Students of both sides recount stories from the Mideast
Or Skolnik (COL ‘09) doesn’t live in Israel anymore, but the outbreak of violence in the Middle East this summer threatened his family in a very real way.
In the heat of this summer’s war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the region where he lived was the target of as many as several hundred Hezbollah Katyusha rockets per day. Two of Skolnik’s cousins live in houses that were hit by the rockets, and the only escaped by narrow margins.
“One failed to explode, and another landed far enough away in the back yard that nobody was hurt,” Skolnik wrote in an e-mail last Friday. “That wasn’t an accident; when Hezbollah fired those rockets, they meant to hit people like my cousins.”
Skolnik said that criticism of excessive civilian casualties by Israel was unfair and that Israel aimed only at military targets.
Unfortunately, he said, Hezbollah often hides within civilian areas. They, not Israel, were responsible for the death toll of Lebanese civilians, he said.
But Nick Ingaciola (SFS ‘07), who was studying at the American University in Beirut when the war broke out, disagreed.
He wrote in an e-mail last Saturday that the Israeli bombing campaign hit major parts of the Lebanese civilian infrastructure, including bridges, power plants, and the international airport. The effects of the bombing were more widespread than the targets, he said.
“Hearing even faraway sections of the city under attack is disconcerting, to say the least,” he said. “Physically and psychologically, all of Lebanon was damaged.”
Ingaciola said that entire blocks in the south of Beirut were flattened and that it was for the most part left to “a vast grassroots effort,” part of which was organized by Hezbollah, to provide for displaced civilians.
Ingaciola left the city with a Lebanese friend, driving to the relative safety of a Christian town in the mountains. His flight from the city, he said, was probably the time at which he was most in danger, as smoke from Israeli bombs rose in plumes in the south of the city.
He was eventually evacuated by the American University to Cyprus, where the State Department took over and brought him home.
After a U.N. resolution called for a cease-fire in the region, the majority of fighting ended and Israeli ground troops began to pull back. But the terms of the cease-fire have led some students to express concerns about the strength of the resolution.
Skolnik said that it can only be successful if Hezbollah is disarmed.
Mark Lerner (COL ‘09), president of the Georgetown Israel Alliance, agreed, writing in an e-mail last Friday that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and warning against any diplomatic negotiations with it.
“I think that it should be common knowledge that negotiating with terrorists will only lead to more terrorist acts,” he said.
In spite of his own opinion that the scope and level of Israeli aggression was unjustified, Lebanese student Khalil Hibri (SFS ‘07) wrote in an e-mail last Saturday that Hezbollah had dragged the Lebanese people into a war that they did not want.
He said that although many Shiites saw Hezbollah’s stand against Israel as a “divine victory,” many others resented both Hezbollah and Israel for the war.
Lebanese support for Hezbollah may not be so cut and dry, said Nadya Sbaiti of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in an interview yesterday.
Initial frustration with Hezbollah quickly turned to widespread support that was probably organized more along class lines than sectarian lines, she said.
Whether or not Hezbollah is disarmed in the near future remains to be seen. Sbaiti said that any internal call for disarmament was unlikely, considering the popularity of Hezbollah now that the war is over. She was unwilling to make an overt prediction but said that the next few months will be critical.
Hibri said that he has hope for the future, if Arabs and Israelis can only increase their dialogue.
Skolnik, however, stayed away from making predictions, saying that there are too many variables to be taken into account.
“I was a kid living on the Lebanese border in northern Israel the last time Hezbollah fired at Israel this intensely in 1996,” he said. “Ten years later, they’re fighting the same war with more destructive weapons.”
