For several days, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been unable to view the website Donia al-Watan (http://www.alwatanvoice.com) as access has been blocked through the PA-controlled telecom company. Readers outside Palestine and a few inside the country using proxies are still able to access the site.

The Electronic Intifada confirmed that several users attempting to access the website in Ramallah and other parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank could not do so and instead saw a message in English stating “We are sorry, the site was blocked based on attorney General instructions [sic].”

Donia al-Watan operates from the Gaza Strip which is under a tight Israeli siege that has led to severe shortages of food and long periods of darkness as fuel for the territory’s only power plant runs dry. Israel has imposed a news blackout on the Gaza Strip, preventing journalists from entering the territory, hence indigenous Palestinian media are one of the few ways for the outside world to know what is happening in the besieged territory that is home to 1.5 million persons.

Abbas issued the order to block the site without any due process, legal notice or opportunity for defense, a report published on the site stated. “We are surprised at these violations emanating from the president of the PA who appears to have forgotten that he was one of the biggest critics of the policies of the late Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat]. But the late former leader Arafat never signed off on such orders and did not shut down publications,” said the website’s editor Abdallah al-Issa, according to the report.

Al-Issa told The Electronic Intifada in a telephone interview from Gaza City that his website had published dozens of stories about corruption since it was founded in 2003. When Arafat was in office, the site would receive complaints, he said, but no such action had ever been taken against them. Al-Issa criticized Arafat for failing to stem corruption, “but at least we could write about it.”

In an article entitled “The Ramallah Banana Republic,” al-Issa severely criticized the Abbas-led Authority for acting illegally in blocking his site, and called for solidarity from local and foreign journalists and international human rights organizations to pressure Abbas to reverse the decision to censor the website.

Al-Issa said that with electricity out, often for eighteen hours each day and the severe deprivation in Gaza, his work as a journalist was difficult enough. “Defending the Palestinian people in Gaza against this siege means nothing to Abbas,” al-Issa said, “what matters to him is defending those who are corrupt.”

Donia al-Watan is politically independent, according to al-Issa, although he describes himself as a former member of Fatah. Abbas is the leader of the fractious Fatah party. In June 2007, Hamas drove US-backed militias nominally loyal to Abbas and Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Following those events, Abbas dismissed the democratically-elected Hamas-led national unity government and appointed an unelected government that is supported and funded by the United States, the European Union and several Arab states.

Since its 1994 founding under the Oslo Accords, the PA’s credibility has been hit by allegations of rampant corruption. In early 2006, the PA Attorney-General Ahmad al-Meghanni — the same official who ordered the censorship of Donia al-Watan — publicly reported that he was investigating no fewer than 52 cases of official corruption. These totaled hundreds of millions of dollars and involved numerous senior officials of the PA and affiliated companies. Earlier this year, Rawhi Fattouh, a close ally of Abbas and former speaker of the Palestinian legislative council was caught smuggling thousands of cell phones into the Israeli-occupied West Bank from Jordan. However, none of these cases have ever resulted in convictions or the return of stolen public funds and foreign aid money to the Palestinian people.

The blocking of Donia al-Watan appears to be the first time the PA has attempted to censor a website and may foreshadow even more extreme efforts to crack down on critics of a regime Palestinians increasingly view as little more than an arm of the Israeli occupation.

* This report originally appeared on Electronic Intifada.

Dr. Sarraj, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, is the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme—a groundbreaking NGO in Gaza catering to the masses of Palestinians suffering from emotional trauma, especially victims of torture. Sarraj is well known for his outspoken criticism of the Israeli occupation and of corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

In the excerpts that follow, I discuss the state of Palestinian democracy with Dr. Sarraj.

Kris Petersen: Before we begin, will you please explain a bit about yourself and your background working in Gaza?

Eyad Sarraj: Well, I was born in 1943 in Be’er Sheva, in what is now Israel but my family was from Gaza. My father was working at that time with the British police in Be’er Sheva. And after what happened in 1948, he came back home… He had already built this house in Gaza. It was not exactly this house. The whole area here was his and he built a smaller house. Then he built this house for me and for my brothers… each of us has a floor. But since then, we went to school in Gaza. I went to school in Gaza, the University in Alexandria and Harvard to study medicine. Then I did some residency in Bethlehem at the hospital after I graduated. I studied psychiatry and worked in England for some time and when I finished my training in psychiatry, after five years I came back to Gaza Started to work here.

