Sunday was a day of eating for me. No rest for the wicked and all that it was an early start, and up the mountain for some breakfast with my Aunty Victoria. Typically I turned up starving and left feeling fuller than would be advisable. Having spent a few days before with my bottom doing a sound impression of its forward facing counterpart (after an absent-minded washing incident involving some strawberries and some tap water), it would have been ambitious to expect anything else. So after breakfast, it was time for lunch.
Marwan (my cousin) took me to a friend's house on the other side of Mount Lebanon. It had a stunning view of the Chouf Mountains and, at 1000 metres above sea level, the mountain breeze drifted lazily through panoramic open windows with clementine and olive trees set down the mountain side from their sills of the house to the floor of the valley.
It was a great chance to practice some arabic, to be laughed at for "sounding like the russian ambassador" and to get to know another lovely Lebanese family. Typically there was plenty of food. Indeed, I felt as though I should have brought some friends to help out. Much of the food was sheep. And much of the sheep was raw.
Despite this not being my favourite combination of qualities in Sunday lunch I steeled my sense of adventure and accepted the offer of some Kibbeh Nayeh (Raw lamb/mutton minced with burghal wheat and spices). It's not that I haven't eaten it before, or that I wouldn't order it in a restaurant. It is more that I was feeling fragile and that I was, most kindly, given about a fifth of an enormous tray of the stuff. If it had been beef, it would have constituted a steak.
So I ate. Not exactly wolfed, but put away as politely as possible. Full, tired and mildly hungover I felt pleased with my efforts. Then came the meat and rice. A few modest fork fulls to show willing and more chuffed silence. The came the keftah (cooked lamb-mince kebabs). Finally the ice cream and the fruit and the uncomfortable quiet inducing fullness that comes with eating lunch for three.
But just as my culinary woes were served with buckets of generosity, so they were delivered in pails of insignificance. In Nahar Al-Barid, the Palestinian refugee camp south of Tripoli, the Lebanese army and the radical Palestinian splinter group Fatah Al-Islam were engaged in a vicious street battle. By the time I awoke this morning (for the second time, though that is another paragraph) the body count was over fifty. The fighting was very localised and very specific to Tripoli but the Lebanese Army was seeking out for destruction every unit of Fatah Al-Islam. One army spokesman said, "We are targeting every building they are thought to have been in." By all accounts, they still are.
At the end of a days fighting there were over fifty dead, at least of those were from the Lebanese Army, who are instrumental in holding Lebanon together as it sails these difficult straights of opposition movements and Islamist factions. Perhaps more worryingly the Palestinians in Nahar Al-Barid, who are currently under an army seige and thus without water, electricity, telephones etc are suffering terribly. But then that is the way of the Levant since 1948, the Palestinians are a refugee nation and 59 years after their initial displacement from Israel they live in inaccessible camps, called in Arabic Mukheim (tented places). Palestine's Arab 'brothers' as they are often referred to, are by now as implicitly guilty in the suffering of that tented nation as all the Jews in Jerusalem. And now 35000 Palestinians face a second night of filthy, dangerous and sleepless suffering brought about by the desperate efforts of their misguided, and all too often under-educated (only 14% of Lebanese Palestinians currently finish school) brothers, seeking a solution to the misery of their political non-existence have brought yet more upon themselves and their fellow nationals and distanced themselves yet further from the population of the country they 'live' in.
As the Jews were in Europe for centuries, so the Palestinians are becoming in the Middle East. Distrusted, insular, nationless and downtrodden in an ever tightening cycle of isolation.
I finished reading an essay by Edward Luttwak about the irrelevance of the Middle East to 21st Century politics in Prospect Magazine around 10 o'clock last night. In strident and mostly convincing prose he proposed that Arabists and politicians the world over would have us believe that the Middle East is vital when really it is at best a marginal backwater, whose contribution to the world oil markets is only (perhaps not the word!) 40% and set to diminish as America has reduced its dependence on Middle Eastern oil imports by ten percent and intends a further cut of 25% by 2025. He continued to make the point that military threats from this part of the world have never been backed up with anything other than statistics and that even lists of aircraft and warships do not go far toward a real picture of the threat posed. (For example he argued that F4's, F5's and F14 fighter jets owned by Iran have barely left the tarmac in the last ten years). He says that there is a great pedalling of armageddonism amongst Arabists, he sights King Hussein and now Abdullah of Jordan, especially in relation to Palestine. "Humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000—about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur." he says.
Most interestingly to me he asserts, "What actually happens at each of these "moments of truth"—and we may be approaching another one—is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough."
Two hours after I read this article, in the depths of a much desired sleep, I was awoken by a loud bang. I cannot lay claim to the feelings that filled me in the instant of the sound, because it was the sound that rocked me awake, but immediately afterwards was the gasp of silence. As though the city around me had been hit in the stomach and a good winding had emptied its lungs and widened its pupils. Then the sirens. A huge cloud of smoke drifted past the window of my flat, and where there had once been the sounds of sleep there was the ringing of phones, the chatter of uncertainty and the wail of emergency response. Where two hours before I had been reading Luttwak's take on Middle Eastern irrelevance, four hours earlier I had strolled from my usual internet cafe in ABC shopping mall back to my house, past the car park that had contained the blast of this yet unaccounted for bomb.
It is difficult to know what was more shocking. The knowledge (and it was immediate despite it being the first I had ever heard) that I had heard a bomb go off. Or the discovery that a poor old lady, on her way home, had been the only fatality. I made the requisite phone calls to reassure people that I was okay. I contemplated togging up to go and have a look but all I could see on LBC were journalists scrapping for interviews and photos, and then a friend of mine (Paul Cochrane), a freelancer working out here, sent me a text message. "Went to the site, car bomb done some damage but coudn't see extent. Saw lot's of soldiers and journalists." Time for bed.
This morning I was due in Dahieh (ominously known as "the suburbs", a Hezbollah stronghold and a major target for Israeli during the war last summer) to a workshop of NGO's discussing redevelopment works in Dahieh and its surrounds. The event, which was due to be quite big, was mostly empty as the NGO's were concentrated in the troubled North. Instead I listened to local civil development planners listening to the sounds of their own voices (a little dismissive but despite us having to stand for the national anthem at the beginning there was no pause or mention of respect for the dead, on either side). Back at the office the whole paper was being dedicated to the bombing and the ongoing violence in Tripoli. At 4 o'clock, it seemed a ceasefire was called until 6. But by 4:30 violence had recommenced and the chance to gather the wounded of both sides was lost, or was it. Confused messages were coming through on the phones and the wires. One reporter, who had written an excellent piece for the front page the day before, (Rym Ghazal) was on the phone to a young man from Fatah Al-Islam who told her he expected not to survive the night.
All this happening in a a few square kilometres in the north of the country, and being beamed around the world. A tiny snippet of the lives of thousands from a country of nearly 4 million people. Edward Luttwak continues: "Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more." He is right. The fighting in the north may be of national concern to Lebanon, but it is only of vital concern to the inhabitants of the localised fighting district. Until it spills out across its narrow margins, it is unlikely to be more than a marginal, if shocking, step on a road to Lebanese stability. The questions it raises are at the heart of the innate unfairness of Lebanese society. It is this core of inequality that needs paring from the daily life of so many Lebanese. It is also the purpose behind the Hizbollah-Aounist sit-in outside Parliament. Violence is not a highway to peace, but then, nor is oppression. After fifty-nine years, it still has explosive and meaningless, results.
