Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 17
June 6, 2015
JUNE 8, 1967
On this the 48th anniversary of that unprovoked attack intercepted Israeli messages leave no doubt that the sinking of the USS Liberty was the mission assigned to the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats as the Six-Day War raged in the Middle East.
Recently declassified NSA documents offer irrefutable evidence that Israeli knew it was attacking a US Navy vessel that was flying an American flag and in weather conditions that were ideal to ensure easy identification.
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to the opposite conclusion. It declared “No American or any other flag appeared on the ship.”
Yiftsah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post that there was “positively no flag. I couldn’t identify it but it was a military ship.”
According to John Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote a detailed account of the attack which was published in both the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun on October 2, 2007, the Jerusalem Post account differed dramatically from the one that rolled off the teletype that day in 1967 behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
“The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by its American flag. The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure there were no survivors.”
Forslund’s recollections are supported by two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who also saw the transcripts.
“It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at the USS Liberty,” they said. “Later, around the time the Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to complete the job and get out of there.”
Some of the Israeli pilots did not want to attack according to the transcripts. “This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?” they asked. Ground control came back and said, “Yes, follow orders.”
Perhaps the most persuasive argument that the transcripts existed, according to Crewdson, came from the Israelis themselves. In a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv. Harman said that a source the Israelis code-named ‘Hamlet’ was reporting that the Americans had “clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway.” Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban that the White House was “very angry” and that “the reason for this was that the Americans had findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American.” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, in his recent book “1967” showed that Harman’s source was Arthur Goldberg, then US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Thomas Moorer helped lead an independent commission to investigate what happened to the USS Liberty. The findings were made public in October 2003 and concluded that:
The attack by a US ally was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill its entire crew.
The attack included the machine-gunning of stretcher-bearers and life rafts.
President Johnson’s White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of the USS Liberty. Never before in naval history had a rescue mission been cancelled when an American ship was under attack.
The surviving crew members were later threatened with court martial, imprisonment or worse if they talked to anyone about what happened to them. They were abandoned by their own government.
In his book The Gulag Archipelago, the Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn warned about what silence does to the foundations of justice.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
These events and others can be found in Cathy Sultan’s Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides.
JUNE 8, 1967
On June 8, 1967 Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a state-of-the-art US Navy intelligence collection platform sailing in international waters off the Sinai, killing 34 of the 294 crew members and wounding 174.
On this the 48th anniversary of that unprovoked attack intercepted Israeli messages leave no doubt that the sinking of the USS Liberty was the mission assigned to the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats as the Six-Day War raged in the Middle East.
Recently declassified NSA documents offer irrefutable evidence that Israeli knew it was attacking a US Navy vessel that was flying an American flag and in weather conditions that were ideal to ensure easy identification.
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to the opposite conclusion. It declared “No American or any other flag appeared on the ship.”
Yiftsah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post that there was “positively no flag. I couldn’t identify it but it was a military ship.”
According to John Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote a detailed account of the attack which was published in both the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun on October 2, 2007, the Jerusalem Post account differed dramatically from the one that rolled off the teletype that day in 1967 behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
“The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by its American flag. The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure there were no survivors.”
Forslund’s recollections are supported by two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who also saw the transcripts.
“It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at the USS Liberty,” they said. “Later, around the time the Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to complete the job and get out of there.”
Some of the Israeli pilots did not want to attack according to the transcripts. “This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?” they asked. Ground control came back and said, “Yes, follow orders.”
Perhaps the most persuasive argument that the transcripts existed, according to Crewdson, came from the Israelis themselves. In a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv. Harman said that a source the Israelis code-named ‘Hamlet’ was reporting that the Americans had “clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway.” Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban that the White House was “very angry” and that “the reason for this was that the Americans had findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American.” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, in his recent book “1967” showed that Harman’s source was Arthur Goldberg, then US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Thomas Moorer helped lead an independent commission to investigate what happened to the USS Liberty. The findings were made public in October 2003 and concluded that:
The attack by a US ally was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill its entire crew.
The attack included the machine-gunning of stretcher-bearers and life rafts.
