Beirut, Part 3

Saturday was field trip day. Destination: parts of southern Lebanon.
To be precise, we visited, in short order:

1. The Old City of Saida (Sidon),
2. The family lands near Marjayoun to which my
   ex-husband–and therefore, in their turn, my two eldest kids– have some
   claim,
3. Members of that same family, in Marjayoun,
4. The infamous Khiam Detention Center, which through
   to the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 featured in numerous reports by human-rights
   organizations because of the tortures and other abuses practiced there by
   Israel and its local collaborators,
5. The truly historic Beaufort Castle (Qala’at
   al-Shaqif).

In the course of the trip, I got a much more vivid idea than I’d previously
had both about the current situation in south Lebanon and about the complex
relationship between Hizbollah and the Lebanese government. I also gained
some interesting insights into the whole process of “unilateral withdrawal”,
such as Sharon is now proposing to undertake from the Gaza Strip. So number
“6” of what I post about here will be:

6. Some reflections after the trip.

Saida, first, and I’ll link to that the whole
little story of our attempt to get out of Saida to our next destination…

Bill had never been to Saida before. I’d been to it several times
when I lived here in the 70s– and been through it even more times,
on my way to reporting stories further to the south.

We got a smashing, fast start out of Beirut, and reached the outskirts of
Saida by about 8:30 a.m. This was partly due to the efficiency of the
new autoroute/underpass system inside Beirut, which got us out of the city
like a cork from a bottle, and partly to the efficiency of the whole expressway
between Beirut and Saida. Since we seemed to be doing so well on time,
and since Bill was interested in seeing the city, we had the driver take us
in as near the Old City as possible, then wandered around inside there for
20 minutes.

I guess that’s basically a Mamlouk-era enclosed city? JWN commenter
Talal Chatila had urged me to go in and see the rehabbing work going on in
there. We certainly saw some fairly nicely restored stonework in the
honeycomb of stone pathways we walked through. We went through both
tightly packed-in streets of small shops and also some much more residential
(but still tight-packed) areas.

My experience of Muslim-design traditional walled cities is that for the
best experience you have to walk through them rather slowly, as nearly all
the interesting things to see are located down tiny side-alleys that you pass
by in a blink if you walk at anything faster than a slow amble…. But
look down those side alleys and you can see lovely stone arches, intriguing
little doorways, the upper sprays from a bougainvillea that someone’s planted
in a courtyard two or three storeys up, kids playing; women calling to each
other through open windows– there’s just no knowing what you might miss
if you walk too fast.

I have to say that compared with the Old City of Jerusalem, Saida’s looked
to be about one-tenth the size and have about one-tenth the mystery. Still,
we walked through it for a little–the little butchers’, grocery, and housewares
stores were just starting to come to life, and householders were starting
to venture forth to do their daily shopping. We came to a small saaha
(a square), in front of a large-ish mosque, and then we turned back.

Oh, beforehand, we took some great pictures of the ancient Sea Fort, glowing
golden in the light against a slightly threatening sky.

After we left Saida, we headed for Marjayoun, which you get to by driving
south along the coast a little, then striking east and a little south through
the big Shi-ite city of Nabatiyeh. From Nabatiyeh, the road heads east
for a little, then turns south to head seriously down down into the ravine
that carries the Litani River (here flowing north-to-south), and then up
again on its eastern bank to the first ridge-line where sits Marjayoun.

It turned out our driver really did not know the region very well. He
took the wrong road out of Nabatiyeh–twice–and even then we ended up on
the road to Arnoun, a little south of where we needed to be to descend down
into the valley of the Litani. Arnoun is near Beaufort Castle, but
at that point we were not thinking of going there.

At Arnoun, there was a Lebanese Army roadblock. “Foreigners?” the
man staffing it asked as he peered into the back of the car at us. “You
can’t pass through here. You have to go to the other roadblock, on the
road to Marjayoun.” So we turned back and went to that other roadblock–where
the Lebanese Army guys staffing that one was adamant in turn that we needed
to go all the way back to Saida to get permits to proceed.

“No-one old me anything about permits,” the driver muttered under his breath
as he turned the car around. (Earier, I had made a point of asking
him if there were any special requirements for us to travel south and he
said “No.” He was majorly losing face by this point.)

