In these days six years ago, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and his team were battering much of Lebanon to smithereens in the “Dahiyeh War”– designed, as we remember, to break Hizbullah once and for all, primarily by battering Lebanese civilians and their infrastructure so harshly that they would turn against the Hizb.
We all know how that turned out. In mid-August, after 33 days of extremely destructive actions against Lebanon, Israel finally acceded to a ceasefire and withdrew from Lebanon with its tail between its legs.
Today six years later, we should all recall just how lethal and destructive that war was for the Lebanese people who bore the brunt of the destruction… This evening, we watched a remarkable film, “Under the Bombs”, which was set in the ending days of the war and uses a lot of raw, real, contemporary newsreel footage to set the scene for the situation through which the two main characters move. It is an amazing depiction of the immediate postwar days.
For another depiction of what it was like to live through the war, people should buy Rami Zurayk’s small book War Diary: Lebanon 2006, which I was proud to publish last year. You can buy it as either a paperback, or a Kindle ebook.