Almost Exactly the Same

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody… all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this… held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same?" -George Orwell's 1984

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Before 2000, my summer days were spent at my house in Southern Lebanon, listening to Israeli war planes overhead while my nights were occupied watching for the small red lights that fell through the sky on nearby villages; these were bombs. Their impact was left for my imagination, at least for the most part.

Sounds of explosions, ground shaking, glass breaking, and psychological warfare: warplanes breaking the sound barrier, whistles as bombs flew overhead, and my dad's voice: "If you hear the whistle, it's a good thing sweetheart! That means they're flying over us, not on us." Oddly, his words were comforting at the time.

Bombs would land in my village and I would wake up to the sound of my balcony crashing down. The house would shake and I would collect shrapnel on my way out. Had I been standing, I would have been killed. What had I done? I was ten. I would hear about my neighbors being killed. My father would drive slowly “so the Israelis wouldn’t think we were trying to escape.”

Through much of the later years of the Israeli occupation, it was the South that took the beating. Many in central Beirut and to the north were thankfully able to live an undisrupted life.

After years of fear and destruction, Israel had left most of our land, but the warplanes violating our airspace never did. Today, as most are well aware, thousands of prisoners are still being kept hostage. Shortly after Israel fled Lebanon in 2000, I visited the camp in the southern Lebanese mountains that they used to keep prisoners in; it was destroyed in recent bombings. Never will I forget the small box they locked prisoners in for weeks or the odd looking contraptions they used as one of their devices for the daily electrocutions that came with the shackles. The prisoners include men, women, children, and the elderly.

At nineteen years old I've already seen things most people have not and should not see in several lifetimes. These days, I guess it comes with the area code. In the Middle East for a total of eleven years to date, I've been living in Lebanon for the past three.

Hezbollah took two soldiers on July 12th. They took these soldiers in hopes of a prisoner exchange. This is the only method that has worked in the past; it is the only way Israel has even considered returning prisoners to their homes.

Israel responded by crippling an entire country that was slowly trying to stabilize itself. The Israeli Defense Force bombed a bridge, then the airport which was only five minutes away from my house. With no warning whatsoever, I was thrust into an all-too-familiar scene. I wasn’t a child anymore though; it's July 12, 2006 and it's so much worse than all the times before, so much louder, more persistent, and bloodier.

For three days, I felt the devastation first hand. I shook with each bomb that fell. I watched as the sky lit up. I listened to the minute-by-minute updates of new deaths and lost landmarks, places I had only just visited, roads I had just crossed within days of their destruction, gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring them back. Worse, I couldn’t say anything to stop the violent reaction from continuing.

Day 3, July 15, 2006: I get in my car and drive towards the Syrian border. It took 10 ½ hours to cross and reach a safe location. People with bags and small children were walking across the border. I was in the car with my father, my grandparents, and my uncle’s children; their father is a doctor and they were forced to leave their parents behind in the war-ridden country.

I can’t sleep because I don’t know what is going on in my country anymore. What is shown in the media is the ‘known death toll’. The devastation goes far beyond deaths. With the daily shelling, thousands of people are now homeless. With a full air, sea, and land blockade, as well as all the destruction of all connections between towns, cities, and villages, there is no way for people to get food or medical help. People can’t even leave. Helplessly, I watch as the infrastructure, the ports, the capital's 'suburbs', and any possibility of tourism in the near future, are destroyed along with all signs of advancement. Now, Lebanon is divided into small islands that cannot sustain themselves and more than a fourth of the entire country's population is propelled into refugee status. This wasn’t a war against Hezbollah; Hezbollah is a highly organized militant group. This is a war against our country.

Days after I left Lebanon, I called and found much of my extended family still stuck in our village with no bread or water and no way to get out. Israeli warplanes flew overhead and dropped fliers telling them to evacuate. It’s my village’s turn. They already destroyed the way out though, the roads, the bridges, how were they supposed to leave?

There were some Hezbollah flags there, but it was no headquarters. There were no men associated with Hezbollah left in any of these villages that were being bombed, let alone mine. Nor did they launch rockets close to these houses; no one is to see them during this time, not even their families know where they are. They sleep in the shrubs in the middle of deserted mountainous areas, eating a pear a day.

Excuses to sustain the violence echo pathetically in the emptied villages and hollowed bodies. Hezbollah's missiles fired at random targets hit innocent civilians. Lives largely disrupted and plagued with constant fear, sirens frighten Israelis into bunkers of safety. In Lebanon, no bunkers are deep enough, no road safe enough to escape the 500 pound bombs or the massacres, small and large, executed by the Israeli Defense Force and attributed to 'mistakes.' My history teacher in the eighth grade used to say, "People make mistakes; with guns, you don't make mistakes." This "your face got in the way of my gun" logic as an excuse should not be accepted in a world of reason.

With deaths in the hundreds and unnecessary devastation on both sides, Israel claims to be fighting terrorism. Some forget that Hezbollah was born out of the Israeli invasion and occupation; Israel is now fighting it with the very thing that created and fuels it: aggression against the Lebanese people. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, says that they must continue to strike Lebanon in order to stop the missiles from hitting Israeli territory. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said he won't hit the settlements, i.e. the civilians, as long as Israel promises the same. There's the solution! Yet the world allows - even encourages - violence to persist in order to allow Israel to "fight terrorism" with another, more deadly form of terror. It's funny how easy it is to risk other people's lives in the name of 'reason.’

When I think about this war, first I see one side: I see the pictures of the dead children strewn amidst the rubble; I see the blocks and blocks of destroyed buildings in the Beirut suburbs; I shudder as I recall the image of my old apartment building burning on TV (the only way I found out). Then I look at the other side, and I see Israel, a country whose neighbors don’t even think it should exist. I see the images of the ambulances carrying the victims of the Katyushas; I hear the sirens and feel the fear. I put myself in all of their shoes and my insides twist and turn in agony, and I realize what the world refuses to believe: that this violence isn’t solving anything.