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Dollars & Sense collective member Mary Jirmanus recounts her stay in Beirut during the war in July.

How are things over “there?” I read an e-mail on July 15 from a friend while sitting in my cousin’s apartment in Rabieh, a Beirut suburb. It reads, “I can’t imagine what it’s like there— here things seem to be moving so slowly.” There: the physical, geographical reality of “the region” and “the conflict” on which my friend expects me to offer some insight as to whether Syria will get involved, whether this is the United States’ proxy war with Iran, whether World War III has started.

There: also my internal connection to the space and the constantly changing political scenario, where Al-Jazeera is our constant sound track, where each village mentioned in the news strikes a particular chord of concern, and where we text-message with a friend, Nuha al Masri of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, trapped in Sidon since Israeli planes began bombing out the road. The next evening, while seated in an internet café in Jordan, we receive a message from her: “cant tell u how scared i am, they just bombed the area behind us, i feel like i’m going to die, thanks a lot for ur concern, glad to know u left the country.”

I arrived in Beirut this past June, planning to spend two months improving my Arabic language skills and learning on my own to love the country my family is from. My earlier visits had been limited to family vacations, with little independent opportunity to explore or develop a relationship to the place where my parents grew up, and from which they fled in 1977.

How one might have lived in Lebanon during the 16-year civil war had always been incomprehensible to me. The war, from 1975 to 1991, caused an estimated $25 billion in damage, forced some half a million people to flee the country, and sliced per capita income to $1,003 in 1990, a third of what it had been in 1974. Amid a climate of low-level tension among the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel, and the Phalangists, a Maronite Christian militia, the war began in 1975 when a busload of Palestinians was attacked by armed Phalangists. The many militias that fought were divided largely along sectarian lines but rooted in vast social and economic inequalities essentially written into Lebanon’s constitution, which gave disproportionate power to Lebanon’s Maronites (and Sunni Muslims). For 16 years, periods of relative peace were shattered by outbreaks of violence and invasions or interventions (depending on whose narrative you select) by Syria, Israel, and the United States. In 1983, U.S. peacekeeping forces defended the Israeli-backed government of Bashir Gemayel, effectively taking sides with the Maronite leadership against the Lebanese Muslims and Druze allied with Syria.

My earliest Lebanon memories: The sweaty, crowded airport with its cracked tile floor, its decaying landscape better suited to a Beckett play than “the Paris of the Middle East.” The dilapidated remains of Souk el-Gharb, my parents’ village, where weeds and shrubs grew over the abandoned buildings where wealthy Lebanese once summered. The roof of my mother’s home blown off by a rocket which finally forced my obstinate aunt and uncle to pack up and move to London in 1982. And no, we could not walk into the overgrown garden, maybe filled with undetonated bombs.

Sixteen years and a $20 billion reconstruction plan later, Lebanon had changed dramatically. With the help of remittances from émigrés like my parents and money from Gulf State regimes, the Lebanese have tried to gut the memories of the civil war. This summer, for the first time, I was able to imagine—and live—something resembling the Lebanon of my parents’ youth.

Three new banks were opening up, 1.7 million tourists were expected. In Beirut’s central commercial district, shiny new developments now stand next to Ottoman-era apartment buildings with crumbling balconies. During the last Israeli invasion in 1982, PLO tanks took cover next to residential buildings, “provoking” Israeli artillery. Despite media reports that condemn Hezbollah for doing the same, a Human Rights Watch report suggests Hezbollah fighters largely refrain from using civilian areas as shields. The group documented 24 incidents of attacks on civilians between July 12 and July 30 in Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, and found no evidence of Hezbollah’s presence in or around areas attacked by the Israeli air force.

I had expected to feel closer to my parents after this summer: more fluent in their native language, more connected to our country of origin. Instead, our bond is reinforced by the experience of fleeing together. In Lebanon one cannot stay inside bomb shelters all day for 15 years or even one month, as was possible during this war in many parts of northern Israel. For the most part there are no effective bomb shelters, especially in economically and politically marginalized southern Lebanon. But life does not stop despite the continual threat of becoming “collateral damage.” On July 12 we go dancing to celebrate my birthday; the next morning my parents wake at 4 a.m. to watch the airport burn from their balcony. I keep my pedicure appointment the next day and watch Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz announce on TV, “Nothing is safe … no target is immune.” My uncle calls a taxi and heads to a bridge tournament in West Beirut, despite his daughter’s half-joking pleas for him to “come home in one piece.”

