Border Crossing:

Redrawing Lebanon’s

Ethnic Map

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in the opposite direction, the trees were on the wrong side of the road that I had watched over the years. The sea lay to the east. Lebanon was in the west. The tide swept in from the Orient, not from Europe. The sun set heavily, boiling down into the sea in the east, darkening the apartment blocks and the trees, casting shadows across the mirror… Hold up a mirror and there were two realities, two countries, two governments, each complementing the other, fragmenting and fracturing along the fault line of the Beirut ruins. Thus did Lebanon represent itself.

Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, 1990

Among us, wars happen in order that the names in one place should be alike… I now believe that we must approach the world another way. And this is impossible.

Rashid Al-Daif, Dear Mr. Kawabata, 1995

But the children of tomorrow are the ones called by life, and they follow it with steady steps and heads high, they are the dawn of new frontiers...

Giran Khalil Gibran, The New Frontier, 1925

24 April 2005

The Martyrs Square is lit with nighttime campfires between tents of youth. They have been camping out there for over two months now, demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanese land. Across the street, in an empty parking lot, our smaller group of youth enacts its own kind of liberation. We have come together to celebrate Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. As a Jewish American, this has special significance for me.

Tonight we choose not to focus solely Jewish liberation. Such a limited vision cannot contain the rich patchwork of identities in our group. We are Lebanese, Palestinian, Armenian, Algerian, gay, woman, Jewish, Sunni, Shiite, and Maronite Christian. Each of us has struggled to overcome a history of oppression. Some of us have fought to end the oppression of others. And all of us are struggling to cross ethnic boundaries, to erase the borders that have isolated our communities.

This act of coming together is especially poignant in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands have died in inter-ethnic warfare. Today, unity across ethnicities seems like something only this new generation can even begin to achieve. The youth of Lebanon lost their childhood to a war they had no part in starting. Now, it is up to them to learn from the mistakes of their parents. A growing movement of youth seems ready to lay to rest the sectarianism that fueled the battles they inherited.

Tonight we share music and culture. We cross the borders of language and religion. By the third glass of wine, we lose track of the things that divide us. Arabic, French, English, and Hebrew, weave together into conversations and songs.

However, the legacy of war will not be easy to overcome. Tomorrow will be what we make of it. I look at the people around me, wondering if we are up to the challenge.

Part I: Lebanon

Geography

Barely a century old, Lebanon has yet to fully embrace its nationhood. Despite recent calls for national unity, and claims thereof, the country remains deeply, almost irreconcilably, divided. Some 3.8 million people are divided into eighteen distinct religious communities that share the tiny patch of 10,400 square kilometers – one fortieth the size of California. Some of these communities date back hundreds of years; others have immigrated much more recently.

The country’s terrain is as varied as its inhabitants. A one-day drive travels through all four seasons at shocking speed. That same drive also spans socio-economic, cultural, and religious populations as diverse as the land they inhabit.

From Beirut’s dense buildings, coastal climate, and metropolitan pollution, it’s just a two-hour drive southeast to Nabatieh, the northernmost edge of the 250 square mile strip occupied by Israel for 22 years, ending in January 2000. Ubiquitous portraits of party leaders are a political barometer across the Middle East, and you can tell you’ve left Beirut by the posters on the walls.

When the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, overnight his picture hung everywhere in Beirut. Signs the size of small buildings were unfurled from the roofs of office high-rises. Smaller signs were distributed to pedestrians, pasted onto walls in rows, or hung like prayer flags from ropes that stretched across the boulevards. Thus Beirut mourned its hero, for Hariri had lavished favors on that city. They paid little notice to the US$ 43 billion debt he was incurring for future generations, as he employed his own construction company, Solidère, to rebuild downtown for the third time since 1976.

In Nabatieh, the signs change. They do so gradually along the route from Beirut, but in this former occupation bordertown, it becomes clear that the winds had shifted. No longer does Hariri’s reassuring smile peer out from shop windows and doorways. For Nabatieh is the gateway into Shiite country. Here, Nabih Berri* and Hasan Nasrallah** smile down from behind their beards, full of religious piety and benevolent charity.

