Adonis Diaries

Diary of a war in Lebanon (July 15 to August 15, 2006)

July 15. 2006

The sixth war between Israel and Lebanon (as our news media labeled it) started on June 12, 2006.

For 3 days Israel has been pounding all of Lebanon for the lame excuses that the Islamic Lebanese Resistance of Hezbollah was successful in taking two Israeli soldiers as prisoners.

Mind you that Hezbollah had warned everyone for many months and at several occasions that it is in the process of planning to capture Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them with Lebanese prisoners.

The problem is that the well planned “adventure” (as labelled by Lebanon Seniora PM and Saudi Arabia monarchy) did not go as smoothly and as expected and it resulted in the destruction of two Israeli tanks and many Israeli soldiers dead.

Apparently, Israel’s Olmert PM is not now in the mood of negotiating with Hezbollah for the mutual release of prisoners as former Sharon PM has done last year.

Israel has the total backing of George W Bush to punish Lebanon with extreme vengeance for failing to promptly satisfy his strategic plans in the greater Middle East.

Bush Junior also wants to revenge the more than 200 US soldiers who perished in 1983 by a Hezbollah suicide car bombing around Beirut airport.  Hezbollah has just been created a couple of months ago to resist Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

Israel had started its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and went as far as entered our Capital Beirut. The occupying Israeli force remained in Lebanon till 2000.

Yesterday, my mother started to speak to herself, at my ear shot, that we need to withdraw some cash for emergency and secure supplies for a protracted war.

Within an hour, I drove and withdrew more than my usual amount of cash and stopped at the Wooden Bakery around 11: 15 am for bread: there was none left.

There were promises that more supplies of bread would be forthcoming by noon. I continued and parked on the street instead of the overflowing parking lot of Storiom’s supermarket.  There were no carriages left and I picked up a hand held basket instead just for a loaf of bread:  the supermarket was jammed with customers in the cashiers lines, their carriages filed with two months supplies.  I felt a wave of disgust and left immediately.

On my way out, a lady told me that there is no milk on the shelves and certainly no bread of any kind.

I resumed my trip to Bekfaya to a shop that sells purely Lebanese food ingredients at affordable prices and bought three bags of white bread because brown breads were scarce, cheap olive, small white beans because the large beans were three times more expensive, two kilos of sugar, a kilo of “kishk”, some white hot pepper.

I continued to the vegetable and fruit market where on Sundays I usually buy in bulk for our extended family of eleven persons; the market was jammed and no price tags were attached to the stands; prices have at least doubled and no one was asking for prices anymore.  I refused to wait and did not buy anything.

The road to Bekfaya coming from Antelias was unusually busy: streams of cars driving fast were heading up to the mountain and I was told that they were going to Zahle and Chtoura toward the Syrian border at Masnaa.

Israel has finally decided to bomb the main highway to the Syrian border through the town of Sawfar; fleeing people were borrowing the next best route.

On the first day of war, my nephew Cedric came home mightily upset:  he is graduating in hotel management and the tourism season was completely shot and the tourists were evacuating Lebanon in drove.

Cedric initially blamed Hezbollah for that catastrophe but as Israel was decidedly going ahead with its destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure he relented.  It is a common behavior for people to blame the weaker party in any conflict for mass destruction as if Hezbollah is the one party who destroyed the airport, the electrical utilities, the maritime ports and the main highways.