A Prayer for a Neighbour

One of the things about living in Egypt is the fact that my neighbours in an international sense are pretty high profile. About ten years ago, right after the end of the long Lebanese war, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit Lebanon for a weeklong conference of millers, mill owners and suppliers where the wives spent four days visiting different parts of the country. Diaa fell into the later category as one of the main suppliers of corn and soybeans in Egypt and I was happy to be a tourist. He'd been to Beirut once long before the war and I'd spent a couple of summers in Cyprus arguing idly with a Danish woman married to a Lebanese pilot who was a refugee with her two kids while various armies shelled the hills around their home above Beirut. Our longterm friendly argument was over which city was more beautiful: Beirut or Vancouver, BC. They have so much in common with the sea, the mountains, skiing, and good living. We never really decided, but Beirut definitely had some problems.

When I finally got to see Lebanon, I could definitely see my friend's side of the argument. Lebanon is one of the most lovely countries on the planet...or at least it was. When we visited the first time the scars of war were very fresh and the rebuilding that the Israelis again so brutally shattered summer before last was just getting started. Our Lebanese friends were very worried however about the generation of Lebanese who were growing up with no experience other than chaos...how can you teach order and care to people who have never known it? This is a central issue in any developing country and a heartbreaking issue for a country that knew order for so long and then lost it for fifteen years.

One of my blog notifications brought up a post about a Lebanese singer Majida el Roumi who is a UN goodwill ambasador and who recently took all of the parties in her country to task for not working together to rebuild Lebanon. She was speaking at a ceremony to remember the slain journalist Gebran Tueni and I think that every leader in the world should take these words into his/her heart:

The English translation of her speech is online at
Now Lebanon

How many hearts have to be broken? How many homes have to be ruined? How many Lebanese have to be given worries as their daily bread? How many young men and women have to leave the country before you decide to meet and put an end to this disastrous situation and this horrible division? How can divisions reach the point of having people tell me, “Do not pray at Pierre’s funeral or say a word in Gebran’s commemoration, or you would be speaking up against the others.” Who are the others? Aren’t you all Lebanese? All those martyrs who have died from the southernmost part of the country in massacres perpetrated by Israel to its northernmost part, in the case of our beloved army martyrs, and all those who died for our youth’s sake, … Aren’t they all – truly and honestly – ours? Didn’t they break our hearts? Aren’t they only guilty of being Lebanese?

We no longer meet to pray for the martyrs’ souls, since we now have “their” martyr and “our” martyr. I reject this painful discrimination. I hereby say that it was an honor to sing for Pierre inasmuch as it is an honor to speak about Gebran. If I am accused of being Lebanese, then I am the lucky one. I no longer care who will be offended by these words. Indeed, I know that some people will be offended, but I no longer care about them because, after 30 years of war, we have come to lose hope. I no longer care to bear witness to anyone on this earth, especially not in politics. I only bear witness to the Lord, and our Lord loves peace. He is against violence and He tells me to bear witness to what is right, to the best of our youth and to the sovereignty and freedom of this land, as any self-respecting citizen with some dignity should do. I bear witness to the tormented, martyred Lebanese people who has close brushes with death everyday and barely hangs on to life. I say: enough is enough…

You say you are entrusted with Lebanon’s sovereignty and our safety… [In reality,] you have torn the country into pieces, and you want to replace it with one that is tailor-made for confessions, parties and power obsessions. However, this country is far greater than that. You are responsible for driving wedges among us and dividing us under a single roof. You have scattered us and linked our case with half of the world’s pending issues… Why should we be a card in everyone’s hand? How can you accept to remain divided for 30 years, and then tell the whole world that you are unable to run the country’s affairs? In the end, this may be the ultimate aim. If so, then why are you doing it? You are entrusted with our freedom, our sovereignty and our independence. I am here to say: [You have done] enough… let us live.