In the road leading south out of Nabatieh, a few Lebanese soldiers man a checkpoint that is the doorway to the South of Lebanon. It doesn’t matter that the Israelis fled several years ago, some leaving their tanks behind as they ran to escape the nightmare they had created. Those who want to enter must show appropriate identification and add their name to a long list. For foreigners without permits from the Lebanese General Security office in Sidon, the door is closed. No exceptions.

The south calls itself a country within a country. It is the Shiite heartland of Lebanon, a land of small farming villages known for their impenetrability to the Lebanese Army, and for their famous defenders, the two Shiite militias Hezbollah and Amal. Amal, once the only significant Shiite power bloc, has now lost popularity for its dealings with Israel, and for its ineffective military tactics. Hezbollah, a militia forged in the fires of war, has become legendary in its successful struggle against the Israeli occupation, and still manages to capture headlines every few months by firing a rocket into northern Israel. However, its leaders have since formed a political party, and now busy themselves mostly with political campaigning, administrative work, a few seats in Parliament, and providing health care, education, and community resources to their constituency.

It is Hezbollah that keeps up Al-Khiam, the stark prison where the Israeli proxy ‘South Lebanese Army’ kept hundreds of prisoners in various states of solitary confinement and torture. Members of the SLA fled in 2000, on the backs of the retreating Israelis with whom they sought asylum. Their retreat was so rushed, even the electric wires were left hanging in the torture rooms. Now, former prisoners man the gates, giving tours of this place that had been their own personal hell. From one wall in the courtyard, the mountains fold into one another, and, at an approximate boundary they become Palestine.

Back in Nabatieh, mountains sprawl in all directions, thick with trees under a clear, clean sky. It is eternal autumn, brisk and fresh; or spring, since the leaves never change. A deceptive paradise. A more sinister force lies deep in the mountains, forcing drivers to pay careful attention to keep to the one-lane roads: they are still littered with Israeli landmines and abandoned tanks. Those tanks, once fearsome monsters, are now victory trophies for the Shiite militias, benign relics left in place for tourists to pose next to. But the landmines have claimed upwards of 220 casualties since the Israeli withdrawal in January of 2000.

North of those conflicted South Lebanese mountains, but East of Beirut, lies the spectacular Bekaa. Here coexists a strange mixture of religious conservatism and organized thievery. The valley is made up of villages and clans that make their money from a network of casinos, stolen cars, and a flourishing hash industry from which Syria makes occasional attempts to reap the benefits. It is one of poorest parts of the country but also boasts the Temple of Jupiter of Baalbek. The sprawling Roman temple, many of its enormous pillars still intact, is a popular tourist site and a source of pride for many Lebanese.

It is also in the Bekaa that the Syrian intelligence set up its Lebanon headquarters in 1976. The fortress made a business of issuing secret decisive lists of who would win in upcoming elections, who would disappear forever should they happen upon a Syrian checkpoint, and who would not even make it that far. However, it was emptied out in short order in the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination, and soon became just another skeleton in a series of skeletons left behind by millennia of occupation. The most ancient ruins, such as the Temple of Jupiter, had over time become sources of national pride. But recent history was too recent yet to be glorious. The most impressive of its leftovers are the Israeli tanks, the Syrian intelligence headquarters, and Al-Khiam, each one a reminder of a history lurking all too close for comfort.

Heading north from the Bekaa, the mountains grow taller, lose their perennial green, and don thick white snowcaps of ice that never melts. Here is a winter so bitter that only in the height of summer can the roads be passed. At the highest point, in the thinning frigid air, is Mount Sannine. The peak is home to Lebanon’s old cedar trees, the insignia of the national flag and the pride of many Lebanese.

It is Christian country in the North, and every Christian militia appropriately invokes the cedar on its logo. More mountains, more villages, more ruins – and then a straight shot back down to Beirut, that forest of buildings under a low-hanging cloud of smog. Back to that microcosm of the whole country, with its eternal conflict brewing through its eternal coastal summer.

