Death of a Lebanese family
By Osama El-Sherif
To Muna, an infant, Zeina, 3, Laila, 4, Hassan 5 and their
parents , all of whom were killed when an Israeli rocket blew
to pieces the ambulance that was carrying them as they were
fleeing Israel's "Grapes of Wrath".
FORGIVE US! But then you may not. Why should you? Muna,
Zeina, Laila and Hassan will never understand why life ended
so suddenly for them on that terrible day. But death, like
many of us, was humbled. Death had no cause to celebrate;
plucking the lives of this Lebanese family. There was no
triumph, only "collateral damage."
Forgive our transgressions; our weakness and our madness. For
this is the age of madness; from humans to cows; this is the
age when MADeleine Albright can sit and judge and pronounce
sentences on every thing Arab; on little Zeina whose face was
blown to pieces. Oh God, the pain that flows like a virgin
river, the anger, so pristine, that burns like molten iron
inside our guts; the despair, the bitterness, the echo of
Muna's cries resonates like thunder forever, till Kingdom
come and beyond.
Between the fruits of peace and the "grapes of
wrath" little children lay gasping for life near a UN
checkpoint. They were not the first, nor will they be the
last. Israel! Oh Israel: your peace is killing us! Oh Israel
whose tyranny is soaked in our blood. Your holocaust is
becoming our nightmare; the irony of your history is
deafening; your commandments; a mendacious epitaph!
Forgive our shenanigans! The silence with which we greet
newspaper headlines every morning, the morbid looks on our
faces as we watch the graphically detailed news bulletin
every evening and the empty feeling we try to dispel every
night as we go to bed. Forgive the peacemakers, the
warmongers, those brandishing the sword dripping with blood,
the brooms, the helmets, the turbans, the pens, the
microphones, the little notebooks, the video cameras. Forgive
our barren imaginations as we spit out carefully written
words of condemnation or call for restraint or beg the
Security Council to utter words of eternal wisdom and make a
sense of the killings, the deportations, the demolitions, the
mass evacuations, the nagging bombardments, the sanctions,
the no fly zones, the no food zones, the no life zones! Is
there a zone left for us to scurry to where we can raise our
heads and smell the air of liberty and freedom?
Muna might have been hungry that noon day. She probably was
suckling at her mother's breast when a hellish fireball
burned the skin off her face; it is difficult to say. Does it
matter? Zeina and Leila were frightened because the sound of
explosions was so close, but Hassan, a young handsome boy was
putting up a brave face, like his father. The ambulance siren
was ululating like a bereaved mother. There on the ground lay
fragments of a Lebanese family--a typical Arab family. The
air smelled of burning flesh as Israeli aircraft reported a
direct hit. Another Hizbollah target destroyed. Oh yes, the
driver was a fanatic, the car was laden with explosives, Muna
was to become a woman and then a mother who later gives birth
to two boys who join the resistance, blow themselves up and
kill tens of Israelis. It was a legitimate target, it could
have been one, ten years from now, may be twenty or even
thirty years from now, it will remain a target. It was a
preemptive strike to kill the fighters who haven't been born
yet.
Forgive our sordid lives in this age of helplessness; where
poetic justice is merely a dream, where innocence is a
legitimate military target and where humanity is a disease.
We live our tortured lives to see and see yet again the flesh
of babies being spent like empty shells. So do you forgive?