Book Excerpt
Belén Fernández
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Coffee with Hezbollah, by Bélen Fernández, a travelogue from Publio Magazine publications, is due in spring/summer 2008. (...) According to [Harvard law professor Alan] Dershowitz’ math, Hezbollah encouraged the dropping of quarter-ton bombs on Lebanese civilians in order to hijack global sympathy. Evidence of the devaluation of life was that, in 2004, a group of Palestinians had paid an 11-year-old to unwittingly carry a bomb through an Israeli checkpoint in Nablus, in the Occupied Territories (the bomb had not been detonated). In response to the arithmetic of pain, Dershowitz derived the “continuum of civilianality” to guide Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks. The continuum identified babies as among the most civilian civilians and human shields as among the least; civilians in between were categorized by varying degrees of political and spiritual support for terrorism. Following the new laws of war, it was acceptable to drop quarter-ton bombs on lesser civilians or to bulldoze anyone opposed to the demolition of Palestinian homes. The purpose of civilianality was called into question when Lebanese babies continued to be bombed. Dershowitz experimented with amendments to the continuum, such as that: 1. Arabs killed each other every day in other parts of the world. 2. Israelis had wept in grief over the bombing of the more civilian components at Qana, the south Lebanese town where Jesus reportedly had changed water to wine. He then concluded that Lebanon was a terrorist collaborator, rendering it as exempt from continuums as pre-World War II Austria. His conclusion was authenticated by a Lebanese car mechanic interviewed by the New York Times in August, who quoted south Lebanese trees and stones as saying: “We are Hezbollah.” Not interviewed in the article were trees and stones in Nagasaki. (...) The taxi driver was painting over bullet holes on his front door and spoke minimal English, but managed to declare that he was a citizen of the United States. We assumed he was speaking metaphorically and accepted his offer of coffee. Inside the house, the taxi driver’s 13-year-old daughter Maryam welcomed us to Bint Jbeil, thrust Lebanese coffee cups into our hands and explained that: 1. the taxi driver was literally a U.S. citizen and had just moved his family back to the state within a state from Dearborn, Mich., state within the States. (She cited the reason for the move as educational; we reminded her that everyone on the continuum of civilianality in the U.S. could study biology and chemistry or become professors of law at Harvard.) 2. Amelia and I were invited to spend the night whenever we liked. 3. there was an unexploded aerial bomb an estimated 2 feet in length inside the unoccupied house next door. The third piece of information called into question the feasibility of the second, and Amelia and I proposed calling the Norwegians de-miners in Tyre. Maryam adjusted her ponytail, and assured us that the proper authorities had already been notified. Maryam’s family had refused the American Embassy’s offers of evacuation in July, as her non-citizen grandparents could not be evacuated and as boats to Cyprus did not depart from her neighbor’s basement, where a crowd of human shields had gathered to await the arrival of American-made laser-guided bombs. Such weaponry had been rush-delivered to Israel during the war to neutralize fortified underground bunkers and arrived in south Lebanon with no advance warning from air-raid sirens. Maryam’s father had thus had to calculatingly dodge air raids in his taxi when her grandfather suffered a heart attack and had to be rushed from the basement to the hospital. Northern Israel was meanwhile suffering what CNN compared to the London Blitz, based on the prevalence of sirens and the neutralization of two Israelis in Haifa by the rain of rockets from Lebanon. After approximately 10 days in the basement, Maryam’s family had escaped to north Lebanon in a caravan of human shields flying white sheets, having no stars and stripes handy. Maryam explained that the final vehicle in the continuum had been struck by a missile; she then: 1. explained what happened when missiles landed inside cars, when Amelia and I asked if the human shields had survived. 2. expressed her hope that U.S. media outlets had not covered the full extent of the war, as it would have unnecessarily pained the American people. 3. showed us a map of the United States in one of her schoolbooks, with Michigan outlined in pink hearts. (...) BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ grew up in Austin, Texas. She attended Columbia University and the University of Rome where she was inhibited by cheap Italian wine. Her post-graduation accomplishments include packing avocados in the south of Spain and hitchhiking from Spain to Turkey. Fernández is currently completing a book entitled Coffee with Hezbollah, based on a two-month hitchhiking excursion she and Amelia Opaliñska conducted in Lebanon in the aftermath of the July 2006 war. |
