Greg’s Letter from Lebanon

Just because we are baby boomers and over age 50 doesn’t mean slowing down for many of us … certainly not BoomerCafé Co-Founder and Executive Editor Greg Dobbs. In Greg’s “day job” as news correspondent for HDNet Television, he travels the world to cover news, sometimes to dangerous places, and he shared those experiences with family and friends in personal dispatches. We’d like to share Greg’s Letter from Lebanon, about a recent visit to that troubled part of the world.

Beirut, August 2008

Dear Family and Friends,

From the moment I landed a week ago in Beirut, there were reminders of what this city has gone through. When our tires touched the tarmac, the whole planeload of passengers (which during a walk down the aisle during the flight from Frankfurt appeared to be all Arab except for me) erupted in applause. That’s how it used to be back in the bad old days, when a safe landing didn’t just mean the pilot had outsmarted the strong crosswinds off the Mediterranean; it meant none of the rockets fired from the militant (now heavily Hezbollah) neighborhoods just north of the runway had struck their target: us. For that matter, there were trips back then when we got no closer than Cyprus by air, then had to finish the trip by boat to the port of Beirut because the airport was under fire.

That was then, this is now. No one shot at our airplane; better yet, my luggage was on the carousel by the time I got through Customs. On second thought, having landed without rockets honing in on my plane, maybe the prompt delivery of the luggage wasn’t really the best thing about reaching Beirut. Anyway, on these HDNet shoots overseas we’ll usually travel overnight to another continent and jump off the plane and go right to work; time is money, and in my experience the best way to beat jet lag is to ignore it. But on the first full day in the Middle East, I wanted to overcome the jet lag of nine time zones by just kicking back in a hotel room taking it easy; I mean, I’m not an ideologue about getting right to work! But oooohhhh no, there is no rest for the wicked. My local Lebanese cameraman, who works from time to time for HDNet, had other ideas. The first one was to go to Hezbollah headquarters, which is in the densely packed and impossibly poor southern segment of Beirut. Doesn’t sound like a good way to ease oneself into a hard place, but it’s something we’d have to do soon, anyway, because Hezbollah would be at the heart of what I went to shoot.

So we went….even though the nation’s own government won’t. Where Hezbollah’s in charge, you don’t see government soldiers, or police, or anyone else in a Lebanese uniform who’s supposedly paid to protect you. I had the chief anchorwoman for the Hezbollah-run TV network Al-Manar tell me in an interview that there’s nothing unusual about that; people everywhere contribute what they can to their neighborhoods. The difference is, government agencies almost everywhere else contribute too. But not where Hezbollah rules. Wherever you look there are guys with guns slung over their shoulders; they work for Hezbollah. Even men in the middle of intersections directing traffic, holding walkie-talkies in one hand and batons in the other, are paid by and loyal to Hezbollah. On my last day in town, I wanted video of these guys, as a simple visual illustration of Hezbollah’s “state within a state” in Lebanon. But we didn’t get it. Every time I’d direct the cameraman to take shots of “the crowds, the traffic, the fast life on the streets,” one of our “media escorts” (yes, even in terrorist organizations) would divert him for a moment while another would quickly shoo the makeshift traffic cops out of the scene.

They do a lousy job of traffic control by the way; one of the “rules of the road” in these crowded and chaotic streets seems to be, left turn lanes are for sissies. You’ll be going straight down the middle of the road doing 30 mph, and a car or a motor scooter will zip around you from your right side, literally about two feet in front of your hood, doing 40 and turning left. Another rule evidently is, one-way streets are for nerds. I don’t just mean the occasional rebel; I mean, you’ll be approaching an intersection going the way you’re supposed to go, and a car will fly around the corner on the left side and come right at you, while a motor scooter heads for you rounding the corner on the right. Multiply by about a dozen per block and you get the picture. But although you cope with this kind of driving all over the country, it is almost a metaphor for the autonomy of Hezbollah; they are their own authority, they have set up their own government, and they answer to nobody but themselves. That’s why, because we had to shoot part of our documentary in a Hezbollah-controlled part of Beirut, we needed permission from them, and had to have their monitors with us any time we pulled out the camera. Our credentials from the Lebanese government, and eventually from the Lebanese Army a couple of days later to enter what is still officially a war zone in southern Lebanon, would be worthless without corresponding credentials from Hezbollah.

