Northern Israel from the Lebanon-Israel border. (Photo: Ahmed Moor)
While Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving this year, Muslims were preparing for Eid Al-Adha, or the Holiday of the Sacrifice. In a way, the two are related. Both holidays celebrate the forestalling of potential disaster by the grace of a third party. Americans commemorate the aid provided to early settlers by Native American peoples, while Muslims celebrate God’s command to Abraham that he should sacrifice a goat in lieu of his son. Muslims who can afford it buy a sheep or goat, have it slaughtered or slaughter it themselves, and distribute the meat according to religious tradition; one third for the family, one third for one’s relatives, and one third for the needy. In a country where most produce is fresh, with an abundance of butcher shops, much of the slaughter is conducted in full public view. The experience can be overwhelming for new arrivals from Western countries. One British friend, a vegetarian, was mesmerized. He wished people back in the UK would engage more fully with the process of consuming meat themselves.
The two holidays were separated by only a day this year, so we also had a four-day weekend. As with Thanksgiving, many people spend the time visiting with relatives. Families stroll along the seaside esplanades that characterize so many coastal Lebanese cities. After dinner, they sit at outdoor cafes smoking nargileh late into the night. The smell of roasting meat is everywhere. It’s a wonderful time to be in a Muslim neighborhood or city; Lebanon has many Christians as well.
My sister Yasmine is my only relative in Lebanon. She works for UNRWA, the temporary UN agency created to cope with the 700,000 – 800,000 Palestinian refugees who lost their homes to Zionist aggression in 1948. Sixty plus years of dispossession later, and UNRWA still exists. Both of my parents attended UNRWA schools in Rafah, and I was born in an UNRWA clinic there. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are worse off than in most places, bereft of many basic human rights, and so UNRWA has an outsized role to play here, too. The Lebanese government gives various reasons for depriving the Palestinian refugees of human dignity and rights. Chief among them is the argument that naturalizing Palestinians will shift the demographic balance amongst vying confessionals – the Christians in particular cannot permit more Sunni voters into the republic. I’ll withhold my opinion of this and other arguments for now.
Yasmine came to work here after the destruction of the second-biggest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon – Nahr Al Bared, or Cold River in Arabic – by the Lebanese Army in 2007. Their ostensible goal was to eradicate an Al-Qaeda offshoot – Fatah Al Islam – which they did by flying air sorties. I learned from conversations with people from the Nahr Al Bared camp that the Fatah Al Islam members were mostly Arabs from the Gulf States. They streamed into Lebanon after combating the Americans in Iraq, but it was unclear what their objectives were, and they did self-identify as Al-Qaeda affiliates. Many Nahr Al Bared residents believe that the Army saw an opportunity to exercise control over the camp – in effect, an autonomous Palestinian enclave – through the Fatah Al Islam conflict. In any case, the Army destroyed the camp. When I first saw it I thought of pictures of Dresden that I’d seen from World War II – it was completely leveled. The international community pledged millions of dollars to rebuilding the shattered lives and homes, and Yasmine was hired to engage in that rebuilding.
Many of our European friends, some of whom work with Yasmine, decided to visit neighboring countries over the long weekend. A flight to Cairo from Beirut is only about $200 and takes roughly an hour. Istanbul is an hour-and-a-half away, and Damascus is a three-hour drive by car from Beirut. I asked Yasmine about going to the Lebanon-Israel border a few weeks ago and she said she’d try to get us permits. Foreigners need permission from both the Army and Hezbollah to visit, and that isn’t always easy to get. Her connection worked out and we were cleared to go south right as the Eid was approaching. I thought about leaving the country for a few days, but decided instead to try visiting Lebanon’s border with Israel.
We left Yasmine’s apartment in Tripoli at seven a.m. on Sunday morning. I’ve been staying with her since I moved out of my last apartment in Beirut, and so I’ve traveled the road in-between the two cities a lot. Tripoli is about 80 kilometers north of Beirut along one of the most scenic coastal drives I’ve ever traveled along. Beaches are scarce and the Mediterranean crashes into natural jetties for most of the way. Hills of varying sizes rise abruptly from the coast, offering a sudden verticality to the sea’s horizontal plane. Snow-capped peaks dominate the landscape only a few kilometers farther inland and the juxtaposition is breathtaking.