In the name of what is right, in the name of the Lord, who you say you love and according to whose will you claim to be acting, let this state remain a state. Whose interest would be served if this nation remains unsheltered and if the state breaks up into countless component parts? I am here to conjure you up in the name of the Lord to make peace. You are so stifling us that there will be no one left to hear you. I am here for Gebran’s sake to tell him: I have come to pay tribute to you, my dear brother and friend. Our hearts will keep on beating as one as long as you are alive within us. Why is that so? Because we remained oblivious to the worth of the perfect man that you were. If no tribute is paid to you today as a King who left us, who deserves such a tribute then? Do those who have slain us deserve it? We shall not give it to them. Dear Gebran, I see your pictures on billboards, and I am ashamed to tell you that your blood will not have been spilled in vain. In the name of the everlasting God, I tell you with total confidence that there will come a day when your blood will bloom only in the three colors of our national flag. This day of freedom and sovereignty will undoubtedly come no matter how long it takes because no one can grow greater than Lebanon… Nor shall Lebanon ever be diminished. All shall perish and Lebanon shall remain, and you shall always be there, O Gebran, along with the great men who have borne witness to its dignity and its special vocation on this Earth.




copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Historical Note

One of my internet treats is The Writer's Almanac, published daily by Garrison Keillor and American Public Media. Each day it brings a poem and historical notes about writers and world culture. Today's historical note offered an interesting and thought provoking reflection on the conflicts of today:

"It was on this day in 1095 that Pope Urban II, while on a speaking tour in France, called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. There was no imminent threat. Muslims had occupied Jerusalem for hundreds of years. But Urban II had noticed that Europe was becoming an increasingly violent place, with low-level knights killing each other over their land rights, and he thought that he could bring peace to the Christian world by directing all that violence against an outside enemy. So he made up stories of how Turks in Jerusalem were torturing and killing Christians, and anyone who was willing to join the fight against them would go to heaven.

About 100,000 men from France, Germany, and Italy answered the call, formed into several large groups, and marched across Asia Minor to the Middle East. Nearly half of them died from exhaustion and sickness before they ever reached their destination. They began sacking cities along the way, and they fought among each other for the spoils of each battle. When they reached the trading city of Antioch, they killed almost everyone, including the Christians who lived there. By the time they got to Jerusalem, it had recently fallen into the hands of Egyptians, who were friendly with the Vatican. But the crusaders attacked anyway, killing every Muslim they could find. The Jews in the city gathered in the temple, and the crusaders set it on fire.

Pope Urban II died two weeks later, never hearing the news. But the crusading would go on for the next 200 years. In the fourth and last Crusade, in 1202, the crusaders never even made it to Jerusalem, but got sidetracked and wound up destroying Constantinople, which was at the time the last great city left over from the Roman Empire."

The Egyptians who whom the note refers were those under the leadership of Sallah el Din (Saladin in western history books) who built the Citadel in Cairo and established the city in its current place. One of the buildings of importance in Constantinople was Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine cathedral that was later remodeled with minarets to become the Grand Mosque of Istanbul and the model for the mosque of Mohamed Ali in the 1800's. Now when you visit the Grand Mosque you can see some of the old Christian Byzantine paintings and murals that were once painted over with whitewash, and Mohamed Ali's mosque remains a favoured resting spot for weary tourists schlepping their way through Old Cairo. The past never really leaves us.


copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Some Things You Just Can't Ignore

I don’t like politicians. I’m not at all sure that they do anything at all to benefit the rest of us, while I’m quite sure that they make sure that they and their cronies do benefit from their actions. I don’t follow the news of the G8 or other summits because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that the governments of any countries are really going to help us keep our world in order, but on the other hand, we seem to be rather stuck with them all.

My kids arrived home from Syria seriously pissed off that a war in Lebanon and Palestine disrupted their vacations. With their reports of Syria, I would love to visit there as soon as I could feel that I’d be safe enough. This may sound pretty trivial but I daresay that there are a lot of Syrians feeling just as disgruntled and distressed, as there are Lebanese. (Given their shaky situation, Palestinians don’t get much in the way of vacations.) This isn’t so odd because vacations are part of normal life, and normal life of any variety has been violently abused. Vacationers in Lebanon are now refugees in Syria and Cyprus. And over what? Three soldiers who were kidnapped…three soldiers in an army that proudly proclaims itself to be at war with the Arab nations around it. I’m sorry, but why should Israeli soldiers be free from the same fear of imprisonment that many men in Palestine and southern Lebanon have suffered for years?

