Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 14

THOUGH LEGALLY DECLARED DEAD, ELIE BECAME HER HUSBAND AGAIN

In this scene from The Syrian, Nadia has just gotten her husband out of prison. She, Andrew and Samir are now faced with the challenge of getting Elie, who has spent the last 13 years in a Syrian prison and has no official papers, across the Lebanese border and back to Beirut.

Andrew smelled the cheap soap Samir used to wash Elie and the stink that lingered even in his new clothes. What troubled him more than the smell, though, was the rottenness in the man—it shined through his stare. No shower could cleanse Elie of the anger, jealousy and self-hatred he so freely projected onto others. On one level, Andrew understood Elie’s behavior. Andrew could make love to Nadia; Elie could not. The old man’s self-loathing had to do with how he looked and acted. He was a sixty-year old man who should still be in the prime of his years, but instead acted and looked like a man in his eighties. His appearance was so repulsive his wife could barely stand to look at him. Andrew knew from his rotation in a psychiatric ward what deprivation and torture did to a person’s psyche. A man barely able to function on either an emotional or physical level could hardly be expected to act like a gentleman.

He knew that Nadia’s dilemma was different. Though legally declared dead, Elie had become her husband again. With that came a spousal responsibility to do what she could to get him out of prison. Having met that moral obligation, she now had to choose to stay married to a man she no longer loved, or divorce him. Andrew had silently vowed not to interfere with whatever Nadia decided to do. Can I go through with that? He wondered.

He heard Nadia’s voice and looked up from his food.

“We need to get back on the road, so finish eating as quickly as possible.” She overpaid for the food and gas, delighting the owner.

“Samir, please go check on the car,” she said. “Andrew, I’d like you to stay here. I have a few things to say to Elie and I want you to hear them.” She sat down directly in front of Elie.

“Samir tells me you’re peeing blood,” she said.

“That’s my business.”

“It’s our business too. We’ve all invested a lot to get you out of prison. Continue to act this way, Elie Khoury, and I’ll regret I ever got you out. As for Andrew, he came to Damascus to help. He didn’t have to do that. So, stop being such a bastard and start showing us all some civility.”

“I warned you I couldn’t abide another man in your life.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” Nadia said. “Right now we have bigger issues. Andrew’s a doctor. You’re ill, so you need him. No’ I’ll rephrase that. We all need him if we’re going to get you back to Beirut. We have at least a five hour trek once we reach Tel Kalakh and he’s going to help you make that trip.”

Elie looked at her, surprised.

“Yes, that’s right. How did you think we were going to get you across the border with no papers? It’s the only way—through the woods and over the mountain.”

Elie groaned and shook his head.

“While I go check on Samir, you’re going to explain your symptoms to Andrew. Elie—look at me. Are you listening? Are you going to accept his help?”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“No,” she said as she stood. “I’ll wait in the car while you two talk.”

This book is available for purchase here.

amazon

SOMETHING SLICED HIS UPPER TORSO AWAY FROM THE REST OF HIS BODY

in this excerpt from The Syrian Andrew, Nadia and the others have left a village in South Lebanon with a UN convoy responsible for getting three thousand people to safety but Israeli planes attacked the convoy killing scores of people.

The convoy had finally reached the Bekaa Valley and was approaching Joub Jannine when Andrew heard planes overhead. A loud buzzing suddenly filled the air as the jets swooped down. They came in low, from behind the convoy. Before Andrew could turn to look, an explosion shook the car. Samir slammed on the brakes. Andrew jumped out of the car and cranked his head upward, catching a glimpse of two planes arching their wings back toward the sky. Sonia and Leila, carrying the orphaned children in their arms, rushed toward him. Standing together, they watched as the planes disappeared into slim glimmers of silvery metal during a turn before heading toward them again.

Everyone flattened themselves on the ground. The attack was quick and precise. The car windows shattered, showering their faces with splintered glass and debris.

Andrew was on his feet in an instant, looking behind him. “Oh my God—Samir, Tony, come with me!” He shouted. “Nadia, get back in the car and stay there.”

He heard Nadia scream. She’d seen the smoldering remains of metal and body parts in the car behind her. He watched her open her car door and climb out. Sonia tried to stop her but she pushed past. Andrew met her head on, throwing his arms around her to shield her from the sight.