Long story short. We returned to Saida. Ibrahim– the driver–took
a couple more wrong turns. We finally found the room in the army barracks
in Saida where they issue tasreehat (permits). We had to submit two
photocopies of each of our passports; the plainclothes guys there asked what
the purpose of the visit was. I explained the thing about the ex-husband’s
family, and they painstakingly wrote down his name along with Bill’s and mine.
And then we were on our way.

“Permits?” I asked.

“They didn’t give us anything. They just they’d call ahead with your
names,” said Ibrahim.

Amazingly, it worked. We’d lost nearly two hours on the tasreehat
business. But then there we were, finally, swooping down from the high
plateau toward the valley of the Litani.

I’d forgotten, I think, how stunning the scenery
is in those parts. Parched at the end of Lebanon’s nearly dry summer,
the broad vistas of high rocky hilltops roll on all around, giving way behind
them only to further hilltops receding toward a very distant horizon. The
general topography reminded me of Montana, or Wyoming.

Here, though, many hills and ridges are topped with villages. These
days nearly all the houses are built with concrete. They are rectilinear,
and most of them are– because of obscure provisions of the tax or inheritance
laws– essentially unfinished, with gangly pillars left on top to build the
next storey sometime in the future. Most of the villages have one or more
whitewashed mosques. A few have churches, instead.

Many of the hills are bare, but others have extensive olive groves, or close-planted
tobacco fields. I guess those looked like the main crops up here, though
down on the coast there are lots of banana plantations, citrus groves, and
date palms.

So S (the ex) comes from a family that owns as he has described it fairly
extensive lands right next to where the main road to Marjayoun crosses the
Litani. The bridge there is called Mustard Bridge (Jisr al-Khardali),
and the most salient thing about it in the past 30 years is that it was an
important and much fought-over front-line point in the longstanding (1978-2000)
battles between the Israeli occupation forces and the indigenous Lebanese
resistance.

Acouple of times in the 1970s S and I had come from Beirut down to
the little stone farmhouse here, to visit his Dad who was trying to farm some
of the property. But as a result of the war and the occupation the
farmhouse was long ago ruined. The pumps that his Dad had installed
to raise enough water to irrigate the fields along the riverbank had long
been stolen. The fruit and nut trees had been cut down. Along
the way there the Dad died; and as far as I know the problem of subdividing
the whole big portion of land between S and the other 30 or so cousins who
have a claim on it has never yet been resolved.

I remembered the valley as a dark and shady place where the river flowed
swift and deep between lush orchards. Now, there are no lush orchards.
Indeed, someone seemed to be using the family’s land as a quarry, so
today there was a lot of white dust in the air as massive great trucks trundled
along a white-dirt track carrying the land away. (Maybe somebody
in S’s family knows what’s going on? I didn’t.)

And Bill–to whom I had extolled the speed and volume of the river’s flow
at this point–was distinctly unimpressed. I wasn’t. This is the
end of summer, for God’s sake! The fact that there was a flow at all
in this season, in this part of the world, was pretty impressive to me. Even
if the flow was slightly scummy and swirled round a whole flotilla of thrown-away
plastic bottles that bobbed in the eddies at the approaches to the bridge.

We stopped and took some more pix. I tried to figure exactly where
S’s Dad’s farmhouse had stood. On that eastern bank of the river the
land still rose as I remembered it– climbing wild, grand, and rocky the
3,000 or so feet of elevation to where the houses of Marjayoun run
along the top of the first ridge to the east.

It takes considerably more than 1,500 feet of driving to zigzag your way
up the brown hillside that is the bulwark of the town! Once we got there,
Ibrahim’s car had a flat. Bill and also had to figure out how to proceed.

Marjayoun is a Christian town–divided in some proportion
between members of the Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches. (These
are indigenous Lebanese churches. “Greek” is just a ways-old reference
there.) A small number of the town’s people had, essentially, collaborated
with the Israeli occupiers. The main forces that “liberated” this whole
part of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation were the two Shi-ite movements,
Amal and Hizbollah. Indeed, all the way up the grandly rebuilt road
from Saida, sturdy signs along the road had been glorified the names of the
Amal and Hizbollah fighters who had perished during this liberation war–
and as our road had just started the steep descent down into the Litani Valley
there was a massive billboard welcoming us to the “liberated areas”, with
Hizbollah’s yellow flags flying proudly all along the top of it.