President Johnson’s White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of the USS Liberty. Never before in naval history had a rescue mission been cancelled when an American ship was under attack.
The surviving crew members were later threatened with court martial, imprisonment or worse if they talked to anyone about what happened to them. They were abandoned by their own government.
In his book The Gulag Archipelago, the Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn warned about what silence does to the foundations of justice.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
These events and others can be found in Cathy Sultan’s Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides.
June 4, 2015
MY SULTAN
For years I had imagined living somewhere in Central Asia. I saw myself behind a strong Tijik on a galloping horse. In other dreams I was sailing the South China Sea on my way to Borneo, the scent of nutmeg and cinnamon in the air. Or I was kidnapped by a sultan and traversing a brilliant star-lit desert atop a camel.
My future in Beirut began in a dream where sheets of sand and waves of dunes rippled across the serene beauty of a boundless stretch of desert. My dream-woman lived in a tent with her Bedouin husband. Like him she was tall and majestic. Her long blue garment embroidered in gold shone brilliantly when she stepped into the sun. Her golden hair hung in two long braids almost touching the ground. She was queen of her husband’s tribe in the exotic land of Ali Baba, of Scheherazade’s A Thousand and One Nights, a place where caravans of laden camels traveled along sand highways heading for market at the desert’s edge.
I met ‘my’ Sultan in early December 1964, not on a sandy desert of my dreams but when he began his internship at the Washington Hospital Center. A mutual friend who had attended the same medical school in Beirut introduced us. Over the next six months when Michel was not on call on alternate nights we spent every minute together. He introduced me to his world of music, art, language and culture. I saw my first live opera, attended a concert at the National Symphony Orchestra and heard Jean-Pierre Rampal play the flute. Michel took me to charming restaurants in Georgetown where we sat at secluded, candlelit tables and ordered champagne. For my birthday he gave me a pair of gold earrings studded with turquoise stones. Sometimes after a concert at the Washington Cathedral, where I heard Bach and Vivaldi for the first time, we would stroll through Rock Creek Park.
I loved that he treated me like a lady, opening doors and pulling out chairs. When he took my hand, he kissed it; when he looked into my eyes, his smile was reassuring. In his ongoing effort to speak better English he was willing to be corrected when he made a mistake. I loved everything about him. I loved the texture of his slightly darker skin and the warmth it gave off in the sunlight that made his black eyes glow. There was something special about the way his curly hair lay in tiny ringlets on the back of his neck. I loved the way he kept his nails short and clean; his fine leather shoes and cashmere socks; his Chanel cologne; the way he wore his beautifully-tailored cotton shirts and silk ties with French labels under luxuriously soft woolen suits. There was always a neatly folded handkerchief in his right pants pocket. Sitting beside him in a dark theater I loved the way he took my hand in his, the way he stroked my palm in circles with his thumb. Most of all, I loved his gentleness.
As our plane approached Beirut on June 17, 1969, I saw miles and miles of pristine beaches beside turquoise waters. Along the corniche dozens of white marble buildings glistened like pearls in the late afternoon sun.
My heart throbbed with excitement. ‘Just as I dared imagine,’ I thought, ‘only better.’
When we landed the passengers applauded. As they stood gathering their belongings they turned to each other, mostly perfect strangers, and said ‘Hamdalah al salame,’ which Michel explained, meant ‘Welcome home, thank God you had a safe trip.’
“Why were they cheering?” I asked. “Were they afraid they would not land safely?”
An elderly man seated behind us overheard our conversation. “Mais non, Madame, we applaud because we are glad to be back in our dear city.”
I had never seen such warmth, such joie de vivre. I would come to learn that this was standard behavior for the gentle but spirited Lebanese.
These stories and more I recount in A Beirut Heart, a memoir of my fourteen years in Beirut.
June 1, 2015
HOW THE MEDIA COVERS ISRAEL’S WARS
As someone who has lived in Lebanon for fourteen years, eight of which were during Lebanon’s civil war, I am particularly sensitive to how conflicts are covered, especially those that involve Lebanon and Israel. I am also keenly aware that accusations of anti-Semitism are frequently used to silence any criticism of Israel. However, any criticism here against the State of Israel is directed at its political and military actions during the 2006 war, and not against Judaism. Hezbollah is an organic Shiite Lebanese political and military movement and any criticism against its behavior during the war is not against Shiite Islam or Islam in general. That said, since both Israel and Hezbollah are guilty of war crimes, it is reasonable and necessary to have an honest and frank discussion about their conduct and how the media covered it.
