Nakba 2009

I commemorated 61 years of Nakba together with Palestininian friends from Bourj al-Barajneh Refugee Camp in the south of Beirut. For the first time, the commemoration was held outside of the camp, in the centre of the roundabout in an underpass of an elevated highway. The event began with the opening of a small exhibition, including photographs from 1948, posters, and paintings by the camp children.

Six Palestinian NGOs working in Bourj al-Barajneh were selling handicrafts: all kinds of practical and decorative items adorned with traditional or modern cross-stitch motives.

The Palestinian map was everywhere; Handzala, the little fellow turning his back to you, barefooted and in tattered clothes, who was invented by the famous Palestinian cartoonist Naji Ali to represent the Palestinian Right of Return, decorated many paraphernalia; and like everywhere in the Westbank, there were a lot of items decorated with the famous portrait of Che Guevara, the revered freedom fighter. The third symbol you can see everywhere where Palestinians live is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.


One person from each participating NGO held a speech; journalists from Lebanese dailies and a TV station were filming and photographing the event and interviewing participants.
The children were playing and dancing to the loud music blaring from two giant loudspeakers.

Old men and women had come, some hobbling on their walking sticks across the busy road passing between the camp and the place where the event was held. They are the last witnesses to the actual Nakhba in 1948, the last of their generation to tell the now fourth generation of the loss of their homeland.

In one corner, sitting on dusty cushions on the ground, some old women were demonstrating old household appliances used by them in Palestine before, such as a coffee roaster, a hand-mill to grind corn, a stone with a wooden club for mashing food items, a mortar with pestle, etc. The hand-mill and the mortar could also have come from rural Malaya.

Many children were trying out these household tools, struggling and laughing and having a good time.

A woman brewed the freshly roasted and ground coffee and we all tried a few sips; the coffee was fragrant, most delicious and refreshing.

The tantalizing rhythms of Palestinian music got everyone dancing, whipping with their feet, nodding the head, moving shoulders, arms and hands with the rhythm. Even small children who could barely walk were dancing.

I watched the kids drawing on huge white papers which had been put up on some of the walls: they were drawing the Palestinian flag, houses, tanks, people, explosions, bombs, helicopters, and other things from their collective memories.

Then I had a closer look at the exhibited photographs of the Palestinian exodus in 1948, as well as the victims of Zionist violence in British Mandate Palestine.

The pictures immediately reminded me of pictures of Palestinian victims in Gaza 2009. It seems that nothing has changed in 61 years. Palestinians are still being slaughtered, burned, and torn to pieces by the Zionist colonial war machine. To the collective trauma that affects Palestinian refugees until today, my friends in Lebanon and elsewhere have to deal with the collective trauma that years of civil war in Leban, total depravation, dispossession, and complete disempowerment for generations have heaped on them.



How many more generations are the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere not allowed to go back to their land in Palestine where they, their parents, grandparents and ancestors before them had been born and were living, while Jews from whatever country in this world, many of whom have been completely assimilated and culturally integrated and are full citizens with all citizens’ rights in their country have the right to hold Israeli citizenship and live in Palestine.

After having written this, I actually feel the urge to do some research on the statistics regarding the Jews and the Palestinians. Are the Palestinians the ‘new Jews’? Persecuted, gassed, burned, exterminated? The Palestinian people have the right to live peacefully in their own land. But peace cannot be achieved without justice. So what does ‘justice’ entail in the context of the conflict in Palestine?

More on this at a later date.

