Report Number Eight from Lebanon: The Divine Victory

Sept. 22, 2006

On the way back from the south of Lebanon on Sept. 21, we watched groups of people walking north to attend the great victory celebration planned for the following day. By noon the next day, large crowds of people were already gathered at the site of the big celebration. By three, it was a sea of yellow flags waved by millions of supporters of Hisbullah. As much as I would have wanted to be there, I decided that it was wiser to go watch it on TV with a friend. As I arrived, the opening reading had just finished. My friend said she cried at the mention of those who died because she remembered how many Arabs had died in recent decades due to Western oppression. As Nasrallah talked, we admired his style and his honesty, and my turn came to feel sad when he talked about Palestine and made his promises to Palestine.

Nasrallah is clearly a nationalist leader completely in touch with and animated by popular support. He talks directly to the people at hand. He does not give them ample time to cheer. They in their millions go to total silence the minute he starts talking again.

I noticed that everyone in Lebanon was talking about the sectarian divisions but Nasrallah reminded them that there were no sectarian divisions but rather political divisions. This was excellent but fell short, of course, of clarifying these political divisions as being divisions along class lines. Another important aspect was his leadership in regard to Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, including them in the general Arab nation and urging unity and liberation, and the cessation of sectarian struggle in Iraq. He made clear his disregard of Arab states and their governmental leadership.

Nasrallah praised the Lebanese military and called them brothers and said that it was the government, the disunited government, which was responsible for turning them into an adding machine of Israeli incursions rather than the heroic men that they were. He added that they must be armed with modern weapons. Nasrallah urged everyone to work for an honest, clean, moral, responsible, united government. He said that personalities are not important but that all should work for such a government of Lebanon that is not Hisbullah.

He also declared that they are stronger now militarily than they were before the war and that they will never use their weapons against a single Lebanese. He said that weapons are not forever and that once there is a safe and defensible Lebanon at a future time, Hisbullah’s weapons would naturally be unnecessary.

Nasrallah also clarified and stressed how this victory was historic and that it was a victory not for Hisbullah but for all Lebanon, for Palestine, and for the entire Arab Nation. Pride and optimism were clearly the message he wanted to communicate

Amazingly, the huge crowd came and went without tragedy or undue difficulties for the city of Beirut. All over the streets, people were happy and banners waved in the air declaring the victory to be a divine victory but also congratulating the people, their dignity, and their will to resist. Beirutis were to their vast majority in support of the victory celebration. But everyone in Lebanon has the quality of making things work regardless of what. Little problems and little knots dissolve in the general willingness to grease the motion of life, to make a bit of livelihood, to respect other, to laugh a little. If the Palestinian trait is stubbornness, then the Lebanese trait is clearing the little problems.

Report Number Nine from Lebanon: A swim at the beach

Sept. 23, 2006

We arrived at the beach, one that is built out of cement balconies of many levels over rock next to the famous Rauche. On the cement slabs were many spots of oil, some large and some small splatters. They colored my feet and took a lot of scrubbing to remove. Yellow awnings were discolored with various tints of tarry oil. The deck chairs in their hundreds had had to be replaced. They were all new. Red floating rectangular volumes of plastic were tinted with oil. The chain of floats marking the safety zone for swimmers were all black. As I had approached the beach from a distance, I had thought them all heads of hair, people swimming far out into the water as normal. But no, no one was in the sea. People swam in the pool filled with cleaned seawater, and they lounged under umbrellas looking over the beautiful ocean. I stayed with my friend to attend the sunset. And it did set slowly, turning redder and reminding me of my childhood days on the beaches of Yafa.

I recognized the location of this beach from my own childhood when I was first there as a refugee from Palestine between 1948 and 1951. At the inlet we used to swim in, a flotilla of oil and garbage held me fascinated in horror. I was told that it is merely a fragment of the many larger flotillas. Plastic bottles of spring water, once clear, now were a thick oily black. The slick of oil and garbage expanded and shrank with the waves. Among the garbage was a yellow container floating upright tinted with various layers of black, refracting the rainbow colors of the sun, a thing of accidental beauty in the environmental disaster.

But today the beach waned in comparison to the many taxi drivers with whom I went going here and there to my many appointments. The taxi drivers of Beirut on this day, Sept. 23, the day after the victory celebration and the first day of Ramadan, were all lit-up with hope and joy… their voice is Nasrallah and he had just spoken their thoughts to the world and they adored him.

One talked all the way in defense of Nasrallah, arguing against all the accusations and in the end apologized for talking so much. I told him he spoke the truth and he beamed beautifully. Another listened to a radio covering the celebration event of the day before. He listened intently all along the way even while his rickety car and radio made all manner of audible and palpable intrusions. He listened with hope and joy unlike.

Nasrallah animated these men unlike anything else. His goodwill extended to his clients and to the world around him, to those who drove badly and to those who parked askew in the narrow street. It was as though a new light was shining after years of imprisonment. There are those that, of course, are sitting back and watching and complaining about the complexity of the political situation in the land of Lebanon. Some claiming how in the good old days there were only three parties but that now there are 140 parties.