| Jennifer Loewenstein Archive |
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From by Charles Glass, The
Nation In the autumn of 1972, arriving in The mainly Palestinian-led student movements were only a few
years behind sit-ins, students sang "We Shall Overcome." Discussions went
on all night. Caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and hashish stimulated
self-criticism sessions and persuaded many a young woman to hasten the
revolution in bed. One of the more urgent debates was whether the
Palestinians should choose a secular, democratic state in all of Palestine-Israel
or content themselves with a truncated Palestinian state in the and pop-gun war on Israeli government to offer either option. Still, the talking
went on. And on. A friend took me to his aunt's house in one of the refugee
camps for the Arabs expelled from atop her television, beaming a kind of innocent hope, was her
son. He had died the month before in the Black September kidnapping
of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in tailor's shop near the synagogue in Wadi Abou Jamil, Quarter. The tailor gave us Turkish coffee and joked with my
friend about carried him on her back from their village in into hundreds of others--lest the refugees have anything to return
to. The tailor, who was born in that he could move to visit, made him laugh. The two exchanged jocular ethnic abuse
with an ease unknown to me in Today, neither one lives in Wadi Abou Jamil was a curving road of old, rickety apartment
buildings with shops and cafes on the ground floor. The lovely
synagogue in those days seemed as poorly attended as churches and mosques. At
the eastern edge of what would later be Muslim West became vulnerable in the civil war that began in April 1975.
No one wanted to destroy it. On the contrary, Yasir Arafat's Liberation Organization and the Christian Phalangists fought
each other to defend it--Arafat to prove his movement was not
anti-Semitic and the Phalange to ingratiate itself with elsewhere in the world, were the Jews. Their abandoned houses
gave shelter after 1982 to Lebanese Shiite Muslims, who had been
displaced by Israeli bombardment and occupation. Very old men, red tarbooshes tottering on their wizened
heads, looked on the young generation with skepticism. Coffeehouse politics, nightclubs and relaxed sexual mores offended their honor. It
had been bad enough when their mothers renounced the veil fifty years
earlier, but daughters unfastening their bras were too much. The old
politicians' collaboration with imperialism, their tawdry compromises and
their betrayal of independence repelled the children. Youth's
insistence on change brought it all down--the tar- booshes as much as the coffeehouse debates, the revolutionary aspirations as well as
the Levantine compromises and mixing of peoples. The war it
produced let religion out of church and mosque, twisting a political
battle into a struggle between Jesus and Mohammed that could not be
contained within the borders of fabric of the downtown gathering places of all
communities--the ancient souks, smoky restaurants, trading companies and cafes. People
and ideas were segregated by a north-south Green Line, crossed only by
bullets and artillery shells. Of course, the war among the Lebanese was
also a series of wars by proxy between Palestinians and Until the war were yacht harbors, casinos, dancing girls, skiing and
water-skiing amid Mediterranean palms and cypresses. They did not see the
Palestinian refugee camps around the airport, the armed Palestinian
commandos, the Phalangist military parades or the slums expanding to
accommodate peasants driven from the south by Israeli bombs and mechanized farming. The Palestinians had transplanted their revolution
from to jealousies--rather than their stated ideals of secularism and democracy--took root in to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming
another Lebanese tribe. The Palestinians' secular revolution died in the hands of its incompetent leadership and neighbors, I had lived in fearful, oppressive and conformist. Children wore military- style uniforms to school. Newspapers practiced Stalinesque
obeisance to power. Billboards exhorted the masses to struggle for unity,
socialism and Arabism. Visitors had to declare how much money they brought
into the country, how much they were taking out and at which state
banks they changed it into Syrian pounds. (Just about every in dollars, francs, deutsche marks, lira and rubles.) Where
the Lebanese cursed their leaders in loud voices, the Syrians whispered
even the mildest, most hesitant criticism. It took me several visits
to see behind the facade of party-military rule. In self-assurance that Lebanese was flamboyant--knew who he was. Syrian Christians in particular had none of the identity crises that afflicted
their co-religionists in Druse leader Kamal Jumblatt
called a prison-state, the prisoners were generous, patient and interesting. And their history imposed
