Remnants from the 2006 war (2)

Pulling myself out of bed was very difficult this morning despite the continuous sound of rockets falling on the southern suburbs of Beirut. I probably wanted to believe that all this was just a nightmare.

It is true that I live in the Christian part of the capital, which is relatively secure, but with the Israelis escalating their assault each day, safety has become a dull notion.

It’s as if I had taken hallucinogenic pills; sometimes I see images of warplanes shelling bombs that explode into mushrooms or shattered glass falling on my head like a thousand daggers. Everything is getting mixed up in my head. Numerous clichés and noises are resonating endlessly within me. I am starting to feel incapable of processing more data. I am like an empty vessel bearing more and more stuff to the point of exploding. The pattern is the same: air strikes, demolition, civilians dying, people displaced, foreigners evacuating, hollow political declarations. The details are only slightly different.

We entered the second week of this absurd conflict. I am realizing how helpless we are. I tune in to international news channels and all I get is pro-Israeli propaganda. Why doesn’t the world just come and spend few hours in the south where people are stranded and running out of food?

Tens of thousands of people have fled southern villages and towns in the last week. Those who stayed are cut from the outside world after Israel had bombed bridges, roads, electricity and telephone infrastructure turning the whole zone into small separated islands.

Everybody around me has lost faith in “the international community,” in “Lebanon’s friends,” in “our Arab brothers.” What is a human life or two or even 300 (the death toll so far) worth when the masters of the world are discussing how to split the earth’s resources at the G8 summit in St Petersburg!

I switch off the TV. I don’t feel like listening to analysis about the reasons and consequences anymore. It’s all futile.

Yesterday, I actually decided to see “reality” with my bare eyes. I went with a group of journalists to the heart of the southern suburbs, to Dahyeh, where tens of thousands of Shiites normally live spiralling around Hizbullah’s strongholds.

As we got closer to Haret Hreik, Hizbullah’s headquarters, which was reportedly almost wiped out by non-stop Israeli raids, large photos of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s chief and a semi-god for Shiites, and other Iranian ayatollahs were more and more abundant everywhere. The streets were very calm and few cars were circulating.

I tried to think to myself what total destruction could look like.

At some point, we were stopped by Hizbullah fighters who had encircled the “hot spot” forbidding us from getting closer. We were only allowed to take photos around “hell.” As I step out of the car, I immediately felt I was entering into a different reality. The sight had a certain esthetic about it; nothing but annihilation; pounded cars, pulverized glass, buildings cut into two and masses of gravel everywhere separated by a crushed bridge. Beyond the heavy silence, the laughter, the arguments, the screaming of all those who used to live here just few days ago were resonating through the walls and the indefinite concrete structures.

Almost everybody left in a hurry after Israel dropped hundreds of flyers summoning the Dahyeh’s residents to leave their homes before the army would start hitting.
This area is one of the most populated of Lebanon. It was haphazardly constructed during the Israeli occupation of the South (between 1978 and 2000). For years, the area kept receiving floods of displaced people forced to leave their villages in the South.

I move towards the ruined bridge. I stand on one of its broken edges and feel like the whole energy of the place is pouring inside me. It must have been one of the most intense moments of my life, as if I was allowed to sneak into another mysterious dimension where time and space are entangled.

It’s weird now that I remember all this; I cannot but feel like it had never really happened. It’s like this sight of the war with its splendor and horror could not have been but a movie scene. Tomorrow I might wake up and find out I had been caught up in a nightmare.

We have no evidence the sun will continue rising everyday, but we still believe it will happen anyway

-Isn’t this Hume’s motto?

I am really scared the situation would last too long to the point of getting up one day and realizing that the war has become an inescapable reality. It’s just day seven, fortunately I still have this tiny hope that tomorrow will be different.

*This entry was published in a blog on Beirut during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel published by the website of the german newspaper, Die Zeit.