Their stronghold, in south Beirut, would look almost prosperous from a healthy distance, because sky cranes cover the horizon. During the war two years ago, Israeli planes targeting Hezbollah leaders took out dozens of buildings, typically styleless eight-story concrete apartment houses. They’re still being rebuilt. It’s a sign of how much money Hezbollah gets from Iran and possibly Syria that tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent. I asked one of my escorts where Hezbollah gets its money; his answer was, in a word, “membership.” Yeah, right. They also took me to a couple of sites where they haven’t yet started reconstruction, to show me the rubble the Israelis left behind. I climbed down into the pit of one destroyed building, and while negotiating the concrete chunks and broken rebar, came to a spot where clearly, from the smell, a body had never been recovered. War isn’t pretty….not even two years later.

Being American, I am not Hezbollah’s biggest fan. But when you wander through this part of the world, you best keep that kind of thing to yourself. Which is why it’s always a challenge when dealing with officials from groups like this to make sure your inner thoughts and your outer demeanor don’t get mixed up. For the fact is, people who run terrorist organizations can be just as congenial, just as sophisticated, just as gracious as anyone else. I used to cover Libya back in the days when President Reagan and Colonel Gaddafi were mortal enemies. Yet of the eighty-some nations where I’ve worked, I’ve met no sweeter people than the Libyan people. Here we were back in those days, Libya supporting terrorist training camps and anti-American terrorist acts, the United States flying warplanes over Libya and dropping bombs on its capital (one of which killed one of Gaddafi’s daughters), yet person-to-person, when you put politics aside, relationships were sociable and affable.

And sure enough, when we walked on that first day into the heart of Hezbollah’s beast, we were welcomed warmly, offered tea, given help with my application to shoot pictures in their domain, and generally treated with courtesy and respect. In fact after I interviewed that Hezbollah anchorwoman I mentioned earlier, which was in a café she chose for our meeting, she joined a table with some colleagues sharing an appetizing Arab Mezza, and they emphatically insisted that the crew and I join them. It was awkward not to, so we did, and while their politics are bad, their food is delicious. But the point is, besides being congenial and gracious, they’re smart, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Just because people don’t think the way we think doesn’t mean they’re not as smart as we are. (When conservatives and liberals are at loggerheads on political issues in the United States, they could stand to grasp that reality a little better!)

That’s part of the reason why, I have a sort of love-hate relationship when I come to this part of the world. I love that I know what it takes to survive pretty well here….but I hate the things that make me so acutely conscious that survival must be my goal. Part of that is dealing with people I find dangerous and detestable; the real focus of this trip, for example, was to interview a man named Samir Kantar, who was caught and convicted many years ago of murder; four people died, including two children, during a terrorist attack in the coastal northern Israeli city of Nahariya. He spent three decades in an Israeli prison, but just last month was released in exchange for the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers Hezbollah nabbed at the Israel-Lebanon border two years ago, which precipitated a month-long war.

Basically, the Israelis gave up a terrorist (actually, they surrendered five live Arab prisoners and nearly two hundred corpses from encounters in the past) to get back the bones of their own two dead soldiers. In that respect, they are like us; they will do darned near anything to bring home their heroes. But the exchange triggered a debate in Israel, where I went for a couple of days after Lebanon, and the debate was, Is the price too high? Some Israelis argued that no price is too high because of the principle, as one woman put it to me, “Every soldier is every family’s son.” A man told me, the ratio only proves “how much more valuable a Jew’s life is than an Arab’s.” But others argued that Israel has only encouraged Hezbollah, or Hamas or any other enemy, to abduct more Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips to liberate more of their own captured fighters from Israeli prisons. What’s worse, they argue, there’s still one Israeli soldier in the hands of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and getting him home is now more difficult; he is known to be alive, but reportedly in negotiations through the Egyptian government, Hamas has raised the price for his release, because it sees what Israel will pay for its captured soldiers even when they are dead.

So Israel released Samir Kantar into the hands of Hezbollah (which didn’t even exist when he committed his crime, but no matter). Once he crossed into Lebanon, he was celebrated as a hero, which raised some of the issues that sent me here. To be sure, ultimately I never got close to the man, because while my Arab contact successfully arranged for us to be the very first western news organization to get an extensive interview with him, on the “day of,” when we showed up at an assigned rendezvous point in Beirut to be taken to where Kantar was kept, they saw that I was American and wouldn’t let me anywhere near him. (I thought about this for a while, wondering what it was that scared them. My guess is, they figured I might memorize the route to reach his house and give the location to the Israelis. But I’ll make a second guess to complement the first one: the Israelis have the world’s best intelligence, and don’t need me to help them find Samir Kantar and take him out!) Anyway, unable to do the interview myself, I gave a list of blunt questions to the Arab colleague, who did the interview. What Kantar said about his victims is that they didn’t really matter. He viewed them as tools, not as human beings.

