And so it continues....

My family and I differ a fair amount on politics...not enough to divide the family...but enough to foster a few healthily 'heated' discussions....my brother is normally pro-Israeli...and I, for whatever different reason, am normally pro-Arab...note, it's not a religious issue...but a 'people' issue! However, on the phone last night, my brother expressed horror at what the Israeli's are doing to Lebanon...a serious over-reaction, I think he termed it, damaging an amazing country that was just beginning to drag itself out of the pit of despair from its last wars...and really through no fault of its own...

Yes, Hezbollah is based in Lebanon, yes, Lebanon has not disarmed Hezbollah as dictated in resolution 1559, yes, Israeli is greatly threatened on all fronts at present. However....Hezbollah's (although disputed) funding, support and possibly instructions are more likely to come from Syria and Iran than from Lebanon itself...

So Lebanon is being "torn to shreds"...it breaks my heart to see this happening to this beautiful country...

Robert Fisk has written and 'elegy for Beirut', printed in the Independent, shown here in full on Ajnabeeyeh

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword'
They perished from hunger In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut.

and then later....

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I have been watching the evacuations with interest...a few days before the Iraq war started and the threat of WMD from Iraq towards Amman (an apparently likely scenario given the connection between Jordan and the US), the evacuation of foreigners and non-essential staff was fairly swift...the British embassy was very organised and very thorough...giving us the precise time when borders would close, the last flight would leave the country and when the British embassy would cease to operate...myself and my two British colleagues chose to stay behind...and the way the embassy dealt with it was very professional but also fairly simple...it basically came down to 'Ok, well you're on your own'....It is a fairly big decision to make...and I guess it becomes a different decision if you are responsible for anyone other than yourself...

And so it continues...the UN is only now pointing out the possibility of War Crimes on both sides...and Kofi Anaan is demanding a ceasefire....the word 'tragic' doesn't even begin to describe what's happening in the region.