I don't want to talk about politics!

I came here to find out a few things:

• After all these years, what's going on in the country I lived in for five formative years?
• There's something enormous going on in the region generally. What is it, and what's the prognosis?
• What's happening to the Palestinians in Lebanon, with all the new stresses?
• How's the fighting next door in Syria affecting Lebanon?
• If the Syrian fighting continues becoming ever more sectarian, will it spread to Lebanon, which has many of the same communal fissures?
• In the obvious struggle going on in the region between secularism and religious confessionalism, what is Lebanon's role?
• Lebanon has always had the most vibrant civil society in the Mideast. What's its status?

Since I got here, I've added a few more, but that list is long enough to make one thing clear: it's all about politics.

So it's been interesting to discover how my friends and new acquaintances react to my questions. Across the board, the answer is the same: 'I don't want to talk about politics! Khalas! (end of story). Followed by anything up to about 3 hours of impassioned discussion.

Nobody wants to talk politics because politics has totally failed them for the last several decades. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost to politics, millions have left, and most of the rest have seen their lives irredeemably changed for the worse....and after all that Lebanon is still run by the same 6 or 7 families that have run it essentially as a mafia operation forever. In many cases, the sons now rule where the fathers used to be. Incredibly, in a few cases the fathers themselves are still calling the shots (literally).

There's a couple of other reasons. Among them I could mention in passing the fact that Lebanese politics has always been run largely from Damascus, i.e., by an even bigger mafia operation. This is currently hanging in the balance, but for the moment the Syrian influence is still very great.

Even more important, everybody I've talked to so far - young or old - believes that events in this part of the world are not determined here - that the invisible hands of America and Israel (and not always so invisible) control what happens, who rules, who lives, who dies.

People who believe this readily admit that the conspiracy theory of politics has always been a trait of politics here, and that it cripples efforts to change things for the better. As a new friend said at lunch today, 'everybody says things aren't fair, but nobody seems willing to figure out how to make them fair.'

Another friend was telling a friend of his today about my visit and about how I used to teach in the village of Ba'aqline. His friend immediately replied: 'Oh that was the school where all the MI6 Brits were teaching as a cover!'

In fact, there were NO Brits in Ba'aqline during my 4 years there, and therefore no MI6 presence. We were considered by many people, self-evidently, to be CIA spies, however. This almost cost us dearly at one point, something that I might use as an example of this problem in another post. Why the CIA would want spies in a village secondary school is and was never self-evident to me, though I suppose more outlandish covers have been used.

There are, in fact, a number of very good reasons why people in  this part of the world might be suspicious, and driven by a belief in conspiracy. I'll mention a few that come to mind but first I want to point out how extraordinary - and how dysfunctional - the situation is when looked at from the outside. To do that only requires a simple thought experiment: try to imagine another part of the world where this situation occurs. When American or European kids fan out through the world to experience other cultures and land up in villages in Nepal, Uruguay or Kenya, is their presence assumed to be deeply insidious? Whatever day job they may have found in India, Japan or New Zealand, are they assumed to be feverishly communicating with spy agencies at night?

This proclivity can reach absurd heights. New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, in House of Stone, the book he wrote just before his death in Syria, talks about how the residents of the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun, where he was renovating a house, were convinced he was a spy. One person was certain he had been placed in Marjayoun to report back to the CIA on weather patterns. Huh? Yet Shadid was of Lebanese origin, his family came from Marjayoun, and the house he was redoing had belonged to his grandfather!

Another rejoinder I have tried to give - with very limited success - to this is to say something along the lines of: so, ok, let's assume it's all true. In fact, it may well be. Still, if it's true here, then it's certainly true everywhere else. After all, we know for a fact that the hand of the US is active everywhere, from Latin America all the way to east Asia. Yet, other countries and regions have managed to change their economies and politics despite this fact. What about South Korea? India? China? Venezuela? Singapore? Argentina? Chile? (and how much Chile!).

So why would people here be reasonable in the assumption that they are under a form of remote control? In two words: Israel and oil.

There's no other part of the world where those two words are true, where they determine almost everything that happens - or doesn't happen.

The theft of Palestine and the expulsion of 700,000 people from their homes (and here I'm not reporting the opinions of others, I'm stating this as a fact), as bad as it was, isn't even the worst. What most people here would consider even worse is six decades (OK, they exaggerate slightly, the US wasn't supporting Israel under Eisenhower the way we do now) of unquestioning support by the US for the perpetuation of this theft, for its continual enlargement, for Israeli settlements on the little slice of land still considered 'Palestinian', for supporting the building of an 'apartheid' wall (the Israeli term for this wall exactly equates to this word), for turning Gaza into the world's largest open-air prison...and on and on.