Buses travel between all of the coastal cities regularly, and we caught one from Tripoli to Beirut paying a combined fare of about four dollars. The driver dropped us off in Al-Cola, one of Beirut’s most commercially vibrant neighborhoods. The Sabra and Shatila refugee camps are situated nearby as is the Lebanese Arab University. I once asked a cab driver why the neighborhood was called Al-Cola and he motioned to where a Coca Cola factory once stood. The Israelis had occupied it, and the PLO subsequently bombed it. I haven’t yet checked his account’s veracity, but I intend to at some point.
We caught a different bus from Al-Cola to Sidon, another coastal city. About 40 kilometers south of Beirut, Sidon has been continuously inhabited for six-thousand years. Phoenician craftsmen extracted the purple pigment from Murex snails for its once considerable commercial value. Pharaonic Egypt used to come to Sidon to trade in purple dyes and cedar wood. Much later, Sidon witnessed Salah Al Din’s victory over the Crusaders. Indeed, one of the city’s main attractions is a medieval fort built on a quay in the Mediterranean. Today, a recently constructed mosque sits nearby. It was built by the late Lebanese Prime Minister and billionaire Rafiq Hariri, Sidon’s native son. Massive portraits of the former Prime Minister and his son – the current Prime Minister – adorn many otherwise vacant walls on the sides of buildings.
Lebanon has seen the sorry convergence of religion and politics. That means that it’s never difficult to identify the dominant politico-religious affiliation in a Lebanese town or village. In general the Hariris stand for Sunni parties, various Shias stand for Hezbollah and Amal, and Christian generals and politicians stand for Tayyar and other political parties. Tripoli has many portraits of Rafiq and Saad Hariri, so it’s predominantly Sunni Muslim. When I went to visit the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, a beaming Hassan Nasrallah greeted me in most places; vendors at the Temple were selling yellow Hezbollah t-shirts. The portraits also serve as a useful shorthand guide for visitors. I recently went hiking in the hills east of Tripoli and encountered Samir Jaajaa’s melancholy features in one hamlet. As a Palestinian, it was a place I thought I had better avoid, or at least avoid identifying myself as such. Mr. JaaJaa headed the infamous Lebanese Forces – the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982.
From Sidon we boarded yet another bus to Tyre, another 40 kilometer ride south. Tyre isn’t quite as old as Sidon, but it boasts a storied history nonetheless. The city was originally comprised of two urban centers, one on the coastal mainland and on one a nearby island. Alexander the Great connected the two by building a causeway after laying siege to the city. Jesus Christ visited the city, and it was also the scene of later battles between the Crusaders and Salah Al Din.
Yasmine and I stopped off at a local restaurant for lunch after we arrived in Tyre. The 160 kilometers we traveled along the length of Lebanon had taken roughly four hours and it was now noon. We lunched on lamb skewers and salads while Yasmine called her liaison about access to the south.
We were already in Shia territory – billboards commemorated Shia martyrs and Hezbollah flags fluttered in the Mediterranean breeze. What remained was passage through the army checkpoint that lay between us and the border. This was what we needed permission for. Yasmine’s liaison informed her that we could not proceed to the border unescorted. An escort would meet us at the main gate to the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL) compound in Naqoura; local drivers would know where that was. He gave us a number and asked us to call and announce our visit. He said we were expected.