“It’s too late, darling. There’s nothing you can do. They died instantly.”

“Poor Elie and Anna,” Nadia said. “And the children in the trunk, what…?”

He shook his head. “They’re gone.”

“Why, God?” She cried. “Why did you let this happen?”

The planes swooped down again. Whatever they were firing took large chunks out of the road. Debris flew into the air like an erupting volcano. Glass shattered; people screamed.

Andrew pushed Nadia to the ground. As he shouted to Samir and Tony to take cover, something sliced Samir’s upper torso away from the rest of his body and beheaded Tony. Blood and bone and sinew splattered over the hood of the car and onto Andrew’s face and shirt. The shock sucked the air out of him. He couldn’t breathe or even scream. His brain still functioned. It told him to move, put one foot on front of the other, and go to Samir and Tony but his legs collapsed and he fell to the ground. How was it possible that the pieces of human flesh around him represented all that was left of his two friends?

Someone shook his arm. It was Nadia, sobbing, “Come away,” she said, “there’s nothing we can do.”

Andrew heard her voice but he still couldn’t move amidst the dismembered bodies. He was a physician, a healer, yet there was nothing he could do. A dozen Lebanese soldiers pushed the burned remain of cars to the side of the road. Others tended to the scores of wounded further back in the convoy.

Two soldiers brushed out the glass from their car. When they had finished, Andrew watched Sonia put Nadia into the back seat of the car and close the door. As she climbed into the driver’s seat, Sonia looked over her shoulder at Andrew. She saw him pick up Victor’s gun from the asphalt where it had fallen from Samir’s pocket. Suddenly she started the engine. Andrew dashed to the car and climbed in next to Nadia.

“What the fuck are you doing, Sonia?” he screamed.

“An officer just passed,” she explained. “He ordered everyone back in their cars. We’re about the leave.”

“Leave?” he shouted. “We haven’t buried our dead. We can’t just leave Samir and the others here.”

“We must, my carling,” whispered Nadia.

“Sonia took the walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “We’re ready when you are.”

This book is available for purchase here.

amazon

A BAD NEIGHBOR AND A WATER THIEF

In this excerpt from Tragedy in South Lebanon: The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006 I discuss the issue of water wars. This is a subject rarely discussed but it is a vital one particularly in a region of water scarcity.

It was in 1937, in an address to the Zionist World Worker’s Party in Zürich, that David Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, first unveiled his intention to destabilize and dismember Lebanon in order to install a puppet regime pliable to Israeli demands and take its water.

“Lebanon is a natural ally of the Jews of the Land of Israel,” said Ben-Gurion. “The proximity of Lebanon will furnish a loyal ally for the Jewish State as soon as it is created and will give us the possibility to expand to the Litani River, with the agreement and benediction of our neighbors who need us.”

Ben-Gurion, as it turns out, was not the first to formulate a strategy for Lebanon and its water. On November 5, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine “from the North Litani River in Lebanon up to the Banias River in Syria.”

David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann urged then Maronite Christian Patriarch Hayek to abandon South Lebanon in return for a promise of technical and financial assistance to develop the north an area Israel hoped would become a Christian state. The Maronites chose, instead, peace with the Muslims, establishing the 1943 National Pact which succeeded in preserving Christian dominance over the country for many decades.

Determined to succeed one way or another, Israeli forces managed to reach the Litani River in 1949 and occupy part of the district of Marjeyoun and Bint Jbeil. International pressure, however, forced Israel to withdraw. In 1954, Israel tried again to renew its claim on the Litani. President Eisenhower attempted to diffuse the crisis by proposing a formula of sharing the Litani among Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Israel rejected the proposal and threatened to use force against Lebanon to prevent its utilization of the Litani to develop South Lebanon.

Historically, any analysis of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has focused on religious differences. This is a shallow veneer covering a deeper conflict for this basic resource. When war broke out in 1967, the water issue was among major Israeli concerns when it launched its preemptive attack. With purposeful planning, Israeli tanks and troops stationed across the proposed route effectively completed Israel’s encirclement of the headwaters of the Upper Jordan, which included the West Bank. Its seizure of Syria’s Golan Heights assured Israeli control of the Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee) water pumping facilities while the take-over of Gaza gave Israel additional water supplies.

