Throughout Lebanon, talking politics was the national pastime. I watched men visiting my dad talk and noticed how they disagreed, and I compared their behavior to what I had observed in Israel. In Lebanon, the more people disagreed, the more they shouted and yelled and called each other insulting names, as if that were going to make their point more valid. I would contrast that with conversations I heard at the hospital between Israeli families who disagreed on many issues. Even though they passionately disagreed, they never called each other degrading names.
The more people visited us and the more I heard them talking, the more I realized how shallow and uninformed they were about Israel and Western culture. Of course, the main conclusion of every conversation was that the Lebanese war was an American-Israeli conspiracy, and if America wanted, it could stop it in three days. Both the Christians and Muslims believed this. This belief was repeated over and over by politicians at every opportunity in the Arabic media. The people believed it because they had no other perspective, as I’d had in Israel. The irrationality of the belief in conspiracy theories and lies presented by leaders and governments with hidden agendas is important to understand. People’s subjective reality is far from the real situation. They believe ridiculous ideas, and logic simply isn’t part of their thinking, which is why Western liberal reasoning isn’t going to work.
As days passed, I became more disgusted with my culture. I began to compare my place as a female in Lebanese society to that of females in Israeli society. I recall a day when my cousin’s husband, Shahine, came to drive my mother to the hospital, since we did not have a car. I was determined that I was going to have a good day. I was wearing a pair of shorts that Lea had given me, with a matching T-shirt and sandals. I felt beautiful, loved, and privileged to have met people like her. When Shahine walked through the door, I welcomed him with a big smile and told him how much we appreciated his help in driving us to the hospital. I asked him if he would like a cup of coffee before we left, and he said, “No, thank you. I have to get going."
I called my mother, who was already dressed, and informed him that we were ready. He looked at me with shock and said, “Aren’t you going to get dressed?"
I said, “Oh no, I don’t feel like dressing up today. We’re only going to the hospital. This is cool and comfortable."
"I think you should go change.” He said it like an order.
I said, “No, I am comfortable, I am not going to change."
"I will not drive you to the hospital looking like a slut. Go put something on that will cover your legs."
My mother intervened at that moment and asked me to go change. I said, “No way. If you don’t like how I am dressed, you go to the hospital by yourself. I don’t think I look like a slut. I wore this for three weeks in Israel. Nobody treated me like a slut."
Shahine screamed, “This is not Israel, this is Lebanon! If they don’t have any morality over there, we have some."
This supposedly educated, not religious, middle-aged Arab man, and a family man at that, had decided I was not worthy of respect just because I wore shorts that showed half of my legs. Rather than worry about important things like my education, my values, my intellect, my character, and what I was going to accomplish in life, he was concerned with ancient tribal ideas of our family’s honor, which depended on my sexual propriety. My poor mother was embarrassed and hurt. She insisted that I change because she needed me with her at the hospital. She was almost begging.
Feeling angry and degraded, I walked into my room to change my clothes. I started crying. If not for my mother, I would never have given in. Is it any wonder that Americans have gone to the moon and Israel became the strongest, most intelligent country in the Middle East? Arabic lack of development is because of Arabs like Shahine who spent their time worrying about nonsense. I swore that I would leave Lebanon as soon as I could, especially after the victory smile on Shahine’s face telling me that now I looked worthy of respect. I couldn’t understand how somebody could be judged on her appearance instead of her intelligence and what she had to offer her country and the world.
During the first few days I was in the hospital in Israel I earned the respect of everybody who came to know me. I helped many people by using a language that I had taught myself in a bomb shelter while watching TV programs. I checked people out of the hospital, translated for doctors, ran errands, changed people’s clothes, and took them to the bathroom, none of which I had ever done before. People respected me for what I had to offer, for the attitude I had, and for going out of my way to help others, even my enemies the Palestinians.
I did not belong in Lebanon. I had no fond feelings toward the country. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I felt more at home in Israel, the place that had given me a glimpse of Western civilization. I related to the people there and the way they respected each other. Civilization can exist only where both culture and society respect and protect the rights of individuals, where self-improvement is encouraged, and where mutual respect is demanded, regardless of gender, religion, or ethnic identity.
Civilization is a collection of behaviors that people live by. It is a respect for education, for human beings. It is the desire for the improvement of self and the broadening of the mind without differentiating between a woman and a man. Civilization is the result of citizens who have been nurtured and encouraged to reach the ultimate goal of bettering themselves and others at every level. I did not feel civilization in Lebanon. The people there respected the shrewd, con artist businessman who made his wealth taking advantage of others. Bullies and corrupt politicians were respected, put on a pedestal as powerful. One thing that both Muslim and Christian cultures shared was their lack of respect and equality for women. A girl was never encouraged to continue her studies and have a career of her own if she chose to. Five friends of mine dropped out of college during their third year because they got married. It was time to have children and be wives. They would never be able to work, so education served as only a good addition to increase their value on the marriage market.