At the place where Ibrahim had his flat fixed we asked who from S’s family
was still around, and were directed to the home of a really lovely family
where the Dad was some kind of a distant cousin of S’s dad, but with the
same family name. And we just knocked on their door. A woman and
her daughter came to greet us. Kindly, but a little warily. I
gave my somewhat complex explanation of how I was the ex-wife of someone from
their “same” family, and here I was now with my second husband… And of
course I told them about my two kids who– according to the firmly engrained
Lebanese ideas of patrilinearity– are also members of their “same” family.
At which point C (the mom) couldn’t have been more welcoming. Her
daughter– who’s just writing an M.A. thesis at a university here in Beirut
on the subject of preventive war, believe it or not– speaks good English;
and the four of us were soon sitting around a table in their kitchen where
we yakked about family stuff for around three-fourths of an hour. I
drew a couple of family trees to show them what I know of S’s immediate relatives.
They showed me an entire book someone had published that showed the
family trees of all the 2,000-plus family members who now live in Brazil.
And so it went on…

At one level it was a lovely and very heart-warming experience. C
and her daughter were very kind, smart people. (We also had a drop-by
visit from the teenage son; however, the husband was asleep, having had a
busy night doing something or other.) It was great to catch up even
in only this partial and hurried way with people who are “hometown” relatives
of my two half-Lebanese kids. Actually, I think either of the kids
would have a ball if they ever make it to Marjayoun.

At another level, it all seemed slightly poignant. Marjayoun like
so many Christian communities in the Middle East has been bleeding people
to international migration for more than 100 years now. I have talked
to many Marjayounis over the years. Not just S’s rels, but people like
my dear guru the late Albert Hourani, of Oxford; or a lovely Marjayouni we
knew a little in Beirut called Labib Ghoulmiyeh; etc etc. And they
had always carried with them the idea of Marjayoun as the center of all forms
of cultural and economic life in South Lebanon, its fame renowned far and
wide; etc etc. On Saturday, though, the town seemed like a sleepy and
half-empty backwater, with few signs of any recent investment at all. The
nearby Shi-ite town of Nabatiyeh, by contrast– well, it looked like a huge
metropolis; it was bursting at the seams and its streets pulsing with life…
So it did seem kind of sad to go to Marjayoun, as well as heart-warming.

C pressed us to stay for lunch. But we didn’t want to burden her with
that– dropping in quite unknown and unexpected as we did, it truly would
not have been fair to her. (She also told us she works as a teacher
in a government school. Heck, I know exactly how valuable every minute
of weekend time is for someone who’s a working mom.) She was, however,
successful in pressing us to eat a little dish of dessert each, and to have
a couple of cups of Arabic coffee as we talked.

Also, we had other things to do. We were still
hoping to loop back to the coast and visit the ancient city of Sur (Tyr).
And I’d also been quite taken with the idea of visiting a a place nearby
that had been prominently posted as a major attraction on brown-and-white
“tourist info” signs coming all along the road from Saida: the Khiam
Detention Center, an army camp in the nearby town of Khiam that
the Israelis and their local surrogates had used as their own mini-Abu Ghraib
throughout their 22 years running a military occupation of the area.

Last year (as you can read about on JWN–use the Search button), my daughter
Leila and I visited the Robben Island Museum in South Africa. The idea
of a new regime turning the major prisons of the despotic regime which it
has displaced into museums is not a completely new one. But because
of my current interest in issues of memorialization, broadly speaking,
as well as my continuing interest in the history of South Lebanon, I was eager
to see how this particular act of memorialization had been carried out.

At Robben Island, one of the most striking aspects of the experience was
that each separate part of the standard tour that we took was led by someone
who had been an inmate there. The guy who showed Leila and me around
the cell-block was especially effective explaining his experiences diuring
his many years of incarceration there.

In Khiam, near the entrance, there was a room with a sign that promised
that the people inside it were “liberated prisoners who lead tours.” But
everyone who was in the room when we arrived was saying their prayers, so
I didn’t feel like disturbing them.

