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El Blog!, Touppi's Super Eleet Blog.
Tuomas Toivonen
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Wed, 26 Jul 2006
Seeing Beirut, thinking Quneitra
When my brother visited me in Damascus last fall we day tripped to the village of Quneitra. Beyond the modern village lies a strip of UN controlled land accessible from Syria, beyond that the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. A permit (easily obtained in Damascus) is required to enter old Quneitra. Also, a representative of the Syrian security services will accompany all visitors and show around the "sights".
My feelings towards the visit are mixed. What the Syrians want visitors to see is a testament to the evils of the Israelis. When the Israelis retreated after the 1967 war they purposefully ruined most of the village. The Syrians have left things as is except (naturally) adding signs such as "Quneitra hospital: turned by the Zionists in to a firing target and destroyed".
After the visit I was feeling rather disgusted. No denying that the Isrealis had reduced buildings to rubble, but first and foremost I was feeling the usual nausea of an onslaught of Syrian propaganda. Having been in Syria for months and months I had little patience for the dogmatic anti-Israeli drivel propagated by the regime and sadly accepted by the population at large. Why support a war memorial when it serves a repressive regime that requires an external enemy as an important source of domestic support?
Some five months after the visit I was in Damascus again and staying in the al-Rabie hotel (highly recommended), a backpacker haunt. There I met a Japanese-Korean fellow. He'd visited Quneitra earlier that day and was highly impressed. For him the site had meaning as a way to grasp what war is truly about. A valid viewpoint, I agreed, but still it was hard for me to see the village as anything but a propaganda exhibit.
The reason why I am writing about this are the pictures coming from south Beirut and the border. First few days of the war I didn't seem to quite grasp the situation. The south was inaccessible and Hezbollah had cordoned off south Beirut. Walking around in Beirut I've seen enough reminders of the previous wars - buildings left standing as skeletons only and the ubiquitous pockmarks of machine gun fire - to have thought I knew the look of destruction. Not so, not at all. I've seen a living Beirut, not Beirut being destroyed, reduced to non-existence.
Please, IDF, don't destroy Lebanon. Hezbollah asked for war, I don't really care about them, but Lebanon has been scarred enough.