Tea
And Rockets: Café Society,
Beirut-Style
By Robert Fisk
14 August 2006
The
Independent
Sunday, 6 August
In the early hours, motor-cycle
riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is
cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines.
Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their
special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.
A friend calls from Tyre
where Palestinians are welcoming Shia refugees from the hill villages
of southern Lebanon into their homes. One old Palestinian lady turned
on her guest with memories of her own endless exile since 1948. "Better
to die in your home than run away," she shouts.
Too many journos are wearing
flak jackets and helmets, little spacemen who want to show they are
"in combat" on television. I notice how their drivers and
interpreters are usually not given flak jackets. These are reserved
for us, the Westerners, the Protected Ones, Those Who Must Live.
I used to wear a flak jacket
in Bosnia, but no more. Ever since a bullet penetrated the neck of a
colleague and was kept within his body by the iron jacket - going round
and round until it had destroyed his kidneys, liver and heart - I have
refused to touch these things. Better to die in shirtsleeves.
Monday, 7 August
A pilotless drone buzzes
over my home at 4am. To Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp to talk to
Suheil Natour, the human rights man for the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. A book-crammed room that smells of paper and
cups of tea - always a good sign - and he goes through the options of
the Israelis and Hizbollah.
Do the Israelis want to draw
the Palestinians into their battle, to help destroy Hamas? "Do
you realise that the largest community in Lebanon - the Shias - are
now spread as refugees in every other area of Lebanon for the first
time ever?" he asks.
As I leave his office, I
hear the drone again, surveying the camp. I do an interview with New
Zealand television on the Beirut seafront and a group of young Shia
men and women - the latter all in brown scarves - stand behind the camera
to listen.
I talk about Lebanese history,
the Ottoman empire, the disasters of the Shias, the Israeli invasions/bombardments
of 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and now. Even the threats of the PLO, Hizbollah
and the Israelis are the same.
When I've finished, one of
the young men translates for his extended family. He is from Qana, he
says. They fled after last week's massacre of 28 civilians who were
hiding from Israel's bombing in a basement. The Israelis dropped a bomb
that exploded in the basement.
Tuesday, 8 August
Ed Cody and I pick up Hassan
and the "Death Car" to race to the southern suburb of Shiyah,
where the Israelis have fired two missiles into an apartment block.
Rubble, muck, body parts, shrieking men and women - the death toll of
20 soon to rise to 63, all civilians.
Some idiot had heard a drone
over the street and opened fire on it. and within minutes an Israeli
plane - or maybe the drone itself, so wonderful is American technology
- had demolished the nearest building.
We drive across to the Mount
Lebanon Hospital to talk to the wounded. How different it all is from
Europe or America, where a journalist visiting a hospital is regarded
as a vulture feasting on human misery. In Lebanon, we are always greeted
by the head doctor, taken immediately to the wards, encouraged to talk
to any of the patients.
And the patients brighten
up when the foreigners arrive and talk happily. They want to shake hands
and try to discuss their torment and pain and misery. It is always the
same, at every hospital in the Middle East. We are welcome. Dr Nazih
Gharios orders tea and asks his secretary to find out the name of the
little boy in the mortuary who was brought dead to the hospital after
the bombing.
The morning papers carry
an odious speech by an American diplomat visiting Beirut. He is David
Welch and he manages to express his love for a country his nation is
helping Israel to destroy while avoiding any journalists' questions.
"I am late for another
meeting," he pants. But get this for a quote: "Much has happened
[sic] in the past three weeks, but the commitment of the United States
to Lebanon remains firm; it remains enduring and it is not negotiable.
The relationship of the United States with Lebanon is based on mutual
respect..."
At no point does he mention
the word "Israel". Of course not. The US embassy in Ulan Bator
would beckon if he did.
Wednesday, 9 August
Oil from the burning fuel
storage depot at Jiyeh is washing up on the shore opposite my home,
dead birds, black fish and the smell of a refinery. It's broken up into
thick black balls that lie on the rocks and sand when the tide goes
out.
In the Chouf, the Druze are
now caring for 100,000 Shia refugees. "There is not a single man
between 25 and 40 among them," the wife of a Druze official remarks.
I have a shrewd idea where all those men have gone.
