Dear friends,
Thanks to all of you who responded to my last note from Syria. I wrote it while sick and a little down, so I just want to say to any of you who are thinking of visiting Syria, please do. It is an amazing place in many ways. Yes, I feel more comfortable in Palestine, but I have no regrets about my month in Syria. I’m now back in Palestine and my reports will likely start to take on their normal form again, but first, here’s another in the style of a travel blog, this time largely from Lebanon.
After my Arabic class ended, I left for Lebanon for a few days. I went to the bus station in Damascus, got in a shared taxi, paid $15, and was in Beirut a few hours later. Easy as that. There are street signs on the highways near Damascus with arrows pointing in different directions and the words “Lebanon” “Jordan” and “Iraq”. It reminds me of the arbitrariness of borders, and of how small this region is. I often think of Syria and Jordan as huge countries because they’re many times the size of Palestine and Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan combined are only slightly larger than Texas (which is a large state, yes, but it’s one of 50).
In my car ride to Lebanon (as in my car ride from Syria to Jordan the following week), there were several nationalities represented in the car: Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and American. When the Iraqi man heard that I was American, he began to talk to me in fluent unaccented American English. “I was an interpreter for the US army,” he told me, and began talking about all the medals he received. I was taken aback at first, and admittedly judgmental of someone working with the army, but I was also curious. I asked him why he started working with them, and he thought I asked why he stopped. “Too many threats to my life,” he said. “So now I’ve been in Syria for a couple years, and I’m trying to get to America but they say they don’t have me in the system anymore and won’t issue me a visa, even though I worked with them for 3 years and got all these medals.” We talked a bit about his status in Syria and how he’s able to go to Lebanon (he has work there as an engineer rebuilding some of what Israel destroyed in 2006). I asked him again why he chose to work with the army. “It’s not just about the money,” he said, “though the money was good.” He went on to say that at the beginning of the war, most of the interpreters were Arabs from other countries, not Iraqis. He heard many stories of slight mis-translations leading to what he called “unnecessary killings” (I would argue all the killings are unnecessary), and he wanted to try to help. He is Iraqi, and speaks excellent English, so he thought he could save lives, and indeed, feels that he did.
As we crossed the border into Lebanon, I was struck by its beauty. I was there last February, when the mountains were all covered in snow, a different kind of beauty. But the greenness this time, the different colors in fact, were gorgeous. We weaved in and out of the mountain roads, and I started to see billboards for tattoo removal and other signs that distinguish Lebanon from Syria. And then, of course, the destruction. I remember reading about the Israeli bombing of the only road from Lebanon to Syria, but the sight of the bridge, or rather the pillars with no road on top, still undergoing reconstruction, was eerie. I imagined people in their cars plunging hundreds of feet to their death in the rocky ravine below.
This abrupt entry of memories of war into otherwise normal life would be repeated again and again in the coming days. Sitting in traffic, a driver would point to the bombed bridge next to us and say, “Traffic wasn’t like this before the summer of 2006.” Walking to a fancy café in the evening, my friends would tell me how they walked there once during the war and were terrified. When we arrived at the café they told me the whole area had been closed during the war. “Was the Lebanese army here preventing people from entering?” I asked. “No,” they said, “the army wasn’t allowed in either. Hizbollah controlled the area.”
You can’t walk or drive in Beirut without seeing destruction, construction, and a plethora of martyr posters. Except for the hairstyles and clothing, it’s hard to tell if the martyrs are from 1976, 2006, or sometime in between. I walked by one poster that at first glance looked like another martyr poster. A young man wore military gear and held what looked like an automatic weapon. Then I noticed the word “paintball” at the bottom of the poster. It was an advertisement. Strikingly similar.
I took a day to visit the south with my friend. I spent only about a half hour in each of Saida, Sur, and Bint Jbayl, but even the ride was worth it. I saw the hills with olive groves and thought, “This looks like the rural West Bank.” I saw the sea to our right and thought, “This looks like the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv.” I saw the specific shade of green and thought, “This looks like Jenin.” And of course, it is all of those things. And probably, had Israel not taken over in 1948, northern Palestine today would look quite similar (almost like it does now, but without all the Hebrew and red rooves).
We arrived in Bint Jbayl, the town that successfully resisted a ground invasion by the Israeli army in 2006. Many buildings still show the scars from bombing, but mostly life just continues. I realized that while I think of Bint Jbayl and Qana (which we also drove through) as sites of resistance or massacre, they are first and foremost places, like any other, of daily life. I looked up at the mountain and thought about how Palestine (Israel) is just on the other side. As I walked around with my Palestinian Lebanese friend who will likely never set foot in Palestine, I again thought of the arbitrariness of borders.
In Beirut I went to a play with my host and the kids from the Palestinian organization she works with. It was a story of a family from a fictional island who has many adventures traveling by boat around the world, but they are always trying to find their way home. I asked my host later if it was a reference to the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For Palestinians, she said, and Iraqis, and everyone else. I wondered if the actors were Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Iraqi, knowing how ethnically divided Lebanon is. But I was then comforted by the thought that it doesn’t matter, that one thing I like about Lebanon is that it seems to have a strong, or at least visible, progressive scene that does cross those boundaries.
As I got ready to leave for Syria, my friend said she would love to come to Damascus with me, that she had never been. She had been talking about it for days and I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t set in stone yet. She finally convinced her mother to ask her father. His response: No, the situation is too uncertain. “The situation?!” my friend asked angrily. “It’s been the same for 30 years!” Yes, her mother said, and it’s too uncertain. We never know what might happen.
I think about the concept of security, something most certainly missing from people’s lives in Lebanon and Palestine, and something largely present for people in Syria and Jordan. I had a conversation with a Palestinian friend the other day in which he said, “I don’t like Syria. You always feel like Assad is breathing down your back, you can’t say what you think, especially if it has anything to do with him.” I argued, “But people there live mostly happy, secure lives, with government services (health, education) provided. And Palestinians there too.” He agreed. “Sure, in Lebanon the Palestinians’ conditions are awful, the law discriminates openly against them, but they are free to speak and associate as they want. I prefer Lebanon and Palestine to Syria and Jordan.” I had a similar conversation with another friend, but with the opposite perspective: “Talk is nothing. So what about freedom of speech if we don’t have our basic needs?” This is of course a simplification of the countries in this area, but it’s an interesting context to think about.
Of course, there are certain things that do cross all the boundaries, that unify all the people of the region, and that once again remind me of the arbitrariness of borders. Right now, there is one that stands out to me most: Turkish soap operas (dubbed into Arabic). :)