We hired a car to take us to the village of Naqoura, about 15 kilometers south of Tyre. The interim UNIFIL forces are headquartered there, and their presence provides much needed economic stimulus to the village. About ten minutes out of Tyre we were stopped at the army checkpoint I mentioned earlier. Our passports were collected and our names were written down. Y, a Lebanese army regular, asked a few questions to confirm our meeting with A. Evidently, our escort had called ahead with our names, easing our passage through the checkpoint. Everything south of that checkpoint was occupied by Israel up until the year 2000, when Hezbollah succeeded in liberating the territory from enemy hands. We collected our passports and drove through agricultural lands – mostly banana and orange groves – until we arrived at the telltale blast walls encompassing the UNIFIL compound. UNIFIL has been in Lebanon for decades as a peacekeeping force. When the United Nations brokered the ceasefire ending the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, UNIFIL stepped in to maintain the peace. As we got out of the car, our driver gave us his number, mentioned that this was a lightly trafficked area, and said to call if we needed a ride back to Tyre. He made a u-turn and drove away.
We crossed the street and stood in the shade of a gasoline pump awning while we waited for our escort. The UNIFIL compound spreads for hundreds of meters in both directions, casting a drab shadow on one side of the street. A few plants grow in the small spaces left by the L-shaped concrete slabs surrounding the place, but they do little to alleviate the oppressive environment. The other side of the street has a shoddy assortment of local shops designed to cater to the UNIFIL troops. I watched through a window as an Italian soldier bartered with a Lebanese shop owner over the price of a pirated Playstation game. It’s easy to identify a UNIFIL soldier’s home country; they all wear patches on their right shoulders with their country’s flag and name. Aside from three Italian UNIFIL soldiers manning the entrance to the compound, the two of us were the only people in the street. Every now and then a UNIFIL APC or jeep passed by in the direction of the border. After about fifteen minutes of waiting, a Citroen van pulled up and our escort stepped out of the passenger side. He waved and asked if we were Ahmed and Yasmine. I replied that we were and we shook hands.
As a Palestinian in Lebanon, I sometimes feel more or less at ease depending on where I am. Many buildings in Beirut bear the scars of the civil war, and some people of a certain generation harbor resentments and nurse decades-old vendettas stemming from those scars. Communitarian memory can exist independently of individual experience – I understand that completely. At this moment however, kilometers away from the nearest Lebanese Army checkpoint, sitting in the back of a van winding its way up and away from the UNIFIL headquarters, I felt completely at ease. I was welcome here.
Yasmine was sitting up front with our driver, while A and I chatted in the back. He had an athletic build and went running five days a week. I figured he was in his mid-thirties and later learned that he was a non-smoker, which is notable in this country. A’s hair was short, and he sported a trim goatee. The van lacked rear passenger seats, so we sat in plastic lawn chairs and held on to the inside rails of the cargo compartment to avoid being tossed about. We were climbing higher into the south Lebanese landscape and away from the coast. My only view out of the van was through the two rear windows, but they provided enough scenery for A to make comments as we passed by certain landmarks. “Here,” for instance, “was the place where the Enemy bombed a caravan fleeing the fighting in 2006. Twenty-one civilians were murdered.” And, “Look there, Ahmed. Those radio towers are in Enemy territory.”
I asked our escort, now our host, whether there was a place where I could take pictures of the border. A obliged and gave our driver instructions on where to go so that I could. He expressed admiration when he learned that we had traveled from Tripoli to see ‘Palestine 1948’ and was very gracious, I think, as a result of that. He had questions about what Gaza was like, and life under the Occupation in the West Bank. I made an offhand comment about how unusual it was to live in a state of war, the paranoia, the sensation of enemy guns trained on you. My host smiled and said that when one was protecting his homeland from the Enemy, with only God to answer to, life assumed its own tranquility.
We continued along conspicuously new roads for about half-an-hour before our van came to a stop. “Here we are. You can take as many pictures as you like.” Up until now I hadn’t really considered what it would be like to see Palestine/Israel for the first time in almost ten years. It had almost been an academic detachment – I was going to one of the most volatile borders in the world – it would be interesting. But this was also my country. My country, which had been lost to ethnic cleansing. My country, coveted by Zionists with a predilection for Bauhaus architecture. The land of ‘Milk and Honey.’ My country. I was unprepared for how it would feel to look across the small valley at the border. I climbed out of the van and took my first look. We stood in silence as Yasmine and I took it in. At first, I experienced a subdued elation. Here it was. I was here. I imagined driving down the coast from Tripoli, to Rafah. I would drive through Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Netanya, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Gaza City and finally Rafah. It might take eight hours, tops. Then, a few minutes later, the realization that there was nothing in the world I could do to walk across that border. I was overcome by frustration; frustration at history, at European imperialism, at Zionism, at America, World War II, the Arabs, my grandparents. There, only a kilometer away, was Zar’it, an Israeli town. It may as well have been Jupiter.