By the way, I didn’t mention that to the people I interviewed when I got to Israel. I wanted to— it probably would have led to some pretty provocative answers— but I just couldn’t. I talked with the brother and sister of the police officer Kantar killed when he responded back in 1979 to a report of terrorists in a neighborhood a couple of blocks from the beach in Nahariya (the other invader who landed by boat with Kantar took a bullet and died); they had petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to block the prisoner exchange. I also talked with the mother of one of those two dead soldiers who Israel got back last month in the exchange with Hezbollah; she had pressured the government to go ahead with it. Then I interviewed a woman who lost her son and two little granddaughters during Kantar’s attack: Kantar had kidnapped the son from his apartment and killed him on the beach, along with his four-year-old daughter who, according to forensic evidence at the time, had her head smashed on the rocks. When this woman, now 82, was showing me some newspaper clippings about the attack, we came to a photo of Kantar and she turned away saying “I cannot look at that beast.”

But the most moving interview was with the widow who lost not only her husband and four-year-old daughter, but her two-year-old daughter as well. I don’t think the story could be any more tragic. When Kantar and his colleague pushed into the family’s apartment, she rushed to a closet with the younger girl. The commotion lasted a long time before the terrorists pulled the husband and the four-year-old outside and dragged them to the beach and ultimately to their deaths. The two-year-old started to cry, and in her efforts to muffle the sound, the mom laid on top of her little girl….and the girl suffocated. Imagine living with that. Interestingly, when the prime minister of Israel was wrestling with a decision about the prisoner exchange, he asked this woman what she thought. She told me that her answer was, It’s not just about my pain, it’s about Israel’s pain, and you must do what you must do. She was against the exchange and had the chance to veto the release of the animal whose brutality cost her her family, but she put her country above herself.

But back to my love-hate relationship with the Middle East: even putting aside the need to deal with undesirables, I hate the conditions in which we often have to work: the dirt, the noise, the heat, the sometimes ubiquitous hopelessness… but personally for me, this time the heat was almost the worst part. After doing our business at Hezbollah headquarters on that first day for example, the local cameraman and I went to one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, called Bourj el Barajne. It is a few years since I last climbed through a place like this…. and I use the verb “climb” deliberately, because you climb through dank dark alleyways, you climb up steep concrete stairs, you climb over piles of rubble and trash, you climb out of the way of cars and trucks to avoid being crushed against the walls that define the slender streets (that climb is always very quick!).

Every camp I’ve ever visited is a sweltering rabbit warren of tin-roofed cinderblock homes stacked upon one another and winding dirt alleys narrower than the span of my arms. There is usually the stench of urine. And the unrelenting noise of Islamic chants from the nearest minaret. And the despondency of poverty like we’ve never known in our country. This camp crammed into the heart of Beirut, which covers the equivalent of only ten or fifteen square blocks, holds upwards of twenty thousand people. Which somehow makes the heat more intense. (That might not sound like a high population density to someone in Manhattan, but there are no skyscrapers in Bourj el Barajne. A couple of days later there was a camp in Sida, in south Lebanon, roughly one square mile with 90,000 people inside.) After five or six hours in Bourj el Barajne, my shirt went from bone dry, to spotted with sweat, to dripping wet. When I’m in Florida anchoring launches of the space shuttle, especially in the summertime, I wrap a terrycloth towel across my chest; it’s a trick a cameraman once taught me to keep those nasty dark little sweat spots from seeping out onto my shirt during our long live broadcast. But there was no terrycloth to be had in Bourj el Barajne.

Yet as a counter to that hate relationship, there is, as I said, the love of surviving. Against drivers who’ll knock you down if you don’t twist out of their path. Against people who’ll throw things at you just for looking rich, and western. Against bureaucrats who take a day to do what could be done in a minute. Against gunmen who make you sweat by sticking the barrel of a rifle in your chest. Say something controversial, do something disrespectful, you could disappear from the face of the earth and no one would even know where to start looking. But there are two survival tools I’ve long since learned to use. One is simply a smile; not a broad happy smile, which looks phony, and not a smart aleck smile, which looks arrogant; just a thin, slight, subtle smile fixed on the face that walks a tightrope between naiveté and disgust. I’m always amazed when I see dancers in a stage show ceaselessly smiling as if they are putting no effort at all into their performance, but that’s what’s required for the audience. And in a place like this, that’s what’s required when you’re the only westerner in the midst of anti-Americanism; don’t look anxious, don’t look scared, just look content (and put on a double dose of deodorant before you start).

