by Alberto Piccinni * –
With their proverbial wallah(ra) (1), accustomed to laughing to ward off misfortunes, in the early hours of Sunday, the Lebanese seem to underestimate the situation of exceptional tension on the Blue Line considering it only a mutual demonstration of strength in the face of the news arriving from Gaza.
After all, the so-called “skirmishes” between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militias are very common along the jagged border, especially in the area of the Shabaa farm, a strip of territory inhabited by Lebanese but located just beyond the Syrian border, of which Israel is It was forcibly seized during the occupation of the Golan Heights in 1967.
But, after a few hours, although someone still wanted to joke by filming themselves while ironically offering a Sikh (skewer) to the Israeli soldiers at the border, the atmosphere had changed a lot. The cannon fire on Monday afternoon had shaken windows and floors throughout the district for an hour and were enough to reawaken the still fresh memory of the 2006 war. Tyre, the splendid city, a UNESCO heritage site, is semi-deserted. An unusual calm worries the streets. No hubbub of hookahs, cotton candy, ice cream, corn on the cob and sports cars with blasting stereos. There is the usual group of street urchins with scooters who take advantage of the empty seafront to challenge each other with wheelies.
In the land of noise, it was that silence that made me understand that something had clicked. The following day schools and main businesses will remain closed. Our friends from the crisis unit together with the municipalities, volunteers and UNIFIL forces are coordinating to evacuate the villages near the border. Families are accommodated as best as possible in the city’s schools and public facilities. The aid machine is activated immediately. They need water, food, milk, mattresses, blankets… and they will need them daily until the tension has subsided.
After the alert I received from the embassy, for security reasons, on Wednesday, I had to leave Tire to fall back to Beirut, evidently considered less dangerous. Indeed, in the capital, the situation seems more relaxed, at least on the surface. Even here, on the street, there isn’t much traffic and, in the evening, at the friends’ jam session, there were four of us. A very reliable source from the diplomatic channel tells us to be on guard: “In the event of an escalation, the airport is the most sensitive area.” Well! …it’s not hard to imagine! Beirut has been a “hot” airport since the dawn of a conflict played out by the parties with attacks and reprisals. The Lebanese know this well, having lived in a continuous back-and-forth in which an attack corresponded to a punitive operation in a tragic succession of violence. Apparently, the Germans and Swiss who canceled their flights to the Lebanese capital also know this. And the Canadians who invited their compatriots to leave the country as soon as possible. Even the youngest still have vivid memories of 2006, when the first attack by Israeli forces was the bombing of the airport to prevent Hezbollah from using it for weapons and supplies. In December 1968, Israel surprisingly attacked and destroyed around fifteen civilian aircraft in response to the PLO attack on El Al Flight 253. Exactly 40 years ago, the airport hub was also the site of the attack on the PLO forces multinational peacekeeping forces in 1983, a few months after the attack on the American embassy. 346 victims were killed in the episode, including 241 American soldiers.
In the 1980s, the events of the civil war and the Israeli invasion were placed in the broader context of the Cold War and the conflict between Saddam’s Iraq, at the time a trusted ally of Washington, against the sworn enemy of all time: the Iran.
The ethnic-religious groups that make up the Lebanese mosaic intercept different interests which make the country particularly sensitive to what is happening throughout the area, a litmus test of international power games. Today, in addition to further instability in the area, the opening of a possible open conflict on the Lebanese front could trigger a domino effect which would not only involve the Iranian republic but would transform a series of regional conflicts into a feared new great world war. Uncle Sam has come to protect his nephew with two aircraft carriers and around 2000 soldiers who, for now, act as sentries off the coast of Gaza but it is feared that they may be directed towards other objectives. For the United States, the geopolitical interests are enormous: Suez, the gas and oil routes and then we must prevent the countries of the Middle East from being attracted into the orbit of the BRICS or from having the temptation to abandon the dollar. If you look at the map, the directive that goes from Ukraine to the Middle East now represents almost a united front considering the further Azeri crackdown against the Armenians.
Chatting with local colleagues and friends, it emerges that everyone finds it incredible the way and speed in which Western public opinion has sided with one side and not in favor of mediation and de-escalation. The propaganda was massive. Then as today, true or false, the alleged atrocities of the enemy are exploited to justify retaliation. Fake news, segmented or devoid of context, is deliberately aimed at arousing outrage and ensures that the concern of relatives and friends in Italy for our safety is often exaggerated. While in Italy, therefore, all the newspapers published the fake news of the children massacred by the Palestinians, I was looking in my books for the image of the Kaiser who in 1914 was depicted cutting off the feet and hands of the women and children of Belgium, to show it to my parents and explain to them how war propaganda, the so-called Psyop (2), works.
The impossibility of working in Tire currently forces me to leave the country. I head to the “hot” airport in my car. It’s barely midnight and there isn’t a soul alive on the street. Next to me is the taxi driver, who will take my car back to the parking lot. I try to talk to him about the al-Aqsa Flood in Gaza but the misunderstanding is such that he shows me photos of another flood: the one that hit Beirut the evening before, causing flooding and a collapse.
While Sleepy Joe prepares his trip to the Holy Land and the Shiite leaders of Lebanon and Iran meet in the corridors of power of Beirut, ordinary people try to distract themselves without success, hiding their anxieties behind a timid and poorly concealed normality. He witnesses the genocide taking place in Gaza helplessly. Blockades for solidarity demonstrations are daily. There are half a million Palestinians in formal and informal refugee camps in the country. The balance is always precarious. As was the case in the civil war, certain things can happen in a few hours and then there is no longer any brake on the spiral of attacks and reprisals. Fears, especially those of war, are not easy to erase. We hope that all these fears remain such and never materialize into a chain of uncontrollable events. Inshallah.
Note:
1 – The Neapolitan term “uallera” is borrowed from the Arabic “wadara” which means “hernia”.
2 – I could also have used the famous video of little Nayirah who, in 1991, claimed to have personally seen Iraqi troops “rip babies out of incubators and throw them on the floor”. But my parents don’t know English and could have misunderstood. In that case, the media operation was to transform the image of Saddam’s Iraq. From a propaganda point of view, just as the Kaiser was the “butcher of Berlin” so Saddam became “ithe butcher of Baghdad”.
* Alberto Piccinni graduated in International Relations at the University of Bologna and works as an international aid worker in Lebanon and Algeria. Educator and MusicArTherapist, he has coordinated projects in Italy and abroad dedicated to childhood and disability in long-term refugee camps and historical and anthropological research for scientific or popular purposes.