Israel’s ecology varies from semi-arid to complete desert so it has intense water needs. These are fulfilled primarily by three sources. The Seat of Galilee provides over a third of Israel’s water, or did until recently. Another third comes from two aquifers—large, geographical areas of subterranean catchments where water accumulates. These were beneath the West Bank and Gaza, precisely the territories Israel seized in the 1967 war. In 2005 then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Israeli settlers out of Gaza to resettle them in the West Bank because Gaza had by then, because of over-use, ceased to provide an adequate water supply. The level of salt and other pollutants had reduced the quality in numerous sites to below what was permissible for drinking water. Gaza today has no potable water.

While the 1967 war helped Israel secure eighty-eighty-five percent of the West Bank’s water, its Separation Wall ensured yet another means of claiming even more water. A 2006 article in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz estimated that the bizarre loops and zigzags of the Separation Wall, adhering to no previous delineation, and not even remotely resembling the pre-’67 border, placed ninety-five percent of the aquifers on the Israeli side. Currently, Israelis in the West Bank receive approximately 92.5 gallons of water per person per day while Palestinians get 18.5 gallons per person per day. Palestinians are also forbidden to drill wells for their additional water needs.

It is no wonder that Israeli considered the permanent occupation of South Lebanon and continued access to the Litani River as the answer to its water problems. The 170-kilometer-long Litani River is located entirely within the borders of Lebanon. The river’s proximity to Israel, a distance of some four kilometers, makes it even more tempting for Israeli to exploit. Israel’s twenty-two year occupation of South Lebanon which was another attempt to control the Litani ended in 2000 when Hezbollah threw their occupation forces out of the country. The 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war was another attempt to capture the Litani River.

A simple solution to the water crisis has existed since at least 1949 when then-Syrian President Hosni Zaim proposed a peace treaty with Israel in which he offered to share the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Israel refused. In 2007 Syrian President Bachar Assad offered a revised version of the 1949 peace treaty.  Again, Israel refused.

In the end, Israel should realize that nothing is gained through threats and military incursions. The only solution is equitable use of water and reasonable sharing of water rights.

This book is available for purchase here:

amazon

WELL, WELL, IF IT ISN’T THE DEVIL HIMSELF

This is an excerpt from The Syrian. In this scene Sonia has been accused of collaborating with the enemy. She was severely tortured. Thrown into a filthy cell once her interrogator has finished with her, she is visited by the most unlikely character.

Sonia resisted waking up. The slightest movement caused her pain. She willed herself back to sleep so she wouldn’t feel the throbbing in her thighs or recall her brutal treatment at the hands of her interrogator, a man she’d gladly kill in cold blood. Now she understood why Leila had killed the Shin Bet officer.

She was finally on the verge of sleep when she heard the planes—two, maybe more. In unison, they nose-dived. They came in low, practically touching the building—at least that was how it felt when the walls around her shook from the ear-piercing noise. Just as abruptly, the planes veered skyward again. They circled overhead for some time, a tactic meant to intimidate, to force victims to cower in their homes.

Again the planes swooped in like birds of prey. One bomb hit the building, maybe two. The walls shook. Plaster fell from the ceiling, covering her in white dust. She heard agonized screams. Women wailed, men shouted for help. No one came to open her cell door. If the planes returned, she knew it would be here in this stinking jail that she’d die, buried and forgotten under piles of rubble.

In the aftermath of the raid, she was finally able to fall back to sleep, desperate for the comfort of a consoling dream, any escape from her filthy cell. When she opened her eyes again, streaks of morning light shone through the slits across the top of the wall. She hoisted herself up and made her way to the drain on the opposite side of her cell to relieve herself. The blood had dried so the welts no longer stuck to her pants. But her thighs, still red and puffy, throbbed when she flexed her muscles and tried to walk. After peeing, she wiped her hands on her pants and returned to her mattress. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before and would have welcomed nourishment of any kind, even a glass of water.

