In 1948, my mother Leatrice was living in Paris and working for UNESCO. In November, she travelled to Beirut for a conference and she wrote to her parents on the 16th, soon after arriving:
… I hope you have already received my cable. I didn’t want to let you know until I arrived that I was travelling by air, knowing that you would worry, but we had a most uneventful trip…
Flying was still an adventure seventy years ago. It’s true, I tend to phone Danielle after a flight to say I’ve arrived safely, but I do the same after a train journey or even a car trip. As it happens, I find the prospect of travelling any great distance by car far more daunting than catching a plane. I have more confidence in the pilot’s ability to fly his plane than in my own driving – or that of other drivers on the road.
As for a cable – a telegram – I don’t even know who still provides a service these days. Certainly, I don’t remember the last time I sent or received one. In the ages of text messages or emails, does anyone use telegrams?
 |
| Leatrice (third from left) enjoying a moment's relaxation in Beirut, 1948 |
The mountains now have snow on them, she wrote on 20 November. It is cold, clear and sunny. This country grows on one. The colour on the hills mixed with the brilliance of the Mediterranean is unbelievably lovely. I have come to like the Lebanese very much. After the coldness of the Parisian, it is heart-warming to meet people who laugh with their eyes as well as their mouths.
The people may have been great, but apparently Leatrice was concerned about the sanitary conditions:
… if we drink any water, we put chlorine in it. It tastes exactly like a swimming bath, but is at least disinfected.
Personally, I’d prefer to take my chance on the infection. On the other hand, it took me a week to recover from the Cairo belly I brought back from Egypt ten days ago, so maybe Leatrice was right.
But she hadn’t finished with the subject of the people.
… it is quite obvious that they are a pure Semitic race. Olive skinned, long heads, black hair, large black eyes, curly mouths.
The racial comments I’d probably avoid, personally, but I like the underlying message, one Leatrice would repeat throughout her life: ethnically, there’s no difference between the Arabs of the Levant and Jews. The idea that there should be racial tension between them, far less conflict, is simply indefensible.
But, and this is one of the things that has not changed in seventy years, or if anything has got worse, that conflict is proving agonising and irresolvable.
We touched down in Damascus and came by taxis over the border into Lebanon… We saw some truckloads of soldiers in Syria, but there isn’t actually much military activity there. Lebanon isn’t actually at war, although Syria is.
The Israeli-Arab war of 1948 had already broken out.
Isn’t it curious that at the time Syria had been relatively untouched by war? To the extent that it was regarded as safe enough to bring staff through to Beirut? That wouldn’t be the case today.
In any case, these days we’d fly directly to Beirut.
I am, of course, very tactful about myself, but discover there is practically no feeling at all about the war. After all Lebanon is not officially engaged in it. The people I know are all Christian, and they feel themselves in very much the same position as the Jews in the Middle East. A few hundred thousand (about 600,000 surrounded by 40 million Moslems, who hate their guts). They generally feel that there is a slight bond in having another minority just over the border as some slight protection. In 1860 there was an awful pogrom of the Christians here, and the ones left fled to the mountains, and hence most of the people living in the hills are members of the Greek Orthodox church [I think she meant the Maronite Christian church]. There are actually about twenty different sects getting on fairly amicably, including a Jewish community. I had my hair washed by a woman who spoke Russian, and then burst into Yiddish with another customer.
Some things have changed, others have stayed the same. The underlying tensions have continued and, if anything, hardened. And the communities that got along reasonably well have broken out into full-scale combat, especially in Syria. The fighting Lebanon was spared in 1948 has spilled over its borders. Indeed, the links between the Christians and Jews that my mother spotted, took a particularly ugly form in 1982. That was when Israeli forces stood back and let Maronite Christian militia carry out a massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.
A deeply moving representation of this terrible event is in the excellent semi-autobiographical Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The sense of horror is made somehow even more intense by the film being made as a cartoon. Until the last few scenes, at least.
Leatrice left Beirut on 15 December, after around a month. With many fond memories. As early as in her letter of 16 November, she had written:
Have now seen the cedars of Lebanon. A very lovely tree. Tall, graceful and a very bright green.
What a pity that Lebanon isn’t primarily known for its cedars any more.
And as for the effect of war on a peaceful nation, what more pitiful example could be provided than Syria...
No comments:
Post a Comment