The other tool? Adherence to my favorite Arabic word: “malesh.” Malesh basically means, “Don’t agonize over things you can’t control.” Frankly, I use it any time I travel; what with long lines and long delays, think of its applications! Here, putting your mind in malesh-mode helps you function in a sometimes dysfunctional society. If you’re going to come and work in the Middle East at all, it’s a given that because the rules are different, the relationships sometimes fragile, the restrictions often abundant, and the culture occasionally incomprehensible, you’re going to sacrifice some control over your time, your movements, and sometimes your destiny. You have to depend on your wits —and a subtle smile— to keep you both sane and alive. Malesh. So far, it’s worked.

In the refugee camps, they need to think “malesh” every day of their lives….even though they could take more control if they wanted to, or knew how to. Despite the many decades since they were established, these places still have the stamp of impermanence, with ubiquitous networks of snaking lines carrying electricity and hoses carrying water, stretched like spider webs over every open space; technically, here in Lebanon and in other countries where these open sores exist, the Palestinians are not allowed to build for the long term, because then the permanence would be codified. But you can’t allow yourself to be fooled. The “camps” are definitely permanent, so permanent that as many as five generations of Palestinians live in them, most of them actually born and raised there. They know nothing else.

Even worse, for some to whom their “host” governments don’t provide any record of identity, it is hard to even escape the barrier walls of the camps themselves. They are squeezed into the heart of a big city but have no way to be a part of it. The people are called refugees because they choose to be; by and large they’re there because they still cling to the pipe dream of returning to homes their families once occupied in what for sixty years now has been Israel. That’s the fate they’ve chosen for themselves…and their children…and their children’s children. When you read about negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, that’s the issue called “right of return.” Let me put it bluntly: not gonna happen. The Palestinian with whom I’m working here, who has made a very good life for himself, knows that; he told me, “Israel’s a reality; I don’t like it but it’s not going away. Why would I want to live in one of those sh-t holes pretending something different?” Sounds like “malesh,” although a much healthier kind.

So what does this have to do with Hezbollah? Plenty, because in the old days, these refugee camps were festooned with the red, white, and green flags of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. It was the PLO that provided order, food, and health care, although meager. But today, the flags are yellow, the color of Hezbollah. From a Western point of view, that’s a bad thing, because although Hezbollah does provide social services (with funding from Iran) for people who are poorer than poor, it is as militarily aggressive and politically unyielding as the PLO used to be in the worst of times. One Hezbollah official summarized the organization simply: it is a “movement of resistance;” it exists to resist “the Israeli occupiers.” So the shift to yellow flags may be a bad omen for us, but it’s a very good thing for Hezbollah, because it bolsters its ranks in a nation where there are deep divisions between Muslims and Christians, between Shia and Sunni, between Lebanese and Palestinians, and between moderates and militants. Not to mention between the incomprehensively rich and the pathetically poor. The growing loyalty to Hezbollah in this part of the world elevates the status and strength of an organization for which divisions are the lifeblood of its existence.

That’s not to say that Lebanon’s capital is a city at war. Not today. There are still political assassinations, and just the day before I landed, someone put a briefcase bomb on a bus in northern Lebanon and killed a dozen people or more. But that’s mere child’s play compared to those fifteen destructive years of civil war. It was mainly Christian against Moslem back then, East Beirut against West Beirut, with what we then called “the Green Zone” separating the two sections of the city (kind of like the buffer zone of derelict deserted brick houses we used to see between the segregated neighborhoods of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland). The Green Zone was the heart of downtown Beirut, burned and blasted to smithereens, and eventually just a haven for snipers in one militia or another, hiding in dark window wells or hidden on rooftops, firing on anyone stupid or driven enough (we probably fit into both categories) to run in zigzag patterns trying to make it to the other side. The snipers were always up there; they really didn’t seem to care who they shot at.