I established the first Gaza psychiatric hospital and community center in 1980. Then in 1986, I left Gaza once again. My English wife at the time became so depressed living here and I decided to sacrifice being in Gaza to save the family. I went back to England. When the Intifada started in 1987, I felt so weak being there. I had been the only psychiatrist in Gaza at the time and people were suffering so much while I was enjoying my time in England – so I came back.

I came back and after one year, the Israelis fired me from my job because during the Intifada I was training Israeli peace activists, human rights activists and doctors in Gaza and the Israeli occupation authority did not like it at all. The Physicians For Human Rights group was established in my house. When the Palestinian Authority came in, it was divided into two: Israel and Palestine. But to begin with, it was a group of Israeli doctors who came to Gaza and when they saw what they saw—breaking bones and so on—they were so shocked… and everybody was so depressed. Then one of them asked “What can we do?” So we started to think about what we could do and founded Physicians for Human Rights.

Then I was fired… So I went for a trip to Europe and in Sweden and I met a good friend of mine—a Jewish American—and in his kitchen we started to think of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP). But the question was: should I accept that I am fired or should I return to Gaza and do something even better? And this is how we came up with the idea for the GCMHP and in 1990, I came back to Gaza and founded the GCMHP.

In 1994, the Palestinian Authority came and at that time I joined the Palestinian Commission for Citizens’ Rights. This was a group of people including myself, Hanan Ashrawi, Haidar Abdel-Shafi and Mahmoud Darwish; together we went to Tunisia, where we got the signature of Yassir Arafat and he gave a Presidential decree to establish the Commission. And that is how it started. The first Commissioner General was Hanan Ashrawi. The rule was that ever Commissioner General should stay for two year maximum so after two years, I became the second Commissioner General. Because of my work in human rights, I started to expose human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority. And that landed me in prison.

KP: With Raji Sourani?

ES: No, Raji was arrested when I was on my way to Ramallah one day. I came back to Gaza immediately with Hanan Ashrawi and some others and Raji was released the same day. I was arrested again two more times; the last time was in 1996 for 17 days in solitary confinement.

Then the people on the Commission decided that I should be elected for a second term against the regulations and I accepted. Then the question of human rights became a very big issue, after they arrested Raji and myself—and the torture. The exposure of all these violations of human rights and corruption became a big issue.

Later, I joined the Palestinian delegation to the Washington peace talks, when Haidar Abdel-Shafi was there. I joined them for two of three sessions, which was quite an experience. You know, I saw the Israelis taking us for ride, basically. For them it was just a waste of time, but for us it was a very serious time. We thought that it was going to be very serious—in particular, Haidar was very serious. But when he realized that the Israelis were not serious at all, he was very depressed like all of us.

I believe strongly that only through education can people and nations become powerful. Education is very important. I believe that the Palestinian situation, in terms of our defeat, is because of our poor education for centuries—because we, in the 20th century, had to face European Jews who were so sophisticated compared to our peasants and farmers.

My father used to work as a Chief Clerk for the British police in Be’er Sheva during the Mandate period. They wanted volunteers. His commander said that they needed volunteers to be aware of the policing of Be’er Sheva, and so on and so forth. They wanted to get helpful ideas from these volunteers—from these civilians. So they advertised the need and my father received the responses. He was amazed at the number of Jews applying to become volunteers. And not only that their numbers were so high, but that they were so sophisticated—PhDs, masters, doctors, engineers, and lawyers wanted to be volunteers for the police. So he took this information, which he could not explain, to his commanders and at the time there was an underground national leadership for the Palestinians in Jaffa. He took that information to them at one of their meetings and said to them, “Look, this is what I have found. These Jews are applying to become volunteers, which means they will be paid only one pound a month.” After some time, the leader of the group said, “This is very good news! It means that the Jews are starving!” But this was not the case.

The idea was that immigrant Jews should be trained to use arms, so that one day they would be able to use them. That was the idea. So ultimately it was a confrontation between sophisticated, educated Europeans Jews and uneducated, divided peasants.

At the time, there were only two or three doctors in Gaza and one of them was Haidar Abdel-Shafi. That’s all. If somebody had the chance to send their child to be educated at a university at that time, it was a big deal—a very big deal. To be educated! Fortunately, education was very important for my father and we were all educated at a time when very few people graduated from secondary school.

My greatest commitment is to human rights, to justice and to peace. I don’t believe in nationalism and I don’t believe in religion. I believe that people should be treated as equals and I hope one day the world will realize this.

KP: What role do you think NGOs play in promoting democratic social change?

ES: Well in theory, they play a positive role but I think it is very challenging. To begin with, Palestinian culture is not democratic. Our culture itself is not rooted in democracy. Democracy is a Western concept and very new to us. Only the elite, intellectuals and politicians perhaps understand democracy. I’m not saying they practice it, but they understand what it means. The practice of democracy is a different story. You can read about it in books, but to practice democracy is something else.