She heard voices outside her cell. She pushed herself up to a seated position. Keys rattled. One was inserted into the key hole. Her cell door opened. A man carrying a tray walked in. He kicked the door closed behind him then put the food on the floor. She stared incredulously at the person standing before her. It was Hassan Jaafar, dressed in a white shirt, black jacket and slacks.

“Well, well—if it isn’t the devil himself. Were you sent in to finish me off?”

He walked to the edge of the mattress and stared down at her.

“Ever the feisty one, aren’t you.” He laughed as he knelt on one knee and gently rolled up her pajama pants. “I heard what happened yesterday.” He examined her wounds and stood again. “What a pity to make a mess of such beautiful thighs.”

“You’re not here to examine my wounds. What do you want?”

“Relax, this is a friendly visit. I brought you a few sandwiches.”

She glanced at the two pita breads filled with tomato, olives and lebneh. Her hands smelled like wet, stinky socks but she grabbed one of the sandwiches and started eating.

“Your kind doesn’t make friendly calls, so why are you really here?” she asked between bites.

“To offer you your freedom, I’ll corroborate your story with Hezbollah. In return, you give me what I want.”

“And what is that?” Sonia asked.

“Nadia.”

This book is available for purchase here.

amazon

 

 

NO ONE CHOOSES TO BECOME A REFUGEE

This essay is an attempt to pay tribute to those who are obliged to become refugees. My family and I stayed in Beirut for the first eight years of Lebanon’s civil war. Parts if this piece are taken from A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War. In the end, we chose to become refugees in a country I knew growing up. My husband had what his grandfather called a gold coin. He had a medical diploma which he could put in his pocket and carry anywhere he wished. Many of the Syrian refugees are not as lucky.

It is never your first instinct to become a refugee. Rather, when war breaks out, your first instinct is to stay in the comforting familiarity of your home and your neighborhood, surrounded by family and friends. When that becomes impossible, you move your family to a safer neighborhood. When even that place becomes dangerous, you move yet again. My family and I stayed in Beirut for the first eight years of Lebanon’s civil war. All the while we convinced ourselves that the war would end, that things could not possibly get any worse. We hoped that in a week’s time, a month at the most, that the warring factions would come to their senses and resolve their differences, that some statesman, somewhere in the world, would find a way to dissuade the various political factions from turning into vicious militiamen.

We refused to give into despair. We remained hopeful and clung to all things familiar. Our sanity demanded it. There were periods of calm when we thought peace had broken out. We would rush to repair our bombed-out apartments and replace broken windowpanes. We would take our children to the beach and to the mountains to share a picnic with friends. And when the fragile ceasefire ended and the warring factions returned to the streets behind their barricades, we would hunker down once again in our homes, often times without electricity or water. We would return to sleeping in our shelters and homeschooling our children because their schools were closed for as long as the bombs fell, the kidnappings continued and the snipers continued to pick off innocent people, children included, as if they were sitting ducks on a picket fence.

In Beirut, we were lucky, if you call sitting out a civil war lucky, but we didn’t have air bombardments, except when Israel invaded in 1982 and bombed Beirut for 72 days. We had no beheadings, no ISIS, no chemical weapons and no barrel bombs. In a strange way, Lebanon’s civil war was civilized. There were truces; there were cease-fires at the end of each month so the combatants could be paid. We did not have government forces shooting at civilians or crazed jihadist fighters singling out people for execution based on their religious beliefs.

In Syria, theirs is a lawless war. The violence isn’t just melted out by fighters against their opponents. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled, whole towns and villages cut off from food and supplies. Villages have emptied and countless numbers have disappeared inside government prisons.

Not one of the 850,000 who have sought refuge in Europe ever thought to become refugees. It was forced on them because the world, the Western powers in particular, failed to do anything substantial to bring the Syrian crisis to an end. My country turned a blind eye to the mounting refugee crisis, to the 1.5 million refugees in filthy, infested, make-shift tent camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, or the millions more who sought refuge in Turkey and Jordan. There were repeated warnings from the Vatican, the UN, Doctors without Borders, humanitarian relief agencies but no one cared enough to listen.

It wasn’t until an innocent three-year-old washed up on a Turkish beach, until forty-four children died at sea trying to cross to safety, until Russia’s military intervention, that Western governments took serious notice of this crisis. It was too late for those who had already perished, for those who had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their homes and villages ravished, their life savings wiped out.

