Wartime Has Never Begun So Quickly

On Tuesday the Lebanese were rejoicing at another annual increase in the numbers of tourists visiting the country. Every day there seemed to be more cars with a wide variety of foreign licence-plates on the streets of Beirut. No, there were no warnings. Many of the Lebanese living abroad who come back to visit their home every summer were already in the country. Well before they came, they had got their friends to buy them tickets for events in the Fairûs festival which was to begin on July 14th.

Tickets have been sold out for over a month. And now they have to ask themselves – even if it sounds trivial in the light of the serious problems people are facing – what are they going to do with the tickets.

Within one day Lebanon changed. The visitors disappeared from Verdun Street in Beirut, and instead of hearing shouts and screams of World Cup supporters you can see numb fear on the faces of the few people who still dare to sit on the chairs outside the Café Amore.

The residents of southern Lebanon, who believed until Wednesday morning that the years of bombardment and evacuation were finally over, saw the familiar pictures on television once more. Laden refugees carrying their few possessions in small cases and plastic bags, scrambling over the rubble of bridges which had been destroyed by Israeli bombers only hours before.

The wrong time?

People speak repeatedly of the "wrong time" when they talk of the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah which served as the justification for the bombing. It's a term which people use to avoid any clear criticism of the kidnapping – there could be someone listening who supports the action.

Even politicians speaking on television continually use the term; it's the consequence of a political environment in which one can never be too careful. Someone who says that the time of the action was wrongly chosen places himself between the kidnappers of the two soldiers and the progressive forces of the "cedar revolution," who have issued a statement condemning the kidnapping for its ruinous consequences.

They are not really against the kidnapping as such, but they would rather it would have happened at another time – after the summer tourists have left, when the Lebanese are on their own again.

This call for such actions to be postponed, grotesque though it is, points to Lebanon's continuous indecision as to whether it should take the road to peace or return to war. The worst thing is that people want peace as a kind of ambiguous state of affairs, in which the number of tourists keeps going up but the war never really ends. That seems to have been Lebanon's fate since 1967.

Unlike in other Arab countries, people feel that it's something shameful to disapprove of war and to believe that it's time for the Lebanese to enjoy the same calm which other people enjoy.

Collective timidity

Lebanese people say the time was chosen wrongly because they can't say what they would really like to say. It's a kind of collective timidity. The only people who don't suffer from it are those who hold up the banner of war and repeat the slogans of armed conflict. It's these people who have been permitted for years to determine what is forbidden and what is allowed in Lebanon. And so the same scenes are repeated over and over again: flattened houses, rows of bomb craters and endless streams of refugees.

This time the transition from peace to war was quicker than ever before. In one day the country was changed; everyone was thrust back to their worst old experiences. Suddenly the cars were queuing up again at the petrol stations, the bakeries were crowded with people demanding bread, the exams at the university were broken off, the papers published the picture of a girl who was torn apart with her family in their village on their front pages.

This massacre is intended to remind people of similar massacres: the one years ago in Nabatiya which was caused by Israeli bombs, or the massacre in al-Mansuri, or the worse one a few days later in Qana.

Pointless reckoning

These are massacres which we always reckon to our advantage. We always see them as new proofs of Israeli brutality, and we always point to them without realising that the horrifying pictures don't hurt anyone any more except ourselves. Indeed, we'll probably reckon the destruction of all the bridges in Lebanon in these latest attacks to our advantage, as a proof not only of Israeli brutality but also of the silence of the rest of the world in the face of this destruction.

On Thursday evening a Hezbollah sympathiser said on television that everything which had been destroyed could easily be repaired. He said the houses could be rebuilt and the army would look after the bridges. He was speaking just as the Israeli planes were standing by, ready to bomb still more bridges and to kill still more people – as they did over the following days.

One of our senior officials made a similar statement when he described our relationship to Israel like this. "They destroy; we build." And so on, for ever. He was proud of his neat summary, and it sounded as if Israel was always destroying its own country, while we were always building ours.

No, we can work it out for ourselves without needing many examples: the real problem is not one of formulation, it's a problem of logic. Even we, who have lived under the pressure of this logic for so many years, no longer understand how its mechanisms work and how they can be put properly into words.

Hassan Dawud

© Neue Zürcher Zeitung/Qantara.de 2006

Hassan Dawud is a writer and the arts editor of the Lebanese newspaper "Al-Mustaqbal." Two of his novels have been published in German by Lenos.

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Qantara.de

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