July 18th - Update #3 from Lebanon

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Dear Friends

Thank you for your warm words. Knowing we've been in your thoughts has meant a lot to my family and friends in Lebanon in the past few days. I’m sorry that I have been unable to write an email to all of you until this point. If at any moment you have been concerned for my safety, I urge you to write or call your representatives in Congress and demand Israel to institute an immediate cease fire. If you don't know who your Congressperson is, call the Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121. Please, forward my email to family and friends and urge them to do the same. Write a letter to the editor of newspapers to demand better coverage of Lebanon. We, after all, are paying for the weapons being used against Lebanon out of our tax dollars. Israel, annually receives over $3 billion dollars of aid from the US government, $1.98 billion of that is military aid. (See footnote at end of email.) As of Tuesday, July 18, 208 Lebanese civilians, among them seven Canadian citizens, and 22 soldiers had been killed. The Israeli death toll is now at twenty-five: 13 civilians and 12 members of the military, according to the BBC. Let us not forget how this began. Hezbollah captured 2 Israeli soldiers on Wednesday, July 12. Israel sent troops into Lebanon for the first time since Israeli occupying forces left the south of Lebanon in 2000. Israel demanded the captured soldiers back, refused to negotiate a prisoner swap (although they did so in 2004) and that very morning began bombing the south of Lebanon. The following morning, Thursday, at 6AM, Israel bombed three runways at Beirut International Airport. Israel declared the kidnapping of two soldiers by an armed organization in Lebanon, "an act of war" by the state of Lebanon (refusing to acknowledge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state) and began to destroy Lebanon's new civil infrastructure. Does this seem like a logical course of events? Israel says it will continue its offensive for a "few more weeks."

At the beginning of this summer, multiple parties within the Lebanese government, including Hezbollah, to keep the southern border with Israel quiet this summer in anticipation of Lebanon's largest tourist season yet. Indeed, 1.7 million tourists were expected to arrive in Lebanon this summer.

On Saturday at 12:30PM we left my cousin’s apartment in Rabieh in a taxi. We kiss our family goodbye. Naila, my cousin, was planning to leave with her father and son on Monday, but she needs notarized, written permission from her husband to take her two-year old son, Bechara out of the country. “Yalla, don’t fight too much,” she says. “Text us from the border.”

Everyone is tense after three sleepless nights. We didn’t hear shelling last night. Israeli planes only shelled the south. Before leaving I made my final phone calls, using up the minutes on my pre-paid cell. I call my friend Nuha al-Masri, who works with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She brings doctors to the Haifa hospital in Bourj el-Barajneh to do operate on children. At her request, Dr. Harvey Clermont sent me with medical supplies for children: pediatric stethoscopes, a nebulizer, among other supplies. I met Nuha last Tuesday, July 11; she introduced me to Dr. Said, a plastic surgeon who came from Palestine to volunteer in the Haifa hospital. I watched him operate on four children, removing scars and performing surgery on a cleft lip. I was merely calling to explain that I would be unable to return to the hospital on Thursday as I had promised.

“Marhaba, Nuha. How are you? I was just calling to let you know that I’m leaving to Amman.” I said. “Oh my God,” she sounds panicked. “I’m stuck in Sidon. They’ve hit all the bridges and we can’t get out.” I’m confused. I thought she lived near Beirut. “I live here. My whole family is stuck. We can’t go anywhere. Good for you. Leave the country. No, of course, don’t go back to Bourj el-Barajneh. Get out of the country if you can. Go to Amman!” I’m shocked. I ask her if there’s anything I can do. She wishes me a safe trip. I promise we’ll pray for her. “Allah maek,” she says. May God be with you.

We climb into the car and set off along the mountain road, through Dhour el-Shoeir to the border crossing at Masna. Rumors are flying that Americans are being turned away at the Syrian border, and we are concerned because my sister Mary has an American passport. As the car sped up the winding roads, we would ask the driver, “What is the name of this town? What area is this?” Unlike most parts of Lebanon we’ve seen, where six-story apartments clutter the mountainside, the road through Dhour el-Shoueir, to the border crossing at Masna is relatively undeveloped. We snap pictures at rock formations and pine trees rushing past. “I wish we could have seen this before,” says Mary. The area was untouched by the last war. We wonder what it will look like when we next return.