Then, from some points of view the “museum experience” at Khiam did seem
a little ramshackle. There was no written guidebook or floor-plan for
the place– and no-one charging any formal entry fee, either. There
was a small gift store near the entrance that offered many tapes of Hizbollah
sermons and pro-Hizbollah songs. I could have bought a tasteful yellow
baseball cap emblazoned with the Hizbollah logo, or a ditto headscarf. Trading-card-style
photos of the visages of various mullahs seemed like a hot item in the shop,
too…

I resisted the various temptations, and asked the guy there if he had any
English-language guidebooks. By way of reply, he led us to a small
curtained room where he started showing the orientation video for us. It
was 10 minutes long, in Arabic with English subtitles. The facts it
presented seemed broadly accurate according to what I remember of Human Rights
Watch and Amnesty Int’l reports about the prison; but the general narrative
within which the facts were presented seemed to me to be floridly overdone–
“the worst crimes against humanity”, etc etc. I wanted to yell out,
“Just stick to the facts of what they did! Even, be conservative
in presenting them! That is so much more dignified, and more fitting
as a memorial to the people who died and otherwise suffered from the torture
here!” But I guess those may be merely esthetic judgments, and have
little bearing over such affairs?

Actually, on consideration I think this is not merelyt an
esthetic judgment. I really do think it depends on the broad goals
people have in presenting memorials like these. If the goal is, as
part of a Narrative of Reconciliation (see below), to present an effective
reproach to members of what we might broadly call the “social group
from which the perpetrators had arisen”, then the way that reproach is presented
is extremely important, and not “merely” esthetic.

Anyway, in the instructional film there, there were numerous “re-enactments”
of various phases of the detention experience there that seemed to me to
be clumsy, and not terribly effective at explaining anything. (H’mm,
strange that all the “Israeli solders” depicted as beating up on detainees
sported bushy, Hizbollah-member style beards??)

There was, without any shadow of doubt, a tremendous amount of human suffering
inflicted within this place, and I don’t want to minimize that fact for a
moment.  Some 3,000 detainees passed through it during the 22 years
of occupation, and many of them had long and very inhumane stays there. (The
International Committee of the Red Cross was admitted only in 1995, and almost
immediatey started pushing the camp’s administration to make very basic changes
like introducing iron bunk-beds rather than expecting the detainees to sleep
on the floor in all weathers.) Some terrible tortures, both physical
and psychological, were enacted there, and a number of detainees died under
the torture. The whole idea of an occupation army taking detainees from their
homes and loved ones for long periods of time and then keeping them in detention,
whether to use them as, essentially hostages for their own political goals,
or to try to “turn” them and force them to become collaborators, or to torture
them to try to extract information– all of these being goals quite incompatible
with any concept of due process under law— is quite abhorrent. And
it is excellent that when these things are done, their enactment and the immense
amount of human degradation and suffering that they cause should be remembered,
and those lessons taught to coming generations.

But what I saw presented in Robben Island that I did not see in Khiam, were
two additional narratives, in additin to the very necessary narrative of suffering:
in Robben Island, there were also present the Narrative of Reconciliation,
and the Narrative of Moral Betterment (“those kinds of actions were so deplorable
that we commit ourselves more deeply than ever before to never repeating
them”). In Khiam, there was only the Narrative of Suffering.

Having said that, I did find the tour we took around the cell-blocks and
the rest of the prison incredibly poignant and moving. The tour was
self-guided, and generally well signed, with signage offered in both Arabic
and English. Also, many of the cells looked as though they were much closer
to how they had been in the days when the camp was operational than were
the cells we saw in Robben Island. For example, in Khiam, several
of the “collective” cells still had the bunk-beds in them, with thin mattresses
and blankets on top of them, and various other personal items strewn around,
whereas the big “collective” cell we saw in Robben Island had been stripped
almost totally bare so our guide, Thulani, had to explain how things had
been in the days when 70 prisoners were kept there.

I thought conditions in Robben Island looked significantly worse than those
in Robben Island. For example, in the “individual” cells in R.I. where
Nelson Mandela and other top nationalist leaders were held, I recall that
each one at least had a (barred) window from which he could look out onto
a bare courtyard, and a toilet; but in Khiam, the individual cells had no
toilets built in and gave no opportunity for the prisoners to look out of
the cell at all. Some had a ventilation hole high in the wall that let
in some natural light; some didn’t even have that.

