THE SEA, INSHA'ALLAH - The inky mass pulsated before the young man’s narrow eyes as he peered into the darkness from where came the sounds and smell of the sea. In the distance he could distinguish Israeli vessels. They were the same which had fired on Gaza only a few days ago. He sat very still in his uncle’s dinghy, back straight, alert, his left hand resting on the outboard motor’s throttle. There were two plastic gas containers at his feet and a backpack. Only the moonlight interrupted the slow movement of dark clouds and was dimly reflected in the receiver and barrel of his AK-47. His attention shifted to the assault rifle and he picked it up from the bottom of the boat, resting the butt on his thigh. He took the gun’s magazine out and checked it, though he knew it was full. He pushed the magazine back into the receiver and placed the weapon on the floor.

The fishing boats around him moved with the water’s swell. Beyond the beach he could discern the outlines of buildings jutting out amongst the densely populated neighbourhoods, where an expanse of concrete structures was punctuated by the minarets of mosques and the empty spaces left by the bombs. Lives remained entangled and broken in the rubble-filled craters in which bodies lay rotting under heavy slabs and mangled iron rods. Here and there bombed-out buildings, pockmarked and gutted, still stood like concrete carcasses. Gaza was all concrete, and now, it seemed to Hakim, Gaza was empty, dead and cold. The vast sea too seemed cold. Without feeling afraid or nervous Hakim mulled over the fact that he would soon likely be killed. He contemplated his death from the little boat floating on the cold sea and made up his mind to go. Khalas, he said, no more, and he pulled on the motor’s starter cord.

He untied the dinghy, turned the throttle, and cut the sea’s surface with the bow. No fishermen had yet come to prepare their boats. Perhaps they were too tired from burying their dead or helping bury the dead of others, Hakim thought. Many had spent the day combing the ruins for survivors and bodies. Hakim wondered if perhaps the absence of fishermen meant they thought it was too dangerous to cast their nets in the few, overfished miles from the shore the Israelis still allowed them to be in. Those who cast their nets in deeper waters were often rammed by Israeli patrol boats from which soldiers fired shots over their heads while ordering them to go home. Now there were Israeli vessels waiting at the ready. But Hakim didn’t care about fishing, he wanted out, and he was going.

The bodies he had seen over the course of three weeks had gotten all mixed up in his mind. He couldn’t remember which airstrike had killed what person. In his dreams he helped carry the dead out of a crater where an apartment block had stood moments before while the sirens of ambulances wailed from every direction. The bodies kept coming and a bearded man with sweat pouring down his face and holding his palms out as though he were praying kept imploring Hakim to go to Zeitoun where the Samounis’ house had been bombed. Hakim refused to go because he knew what he would find there. So he carried bodies, ignoring the pleading man, until he would wake up, choking and in tears.

Hakim looked back at Gaza city and the few lights in buildings running on generators people had been able to find fuel for. The boat was moving fast now and his fist tightened around the outboard motor’s throttle. The boats floating in the port were becoming hard to make out in the dark. His heartbeat quickened, he took a deep breath, looked at the city and then turned his back on the strip of land he had never left before.

The sea was large before him and he scanned the horizon for the Israeli ships. There were three to the southwest so he aimed northwest where he could not make any other vessels out. The dinghy was going as fast as the spiral blades on the motor’s propeller could cut through the dark waters, and Hakim knew he was approaching the limit to which Palestinians could navigate without being intercepted or attacked. Hakim fought the urge to look back at Gaza and tried shutting down his mind, which had frantically began trying to reckon how far he was from Gaza and how soon he would die.

The AK-47 was sliding around on the floor along with the oars, so Hakim placed his foot over the rifle to keep it in place, but changed his mind and picked it up with his right hand instead. He had lost track of time and distance, and again he repressed the urge to look back. If the battle was coming he wanted to stay focused on what lay ahead. He put his hand over the pistol grip to be ready. A frightening thought came over him that perhaps they would shoot him from far away or that an Israeli drone high above him would suddenly turn him to pieces on which fish would feed. His heart raced now trying to imagine all the different scenarios. He concluded it was most likely they would try to capture him, so they would send patrol boats to chase him down. He could see a few lights on the vessels and wondered if he was being watched through binoculars or tracked by radar.

