From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon

I was going to write about some books I've been reading, but I decided to write this blog entry about something that is making me sad right now: the destructive attacks in the Middle East, particularly those in Beirut and Haifa. Whatever one's view on Middle East politics at a given moment, one must acknowledge that real people are suffering. Civilians whose lives are as important to them as mine is to me, are suffering. And whenever a beautiful city (like Beirut or Haifa) has havoc wreaked upon it, the world at large loses. People in the West have strong, often sentimental associations with cities such as New York, London, Berlin, Madrid, and Paris. Beirut used to bask in the title of "The Paris of the Middle East." What if Paris were the city receiving rocket attacks?

It's easy, in the West, to dismiss the current exchange of fire as something that seems like the natural state of the Middle East: fighting happens there a lot, and has been happening, and seems like it always will happen. But each particular conflict is not always as simplistic (everybody vs. Israel, Israel vs. everybody) as it seems. There are often subtle differences with each local situation, and lots of innocent people get caught up in fighting that they'd be happy to avoid. I think we owe the people affected by the fighting the dignity of at least temporarily seeing them as individuals, and not some mass grouping of "good guys" or "bad guys", or even just "those guys".

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has a good introduction (complete with current info) on both Beirut and Haifa; a quick Yahoo! search gave me gorgeous pictures of both cities.

Some quotations I found:

"You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East. My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards. You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people. "

Kahlil Gibran, “You Have Your Lebanon and I Have My Lebanon,” Mirrors of the Soul, trans. Joseph Sheban, pp. 30–31 (1965).

"Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, halfway between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, in such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming."

Jan Morris, On Beirut, Among the Cities Oxford 85

"There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can."

Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), Romanian–born U.S. writer. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton (1988).