Arab culture has historically been dominated by foreign rulers. And after that, it was dominated by corrupt and oppressive indigenous rulers, using a gun and a prison to control people. So people are generally frightened in our culture. They don’t take initiative. They are frightened and they do not dare to express themselves freely. You cannot be democratic if you cannot express yourself freely.

The only time we started to know about democracy was when the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and we started to see their system. We said, “Oh my God. Israelis talk to each other in such a way and they expose themselves in such a way. And they are not punished. They can say whatever they like and they are not punished.” This was very strange to us, but the people in Gaza working within civil society are from this culture. They are not trained in democracy. They read about it in books, like myself, but we are not trained in democracy. The general population is eager, definitely eager, for a state of citizenship. People want to belong to a state and they thought that the path to statehood was through democratic elections, which is a good sign. However, the experience is nuanced and the role of Palestinian NGOs and civil society in the process has been weakened, unfortunately, by the Palestinian Authority.

At the beginning of the Israeli occupation, the rising NGO sector of the time was at the forefront of building human rights and support for international law. But under the Palestinian Authority the NGOs were marginalized at best—controlled in many ways or dismissed and even arrested or harassed by the Palestinian Authority. So the question of democracy is not really rooted in our culture at all.

And I’ll tell you also that people who are in the political parties or the NGOs generally are not democratic people. Yassir Arafat was a one-man show. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was a one-man how. Raji Sourani is a one-man show. You can’t deny their energy and their commitment and their ideals. You cannot. But they are not democratic people. They are not doing anything to really enrich democracy in our society. Politicians also have the same handicap. Politicians… and this is something very interesting. Politicians are not democratic at all in any Palestinian political organization. Not at all. PFLP, Fatah, Hamas… You name it. They are not democratic.

Palestinian NGOs and political parties operate like tribal affiliations. They are a replacement for tribal affiliations. If I belong to a good family, a big family, then this is my most important circle of security. In this society, you cannot be an individual; you will be crushed. If you don’t have a family behind you, then you must have a political party or an NGO, otherwise you will be crushed. Or you will just become, for instance, a business man. But even then you have some people around you and you have your own “tribe”. It’s a tribal mentality.

Nepotism and, to some extent, corruption are very pervasive in the NGO sector. I can ask Raji [Sourani] to help my son and he can ask me to help his daughter. I can ask Sami [Abdel-Shafi] to help my cousin. He will ask me to help… But we consider this to be done in good faith.

If I have a neighbor now coming to me and saying, “Look, I have a family of ten people living next door to you and we cannot eat” then I have the obligation to give money or food. I have the obligation, not because I want to show people that I am doing it. No. I cannot sleep if I do not do it. These are clear examples from real life. Secondly, I will begin looking for a job tomorrow for one of his children to work—in my own institution sometimes, in the GCMHP or in the school or wherever. This is how tribalism is working sometimes… in good faith. Because there is no state structure. People only have themselves to rely on, as well as their families and friends, etc. We have not progressed to the level of democracy you think.

KP: There is an argument reasoning that any kind of civil society organization, from cultural clubs and other non-political organizations to NGOs, aid democracy. That as long as people are forming associations and as long as they are operating in some kind of non-state environment, it cultivates a democratic culture. Would you agree with this analysis?

ES: Well, it can. But that is not what is happening today in Gaza. No. Our problem is that our energy has been invested, always in the question of politics for our entire lives. I do not remember… I’m 64 now. I cannot remember one single day in which I really lived like a normal human being, without being concerned about the political situation in Palestine or in the Arab world. Not a single day. I do not remember. Since I was a child. You know? The first experience was when I was 12, when the Israelis occupied Gaza at that time, I became aware of what was going on. Really. Because the Israelis put a rifle to the back of my head and asked me go downstairs. We had a bunker underneath the house. We went down into the bunker and it was so dark. I was so frightened because I was only 12 and the Israeli soldiers were threatening to shoot me if I didn’t go down. I did, but I was so terrified I actually pissed myself.

After that, I became involved in politics. I think many Palestinians have had similar experiences, at even younger ages. So all our energy was possessed with the political situation. I remember a feast during the first year I was at the university. Some people came to say hello. I was still unshaven and in my pajamas but they said to me, “Kull sana w’inte salem” (Happy feast!). And I said to them, “What happy feast? What are you talking about? We are not living in our country! We are refugees and our country has been taken away from us! And you are talking about a happy feast? Who should be happy?” I was having a kind of awareness of what was going on and then I joined the Palestinian Student Union. I spent most of my university life there, not really studying, but doing work for the Student Union in Egypt and elsewhere. I became a member of a secret organization, like Fatah and PFLP and the others. But it was dismantled after some time. Anyway, I used to be heavily involved in this. Many Palestinians were.