To begin, let me dispel several myths that distract from the facts.
Israel’s very existence was at stake. No, Israel’s existence was not at stake and has not been for decades, if it ever was. It has the second largest fleet of F-16s on the planet, second only to the US, and is the single largest recipient of US foreign aid since the early ‘70s, receiving over $3 billion annually, seventy-five percent of which must be spent to buy weapons from the US military industrial complex.
Perhaps a better question would be: Can Israel successfully invade another country such as Lebanon, conduct a conventional war against a homegrown guerrilla movement that knows the terrain like the back of its hand and win? No, chances are Israel would not win such a conflict unless it was willing to put thousands of its troops on the ground, something its military brass refuses to do.
Israel has the right to defend itself to maximum capacity against every Hezbollah infraction. Israel has the right to defend itself. No one disputes this fact, but proportionality is the issue here. The question of whether Israel’s use of force involved excessive harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure in relation to Israel’s legitimate military aims arises from the scale of Israel’s bombing campaign inside Lebanon. Lebanese civilian casualties were higher than Israeli civilian casualties by a ratio of twenty-five to one—clearly a disproportionate response to the capturing of two soldiers.
The war began because Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers. The capture was but a pretext to begin the military operation against Hezbollah that had been planned for some time. Abductions are a routine occurrence along the border. It is common practice not just for Hezbollah to abduct Israeli soldiers but for Israel to take innocent Lebanese.
Hezbollah deliberately targeted civilians. Hezbollah fired over four thousand Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, killing thirty-nine civilians, eighteen of whom were Israeli Arabs. However, only eight hundred of the four thousand rockets hit built-up areas, suggesting that Hezbollah was not trying to hit the center of Haifa and kill as many civilians as possible, but rather to strike the oil refinery, the naval docks and other military installations around Haifa. According to Human Rights Watch, Hezbollah’s rocket attack on the Haifa area was a war crime. This, therefore, means that Israel’s missile strikes and bombardments of Lebanon were also war crimes on the same or greater scale.
Israel was justified in dropping bombs where ordinary people lived because Hezbollah hid among the civilian population. Human Rights Watch could find no evidence to support Israel’s claim that Hezbollah hid among civilians. According to a July 2007 article in the Israeli daily, Haaretz,Israel’s military admitted that most of the rockets fired at Israel were from nature reserves and not from urban areas.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. The US, Israel, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK are the only countries that have classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. “Terrorist” is a useful rhetorical bludgeon that Israel and the US have wielded to outlaw or dehumanize radical or revolutionary groups. The PLO was labeled for years as a terrorist group just as Hamas and Hezbollah are now. Nelson Mandela was also labeled a terrorist. He remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008.
These are excerpts from my book Tragedy in South Lebanon, Chapter Nine “The Media’s Coverage of the War: Myths versus Reality. Tragedy was nominated for best book of the year in the category of Political Science in 2008.
CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Rick Polad has a new fan. I’ve just finished reading Change of Address, his first in a series of Spenser Manning Mysteries and I am hooked. Rick’s genius as a writer is his simple yet confident prose that engages the reader. His introduces his characters like they were old friends and they probably were, at least in part. His father was on the Chicago police force. He has a story to tell but he isn’t in a hurry to tell it. He settles his readers in first, gets them comfortable with the characters and then begins to weave in the plots and subplots, never rushing, adding a few red herrings now and again with subtle twists which make you think you know how the story will end only to discover you don’t.
