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CHAPTER 1
The Deeds
1
"When we drove into Qana last year," Joseph told me, scanning the gray concrete houses on either side of the road, "we heard flames roaring, the sound of the jets, people screaming, and the ringing of cell phones." He looked at me and shrugged. "The relatives of people were calling to see if they were OK." Joseph worked for the Red Cross during the 2006 war with Israel and was one of the first to enter the village after an Israeli bombardment killed twenty-eight Lebanese civilians. Soft-spoken, slight, he was solicitous on the surface, but underneath he seemed watchful, even wary. When I hired him as my driver and interpreter to take me south from Beirut, I knew only that he drove a taxi with his father and worked as a draftsman in an engineering firm to pay his way at Lebanese University. But then he offered to take me to Qana. He could show it to me, he said; he could tell me what he'd seen.
To get to Qana, we needed military clearance, and so we'd stopped at the central army compound in Sidon, one of the major cities in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese intelligence officer who handled foreign press was dressed in blue jeans and a checked Oxford, his shirttail hanging out. His wire-rimmed glasses gave him a bemused air, and his thoroughly unmilitary bearing unsettled me. I knew that he knew that I knew he had all the power, and while he seemed to enjoy this, he also seemed to appreciate the absurdity of his own position. Why should he be the one to control who went to the south of Lebanon?
"This is not my decision," he said. "You need to get permission from the military authority in Beirut."
"But," I explained, "when we came yesterday to the base, I was told that we were to talk to you, and that you could grant us permission."
"Who are you writing your story for?"
I tried to explain that VQR was a general-interest magazine and that I wanted to tell the Lebanese side of the story of the 2006 war against the Israelis. He could barely keep from rolling his eyes: How many times had someone like me come in and said the same thing? And which side of the war would that be — the Druze, the Shia, the Sunni, the Christians?
I wasn't exactly a seasoned reporter — as a matter of fact, I'd spent most of my writing life as a poet. This was my first so-called assignment, and the role of foreign correspondent felt a little outsized. As the officer stared me down, I realized his checked Oxford was, in fact, a cowboy shirt, complete with snaps and pocket flaps. And when I noticed his cowboy boots shining under the rickety metal table, on which a comic book and various official-looking papers were spread in casual disarray, I began to feel a little desperate, realizing that whatever I'd expected to find in Lebanon would be of an order of complexity beyond any of the books I'd read, or the people I'd talked to, in preparation for the trip. I started to babble about how close to Washington, DC, my magazine was and how it was read by important DC politicians. I could picture my editor grinning, exhorting: Shovel faster, boy-o,shovel faster. At last the officer smiled — quite genially, in fact — and lifted his hand the way a casting director might to spare himself one moment more of a bad actor. He asked Joseph where we wanted to go.
Joseph, his face tense during the entire exchange, wanting to help but knowing how capricious the military authorities could be, said simply, "Qana." The officer wrote a few words in Arabic on a scrap of paper and said, "This will get you where you're going. Show it at all the checkpoints." He then shrugged good-naturedly: "Beirut has many good nightclubs and shops. I hope you will visit them." I assured him I would. Then he looked at me and said, "Everyone says that we Lebanese are good at two things. Fighting. And shopping." I nodded and smiled, he nodded and smiled, and Joseph and I went back to the car.
On our way south we inched along in the dust cloud kicked up by dump trucks, convoys of United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and Lebanese Army transport vehicles. All the coastal bridges had been bombed to rebar and rubble and were now being jackhammered apart by work crews. As the sun beat on the sea in the distance and the rocks riled the waves into scuffed-up patches of foam, I remembered that Qana was the place where Jesus worked his first miracle. At a wedding feast, Jesus turns water into wine and inadvertently humiliates the bridegroom for serving up plonk, at least compared to Jesus's miraculous vintage. That I was on my way to this scene of biblical faux pas and realpolitik slaughter in a cab I'd rented for the day — the logo TRUST TAXI emblazoned across the rear window — was just the sort of irony that made Lebanon Lebanon.
Checkpoint after checkpoint, we flashed our flimsy scrap of paper and my passport at the soldiers lounging in their flimsy wooden booths, or just as often leaning on stacks of tires painted red and white. Between checkpoints, I studied the map, locating Qana, then searching out each of the twelve official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon — though by now there was nothing camp-like about them. These were established neighborhoods built alongside Lebanese neighborhoods, in the capital city of Beirut and throughout the country, and they were home to somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 refugees, depending on whose statistics you believe. Three generations had grown up in these makeshift cinderblock-and-rebar quarters since the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 and 1949, when over 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been driven from their homes by the Israeli forces. In the subsequent armed conflicts between Israel and Lebanon, Israel had labeled them "terrorist strongholds," while Palestinians saw them as centers of resistance against Israeli aggression.