You may think this refugee crisis is happening to people you have nothing in common with. Syria and Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan may seem far away in some distant land where they speak incomprehensible languages but we share a common humanity with these people even if that common link is not language or culture.

Perhaps this refugee crisis has happened because we think we are exceptional, because we consider ourselves the sole superpower nation that has the right to declare wars, demand regime change at will, destroy cities and kill innocent civilians because we are better than the rest, because we share no commonality with people who practice a different religion, even though we, and we alone, created their plight and made them refugees.

WAR-WARPED AND PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED

This is an excerpt from A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War. This particular episode takes place in 1983.  Our minds are war-warped. We have lived through the Israeli invasion and bombardment of Beirut 1982; we are physically and mentally spent. Life has returned to what we considered now our new “normal.” This meant a return to our apartment and cleaning up the rubble for the 11th time, sending our children back to school after months of forced closure and patients willing to cross the Green line to see my physician-husband in his clinic.

In this particular scene I am reflecting on America’s ineptitude when it comes to their Middle East policies. Blunder after blunder, as violence and hatred toward the West found ever stronger voice, we civilians were made, once again, to pay the price. In May 1983 the American government coerced Lebanon into a treaty with Israel based, in part, on Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, without ever consulting Syria. Furious, Assad punished the Lebanese government for agreeing to such a treaty and began bombing our neighborhood in East Beirut.

During those years there was a great deal the American government did not understand about the Middle East and Lebanon in particular. It certainly did not understand that Lebanon, due to enormous social inequities, was emerging as a place where centuries of Arab resentment of the West was beginning to find voice and direction, where the ideology of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini would take root and produce a unifying voice against America.

The peace treaty signed by Lebanon and Israel on May 17, 1983 was a perfect example of American ineptitude. Brokered by the United States, the agreement was centered on a series of clandestine understandings between Israel and Lebanon. It pledged a phased Israeli withdrawal from all of Lebanon, based upon a simultaneous withdrawal by Syria. Free of foreign intervention, the Lebanese government could then pursue a formal peace treaty with Israel. The agreement had one enormous flaw: the Americans failed to inform Syria’s President Assad of the deal. Assad enlisted the Druze in the Chouf Mountains to bomb East Beirut to punish the Lebanese government for their collusion with America and Israel.

I had just left the hairdresser, a block and a half from my apartment, when I heard explosions. The morning news had announced that the French contingent of the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force would begin blowing up mines that day, ones left behind by the Palestinians during their offensive against Israel in 1982. Since the track was just two blocks from our apartment, I assumed the blasts were coming from there. I stopped at the green grocer to buy lettuce for lunch, and didn’t think anything of his curious gaze. At the baker’s I was surprised when he said he was out of French baguettes.

“Didn’t you bake today?” I asked.

“Oui, Madame,” he replied, “but you know how frantic people get when bombs start falling. They buy everything I have.”

“Those aren’t bombs,” I said, as I laughed and turned to leave. “The explosions are from the mines. Didn’t you hear the news this morning?”

I was so confident the baker was wrong that when I saw my husband’s car parked in front of our building I assumed he had returned early to see patient’s in his clinic on the second floor. When I opened the front door of our eighth floor apartment I thought it odd that neither Foxy nor Leila, my cleaning lady, greeted me. I had just finished searching the apartment when Michel burst through the door.

“Cathy, what are you doing up here?”

“Why are you so excited?” I asked. “Where are Leila and Foxy? Did something happen to them?”

“Have you lost it completely? Don’t you hear the bombs?”

“Bombs? I thought it was…” Before I could say another word, I remembered Naim and Nayla at school.

“I’ve got to get to Jamhour.” I turned to get my purse and almost bumped into Michel when he grabbed my shoulders.

“Relax. Andree has already gone to get them.”

I fell into the nearest kitchen chair and began to cry. “How can I relax when my children are dodging snipes and bombs? It should be me driving them home. Then I wouldn’t have to sit here worrying.”

“Come on, my nerves-of-steel lady,” he said, helping me up. “Let’s go down to my clinic.”