To a hubble-bubble café
in the evening where the oil-sogged waves slosh around the feet of a
Lebanese fisherman perched on an old concrete pillar in the water. He
wears a straw hat and I think at first he's a statue for tourists until
he turns to put an oily fish into the basket on his back. "We have
no food and we have stopped selling alcohol," the waiter proudly
tells me. Well, I say, that's really going to bring in the customers!
The BBC is back to its old
craven self, referring in a report from Israel to the tiny sliver of
Lebanese territory taken at great cost by Israeli troops as Israel's
"security zone" - Israel's own preposterous title for what
must be the most insecure piece of land on earth.
It is, of course, an "occupation
zone" but not, it seems, if it's occupied by the Israelis. Had
Hizbollah seized Israeli territory - they did after all provoke this
savage conflict with their own reckless crossing of the border - would
the BBC be calling it Hizbollah's "security zone" in northern
Israel? Would they hell.
Thursday, 10 August
To the City Café to
meet Leena Saidi, Lebanese journalist and formerly one of the national
television station's top newsreaders. City Café is definitely
upmarket, opposite a traffic circle but filled with boring old men smoking
cigars and discussing the future of Lebanon and elegant ladies in silk
skirts, and one or two women whom my Mum used to describe as "mutton
dressed as lamb".
We order green tea and then
there's the roar of an explosion in the sky. An Israeli missile screeches
right past us and crashes into the old French Mandate lighthouse, a
brown-stone tower built in 1938 from which the Vichy French once sent
out their propaganda.
Never have I seen the great
and the good of Beirut society hurl themselves from their seats at such
speed, overturning tables amid splintered glass, racing from the café
for their chauffeur-driven cars, crashing into each other's vehicles
- and failing to pay their bills. I see a panic-stricken motor-cyclist
thrown on to the road. He rolls down the side of the traffic island,
then runs for his life.
A second missile streaks
past us into the tower. Do the Israelis think that Hizbollah's television
station is broadcasting from here?
"Fisk!" Leena roars,
almost as loudly as the rocket. "Why do you always bring trouble
with you?" We finish a second cup of green tea and The Independent
pays the bill. I am left wondering: what has Israel got against the
French Mandate?
Friday, 11 August
I visit the barber. "Thanks
to the God!" cries George when he sees me. It is lunchtime, and
I am his first customer. Every Lebanese believes that we journos know
the future, and we have to pretend that we do so that they will tell
us what they know.
Ceasefire? Will Hizbollah
fire more rockets into Israel? Photographs on the Lebanese front pages
show burning Israeli tanks near Khiam. Shortage of newsprint. One of
my morning papers is now only four pages - it was blown off my balcony
by the wind this morning and I had to run down the street to retrieve
it. But a bad thought. I like small newspapers. Less to read. More time
to report.
Saturday, 12 August
A long radio interview with
an Israeli professor who says "the number of people killed [in
this war] doesn't reflect morality". Well, at more than a thousand
Lebanese civilians dead against a few dozen Israelis, it can't reflect
morality because, if it did, that would suggest Israel was committing
war crimes.
But Hizbollah will also have
their day of reckoning. Who gave them the right to bring this cruelty
down upon the head of every Lebanese? Who gave the Shias permission
to go to war for Lebanon? There will be questions in Israel too. How
come the Israel Defence Forces, famous in legend and song, could not
defend the people of Israel, despite slaughtering so many Lebanese civilians?
Cody has invented a great
new word: to "flamboozle". It's what politicians do to their
people when they go to war. Ehud Olmert has been flamboozling the Israelis
and Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has been flamboozling Lebanon's Shias. We
may have a ceasfire at the weekend. So the end of the flamboozling may
be nigh.
Sunday, 6 August
In the early hours, motor-cycle
riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is
cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines.
Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their
special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.
A friend calls from Tyre
where Palestinians are welcoming Shia refugees from the hill villages
of southern Lebanon into their homes. One old Palestinian lady turned
on her guest with memories of her own endless exile since 1948. "Better
to die in your home than run away," she shouts.
Too many journos are wearing
flak jackets and helmets, little spacemen who want to show they are
"in combat" on television. I notice how their drivers and
interpreters are usually not given flak jackets. These are reserved
for us, the Westerners, the Protected Ones, Those Who Must Live.
I used to wear a flak jacket
in Bosnia, but no more. Ever since a bullet penetrated the neck of a
colleague and was kept within his body by the iron jacket - going round
and round until it had destroyed his kidneys, liver and heart - I have
refused to touch these things. Better to die in shirtsleeves.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited