Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 33

  An opaque grey blanket of debris hovered over Dahiyeh the following morning. The deafening bombs that had fallen around us the night before were angelic in comparison with the state-of-the-art silent smart bombs that would target Hezbollah’s ‘Secure Quarter’ in the midst of Dahiyeh in the following days and nights. Those bombs imploded buildings with ne’er a whisper into minute rubble. The target, the Secure Quarter, was where Hezbollah officials had homes and offices. ‘Secure Quarter,’ a name evoking the ‘Pentagon’ or the ‘Green Zone’ of Iraq creates images of a formidable military complex surrounded by laser-guided missiles. In reality Hezbollah’s ‘Secure Quarter’ is just another densely populated Dahiyeh neighborhood of apartment buildings, car repair shops, internet centers, mini-markets, bookshops, and bakeries where other people seeking cheap housing with no connection to Hezbollah lived as well. From our balcony where we were permanently rooted, we stared in mesmerized horror at laser-guided smart bombs that glinted briefly in the sky before making earth-shattering impact with their target. The moment of mute impact created a burst of iridescent silver sparkles that came together into a terribly beautiful shimmering fountain of glitter that fluttered lackadaisically to cover the confetti of body parts and homes strewn beneath.

  The enemy knew well that Hezbollah’s leadership were not waiting in their offices and living rooms to be bombed in Dahiyeh and that those who were being torn into unidentifiable body parts were innocent civilians. The smart bombs killed and destroyed in a ghoulishly selective manner. Brazil’s and Germany’s national flags, Dahiyeh’s favorite soccer teams, still flapped in the summer breeze, but they were now on the ground level instead of on the topmost floors of apartment buildings that peered out of moonscape craters where their lower floors had vanished. Entrance exam papers lay in folders next to dozens of brand new graduation caps in tight but dusty rows piled next to one another where they had settled in one undisturbed heap next to a jumble of school desks and chairs. A sofa sat primly in an exposed living room on the third floor of a building with a cheap landscape painting firmly in place on the wall behind it and a gaudy chandelier from the ceiling above it. The façade of this ten-story building had been sliced neatly off, leaving the remaining three walls of the apartments intact. Amongst the twisted metal and broken glass rendered asunder by the smart bombs, lay children’s schoolbags with their books and homework papers still in them, an unblemished teddy bear, a garlic bowl and pestle, and a doll that did not survive, lay beheaded and face down in a stream of black slippery oil from gnarled blackened cars everywhere.

  Deep within a gift shop whose front window had been ripped away, stood a clock with Nasrallah’s smiling image on its face, its pendulum swinging methodically to and fro in total oblivion of the war crimes strewn around it. In the rubble of the street, a video cassette lay next to a destroyed video recorder with the label ‘wedding1969.’

  Bushra, who had been weathering the incessant bombing in and around Sidon, got a 4 am phone call: a recorded voice in Hebrew-accented Arabic that said to her that she should not throw her fate in with those Hezbollah ‘terrorists.’ “The State of Israel will utilize any and all forms of force to exterminate those terrorists hiding in their caves,” the recording said. Bushra was furious.

  “If Olmert wants to threaten me, then why doesn’t he call me himself? I want to curse him to his face, what’s the point of shouting at a lifeless recording?” she told me angrily over the phone.

  During a lull in the bombing, we drove down to the untargeted sections of Beirut where the American-supported government officials lived under heavy protection. People were in the streets going about their daily tasks without needing to look nervously up at the sky. Nevertheless, there was no avoiding the war’s presence: supermarket shelves were emptying fast and newspaper vendors had only the local newspapers. But what brought the war firmly into Beirut’s untargeted sections were the wretched refugees crowded in schools, unfinished buildings, parks and parking lots. For most, this way of living has become as normal as living in their village homes. The ordinary Lebanese embraced them as they had in 1996. There was no hide or hair of government assistance or even presence, only Hezbollah and various grassroots NGOs. Many young people fanned out to assist in any manner they could to those who had lost everything but their pride and dignity. Rola and her cousins formed their own private NGO of four to give what assistance they could to a hapless group camping out in the municipality park of Sanayeh.

  The road back home to Doha along the southern Khaldeh highway from Beirut was frighteningly empty, save for white-flagged vans and cars filled with three times their capacity, fleeing the fighting in the south. Khaldeh was strewn with garbage. The hired foreign street cleaners had all fled. We raced at top speed under each overpass frozen with fear of being bombed. Israel’s methodical destruction of most of Lebanon’s highway overpasses was inexplicable except to those who ordered it. This did not faze the Lebanese, and advertising agencies expressed Lebanon’s spirit with humor. Not surprising for those in tune with Hezbollah’s machination, the most successful ad in support of Lebanon’s resistance was a Johnnie Walker one. The Johnnie Walker’s advertisement portrayed its mascot, a spirited golden gentleman in top hat and waistcoat, striding jauntily across a destroyed bridge, having successfully leaped over the bridge’s gaping chasm to the logo of ‘keep on walking.’

