And so it’s over, but it isn’t

Imagine you are colleagues. You see each other almost every day, you spend more hours together than you do with you family. You have different political opinions, but it doesn’t matter – as long as you don’t talk about it, except for a small joke every now and then – you get along very well. You even become friends, in the way that colleagues do, because over time you learn so much about each other’s lives. Then, one day, you can’t go to work. The roads are blocked, gunmen are outside your house, cars are set on fire. You hide inside with your family – your mother, your father, your brother and your son – while rockets are being fired from your building into the one across the street. Everybody is scared, trying to hide in ‘safe places’ (the rooms with no windows), angrily watching the news as the events unfold. It’s one political side against the other.

Your colleague is in another neighborhood, also forced to stay inside. You send each other an sms each day, for the basic information: Are you still alive?

The day arrives that everything calms down enough to return to work. But what are you going to say? The bullets that landed on your balcony were fired by gunmen of the party your colleague supports, the rocket that burned out your neighbor’s apartment came out of their RPGs. You know your colleague survived, but you heard her uncle died. His car was riddled with bullets by fighters from your side of politics. How can you talk about all this? You know that any mention of the events will be met with a staunch defense of their party’s role and reasons, and you know you will feel compelled to do the same if they tell their stories.

So you both remain silent. You give each other a smile and carry on where the work had been left off. The anger, the hurt, the fear that you experienced – you can’t find a way to share all of it with these people so close to you. Similarly, you do not hear about their anger, their hurt, their fear of the past few days. But what is left without these emotions? How can you sympathize when you don’t know the other person’s pain and worries? Will it still be possible to see them as friends, or even humans, if what remains for you to see and know is merely the physical expression of a political party you despise?

Or will you turn to ‘co-existence’, an innocent-sounding phrase that another blogger describes as “a Trojan horse filled with many bloodlusting soldiers ready to come out and murder the Lebanese people in their sleep”? And this is why it’s over, but it isn’t. Because as that same blogger says: “This phrase is saying: ‘We acknowledge that we have sectarian and religious differences, but we must ignore them and live together in peace.’ [But] a country is not built on mutual ignoring of differences. A country cannot be built on the fact that its denizens look at each other with scrutiny and hate. A country cannot be built until its citizens accept each other for who they are.”

[more than 200 000 martyrs / more than 3700 bombed cars / more than 1 000 000 emigrants / and still we haven’t learned / it’s enough] [clip "from all Lebanese for all Lebanese"]

Far from disillusioned

I feel empty, like the streets of the city I live in.Betrayed, by the promise to withdraw all gunmen from my neighborhood, whereas in reality the building across the street is still the base of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the guys waving their guns at the army patrol passing by. Defeated, by the accusations of friends that I have been brainwashed because I have a different opinion than they do– friends from both sides of the political and sectarian divide. You are either with us or against us. Drained, trying not to lose faith in people; the people I know, and the people I don’t know. Empty like the streets of the city I live in.

In the media, the past few days have, yet again, been classified as ‘the worst violence since the 1975-1990 Civil War’. How many times can something be ‘the worst violence since…’ until it becomes the new civil war? How many rockets need to be shot from one apartment into another until we call it a civil war? How many masked gunmen on streetcorners, how many houses burned, how many people kidnapped or stabbed to death with knives?

On Thursday everyone said: it will be over by tomorrow night. On Friday everyone said: Saturday it will be over, at the latest. Saturday, everyone was convinced it wouldn’t last another day. It is now Sunday night. The fighting has moved from Beirut to Tripoli, to Choueifat, to Aley…

I have heard enough stories about the beginning of the war in 1975 that I don’t need to add ‘disillusioned’ to the list above, should the current situation last another year. Or fifteen.

Not on the news

This is where we tried to sleep tonight: between the bedroom wall and the hallway, with our heads against the toilet. There were rounds of heavy shooting in our street and the streets surrounding us, shrapnel ricocheting off fences and balconies, and big explosions that made the windows rattle. We stayed between the walls, with the windows slightly ajar and the curtains closed, as we were told to do by many civil war-veterans (our friends’ parents).

Yet Hamra is not mentioned on the news. I think no-one really expected much fighting here. ‘If anything happens, come to me!’ I would tell my friends from areas that would obviously be battlegrounds. ‘Don’t worry,’ my friends would tell me in return, ‘you live in Hamra, it’s safe.’ Well, not as safe as we thought. I knew it last night when the janitor of the building told me that the two men who came to check the roof the night before were not Lebanese Army, but from the Future Movement (pro-government Sunni). And when I saw two armed men on the abandoned building across the street.

In the middle of the night we woke up by particularly heavy rumbling. Explosions? Bombings? This sounded too heavy, too close. Then we saw lightning and rain, and we were strangely relieved. Maybe, if they get really wet, the fighters will give up for the night? ‘When I was little,’ I told my friends, ‘I used to think a storm meant that God was angry with the people. He must be really pissed off now!’ ‘Well of course he is! I mean, of course he’s very patient, – after all, it’s God – but come on, he’s dealing with the Lebanese here!’

View from the balcony

Here we go

And so it is war. I just left my 8th floor (rooftop) apartment when I saw two armed men on the abandoned building across the street, pointing their weapons to the road, and when I realised there is not one room in the house without windows. The people who were outside were running across the intersections, staying close to the walls and closed shops.

In the afternoon, I went to the supermarket and saw people with panic-stricken faces, throwing 20 packets of one-minute noodles in their shopping carts. There were no vegetables left, no bread, no eggs even. In a half-hearted attempt to follow their example I bought some cans of beans and a pack of toilet paper, which are now sitting on the table in an empty house.

After Nasrallah’s speech, in which he didn’t say he would tell his people to stop fighting, this side of Beirut went crazy: incessant gunfire, the sound of explosions so close that the windows were shaking, people screaming at each other to GET OFF THE STREETS! I am now with some friends who live on the second floor around the corner. We have closed the curtains and cracked open the windows in case the fighting gets closer and the glass breaks.

The government is meeting to decide whether they will declare a state of emergency. Meanwhile, we are doing our cardio-exercises sitting on the couch: our hearts are racing at an unimaginable speed, and we smile crazily at each other every time the explosions seem to come closer. No reason to panic, if it’s not even a state of emergency yet.