My Levantine Nightmare

It has been several days since I posted anything. I was too angry, depressed and disgusted to think of anything to say that has not been said before. I am also old enough to have lived through similar situations with nauseating regularity that it has become like a recurrent nightmare. The scenario being played out is all too familiar: the clash, the escalation, the appalling death and destruction, the U.N. resolutions followed by even greater spasms of violence before it all comes to an uncertain end when the beasts of war are satiated.

However, I cannot sit back, wallow in despair and do nothing. There is something different about this conflict. In the 1980s in the midst of years of civil war, the Lebanese were resigned to the inevitability of violence and destruction. This mix of resignation and fatalism is not evident today. It is in part because there is a new generation of Lebanese that have not experienced war and its aftermath. Additionally, during more than a decade of peace and reconstruction, Lebanon, despite its still visible sectarian divides, was slowly developing a post-sectarian civil society and a more cohesive Lebanese identity. Lebanon was regaining its independence with the departure of the Israeli army from the south in 2000 and the Syrian army last year. So in many ways, the Lebanese have much more to lose now than they did in the 1980s.

We had been receiving streams of emails from friends in Beirut with information, relevant articles, links for helping Lebanon and calls to action. As the war drags on, the messages are becoming more numerous and the tone more urgent. These are not emails from anxious and fearful youngsters but from friends my age who have seen war in all its permutations before and they are not going to passively accept their fate. This cyberactivism along with the large mobilization of civil society in Lebanon may not alter the course of this was but is essential for Lebanon's recovery.