Unsolved

It requires some navigation, but there is something I would like to show you. Please click here, go to the bottom of the menu (left), click on ‘wat kunt u doen?’, then on the first link on that page: ‘verstuur een e-card’. Take a look at the map at the bottom of the page. That’s Palestine/Israel.

The red is the amount of land in Palestinian hands (1946 – 2007). The light grey is the amount of land in Jewish/Israeli hands (1946 – 2007).

Lebanon, neighbor to the above, hosts about 200 to 400 thousand Palestinians in various camps around the country. Some people have been living there since 1948. Can you imagine? Living in a refugee camp for 60 years? Life in these camps is not exactly luxurious: high unemployment and poverty rates, militias ruling certain areas (the Lebanese army is not allowed to go inside the camps), housing often consists of random building materials with essential elements (doors, windows) lacking. A friend who works in Bourj el Barajneh, one of the camps, overheard a colleague saying ‘my wife couldn’t go to work today. The roof fell down and it dislodged her shoulder’, in the same tone of voice as if he told her he forgot to pick up the newspaper on his way to the office. Shit happens. That’s life in the camps.

Living in Lebanon it is impossible to forget about the Palestinians. Their presence in Lebanon, and what’s happening to them in their homeland, is a constant factor even outside the news-bulletins. If it’s not in one of the exhibitions, lectures or concerts organized to commemorate the start of the civil war in Lebanon (33 years ago, this April), it’s in the words of Walid’s grandfather who starts many of his stories with ‘when I was young, and the state of Israel didn’t exist, I would walk to [name of a city in Palestine/Israel] to teach there’. And then there is the inevitable response when discussing the news: Sure it’s bad that two soldiers died in Afghanistan. But is anyone concerned with the nine Palestinian children that were killed today?

This is not an accusation. It is merely a reminder of the bizarreness of the situation, a reminder that this should not become ‘normal’. Other people’s thoughts can be found here and here and here.

I didn’t write this because I know what needs to be done (obviously, I don’t). There are many solutions, to as many problems, and none of them will please everyone. I just wrote this because I think it is a situation that requires more attention. And hopefully, if enough people hear about it, somebody will have an idea that works. But I have one suggestion: let’s get rid of the term ‘the Palestinian Problem’ first. The other time somebody thought a certain People constituted a Problem, he called it ‘Judenfrage’, and we all know what happened then.

De vijanden van Geert

Vanuit Nederland kreeg ik de volgende link opgestuurd: “Wilders is not Holland.” Wat ik me afvraag is of de ondertekenaars diezelfde nuance aanbrengen als er ergens een ‘terrorristische aanval” is gepleegd in de naam van God en iedereen om het hardst roept dat “de Moslim-gemeenschap” zich daar openlijk van moet distantiëren. Kennelijk snappen wij Nederlanders zelf nog niet dat een individu niet noodzakelijkerwijs de hele groep vertegenwoordigt, en nu het ons betreft moeten we dat met een website aan de rest van de wereld uitleggen. Mijn lerares Arabisch heeft dat in elk geval wel begrepen. Ziedend kwam ze binnen met een pamflet dat ze op straat van “zo’n bebaarde man met een jurk” had gekregen. Zie hier de laatste geboden zoals opgesteld door een paar studenten van de hoogste Soennietische religieuze authoriteit:

U zult geen contact hebben met landen waar de profeet Mohamad (vrede zij met hem) beledigd wordt, U zult alle economische banden met deze landen doorsnijden, U zult uw ambassadeurs terugtrekken, en U zult werknemers uit dergelijke landen ontslaan. Het papier verscheurend zucht mijn lerares: “Zulke mensen maken bijna dat ik me schaam om Soenniet te zijn. Maar dan hoop ik maar dat iedereen begrijpt dat zulke groeperingen ook niet alle Soennieten vertegenwoordigen”.

Mijn collega’s hebben een praktischere oplossing: “We zullen die man wel eens een email sturen met argumenten tegen zijn betoog. Woorden moet je met woorden bestrijden; hij is niet zoals Amerika dat Israel financieel ondersteund. Dan heeft economisch boycotten zin. Nu gaan we gewoon lekker een stukje Nederlandse kaas kopen.”

Reflections on an assassination

Saturday. My dad calls and asks: ‘So how is Beirut today?’ I feel the oh-so-familiar knot tying itself in my stomach – I’ve been out all morning and haven’t checked the news yet, so who knows what has happened. ‘Why, did they blow up someone else?’ ‘Well, the guy from three days ago…’ Ah yes. The guy from three days ago (now almost a week). François el Hajj, a general in the Lebanese Army, mentioned as a possible successor to Michel Sleiman (the current commander of the army), if Sleiman indeed becomes the next president of the Lebanese Republic. He came from a poor family in the South, el Hajj, and as one of 10 children this job represented a rare chance for someone of his background to make it to the top. In Rmeish, his village in the South, there was even talk of him becoming president, eventually – for a commander of the Army, necessarily a Maronite Christian, not a strange career-move in Lebanon.