But the reality is, the war was much more complicated than that. Rather than just two religious factions, there actually were about a dozen militias, and you’d be in big trouble if you ended up in the arms of one militia that thought you were cozy with another. And there were the anti-western kidnappers, who took hostages like Tom Sutherland, a dean at the American University of Beirut, and Terry Anderson, from the Associated Press, and kept them chained to basement walls for eight hard years without once seeing the sun. Throw in an Israeli invasion to try to tame the PLO, and even American arms dealers trying to profit from the chaos, and it was quite the place to be! The “law” as we know it was so lacking that I once arranged a meeting in a coffee shop in Christian East Beirut with one of the arms dealers— a former CIA spook-gone-bad— but before we had three minutes sitting side-by-side to negotiate (I wanted an interview), two thugs with machineguns barged into the café, reached across the table, pulled this guy up under both arms and as he kicked and screamed “NO NO NO NO NO,” overturned the table and dragged him to the street (scared and shaking as I was, I saw that every other patron in the café just put his head down as if he hadn’t seen anything; that was the best way to stay alive). I came back to Beirut a few times after that; the guy had never been heard from again.

But for all the terrible things Beirutis saw, and sometimes did (when I was last in the city three years ago, the mild meek middle-aged man who was my driver told me that he had been a sniper in the Green Zone), they never seemed to lose their spirit. Spirit is an intangible, but you know it when you sense it. In South Africa in the days of apartheid, blacks told me that by peaceful transition or revolution, some day they’d run their own government; today they do. During martial law in Poland after Solidarity was shot down, I had people say that they’d never forget the brief taste they had in determining their own fate, and that while they didn’t know how, some day they’d get it back; they did. In Beirut during the civil war, the spirit never died.

I can think of two metaphors and oddly, one is about food. We could be out all day covering battles in the streets and hills around Beirut, yet at night, when we retreated to the journalists’ favorite Commodore Hotel, we could always be assured that within about a six block walk, we could get a good French meal. (Occasionally, with all the western journalists staying there, the Commodore itself came under attack, and once when asked if he had a plan to save us the war-weary manager said, “If they come in the front we’ll go out the back, if they come in the back we’ll go out the front.”) Another metaphor: a camera crew and I were in the hills above the airport, looking for a relatively safe vantage point for a fierce firefight in a canyon below us. I ran to the front door of a house overlooking the canyon, banged on the door, and a woman answered….with her hair in curlers! People are firing from all directions, combatants are dying in the hills around her, and this woman is fixing her hair as if she’s going out dancing! That’s spirit.

The single most interesting thing I saw on this trip to Lebanon was in a village at the southern border of the country. We went down there to see the spot where the two Israeli soldiers, who were returned dead to their homeland last month, were captured. They’d been on a dirt-track patrol road, which is fenced in on both sides; the electrified barbed wire fence on the north side of the road is the actual borderline between Israel and Lebanon. It was through that fence that apparently Hezbollah fighters cut their way, and grabbed the ill-fated Israelis. What’s amazing is, although there were Lebanese Army and UNIFIL (United Nations peacekeepers) soldiers along the way, I was able to go right up to the fence and, were I Hezbollah, I could have cut through it again. Even more amazing, there are camouflaged Israeli bunkers about fifty feet the other side of the fence (and you know they’re watching you); the two sides don’t really need guns; they could hit each other with stones.

But most amazing of all, there is an Israeli settlement just a few hundred yards beyond the fence (in fact we found a side road and weren’t a hundred yards from Israel… although actually trying to cover that short distance would have gotten us killed). Here’s what you might not necessarily understand, though. If you wanted to go from the Lebanese village to the Israeli settlement, you’d have to drive about three hours north to Beirut, then catch a flight to Amman or Athens or even London (I’ve done it), then catch a second flight back to the airport in Tel Aviv, then drive several hours more to reach a place that was almost close enough to hit with a well struck baseball. That’s because, the two countries have long been and still are in a state of war.

I met a female journalist in Beirut. She told me she had been born in Canada to Lebanese parents who had emigrated during the civil war, and they came back when she was in her teens. People kept asking her, What sect are you? But she didn’t even understand the question; she’d say, “I’m Lebanese,” or sometimes, “Canadian.” To me, that almost says it all. It’s about whose side you’re on. Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel; in my transit from Beirut, I flew from Amman to Tel Aviv on Royal Jordanian Airlines! But generally, the animus in this part of the world is so strong, the loyalties so historic, the divisions so deep, that some people would rather kill, or even die, than reconcile and coexist. You’ve got Shia versus Sunni, Palestinian versus Israeli, Israel versus Arab. And more. So it was before I first set foot in the Middle East more than thirty years ago; so it will be when I’ve left for the last time.

Greg