My knees hurt so badly I could hardly walk down the stairs. Leila went back to the apartment to get us some food. I swallowed my pain pills, got as comfortable as I could on the leather couch, propping my knees up on a pillow, and waited. Half an hour later Foxy suddenly leapt up. He ran to the door and started and started to sniff. When her tail began to wag, I knew my children were safely home.

A RITUAL THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD

This is another excerpt from A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War. In this scene we are about to leave our apartment after yet another cease fire, the fifteenth in the past year, has been broken. Our apartment is located on the infamous Green Line, a virtual no man’s land where identity papers and Fate determined life and death.

The original Green Line in Beirut was designed by a Frenchman named Ecochard. Under his supervision bougainvillea and eucalyptus trees were planted the entire length of Damascus Street from the city center all the way to the end of Fourn ni Chebak. The warring factions had transformed the Green Line into a deadly territorial divide between East and West Beirut, a virtual no-man’s land where identity papers and Fate determined life and death.

Because renewed hostilities on the Green Line were inevitable we decided we should take refuge elsewhere. Badaro Street, where we lived, was technically on the West Beirut side of the Green Line and we were worried there might be some sort of formal closure of the two sectors which would restrict our activities and prevent Michel from getting to his hospital.

From the onset of the war I had never had the leisure to pack away my valuables in their proper places. We usually threw a few things into a suitcase and scampered to get out the door as shells fell around us.

March 1976 was different.

In the Sultan family certain possessions like carpets and antiques were highly prized. Michel and I had two Persian carpets, wedding gifts from one of my father-in-law’s associates. Each was approximately twenty-five feet long; they were nearly seventy-five years old and had to be rolled up very carefully. Once I finished lifting chairs and moving tables and sofas, I rolled up the carpets and tied a plastic bag on each end to prevent moths and mites from crawling inside, and stored the carpets, one on top of the other, behind the couch. I pulled up the Venetian blinds and tied the living and dining room curtains in knots and wound them over the rods.

Our most important treasures were a dozen three-thousand year-old vases, some only three inches tall. They came from my father-in-law’s collection which included some five hundred amazingly intact artifacts: vases, Roman busts, oil lamps, and coins, which he kept in a vitrine in his apartment in Achrafieh.

I loved to touch these precious objects and run my fingers along their smooth surfaces. Their transparency made them seem so fragile, yet they were as solid as if they had just been made. Their colors varied from pale blue to turquoise. Several of the taller foot high vases has frosted exteriors which gave an added visual dimension. Their uses varied too. The tallest one held spices. Body oils were stored in the medium sizes; musk and cedar-wood for the men, lavender and jasmine for the women. Perhaps the smaller wide brimmed ones, used as receptacles for tear drops, held the sorrow of another war or some abandoned lover.

This time as I put them away it struck me, as it never had, that many other women before me had cared for these same vases. How arrogant of me not to have thought of that! I was only a curator honored to be entrusted with these precious artifacts of ancient civilizations. Since at least the Babylonian, Roman and Greek invasions women had made it their job to preserve these particular vases while their men were away fighting. Here I was, another housewife in the midst of yet another war, carrying out the same ritual thousands of years later.

I GREW ACCUSTOMED TO MACHINE GUN FIRE

What follows is an excerpt from A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War. In this scene I am still trying to get used to the horrors of war, the daily struggles of running a household, of sending my children to school in spite of nightly bombing and trying to maintain some form of normalcy, whatever that was.These are the daily struggle of too many people around the world, and particularly across the Middle East, who are subjected to the West’s senseless wars which wreck death and destruction and destroy whole countries.

During periods of heavy shelling I ran on adrenaline and so when things returned to normal I suffered a severe ‘crash.’ I had not yet learned to push a button in my mind that said, ‘Okay, Cathy, carry on.’ Gradually the familiarity of war crept up on me and I became more resolute. After a few months I began to feel more in control. My husband and children had long ago adopted me as the gauge of their well-being. Keen observers of my tiniest movements and expressions, they took comfort from my cool-headedness. I had grown accustomed to the sound of machine gun fire; I no longer jumped when a bomb exploded nearby; I hung my laundry out to dry in spite of knowing a sniper might have me in his sights; I shopped for non-perishable canned goods and large quantities of flour and sugar; I bought several canisters of cooking gas at a time, ignoring the possibility of a massive explosion should our apartment take a direct hit.