upon them a duty to act, in heart" of Arab nationalism. empire--the Umayyad--and for a few months in the twentieth,
of the independent state that expelling the Ottoman Turks. Many Syrians--and not a few
Lebanese and Jordanians--regard their country as a small part of a larger
Arab homeland that includes Greater Damascene obligation to prevent Lebanese and Palestinians from compromising with an another. The Damascenes will remind the visitor that the
Crusaders, like the ancient Israelite kingdom, never conquered important part of the Syrian legacy, and it is not easily
dismissed for modern political convenience. Barely three years before my first trip to air force commander, had seized power in a bloodless putsch
against the self-destructive deputy secretary general and fellow Baathist Salah Jadid. Assad in his early years as dictator must have
felt vulnerable. Military dictators had come and gone as
frequently as city buses since the first, CIA-backed, coup dissolved elected parliament in 1949. To add to the usual problems of
retaining the throne, Assad came from a religious minority, an obscurantist offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Alawis, who had come to dominate the military under the French Mandate. The
Sunni Muslim elite in quiet about the fact. The only Sunnis he made room for in his
regime, notably Defense Minister Moustafa Tlas and Vice-President
Abdel Halim Khaddam, were neither Damascenes nor from prominent
families. Internal resistance came from the armed assassins of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, who disliked Assad's sect
as much as his party's secularism. base for subverting the Syrian regime, as Assad knew well.
Syrian exiles in power in explorations of planning a war to dislodge territories it had seized in June 1967. That war took place
in October 1973 and exchanged a few thousand lives for a few miles of
land. It also made Assad--the near "liberator" of the a player on the world stage in negotiations with then-US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Assad's prestige made him dangerous,
however, to could ignore. Throughout the 1970s, skirmishes in commandos and the Israeli army claimed more non-combatants
than soldiers on both sides. They also weakened an already feeble Lebanese
state that could not protect its citizens from either did not let the Palestinians breathe in encouraged them in The Palestinians hijacked airplanes, and the Israelis bombed
refugee hovels and villages. Any responsible imperial power would
have put a stop to it, but neither the Soviet Union nor the maturity to manage a local conflict in which both envisaged
benefits to themselves. It was an ugly time, and the vicious civil war
that erupted in April 1975 between alliance of Palestinians, Lebanese leftists and Muslims made
things worse. In 1976 Assad met the prospect of a Palestinian leftist
takeover of could not mask the fact that its interests lay with
maintaining balance in meant trouble for demanded power similar to that won by Muslims--both
Palestinian and Lebanese--in consequence--an Israeli invasion of establishment. Thus, he made his pact with the extreme
Christian leadership. His army entered liberation, fighting Palestinians on the way in. Syrian
support for the Christians in the summer of 1976 enabled the Christian
militias to destroy the last Palestinian refugee camp, Tal Zaatar, on the
Christian side of Tal Zaatar may be laid at the feet of the Syrians, just as
the Israelis would be held responsible for helping the same Christians to
massacre civilians in two other Beirut Palestinian camps--Sabra and Shatila--under Israeli occupation in 1982. The accepted the Syrian intervention to suppress the PLO, with
the proviso that no Syrian troops would tread south of a "red line" well
north of Palestinians and Israelis until 1982. Meanwhile, the only Lebanese community to remain aloof from
the civil war--the Shiites--was coming under other influences. Partly
due to the interests of the large landowners who were their communal
leaders, Shiites were the poorest community in the country. The Shiite
clergy had been proselytizing among the displaced petite bourgeoisie and
the peasantry since the 1960s, when their ideas were less
fashionable than either communism or Arab nationalism. As Sheikh Naim Qassem,
deputy leader of Hezbollah, writes in his history of the movement,
"Initiated by a number of Islamic clerics just back from the holy
schools of religion of Najaf in dialogue that ensued prompted many concerns and queries about
Islam's proposed role in life." University students engaged in this
process were "rare," and women's presence "was scarce and underwhelming." Undereducated, underemployed young men could not afford
universities or nightclubs. The mosque was free, and within its confines they
found brotherhood. Then came the Iranian revolution of 1979, which
gave the Shiites hope, and the Israeli invasion of 1982, which gave