I have the privilege of knowing Rick Polad. He is Spenser Manning—thoughtful, witty, curious, honest and a downright old-fashion and genuinely likable guy—everything you would want in a PI, should you ever have need of one. He grew up listening to his own father’s stories so who better than Rick to craft his own. Like his character he grew up in Chicago. And like Rick, Spenser loves his Cubs and never misses an opportunity to take in a game at Wrigley Field as long as he can down a cold beer and a couple of hot dogs. And whether he takes a left on Cicero Avenue and heads north, turns onto the Stevenson Expressway or takes his lady friend to a posh restaurant with a view to the east overlooking Lake Michigan you relax and tag along because you have every confidence that he knows what he is doing and where he wants to take you.
I’ve already begun Dark Alleys. I can’t stop reading it.
DESPAIR OR HOPE?
The people of South Lebanon, for their part, feel incredibly burdened by the constant threat emanating from Israel on the other side of their border. They still reel from the injustices inflicted on them by Israel’s twenty-two year occupation when they saw their lives, their freedoms and basic human rights trampled on without so much as a yawn from the international community. In 2000, when the Israeli public finally demanded that their troops come home, the Lebanese knew that it was not because of the immorality of brutally occupying two hundred thousand of their people. The protests, led mostly by women, focused exclusively on the blood of Israeli soldiers spilled in Lebanon in vain. Nothing would have been more important, of course, to an Israeli mother, sister or wife than their loved ones’ lives, just as nothing is more important to a Lebanese mother, sister or wife from South Lebanon than the lives of their loved ones who steadfastly defend their villages.
The Israeli government casually talks of establishing a security zone in South Lebanon as though no one lives there. Such talks by their leaders leads the average Israeli to believe that South Lebanon is a land of bloodthirsty Shiite terrorists, intent on destroying Israel, and so it is justifiable to ethnically cleanse the area to safeguard Israel’s northern border. It is a modern-day version of Chaim Weizmann’s “a land without people for a people with land” theme all over again.
The 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war produced no clear winner. Lebanon is a bitterly divided between the March 18 pro-Hariri-Saudi Arabia camp and the March 8th Hezbollah-Christian coalition. Israel fares no better with its hollow extreme-right leadership itching for another war. I saw this first hand when I was in Beirut last month. Every single day Israel threatened to bomb Lebanon back to the stone-age. There was no provocation from Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanese board, yet Israel presumed the right to threaten to re-define, yet again, its military deterrence and destroy Hezbollah.
These sad truths stated, how difficult would it really be to promote peace as an option to war and make it work? This question prompted me to revisit something I wrote in my memoir A Beirut Heart about a real possibility of peace in the Middle East, if only its leaders would oblige. The particular scene takes place in 1976. Civil war is raging in Beirut and my family and I had just escaped on an apple boat to Syria. Upon landing in the seaport of Lattakia, my husband Michel was unexpectedly detained. During his interrogation his Syrian guards questioned him not about the supposed charges against him but about Israel. They wanted to know about Israeli technology and what kind of products they made, whether or not America supplied Israel with all its weapons or if the Israelis manufactured their own. Did Israel really have the best hospitals in the Middle East? The mother of one soldier needed open heart surgery. “How wonderful it would be,” he said, “if I could get into my car and drive my mother to Israel for treatment.”
Even after living the past thirty-one years in tranquil Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I still reflect on and appreciate how wonderful peace could be, if allowed to happen. Given that this is a very remote possibility, all I can do is write about the horrors of war so that our collective national memory can never say “We didn’t know.” I can bring to light the voices of the ordinary people in Bint Jbeil, in Beirut, in Gaza and the West Bank, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, who scream, “Stop these horrors. We want to live in peace.”
May 31, 2015
DESPAIR OR HOPE?
Israel’s paranoia and sense of insecurity is, to some extent, justified. Given the less than desirable outcome of its with Hezbollah in 2006, the real or perceived threats from Syria and an emerging Iran, it is understandable from an Israeli point of view that the State of Israel would feel the need to attempt once again to redefine its military deterrence, to definitively crush Hezbollah and establish a permanent presence in South Lebanon.