I’m not discounting the value of anyone’s life, but when was the last time that a country was allowed to carry out major bombing raids on a neighbouring sovereign state to destroy that country’s hard built infrastructure once again after a previous 20 year war during which most of it was destroyed by the same people? If a group of criminals or a political group was to kidnap personnel from the Mexican-American border, would the Americans be allowed to bomb Mexico in general into oblivion? What would have happened if the Quebec separatists had taken some Americans hostage…why is not all that important, since I can’t imagine why they would want to, though I’m sure that a reason could come up. Would the American Air Force have launched attacks on Toronto? I don’t think so.

Other than Israel, I can’t think of a single nation that has been permitted the freedom to bomb and invade its neighbours in the way that this nation has done for the past fifty or so years. Maybe there has been someone who has been given a blind eye while it reduced its neighbours to rubble, but I can’t think of one. There is a certain unfairness in the situation, an unfairness that Israel’s critics have been commenting on for years. Everyone EXCEPT Israel has been expected to conform to UN resolutions. Israel’s policies concerning its Palestinian citizens (?) such as those that encourage the sale of Palestinian properties by the shutting off of water and power and then forbidding the purchase of new property by Palestinians would be labeled “ethnic cleansing” somewhere else. As a mother who spent a fair bit of time trying to teach my children the importance of basic ethics, I find the situation astounding.

Palestine was recognized as a sovereign state a few years ago, but when Hamas was elected to the government, everyone decided that the election was a bad idea. I thought that democracy was supposed to be A Good Thing, but I guess it depends on who wins. What happened after Hamas won the Palestinian elections was that although they were the duly elected government of a recognized nation, all funds traveling to Palestine for the government were frozen by the banks. Aid was frozen, everything was frozen. Why? Because Hamas had been labeled as a “terrorist” group. But they were elected to run Palestine, so the Palestinians found themselves cut off from all services from their own government which couldn’t pay the bills, while the rest of the world just assumed that somehow things would be alright? Somehow, this doesn’t make any sense to me.

So after the elections that put Hamas in power in Palestine, they never really had a chance to do anything legitimate with the funds for the government frozen by the international banking community. This is a marvelous way of controlling who can play the government game. Simply label anyone you don’t like as a “terrorist” and let the banks do the rest. No one in the world can survive without the banks, can they? In this case, one of the aspects of the war on terror was to keep Hamas from showing that they might actually be able to run Palestine.

I don’t claim to have any solutions to this situation. For many years I got the old US party line about the “poor Israelis”….and then I met quite a few of them in Cyprus while I spent summers on the sail boat with the kids in Limassol. Word would go through the marina the second an Israeli boat came in with everyone locking up outboard motors and securing any property left on deck or on the dock. I was shocked to see that within fifteen minutes of the arrival of the boat from the Haifa Sailing School, the bathrooms were stripped of toilet paper and filthy. They thought nothing of “borrowing” someone’s bicycle without asking, or of trying to break into the soft drink machine or ice cream freezer. I’d never seen anything like it. The marina was a small community of a number of nationalities who all lived together very harmoniously and respected each other's property and rights, so this departure was fairly amazing. I’m less inclined to feel that these people are so downtrodden because of the extraordinary arrogance that I’ve witnessed personally in Cyprus and through events that have unfolded in the Middle East. But in the end, the fact remains that there are decent people everywhere in the world and somehow they must find a way to establish decency as a way of life.

I know that we are stuck with governments that somehow we must try to influence to do good, but I’m not so optimistic about our success there. On the other hand, as parents we have children that we can teach to see right and wrong and to speak out about it. We have our own voices and minds. We can switch off the television and Google the news for half an hour and see how China, India, Portugal, the UK are viewing events in the world. We can seek the information and speak, speak, speak. I suspect that each of us must simply try to do the right thing and try to get others around us to do the same. Good lord, if enough people actually try living good lives, it could turn into a movement. What would the neighbours say then?