Spectator's Journal/Lebanon: A Traveler's Confession
Norden, Edward
"Spectator's Journal/Lebanon: A Traveler's Confession" Dual citizenship was not without advantages. For example, first as a journalist on his own with an American passport, then as an Israeli in army uniform escorting foreign journalists to the...
...Wilson arrived in Milan two years after the event, so his readers had to accept as the truth what the man of letters was told by the townspeople...
...Who knew who was inside being blown to pieces...
...They and/or their editors in London, Paris, and New York were taking this chance to bash his adopted country in print and on the tube, saying things they had waited years to say, making the invasion out to be as bloody as anything in history...
...They turn cartwheels under the blades of a chopper...
...H e and his traveling companion, a German journalist, drive into the U.S...
...He had to learn that a sensitive Jew like himself could see such a sight with his own eyes and then go to a restaurant and eat heartily...
...He saw and listened to his countrymen, his fellow soldiers, far from home...
...His eighteen months as a reporter in Ramallah, Bethel, Hebron, etc., the maudlin songs on his car radio of the Palestinian refugee Fayruz who resided in Beirut and all his reading about the Geopolitical Context, the Arab World, and the Palestinian Diaspora, had prepared him almost not at all for what he saw, smelled, heard, and felt when he got to Beirut...
...Without missing a beat, the German answers that they are indeed...
...If they did that, the limits of their power and intelligence would be shown up too glaringly, and there would be all kinds of geopolitical hell to pay...
...But compared with other sieges described by historians and eyewitnesses from Troy to Leningrad, this one seemed to have been not so horrible...
...He was disguised as an American who didn't know Hebrew, and he eavesdropped on their bafflement at how things had turned out...
...Yet didn't good manners mask a craving for violence that raged in more goyim than would readily confess to it...
...Some, not many, of these were true too...
...It would have been very different if they had been in a situation comparable to that of their friends the Israelis, if, to let the imagination soar, there was a Mexico Liberation Organization, armed by the Kremlin, operating across the Rio Grande and confining the people of El Paso and San Diego to underground shelters...
...The Mossad...
...They're clingingto the Raleigh's spars, hanging from the bridge, shinnying half-way to the top of the superstructure where the radar dishes rotate under the Stars and Stripes...
...Yet he had also believed that basically the Jews were the ones who chiseled and the goyim the ones who killed...
...It's just good clean fun far from home...
...Lebanon was a higher education for the ex-American, for not a few other Israelis, and for the occupied Palestinians in Ramallah and Gaza, especially the teenagers...
...A lieutenant takes him and the German in hand...
...Run they do...
...No one, he now learned, should say that he knew Ramallah, Bethel, Hebron, Ophra, Nablus-Shechem, Gaza, and supposedly united Jerusalem until he had been in the ruins of Arafat's Kingdom and walked alone at dusk, heart thumping, across that other Green Line, the one which separated Beirut's Christian and Moslem halves and was nothing but sandbags, teen-aged gunmen, rats, garbage, and block after block of buildings shot to Swiss cheese...
...He had held on to this little article of faith after moving to the Jewish state...
...They felt it and were terrified of the happiness they would get from satisfying it¡ªyes, the ex-American thought he sensed this strain among many Lebanese civilians and gunmen, and also among the mild-mannered, likable U.S...
...There was no end to the lessons taught across the border...
...But when Operation Peace for Galilee turned into a siege of a metropolis, he had second thoughts...
...Long Live the Liberation of Palestine," someone had scrawled...
...He saw the IDF engineers shutting off the water to half a million people...
...Most of this hideous damage was inflicted in August, 1943, when we were trying to force Badoglio's hand by a series of pure terror bombings aimed at densely populated districts...
...1D...
...Marines and sailors and French paratroops who spent a season in Beirut keeping the so-called peace...
...The young ladies do what they do, they give it everything they've got for ninety minutes, but it's not hot, not dirty, not apocalyptic...
...L ater, after Arafat sailed away and the siege was history, and after the Syrians liquidated Bashir Jemayel, he crossed into West Beirut for the first time and toured the wreckage of Arafat's Kingdom...
...H e learned in Lebanon too of the casual heroism and viciousness of ordinary Arabs, ordinary humans, ordinary civilians in a country where the front was everywhere and the nearest thing to consolation was revenge...
...They touch down on the deck of the helicopter landing ship USS Raleigh...