I arrived to work Wednesday last week to find one of my colleagues crying. ‘The explosion this morning, it was her uncle’, whispered another colleague to inform me. Other than her red, teary eyes, there was nothing that day that reminded me of the awfulness of what had happened that morning. Nothing on the streets, nothing in the conversations – not even the loud accusations of Syria, the country that gets blamed first (and exclusively) for every assassination, by members of the current government.

One of my colleagues thought it was because he was from the army, and the army is supposedly ‘neutral’ in Lebanon – neither with the government, nor with the opposition – so if you have no political party to stage the mourning for your martyrdom, your death hardly receives any public grief.

Yet the silence over el Hajj’s murder, the absence of government-members blaming Syria, might have another source: apparently, el Hajj refused to join the ‘Southern Lebanese Army’, an armed group that helped the Israeli army, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Being from a village on the border with Israel, he has seen the destruction and aggression from Lebanon’s Southern neighbor, and his moral stance against Israel hasn’t changed over the years. This means that having him as the leader of the Lebanese Army (which is deployed in South Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from re-arming, or even disarm them) might be disadvantageous to countries other than Syria, to put it mildly.

Question remains: who blew him up? Maybe this time, we shouldn’t look to the East for an answer…

What will it be like when the ship is sinking?

Sietske asked ‘how do you know when the ship is sinking?’When do you know the country is descending into war?

Maybe when you ask for the prices of membership at a new gym, and their promotional talk starts with “Fitness First is proud to be the only gym in Lebanon with the guarantee that we will always be open; explosions, unrest – we might have special opening hours, but we will never be closed!”

Or maybe when a friend replies to your complaint that it is hard to find a job with “Don’t worry, there will be a war soon, and you will work as a reporter.”

Walid, who is in Amsterdam and reads the news every night as soon as the newspapers publish their content online, is almost certain that the presidential elections will be a breaking point and that a regional war is looming on the horizon. The USA and Iran (aside from Afghanistan and Iraq, let’s not forget), Syria and Israel (which is already busy on the Palestinian front), different parties inside Lebanon backed by different powers outside of the country… the tensions are running high and violent conflict is likely. Yet I told Walid he is reading too many newspapers, scaring himself needlessly.

I remember the feeling: in January of this year, while I was quietly writing my thesis in Amsterdam, riots broke out at the Arab University of Beirut. There was nothing I could do but watch CNN, seeing the neighborhood I had lived next to turn into a scene of rock-throwing, car-window smashing groups of men, shot at by snipers on several balconies, ultimately dispersed by the army. Although it wouldn’t do anything to change the situation, I checked the news every few minutes, paralyzed on the couch, unable to concentrate on writing. And the anchorwoman kept asking the reporter: “Do you think this is the start of a new civil war?”

Until the moment my plane landed in Beirut, at the beginning of this summer, I constantly told myself that the situation could change at any time, thus preventing me from coming here. Like Walid, I read the news daily, searching for clues as to when the war would start – there was no doubt in my mind that it would, it was only a matter of ‘before or after my arrival’. It didn’t happen. There has been an attack on the Spanish UN convoy in South Lebanon, there was a war in the Palestinian camp Nahr el Bared in the North, and an assassination of a politician, but nothing has turned the country into yet another Middle Eastern battleground.

This is not to say it won’t happen. Yet when reading the news, war can become an abstract phenomenon, something that is decided upon by the powers that be, something detached from the countries it takes place in. It looses its day to day reality of people living a life despite the fear, the threats, the anticipations, the paranoia; the damage, suffering and death. When I think of Iraq, I try to think of all those people going to school, to work, to the market, and I wonder how they deal with their fear, I try to imagine how, for them, war is their life, not an abstract issue on a page of the newspaper.

Then I often end up trying to imagine what that life would be like here, if there would be a war. Will it be like the stories I heard and read from the war of 1975-1990, with fights between militias in certain areas (the radio announcing which streets are safe), snipers shooting everyone moving within target-range, random checkpoints of militias and people being kidnapped for ransom? Or will it be more like what we hear from Iraq, with suicide bombers and car bombs in markets and other public places? Which areas will be affected most, where (if so) will the fighting take place? My neighborhood, Hamra, is a mixed neighborhood and politically not very outspoken – will it remain semi-neutral and thus livable? How will I live it, providing I stay here and stay alive?

It is strange and unsettling to ask myself these questions, but sadly enough it is unavoidable.

(This beautiful, handwritten note in the local supermarket says: To our customers: Veelmann has been 30 years, let's celebrate they come from peaceful country Germany. The note appeared last year, a few days after the end of the war, and is still there...)

Symbolic?

Lebanon is almost halved; Palestine is torn to pieces; Hezbollah is resisting destruction. And these are only the flags...

Photo taken at the Lebanon - Palestinian/Israeli border; September 1st, 2007.