The Legend of Hariri

When I arrived in Beirut on a Friday evening, the city was hidden beneath the night. In the distance, I could barely make out outlines of mountains against the sky; the canopy of stars faded into a curtain of lights that blinked from the shadows of mountain villages. Beneath the backdrop of sky and mountains, the sea stood out like a black bowl.

We stood in the airport parking lot, looking at the city below. From this vantage point, the immense bloodshed, out of which Lebanon had made a name for itself, seemed as distant as the horizon.

But, as we descended into the city, neon lights blotted out the stars, and shadows were replaced by realities, of buildings and people, of traffic and food, all things competing for space. My two guides, Mohammed and Said, who had come to pick me up at the airport, pointed out landmarks as we rolled through the city. Said was a short, slight, 27-year-old Lebanese who wore the thick glasses of a budding intellectual, who spoke in the academic French of his philosophy books while chain-smoking Gitane cigarettes. Mohammed was an ebullient, enormous 21-year-old Palestinian, a computer nerd with a crush on Emma Goldman*. They had been sent to pick me up by Association Najdeh, a Palestinian women’s and children’s center with whom I would be working in Lebanon. Together, they would be my first eyes into Lebanon, Mohammed with his visions of utopia, and Said with his perfect academic cynicism.

“Here is the Hamra, the historical meeting place for Beirut’s intelligentsia.” The car turned onto a street made of black bricks; my tour had begun. “At one point,” Said continued, “before you or I were born, this place had soul.”

Here, for example, was the old café that had been a second home for leftists with a few Lebanese Lira to spend on a cup of coffee and a chair. It was now a chain clothing store boasting Valentine’s Day sales for pretty, imitation European clothes. It had been thus transformed in Beirut’s famous “Reconstruction,” a controversial subject that would be the topic of innumerable discussions in the days to come, following the assassination of its head visionary. Across the street was the Wimpy’s, a Lebanese version of McDonalds. It was distinguished only by the sign outside, which been erected to remember the day when a Lebanese gunman shot several Israeli soldiers dead in the restaurant, before he himself was killed.

Said rolled down the brick road for a few blocks, then turned the car around and headed north. We arrived at the Corniche, one of the prides of Beirut, with its strip of elite hotels and restaurants running parallel to the walkway, with its vendors of coffee and tea and c’ak and gardenia garlands in the spring. It overlooked the sea, pitch black except for a couple of ships blinking along the horizon. The mountains curved around the water like a horseshoe.

It was quiet at the Corniche. Nothing suggested that three days later the very place where we stood would be closed off for good as 300 kilograms of explosives tore through the seaside, through the car of the former prime minister, and through the myth that the war had ended.

The explosion should have come as no surprise, for to be a politician in Lebanon was to take your life in your hands. Kamal Jumblatt* had been assassinated by Syria. Bashir Gemayel** by Syrian nationalists. Dany Chamoun† and his two sons, by unidentified hitmen, probably Phalangists. Elie Hobeika†† by his own benefactors, the Israelis. Scarcely a soul in Parliament had not seen members of their immediate family assassinated by the immediate families of other members of Parliament. For decades now, the same players had played the same dangerous game. Films from the seventies and old newspaper photos show the same faces conducting politics thirty years ago, faces that today smile reassuringly from the posters pasted along on the walls of the country. On the posters of the luckier ones, thirty years have drawn deep lines and a receding hairline. For those less lucky, untimely deaths have frozen their portraits into eternal youth, and their faces have reemerged in the portraits of their progeny.

Perhaps in those pictures of aging and frozen faces lies the myth of Hariri on which the lie of Reconstruction stood. Rafik Hariri was the poster child for the country Lebanon wanted itself to be: carefree, confident, untouchable. Lebanese by birth, he had moved to Saudi Arabia in 1965 at the age of 21, keeping his own hands clean while those in Lebanon bloodied theirs. While Lebanon destroyed itself in a civil war spanning from 1975-1991, Rafik Hariri built up a construction business and became the tenth richest man in the world. In brief interludes in the fighting, he would send his people to rebuild Beirut’s city center Centreville, only to watch it get torn down again within months. For the front line of the war ran right through the middle of Hariri’s beautiful buildings.