Then I came back to Gaza and started to practice medicine. Every night I was a casualty officer at Shifa Hospital here in Gaza. There were only 14 doctors in Gaza at the time. Every night I would receive the bodies of resistance fighters killed by the Israelis. Every night! Wounded or killed. What can you think of then? As a doctor? Or as a Palestinian? Or as human being? Nothing, except what is going on in this country. The political situation and the injustice.

Even as a medical doctor, I was in such confrontations all the time with the Israeli Occupation Forces to the extent that they fired me. They fired me twice! The first time was only six months after I began working! Six months! Because the Israeli intelligence insisted that I cooperate with them and I refused. So they said “you are dismissed for security reasons.” Then I made a big, a big fuss. The United Nations Secretary General, the World Health Organization, the Knesset, the Israeli Defense Minister… Haidar Abdel-Shafi was involved. Other doctors in Gaza were involved and there was a strike at Shifa Hospital. So I was reinstated two weeks later. And since then, the Israeli intelligence has not touched me! And the second time, as I told you, was when I brought Israeli colleagues to Gaza to come and see the situation here.

If I were a normal human being, not overburdened by the political situation, I would definitely go to a salon with intellectuals. We would discuss ideas—everything from God to [Sigmund] Freud. This is the free exchange of ideas which you say can promote democratization and so on. But you cannot do it today under Hamas because Hamas does not support freedom of expression. You cannot do it under Fatah. You cannot do it under the Israeli occupation. Of course, you can establish a salon and invite people, but everybody will be very careful.

The first thing I remember when I returned to Gaza in 1970, everyone was warning me, “Be careful who you mix with, who you talk with, be careful what you say.” The place was full of spies and people were so paranoid. Today, it’s the same as the Fatah time. Back then, the spies were my family. I used to keep drafts of op-eds I would write for al-Quds or any other newspaper in Gaza. My sisters would come to the house in my absence to clean or to prepare food and they would spy on my writings. Then at night they would say to me, “Oh, are you writing a new article? Oh please, we don’t want you to be in trouble. You should not criticize Arafat or Dahlan. You should be careful.” Every night! And even today you cannot have a free intellectual debate.

KP: What do you see as the greatest obstacle to democracy in Palestine?

ES: The Israeli occupation is a major obstacle and then there are the Palestinian political parties with their old-fashioned leaders who do not allow the younger generation to take over. I cannot understand why old people continue to be in control of everything! I cannot understand it!

KP: But do you think there has been any democratic progress at all since 1967?

ES: Definitely yes. There has definitely been progress. Look there is an awareness that we Palestinians have lost to the Israelis for a reason. You ask them, “Why did you lose?” and they tell you “We lost because the Israelis are democratic and sophisticated.” I think there is an awareness of what is going on and there is a great deal of disappointment in ourselves. It is so serious to the extent that we have a process of national self-hatred. One hears a common sentiment now in Gaza particularly but in Palestine generally, “We don’t deserve to rule ourselves. We don’t deserve a good life. Jews deserve a good life. We deserve the whip.”

I know a man who spent 23 years in an Israeli jail for fighting with the PFLP. When he came out of prison after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, he wanted to see what had become of the old settlements. He remembered that when he was a little boy, he used to carry a jug of water to the tree his father had planted in the area. So he went to see the tree and it had been well looked-after, to the extent that the Israelis had placed some seats underneath so that you could sit with your family and friends. It was a nice big tree. But one day he went there and some Palestinian boys were setting the tree alight. When he demanded to know why they were doing this, they said that the tree was “leftover” from the Israeli settlements and “we don’t want it”. He said to them, “Look, I watered this myself when I was a little boy. It was here long before the settlements.” He was so beaten and depressed after that that he would things like “This land is not for us. This land is for the Jews. We are just passersby.” When I asked him why he would say this, he replied “Because Jews build and we destroy.” You know, this a very serious kind of self-criticism and it is very common in different forms and in different ways.

We are all shocked that Palestinians are killing each other in such a brutal way. Many people say the Israelis are merciful in comparison—that they are kinder to us than ourselves. People are so brutal, I mean Fatah and Hamas. The Israelis have never killed a wounded man in the hospital. We did it. The Israelis have never thrown men off of tall buildings… People in Gaza are honestly shocked at this.