The radio plays the news nonstop and the driver’s phone rings off the hook. “No way,” he says. “$100 to Damascus? Where are you living? The rate is $500 for a taxi to Damascus now. Yes, it’s safe. Let’s talk tomorrow.” By Friday evening, a seat in a bus or taxi to Damascus from Beirut cost $100. We heard about people who had paid even $1200 for a taxi out of Beirut. The chauffeur communicates with other drivers, determining which roads are safe and unsafe, deciding minute by minute which road to take. We are heading to the crossing at Masna, avoiding the parts of the Beirut-Damascus road which the Israelis have bombed. Israel claims it is not targeting civilians, but its relentless assault on civilian infrastructure suggests otherwise. Lebanon is a small country and there are a limited number of roads which cross the Syrian border. We have heard rumors that the northern road through Tripoli to Homs in Syria is impassible. It’s as though they are trying to make it impossible for people to leave via land routes, which would mean that anyone not being evacuated by their government could not escape.

On Friday, July 14, a runway at the Beirut airport was repaired long enough to allow a private plane carrying Former Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Nakati and five planes from Lebanon's national carrier, Middle East Airlines, to take off before Israeli forces bombed the runway again. The words of Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff still haunt me, "If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years." I remember our arrival at the Beirut International Airport in June 1990. Our clothes stuck to our bodies, weary from travel, in the stuffy airport lobby. We climbed into Amu Khalil’s cab, our aunt and uncle’s neighbor in the apartment in Zouk Mikael, north of Beirut. As the old Mercedes bumped along the highway from the airport, we would marvel at how the cars would pack alongside one another, with no rhyme or reason. “Where there’s no lane, make one,” we would say. “That’s the Lebanese way.” In 2002, I remember being astonished by the bright air conditioned airport lobby, with giant panes of tinted glass and revolving doors. Dotted lines began to appear on the newly paved highways. “This one guy was so confused,” joked my friend Abdullah. “He followed the dotted lines all the way home to Sidon, his car centered on the lines like a railroad track.”

Our car swiftly overtakes buses and cars along the smooth, winding road. We have no idea how far we are from the border. On the radio it says that Masna was bombed, but the driver assures us all is well. Two ambulances pass us on the highway. The driver pulls over to ask a storekeeper which way to go. “We’re going to drive around the road that they hit,” he says. He points out the bombsite as we drive by. “See? It’s fine, we can still get through.”

The car slows as we approach the border. Cars are stopped, as everyone climbs out to have their passports stamped and buy visas. The driver takes our passports and we climb out to make phone calls at the public phones by the border. Over the course of the past two years the number of public telephones throughout Lebanon has been growing. Even villages usually have a public phone or two and phone cards are sold everywhere. There is a new BMW parked on the side of the road by the phone; corsages decorate the door handles and giant crinoline bow is attached above the license plate. Inside sits the bride in her wedding gown, the window rolled down and her veil in her lap. The bridegroom is inside having their passports stamped. If they are lucky, there will still be a hotel room in Syria when they arrive.

At times my heart races. Parked at the border, we are sitting ducks. What would happen if Israel decided to bomb the border crossing? There must be 500 people trying to cross at anyone moment and more arriving at any time. After an hour at the Syrian border the driver returns. We are lucky, my cousin's colleague from Syria meets us at the border with documents approving her entry on the American passport; Mary's Lebanese documentation speeds up the process. Otherwise it will take three to four hours to get approval for an American visa from Damascus. At last we get through. Two hours after we had crossed, Israel bombed Masna again. This road, through the mountains in the north – Zahleh, Dhour el-Shoueir, Masna, is the remaining land route out of the country.

Upon reaching Damascus, we go immediately to the Middle East Airlines office to change our flights. We aim to wait out the violence in Lebanon and stay in Syria for a while. The employees in the MEA office sit back in their chairs. “There are no flights out of Damascus,” they tell us. “None until August 8 or later.” The hotels in Damascus are packed to capacity with refugees and tourists who have fled from Beirut, so we continue to Amman. We arrive at 10:30PM, 11 hours after our departure from Beirut, a drive which normally takes five to six hours.

