Geography has been Lebanon’s curse since the creation of the State of Israel south of its borders, in what was the British mandate over Palestine. Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arab peoples have been paying the price for European anti-Semitic barbarity for eight decades.
Israel continues bombing Lebanon, claims to have attacked more than 100 Hezbollah ‘targets’
In the mid-1980s, I lived in Beirut for two consecutive years and married a Lebanese woman there, the mother of my two daughters. I say this for the sake of transparency: I write about the land of cedars from a raw subjectivity. I love Lebanon and I love the Lebanese even more, people who are as patient and resilient as they are jovial and loving life. I am therefore saddened by their suffering, the latest new fruit of Israel’s brutality: state terrorism with explosive devices, aerial bombardments on a country without anti-aircraft defense.
Geography is Lebanon’s blessing and curse. An eastern corner of the Mediterranean surrounded by high mountains and with a steep coastline of rocky coves. In such a beautiful place, this civilization of great navigators and merchants that we call the Phoenicians was born. There, already in our time, many persecuted minorities in the Middle East have found refuge: Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Shiite Muslims, Druze… They ended up forming the most plural, tolerant and vitalist country in the region. Until all their communities clashed in the civil wars of 1975-1990.
The trigger for these fratricidal wars was the presence in Lebanon of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled Israel’s ethnic cleansing and who, from there, intended to fight their oppressor. And geography is also the curse of contemporary Lebanon since, after the Second World War, the State of Israel was created to the south of its borders in what was the British mandate over Palestine. Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arab peoples have been paying the bill for European anti-Semitic barbarism for eight decades.
When I arrived in Beirut in 1986, the sound of the city had for a decade been that of cannon fire, gunfights and car bombs. Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in 1982 to expel armed Palestinian militias, and they succeeded. But planes with the Star of David on the fuselage continually flew over the Lebanese sky, breaking the speed of sound, and their soldiers occupied the southern strip of the country. Hezbollah, then a young militia created under the patronage of Khomeini’s Iran, fought for the liberation of this southern strip, with a Shiite majority.
I was afraid of Hezbollah during my biennium in Beirut. He specialized in the kidnapping of the few journalists, diplomats and workers of humanitarian organizations who lived in Beirut. To exchange them for money or favors to Iran, then at war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They couldn’t kidnap me. alhamdulilá, but yes to sympathetic journalists like the Frenchman Roger Auque. But even then, I did not call Hezbollah a terrorist organization in my columns. He practiced terrorism, certainly, but his objective was the liberation of southern Lebanon and the improvement of the political and socio-economic situation of the Shiite community, which, due to its demographics, was already the largest in the country. One of the reasons for its popular success was precisely the humanitarian aid it provided, with Iranian money, to Lebanese Shiites.
Beirut and Lebanon had become the global symbol of horror. But the Lebanese admired us, the foreigners who lived with them, for our extraordinary ability to live in the midst of bombings, shootings, and kidnappings, and to do so with as much humor and joy as possible. They precariously continued their work, their studies, their marriages, their baptisms if they were Christians, the circumcision of their children if they were Muslims, their festivals. At the slightest ceasefire, they were already inviting you to a party.
I made Lebanese friends and relatives in Beirut and connected with correspondents such as Tomás Alcoverro, Marie Colvin, Juan Carlos Gumucio, Emilio Arrojo and Robert Fisk. When I left the city, the civil wars continued until 1990. And also the attacks, like the intentional Syrian cannon fire that killed Pedro de Arístegui, the ambassador who celebrated my wedding at the Chehab Palace in 1989. . Syria’s eastern neighborhood of the Assad clan was already then, and remains today, another geographic misfortune of Lebanon.
Israel invaded my daughters’ mother’s country again in 2006. It used the same pretext as today: to end Hezbollah. Use the full power of the most formidable spy services and armed forces on the planet. Without the slightest pity or the slightest respect for the rules of war, which also exist. Israel thinks that everything is good, even crime, to terrorize the Arabs of the Middle East, to make them discover who is in charge in the region. It is sad that the country which claims to be the heir of the victims of the Holocaust does not hesitate to inherit the spirit of victory at all costs from the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Israel could not defeat Hezbollah in 2006 and perhaps it cannot today either. And if in 1982 he expelled Arafat and his fedayeen from Lebanon, he could not put an end to Palestinian resistance either. Arafat sought a two-state peace with the 1993 Oslo Accords, but a Jewish fanatic killed Israeli Prime Minister Isaac Rabin and hope faded. An ultra-warmonger named Netanyahu took power in Israel and the old fedayeen of the PLO were replaced by the extremists of Hamas.
The conflicts in the Middle East did not start on October 7 last year. And they won’t end now either. I predicted here a year ago that the horror would continue. With the protective shield of the United States, its cowardly European allies and shameless Arab leaders, Israel can do what you want. On both sides of its borders. Already Haram Lubnanpoor Lebanon.