We leave Beirut to reunite with aunts and uncles in my cousin’s apartment in what we hope is a safer area. We listen to the news constantly, hoping that the international community will recognize the absurdity of deliberately destroying a nation—and jeopardizing civilian lives on both sides—ostensibly for the return of two soldiers. Instead, a New York Times headline reads, “U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery to Israel,” done with “relatively little debate.” The House passes the Senate’s resolution in support of Israel’s campaign of “self-defense,” first removing the clause that cautions to minimize civilian causalities. Israel’s Deputy Representative to the United Nations remarks on CNN, “the Lebanese know we are doing them a favor.” The Lebanese—while not speaking in one voice and divided on the question of Hezbollah’s disarmament—certainly are not grateful to Halutz for promising to “set their country back 20 years.”

Five days into the shelling, we convince ourselves to leave because we are able: those without foreign passports, money, or places to stay are not so privileged. The taxi for four to Damascus, normally $50, costs $400. A week later, the fare rises to $1,200. Leaving southern Lebanon for Beirut quickly becomes equally expensive. Many residents of southern Lebanon simply cannot afford to obey Israeli leaflets telling them to evacuate. After a convoy of civilians leaving Marwahein on July 15 is struck by an aerial attack, my cousin’s wife comments, “People would rather die in their homes than on the road.”

During the taxi ride from Beirut to Syria, I try to distract myself from our driver’s frantic telephoning with other drivers to determine which roads are safe. I barrage my parents with questions: “Did the American University close during the war?” “How did Jean Claude go to school?” “Why did you finally leave?” My mother’s recounting of our family history is interrupted by an ambulance speeding past our car. The road we plan to take has been bombed by Israeli planes some 20 minutes ahead. Our fear is punctured by a sickening irony: we are being bombed with our own tax dollars, part of the approximately $2.2 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel last year.

In Damascus two days later, seeing me with a copy of Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk’s treatise on the Lebanese civil war, a Canadian woman remarks, “Interesting parallels between then and now.” And while the experience of fleeing a war is part of my family history and a recurrent theme for many in the region, reducing this conflict to banal assertions of interesting parallels” or dismissing the Middle East as a “troubled region” keeps us from asking why these wars got started and broaching the urgent questions of Palestine and of U.S. involvement in the region.

Evidence that the U.S. administration may have helped orchestrate this particular conflict, reported by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker last month, is lost in the public discussion that asks instead, “Who won this war?” and “Will Lebanon be dominated by Islamic fundamentalists?”

Civilian deaths amount to nearly 1,400 in Lebanon, 40 in Israel. The Lebanese government estimates the five weeks of fighting caused some $3.5 billion in damage to homes and infrastructure. According to Reuters, economists have cut Lebanon’s 2006 economic growth forecast from 5-6% to zero; some even predict negative growth as a result of blows to the
important tourist industry and to investor confidence. Israeli bombing of a Lebanese power plant created an oil spill the U.N. Environmental Program is calling one of the worst environmental disasters the region has ever seen. It will cost $100 million to clean up, with impacts to wildlife, fishing, and tourism stretching ten years into the future. As collateral damage is tallied, we must demand a formal investigation into the United States’ role in this conflict.

If we do not, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Middle East as perpetually “troubled” will persist. Civilians will continue to suffer. The greatest burden will be carried by the economically and ethnically marginalized groups who suffered disproportionately in this war: Lebanese Shiites and Israeli Arabs. Rather than pledging substantive rebuilding aid to Lebanon, the U.S. government will decry Hezbollah for financing the reconstruction. The Lebanese will laugh it off and rebuild, again.

In mid-August, back in Boston, my family and I join other Arab Americans and Jewish Americans in rallying for a just solution and in reaching out to the Arab-American community, typically too afraid or discouraged to comment on U.S. foreign policy. The Boston-area peace movement has come out as well to emphasize that this war is an American issue as much as it is Lebanese and Israeli. Protesters dressed in the white and red of the Lebanese flag gather in Copley Square and take up the Iraq War chant, “Money for jobs and education, not for bombs and occupation.” In Israel also, dissent mounts against the military’s operation in Lebanon among those who feel the country cannot bomb its way into security, though their demands are given little coverage in the United States.

At a prayer service we speak with a group of Maronite Catholics, traditionally among Hezbollah’s most; strident political opponents. One man says, “It’s time we Lebanese unite and demand our right to live in peace.” Father Timothy Fergusson of West Roxbury’s St. George Orthodox Church replies, “We are not pacifists, we are peacemakers. Peacemakers get out there, roll up their sleeves and make peace.”

[Mary Jirmanus, a member of the Dollars & Sense collective, is a fellow with Harvard’s Human Rights Committee and works with the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee of Massachusetts. For more information on local and national activism on Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, see www.adcma.org, www.bostontolebanon.com, and www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org.]

Sources:
Human Rights Watch, “Fatal Strikes,” August 2006; New York Times 7/21/06;
Stephen Zunes, “Congress and the Israeli Attack on Lebanon: A Critical Reading,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 7/22/06.

This article is from the September/October 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense:
The Magazine of Economic Justice www.dollarsandsense.org