is left."
Even as much of the attention was focused on Lebanon, fighting raged between Israelis and Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with 13 Palestinians killed in a series of Israeli raids.
Fierce fighting in the Mughazi refugee camp in central Gaza overnight and into Wednesday morning left at least seven Palestinians dead. By 9 a.m., the lobby at the Aqsa Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah was jammed with cots holding as many as 60 wounded Palestinians, mostly militia members but some children. The wounds appeared to be mainly shrapnel from tank fire.
A reporter and and a cameraman for al-Jazeera television were slightly wounded covering the fighting and an ambulance driver who attempted to come to their aid was also wounded.
At least three other Palestinians - one a woman - were killed in other incidents.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, about 50 Israeli armored vehicles, including tanks and bulldozers demolished a Palestinian security compound and a half-dozen other Palestinian government buildings.
IN THE year AD 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus — headquarters of the Romans' East Mediterranean fleet — was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors — ancestors of the present-day Lebanese — walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed to them.
That was when a giant tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople to every family left alive.
Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived in Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city.
In World War I, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine — the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.
An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found …"
How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they look like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses.
Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite.
But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis — in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside — tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity?
We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties — more than 300 in all of Lebanon by last night — with Israel's 34 dead, as if the figures are the same.
And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hezbollah.
I walked through the deserted centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded me more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city — once a Dresden of ruins — was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on February 14 last year.
The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his legacy is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination — an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
At the empty Etoile restaurant — best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined with French President Jacques Chirac — I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the facade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French Mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock-Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.
Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared, turning to Chirac like a cat about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
And now it is being unbuilt. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shiite Muslims to schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hezbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands.
Here lived Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man, and Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics, and many of Hezbollah's top military planners — including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pinpoint accuracy — a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue — what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?
In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well-known and prominent Hezbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes.
"We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or …" And he counts these awful statistics on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis — much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."
I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillea, white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.
As for the inhabitants of the southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdelhamid. How empires fall.
Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half-million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword …
They perished from hunger in a land
rich with milk and honey …
They died because the vipers and
sons of vipers spat out poison into
the space where the Holy Cedars and
the roses and the jasmine breathe
their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft — perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this — came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chima, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.
I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick, because I think the Israelis will bomb again, but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
A few hours later the Israelis did come back, as the men of the logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chima.
And why? Be sure: the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines?
And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near the border village of Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes — beneath long, soft hair — closed, turned away from the camera.
She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Shatila by Israel's Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops — as they later testified to Israel's own commission of inquiry — watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.
I am back on the coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians.
"Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
Then, on my balcony — a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea smog — I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was an Ottoman metropolis: "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."
On my dining room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Maronite Christians from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 30 kilometres out to sea.
Fairuz, the living legend of Lebanese song, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek Festival, cancelled now like all the country's festivals. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
Peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses — to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?
Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate.
1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD -
3 and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears;
4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
5 Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.
6 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling [a] together; and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
10 In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.
11 In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, [b] from Cush, [c] from Elam, from Babylonia, [d] from Hamath and from the islands of the sea.
12 He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.
13 Ephraim's jealousy will vanish, and Judah's enemies [e] will be cut off; Ephraim will not be jealous of Judah, nor Judah hostile toward Ephraim.
14 They will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west; together they will plunder the people to the east. They will lay hands on Edom and Moab, and the Ammonites will be subject to them.
15 The LORD will dry up the gulf of the Egyptian sea; with a scorching wind he will sweep his hand over the Euphrates River. [f] He will break it up into seven streams so that men can cross over in sandals.
16 There will be a highway for the remnant of his people that is left from Assyria, as there was for Israel when they came up from Egypt.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
war
CAIRO Hezbollah is a Shiite militia. Its followers hang pictures of the grandfather of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in their offices and in the towns. And it says its mandate is to liberate Lebanon and Lebanese prisoners from Israel.
None of that matters to Ahmed Mekky, 40, an Egyptian lawyer and a Sunni Mulism. Like many other people around the region, Mekky says he supports Hezbollah because it is doing what the Arab leadership has been frightened to do for too long - standing up to Israel and the United States.