It is, of course, a fundamentally different experience to live inside a war than it is to watch it from outside. From outside, the problem always seems to be the (unenlightened) people who are fighting, and therefore the solution seems to be foreign (enlightened) intervention. With just such logic, foreign army after foreign army entered Lebanon, promising redemption. They were unaware then that their presence would only sow more destruction.

Hariri was his own foreign one-man army. But instead of weapons, Hariri sent buildings. The same buildings that the armies in Lebanon destroyed, Hariri built up again. It was his solution to the war, an uncomplicated one, which is why, like the rationale of the foreign occupying armies, it finally fell apart on its own flawed foundations.

The truth was, no one from the outside could understand the logic of the Lebanese civil war. It was a war that followed its own logic, pulled onward by an inertia that spared no one, not Hariri’s buildings, and in the end, not Hariri. He was destined to join the ranks of Kamal Jumblatt, Pierre Gemayel, and Elie Hobieka on the walls of Beirut, eternally young and handsome, smiling with easy confidence at a world that had been kind to him until the end.

It was that easy confidence that people loved. His unbloodied hands awakened the dreams of the Lebanese for a life unblemished by war. Muhammed Faour, a sociology professor at the American University in Beirut, described the image of Hariri in the early nineties:

In 1993, Hariri was a newcomer to the premiership and a lot of hope was pinned on his perceived ability to create a drastic economic and political transformation. His projected image then was that of a savior capable of miraculously transiting Lebanon from a state of chaos, destruction, and misery to stable peace, busting construction, and sustained prosperity. The media portrayed Hariri as a man who could obliterate the profound anguish of demoralization and despair the Lebanese had developed, and they created an air of genuine hope and ever-lasting bliss.1

With a combination of popular support and corruption, Hariri would maintain his post of Prime Minister for ten of the next twelve years. He would use the time to implement his “economic master plan, Horizon 2000,” the official name for the Reconstruction. The plan carried the hopes of many. But the promise of Hariri contrasted starkly with the reality he created. Under Hariri’s administration, the gap between rich and poor only widened. Hotels to accommodate Gulf tourists sprung up along the coastline of Beirut, while in poor areas people struggled to rebuild their homes.*

Hariri’s pet project, and the centerpiece of the Reconstruction, was Centreville. These are the buildings that Hariri had constructed out of the rubble of the front line during pauses in the war. Their walls had been made of pale yellow bricks to give them a false appearance of aging, and the streets struck outwards from the grand clock in the center, like spokes on a wheel. European style cafes lined the streets with chairs and Gulf tourists in business suits, drinking five-dollar cappuccinos and inhaling apple tobacco from water pipes.

Already in 1998, Faour could articulate the disparity between the bubble of Centreville’s prosperous streets and the world outside:

There is evidence of a growing rift between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ … About 60% of households in Lebanon earn under $800 per month and 20% earn under $325, a bleak account knowing that the average household size is close to five persons… The minimum legal wage ($250 per month) is below the line of extreme poverty… Careful observers who have past knowledge of Lebanon can recognize a new pattern of social polarization.3

All this would be forgiven and forgotten by the media in short order following Hariri’s death. Like the Temple of Jupiter, history would transform Centreville from an elitist haven of luxury for the rich, into a national symbol of past and future glory.

*****

Said, Mohammed and I, sat on the Parliament steps that overlooked Centreville, chewing manoushas (Lebanese-style pizza – fresh dough circles dripping with cheese and spices), and sharing sodas. Below, the ancient Roman baths were lit up amid overgrown grasses. Light bulbs carved shadows into old rock. Bored looking kids in compulsory military service uniforms guarded the entrances of streets. A couple walked by, holding hands. It was my first evening in Lebanon, and there was no obvious hint of the upheaval only three days away.

Only a few people might say, much later, that they saw it coming. Said and Mohammed were two such people. They spoke urgently of the Reconstruction, describing in detail what their Lebanon looked li