Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAccording to the Kuwait News Agency dispatch, the Lebanese army has whittled its fight with Fatah al-Islam to within 200 meters of the militant's position. [1]
According to yesterday's video from Reuters [2], the devestation of the camp may lay beyond imagination. From tents to blocks in 60 years, from blocks to ruins inside of two months: when it is said that "Allah makes all things possible," the broadest consideration of what is possible may be included in that thought.
From bank robbery to shootout at the camp gates to siege to the methodical, steady thumping by a modern military, Nahr al-Bared as an event fits the closed-loop pattern noted here last night. History surrounds it, contains it, ends it.
Reuters on July 24 report the numbers killed by the fighting to that date [3]: Lebanese army--120 dead; militants--81 dead; civilians--41 dead.
The familiar toll in twice-displaced Palestinians: about 30,000.
After the loop closes, there's always the next action founded on the last hopes of both sides.
For old PLO caught somewhere between Hamas in Gaza and the immediate futility of returning to the devestated "camp" that was Nahr al-Bared, one may hope for reexamination of the possibility of campaigning for integration into Lebanese life.
It's well know that while dreams need never expire, lives do, and with the destruction of the adjusted, if less than happy, ecology of 30,000 lives, the matter of sustaining violence in service to dreams becomes just that much more accute: how much longer, how much more?
The only good answer is no longer, no more.
The enjoyment and inclusion of amenity in contemporary life involves enormous administrative challenges for which the channeling of misery into endless arguments about systems of belief, government, and justice proves always counter-productive. Where "winning" (anything) may have once meant "control" of the thing won, it now means having in addition and ready for implementation a beneficial program for after the fact.
Some have cast the "war on terror" as a conflict between the modern and medieval worlds: I would submit and quite to the contrary that it's about the end of colonialism and World War II--i.e., the unfinished business of the 20th Century, including finishing off the mythic superman and racism.
May the 21st Century start with concern and action taken on behalf of all those displaced by warfare, and then not to reconstruct the past but rather to renew their lease on the future.
3. "Militants kill 3 Lebanese soldiers in camp battle." Reuters, July 24, 2007, 10:13 a.m. EDT.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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