CNN reported already 100,000 foreigners had fled the country via Syria. Our former housemates as I write, caught the first wave of the American evacuation through Cyprusthis afternoon. Unlike the European nations, the US government is charging citizens for the evacuation. Israel says it has hit "1000 terrorist targets." Israeli planes drop leaflets on villages in the south of Lebanon, giving them a few hours to evacuate before beginning raids. A number of families fleeing their village of Marwahin on the Israeli border were killed when their convoy was struck by missiles on the coastal road to Tyre; local residents told Al-Jazeera that the villagers were hit after being told to leave Marwahin by the Israelis and then refused shelter by UN forces. There are often not enough vehicles to carry individuals out and there are no bomb shelters, like in Haifa. In other cases, the roads leaving villages are blocked by bridges which have been destroyed.

On Saturday, July 16 at 10:29PM I received the following text message from Nuha Masri, of the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. She is still stuck in Sidon. "CAN’T TELL HOW SCARED I AM, THEY JUST BOMBED THE AREA BEHIND US, I FEEL LIKE I’M GOING TO DIE, THANKS A LOT FOR UR CONCERN,GLAD TO KNOW U LEFT THE COUNTRY."

In the Southern suburbs of Beirut, the situation is similar. My friend Fadi, a Palestinian filmmaker living in the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp south of Beirut, who on Friday told me, "It's OK. We're used to hearing things at night," wrote the following in an email on Sunday, July 16 at 1:59PM. "I have just reed your mail, its made me happy in the time I need feelings from friends…Its dificult to sleep and wake-up with bombs sround you but what we can do nothing this is the life now. I'm fine so my family and we planning to leave the camp to hamra or mountine tomoro but we are woried from the way." (sic.) Most people in the camps have nowhere to run. Schools and churches have been turned into shelters. My friend Sara and her girlfriend Rasha have been helping to run a relief effort out of the office of Helem (the Lebanese gay rights group) in Senayeh, a neighborhood of Beirut.

"We're OK, just jangled nerves," texted my cousin Naila from her apartment in Rabieh on Sunday. She is planning to bring her son to Amman. "They will not bomb Christian areas," we told ourselves, but they hit Jounieh and Tripoli. "Ras-Beirut is where the foreigners are," but they hit the lighthouse, literally a five-minute walk from the apartment where I lived a week ago. Last night in a café in Amman, we sat with Dima, who works with a media collective in Montreal. In Beirut she was putting together radio programs which you can download from their website: tadamon.resist.ca. At 1AM on Thursday, she and Sara wandered around Ashrafieh, the Christian sector in East Beirut, looking for leaflets from the Israeli government. "We found one, on the ground! In Ashrafieh!" she said. "It said, 'If you are near Hezbollah, leave your buildings or you may be targeted,' It was signed 'the Israeli government.'" What rules? There are no rules, except the one we always hear. "Israel has the right to defend itself." Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said after an emergency cabinet meeting today that Israel was using internationally prohibited weapons against civilians. Lebanese media reports, claimed Israel had used phosphorus incendiary and vacuum bombs, which suck up the air and collapse buildings.

We turn on the television and images of demonstrations in solidarity with the people of Lebanon give us hope. Millions of citizens from around the world take to the streets in solidarity with Lebanon and demanding an immediate ceasefire. A demonstration of 2000 Israeli citizens demanded immediate negotiations and a ceasefire in Tel Aviv on Sunday. These things give us hope. Please, join them. Write your congressmen, call the Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121, and ask your reps and senators to demand an immediate ceasefire for this unjust and illegal war Israel is waging on Lebanon. Organize a fundraiser for NGOs doing relief work on the ground, and I will get in touch with organizations to send donations. I only hope there will still be a way to import goods into the country. I am currently in Damascus, Syria. Feel free to call; we're seven hours ahead. My cell number is 011 963 99543918. My greatest fear is that once the foreign nationals are evacuated, the attacks will become even worse.

With love, Lara Jirmanus

Source re: Aid to Israel http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/palestine/topTenReasons.html. Martin, Kenneth. "Fiscal Year 2001 Security Assistance Funding Allocations." DISAM Journal, Vol. 23 No. 3, Spring 2001, Table 2. Mcarthur, Shirl. "A Conservative Total for U.S. Aid to Israel: $91 Billion -- and Counting." The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2001. Calculating "more than the $3 billion dollars annually:" $1.98 billion in military aid and $.84 billion in economic aid for a total of 2.8 billion. In addition, there is $60 million in "so-called" refugee resettlement and $250 million in the Department of Defense budget, plus $85 million imputed interest for a grand total of 3.215 billion.

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