KP: How do you view the Islamic movement in the context of democratic change?

ES: Well it should aid democracy in theory, but today there is significant amount of polarization—political polarization. This is dividing society, not only NGOs and other organizations but also in the universities. You have al-Azhar University and the Islamic University; some go to a particular grocery store instead of another just because the owner is aligned with Fatah or Hamas. This kind of division within Palestinian society is damaging. It means that you don’t accept the other, you don’t accept the differences between each other and you don’t accept any different political identity. So Fatah people don’t accept Hamas at all and Hamas people don’t accept Fatah at all. It has reduced every aspect of society to political divisions, down to individual families. It’s just not conducive to a free dialog when you cannot accept the other.

I remember the late Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. He was a Hamas leader who was killed by the Israelis in 2004 and I remember him talking to me about the need to pray. He was telling me, “You are such a good man. All you need to do is to pray.”

I said, “I’m not going to pray, because if you pray you have to believe.”

“You don’t believe?” he asked.

“Look,” I said. “Are you going to discuss this with me because I’m ready for the conversation but I will begin with this point: I don’t believe in God. So are you ready?”

“I am ready,” he said.

So we started a very serious discussion, al-Rantisi and myself. I believe that is democratic. That is democracy, when you start from the bottom—from point zero. Now, I challenge any civil society in Palestine, whether secular or religious, a salon or NGO to sit down and ask, “Who doesn’t believe in God?” Just to pose the question… Or, at one time in the past, “Who doesn’t believe in Yassir Arafat?” At one point, that was like treason.

So, free thought is the most important. You cannot have democracy via a parachute—from Madeleine Albright or George W. Bush. Never! It must come from the grassroots, from society. And I tell you, with the current situation as it is today and with the situation in Israel and the Arab states, it doesn’t look good.

KP: What about the election of Hamas and the subsequent rejection of the Palestinian elections by the United States and the West generally?

ES: Well, it is clear that American is the worst enemy of democracy, when it has always claimed that it will go to war for democracy. George W. Bush, this stupid man, is now saying he went into Iraq for democracy—after all his lies. Now, when democracy really happened in Palestine, he did not recognize it. It was very democratic, verified by Jimmy Carter and everybody else. But the American fundamentalist regime and the Zionists did not like it—not because they like Arafat or they like Fatah. No, they didn’t like it because the neoconservatives believe that Islam is a threat and 9/11 ignited this kind of ideology.

So now Islam is a threat and we don’t want Islamic people to be in control. We want secular people in control. But the thing is, America apparently decides who the best leaders are for the world. This is what Elliot Abrams told me and other Palestinian representatives when we met them in Washington D.C. after the Palestinian elections. America decides; America orders the world to be custom-made as it likes. He did not exactly say those words, but almost. Don’t rely on anybody else. Don’t mention Europe; America orders Europe as well.

KP: Do you see any hope in the long term, given the present political environment in the United States?

ES: We must have democracy in America before there can be democracy in Palestine; we must have democracy in Britain and in Israel. Real democracy. Democracy is not just people going to work—it is a responsibility. Look, is it democratic that a minority of the American population decides who will be the next President at the end of the day? Is it democratic that many American citizens do not know anything about the rest of the world they control? It is not democratic in my view. In our part of the world, it is not democratic when you are poor and manipulated and then you go to vote. It is not democracy. When you are not free of hunger, when you are not free of oppression, you cannot be democratic. And when you are not free of ignorance as is the case with America, you cannot be democratic.

KP: Knowing how bleak the situation is, where do you find inspiration to continue your work?

ES: I love my country. I love Gaza. I love my home. I love the sea. I love the people. I want to be productive in any way. This for me is very important. I love this place; I want to be part of it and I want to know that I am doing as much as possible.

My motto when I returned to Gaza from England, was: if I make a child smile every day, then I have achieved something. And this is still my motto. If I can help to promote democratization, the free intellectual exchange of ideas, peace, justice, and human rights, it is a noble achievement. I think I am doing a very, very modest amount, but at least it is gratifying. That is why I am here.

So it was, that on the day before Israel was to celebrate its independence, Maariv’s banner read, simply, “60 Years of Bereavement.”

In a narrow sense, the headline, stark white on a field of black, marked Israel’s memorial day for its war dead and its victims of terrorism. At the same time, the brief headline may have said more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and about Israelis themselves, and Palestinians as well – than all of this week’s floodtide of 60th anniversary punditry put together.