Similarly, the collective cells in R.I. also had some windows giving natural
light, while nearly all the ones in Khiam that we saw had no natural light
at all, but only gave ventilation via a barred-across “false” ceiling.

Who on earth designs these systems, I wonder? Some fiendish mind.

At Khiam, we also saw an upended-girder-type metal utility pole to which
particularly recalcitrant detainees had been tied, and then they were doused
with water, beaten, etc. Two people died on that pole. That was in a
small courtyard. Elsewhere, there were indoor rooms that had been used
for various forms of torture. (Who designs those systems??)

So we wandered on around, reading the signs and peering into the dark depths
of the cells. Bill got some pretty good pictures–I was surprised how well
the flash worked on his digicam.

Khiam is very close to the northern tip of Israel. On the day in May (or
was it June?) of 2000 when Israel finally and peremptorily withdrew from
the place, the local people from Khiam–a Shi-ite town–just poured into
the detention camp, filed off all the padlocks, and freed their loved ones
immediately. Those were heady days indeed– and their joyfulness was
captured in the grainy news footage of them spliced in at the end of the
video presentation we saw.

Nowadays, the detention camp/museum is run under the auspices of the Lebanese
Ministry of Tourism. (Hence, all the brown-and-white road signs pointing
towards it.) But it seems to be most directly under the administration
of Hizbollah. Along the short road leading to the entrance fly about
6 yellow Hizbollah flags, three red-and-white Lebanese flags, and one Palestinian
flag.

Why a Palestinian flag? Well, Hizbollah still has a few top leaders
who continue to be political hostages within Israel. (Their continued
detention was mentioned at the end of the video presentation.) But
in addition to that factor, the Palestine question has been of general concern
to Hizbollah ever since the party was founded in late 1983. On the
many sturdily made, yellow-dominated Hizbollah billboards that we saw
along all the roads from Saida to Khiam, the iconography seemed to be composed
from five main elements. There would be either (1) a picture of one
or more well-known mullahs (no names needed for the faithful– those faces
would already be well-known to them), or (2) the picture and name of a Hizbollah
martyr. With this would be (3) the Hizbollah logo, featuring along
with the calligraphed party name an upthrust Kalashnikov and what looks like
a representation of a globe; plus, very often, (4) a depiction of either a
single red rose, or a whole field of red poppies; but the final element–present
on nearly all the billboards–would be (5) a fuzzy but unmistakeable depiction
of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem…

I’m planning to talk to some Hizbollah people later during my visit here.
I can ask them about many of these things.

Well, moving right along there, as we were, we talked
to Ibrahim about looping on south and west so we could see Sur (Tyr) before
heading home. He was extremely discouraging, and told us we’d never
get becak before 8 or 9 p.m. (which would mean extra charges from the taxi
company), plus everything in Sur would be closed etc etc. After considering
some alternatives, we decided to try to get to Beaufort Castle. Amazingly
enough this time round there were no problems at either of the two roadblocks
we had to traverse, and Ibrahim simply drove us up the rocky western approaches
to the base of the castle on that side, where we stepped out and started
exploring.

This was ultra-exciting for me. I first came to Lebanon (for a one-month
visit) back in the spring of 1970. Then I came back here to live and
work from 1974 through 1981. During all that time, no civilians could
get anywhere close to Beaufort, because it was always (rightly) considered
a magnificent strategic geographic position, and thus was and used as a military
post by the Lebanese Army all the way through from independence until the
time the Israelis stormed it (with little resistance from the Lebanese army)
in 1982.

Quite considerable damage was inflicted on the castle during that assault.
I remember Beaufort as looking–from the distance–like a classic storybook
picture of what a Crusader castle should look like, with soaring stone walls
rising to battlements from the top of the craggy peak on which it sits. Nowadays,
the structure itself looks from afar like a sorry, bombed-out vestige of
its former erect lines. But the location is still superb! It
totally dominates the whole area of surrounding hills and plateaus.  You
can get clear lines of sight to a whole portion of northern Israel, to Marjayoun
and Khiam and beyond them the cloud-crowned peak of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount
Hermon); you can look up along high peaks of the Lebanese range of mountains;
you can see beyond Nabatiyeh; and then, a little south of Nabatiyeh you can
look right down 15 miles away and see the sea glinting off the Mediterranean
near Sur.