One of my friends wanted to become a doctor. Her brothers and family would laugh at her when she started talking about it. And we Christians considered ourselves an educated and sophisticated society because our boys went to the Sorbonne or Oxford to finish their education. We thought we were civilized, but we were acting like any other society that strongly discriminated against women.
Life in southern Lebanon improved greatly for us. The Israelis were able to drive away the radicals and bring peace to the areas they invaded. However, the PLO was turning Lebanon into a terrorist base, as the Taliban would do in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. The world was not thanking the Israelis then, as no one thanked the Americans for driving out the Taliban from Afghanistan and giving people back their lives. No one thanked the Israelis later when they took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant in Iraq in 1982. And people don’t think Hussein had any plans for nuclear WMD? Thank the Israelis for cutting that effort short. Now the same nuclear efforts are being made in Iran. Whenever Israel had the foresight to see what was happening concerning terrorist activity and did something about it, the whole world got upset. If the world had paid attention to the Islamic terrorists that Israel has been fighting for over fifty years, the whole world would not now be plagued with acts of terror against innocent civilians.
The Israeli siege of Beirut went on for ten weeks while the United States conducted negotiations between Israel and intermediaries in contact with Yasser Arafat. Arafat agreed to the expulsion of PLO gunmen from Beirut on condition that the thousands of Palestinians left behind in refugee camps would be protected by an international military force. The first contingent of the UN Multi-National Force (MNF), 350 French troops, arrived on August 21,1982. The remainder of the MNF (800 Italian troops and 800 United States Marines) arrived August 25, and the expulsion of Palestinian gunmen from Beirut was completed.
On September 14, 1982, newly elected Lebanese president Bashir Ge
mayel was assassinated by a massive truck bomb. As a spontaneous act of retaliation against the PLO, Christian forces attacked the Palestinians.
Two of the most publicized massacres in Lebanon is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. The notorious Sabra and Shatila camps were havens for all the terrorists on earth. From the Baader-Meinhof Gang to the Japanese Red Army Brigade, every terrorist organization at that time had some connection to Sabra and Shatila. In addition, kidnappers, drug dealers, and all sorts of criminals found refuge inside the camps. Lebanese were terrified of just the names of these two places.
The massacres during the Lebanese civil war were horrible. But mentioning Sabra and Shatila alone—about four hundred dead, not thousands—without mentioning the tens of thousands of victims of the Lebanese civil war is unjust and cruel to the memory of the dead Lebanese. One hundred thousand civilians were killed, 60 percent of those in massacres perpetrated against Christians. Palestinian militiamen started the killings in 1975, long before the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. Beit Mellat, Deir Achache, Damour, Saadiyate, and many others were peaceful cities and villages where hundreds, if not thousands, of Lebanese were killed on their own land in their own country by armed foreigners, mostly Palestinians and Syrian Muslims. Of course those poor villagers could not afford the millions or billions of dollars that the PLO was paying for worldwide propaganda. So their tragedy remains mostly unknown, except among their families, their fellow citizens, and members of the local Lebanese news media.
The crimes perpetrated against unarmed civilians in Sabra and Shatila should not be excused. But then why not mention the “War of the Camps” of 1985-86, when for more than six months, armed Shiite elements from the Lebanese Amal militia supported by Shiite units of the Lebanese army surrounded Sabra and Shatila, then populated mostly by civilians with few armed elements. The Shiite militias bombarded the camps with heavy artillery and tanks, cut off power and water, and prevented food and medical help from reaching the camp population. It was far crueler than the 1982 attack. So where is the Palestinian and Arab outrage? Why ignore these abuses, which actually lasted much longer, and with more victims and more tragedies, than the 1982 ones?
Is it because the perpetrators were Shia Muslims? So crimes against humanity are now forgiven?
Meanwhile in Beirut the MNF would grow to a force of 5,200 French, Italian, British, and American troops. The United States government continued to conduct negotiations between Israel and the newly elected government of Lebanon.1
While the negotiations between the Israeli and Lebanese governments were progressing, Hezbollah, the newly formed radical Islamist militia supported by Iran and Syria, introduced a tactic that has become a worldwide plague. Although Yasser Arafat was the father of modern terrorism, it was Hezbollah that pioneered the use of suicide bombers.2 On April 18, 1983, the driver of a truck packed with explosives detonated his vehicle in the driveway of the United States embassy in Beirut. Sixty-three people were killed and a hundred were wounded. This was Hezbollah’s salutation to the United States.3
On October 23, Hezbollah struck again, this time both the barracks of the United States Marines and the headquarters of the French MNF contingent, with simultaneous suicide truck bombs. These attacks killed 241 marines and 58 French soldiers. Although the MNF remained for four more months, it was clear that it was not going to be able to maintain order and bring peace to Lebanon. The MNF left Beirut on February 26, 1984.
