Remnants from the 2006 war (3)

It’s always poignant to realize that, after all, history does nothing but repeat itself! The whole world was shaken by the images of children being pulled out of the wreckage, caught by death in the middle of their sleep on Sunday.

More than fifty people were killed, buried under the rubble of a house in the southern village of Qana where they thought they could find shelter from Israeli bombing.

Almost the same incident happened ten years ago in the very same wholly town of Qana (mentioned in the bible as the place where Jesus Christ performed his first miracle of turning water into wine!)

Back in 1996, the killing of more than 100 civilians shook the world to its core and was enough to lead to a cessation of fire. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case in today’s more radical post-September 11 world. The US’s war on terrorists and terrorism can justify everything and anything from the torture of prisoners to the bombing of innocent civilians. Who said labor was an easy thing, especially when the newborn is a new Middle-East that the US has conceived?

As I zap from one channel to the other, I get slowly saturated by the images of cold dusty corpses and inhuman sounds of grief. Other images surface, those of politicians who condemn and accuse and others who apologize.

Also, trapped between these images are scenes from “The Beautiful Mind”, an American movie about a genius mathematician that was playing on one of the channels.

I ask myself: can we really find any logic in all these military operations? Is there any equation that can rationally link among all the current unknowns: the killing of civilians, self-defense, resistance, durable peace and above all the leitmotiv of the American administration, “sustainable ceasefire”?

Maybe Olmert or Condy have beautiful minds of their own and see the whole picture which we, the common mortals, cannot grasp!

Personally what I have seen in the riots of angry men and women who were attempting to destroy and burn the symbol of our modern world’s civilization, the United Nation’s building in Beirut, are hate and violence against as one of the rioters signs suggested “the silence of the lambs”.

I remember during one of my tours in the numerous schools of Beirut packed with refugees the look on an old woman from the south. I asked the futile question of how she felt being forced to leave her home and she looked at me with a docile, almost nonchalant gaze.

“What can I say my son, I’ve spent my whole youth fleeing Israel!” She recalled images of Israeli soldiers breaking into her house in a southern village more than twenty years ago. Strangely, those memories were more vivid and stronger than the recent stories of the thousands of displaced. Israel might justify its current military operation and prove its military superiority, but what it is really doing, is feeding the collective memories of hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon and millions around the world. All this violence will not lead to a sustainable ceasefire. It seems so obvious that I feel ridiculous writing it. Images don’t die, feelings don’t die; they cannot but fuel more violence and more defiance.

*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.