Why would the most powerful country in the world, which claims title and copyright to freedom and justice, support a never-ending series of injustices? The answer, according to many here: because they have absolutely no real interest in justice. And when it comes to the Arabs, justice and well-being are absolutely, utterly insignificant to Washington.

Watching the US Congress cravenly kowtow to the Prime Minister of Israel only drives the point home: the tail is now wagging the dog. How can this happen? Answer: the Jewish lobby. As one who has tangled with AIPAC and other such organizations in the US, this is something of a Gordian knot. Zionist organizations try to draw a line leading from phrases like 'Jewish lobby' directly to Kristallnacht. This needs to be rejected. The alternative is to be debarred from examining US policy, which is exactly what these groups are trying to achieve. Perhaps it will help to rephrase: it's not the 'Jewish lobby' that concerns us, it's the 'zionist lobby'. While zionism enjoys majority support today among US Jews, the two things are not synonymous. In fact, for decades before the establishment of Israel, zionists were a tiny minority among American Jews. To have opinion about zionism is not to be pro or anti Jewish (or Arab). It's to have an opinion about the disposition of the piece of land known as Palestine.

The other big thing in the Mideast is oil. Most of the people I talk to have a very cogent argument about the US, the Arab regimes and oil. The argument always ends up in the same place: rich, authoritarian client regimes and poor, desperate populations.

I'm not sure I buy this argument completely. Canada has lots of oil, but the US hasn't turned it into Saudi Arabia, much less Syria. Venezuela is another example, though it kind of cuts both ways. True, we (meaning the Bush/Cheney cabal) tried to force regime change. In fact, we were quite open about it, in line with that administration's fondness for cowboy politics. However, despite 'our' omnipotence, we failed. And Venezuela now has a second leader in the Chavez mold.

It seems to me that this is where the tendency towards conspiracy theories serves people in this area very poorly, making it easier, not harder, for these plots, if they exist, to succeed. For example, as I write this, Egypt is in turmoil, and new, secular, forces are rising and demanding enormous, historic, change. Here, people are telling me the game is rigged, the fix is in, and the outcome predetermined. If this was true, then how did the Arab Spring happen at all? True, the outcome hangs in the balance. And, true, the US, Russia,  China, and the European countries all have enormous interests at stake in the outcome. But it seems to me that the idea that there's one outcome that satisfies all these interests - and, more, that it's necessarily the worst outcome for the people of the region - is an enormous oversimplification.

Another problem is that it denies the influence of Arab society on events. Are there things that need to change in the way things are done? If so, what are they? What about the struggle between secularism and the rising tide of religious fundamentalism? What about family, clan and tribe? A friend and I were talking about this today and he recited a common phrase: 'one clan's loss is the other clan's profit'. This zero-sum approach to politics and social issues is an enormous problem, and the direct cause of the mafia form of governance so prevalent in the region.

All over the Mideast people are demanding more and different. But, if the fix is in, why bother?

In my list of two things I purposely didn't include colonialism. This is a blog, not a book.

Mohammad min Haleb

When it comes to the Syrian refugees I've given up. I've been warned by literally everyone I talk to - and I'm sure it's true - that giving them money is useless at best and, worse, perpetuates a criminal operation aimed at relieving gullible people of their hard-earned cash.

May and Karma tell me to offer them food, which can actually help ameliorate their condition. Most of them have fled vicious fighting in which no quarter is given, lost everything they have and are now adrift in a sea of indifference. Or frustration...many people are clearly in the same predicament I'm in: they want to help, but they can't figure out how to avoid enriching a bunch of thugs and criminals in the process.

It's not all criminals, of course. As one friend explained, in many cases the father, or surviving male head of a family group will send the women and children into the street to beg. The reason is simple: the men themselves could beg all day and get nothing, while a woman sitting in the street with two or three children will at least come back with something. The need to survive comes above everything. Young women, and even girls, are selling themselves (or, more correctly, being sold) all over town.

The other evening May came across a little girl of eight or so, begging alone in the street well after dark. She told May her family were 'around' but not nearby. May, violating her own rule, gave the girl some money, but said, 'when you give this to your dad, tell him it is haram (shameful), mamnua' (forbidden)' to leave you alone in the street like this at night. He should not do this.'