The people of South Lebanon, for their part, feel incredibly burdened by the constant threat emanating from Israel on the other side of their border. They still reel from the injustices inflicted on them by Israel’s twenty-two year occupation when they saw their lives, their freedoms and basic human rights trampled on without so much as a yawn from the international community. In 2000, when the Israeli public finally demanded that their troops come home, the Lebanese knew that it was not because of the immorality of brutally occupying two hundred thousand of their people. The protests, led mostly by women, focused exclusively on the blood of Israeli soldiers spilled in Lebanon in vain. Nothing would have been more important, of course, to an Israeli mother, sister or wife than their loved ones’ lives, just as nothing is more important to a Lebanese mother, sister or wife from South Lebanon than the lives of their loved ones who steadfastly defend their villages.
The Israeli government casually talks of establishing a security zone in South Lebanon as though no one lives there. Such talks by their leaders leads the average Israeli to believe that South Lebanon is a land of bloodthirsty Shiite terrorists, intent on destroying Israel, and so it is justifiable to ethnically cleanse the area to safeguard Israel’s northern border. It is a modern-day version of Chaim Weizmann’s “a land without people for a people with land” theme all over again.
The 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war produced no clear winner. Lebanon is a bitterly divided between the March 18 pro-Hariri-Saudi Arabia camp and the March 8th Hezbollah-Christian coalition. Israel fares no better with its hollow extreme-right leadership itching for another war. I saw this first hand when I was in Beirut last month. Every single day Israel threatened to bomb Lebanon back to the stone-age. There was no provocation from Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanese board, yet Israel presumed the right to threaten to re-define, yet again, its military deterrence and destroy Hezbollah.
These sad truths stated, how difficult would it really be to promote peace as an option to war and make it work? This question prompted me to revisit something I wrote in my memoir A Beirut Heart about a real possibility of peace in the Middle East, if only its leaders would oblige. The particular scene takes place in 1976. Civil war is raging in Beirut and my family and I had just escaped on an apple boat to Syria. Upon landing in the seaport of Lattakia, my husband Michel was unexpectedly detained. During his interrogation his Syrian guards questioned him not about the supposed charges against him but about Israel. They wanted to know about Israeli technology and what kind of products they made, whether or not America supplied Israel with all its weapons or if the Israelis manufactured their own. Did Israel really have the best hospitals in the Middle East? The mother of one soldier needed open heart surgery. “How wonderful it would be,” he said, “if I could get into my car and drive my mother to Israel for treatment.”
Even after living the past thirty-one years in tranquil Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I still reflect on and appreciate how wonderful peace could be, if allowed to happen. Given that this is a very remote possibility, all I can do is write about the horrors of war so that our collective national memory can never say “We didn’t know.” I can bring to light the voices of the ordinary people in Bint Jbeil, in Beirut, in Gaza and the West Bank, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, who scream, “Stop these horrors. We want to live in peace.”
Israel has invaded South Lebanon four times. Hezbollah was a natural outgrowth of Israel’s twenty-two year illegal occupation. These details are too often left out of the discourse in American journalism. My third book Tragedy in South Lebanon gives a thorough historical overview of the relationship between the two countries. The book also includes a Timeline from Ancient Times to the Present plus a cast of characters, places and events which help the reader better understand the history of the region.
May 25, 2015
UNABLE TO GO back HOME
On the morning of September 1, 1983, I arose early, too excited to stay in bed. Our bags were packed and the children and I were going home, scheduled to fly Middle East Airlines that evening from JFK back to Beirut through Paris.
Around noon Michel called. Instantly I knew from the sound of his voice that something was wrong, that perhaps someone had died.
“You can’t come home, Cathy,” he said. “It’s started again.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, sinking slowly into the armchair near the telephone, as my legs turned to rubber. I knew what he was going to say.
“The war, it’s started again.”
“We just spoke two days ago and everything was fine. What happened?”
“The Israelis abruptly pulled out of the Chouf Mountains and the whole thing flared up again. It is unbelievable. This is the worst it has ever been. The bombing has been going on now for two straight days. There’s no end in sight.”
“I’m going to call the airline to see if…”
“Cathy, listen to me. They’ve canceled all flights. Its planes are grounded. You’ve only been gone two months and already you’ve forgotten? When bombs are falling, planes don’t fly in and out of here.”
I tried to sound reasonable. “Then what should we do?”
“From the looks of things, you’ll have to stay there,” he said. “Maybe you should put the children in school. Call my brother. See what he suggests.”