They are filled with dread here, these people, my friends, the Israelis and the Palestinians both. Part of the dread is the realization that, no matter what direction the conflict takes, the result will in no way justify the violent deaths since 1948 of more than 24,000 Israelis and uncounted thousands of Palestinians.

If we look back 10 years, to Israel’s 50th Independence Day, we see a time of much greater hope. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with then-leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat, there was a sense on both sides that the peace process was irreversible.

Since then, we’ve grown up. A decade of collapsed negotiations and inconclusive fighting has left us at a desolate emotional ground zero. First we lost our belief in the power of peace to solve our problems. Then we lost our faith in the power of war to do the same. Israelis and Palestinians both, we are in a state of unaccustomed loss of ideals. Revolution after revolution has betrayed us, divided us, failed us. Marxism, religious fundamentalism, nationalism, nothing has worked.

Now, after 60 years, we are at our proudest when we have nothing to offer. All we have left, we think on both sides, is the little we have left. We can’t give in anymore. We can’t give up any more. All we have left to offer is nothing.

We have confused manhood, self-worth, true independence, with the doctrine of Just Say No. No to recognition of the other. No to territorial compromise over Jerusalem. No to territorial compromise over the Holy Land. No to discussion of shared sovereignty of sacred shrines. No to compromise, even if only verbal, over return of refugees.

Both sides have their monsters, who see themselves as the keepers of the holy flame, ready to bring down and/or do violence to anyone on their own side who dares to work for peace.

Both sides have their diaspora, with its armchair martyrs and La-Z-Boy commandos, its online ideologue and its Talkback Cato the Elder.

We have done iniquity to one another and felt only victimhood. We do it still. Every single one of us, on both sides, suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Too many of us cause it as well.

We have seen that if the first casualty of war is truth, the second will surely be compassion.

We have seen that humans – or we, at any rate – have an innate need for revenge. We have also seen that vengeance does absolutely no good.

If we look back 60 years, and look closely, we will see that what happened in 1948 was a tragedy, a disaster, a Nakba, for both sides. The Palestinians who lost their homes and their dreams decreed that there would be no peace, no assured future for these newly decreed people, these Israelis, one out of every hundred of whom lost their lives in that war.

Today, we – Palestinian and Israeli both – look into the future, and see nothing. We are blinded by the enormity of our bereavement. We are unable to look into each other’s eyes with anything other than pain. Even the extremists among us are beginning to wonder about how their messianic visions have played out. All of us have been betrayed by some one on our own side.

Paradoxically, though, there may be something in all of this that promotes healing. Psychologists tell us that coping skills which enable children to survive horrific childhoods, may turn disastrously self-destructive if carried into adulthood. Perhaps we need to have our habits, comforting illusions, conforting misconceptions about the evil of our enemies, taken from us by force. Or by force of disillusionment.

There may be something healthy in the sense that the past 60 years themselves have betrayed us. Maybe that’s how a people weans itself from its illusions. Maybe that’s how a people begins to have self-awareness. Maybe that’s how a people finally, perhaps just before it’s too late, grows up.

* This article was written by Bradley Burston and orginally appeared on May 7, 2008 in Ha’aretz.

I was 15 years old, 30 years ago when the civil war started on April 13th, 1975. It was a Sunday that I still remember. My parents were out, and I was home in our middle class neighborhood in Beirut. We did not hear shots fired. We were not close to the scene of the crime. On that day, a bus carrying Palestinians who were earlier attending a rally for the PFLP-GC was ambushed by armed gunmen of the Lebanese fascistic Phalanges Party. My enmity to that party started earlier, much earlier. When I read about the civil war in Spain, I always felt that I could recognize the fascist side. When I read about the communist struggle against the Nazis in Germany, I recognized the Nazi side. I saw them in Lebanon.

Those European fascists all were the inspiration for the founder of the Phalanges Party in Lebanon. A man of limited talents and abilities who was inspired during his visit to the Berlin Olympic Games and went on to start his own youth organization, and later developed it into a political party/militia, and benefited from years of Israeli/US financial and military support. From that party, or in imitation of it, came all the other right-wing factions (Guardians of the Cedar, Lebanese Forces, General `Awn forces, etc). I never doubted my opposition to that side. They thought, with the apparatus of the Lebanese state at their disposal, that they could crush the Palestinian resistance movement in Lebanon. They wanted to do what King Husayn did in 1970. Fat chance. Even when the Syrian regime helped them and armed them in 1976, they did not have a chance. The coalition of the Lebanese left (and the unsavory sectarian and vulgar Arab nationalist groups that Yasir `Arafat along with Iraq, Syria, and Libya set up) and the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon gave them successive good beatings. Innocent people on both (or all) sides suffered as usual. There are no clean civil wars. Israel increased its aid to the right-wing groups. And they were still beaten. But they were good in propaganda; they wanted to convince the Lebanese that all of Lebanon’s ills were the work of Arab outsiders. They denigrated and blamed the Palestinians, just as they now denigrate and blame the Syrian people. They–those who triggered the civil war–wanted to convince the Lebanese that their civil war is not a civil war, but a war of outsiders, or, as right-wing An-Nahar publisher Ghassan Tueni called it, “une Guerre pour les autres”. They believed it. Many Lebanese still believe it to this very day. In reality, the history of Lebanon is a history of civil wars between the various groups.