Lebanon

Tomorrow I am off to Beirut to attend a conference on disabled Palestinian children in the refugee camps in Lebanon. This is my fifth visit to this fascinating place. Why am I so taken with Lebanon?
Lebanon is an interface to several cultures and lifestyles. It is multi-flavoured. There is the flavour of Arab culture, language, foods; there is the flavour of French savoir vivre, very European; and there is the flavour of an international, English language and culture style.
Robert Fisk, one of my favorite writers and journalists, expresses his view about the flavours of Lebanon in the following way:
“When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.” (Fisk, Robert: Pity the Nation, p. 163).
Lebanon is also one of the cradles of civilization: Byblos, called Jbail today, 37 km north of Beirut, was to celebrate 7000 years of ‘continuously inhabited city’ in 2006, when Israel wrought war on Lebanon and bombed the country and its infrastructure to bits. To no one’s surprise hardly any tourists came to celebrate.
Unlike the American army in Iraq, the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces did not destroy any ancient sites this time around. So Byblos and Baalbek can still be visited and admired by tourists today.
The more recent history of the country is very mixed, if not to say tortured. War after war after war have come down on Lebanon during the last few decades. As soon as there is some semblance of reconstruction and normalization of life, the next conflict is waiting around the corner. At the moment though it looks pretty stable politically, despite elections looming on 7 June.
Coming from Switzerland, a mono-cultural country with mostly Caucasian inhabitants, Malaysia and Lebanon are the epitome of cultural mix. Lebanon officially recognizes eighteen religious communities within the country, and its political system reflects these communities. Malaysia also has different ethnic and religious communities which are reflected in the political parties.
Some 20 years ago, standing at one of Zurich’s busiest places, the Bellevue-Platz, waiting for the tram with my two kids, my elder son suddenly said: “ There are so many different people here.” What he expressed was the following: Coming from Malaysia, where you could easily identify the different ethnic groups by their clothes, in mono-cultural Switzerland people expressed their individuality in a thousand different ways, resulting in a variety that did not allow to identify anybody with a particular ethnic or religious group.
In Lebanon, I am still learning about the different groups.

Déjà Vu

I am currently reading this thick book by Robert Fisk “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War”. Robert Fisk is the Middle East Correspondent of the British daily The Independent. He is based in Beirut, Lebanon. The book was published 19 years ago in 1990. In it, Fisk describes the events taking place in Lebanon in the 1980s, including the Sabra-Shatila massacre.

What has been really striking is that about every ten pages I get this feeling of déjà vu.
“I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smoldered for hours.
Dr. Amal Shamaa of the Barbir hospital, after Israeli phosphorus shells had been fired into West Beirut, 29 July 1982” (In: Fisk, Robert: Pity the Nation, page 282.)

The first time I had come across information that something special is going on in the warfare of Israel with its neighbors in the Middle East was in 2006, in an article in Al Ahram Weekly, an online digest in English of the Egyptian Al Ahram newspaper sometime in June or July, during the Israeli attack on Gaza named “Operation Summer Rain”. The article included an interview with a spokesman of Shifa Hospital in Gaza, who stated that the doctors at the hospital were confronted with patients who had horrific wounds, torn limbs and burns such as they had not seen before and were helpless to treat.

Then in the July War in Lebanon 2006, which started on 12 July and formally ended on 8 September, again there were indications that Israel was trying out new chemical and other munitions with devastating effects on human beings.

In early February 2007, at the three-day War Crimes Conference at the Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, organised by the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, one of the speakers also showed the devastation of these new types of munitions: small entry wounds with extensive damage and burns inside, or bodies and limbs torn apart.

With all the above knowledge I am certain that Israel, after having tested the use of these new munitions and weapons in Gaza and Lebanon in 2006, used them systematically for the first time in their war on Gaza named “Cast Lead” in December 2008/January 2009. White phosphorus, DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosives), cluster bombs and flechettes (a sort of ‘cluster darts’ that can penetrate bullet-proof vests) were unleashed onto Gaza, killing and maiming thousands of human beings, civilians, men, women and children.

Coming back to ‘Pity the Nation’: now I know that the use of phosphorus on civilians by the so-called Israeli “Defense” Forces has a much further reaching history than I had known before.

I do hope that the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.net) established on 4 April 2009 in Brussels will uncover the history of such illegal warfare, take these war crimes into account, and make perpetrators and their supporting partners in crime accountable for their horrific deeds.