"We are praying that God would make Hezbollah victorious," Mekky said as he stood beside a newspaper kiosk in downtown Cairo Wednesday. "All the Arab governments are asleep."
Perhaps more so than at any time since Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, the bloodletting between Hezbollah and Israel has highlighted the huge divide between many Arab countries, and between many people and their leaders. Sunni Arab leaders in Jordan, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Countries, see in Hezbollah a dangerous beachhead for Iranian influence in the region. They have criticized Hezbollah for the raid that led to the Israeli attack on Lebanon.
But the longer the conflict drags on, the more these leaders are finding their own credibility called into question. The longer satellite television shows images of civilians killed and maimed by Israeli bombs, the more these leaders face hostility from their own people. The longer Hezbollah fires rockets into Israeli cities and towns, killing and wounding Israelis the longer these leaders have to face questions about why they do not take similar action as well.
"People know that the Arab governments are impotent and are always looking for excuses to justify their failure to do anything," said Adnan Abu- Odeh, a former adviser to King Hussein of Jordan. "In fact, historically, this episode is another example of how Israel embarrasses the moderate regimes in the region."
The attacks on those who have not stood with Hezbollah have been biting. Al Dustoor Newspaper, an Egyptian opposition weekly newspaper, mocked President Hosni Mubarak in a headline comparing him to the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah's son died in 1997 during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Mubarak has been accused of positioning his son, Gamal, to take over as president in six years. The headline: "The difference between a leader who offers his son as a martyr and a leader who offers his son as a successor!"
In Egypt, 75 prominent academics, political leaders and former government officials, issued a statement declaring solidarity with Hezbollah, commending Nassrallah, and criticizing Arab governments as "silent and impotent."
It is impossible, of course, to talk about one "Arab Street," because opinions are as varied as they would be in any multicultural, multinational, multireligious region. But it has gotten to the point that even some of those who are critical of Hezbollah for the cross-border raid into Israel, are calling for unity in standing up to Israel and the United States.
"What is certain is that Hezbollah's step and that taken by Hamas before it, lacks political wisdom," wrote the Saudi journalist, Dawood Al Shiryan, in the pan-Arab newspaper, Al Hayat. "But to insist on calling the resistance to account for this mistake now that Israel's violent response has been launched has created a political reality that is difficult to describe."
Should Hezbollah and Hamas emerge victorious, he argued, leaders of countries like Egypt and Jordan will be isolated from the leaders of those groups. And if they lose, Egypt and Jordan will bear part of the blame. In many ways, the dynamics of the region were predictable. Hatred of Israel runs deep, even when it is not visible at the surface. Arab governments have struggled for legitimacy while often relying on security forces and restricted voting rights to maintain their monopoly on power. And the experience of the Arab League, an organization that was supposed to advocate for the combined Arab interest, has repeatedly demonstrated that Arab states cannot agree on a common interest.
But this crisis has proved particularly vexing to the leadership and galling to many people because it came after the Palestinians elected as their leaders another group that so-called moderate Arab leaders did not trust: Hamas. In the public view, their leaders failed to come to the aid of Hamas when its funds were cut off by the West and then failed to do anything when Israel attacked in Gaza in response to the kidnapping and killing of soldiers. Even in Syria, which has offered strong rhetorical support for Hezbollah during this crisis and is accused of having helped arm and train it in the past, there is growing frustration that tough words are not followed by tough deeds.
In Egypt, the public sentiment toward the government is even more hostile. People repeatedly said that their government was hiding behind the idea that it was trying to block Shiite, or Iranian influence, when they believed it was really doing America's bidding. At the moment, Iran appears extremely popular among many ordinary Sunni Muslims.
"I wish we would send them reinforcements so that they can defend themselves, even if we send them medicine," said Gharib Hamed, 33, a pizza deliveryman in Cairo. "Hezbollah says that Iran is supporting them. I wish the Arab states would all help Hezbollah too. I am impressed with Iran's role."
Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, a cashier at a grocery store in the residential area of Zamalek was watching the Egyptian satellite news when he expressed his own frustrations with Arab leaders. "If I could go fight with them, I would," he said. "Where the hell are we?"
Katherine Zoepf contributed reporting from Damascus.
