As I watch the news about the unfolding crisis in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, I am taken back to 1972, when I was a young American graduate student in Beirut. Then it was the various Palestinian factions, not Hizbollah, who were lobbing shells across the border into Israel. From my balcony in the centre of the city, I watched as United States-made Phantom jets pounded the "southern suburbs" in retaliation.
The next day, almost invariably, the Lebanese papers English, French & Arabic were filled with graphic, horrific pictures of the damage done to the Palestinian refugee camps. The vivid pictures of dismembered babies and women; of the elderly dead, dying or wounded in their shanties; of schools set on fire, homes demolished, women pleading with the cameramen were shocking and unforgettable.
These Palestinians were among the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the country, displaced into Lebanon by the wars of 1948 and 1967. At the time, many Lebanese regarded them with suspicion rather than sympathy, and blamed militant Palestinian groups Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or al-Saiqa that seemed to care more about their struggle with Israel without any concern for the damage it could inflict on the country that had given them refuge.
I knew little then about the details of the conflict. But I was enraged that American-made planes, flying the star of David, were inflicting such casualties on civilians Lebanese as well as Palestinian and violating Lebanese air space (then, as now, there was no Lebanese military response, whether in the air, sea or on the ground). I decided to start writing about the Palestinians. Who were these "refugees", why were they so hated and why did they hate Israel so much?
Thirty-four years later, the TV pictures sweep across my screen here in London of dead and dying women, children, disabled and elderly people being brought out on stretchers from Qana in southern Lebanon and other locations of atrocity and suffering. I wonder what has changed.
Again, the primary victims are civilians, and though the majority this time are Lebanese they include today Palestinians in Gaza as well as in the refugee camps of Beirut's southern suburbs and the Beka'a valley to the east. The same families and their descendants are being targeted as in 1972.
Whatever one's own personal ideology pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-Lebanese, pro-Palestinian, anti-terror it cannot justify these attacks on innocent civilians, children, women, non-combatants.
Pamela Ann Smith is an American writer and journalist based in London who has been covering the middle east since 1968. She is currently updating her book, Palestine and the Palestinians: 1876-1973, and writing a new one, Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora: A Woman's Point of View
Taking sides
When, four days into the war in mid-July 2006, my brother sent an email from his Chicago home with the subject-line "This Damn Israel," all these images and memories gave me the urge to convey to him my own sense of how a horrible tragedy was unfolding in the middle east, particularly for the Lebanese and Palestinians.
Instead, I found myself cautioning him.
I understood my brother's rage. In light of many years of conversations and messages shared during my decades of travelling in the middle east as a journalist and writer, I have seen him develop his own fondness for the Palestinians. On this occasion, he has also been made furious at the lack of TV coverage from Lebanon in the United States, and the overwhelming preponderance of reporting from Israel or from a pro-Israel Washington. The newspapers, including the liberal establishment publications, were no better. "They will have nothing to do with saying anything that is anti-Israel or which harms their alliance with the totally pro-Israeli Christians, for fear of losing their Jewish/Christian readership", he wrote.
On the surface at least, my brother's outrage echoed my own, even though I could not be sure whether he was right in his assessment of the media's opinion-formers. At the same time, I had to say to him that this was definitely not the way forward.
Deep down, I suspected that behind his vehemence lay a sense of impotence that derived from liberal Americans' inability to effect any change in the Bush administration's policies on this and many other issues. It is the same feeling that underlies the increasing assault on the American media by many pro-Israeli Americans (Zionist and "Christian" alike) who also read newspapers and watch TV and see them blame Israel for taking measures in its own self-defence, against an enemy determined to destroy it.
There is here a hardening of attitudes on all sides, a taking of polarised positions, and a use of inflammatory language all of which is likely to fuel the conflict rather than bring a resolution closer. I had already witnessed this phenomenon in relation to many of the region's wars: 1973, 1982, 1990, 2003 and it was also evident to those who recalled or learned about 1956 and 1967, as well as the "year zero" of 1948, when Israel was created and the Arab armies invaded what was left of "Palestine" to try to destroy the Zionist nation at birth.
My brother, despite his fierce opposition to Israeli aggression and its occupation of other people's land, is not an anti-Semite. But I was worried that he and many others like him in the US and their numbers are growing might, if they are not careful, give ammunition to those who are. Many in his generation have forgotten or never learned how virulent anti-Semitism, like racism in general, can be, wherever it appears.
Thinking it through
So I replied to my brother: "What's new?" I suggested that the real reason for Israel's attack on Gaza and then Lebanon was to "break up the Hamas/Fatah alliance that was going to lead to a Palestinian referendum recognising Israel's right to exist in return for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza." Israel's new prime minister Ehud Olmert and many of his supporters, I explained, were determined after the withdrawal from Gaza to keep some of the large Israeli settlements in the West Bank. As a result, they do not want negotiations on a withdrawal to the 1967 borders, even if they could secure recognition of Israel by "hardline" Arab states such as Saudi Arabia (as promised in King Abdullah's 2004 peace plan) as well as by the Palestinians.
In addition, "my" president, George W Bush, was hardly likely to force Olmert towards compromise, given his complete failure to push the "roadmap" process and his administration's determination to bring down the democratically elected Palestinian government formed after Hamas's victory in the January 2006 elections. For Bush and his allies, the "war on terror" comes first.
Two and a half weeks, that email response has stood the test. It seems that this war could go on for still more weeks, with all the consequent losses of civilian lives that entails.
Ever the optimist, I concluded my message by saying: "My biggest hope is that the mothers of Israeli soldiers and relatives of the victims of suicide bombings will get together with the mothers, wives and sisters of Palestinian militants to stop the escalating militarisation, and brutalisation, on both sides."
My current research, I told my brother, has uncovered a lot of evidence "that they are doing that, too, even if the outside world knows little about it." And this is also true, I now realise, of the families of the dead and injured on both sides in this latest war.
Today, in London, I take limited comfort that the newspapers and TV here are highlighting the devastating, criminal attacks on civilians in Lebanon and Israel, rather than just the military strategies and diplomatic manoeuvres. Maybe that's partly because, three decades on from my stay in Beirut, there are now more women in the media?
Meanwhile, I look forward to the day when my compatriots insist that United States planes, bombs and money be used to make peace, not war.
