Memories of a forgotten people

It was a land of mistakes and a land of contradictions. A “Security Zone” which happened to be the most dangerous strip of land in a radius of hundreds of miles, a mountainous paradise through which flows the majestic Litani River, turned into a hopeless hell-hole of terrorists, soldiers and their victims, cousin funding cousin to fight brother, all steadily sinking into the economic, social and moral mud of their rifles’ blazing fire. On the tip of a tall mountain above the Litani sits an ancient Crusader fort turned Israeli army post. Across the river’s deep ravine lies another army base in the village of Marj Ayoun, in which lay the headquarters of two of the armies inhabiting the area – the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and its puppet army of Lebanese Christians and Druze, the South Lebanon Army (SLA). It was at this base that I found myself watching the sun rise over the notorious Al-Hayyam prison, and set over Beaufort Castle, from 1996 to 1999.

In the mornings, after watching my blue and white flag raised, I would skip breakfast and instead go to the office of my friend Abu Mahul, an SLA storage officer. His job seemed to consist of making the most delicious Arab coffee in the world several times a day, occasionally slicing fruit for Israeli officers who came by to ask for a favor. Abu Mahul was a man younger than he looked. Though he was in his fifties, he had soft brown eyes that did not seem to fit his rough, wrinkled face. As I would step into his office and smell the intoxicating fumes of coffee boiling on the stove he would greet me with what was left of his voice, saying “Ya halla bik,” a respectful Lebanese form of “welcome”. Out of the pocket of his shabby IDF uniform he would pull out a pack of Marlboros and offer me a cigarette. The one time I asked him to smoke with me he explained that he had quit several years earlier after an operation in his throat. “Why do you still carry cigarettes around then,” I asked. “For people,” he answered, “for my friends."

I always felt an affinity toward Abu Mahul and the rest of the soldiers of the SLA at the base. Perhaps it was because I felt my presence there as incongruous as theirs. They had made the mistake of joining forces with Sharon when he led the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982. We had made the mistake of staying there for nearly twenty years. We were all aware that within a few years at most, Israel would withdraw, leaving the army of God, Hezbollah, to take over the region. Then the SLA soldiers would either leave or be punished, possibly even killed.

After an excruciatingly boring first eighteen months at the base, spent as a clerk, I was granted my request to become a Commander in Charge of Education. As such I was to be accountable to the newest Colonel at the base, a wannabe macho nerd whose name could be translated as Starry Spring, who immediately ordered me to report to his office for an interview. At the front of a long and narrow office, at the head of a shiny wooden table sat Colonel Starry in his thrown-like comfy work chair. His glasses were a tad too big for his white face, fifteen years or so out of style. Behind them sat gentle blue eyes that were desperately trying to convince all, including themselves, that they were indeed the eyes of a tough fighter.

The Colonel began with a question. “What is military education?”

“Well,” I mumbled, “I see my job as trying to um…give the soldiers a different perspective. To make their service easier by giving them a break from the monotony…”

I was not cut off by his voice, but by a simple touch of his finger on the laser pen in his hand, pointed at the wall behind me.

“Look back there,” he commanded. Behind me was an army poster, entitled “The Ten Principles of Battle.” The laser’s red dot lay hovering over number nine – Fighting Spirit.

“That,” said the Colonel, “that is you.”

Reducing my entire being into patriotic military jargon seemed ludicrous. Nonetheless, I did my best to assume this fighting spirit as the Colonel expected. I immersed myself in early Zionist writings from the times before the ideology and the practice of the doctrine were at odds with each other. The common practice of denial in Marj Ayoun helped to convince both myself, and my soldiers, that our presence in Lebanon was in fact part of a historical struggle for freedom, which had been taking place over the past 5,000 years. We were the slaves in Egypt, the Maccabees fighting the Greeks, the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the brave defenders of our state in five wars forced on us by our enemies. We were another chapter in our people’s and our state’s struggle for survival, for peace. We were not occupiers.

While I did manage to diment the way I thought, my appearance left no room for illusion that I was the model soldier Colonel Starry had hoped I would be. The morning I was to receive my First Sergeant rank from the Colonel in a fancy ceremony at the base, I noticed that the right hand pocket of my army pants was ever so slightly torn. Instead of sewing or replacing them I decided to simply fold the pocket over the tear in way I thought sufficient, even though most of my friends at the base disagreed, and proceeded to the ceremony. As I stepped in front of the cheering crowd I failed to notice the back of my hand rub against the pocket and unfold the tear. That is why I was surprised to hear the Colonel’s whisper into my ear as he pinned the rank onto my arm. “If I see you in these pants one more time I’m going to demote you to Private,” he said without allowing his public smile to slip off of his face.

Unfortunately the warning was not very effective. The next morning when I saw a convoy of armored trucks lined up ready to take soldiers back to the border for their weekend at home - for me the first part of a long journey to Jerusalem - I postponed my plans to exchange my torn pants for new ones to the following Sunday when I would return to the base.  “I've never bumped into the Colonel outside the base,” I thought, “why would I this time?”

