Summer Is Cancelled

SUMMER IS CANCELLED

Austin Gerassimos Mackell.


Everything was going well. As soon as I got to Beirut on my student exchange program I liked it. The atmosphere was an electric and instantly appealing mix of Mediterranean and Arab culture. The depth and variety of history and culture was amazing, the food was great and cheap, the women were beautiful, and the local beer Almaza didn't give you a hangover no matter how much of it you drank. The locals were the most welcoming people I've come across in my life, and the buildings had all these cool bullet holes in them. It was a place that owhere you can party 'til the call to prayer in style. I had originally only planned to stay for six months, but shortly after my arrival I decided to extend my stay for the whole year.

In the past five months, everyone has told me that no matter how much fun I was having at the present, the summer would blow my mind. After the first ten days of July, I could see what they meant. The streets and bars were busier than ever. The pretty Lebanese women were in their skimpy summer best which they had been collecting and perfecting all spring if not since last summer. Tourists packed the streets, bars, and night clubs. People predicted as many as a million of them would be in Lebanon at one time or another during the summer, a figure equal to about a third of the population of the country. Fifty Cent, Ricky Martin, and Paul Vandyke had all just played in Beirut. Sean Paul was scheduled to perform, and later in the summer Deep Purple and Liza Minnelli would be performing at the ancient ruins in Baalbek.

Even the most pessimistic locals I spoke to about the political situation, and there were among the population many with dark predictions on this topic, assured me that nothing would happen till after the summer.

Then, after a huge night out (especially considering it was a Tuesday) I was going to sleep some time after dawn. I heard what sounded like fighter jets over head. Too loud and high pitched for normal planes. "Nah" I told myself, "You're imagining things," rolled over and went to sleep.

I woke up as the evening approached, and wandered down the street to a lovely little cafe called De Prague for my "morning" coffee. Several of my friends were already at a table so I joined them and I started talking about my crazy night and they all stared at me like I was crazy. "You haven't heard, have you?"
"Heard what?"
"The sh*t has hit the fan."

Seven Israeli soldiers had been killed and two taken hostage. The Israelis had begun their bombing of the south. Some say the impetus came from Iran and that Hezbollah's direct provocation of Israel, at such an inopportune time for the Lebanese, was a move by Tehran to divert the weight of world attention from its confrontation with the West over its nuclear program. Others say that Syria wanted to keep Israel busy with Lebanon so as to stall on the issue of the Hamas leaders such as Khaled Meshaal. This was, according to many, another case of Lebanon acting as a field in which the more substantial regional powers play out their never-ending world cup, using the Lebanese people as a ball.

Others, particularly the predominantly Shia supporters of Hezbollah, have given full credit to and rallied around their leader Hussein Nesralah, who they claim was acting out of sympathy for the thousands of Palestinians, including dozens of ministers from the Palestinian authority who have been kidnapped as part of the escalating conflict in Gaza.

Another motive often sighted for Hezbollah's actions, but not by their supporters, is that by generating further conflict with Israel it can prevent further pressure building within Lebanon for it to comply with UN security council resolution 1559. Not only does this Resolution call for the withdrawal of all foreign forces, it has also called for the group, which took arms with the stated and largely achieved [1] goal of driving the Israelis from Lebanese soil, to be disarmed along with all other Lebanese militias [2]. Hezbollah's main defense of its continued armed state was that the Lebanese army was simply not as well able to prevent further Israeli aggression; it was, after all, Hezbollah that eventually drove them out.

If their goal was to remind the Lebanese of just what a powerful threat was dwelling to the south, they have succeeded. However this may not have the effect of uniting the county behind them, as they might have planned. Many people see clearly that this time Hezbollah have provoked the wrath of that threat. They do not appreciate the fact that summer, with its potential of earning billions of dollars through tourism, is cancelled, or that the power is out and they are without air conditioning, or that they now are forced to lay awake at night worrying about their family, as bombs fall in unpredictable locations all across this tiny little country, roughly the size and population of greater Sydney.

It seems the current situation, at least in the short term, has begun to polarize the population over the question of Hezbollah, who many Lebanese, including many non-Shia, have referred to in the past respectfully as "The Resistance". A Druze friend of mine, who was sitting in my flat with me last night listening to the bombs land, turned to me and said, "Obviously, while the Israelis are here, we are with Hezbollah, but once this settles down, there is reckoning to do in this country." Another friend of mine, of Palestinian and Egyptian descent with equally little love for the Israelis, had said to me back on day one "I just wish those bearded mother f*ckers would calm the f*ck down and do a little math before they acted."