What Fernand Braudel said about the people in France through history in volume 1 of his L’Identite de la France: Les Hommes et les Choses applies to the Lebanese people, that they excelled in the art of civil wars. Those people were never united, and will never be united. A country that was not meant to be, except to create a sectarian enclave aligned with Israel. Was that not the dream of early Zionist founders? They had right-wing ideologues and the Rahbani Brothers to instill the silly myth of a “great” Lebanese history. Some are not even embarrassed to speak about a “Lebanese civilization.” I kid you not. They had to distort the history of the Phoenician cities, and think that Lebanon is a 5-thousand year old “nation.” It would be funny and hilarious had people not been killed, and Palestinian massacred in Lebanon in order to impose that fictitious vision of Lebanese past and present. They did not know that Phoenician cities were at war with one another (just as the Lebanese groups and sects have always been at war with one another) and were never holding hands singing x-mas jingles. But the myth had to continue; the survival of the Hummus homeland required it. Lebanese culture industry made fortunes out of it.

I remember the civil war starting, and I do not have recollection of its end. But did it end? How come nobody told me that it ended? I would have celebrated. I would have brought closure to my memory. I always believed that the civil war never ended, but merely went through an extended truce. I fiercely opposed the 1976 Syrian military intervention because the Lebanese were not allowed to settle their own conflicts and disputes once and for all. It was an opportunity to defeat the militias and agendas of right-wing militias and groups that triggered and prolonged the civil war. Not that the other side was led and populated by angels. Militias and groups supported by Syria, Libya, `Arafat, and Iraq were particularly thuggish and engaged in typical civil war brutality. But the trend of brutality was always initiated by the Phalanges. Do you know that once they found in downtown Beirut a barrel, yes, a barrel, of severed penises. Militia men of the right would order men to strip at their checkpoints, and those who were circumcised and Muslim, were killed on the spot and their penises severed.

They started the killing according to the identity card (which in Lebanon identify your sect in case you passed by a check point of the “other” sect.) A Jewish Lebanese once told me that he only carried his passport during the war because he did not want ANY side to see his sect on the identity card. He did not want to take any chances. (He also opposed Israel and Zionism, and was offended in 1982 when Israeli invaded Lebanon, and visited all the remaining Jews inviting them to go Israel. He protested, he told me. He was not Israeli, and did not want to become one. They could not understand, and left him bewildered).

When the war started, especially if you were a youngster, you think that you were a mere spectator. Only now I realize that I lived through a civil war. We would watch the skies flare up with gun fire, and listen intently to gun sounds trying to identify the weapons used. You quickly become an expert. And in a tiny city like Beirut, you could hear the shell launched, and then hear it landing on you, or near you if you are lucky. We did not have a shelter in our building. So we just adjusted in our apartment, and hoped that we would not be hit. We only left our home in 1982 when Israeli planes smashed, LITERALLY smashed, the apartment building next to our home. It was leveled to the ground. My mother lost consciousness, and I remember–those who know me heard me tell the story–wondering for a few seconds–but they felt like a long time–whether I was dead or alive. Imagine. I really remember wondering whether I was alive or dead. I froze on my chair while trying to figure that one out. A thick ray of dust and fire crossed the living room. Only a few minutes earlier I was kidding my mother (who had guests) that the bombing is getting closer, and that they may have hit her hairdresser’s shop. Little did I know. All glass in the building was broken. I remember a few minutes later, having heard of the bombing of the building (which only housed women, children, and an a disabled old man) my father coming with a look of terror on his face. He did not know whether we survived or not. My mother could not stay there any longer. We moved to a hotel in the Hamra district. Later, the son of the aforementioned Phalanges Party founder (what a small country Lebanon is) and later president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayyel, invited my father and his family to move to the “safety” of East Beirut, where Israeli occupation army ran the place. My sister and I did not want to go there. We moved to South Lebanon and stayed in the village of Qulaylah where the AbuKhalil family hailed from, and experienced Israeli occupation first hand. And my friend Amthal and I would walk through empty streets with bombs falling around. We used to go the beach and watch shells falling into the water. That was not bravery, but insanity if you ask me.