But that Sunday, by stroke of some of the worst luck known to man, I did indeed bump into the Colonel in the back streets of Kiryat Shmona. I was, of course, wearing those very same pants, unshaven and without a beret on my shoulder as army law demands, not to mention my perpetually dirty army boots. His blue eyes filled with proud disgust. "Come to my office this evening," he said, "with a beret on your head." The Colonel will try me himself, I understood. That evening was the first time my trial was postponed. 

At 8:00 AM the following morning, all of the officers and myself gathered in the Colonel’s office for a work meeting regarding an upcoming event we had all heard talk of before. At the meeting, the Colonel detailed his plan to conduct a memorial service for all of the SLA soldiers who had died since the army’s inception in 1985. No Israeli commander had ever organized such an event, entirely devoted to honoring the Lebanese soldiers who had died carrying out our orders. I was to work closely with a Civil Administration (CA) officer and local Lebanese educators in planning and carrying out the service, which would be highly publicized. The senior SLA officers, all the way up to General Antoine Lahad, the SLA chief of staff, were to be pressured to make sure the event would be well attended by people from all over the Security Zone.

The cause seemed noble – an acknowledgement of the sacrifice of the dead and a commitment to the well-being of the living – until the Colonel spoke about the service itself: “It will be modeled on Israeli memorial services – songs, poetry, a short film with interviews of family members of those who were killed, and the two national anthems.” No one in the room objected to the idea of imposing an Israeli-style memorial service on people of a completely different culture. And neither did I.

The service was scheduled for two weeks from the meeting, and another meeting with the Colonel was scheduled for the Wednesday before the event, still ten days away. My trial was again postponed, and I began to realize that my punishment would be decided according to the outcome of the memorial service. "This event has to be just like the Colonel wants it," I realized. "Otherwise he'll send me to prison."

The next morning the CA officer and I headed to SLA headquarters for our meeting with Ibrahim, a local teacher. We entered a small but tidy office with the regular Lebanese green, red and gold decorations on the walls, and a beautiful view of the Ayoun Valley, gently descending towards Metulah, the Israeli border town. As we planned out the service, asking Ibrahim questions about songs or poems that he thought appropriate, I began to realize that the entire concept of a memorial service was foreign to him, as it was to the South Lebanese in general. Here we were planning the first public remembrance session for thousands of people, and only one of us was a member of their community. Ibrahim promised to come back the following day with a few songs and poems that we could use. He didn’t. It took nearly a week until he finally came back with some suggestions.

On Saturday we set out with a cameraman in a convoy of armored Mercedes to interview several family members of men who had been killed in battle. We drove east across the Ayoun Valley and up into the Hermon mountain range, which extends from Israel into Lebanon and Syria, regally overlooking the entire region, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. We drove through the winding streets of the picturesque Druze village of Hasbaya, finally parking in front of a simple brick house belonging to the widow of a famous SLA captain who had been killed in action several years earlier. The family was a prominent one in the Druze community and as such seemed like a good choice to start our short film with. However, the widow was reluctant. While she knew that agreeing to the interview would grant her favor in the eyes of the CA officers, and could lead to financial and other favors, she knew that it would reopen her wound in a public, un-Lebanese way. The CA officer took the widow into another room and spoke to her in Arabic. A few minutes later he called out for the cameraman. I was left in the living room to look at the mostly white walls, the Turkish carpet and the enlarged photograph of the woman’s husband in a golden frame, the centerpiece of the room. Fifteen minutes later the three emerged, the interview completed. Before I was hurried out and back into the Mercedes I caught a glimpse of the broken widow, her dark eyes shedding humiliated tears of defeat.

That day we interviewed two more widows, several children and one father who had lost his son.  None of them felt comfortable talking about their loved ones who had passed. The framed photograph in the center of each of their living rooms was enough of a presence, and the money received each month from the CA was a constant reminder of their loss. Their mourning, I learned, was humble and private.

That evening we began editing the material. Wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying loaded M16s we made the short walk from the base to the nearby studio of Middle East TV. A friendly editor sat us in front of a set of televisions, and within seconds we were watching the raw footage, telling him which parts of it we wanted in the film. To his surprise, we chose the most dramatically sad background music he could find, and an hour later we had a beginning to our piece. However, our time was limited, as staying in the unprotected studio was not safe. We used our last few minutes to explain again how we want the rest of the piece structured and which footage he should use at each point. “To close the piece,” I said, “put the crying girl again. The one who says ‘I miss my daddy.’” For the first time the editor protested vocally. “Isn’t one time enough?” “It will make it more powerful,” I replied. “What are you trying to do to these people,” he asked. “Make them cry?”

“Yes,” I responded, “we’re trying to make them cry.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what the Colonel wants. A memorial service. Israeli style.”