Little by little I acquired the coping skills necessary to resist and survive the absurd dysfunction of war. My world got smaller and smaller in reaction to the ever-increasing levels of violence. I desensitized myself to events around me. When bombing occurred elsewhere in the city my response was, ‘Thank God it isn’t us. Let it be someone else’s turn for a change.’

War turned a simple task like emptying the garbage into a major undertaking. Before the conflict began I only had to pull open a lever in the hallway and throw my garbage down the chute. After the hostilities started, trash collection across the city stopped. Badaro, my neighborhood, had designated trash sites as did every other neighborhood. When neighbors began using the vacant lot next to our building as they private garbage dump, my husband had to take action. In an effort to keep the area clean and control the ever-increasing rat population he burned the trash every afternoon.

Water shortage was a daily occurrence. When we heard the water flowing in the large storage tanks on the roof just above our apartment—usually late at night—my husband would get up and fill the large buckets which we used for flushing toilets. If I boiled water first I could also use it to wash dishes and cook. For drinking I purchased bottled water. If it flowed long enough Michel watered the plants on the balcony while I washed a load or two of laundry.

We were able to find most things we needed. This was mainly the result of the entrepreneurial skills of the Lebanese merchants who still attribute their acumen to their Phoenician ancestors, the first and possibly the finest traders in history. When their shops in the old souks (marketplaces) were destroyed, Lebanese businessmen, continuing a century-old tradition, simply relocated their stores to other parts of the city. In spite of daily obstacles, these traders supplied the city with vegetables, fruits, meats and poultry. When the Beirut port closed they opened new ones elsewhere to import gasoline and cooking gas. They supplied bakeries with flour, pharmacies and hospitals with drugs and surgical supplies, and they kept the cinemas open and the video shops stacked with the latest films. Even the clothiers continued to import the latest fashions.

I kept my sanity during the war in large part because I loved to cook. Meals brought our family and friends together for moments of shared joy. I invited guests to my table almost daily. The more people we had, the better for everyone’s morale.

Any normal person living outside Lebanon would have found my behavior ludicrous. Somewhere inside my head I did still remember what ‘normal’ meant, but since there were no normal people around me, it hardly mattered. The surreal world of war which was forcing me and everyone around me to think and act differently gave new meaning to the word ‘normal.’

WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO THIS LAND?

This excerpt is taken from the Introduction to Israeli-Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with both Sides. It defines the premise on which the book is based.

Long before my first visit to Jerusalem and the West Bank IN March 2002, my opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shifted several times. I attribute this metamorphosis in large part to the fourteen years I lived in Beirut, Lebanon. Between 1969—when I moved there as a self-absorbed, naïve young woman—to 1983, when I was forced to leave Lebanon because of civil war—I went from being a de facto supporter of Israel to having sympathy for the Palestinians. I became embarrassed at the extent of my own ignorance and set out on a life-long journey—which remains very much in progress—to understand one thing properly.

The Middle East was my obvious choice, and I quickly found all the areas of inquiry spreading out from there, as one expects from a deep study of almost anything. It became clear to me that the most stable times in this region have occurred when the inhabitants adhered most closely to the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you;’ or, simply, ‘live and let live.’

Whenever extremism, fanaticism or fundamentalism raises its obdurate head, the Golden Rule is quickly set aside and the bloodshed begins. Therefore, as an agitator for peace and cohesion among all people, I advocate the marginalization of extremism on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am convinced it is the middle ground which promotes sustainable safety, comfort and prosperity in any civilization. In various ways my book Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides attempts to demonstrate that most people gravitate to the middle ground.

Currently there are approximately five million Israelis and as many  Palestinians—only two per cent of the original thirty percent Christians remain; the rest are Sunni Muslims—living in Israel proper and the occupied territories. Whatever the outrageous comments, it is clear that these two peoples are not going to disappear. Rather, they must find a way to make compromises in exchange for peace.