On the eastern side, as I have mentioned, the ridge on which Beaufort sits
drops very steeply indeed down 3,000 feet or so into the ravine of the Litani.

Bill and poked around a little on the western side of the ruin. There
was a single iron staircase that had been devised to climb to the top of
the castle from the ground– but since several of the stanchions that were
supposed to anchor this to the castle wall had rusted out the whole structure
swayed alarmingly in the wind, so I chickened out.

What there was, though, was a fairly extensive little army post tucked in
there along the northwest edge of the castle. A lot of concrete
had been poured there, and precast pieces brought in, to produce what must
once have been a whole series of connecting pill-boxes with, at the far northern
end a warren of trenches leading to different firing positions. The
whole thing had evidently been blown up by the Israelis prior to what the
gloating but now-fading billboard there described as “The day of ignominious
departure”, in 2000.

Bill rootled around a but amid the chunks of jagged concrete and shreds of
old sandbag and came up with a very badly stained firing chart, in Hebrew.
It seemed to have been printed especially for use at this (or another?)
position, and gave the precise ranges and bearings of seven assorted targets
between (apparently) the west and the northeast of the place. (We’ll
get it translated sometime.)

It had been carefully wrapped in plastic, which had been stapled onto it.
I wonder how many tired or scared (or even gung-ho?) Israeli gunners
had sat there on a cold, wet night trying to use this chart in order to rain
destruction onto people in the villages and towns around…

Well, from there we decided to try to poke around the castle from the southern
side, and there we succeeded in finding a dusty path that took us up to the
top of the castle at last. It was fairly eery. I’ve been to many,
many great medieval castles in the Middle East and Europe. Usually,
you enter nowadays through what was always the main gate, and rise gradually
through different twisting pathways lined with rooms designed for different
functions that are all nested on top of each other with the vaulting for
one rook providing the floor for the room above. Here, though, we were
just taking the random kind of a path that had been trodden up the side of
the much-ruined castle, and every so often you’d see that the ground you
were walking acorss had holes leading down into vast vaulted chambers beneath.
Some of the vaulting looked pretty impressive.

Up at the top, we threaded our way along paths lined with rusting railings.
After the Israelis left, the “Islamic resistance” took over the place
(as the informational billboard had told us). Evidently Amal and Hizbollah
had both rushed for the high places, and now of the two highest spots there
one flies a large green Amal flag and the other a large yellow Hizbollah
one. I think the place flying the Amal flag was slightly higher– but
Hizbollah’s people had installed a longer flag-pole, so the result looked
more or less like a draw.

The views all around were truly great. Bill and I both took photos.
I don’t think the color on his did justice to the gold tones of the
early-evening light– but I guess Photoshop or whatever can set that to rights
at some point.

Some reflections after the trip

One first very strong conclusion I drew from the trip concerned quite simply
the strength of the relationship between the Lebanese state and Hizbollah
at this point. I have written about this numerous times in the past,
including here on JWN. But it gave me a completely new level of understanding
to travel through the small parts of the south that I did, and see the extent
of the cooperation between these two institutions (and also, between the
state and Amal) as it manifests itself on the ground there.

For example, it looked as if Hizbollah was in charge of many aspects of the
administration of the museum at Khiam, even though a few signs there did
indicate that it was a project of the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism. (And
that Ministry, presumably, had provided the numerous road-side signs leading
to it all the way up from Saida.)

The Hizbollah and Amal flags and billboards that were sturdily attached to
the street-lights going all the way from Saida to Nabatiyeh indicated close
relations between these parties and the “Council of the South” or whichever
government body it had been that administered the construction/rehabilitation
of that road. (Also, I must note that many excellent new or rehabbed
roads seemed to have been built in the south in recent years.)

While the small billboards that hang above the median strip are all for Amal
or Hizbollah signs, the Saida-Nabatiyeh road also has many larger billboards
implanted along its sides, which are used in many cases for normal commercial
advertisements. But USAID evidently wants to make its presence/influence
felt there. I don’t know if USAID provided a lot of the financing for
the road and was therefore rewarded with scores of free or discounted slots
for its (I have to admit) extremely unimaginative and uninformative signs?
Or if it did not contribute to the roadbuiling but simply chose to
use up some budget buying advertising space on those billboards at full cost?
Either way, the result is pretty hilarious: You can see USAID’s
ponderous logo and plodding absence of graphic imagination right alonmgside
billboards for Hizbollah– and usually, quite outnumbered by them.