After I came to the US in 1983, I remember when I would visit Lebanon I would experience something I never experienced while in Lebanon: fear. Extreme fear. I never felt fear while living through the war, until I came to the US. I cannot explain that. On the day of the bomb that devastated our neighboring building, I remember my sister called to be picked up from her friend’s house. When I drove to pick her up, I remember the car shaking as Israeli bombs were falling all around. What a horrific day, year, decade that was. You also see in a civil war how men feel free to act out their aggression, machismo, and violent urges once they carry a weapon. I remember once getting into a fight with armed men who were harassing young girls in a village. They felt that because they were armed that they should do what they wish. Once in 1977, when I was in high school, I was with a friend of mine spraying graffiti and posting signs against the Syrian regime. This was when the Syrian regime was the close ally of the Phalanges militia. After doing our job (and doing it well despite the glue stuck on our hands), we were stopped at a Syrian army checkpoint near the Central Bank building in Beirut. The Syrian soldiers interrogated us, and then very calmly told me to go, and that they wanted my friend. One of the soldiers took me aside, and said: “Go now if you want to live, my friend here wants to fuck your friend. He will kill you if you stay.” I remember looking at her (and she was not my girlfriend and will not name her as some readers know her) and seeing a look of fright that I never saw on a human being. She did not say a word, and did not have to. She did not plead; not to me, and not to them. She just looked, I remember her. Just by looking at her, I knew that no matter what, I could not leave her behind. I stayed, and used whatever powers of persuasion that a high school student had, and they released us. We never talked about it afterwards. I saw her last summer, and she as usual did not mention it.

I know that in addition to my book on the clash of identities in Lebanon that I plan to complete next fall when I take my sabbatical (semi-sabbatical as I will teach my Gender and Sexuality in ME course at UC, Berkeley) I will one day write a personal account of living through a civil war, of growing up in a civil war–not that you are necessarily interested. Odd experience. You meet people with those code names, many code names (like Abu Al-Jamajim, or Father of Skulls). The one that really made an impression on me was a senior revolutionary by the name of Abu `Adhab (Father of Suffering). He was given that name for undergoing unspeakable torture at the hands of Jordanian mukhabarat during Black September). The bad taste award should go to the Hariri political apparatus in Lebanon. They are planning to commemorate the anniversary of the civil war today with drums, music, dance, folkloric carnivals, and, of course, Hummus. They do not think that the mostly poor 120,000 victims of the Lebanese civil war deserve the kind of solemn mourning that billionaire Hariri received. After all, those poor victims of the civil war did not make their contributions to Lebanon like him. They did not arm the militias of the right, left, and center, and they did not expand the foreign debt of Lebanon from $2 billion to $40 billion. They did not fly in private jets, and they were not on first-name basis with the corrupt president of France.

I will think of the dead, and of the ones that I knew. I will think of Iyad who died before reaching his target, literally and figuratively, in 1978. He was shot in South Lebanon. During his funeral, a Muslim Sunni cleric said some words about martyrs in Islam. We his friend suspected that he was insinuating something because our friend Iyad was a communist. We yelled at the cleric, and practically kicked him out of the house. We were so mad at him that he was frightened. Those were the good old days when you could frighten clerics. Now they run the place, and Bush is installing them as leaders in Iraq. That is Bush’s version of freedom. That is why leftists should have at least two (not one) reasons to oppose Bush’s wars.

I had to identify a dead body in the morgue of AUH in Beirut when I was 16. That was the first dead body that I saw. I remembered looking at the seemingly tens of shrapnels that penetrated his body. I remember thinking afterwards: should I react in a particular way? Should I do something? I did not cry, but I felt frozen that day. And when Bush acts giddy in reacting to developments in Lebanon, I will think of the many outside parties that sought to change Lebanon and shape it for their own ends.

What will become of Lebanon and the Lebanese? Some Lebanese are now sincerely under the false impression that there is unity, and they would add “except of course for the Shi`ites” and others. I am going to Lebanon in June, and do not know what to expect. I do not know who will be in charge. I want it to be quiet and peaceful. And I want this personality cult for Hariri (funded by the Hariri political/financial apparatus) to end. Or at least they can suspend their silly activities and carnivals during my stay. Is that too much to ask?

* This article was written by As’ad Abu-Khalil, a professor at CSU Stanislaus, and originally appeared on his blog The Angry Arab News Service.