...There he was taught a few things at first hand which before he'd only heard spoken of, or read about...
...With Fire and Blood Until the Victory of the Revolution," another fool had written in snaky Arabic on the wall of a hovel hit by an Israeli shell...
...The boy is from Nebraska...
...He had heard stories of torture...
...Here it turned out that to banish Arafat and his men, and redraw the geopolitical picture, the ex-American's people were ready to starve and bomb a city most of the people of which had nothing to do with the PLO...
...O utrageously, the ex-American returned to dry land charmed and with his conscience soothed...
...He had spent eighteen months getting to know the occupation...
...Many found the gore funny¡ªthey couldn't get their fill...
...The same went for the Shabak (more or less Israel's FBI) and the Mossad (its CIA), both of which were very on the scene as well...
...He learned that if, thanks to his dual citizenship, he could wear two hats, this wasn't the ultimate in options, because the professional war reporters and war photographers packed even more¡ªthey were voyeurs and journeymen, emissaries and crazy persons, careerists and saints, knaves, moralists, and daredevils in safari jackets...
...Nor was he surprised when President Reagan cut his country's losses and pulled all the Marines out, followed by all the U.S...
...It had supposedly always been so, and it was definitely so in the last quarter of the twentieth century, even now when the Jews had their own country again...
...Marine Corps installation at Beirut airport one sunny day in 1983 looking for a story...
...They sing a Pointer Sisters song¡ª"I want to wrap myself around you...
...Queasy as he often was in Lebanon, he'd find himself almost missing the lawlessness when back in quiet, boring Jerusalem...
...All right...
...He thought, too, about civility...
...Something had gone wrong...
...Never betray puzzlement...
...The English barmaid jumped, and an Armenian Beiruti sipping a drink remarked that the only thing the Arabs didn't understand was force...
...Everyone was brave, and strangely enough everyone was likable...
...This couldn't have been planned or foreseen...
...Run get on it...
...He heaved a sigh every time he crossed the border back into the law and order and safety of Israel...
...The ex-American, doing his job, interviewed Arab doctors at the AUB hospital, both Moslem and Christian, who had become proficient at treating gunshot wounds and trauma...
...exclaimed the Israeli boy in the turret after a shell impacted...
...You men," says the black girl into-the microphone, "are good-looking, you're built, and we love what you're doing for America...
...They're to be seen catching beneficial rays and cutting the grass and pumping iron, each leatherneck with his Walkman and not a weapon in sight...
...diplomats in wretched Lebanon...
...Yet the show isn't hot...
...To arrive in the Jewish state from Lebanon was like arriving in Switzerland from the Jewish state...
...It was simply not that important for America to have its way there...
...For something had gone wrong...
...The ex-American was surprised to learn that likable people could behave atrociously¡ªlikable human beings could treat human beings of other tribes and even of their own tribe worse than dogs and either think nothing of it or love it...
...He had been dazzled, at first, by the size of the operation...
...The Lebanese had suffered at the hands of the PLO and were now suffering at Jewish, at Israeli hands...
...Yes, among some people, goyim as well as Jews, the craving for violence was generally held in check by prudent self-interest and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind...
...For example, first as a journalist on his own with an American passport, then as an Israeli in army uniform escorting foreign journalists to the front, then as a Jerusalem-based journalist again, the ex-American was able to spend much of the second half of 1982 and not a little of the next two years making raids across the border into Lebanon...
...He had to see the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, massacred by other Arabs, laid in a mass grave and covered with lime in the Shatilla refugee camp...
...There's a bird leaving now," the major tells them...
...He read the catchwords daubed on walls in Sabra and Shatilla...
...It's crazy up there...
...He had to sit in a Beirut restaurant spooning creamy labane into himself and have a rat the size of a puppy scamper across the bar...
...Posters of Khomeini and the Dome of the Rock were plastered on the walls¡ªLiberate Jerusalem, ordered the Ayatollah...
...He was taught in the steaming port cities and cool, dry, picture-postcard villages glued to the Edward Norden is a regular contributor to The American Spectator...
...They do an encore, then another...
...Maybe we'll have to kick some ass...
...Also, returning to Beirut after Arafat had sailed away, he learned that the siege, as sieges go, had been mild, far from total...
...When it came to civility, the goyim in their pressed uniforms put the shouting, nosy, sloppy, chiseling Jews to shame...
