The Mayor, the Martyr, and the Pomegranate Trees
Page 4 of 4
|
|
At the onset of the july war, refugees from Aita and other towns in southern Lebanon began streaming by the hundreds into a park in Beirut. There they were met by local activists, some of them Palestinian, who tried to help the refugees find places to stay and schools for their children. When it became apparent that the fighting was not about to stop anytime soon, these volunteers met and resolved to call themselves Samidoun, a term referring to those who stand fast, or withstand, which Palestinians also use to describe their defiance of Israel. Samidoun soon grew to about 250 volunteers. Even as Israeli planes were still targeting vehicles on the roads in the south, groups of Samidoun members began visiting the region to assess the damage and plan for the reconstruction. When they first arrived in Aita, it was a ghost town.
Samidoun's coordinator in Aita was a 28-year-old graphic designer named Sharif Bibi. Serious and energetic, Bibi had reddish-brown skin with a thin beard and curly black hair that he tried to brush back. His father was a Palestinian from Jaffa, and though his mother was Lebanese, he was prohibited from obtaining citizenship. As with all Palestinians in Lebanon, his freedom of movement and employment were limited. The Lebanese government—whose position has been that the Palestinians are refugees and should not be assimilated—prohibited Palestinians from owning land and from working in any of 72 job categories, including bank clerk. Three weeks before the war, Bibi had opened an office in Beirut for his freelance graphic design company, and he would have easily fit into any hipster enclave.
Several Samidoun volunteers, including Bibi, had fathers who had fought in left-wing militias in the 1970s and '80s. "At that time, people believed that Palestine could be liberated if its people fought for it," he told me. "The whole world was boiling then—Vietnam, Nicaragua, etc." In 1983, during the Lebanese civil war, a bomb had crashed through the roof of the family's house and landed, without exploding, in the room next to where they were sitting. "I still remember my father standing there and looking at it," Bibi laughed.
Bibi had worked for the Lebanese Red Cross, and in 1996 he was with the first rescue team on the scene of the Qana massacre, when Israeli airstrikes on a U.N. refugee camp caused more than 100 deaths. He quit the Red Cross soon afterward. "I've seen war," he told me. "I was raised in war. I have seen people get killed in front of me, but I couldn't bear seeing it again. Life becomes absurd to you if you see how so easily you can take the lives of a hundred in seconds." He continued working with children in the camps. Once, he told me, "the Palestinians thought revolution was everything." That had been a mistake: He wanted to focus on development as well. He had chosen to come to Aita because "the feeling you have, standing on a roof, and 300 meters away from you is your home, which you have never been to—it's something amazing.
"Twenty years ago Palestinians thought the only reason for going to the south was to attack Israel," he told me. "But we as the third generation of the nakba believe in development, which will lead to what we dream of."
I asked him why he wanted to help a nation that had relegated him to second-class status. "It's refugee guilt," he said. "When you live as a refugee, you sympathize with all refugees." He worried about collaborating with Hezbollah, and he feared an Islamic Palestine as well. "The leftists' dream and project was broken, so they see Hezbollah as the tool for their dreams," he explained. "In the end, you are the atheist they slaughter, like in the Iranian revolution."
He struggled to explain what Samidoun was. "It's a civil society, grassroots, new entity composed of different things," he said, twisting his arms into a literal knot. "We are trying to empower the community. We believe that our role is trying to participate in resistance, to convince them to stay and give them tools to stay, to preserve the identity and the culture of the village." Resistance, to Samidoun, meant for the village to continue existing.
Sharif Bibi worked closely with another Palestinian named Ismael, a tall, thin architect and urban planner with a gentle voice, who was preoccupied with the history of reconstruction efforts in the region. In southern Lebanon's other wars, he said, donors had often arrived quickly and launched projects without consulting the people, dramatically changing their way of life, their connection to the land, the structure of their towns. Samidoun was interested in a broader kind of reconstruction, taking advantage of the destruction to strengthen the community. "It's a big opportunity to involve people in the process," Ismael said. Volunteers were interviewing the townspeople about their past, their culture, their crafts, and conducting focus groups about how to rebuild.
Samidoun recruited local youth to help with its work, encouraging young men to help unload relief supplies and girls to get involved in the "psychosocial units" working with children. One of the older volunteers from Aita was Nizar, a 34-year-old who had been imprisoned in Israel three times. He had a handsome face with sharp features, brown eyes, and a nose misshapen, he told me, from being broken in an interrogation. Israeli attacks had killed his uncle in 1972 and his cousin in 1978, he said; two of the martyrs from the July War were his cousins. Nizar said he had lost his hearing in one ear as a result of torture, and that his left index finger ended in a stump because it had been crushed by a soldier's boot.