  Israel was unable to achieve any of its widely-trumpeted goals for this war despite jam-packing its northern border with war traffic. Crowding the border region were tens of thousands of foot soldiers, F16-landing pads, artillery lobbing their lethal munitions from the safety of Israel, rows of bulldozers and Merkava tanks, all state-of-the-art weaponry. But the hubris of the ‘army that cannot be defeated’ was smashed into the same size confetti they had reduced Lebanon’s infrastructure. As the war progressed, the Israeli army discovered that in addition to motivated fighters, Hezbollah had state-of-the-art weaponry too that sent back those Merkavas that weren’t reduced to scrap metal on the battlefield, limping back into Israel followed by harrowed foot soldiers, many of them in tears.

  To be fair, Nasrallah had warned them early in the war, “I tell the Zionists: You can come to any place; you can stage an incursion; land your airborne troops; and enter this village or that point. However, all of this will cost you a great deal. You will not be able to stay on our land. If you enter it, we will drive you out by force. We will turn the land of our precious south into a graveyard for the Zionist invaders.”

  Protagonists from within and without Lebanon had brushed it off as mere saber rattling.

  Olmert’s stated goal was to wipe 35 villages off Lebanon’s map and fill them with NATO troops. The 35 villages were reduced to rubble and were filled with the dead and dying and the homeless but they remained free. Israel was unable to claim an inch of Lebanese territory or repel a single Hezbollah fighter from the border. A month of battle had the Israelis still running back and forth across the same terrain a stone’s throw away from the Israeli borders.

  To their deep dismay, like Lazarus, tiny Lebanon rose from the bloodiest Israeli blitzkrieg that the Middle East had ever witnessed very much intact and threw Arab defeatism back in their faces. Despite Israel’s smart bombs that rained down on schools, hospitals, ambulances, electricity plants, petrol stations, bridges, overpasses, airport runways, oil storage depots, and the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon stood firm, the Arab world’s unlikely hero, bloodied but unbowed. Again, the Lebanese were proving their mettle under the right leadership.

  Munira, Ghassan and Yasmine were suffering moral and emotional issues about evacuating. “It would be so much easier if you came with us,” they told me in the typical child-mother framed relationship. What made them safe should also apply to me.

  “I’m staying,” I responded firmly. And Rola stayed too. She felt frivolous studying with strangers while her country was on fire and cancelled her upcoming summer art course. Unlike the rest, Rola and I were the only ones wi
th the luxury of choice. The rest had their decisions made for them.

  The Austrian embassy evacuated Ghassan on a Greek warship, and Munira, Heiko, Nessim and Yasmine left overland in a Nissan suburban under the protection of two Austrian cobra crack troops.

  As they reluctantly waved farewell to Rola and I, Munira commented almost to herself, “Who would have thought I’d be a war mom and Nessim a war baby so soon in our lives together?”

  Here is my daughter’s voice as she is pushed to step into my shoes as a mother torn between country and safety for her child in the last entry of her war diary before she was evacuated:

  I was never very brave when it came to war things, even though (or because?) I grew up in civil war Beirut. Everyday I struggle more with the thought of leaving. I know it is my responsibility to take my child to safety, I know that out there the daily life of the world is going on as before, can I deal with re-entering that sphere of existence, knowing that my family, my country, (even my cats!) are in mortal danger? I don’t know, I just don’t know. At night I am sure I will leave tomorrow. But when the morning comes, like this morning, and the night before has been quiet, I think: this will all be over tomorrow and we will all be safe in spite of Olmert, Peretz, Bush, and Rice. Where is everybody, world! Have you seen all the children dying? All the old people heaving their tired bodies onto sheets on the sidewalk, displaced from their homes for the 100th time? They buried 70 bodies in Tyre yesterday in a mass grave, plywood coffins lined up side by side. The death toll is topping 1200 and thousands have been wounded. Has everyone forgotten 1982 and the 17,000 who perished because of the Israelis and their vicious hubris? When will this stop? I am boiling with rage. How many more will have to die before anyone intervenes?

  The jets are overhead again …

  Notes

  1 Walter Steiger, Discovery! (Beirut: Aramco, 1971).

  2 Nassir Al-Ajmi, Legacy of a Lifetime, quoted in Thomas A. Pledge, Ali Dialdin and Muhammad A. Tahlawi, Saudi Aramco and Its People, A History of Training (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: The Saudi Arabian Oil Company, 1998).

  3 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American Exceptionalism, Hierarchy and Hegemony in the Gulf,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002).

  4 Jidda to State, Dispatch 26, 20 July 1959. RG59, 786A.00/7-2059. “Prince Mohammed Deplores Arab Disunity, Attacks the Arab Press and Extols Former King Abdel Aziz.”

  5 Department of State Instruction, CA3384, 29 December 1953. RG59, 886A.062/12-2953. “Comment on the October–November 1953 Strike at the Arabian American Oil Company Installations in Saudi Arabia.”

  6 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit.

  7 Childs to State, Enclosure no. 3, 22 April 1948. RG59, 890F.20/4-2948. “Memorandum of Conversation with His Majesty.”

  8 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 401.

  9 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit.

  10 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit.

  11 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit.

  12 Power-wielding, rich heads of confessional communities in Lebanese society.

  13 Thyme and olive oil on pita bread.