I hadn't expected violence when I came to Lebanon. I'd originally been scheduled to leave the United States in December 2006. But when a prominent Christian politician, Pierre Gemayel, was shot dead by three gunmen, and the country seemed on the verge of civil war, the trip was postponed to May 2007. By that time, everything was supposed to have calmed down. But the violence that had been building for months erupted the moment I stepped off the plane — and only got worse, in a series of car bombings, shootings, and a full-fledged siege by the Lebanese Army on a Palestinian refugee camp where Islamic fighters, led by Fatah al-Islam, had holed up.
To Joseph, now twenty-two, none of this seemed unusual. He was a child of war. During the first five years of his life, Beirut was a chaos of sectarian zones, a dizzying swap meet of shifting alliances, arms deals, and gangland struggles. He lived through the Israeli and the Syrian occupations, which ended, respectively, in 2000 and 2005. And that's not counting the everyday threat of political assassinations carried out by car bombings, an occurrence so frequent that you'll see television ads for car-bomb detectors. "ProSec: For a World of Security." A man dressed in a fashionable leather jacket holds a device emitting an electronic beam that senses plastic explosive under his Mercedes's fender. A useful gadget, really, in a country where five anti-Syrian ministers of parliament have been assassinated in the last two years. What a thousand kilograms of Semtex will do to a motorcade — enveloping in the blast not only the target vehicle but anything moving within fifty yards — obsesses Lebanese news channels.
I confess that as we drove I was feeling a little paranoid, eyeing cars and their drivers. On TV, two nights running, I'd watched cars exploding into flames — just as they do in movies — and later I visited the scorched remains. There were no "security zones," just a casual-looking ribbon of yellow caution tape declaiming in Arabic and English, STAY BACK. I could stand close enough to see how the blast heat had annealed the body paint to a glassy blue-black sheen. Doors and windows blown away, upholstery fire-gutted. One skeletal chassis resembled the fossil remains of some docile, plant-eating dinosaur. The locals who walked by barely gave it a second glance. When Joseph spoke of this kind of destruction, he was deadpan, unimpressed by its drama for an outsider like me. "Welcome to Lebanon," he said. Welcome to Lebanon: how often I heard it repeated, followed by a half- humorous, half-stoical shrug, when I asked about the car bombings. Cabdrivers, hotel clerks, soldiers, politicians, professors, Palestinian refugees: Welcome to Lebanon.
2
"This is the first time for me to be in Qana since last year," said Joseph. "It's strange to see it so quiet." Where bombs had fallen now resembled construction sites, rubble piled high on the side of the road, though clearly much of it had been removed. "There was another massacre here," he told me, "during the 1996 war with Israel. They bombed a UN compound where the farmers came to keep safe. There is a memorial. People from all over Lebanon come here to see it." One hundred six people died when Israeli howitzer shells collapsed the roof. The 2006 massacre was the result of two bombs — one almost certainly precision-guided and made in the United States — that exploded into a three-story building with a subterranean garage where members of the extended Hashim and Shalhub families had gone for cover. Twenty-eight of them were killed.
The Israel Defense Forces insisted they had evidence that the building was housing Hezbollah fighters and weapons, including missile launchers. But according to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, these claims were disputed by a top Israeli military correspondent who wrote in Haaretz, "It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."
"Our team," Joseph told me, "was called by the military on July thirtieth, at one fifty a.m., and we left Beirut as soon as they called. We got to Qana at four a.m., but the Hezbollah soldiers ordered us not to enter the village. They were waiting for the Israelis to tell them that it was safe to go in, that the bombing was finished. The Hezbollah soldiers said they would shoot us if we tried to enter without their permission. We could see nothing but smoke and rubble. We wanted to enter the town, but they held us back for two and a half hours."
Joseph told me it was common practice for the Israelis to issue general warnings about impending bombardments. But at Qana, he said, the villagers had been too afraid to leave when all the roads out were being so heavily bombed. When I asked him how he felt about Israel, he began to talk about the United States — something that happened again and again, from Lebanon's former prime minister, Salim Hoss, to taxi drivers and hotel workers. "Before 9/11, all of us wanted to go to America to work or study, but that has changed. America is seen as not friendly to us. And also because of Bush and his support of Israel." He glanced sidelong, as if worried he might offend me. "In our eyes, there is no difference between what Israel wants and what Washington wants. They are the same voice speaking."