them a cause. Thus Hezbollah, the Shiite Party of God, went from what Naim
Qassem calls "humble, embryonic beginnings" to "actual victory,
achieved on May 25, 2000, when Israeli troops were forced to withdraw as a
result of Hizballah operations--an unprecedented achievement in fifty
years of struggle with the Israeli enemy." with the anti-secularists of found in Hezbollah a useful proxy to attack Israeli reprisals in Three clerics dominated the Shiite movement: Imam Musa
al-Sadr, Sheik Mohammed Mehdi Shamseddine and Sheik Mohammed
Hussein Fadlallah. Of the three, Sadr was the most charismatic. A man of Lebanese
origin who had grown up in both the Shiite official clerical body, the Higher Islamic
Shiite Council, and the largest Shiite grouping, the Movement of the Disinherited. When the Israelis bombed their training camp in
the Bekaa Valley in 1974, Sadr announced the creation of Amal, the
armed wing of his movement, some of whose members received training from
Arafat's Fatah. Three years into the civil war, in August 1978, Sadr
vanished while visiting have not forgiven Muammar el-Qaddafi. Shamseddine became head
of the Higher Islamic Shiite Council, making him official head of
the community and equal to the Sunni Mufti and the Maronite Patriarch.
Fadlallah would later be accused of being the "spiritual leader" of
Hezbollah, although he neither joined nor led it. His notoriety made him the
target of a failed assassination attempt in March 1985 by a CIA-trained
Lebanese unit, when a car bomb intended for him killed more than
eighty civilian bystanders. By then the ten-year civil war had attracted
armies from peacekeepers, at least twenty other countries. The war of attrition between Arafat and 1970s after the pretext that invasion was a reprisal for the bungled
assassination attempt on its ambassador in linked to Abu Nidal, Arafat's sworn enemy. Arafat for his
part had observed an effective cease-fire with Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon's long-planned Operation
Peace in Israeli order in Palestinian deaths in the invasion, the new Phalangists and their Israeli benefactors. But they ignored a conference in Tehran of Lebanon's Shiite ulama (religious
scholars) in August 1982 under the guidance of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini. Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, whose excellent In the Path of Hizbullah is as
critical of the movement as Sheikh Naim Qassem's Hizbullah: The Story
From Within is partisan, writes, "During the meeting, Khomeini urged the
'ulama' to go back home and mobilize the people to fight the Israeli
occupation and to turn the mosques into bases for their jihad activities." That
is exactly what they did, and they won. Suicide bombings, what Qassem calls "martyrdom operations,"
began on November 11, 1982, in south not tolerate many attacks like that from the pioneer of all
martyr attacks, Sheikh Ahmad Kassir, who drove...a car strapped with
explosives right into the headquarters of the Israeli commander in the
city of missing." The significance of the bombing eluded both the
Israelis and the journalists in south population still supported ridding them of the PLO. Because the main Shiite militia,
Amal, had yet to resist the Israeli occupation, itself. Amal's inconsistent approach to the Israelis left the
field open to the clerics who would found Hezbollah. Missing the signal
of the attack, the Americans took insufficient precautions against
suicide attacks at their embassy in April 1983 and the US Marine
barracks the following October. The Marines had overseen the PLO evacuation from at The Marines were forced to return to promise not to invade Shatila massacres by the same Christian militiamen who had
massacred other Palestinian refugees at Tal Zaatar. The Reagan
Administration compounded its error by compelling with arrest and torture his Muslim and Druse opponents. out of every group disenchanted with rightist Maronite rule,
Israeli occupation and American tutelage. They rallied around
opposition to the May 17 "surrender" to brokered. Hezbollah drove the that killed 241 American servicemen on October 23, 1983, and
other attacks. For the next seventeen years it launched operations
against territory in 1985 and retreated from the rest in May 2000,
save a thirty-square-mile patch called the Shabaa Farms. In the
meantime, not only Hezbollah but its Shiite rivals of the more secular
Amal--as well as many leftist movements--adopted "martyrdom operations"
against the Israeli occupier. It did not take long for the Palestinians,
seeing the success of these operations, to imitate them in the occupied territories--the West Bank and Gaza Strip--as well as in Behind the scenes, military defeat. Hafez al-Assad, whose air force had been
destroyed and whose army had been driven out of his army return to June 10, 2000, Assad died--leaving his son, Bashar, a
precarious inheritance. The Lebanese civil war ended when the United States--as quid