Whether the message was delivered and acted on is, to say the least, highly improbable. What are a little girl's chances, alone in the dark streets in the current conditions? Less than very poor. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that, in the long run, they are nearly nil. With 500,000 lost souls roaming the streets of the city, the fate of one little girl is un-noticeable. Anything can happen to her, be done to her, with impunity. And, given time, almost certainly will.

We did have one fortuitous opportunity to obey May's rule. We were waiting in front of Barbar Shawarma to put in an order and a young boy approached me for money. May noticed and said, 'no money, offer him some food'. Which I did, in my still horribly broken Arabic. He immediately said yes, so we added an additional order.

May ordering our food. The top of Mohammad's head just
visible at the bottom.

While we were waiting we asked him a few questions. His name was Mohammad. I remembered enough to ask him where he was from, and he answered, predictably, 'Syria'. I pushed my Arabic to the limit and inquired, 'What town are you from?', to which he answered 'Haleb' - Arabic for the town we call Aleppo.

It was at this point that I realized my eyes were getting wet. These kids are from Aleppo, Dara'a, Idlib - all the towns we've been reading about in the paper for two years. I used to go to Aleppo, and it was a wonderful town. For over a year I've followed from afar its destruction and the horrible suffering of its population. Now, here was one of Aleppo's kids, standing right in front of me. For him, home is a memory, food is hard to come by, he'll be lucky ever to see the inside of a school again.

Like I said at the top, I've given up. There's no way to carry shawarma sandwiches in my pockets. I'll follow May's rule whenever I can. For in between, I've decided to carry and distribute reasonable amounts of small bills. If it goes to the wrong place...that's not my problem.

Flags

Outside one of my friends' apartment in Ras Beirut there's a little roundabout - although calling it a roundabout doesn't do justice to the actual chaos of the flow of traffic. In the middle of this intersection there's a small island with a structure of sorts, to which are attached some flags. There's a Lebanese flag and what appears to be a tattered flag of assassinated Rafic Hariri's Moustaqbal (Future) party. I realized yesterday with some surprise that also flapping in the wind are two flags of the Islamic Salafists.

In conversations with friends and new acquaintances, it appears that the influence of the Salafists has been growing steadily, even in Shi'a areas. This is somewhat curious. The Salafis are not only Sunni, they are among the most extreme Sunni groups. For most of them (there are nuances) the Shi'a are kuffar, non-Muslims, or - worse - heretical Muslims. In Egypt, engulfed as I write this in tumult over murder charges brought against the deposed President Mohammed Morsi, the Salafis joined the secularists in bringing down Morsi's government. Not because they agreed with the secularists, but because they felt Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had betrayed their charge to islamicize Egyptian society.That their view of an Islamic society leaves little room even for the Shi'a is illustrated by the recent attacks against Egyptian Shi'a in which four people were beaten to death

Here in Lebanon, tensions between Sunni and Shi'a are very high. In Sidon, less than an hour south, Salafi Shaikh Ahmad al 'Assir has been for months attacking Hezbullah and the Shi'a community. By attacking, I mean explicitly calling for war and violence in the battle against the Shi'a. Since Sidon is a largely Sunni town in the middle of a sea of Shi'a (most Lebanese Shi'a live in the south), the wisdom of his fulminations seems questionable. Over the last year there have been repeated violent clashes between 'Assir supporters and Hezbullah. These culminated in June with a 'mini-war' between the 'Assir's group and the Lebanese Army in which a large number of people were killed and wounded. Eventually the Army succeeded in bringing a return - of sorts - to order. The sheikh and several key followers apparently eluded capture, and no one seems to know for sure where he might be.

Avenue Trad

The persistence of memory.

As the years pass, one's memory of important past events gets foggier. The connections between well-remembered moments fade, and after a while all you're left with is a bunch of impressions interspersed with vivid but momentary images. Eventually, if you try to recount these events you find yourself doubting: did these things really happen, or am I remembering it all wrong? Worse yet, am I making stuff up?

I had an interesting, and very unexpected, experience along these lines a couple of days ago, when I accidentally crossed Avenue Trad.

The backstory is this. During the war I was staying in Zouk Mikhael  - or was it Zouk Mosbeh? There it goes again! - with my friend Lionel Ghurra, now deceased, in his wonderful old home above the Mediterranean. Fighting was quite intense in Beirut and Lionel was getting ever more frequent phone calls from a friend of his - a woman with two teenage daughters - caught in a building in the middle of the fighting. It was clear from the terror of the calls that none of them were doing well. Along with bullets, a rocket had come through one of their windows and destroyed their kitchen.