The fate of Lebanon was left in the hands of power broker Syria. The Islamic world was taking notes on how the mighty U.S. military, having been bloodied, had packed up and left. The lesson was not lost on one Osama bin Laden. America and the civilized world have failed repeatedly to understand the players and the cause of the Middle East conflict. When I heard President Bush speaking after September 11 about the Axis of Evil that included Iran and Syria, I wondered where the American government had been for the last twenty-some years. It was Iran that set up and financed Hezbollah and Syria that protected it. These events in Lebanon laid the groundwork for the war on terror we are fighting today. It sent a clear message to the terrorists that America was blinded by its apathy. Because America was indifferent in dealing with Syria and Iran twenty-five years ago, today we’re trying to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb and Syria from allowing insurgents into Iraq, not to mention Syria’s possibly harboring Saddam’s nukes. According to the number-two official in Saddam Hussein’s air force, General Georges Sada, Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. “There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. The flights—fifty-six in total, according to Sada—attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.4
As the exportation of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran began taking hold in Lebanon, I knew that I had no future in the country of my birth. My only hope to escape from the seemingly endless hell of Lebanon was to concentrate on my studies, especially English. I signed up for a typing course to learn how to type English so that I could get a job with a company that dealt with Israelis or Americans. I looked forward to my lessons two hours a week at the YWCA downtown. With each keystroke, I felt I was getting closer to my dream: to work in a company where I would meet people who were going to respect me for my character, for my abilities, for my mind and what I had to offer the world, not for my looks, my clothing, or the shallow “honor” between my legs.
As I matured, I occupied my mind and kept busy by becoming involved in the community and my church. I was a member of the art club and acted in two plays. I was in charge of eighty Scouts, girls and boys aged ten to thirteen. I supervised their involvement in the festivities in town during the holidays, and trained and directed them during the parades and community events. I was one of the founders of the Red Cross in our region. With the help of two people in the choir, we recruited and organized a volunteer force for Red Cross headquarters in Marjayoun. I also graduated from high school. But I had no chance to go to college. As the only child of aging parents, I could not leave them to travel to college in Beirut. And there was no money— every lira had been spent on helping me attain my high school degree.
As I started evaluating my life and the two others that depended on me, I decided to take a one-year business administration course in the business school at the YWCA. Three of the board of directors of the school respected my parents and knew our financial situation, so they gave me a break on the tuition. I enjoyed the course tremendously. My days were spent in school and my evenings at the church.
I graduated from my business course on June 15, 1984, and brought my degree home and showed it to my parents, who were very happy for me. They hoped that I would find a job (and a husband) at the same time. That week I was consumed with thoughts about my limited options in Marjayoun. I decided to go up to the army base and speak to the Israeli general who was in charge of the security zone, and apply to be his secretary. I had heard about him from our neighbors who worked at the army base. His name was Shlomo.
It was a crazy thought for a girl in my culture to go into to the heart of a military fortress alone and ask to speak to the general. How absurd! But I had no other choice. If I wanted to do something with my life, I had to take charge, be creative, and explore all the possibilities, no matter what. In the middle of a war and being in Marjayoun, the options were few. I figured the worst thing he could do was laugh at me and ask me to leave. So I got up one morning and worked up the courage to go see him.
I started walking up the hill to the army base. The route Chuck had used was now a regular shortcut used by the soldiers. Even though it was only a hundred yards from my house, because of the shelling it was the first time I had been there in eight years. The hill was a mess, with barbed wire all over the pl
ace. Even with the path, I had to find my way. Tanks and jeeps were parked on both sides of the entrance. I walked straight to the Israeli soldier guarding the gate. He looked at me and did not know what to think. I asked if he spoke English. He smiled, which encouraged me, and answered, “Of course. How can I help you?” I told him, “I am here to see General Shlomo.” A bit shocked, he nevertheless politely guided me in the direction to the general’s office.
I was on my own and out of my element. I was the only woman in the army base and the recipient of all sorts of looks from the military personnel. I was nervous. My only strength was derived from the thought of my old parents. I thought of their lives, their health, and how proud they would be if I got a job working for the general. When I got to General Shlomo’s office, I took a deep breath and said a prayer. The door was just a hair open. I knocked on it twice, and heard a voice say "ken” which is “yes” in Hebrew. I opened the door and said in English, “Is this General Shlomo’s office?” Surprised, he replied in English with a smile, “Yes. How can I help you? I’m Shlomo.” He was by himself sitting behind a big desk covered with papers. On the side was another desk attached to his with telephones and electronic devices. I asked him if I could come in.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 14