pro quo for Syrian participation in the war to dislodge 1991--permitted the Syrian army to occupy the Christian areas
in decisions. It took Lebanese army and security officers for
training at its military academy in rebuild the country they had so assiduously destroyed for
fifteen years. Some of with Lebanese politicians. who cooperated fared better than those who defended their
country's independence. This year it was Pushing its rule in Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on February 14 in the UN, inspired by the Security Council Resolution 1559 calling on Bashar al-Assad had no choice but to acquiesce. His regime
had already become a target of American and Israeli diatribes and
subversion. The Assad regime's fear of destabilization by the assassination dramatically backfired. Rather than intimidate
the Lebanese, Hariri's murder galvanized a majority of the
population to pour into the streets to insist on the evacuation of crowds also demanded, in chants and on billboards,
al-haqiqa--the truth--about the Hariri murder. An international
investigation, ordered in June by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to find some part
of the truth, presented its findings to the Lebanese government on
October 19 and to the UN the next day. Detlev Mehlis, the amassed thousands of documents, telephone intercepts,
interrogation transcripts and forensic evidence to produce a damning
indictment of the Lebanese security service chiefs and their Syrian masters.
Armed with Mehlis's evidence, Lebanese police have arrested former senior intelligence and security chiefs, as well as the leaders of
an obscure Syrian-supported religious group, Al-Ahbash. Much of the
evidence is circumstantial, and the testimony of one key witness, a
convicted fraudster named Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, has been
questioned. But the case against Syrian officials is convincing and, as the
report itself states, requires further investigation. The UN has
extended Mehlis's mandate to December 15 to follow lines of inquiry
that appear to point directly at the regime in Lebanese institutions and society by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services working in tandem," the Mehlis report
notes, "it would be difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a
complex assassination plot could have been carried out without their
knowledge." The evidence actually goes further than that conclusion: Some
witnesses spoke not of Syrian "knowledge" of the assassination but of
Syrian direction of it. Lebanese allies of Hariri told Mehlis of the
threats that senior Syrians, including their intelligence chief in General Rustum Ghazali, made to Hariri--threats denied by the
Syrians themselves. There was regular telephone contact, according to
the records, between those involved in the dirty work of watching
Hariri and dispatching the white Mitsubishi van (stolen the previous
October in Japan) with 1,000 kilograms of TNT, and senior Lebanese
officers who were themselves in regular contact with their Syrian
counterparts. The Syrians, on the testimony of some witnesses, set up a Lee
Harvey Oswald-type fall guy in the form of a Palestinian refugee
named Ahmad Abu Adass, who was forced to make a videotaped claim that he
was the suicide bomber who killed the infidel Hariri. The trail leads
to the office of the pro-Syrian Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud,
whose cell phone received a call from one of the suspects only minutes
before the bomb that killed Hariri exploded. The imbroglio that led to
Hariri's death began with his term of office expired last year--which involved a
dubious amendment to the Constitution. The acrimony between Lahoud and Hariri
altered the political divide from Christian versus Muslim to pro- versus
anti-Syrian factions--with Muslims and Christians on both sides. needed Lahoud in place to maintain its control of Bashar al-Assad told Hariri at their final meeting in 2004. A thorough investigation should probe the other murders and
bombings in Hamadeh in October 2004 and the post-Hariri murders of former
Communist Party chief George Hawi and journalist Samir Kassir but also
the assassination of Druse and leftist chief Kamal Jumblatt in
1977, as well as President Rene Moawad in 1989 and many others. Suspicion
has long fallen on and more witnesses testify, the Lebanese may learn the haqiqa
about all these outrages (perhaps including murders committed by other intelligence services, like What the matter. This must worry the Lebanese as much as it does the
Syrians. For tutelage, wants to keep its war buried in the past. No
Lebanese, apart from a few psychopaths, would like to risk a resumption of
conflict merely to dispose of the Assad regime. In think less about politics and more about themselves. Without
the war to distract people, the suicide rate for those not seeking
martyrdom rose. Many Lebanese looked to psychiatry, spiritualism, hedonism,
house redecoration, art or plastic surgery to change themselves.