After a couple of days of constant calls Lionel realized that the psychological distress was becoming unbearable and he asked me and another friend of his whether we'd be willing to drive with him to Beirut and try to extract these ladies from their predicament. We both said yes, and all that was left was to try to find the right moment, when a lull in the fighting might give us a chance to get them out. A day later it seemed a good moment had come, so we jumped into the car and drove, very carefully, into town and as close to their building as we could get. The only problem: their building was just on the other side of the line, which meant that we had to park several blocks short, then walk, scoot and dodge the rest of the way.

At one point we reached a wide intersection. Looking across, it seemed a mile wide. Someone warned us not to cross, as snipers were active. I recall him explaining that someone else would motion us when to cross. I looked across the deserted street and saw one of the most improbable sights I ever saw during my year in the Lebanese war: an open vegetable store directly across from me, sitting there as if there was absolutely nothing amiss. After a wait, we saw a man inside the little store come forward and motion us to begin running. Which we did, as fast as we could and without needing to be told twice.

Having made it past that hurdle, we darted down a couple more deserted streets until we reached a 5 or 6 story building. A large, ragged hole could be seen near the top where a rocket had gone into the building. Lionel called up in a loud voice and a few moments later a head poked out of an upper window. 'We're on our way, we'll be down in a moment'. We waited another couple of minutes. Nobody. Lionel called out again. Again, the head at the window: 'We're coming! We're just finishing packing our bags!' Lionel, perhaps slightly testily, said something along the lines of, 'What bags are you talking about?! Forget the bags and come down! The shooting can start again at any moment!' To which the head at the window replied with a wail: 'No! We can't leave our things! We'll lose it all!' We waited another few minutes. Nothing. Lionel called up a third time, and the head appeared once more: 'They're too heavy! We can't carry them! Please, can't you help us?!' I remember Lionel looking at us and saying something like: 'If we don't help them, they'll go crazy.' I remember thinking on the way up the stairs that, as far as I could tell, the damage might already have been done.

That, at any rate, is the essence of the story as I have remembered it all these years. With time, of course, large bits have fallen away entirely, and the rest has become as indistinct as a childhood memory. A few weeks ago I was recounting this story to someone in connection with my forthcoming trip and I found myself wondering privately whether ANY of it had actually happened.

So it was with shock two days ago that I unexpectedly walked into an intersection and discovered myself back where I'd stared across at the improbable little market nearly 40 years ago. Here it is. I've added some visual aids to show where we ran like terrified prey and where the snipers were located:

And just a few blocks away, the building, now dwarfed by new construction, where where we lugged about six suitcases down the long stairs, expecting at any moment to hear the bullets start flying again:

The City

The city is more chaotic than I remember. Not sure if that's because I'm remembering wrong or because it really is. It's now full of huge new buildings which didn't exist in my time, but there's no such thing as 24 hour electricity, which we had in the 70s. The streets are disastrous, the sidewalks non-existent. The number of cars and motorbikes clogging the streets is astonishing, it seems like orders of magnitude more than when I first lived here. Every possible space is used for parking. The sidewalks are unusable precisely because they have become impromptu parking. Because of the way the Lebanese drive (and the lack of traffic controls), there can never be the kind of gridlock we talk about back home. What could happen is 'parking gridlock', where no one can find parking anymore. Then what?

Large portions of the city are subdivided into militia fiefdoms, which means, in practice, that government authority is always questionable.

One result of the lingering effects of the war and the subsequent disorder is that everything that depends on what would be considered public services has been ceded even further than it was in my time to the private realm. You want clean water? Buy it. You want electricity? Get a generator. Security? Put up a bulletproof door with an iron gate in front of that!

There are thousands - I don't exaggerate - of desperate Syrians begging on the streets. Everywhere you go women and children are on the streets, homeless, shelter-less, food-less. According to May and Karma it's important NOT to give them money, because they are all run by syndicates that take the money and send them back out onto the streets. Apparently, the alternative is to give them food, but I'm not yet clear on how one would go about carrying that much food. Complicated.

Paris, by the way, was also FULL of beggars. Around St Michel there were three or four on every block, and people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. Near Denfert-Rochereau there were even TENTS set up on the sidewalks! One guy had a note next to his tent advising passers-by that he was in need of a new tent...

A correction to my lead sentence: Part of Beirut IS more chaotic than it used to be. But not all. Large parts of what used to be 'downtown' were so destroyed during the war that they've been essentially razed and reconstructed in a reasonable - if rather ersatz - imitation of the original.