...Yes, he had read the books on the war in 1948¡ªthe most trustworthy, least propagandistic of them confirmed some of the stories he was told by older Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza of how his adopted countrymen, in the midst of and following a desperate war, had encouraged them to leave and bulldozed their villages...
...His anger, split in two, canceled itself out, leaving him confused...
...The IDF wasn't made for sieges...
...That his ex-countrymen, so far from home, think and behave and express themselves less innocently...
...Well, the war was bloody, it was bad news, it also did not seem to be a particularly intelligent operation on the Israeli side, yet what these reporters were up to galled him...
...He had made a journey of exploration and discovery in the Land of Israel, and come out fatalistic, but still believing that the Jews, thanks to their nature or intelligence, played the tough, inescapable game of power and war somewhat differently, somewhat less like criminals, and, interestingly and encouragingly enough, somewhat more successfully...
...The Raleigh shivers with cheers...
...The Shabak...
...It was a close thing, but finally he rejected the idea that everything and everyone was the same...
...He experienced it, while at the same time resenting what some of the foreign newspersons whom he was escorting and who were buying him lunches were doing...
...Not until he got to Lebanon, though, did he really understand what she had been talking about...
...He had stopped covering these parts of the Land of Israel four years before, and liked to believe that after eighteen intensive months over the Green Line, he knew everything there was to know about them...
...There was nothing like being there, they said, and in this case the clich¨¦ was on target...
...Some of the latest had been inflicted by his own people, by the Israelis, by the Jews...
...They do a cancan...
...The German grins at him and shrugs his shoulders...
...So the ex-American watched as the IDF, aided by the Shabak and Mossad, slowly pulled back by stages, shooting at unexplained roadside objects, and grimly improvised a security zone along Israel's northern border, inside Lebanese territory, which was to prove more successful than not...
...He had reported the thoughts and words of a young Palestinian woman from a good Ramallah family who was rubbed the wrong way by Israeli occupation, who wore a crucifix dangling into her cashmere sweater, and who had been attending the American University of Beirut when the troubles started in 1975...
...First he had to see for himself the adult children and the juvenile adults, the rats scuttling on the Green Line, the gunmen, the thriving restaurants, the Arab civilians of all the various tribes who writhed under, put up with, and positively relished the gore...
...The ex-American, not a professional war reporter, was frightened by a PLO counter-attack with Katyushas...
...He learned that all the tribes had justice on their side...
...He liked to believe that the difference between Jews and goyim in this respect was so great that it was effectively a difference of kind, not degree...
...It seemed like a good idea to have some entertainment before then for the men...
...Or if, having been bloodied, the Americans with their memories of Danang had committed themselves to a real war, no matter how far from home...
...The two reporters introduce themselves to the press officer, a major with a tent of his own, and he asks, "Are you here for the cheerleaders...
...Anyone may drive right in¡ªit's early days yet...
...Yes, Lebanon and Beirut were the West Bank and Jerusalem come into their own...
...There was always more to learn, however...
...This show is just going to be a big prick tease for a lot of the guys," he forecasts...
...Traveling for days and nights at a time and going where he pleased in the Land of the Cedars, he learned that it's possible to fear every harmless window, every innocent wall, every driver of a beat-up Mercedes weaving in your direction...
...He was angry with the journalists, these faithful agents of the right to know and see, who were only interested in the Palestinian women, children, and old people the IDF had injured, ignoring the Lebanese¡ªboth Moslem and Christian¡ªwho had welcomed the Jews as their rescuers...
...But soon enough, he became angry with Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin too for sending the IDF into this madhouse...
...The IDF going in looked all-powerful...
...And in Lebanon he learned more about what some called Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District...
...And in Lebanon too, rather late in life, he was tempted by a notion which he had only come across before in books¡ªthat when all was said and done the only difference between various peoples, tribes, outfits, and nations was the magnitude of their crimes...
...He visited the campus of AUB...
...For what could he demand, in all fairness...
...Wow, that's pretty...
...Most of the ships of the fleet, the lieutenant says, sailed from Norfolk more than four months ago...
...The ex-American in a Beirut hotel had no trouble accepting it...
...The ex-American's unspoken faith had been that the Jews were different...
...ual citizenship was not without D advantages...
...The Arabs who'd done this massacring were temporarily allied with his people...
...He himself was no daredevil...