(If USAID did help fund some of the reconstruction in the south, which I
believe is the case, then that is, I guess, a good thing. But how much
better of a thing it would have been if the US government had been firm with
Israel all along and told the Israelis from 1978 and 1982 on that it was
unconscionable that they should seek to invade and occupy a huge chunk
of what was very evidently someone else’s country? How much better
if the US government had said that US weapons could under no circumstances
be used in Lebanon? As it was, I as a US taxpayer had to pay for the
original Israeli invasion of Lebanon–including the deaths of some 19,000
Lebanese and Palestinians people there in 1982, most of them civilians;
then I had to pay for the occupation, and for the military operations the
IDF sustained inside Lebanon for the next 18 years… And now I pay–just
a fraction of those earlier amounts–to send a few roadbuilding bandaids
to the people of Lebanon??? What a crazy system.)

Anyway, the closeness of the relations between Hizbollah and the Lebanese
state are not surprising at all. Hizbollah has a respectably sized
bloc inside the Lebanese parliament and used to be part of the government.
It is a sizeable force–quite possibly the biggest single force–inside
the country’s Shi-ite community, which is the largest confessional group
in the whole country. 35% of the national population? Maybe more…

Actually, it’ll be good for me to catch up some more with what’s happening
to Hizbollah-state relations here. Will this history provide any kind
of an instructive model for how relations between Moqtada Sadr’s people and
the Iraqi state might be in the future? It might. Here, though
there are lots of other things going on–including the recent assassination
of a Hizbollah official called Ghaleb Awali… (Memo to self: lots
still to find out!)

I guess the other thing I wanted to reflect on here, quickly, is the unsatisfactory
way that that matters were left here in the wake of the unilateral
withdrawal that Ehud Barak’s government in Israel undertook in 200. (Ehud
Barak: what a blast from the past, eh? What on earth happened to him?)

I wrote above that what Hizbollah presents at the Khiam museum is a Narrative
of Suffering but without (as at Robben Island) any complementary Narrative
of Reconciliation. And I believe that the way Hizbollah presents this
is largely representative of the way the vast majority of Lebanese people–not
just Shi-ites–feel about the way Israel has treated their country for the
past 35-plus years.

In other words, if anyone expected the Lebanese people to feel “:grateful”
to Israel for having undertaken the withdrawal, they would have been completely
wrong.

If there’s a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, I am sure that
we could expect the same kind of sentiments to be prevalent there as here,
after the withdrawal– but with this crucial difference: Whereas here
in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawal of 2000 left HJizbollah and its allies
with virtually no pursuable claims outstanding against Israel–oh,
apart from the possibility of reparations for all the suffering imposed by
the occupation?? dream on, Helena!– in Gaza, even if the Israelis
were to withdraw from every single square inch of the Strip, the 1.3 million
Palestinians of Gaza would still have massive claims outstanding against
Israel, since the vast majority of those Palestinians are refugees from
1948 whose longstanding claims against Israel will still not, if Sharon gets
his way, even be on the agenda after the withdrawal.

In other words, in south Lebanon, after Israel’s withdrawal of 2000, the
people may not have been “grateful” to Israel for the withdrawal– but at
least they did have the satisfaction of being able–at last!–to get back
to their homeplaces and farms and start building something there for the
future of their children. Which most of them have been doing very busily
indeed.

But in Gaza, if Sharon withdraws as promised next year, what will
the lives of the people be like– separated as the vast majority of them
will still be from any hope of being able to build a decent and secure future
for their children, whether in their family’s homeplaces, or using money
provided in compensation for the loss of the same?

If in Lebanon, the attitudes of the people of the south are still far from
ready to start crafting a Narrative of Reconciliation with Israel–how much
further away will the people of Gaza be from doing this?

Oh well, everything I work on these days seems to come back to a couple of
very basic conclusions: War and invasion and military occupation and
unilateral decisionmaking are all processes that lead to increased suffering
and difficulties down the pike. But there is always a nonviolent, non-coercive
alternative. In most cases it takes the form of negotiations.