As we drove past makeshift scaffolding around half-rebuilt cinderblock houses, Joseph was careful to distinguish between the actions of the Israeli and US governments and ordinary citizens. And he had equally complex feelings about Hezbollah, which most Lebanese of whatever sect regard not as terrorists but as both a resistance movement against Israel and a mainstream political party. But nothing is ever simple in Lebanon. Joseph was ambivalent about their religious and social agenda — feelings only deepened by his Christianity, which in Beirut is almost a form of tribal identification. Since the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) pitted every sect against every other sect, with the major division falling between Christian and Muslim, survival depended on religious solidarity and the willingness to band together with other sects in sometimes surprisingly short-term alliances. Even the current legal system is divided. Lebanon recognizes eighteen different religious sects, called confessions, and each confession has its legally binding religious courts that handle social issues like marriage, divorce, intermarriage between faiths, and inheritance. So eighteen different law codes operate simultaneously. For example, according to Muslim codes, a Muslim woman can't marry a Christian, but a Christian woman can marry a Muslim — though according to Muslim law, she cannot inherit.
Joseph, despite navigating these divisions, was a fairly secular Christian who loved the Rolling Stones and didn't seem much interested in politics as they broke down along sectarian lines. "During the Civil War, things were not good between Muslims and Christians," he explained. "My father is a fireman — after a battle, the firemen picked up the bodies and put out the fires — and so he saw the worst part of the war. People stayed with their own people. But for my generation, it is different. As a boy, I played with Muslim children. To me, religion is much less important." Still, he said, "If you are a Christian, you tend to live among Christians, marry a Christian. I have many Muslim friends, but your main connections are to other Christians." Each sect is similarly divided over its view of America. "Because America is seen to be anti-Muslim, Muslims hate Americans. But we Christians tend to love Americans, because America supports us. Both points of view are wrong. All the leaders are wrong," Joseph said, as we drove under a banner of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a chubby, bespectacled cleric with a bushy black beard. Beneath his smiling face ran the Arabic caption: THEY FOUGHT THEY RESISTED THEY WON. "We Lebanese are good at blaming the other side. There is enough blame for all sides. We must look at ourselves, but we are bad mirrors. All we see are the things done to us by the other side."
Joseph let down his reserve for the first time. "I live war. I've lived only eight years my whole life in peace. But I lose my nerve when I hear this thing from this mother." He spoke softly, but fiercely: "I saved children out of one home, two were suffocating under rubble and bricks, two had broken bones, they were two and seven years old, and their parents, their faces, they were stone — I cried as I worked, their mother did not cry, she said, 'This is for Hassan Nasrallah.' If I wasn't in uniform, I would have killed her. I would die for my children. She said it was a sacrifice for Hassan Nasrallah. I would not sacrifice my children for anything. Yes, to see the reactions of the parents killed us. We all have martyrs, but I do not call a boy or a girl of seven or eight years a martyr. How many sins did he make?"
He parked the car near a mosque pocked by shrapnel. "We saw bodies of children. There was rubble and dust. We were four ambulances in all. Our first job was to look for the living. Then we took care of the most serious cases. I could hear lots of screaming, but it was sometimes hard to see where it was coming from. We found five children. I did CPR on one until we could get him to the ambulance. One had broken bones, and the other was wounded in the thigh. We put them in the ambulance, and then the driver took them to a hospital thirty kilometers from Qana. Three of the people we pulled out of the wreckage died on the way to the hospital."
We walked by a house that had collapsed into itself, just the doorframe standing and a fragment of the back wall of what had once been someone's living room. Joseph and I stepped through the doorway, and he pointed to a pile of mangled rebar and concrete. "This door was blocked by rubble, but the door was still on its hinges. We could hear two women screaming inside, but they wouldn't open the door. They didn't believe us when we said we were Red Cross. So we had to break down the door. We were all completely covered in dust and it was hard for them to see our uniforms. We could still hear the jets circling overhead, and they were scared that we were Israelis. They had a flashlight and lit our faces so that at first we were blinded. But they hugged us when they saw we were Red Cross."
We walked past a bombed vacant lot where an old man in a Mercedes was assessing his property. A tall, dapper fellow, he offered us a cigarette, and told us how the Israeli bombs demolished his five stores and the villa that he'd built here for his retirement. "The Israeli drones must have spotted weapons here. Hezbollah was hiding rifles and grenades between my houses. So that's why they bombed me. I am lucky to have family in Detroit. They all sent me money to rebuild. But since I have a green card to work in the US, Hezbollah would not give me any money, even though it is their fault this happened." He then insisted that UNIFIL — the UN peacekeeping force — had told the Israelis about the weapons cache in the corner of his lot, and I could sense him trying to control the anger and frustration in his voice. "They are supposed to help us but they help the Israelis."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Land Between Two Rivers"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Tom Sleigh.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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