My host interrupted my thoughts when he pointed to a slight depression in the patrol road on the Israeli side. “That’s where the Resistance captured two Enemy soldiers in 2006.” I was at a friend’s place in New York on that day in July, 2006 when Hezbollah carried out a cross-border raid into Israeli territory. They killed a handful of Israeli soldiers and captured two enemy corpses. They were later swapped for a number of Lebanese prisoners. I gazed at the spot where the raid was conducted while I struggled to remember the footage that emerged from the area three-and-a-half years ago. I asked about the retaliation. “They streamed over these hills, but the Resistance was ready. There are tunnels everywhere here and the Enemy struggled with the terrain.”
“But they also had air and naval support, didn’t they?"
“Yes, but God fought with the Resistance. The Enemy killed many fleeing civilians – that’s how they waged war.” I thought about the recent Gaza Massacre, and the one Israel perpetrated in Gaza in the summer of 2006 and agreed.
A few minutes later, two SUVs pulled up on the Israeli side. They came to an ominous stop and my host said it was time to move along. We climbed back into the van and worked our way back to the collection of shops near the UNIFIL compound. I invited A and our driver to a cup of Arabic coffee at a nearby restaurant, where we talked some more. I made the lazy and embarrassing error of using the Arabic word Yahud, or Jews, while discussing possible peace between Israel and Syria. In Gaza, most of the Jews people encounter are Israeli soldiers. Therefore, every Yahudi is an Israeli. My host noticed and interrupted me to explain that the problem wasn’t Jews, but Zionists – in Arabic, Sahayneh. His view on Israeli-Syrian peace was that it wouldn’t happen any time soon. The Israelis couldn’t afford to relinquish strategic control over the Golan Heights. They would never trust the Syrians enough with their security. It was getting late and we got up to leave. Our host refused to let us cover the bill or even our portion of it and insisted that we here his guests – a common experience in the Arab world. We amiably parted ways after he paid the bill.
Yasmine called the driver who dropped us off in Naqoura to come pick us up. He said he’d be there in half an hour so we decided to take a tour of the UNIFIL compound. This time, Indonesian soldiers were guarding the gate. We entered a cafeteria run by an Italian contractor, and perused a menu full of Italian fare, priced in Euros. I spent a lot of time making a decision and finally ordered an espresso for three Euros. Michael Jackson’s Bad video was just starting on the 40-inch LCD TV attached to one side of the steel structure’s walls. I sipped my Italian espresso, overcome by a surreal reality.
The trip back was uneventful. We stopped off for shawarma sandwiches in Tyre and watched children dressed in their Eid best running around a seaside playground firing off plastic guns. Sidon rested heavily under the evening’s thick roast smoke and it seemed like the entire city had dined contentedly. It wasn’t until I was on the bus from Beirut back to Tripoli that I began to really think through the day. I wondered whether there were Israeli snipers at the borders. They let us know that they were watching when they approached in the SUVs. What would it have taken to for the Israelis to fire? In Gaza, you only had to approach the buffer zone. The threshold was higher here. Handling a PVC pipe would have done it, I concluded. Maybe one of the plastic toy guns would have been enough.
We got back to Tripoli at around 9:30 pm. I fixed a snack and flipped on Al-Jazeera. Apparently, the Swiss had voted through referendum to ban the construction of all new minarets in their country. Europe has given the world some notable racists in recent years: Joerg Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Avigdor Liberman. I went to bed that night wondering if the Swiss would provide the next electrifying installment in this very European legacy.
Ahmed Moor is a 25-year-old Palestinian-American from the Rafah refugee camp. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he now lives in Beirut.