“This is all too much. I can’t think right now. I’ll have to call you back.”
I had no time to collect my thoughts; no time to sound like an adult in front of my teenage children. They could tell from the tone of my voice that something had gone terribly wrong. A large double window looked out on woods and green grass with patches of red salvia, yellow roses and purple veronica. I wanted to be down there. I wanted to go for a long walk, maybe even walk away to some distant place, anywhere so I would not have to be in this room at this moment and say what I had to say.
My children understood the part about remaining in America temporarily, but they objected to the rest.
“No!” Naim shouted. “I know what you’re going to say. It has something to do with starting school here, right? Don’t say another word. We are not going to school here.”
“It could be weeks, maybe months before we can…”
Naim cut me off. “So what?” he cried, his voice cracking.
Suddenly, like the time she shot out of the murky river after falling overboard from the canoe, Nayla cried out, “Oh please, Mommy, please don’t make me go to school here.”
The terror in her voice was like a knife cutting into my heart and I sobbed. And the young boy who had spoken so offhandedly about bombs tearing up roads behind him, about Palmyra and the underground prison his father almost landed in, and about the dead bodies in the street, was crying too.
I had no time to grapple with the intricacies of an indefinite stay in the States. I had to decide as quickly as possible on a course of action. I knew two things: we could not live with my parents in their small apartment, and the school year had already begun.
We moved to Boston to be near Michel’s brother, Jacques and his family. While there Michel sent me a sketch of himself. The white paper was blank, except for a small square cage in the far right-hand bottom corner of the page. ‘Me’ was printed next to it. In my mind I saw him constantly. He was crossing the Ministry of Justice intersection on his way to the hospital when his car stalled, and a sniper killed him. Or he was walking our dog. Foxy, when the bombs began to fall, and both of them were hit and lay bleeding in the street. Or he was upset and yelling at a militiaman blocking the road and the man walked over to his car, pulled him out and beat him senseless. There was no limit to the ways I saw my husband die.
Our lifeline to him was every Saturday morning. The three of us gathered around the phone. All eyes were on me as I dialed his number. My hands shook as I waited for him to answer, to say hello to reassure us that he was well. We cried when we heard his voice.
May 23, 2015
SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, BEIRUT, LEBANON
I write from Beirut where I am visiting the Shatila Refugee Camp, site of the 1982 massacre of some 2,500 Palestinian civilians. While Shatila is some distance from Palestine and is not under Israeli occupation, its plight is no less stark. Under deplorable, overcrowded conditions in cinder-block units, piled helter-skelter, one atop another with no heating, proper windows or doors to ward off the frigid rainy winters; with an inadequate sewage system, staggeringly high unemployment, one free medical clinic, no hospital and insufficient primary and secondary schools to cope with the ever-growing population—the residents, some of whom have lived there since 1948, are generous, warmhearted, feisty and tenacious. They work tirelessly for the overall good of the camp and are an example of discipline and determination.
The residents of Shatila know the names of their home villages in what is now Israel. On May 15th they marked the 67th year of their exile in what Palestinians call the Nakba—the Catastrophe.
I lived in Beirut from 1969 to 1984. When the Lebanese war began in April 1975, my neighborhood, on the Green Line, was shelled by Palestinian-led forces. Their snipers fired on my children. In 1982, I witnessed the Israeli invasion and saturation bombing of Beirut and stood silent during those infamous September days when Christian militiamen entered Shatila Refugee Camp to slaughter Palestinian civilians. Our apartment was but a few blocks from the camp. Some of those militiamen were neighbors. That massacre marked the beginning of my political epiphany, the day I began to recognize a people both manipulated and abandoned by their leaders, a people who still live in squalid conditions both inside Sabra in Beirut and under Israeli occupation in Palestine. Since that time I have authored four books. My memoir A Beirut Heart shares my experiences during my time in Lebanon.
Through my writing and activism, I became acquainted with Interfaith Peace Builders, a Washington, D.C. based NGO which leads delegations to Israel-Palestine to meet with peace activists from both sides. Their delegations provide an in-depth look at the situation on the ground which helps each delegate come away not only as eye-witnesses but as first-hand experts. I have co-led three of their delegations and accompanied an IFPB delegation to the Gaza Strip in 2012.