Earlier this year a businessman in country's billboards advertised beauty enhancement--nose jobs, liposuction, tanning salons, skin lighteners and hair
restorers. This signals abandonment of the political realm, as often happens
when war destroys the idealism that led to it. Alan Ross observed
something similar among British poets in the aftermath of World War II,
a "turning away from public issues to private problems, a nostalgia that
looks wearily back from the social pressures of an age dealing in
ideological betrayal, to the more involved but less revealing crises of
the human heart." What was true for C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and
John Betjeman appears to hold for war. Malu Halasa and Roseanne Khalaf's collection of Lebanese
postwar writing, Transit Beirut, depicts the apolitical concerns of
postwar Lebanese. "My Lebanese depicts the Lebanese male facing a life in his family's house
on an upper floor that his parents are waiting to add as soon as he
marries. "Then, there will be two rival kitchens competing just to
feed you. Your wife will get hell from your mother. First, she will pretend
to teach her how to cook. She will give her the recipes just the way
you've always liked them. Only for some reason, they will never turn
out nearly as good. Too much salt, overcooked, not enough cinnamon."
This goes on for years until "the secret has been passed on and she, your
mother, has made sure that you will be fed the same food. FOR THE REST OF
YOUR LIFE." Food for the Lebanese, as for the Italians, takes
precedence over war. Each village has a specialty that no other village can
cook properly. Zgharta claims the finest kibbeh. Zahleh distills
the best arak. Chtaura produces the purest labneh, soured cream and
yogurt. Others claim the best bread, cheese, hummus, stews or sweets.
And yet write, "people dreamt of having a McDonald's in the fruit of American civilization at last: Civilization.... We asked for it and we got it, big time.
Along with the new roads, the new infrastructure, the new international
airport, a brand new downtown, cellular phone networks, satellite TV,
superstar European DJs and modern beach resorts, the thirteen-year-long
effort to reconstruct Burger Kings, 4 KFCs, 11 Starbucks, 6 Dunkin' Donuts, 1 TGI
Fridays and 8 Pizza Huts.... Like a new toy, the Lebanese played with the
Whopper, tried the McFlurry and collected all the buttons and badges
from TGI Fridays. One of the writers tries the latest McDonald's gimmick: the
McArabia. "Would a Swedish person," he asks himself, "accept asking for
a 'McScandinavia' or worse, a Frenchman order a 'McFrance'?" Longing for antebellum grandeur obsesses many Lebanese too
young to remember it. Antoine Boulad writes in "Place des Martyrs"
that the old center of heart and tears my consciousness apart." Abbas El-Zein writes
for all Beirutis, "I take a stroll in the beautifully restored old
city of again?" Roseanne Khalaf, who returned to years away, writes in "Living Between Worlds," "This was not
the I had come back to in my mind; not the country I had
revisited countless times in my imagination. Perhaps the existed at all." Postwar wistfulness has not affected Hezbollah. Never a
participant in the Muslim-Christian, rightist-leftist clashes that defined
most of the civil war, Hezbollah went on battling Israeli occupation
after the Taif accords of 1989 and the Syrian conquest of officially brought peace. (The |