Samidoun's brigade also included Nadia, a nurse who had lived in Sweden as a social worker for 21 years. She had come to Aita with Doctors Without Borders and tirelessly helped with everything from medical aid to coordinating relief efforts with the mayor. Then there was Abir, a 25-year-old architect and urban planner whose research focused on unofficial settlements, or slums. She had raided the library at the American University of Beirut for books on southern Lebanon's history and postwar reconstruction efforts around the world. Muhamad Ali had just returned from university in Los Angeles, which accounted for his excessive use of the word "dude," and had gotten a job at Timberland in Beirut, only to be dismissed when the store closed after the war began. During my stay, a delegation of Jordanian architects also arrived to pitch in.
Up to two dozen Samidoun volunteers had set up camp in a home belonging to a teacher, Abu Ali, who was staying in Beirut. The building had taken several direct hits, and the volunteers had hung curtains over the holes in the walls and ceiling. They slept in tight packs on thin mattresses, meeting until late at night to plan their work. They cooked together, cleaned fastidiously, and approached their work with a sense of humor that belied its gravity. They were always sleep-deprived, though ice-cold showers helped, as did Nadia's coffee in the mornings, by the pomegranate trees that had survived the bombs, as she fiddled with the radio searching for stations that were not Israeli.
Abu Ali visited one weekend to check on the house. "It was a victory," he told me, as I surveyed the wreckage. "The important thing is our will was stronger." Soon Abu Ali arranged for his home to be demolished, so that the rebuilding could begin, and Samidoun moved into a different partially destroyed home, until it was that home's turn. Finally they found homes that were damaged, but not enough to warrant their demolishing, and they split the men and women into two different homes, because the people of Aita were suspicious of them sleeping in the same building.
At least five of the volunteers were Palestinian, and their work was informed by the experience of Palestine, such as the Israeli attacks in 2002 on the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin. Like Aita's old town, Jenin had been very dense and therefore difficult to occupy, so the Israeli forces had bulldozed a major section of it. The homes had been rebuilt thanks to the United Arab Emirates, but the Palestinian Authority had demanded that the camp not be reconstructed simply to be destroyed again, so wider roads were created that would let Israeli tanks enter easily.
The Samidoun volunteers were consumed with the destruction of Aita's historic core, which had continued even past the end of the war: One day as they were surveying the old town, they had encountered local contractors at work demolishing several of the historic stone houses. Samidoun had secured commitments from the government that no more of the old buildings would be knocked down, and that the owners would nonetheless receive compensation—a concern for many residents, who feared that they would get money only if they acted quickly. But the government was also paying contractors by the number of homes they demolished; Ismael, the urban planner, had been feuding with one contractor who had warned of trouble if Samidoun did not stop talking to residents about preservation.
One afternoon in the old town, I found an elderly man pacing back and forth over a vast pile of rubble. He was dressed in black except for the white scarf on his head. Haj Ahmad had resisted a contractor's pressure to demolish his large stone house for several days; that morning he had been away when someone came to tell him that a bulldozer had shown up. A Samidoun crew tried to block the bulldozer's path, but half the home had already been flattened; then the scavengers arrived, and soon all the stones and the rebar were gone.
The house was more than 50 years old, Haj Ahmad said; he had built it himself, stone by stone. His hands were clasped behind his back and his leathery face was lined with pain. I asked him what he wanted. "I want the government to rebuild my house with new stones because there are no stones left," he said. "I feel that I am buried under the earth and not living on it. I spent the whole day walking around my house, and when they started taking the iron in trucks, I threatened that I would shoot them. I might die tonight.
"This house is deaf and dumb and can't speak to stop them from destroying it," he said. "I'm a rich man, I don't need their money. I even told them, 'Keep your $5,000 and take another $5,000 from me, but keep my house and don't destroy it.' But they refused."
It was September now, and at another time the people of Aita would have been winding up the tobacco harvest. Now they had another job to do, one as tiring, it seemed, and as cyclical. "This is a place that might be occupied again," Ismael told me, "and the historic core had a pattern that made occupying it difficult. We want this community to work and be better. We won't create a fort. But we won't make it easy to occupy."