...He learned, somewhat late in life, that some people have trouble, while some are only under the impression...
...He saw the IDF ambulances racing to collect the casualties...
...Lebanese mountainside that there were limits to what the Israel Defense Forces were capable of...
...Piles of garbage smoldered here and there...
...Furthermore, all went in for atrocities, and all, including the Maronites who suffered from a bad press and the Palestinians who were in Lebanon in the first place only because they had lost to the Jews in the Galilee all the way back in 1948, fought like tigers when their turf was in question...
...H e had written distantly of Lebanon years before in an essay on Ramallah...
...Lebanese in West Beirut told him that the water had never been shut off for more than a day at a time...
...Without toughness, of course, empathy could be suicidal, whoever you were¡ªin principle, he had known that for a long time...
...He could also believe it when Wilson added: "Since the departure of the Germans, the Partisans in the North have been guilty of some ruthless and probably unjustifiable bloodshed: they are supposed to have killed some twenty thousand people...
...He wasn't surprised that, in response, the New Jersey opened up with her VW-sized shells on villages overlooking the airport...
...They informed him that food was always being smuggled through in quantities and except for two days¡ªAugust 5 and 12, 1982, when the IDF seemed to go crazy¡ªthe bombing and shelling was pinpointed on the refugee camps and Palestinian neighborhoods, which as far as most Lebanese were concerned was all right...
...He experienced some guilt as a Jew and as a relatively new Israeli...
...Having come so far, and Sharon having been obliged to quit after the findings of the commission of inquiry into the massacres had been published, the Jews couldn't and didn't just run home...
...No saint himself, he learned that a taste of chaos can be sweet...
...He brings them to the wardroom, where the Dallas Cowgirls are mixing with officers and getting their USS Raleigh caps...
...These wounds over seven years' time had been inflicted on Arabs mostly by other Arabs...
...Compared with what could happen in Lebanon, the stone-bullet-and-tear gas rou tines at the Birzeit campus, over the Green Line half an hour north of Jerusalem in what the trade knew as the occupied West Bank, were farcical...
...We're here to keep the sides apart while they reason with each other...
...This was the old idea he was tempted by when he witnessed the Israeli army's siege of West Beirut...
...He watched a crew of skullcapped tankers shelling houses a mile away...
...The ex-American asks a sailor back on deck why he's been sent to the Middle East...
...The Allies," Wilson reported for the New Yorker from Italy in 1945, "bombarded Milan as cruelly and as indiscriminately as the Germans ever did London...
...The ex-American, like other Israelis, was saddened when those Marines were killed in their sleep a few months later...
...The last drew conclusions from the IDF's publicized troubles, and these were to give birth to the intifada...
...There'll be no shore leave for another month¡ªshore leave, by the way, is going to be in Haifa, not Beirut...
...The ship is sitting low in the water, because on her must be gathered half the sailors of the fleet and most of the Marines from on shore¡ªfour thousand or so young Americans packed together like expectant sardines...
...he had quoted her...
...The Americans, these other countrymen of his, have arrived to keep the peace...
...A crewman gives each a pair of earmuffs for the noise, and before you can say foreign correspondent they've been hoisted a thousand feet over the Shi'ite slums, the Palestinian refugee camps, the Commodore hotel, and the campus of the university, and are zooming over the Mediterranean, where ships of the Sixth Fleet, including the USS New Jersey with her fearsome guns, are strung out like the models the ex-American put together in boyhood...
...He was, it now emerged, very wrong...
...The Americans were especially likable...
...He watched the bloated corpses of Palestinians massacred by Phalangists being laid in a mass grave and sprinkled with lime, he watched the news photographers clicking away for the Pulitzer Prize, he stuffed himself in a restaurant on the seafront, and back in his hotel room he dipped into the book he had taken along, Edmund Wilson's Europe Without Baedeker...
...And indeed, the redhead, the brunette, the soul sister, and the five blondes when they appear on deck have on almost nothing at all and are more perfect than anything Hugh Hefner dreamed of as an Indiana high schooler...
...He wouldn't have liked to be on the other side...
...The Cowgirls perform a hoe-down, slapping rock-hard, silky thighs...
...T he war in Lebanon and the siege of Beirut finally opened his eyes...
...The show, viewed and enjoyed by some of the 241 Marines who would be crushed to death in their sleep one quiet Sunday morning not long afterwards, couldn't have been a bigger success...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