Part of the rebuilt 'basta', where we used to go for cheap foul
mdammas. Now coffee costs $3

The effect is a little startling: brand new buildings in the Ottoman and traditional Lebanese style of the late 19th and early 20th century. I suppose this is no different than the reconstruction of cities all over Europe after the Second World War, but it's startling nevertheless. The reconstruction was spearheaded by billionaire businessman and former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, killed by a car bomb in 2005. As I recall, parts of the reconstruction had to be done more than once, as renewed fighting kept damaging rebuilt areas.

In the meantime, in much of the city there seems to be a general race on to eliminate all traces of the beautiful and graceful Beirut of old. Wherever one turns in what's called Ras Beirut, the formerly trendy but now visibly rundown area where AUB (American University of Beirut) is located, one sees the empty or disheveled hulks of formerly exquisite traditional Lebanese homes sitting in the shadow of 20 or 30 story new construction. In a city where power goes off every day for several hours at a time, the downside of this trade-off is particularly evident. The old houses had enormous windows and doors, high ceilings, wide verandahs and balconies. When power goes out in your apartment building, by contrast, you're forced to trudge in the heat up endless flights of stairs, only to arrive in an apartment made up of a few low-ceilinged concrete boxes baking in the sun. If you're lucky, you might have a small balcony to take refuge on while you look out at your darkened neighborhood and contemplate the wonders of modern life and its comforts.

Of course, since electricity is so spotty, most new buildings have generators or private sources of power (there are companies which essentially provide an alternate grid during outages). However, even before the influx of refugees from the Syrian civil war put enormous new pressure on the real estate market, rents for these buildings were already beyond reach for most middle class Lebanese. The only sure-fire way to stay cool is to be wealthy.

I got a rather unique explanation for the general level of dishevelment from a friend of Karma who's an engineer. Apparently, candidates for re-election to city agencies have developed an interesting twist on vote buying: in the run-up to elections they offer immunity from prosecution for all building code violations. What ensues is an orgy of unsanctioned building, renovation, and general jury-rigging that violates every conceivable standard of normal practices.

Arrival

First off, the heat is bad and the humidity's worse. In Paris they were talking about a heat wave but it was cool compared to Beirut. I walked back to the hotel well after midnight last night and worked up a sweat walking downhill. Except on the rare occasions when a faint breeze stirs the air, the atmosphere is absolutely stiffling. It gets worse at night.

It's Ramadan. There are decorations everywhere, hanging in the streets and large street side displays. May and I went out at 11:30 PM to buy some knafe for desert at midnite. No problem, everything's open! In fact, the restaurants are all full, and and open areas have been converted into ad-hoc restaurants or open-air canteens for people without money. And there are several hundred thousand more of them than usual in Beirut at the moment.

2:30 AM and all's hopping

Because of the fast people are basically up all night. Stores are open, people in the streets, lots of life. In the evening, just before the breaking of the fast, I was nearly knocked out of my chair by a series of explosions. They were loud enough that, were they to happen back in Portland, the 911 system would be flooded with calls. In fact, they were 'fireworks' celebrating Ramadan. As fireworks go, they must be orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we get, at least legally.

Apparently, the Civil War and decades of major and minor wars since haven't cured the Lebanese of their love of loud noises.

Interestingly, as we were walking through the neighborhood behind their house, May remarked that because she was dressed in a tee shirt and shorts, 'some people' might refuse to serve her. By 'some people' she meant observant Muslims, which, in this context equates to Sunni Salafists, of whom there are apparently an ever-increasing number.

May's strategy is to approach everyone with openness and a warm smile, a strategy which she readily admitted doesn't always work. Nevertheless, it appeared to work quite well during our little outing.

Despite the presence of Salafis - who are Sunni - the neighborhood itself is under the control of the Shi'a Amal militia. Amal, whose name means 'hope' in arabic, has roots in the Lebanese Civil War and the Shi'a 'Movement of the Dispossessed'. It preceded Hezbollah by several years and was a major player in the Civil War. After years of clashes with the better organized Hezbollah, Amal has ceded a great deal of its power and authority in the Shi'a community, although it still retains parlimentary representation.

I had a moment of nervousness as we passed the local Amal 'headquarters' - a kind of tent stuck in a parking lot, with a bunch of 'shabab' (guys) sitting in front. May began pointing out where we were, gesturing towards the tent and the large banner of one of Amal's martyrs that hung over the street. For a moment I rather regretted the free publicity of my presence in the neighborhood. But it quickly occurred to me that May's approach was probably the best one could come up with. Certainly, my presence was going to become public knowledge very quickly, in any case. At least this way May was openly associating me with herself - someone they all know as a resident of the area and with whom they have good relations.

Did I mention the heat and humidity?