“You try to make people cry at your services,” he asked, baffled.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what we do.” He looked at the CA officer who was with me, and he in turn nodded, as if saying “Sounds odd, but he’s telling the truth.”

Before we left, the editor assured us he would carry out the editing as instructed, and that it would be ready by Tuesday morning. But once again we were let down. The film was finally brought to us on Wednesday afternoon, one hour before our scheduled meeting with the Colonel. It was not the film we had told him to make.

An hour later I found myself again, the only non-officer around the Colonel’s long table. As each officer reported the successful carrying out of his role in this operation I grew increasingly nervous. When my turn to speak came I felt the Colonel’s gaze land on me for the first time all evening.

“We performed the interviews on Saturday, and went to the station to begin the edit that evening. But the film isn’t ready. We have one, but it’s no good.” Deadly silence. The CA officer speaks up: “They promised us what we wanted by yesterday, and…”

“Tomorrow I am going home for the weekend,” the Colonel cut him off, staring into my fear-filled eyes. “If by 5:00 o’clock tomorrow afternoon the film is not delivered to my house you can start looking for another unit.”

The message was clear – it’s either perform a miracle and finish re-editing the film by noon tomorrow, then send a driver to the Colonel’s house just north of Tel Aviv, a four hour drive from the border, or spend a month in prison, come back, pack my bags and prepare to be sent off to some other base where I would not be allowed to perform educational work. It would be back to being a clerk for me.

Amazingly, the miracle happened. The CA officer made some phone calls, yelled in Arabic at various people, and got the editor to work through the night to make the film we wanted. At 4:48pm the next day I received news that that the driver had arrived at Colonel Starry’s home with the videotape. At 7:15 I got the news that he had watched it and liked what he saw. H-A-L-L-E-L-U-Y-A-H!!!

At 2:00pm Sunday I arrived at the local high school, the site of the memorial service. The large cement courtyard was sparsely decorated with the odd color combination of the Lebanese and Israeli flags, a small stage had been prepared, next to it a large screen connected to a simple VCR. Rows and rows of chairs, two towering flags, a dirt parking lot that was created for the occasion, and behind the stage in a large roofed area was a long wall covered from top to bottom with photographs of over eight hundred dead Lebanese men, the harvest of fourteen years of working with the IDF.

Before I knew it the courtyard was filling up with hundreds of people from all over Southern Lebanon. More people showed up than expected, and so the courtyard took on some characteristics of a local soccer game, with people sitting on top of walls and rooftops, some watching from nearby balconies. TV cameras were set up, making the public nature of the event complete. I spotted my friend Abu Mahul searching around for a place to sit in one of the back rows. At last the officers arrived, both IDF and SLA, including Colonel Starry, General Lahad and General Amitai.

The hour long service passed quickly, and despite my fears the film played smoothly, the people watching and taking it in, some shedding a tear. The anthems were sung, and it was all over. As I climbed into an armored Mercedes, I wondered whether joining together to mourn gave these people some new kind of comfort, or if this public glorification of fallen "heroes" only exacerbated their pain. Reports came from the offices of both generals that they were very pleased, the Lebanese press covered the event widely, and to the Colonel’s delight, Israel’s Channel One called to say they would like to use the Lebanese station’s footage of the event for a feature on the Friday evening news program, Yoman. Even Abu Mahul had some good things to say about it, but in Arabic I could hear his friends’ bitter sarcasm.

For whom did we work so hard? For them or for us? Perhaps for the Colonel’s publicity (which seems to have worked – he has since been promoted to Brigadier General and has been put in charge of the military aspect of the upcoming Gaza pullout). The sarcasm I heard in the voices of many SLA soldiers in Marj Ayoun, demanding that we help them in a concrete financial and security sense rather than in a glittering publicized ceremony, unfortunately proved justified. The Barak government’s sudden withdrawal from the Security Zone two years later was not announced to the SLA beforehand, leaving our allies only hours to decide whether they would leave everything they had and move to Israel, trusting the Israelis to help them settle there, or stay and hope for mercy in the hands of Hezbollah, their bitter enemy.

As for me, the morning after the service I was called to the Colonel’s office to be tried. I entered and found him wearing his red beret on his head, a formal munchkin. The Colonel was merciful and sentenced me to three weeks confinement to the base with no leave, as well as three weeks in prison were I to be caught in violation of military dress code at any point over the next year. Good thing he didn’t know I had received the very same sentence three months earlier from his deputy for roaming the base with a few hairs growing out of my chin.

My only souvenir from Lebanon is a photograph of Abu Mahul and me standing together in front of his coffee-scented office. What happened to my friend I do not know. I picture him living an outsider’s life wherever the Israeli government placed him and the rest of the SLA soldiers and their families, in some town up north near the border. The Security Zone is now a piece of history, the SLA a memory – their dead forgotten, their living in a foreign land. I played a part in the displacement of a people. I was an occupier in their land, and as such my mind became "occupied" with thoughts that were not my own. My actions contradicted who I am. I will not let it happen again.

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