I was invited to sit on IFPB’s Board of Directors four years ago, and will assume the responsibility of Chair in June. It is a privilege and an honor to be part of an organization, unique in the movement, that offers its delegates not only the opportunity to witness first-hand the Occupation, but that also supports their peace building efforts in their own communities by coaching them in writing editorials, giving radio and television interviews, scheduling speaking engagements, and more. As Interfaith Peace Builders approaches its 15th year, the impact of our work grows exponentially. In 2015 we took our 1000th delegate and celebrated 50 delegations. IFPB inspires new activists and contributes to the growing global movement for peace with justice. Help us continue to grow so that we may someday, together with the residents of Shatila and Palestinians everywhere, share a future of hope and peace. Please visit us at http://www.ifpb.org.
April 29, 2015
WAR AND PTSD
When my husband left Beirut to attend a medical conference in Boston he insisted the children and I move from our dangerous neighborhood to the relative safely of my sister-in-law���s apartment. When the fighting stopped the children and I returned home. I thought we had handled this latest round of fighting quite well. So when classes resumed I was surprised when Nayla refused to get out of bed.
���I can���t go to school, Mommy,��� she said. ���Please don���t force me to go.���
���Okay, darling, you can stay home today but������
���No, Mommy, you don���t understand,��� and she began to cry. ���I can���t go back there again, ever.���
After she had fallen back to sleep I called my husband in Boston.
���She���s just being capricious, that���s all,��� he said.
He was wrong, I thought. I decided to trust my instincts and called a psychiatrist-friend and colleague of my husband���s. He promised to come see our daughter later that afternoon.
After he spoke with her, he came into the living room and sat beside me. When he saw how distraught I was, he must have realized I could not handle any harsh clinical terminology. He chose instead to describe my daughter���s depression as a form of self-preservation.
���She has closed off her mind so she no longer has to exist in the brutal reality around her.���
In a serious moment like that, when you think your whole world has just collapsed, and you are frightened your daughter may never recover and the support of your husband is three thousand miles away, you do not mind being given a simple explanation. The psychiatrist thought it best if she was started on medication.
Sometimes such patients have to change their medications several times before they find the one which produces the best results. When there was no significant improvement in my daughter, she was started on a second. It can take up to two weeks before there is any noticeable change, a painfully long time to wait when you are desperately looking for even the slightest sign of improvement. She went for days without eating. She slept a lot and even when awake she was distracted. I wanted to ask her what she saw in that other world, but I think I was afraid she���d reply, ���Nothing,��� and that would have frightened me even more. I got paranoid when I saw her looking out at the balcony. In my mind���s eye I could see her suddenly climbing up on the railing and jumping off, and I would find her spread-eagled on the road below.
Each time she had an appointment to see her doctor, I would sit on a brown leather couch in the corner and observe. Sometimes she replied in soft whispers to his gentle questions. Often times she gazed blankly past him, apparently unaware he was even there.
On one particular visit, a profoundly heavy sadness came over me. At first I thought it was rooted in my fear that my daughter might never recover. But it was the recognition of my own depression. I envied my daughter���s ability to escape into a peaceful world where she had no responsibilities. I, on the other hand, had to be everyone���s rock, the ���woman with the nerves of steel,��� and I could not escape. I began to cry.
Her doctor came and sat beside me. He thought I was crying for Nayla, and he assured me she would recover. I nodded as he spoke, trying to say something, but I could not force myself to be as honest as my daughter and admit that I too was profoundly depressed.
Approximately thirty percent of children my daughter���s age suffered from depression, what we now call PTSD, as a result of Lebanon���s civil war. Returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer even higher rates. Of the eleven states that actually record veteran suicides, twenty-two die every day. Imagine the actual numbers if we were given an accurate and honest account of all veteran suicides. Isn���t it time we demanded an end to our senseless wars?
My political thriller The Syrian from Calumet Editions��is based on countless real-life scenes like these and the never ending psychological damage of war.