There has been a Jewish presence in the area of Palestine for thousands of years. The Holocaust made the formation of the State of Israel a moral imperative, and its continuous secure existence must be guaranteed in any final peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

The Palestinians are ethnic cousins of the indigenous Jews of ancient Canaan, and have shared a presence in this land for thousands of years. From prehistoric times this tiny area of the Middle East has witnessed a twisting continuum of factions, with one city or state rising and then falling. Empires have come and gone. More significantly, the fleeting power of people and ideologies has emerged and disappeared, sometimes almost with a trace.

Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Macedonians, Romans, Israelites, Philistines, Crusaders, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, and finally the British, can all claim strong historical connections to this land either through bloody warfare or benign conquest. The multitude of ruins in the Golan Heights—contested since the Amorites first dominated it in the 3rd Millennium BCE—and Tel Megiddo—a town in northern Galilee where historians believe more battles have been fought than anywhere else in the world—bear witness to the vulnerability of the most powerful armies.

Time after time the inhabitants have been slaughtered, driven into exile or subjected under a new political power which held sway for a few centuries. Who, then, are the rightful claimants to this ancient land? Does the Jewish claim that they were driven out by the Romans two thousand years ago override the Palestinian Arabs claim that as descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Canaan, they too have a right to this land?

THE US CREATES ITS OWN REALITY

Karl Rove, senior advisor to President George W. Bush, famously said “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Regime change in Syria was part of that reality.

Almost from the start of the Bush regime, Assad was marked for “regime change.” In his 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s New Policy Benefiting Our Enemies in the War on Terrorism?” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the Bush administration’s plan to use the Muslim Brotherhood and militant groups linked to Al Qaeda to overthrow the government of Syria, the result of which continues to unfold today under Barak Obama’s administration.

In the early months of the Syrian civil war which began in 2011, the West’s mainstream media presented the conflict as a simple case of good-guy protesters vs. bad-guy government, but the conflict was more complicated than that and the one-sided version only made matters worse.

Many parties are to blame, not least Bachar Assad who responded with brute force against the protesters, but also to blame are the interventionists in the US and its allies who rationalized supporting the Islamist opposition—and refusing to embrace serious peace negotiations proposed by Assad—on the grounds that Assad was a uniquely evil dictator. The conventional wisdom— that “the protest movement in Syria was overwhelmingly peaceful until 2011”—is wrong, or at best incomplete. In fact, opposition to the government had turned violent almost from the start, and was likely aimed at provoking a harsh reaction to polarize the country.

Although nothing justifies the myriad crimes committed by state forces then and since facts ignored by most mass media and government accounts suggest that responsibility for the horrors in Syria is widely shared. The facts undercut the rationale behind inflexible demands for “regime change” from the US and Gulf leaders, in particular Saudi Arabia and Qatar that closed the door on serious negotiations and opened the way to mass slaughter and the rise of today’s Islamist-dominated opposition.

According to Professor Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, the US media and its analysts refused to recognize that armed elements were becoming active. They preferred to tell a simple story of good people fighting bad people. There is no doubt that the vast majority of the opposition were peaceful and were being met with deadly government force. One only wonders why that story could not have been told without also covering up the reality—that armed elements, whose agenda was not peaceful, were also playing a role.”

Rather than seeking to promote dialogue and reconciliation, the US and its Arab allies chose confrontation and a deepening civil war. To make matters worse, they stand accused of funding and supporting the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which is, for all intents and purposes the political wing of Al Qaeda, and is now beginning to arm militants affiliated with Al Qaeda itself.

According to Seymour Hersh the US took part in clandestine operations aimed at the Syrian government. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

For months, after years of headlines confirming the US had been covertly arming militants in Syria for the purpose of overthrowing the government in Damascus, a narrative revolving around tens of thousands of these militants, “defecting” to ISIS and its affiliates, has been peddled to the public to account for the apparent failure to create an army of “moderates” to both fight ISIS and the Syrian government. What documented evidence stretching back as far as 2007 shows is that the US had no intention of building up a moderate opposition in the first place, and any news of “defections” are simply a cover for the direct funding and arming of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria.

Claiming to fight ISIS, while so transparently supporting them, is a doomed position, one that Russia intends to change, much to the chagrin of the US government.