Cairo Post

"How can I describe it to you? As I told you, because we do not have electricity, we do not have TV, we are sitting in our homes and we see our homes being bombed, and that is all. We cannot move around in the camp. I walked around a bit and saw that the homes beside our home were bombed. I see someone injured on the street. Someone killed. The people that were killed yesterday, there is no hospital in the camp, there is no place to put the dead. This morning, our neighbor was killed – at 6.30 am - and he is still in the room and his body is starting to smell within the house. The injured – the same situation."

This from the Angry Arab. A few weeks ago I was in a taxi driving from Aleppo, through the border crossing just north of Tripoli (now closed according to reports), heading to Beirut for a flight back to Cairo. Tripoli was quiet, the ocean road looked idyllic like Robert Fisk suggests in this uncomfortable piece, and we passed a few camps, some in the woods near the border and others along the shore of the Mediterranean, though I can’t say which they were by name.

The latest: Lebanon truce last just minutes 

The road from Tripoli was uneventful, except for a long traffic back-up south of Byblos where a detour forced cars to drive down and out of a shallow ravine — the bridge over it, blown out by Israel last summer, is still unusable. Just like the main bridge on the road out of Beirut eastward, to Damascus.

Over this past weekend, while in the Sinai I was talking to a French guy about having visited Lebanon, even renting a car and driving to the Bekaa Valley. "I wouldn’t go there now, too unstable," he said. This was Saturday night in the Sinai, at a beach camp south of Taba, far away from the coming news of the Tripoli fighting and shelling and the bomb in Beirut.

"I don’t know, you feel some of the political instability I guess, but I never felt unsafe there," I had told him, thinking particularly of the quiet thrill, in travel alone, of the taxi ride from northern Syria through northern Lebanon, down the coast to Beirut.

Which all seems so silly now, these sunny pictures of a cab ride through what is now the latest spot for the shelling of Palestinians by a foreign army, while most of the news coverage focuses only on the fact that Fath al-Islam has al-Qaeda roots. What they don’t mention are that most of the fighters engaged in the clashes with the Lebanese Army are foreigners (Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians… Read the Angry Arab News Service). Nor do they mention that the Lebanese government of Hariri, Siniora et al funded these Sunni fundamentalist groups in the past, as a sort of check to Hizbullah in northern Lebanon. Nor do they mention the 35,000 Palestinians in a camp about a square kilometer in size, under shelling.

That’s Beirut. Walk around downtown, near the water, through the government-brokered and heavily indebted redevelopment of Beirut Central District, or Solidere, trading faux Ottoman-era buildings for glass towers and the counting of yellow cranes before the Mediterranean. Real estate billboards and copy promise the height of modern luxury.

A little bit south in a cab maybe 20 or 30 minutes and you’re in Haret Hreik, the target of so much Israeli bombing last summer. But there is no clean-up, no cranes lifting rubble and setting fresh asphault like there is farther north, along the Corniche, or in the streets downtown, blocked by the military since opposition protests began downtown last winter.

You can buy Hezbollah t-shirts, flags and posters throughout the southern suburbs. Walking around there you don'’t think about State Dept definitions of terrorism, Israeli rationale for "enforcing" 1559, or even the photos of Nasrallah at kiosks in Cairo. Old Mercedes taxis that would drive on new asphault under Beirut’s downtown skyscrapers drive down muddy, unpaved roads alongside rubbble in Haret Hreik. Cab drivers point out to empty lots where a mid-rise used to stand, now only rubble under the flash of a large Israeli bomb last summer.

I saw Robert Fisk lecture at AUB while visiting, his speech on history as the best tool for political critique nearly identical to what he said in Cairo in March, and what he wrote in the introduction to his 1300 page Great War for Civilization. From his "Elegy for Beirut" last summer:

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God’s leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah’s top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that’s not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

More.