It could be Israel's hope that they can force other groups within Lebanon and its government to confront and control Hezbollah, but it seems doubtful that the government has the military or political strength to do this without plunging the country back into civil war.

Hezbollah's Shia support base, who are bound by religious affiliation and filled with gratitude for their liberty from the Israeli occupation to Hezbollah, will be less easily swayed. It has become a binary opposition for many of them - if you aren't with Hezbollah then you are with the Israelis, who, among their many sins, were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during their occupation of Lebanon. You may as well be with Satan.

This well of support is not however bottomless, the same friend who talked about a "reckoning" in Lebanon when the confrontation has died down also informed me of his cab ride over. The driver had been a Shia who had fought in the South with Hezbollah against the Israelis, "Isn't it great?" the cab driver had said, "We really humiliated them, caught them by surprise". My friend had nodded his head, but then posed a question, "Only, who is going to pay for this?"

The car went quiet and both men knew the answer. Lebanon was going to pay. While the Israelis dropped pamphlets warning civilians to avoid known Hezbollah infrastructure and while they were bombed to help "make a better future" for Lebanon they were also bombing the airport and the local roads, particularly bridges, as well as all major routes out of the country, imposing a naval blockade, isolating Lebanon from the outside world and destroying the lives of its inhabitants. Universities and thousands of business have already closed. The driver broke the silence to agree, that Yes, this was a problem. He pulled up his jeans to reveal two wooden legs and said "Nobody can say I don't hate the Israelis, but I have a family to feed".

Whatever Hezbollah was thinking when they did it, they did it, they gave the Israelis a reason to cancel summer.

My date with a cute girl from a little town just north of Beirut is cancelled because her parents are afraid to let her out of the house, the "Drum and Bass Beach Party" booked for tonight is off, there is no chicken at the kebab shop, and there are no donuts at "Dunkin' Donuts". The country is already grinding to a halt. It's only day three.

The reaction of those thousands of tourists who had arrived in the first few weeks of a beautiful Mediterranean summer to find themselves almost immediately in a country under bombardment and siege has been panic. A friend who works at the British embassy recalled being asked repeatedly when the helicopters were coming.

Those of us who have been here a little longer, particularly in Beirut, were perhaps inversely a little too calm. At first, most of us felt this was one of the many small tremors that ripple through Lebanese politics and die out. "A storm in a tea cup," I had texted home. Then last night we heard bombing for hours on end and throughout the day. At least ten have gone off in the last two hours within earshot of my apartment, located near the centre of Beirut, some close enough to set off car alarms. People have been calling from all over the world to either check that we are OK or insist that we should leave apparently, oblivious to the danger we would be bringing on ourselves in doing so.

A German friend of mine tried leaving today by the road to Aleppo, the northern crossing point with Syria. The road to the main crossing point, the Beirut-Damascus highway, was blown out last night. Today about four hours after she left the news broke that they had now bombed this road as well. if the roads were empty it would be an hour or two to the border, and she should therefore have been well clear, but this is the only way out of Beirut and many, particularly foreign nationals of other Arab countries, are leaving for fear of being trapped here. Her mobile phone has been either out of range, out of batteries, or out of commission since we tried calling, thankfully we just received an email assuring she has arrived safely in Aleppo. She will have been one of the last hundred or thousand to have left before the way was closed. It seems that any travel outside the country now requires the navigation of dangerous dirt roads through the mountains.

Since then our mobile phones have become unreliable, messages take hours lines are unavailable. Since then there have been reports of attempted Israeli landings in Sidon, not more than and a forty minute drive from here before they bombed the bridge, defeated by the Lebanese army. Since then the official death toll has climbed past seventy. Since then Israel has demanded the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the south and the destruction of its weapons as well as the safe return of its two soldiers before it will give Lebanon peace. Since then it has become clear that this is the beginning of something, and its end is not insight.

Summer is cancelled. The bullet holes no longer look cool.
[1] The exception being the disputed Sheba farms area which Lebanon, Israel and Syria have all made claims to at various times
[2] The level to which this has been achieved is very much debated as many are suspected of having remaining stockpiles and/or were integrated into the regular Lebanese army