Where are the women?

First, I followed today’s news on the internet: ‘Roads to Airport and Kuwaiti embassy closed with rubble and burning tires’, ‘protestors smash shop-windows on Corniche Mazraa’, ‘hand-grenade thrown at protestors’. When the reporting became delayed, I went to friends with a TV, to actually see what was going on. Streets blocked by burning tires and garbage containers upside down, the blazing contents giving off thick clouds of black smoke. Throngs of young men on scooters, going this way or that, trying to find out where to go to join the fight. Small groups of soldiers from the Lebanese Army trying to push back the protestors without using force. Sounds of gunshots, images of broken windows, the firemen in t-shirts trying to extinguish cars set on fire. Young men on both sides of the street, screaming, burning each other’s flags. When the mosque sang, they stopped the chanting and the running back and forth to bend down and pray on the sidewalk. Sounds of small grenades and explosions, rattling of gunshots.

For whatever political reasons, the army didn’t crack down on the protestors, nor on the people they encountered so violently. It seemed there was a certain space for these men to express their anger, to contain what apparently can’t be avoided.

I walked towards the areas of unrest, to a friend’s house in Bourj Abi Haidar. The streets were empty, except for small groups of men hanging on street corners, or sitting on doorsteps. Every once in a while there would be a garbage can upside down, or some other construction of scrap metal and junk, with the smoldering rests of fires and tires. Shops were closed, the metal shutters down, and if I remembered to look up, I saw people peeking down between the sunshades on the balconies, keeping themselves inside. Whenever I would see someone going in the opposite direction, I would ask them if there was ‘anything up there’. No, there was nothing and no-one, except for broken bricks blocking the road. It felt, strangely enough, like the aftermath of a big football match, or a large festival; everyone has gone home, all that rests is cleaning up.

And then I saw him. He was casually leaning against the wall, brand-new sunglasses on his nose, wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. And he had a Kalashnikov at his waist and a string of ammunition around his neck. There was no doubt about it: this corner of the street was his, and his alone. He was the one to determine what was allowed to pass and what wasn’t. He didn’t hide it, he was just standing there, as if he finally had received what had been his all along.

And then I knew: it’s not another riot. It’s war. On the way back I saw two others had claimed their own corners, typical militia-style: sitting with one leg stretched out behind a small wall, just low enough to shoot over, just high enough to hide behind.

When I came home, the doorbell rang. ‘Lebanese Army. Don’t worry, it’s not your apartment we are after, but we would like to have a look at the streets from your rooftop-terrace.’

Just what we needed to hear from the prime minister

Saturday night, message from a friend“Hey, if you are out, be careful, Amal and Moustaqbal are shooting at each other and they torched a Hezbollah post at Ras Naba’a. Please be careful.”

Monday morning, conversation with my boss “Nicolien, you live in the Hamra-neighborhood right? Have you thought about what to do when a war starts? If it comes to war with Israel, there are two scenarios; air and land. If it is land, we will have time to prepare ourselves because they will definitely tell the UN-soldiers first and let the foreigners evacuate. If it is an air-attack, all we can do is wait and hope not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it is civil unrest, you can come to Sour, the Foundation has facilities to shelter its employees coming from dangerous areas.”

Tuesday night, written on the wall of a café “War is like love, it always finds a way. -- Bertolt Brecht”

Wednesday, on the Naharnet newssite “Premier Fouad Saniora has said civil war is unlikely in Lebanon… ‘I don’t think civil war will happen’ he told BBC.”

Very comforting words. Reassuring indeed.

Waiting for nothing to happen

We think it will happen. In fact, we are quite sure it will happen. In a way, we are waiting for it to happen – at least when it happens, we know it is happening, and then we are finally sure. Yet at the same time, we don’t want it to happen. We hope against all odds that it won’t happen. So what we are doing is waiting for it not to happen. ‘It’ being a war, civil or otherwise.

As I told Sietske, quoting Einstein: ‘One cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war.’ Everyone in Lebanon is preparing for war. Those who want to fight are getting weapons, those who don’t want to fight make sure they have some food, water and a spare recharge card for their mobile phone – you don’t want to get stuck in your house for a week without being able to communicate with the outside world.

I had an argument with a friend; I said her mother panics too much. She says her mother is very calm, she just asks her to come home whenever something happens – for example when there is a car-crash and the drivers have gotten into a fight. To me, this should not be a reason to abandon everything and go home; it’s just two people settling a dispute in a rough way. To her mother, this could be the one incident that sets off a civil war.

Maybe they are right. Maybe my youth in a peaceful country has falsely made me believe that things are right until they go wrong, instead of wrong waiting to explode as life is considered here. Maybe the best thing to do when on the brink of war is to always play it safe, to be well-prepared in as many ways as possible. But then who is going to stop it?

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...)

He who cast the first stone probably didn’t

The following is an article I found last year in the International Herald Tribune, written by Daniel Gilbert. At the time (24 July 2006), the war between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah had only been going on for a week, and the discussion in the international community seemed to focus mainly on the 'disproportonality' of Israel's attack. As a psychologist, Gilbert has a couple of very interesting insights on how people react to each other, and his sources are interesting psychological researches into how people rationalize their own and other's actions and reactions. I am copying his text here in its full length, because I would like to share his insights with you and the article itself is well-written en worth the read:

Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother's lap and my brother and I had what we called "the wayback" all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we'd lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we'd fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases.

"But he hit me first," one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, "But he hit me harder."

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, "He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral - unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words - like "retaliation" and "retribution" and "revenge" - whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That's why participants in every one of the globe's intractable conflicts - from Ireland to the Middle East - offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: Something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people's actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner's statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner's statements.

What seems like a grossly self- serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people's actions but not our own.

Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves - but that the opposite will be true of other people's reasons and other people's punches.

Examples aren't hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it's hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side's identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd- numbered punch that preceded it.

Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel's right to respond, but rather, its "disproportionate use of force." It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer's fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer's finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. And so on.

The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other's fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other's touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating.

Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others - and to start trusting others themselves - there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of "Stumbling on Happiness."