If he was to have any chance of killing at least a couple he would have to hide the weapon and spring it on them at the last second. He put the rifle back down on the floor and pinned it against the hull with his foot. He moved up on the seat so that he was just on its edge. If he was stopped he could try to get his right knee down, grab the pistol grip and swing the barrel around over the gunwale. No, he thought, that would never work. They would have a gunner on him and he would be shot as soon as he made his move.

If he was caught out here, he considered, he would never make it back to dry land. He imagined his decomposed body washing up on a beach in Gaza. Gaza. He looked back and it was almost gone. Far in the distance he could see a few dim lights which looked like stars seen through a foggy night. His grip over the throttle slowly loosened and the boat slowed down. He looked at the faint flicker in the distance and then the sea all around him. The Israeli ships were the last obstacles, then only open water. His fear for a minute was subdued by the elation that accompanied the realization that there were no visible, physical boundaries around him. Then panic surged over him as he caught the flicker of a moving object in the sky. He strained his eyes, desperately trying to see it again but everything seemed out of focus. Quickly he turned the throttle and the boat lurched into motion. He found the lights of Gaza, located the Israeli ships, and sped away from both.

He knew he had to get out to international waters. It was his only chance, and even then if he was picked up by an Israeli vessel he doubted he would be brought back to the coast alive. Hakim imagined the headline: Israeli Navy Rescues Palestinian Terrorist Lost at Sea, Puts him out of his Misery. No, he was just one Palestinian, he was not even worth a headline. He would just be shark food, a story for the soldiers to laugh about over cold beers at the barracks.

Hakim heard a sound like thunder rumbling in the distance. He thought perhaps the Israelis had just fired on him and that he was moments away from obliteration, but realized that impact would have taken place before the sound could have ever reached his ears. He could still barely make out the ships in the distance and it seemed one had moved closer towards the coastline.

The wooden dinghy’s bow dove further into the Mediterranean night and further away from territorial waters and certain death. He closed his eyes and began to recite Al-Fatiha, the opening of the Qur’an. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful… his lips moved and he could taste the salty breeze on the tip of his tongue. He recited Al-Fatiha not out of piety but because he had suddenly been overcome by the impulse to so. He said the words over and over again. You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path… The boat bounced off a wave and landed back on to the sea with a slap. Darkness encompassed him when he opened his eyes. There were no Israeli vessels. There was no Gaza. Only water and shadows as far as the eyes could see.

Hakim navigated the enveloping darkness in which the few stars still shining through the clouds had suffocated and died out. Scarcely could he see six feet ahead of him as the bow broke through the undulating sea mass. He had wanted to print out a map but there had been no power. He remembered the geography from school when he was a child and his teacher had asked him to draw the Mediterranean basin on the board. South of him, stretching from east to west, lay the shores of North Africa. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. That dog Mubarak, pyramids, Colonel Gaddafi, the Sahara desert, and the Casbah. More importantly, North Africa was resistance, struggle and independence, legends of which he had been brought up on as a child growing up through the two Intifadas.

To the North, he knew he could reach Turkey, Greece, or Italy, and, further, France or Spain. He thought Italy would not be a bad start, Venice and Rome. Then he could travel by land through Europe to France—the Evil tower, wine and women. But really he hoped to hit Cyprus, for it was closest. He had seen the boats arrive to Gaza from Cyprus carrying aid and foreigners despite the Israeli blockade. He wished he had a compass, better yet a GPS, but in the wreckage of Gaza he had been unable to find either.

The gas level in the container connected to the outboard motor was about three-quarters out, which made Hakim a little uneasy. He released the motor’s throttle, shut the engine off and rummaged through the backpack for a cigarette. Smoke filled his lungs as he leaned back against the boat’s gunwale slowly exhaling. Presently he wondered about currents and realized he had lost all sense of orientation. He thought Gaza was still behind him but could not say for certain. For a minute, a disturbing feeling came over him. It was the same feeling he had felt during the last three weeks and many times before as Gaza was under fire. His father would pray and hold his mother whose breathing was loud and quick. Little good did praying do him.

There was no guessing what street or what house the airstrikes might hit so no way to be sure whether it was safer to run or to stay put. Hakim felt the same way, only now he had power: he had a motor, he had gas, he had a boat, and there were no borders with watchtowers and snipers. He pulled the starter cord, turned the throttle and the motor roared. He sped away from a hopeless fate and towards immeasurable hope.

Slowly dawn leaked through the darkness and Hakim was struck by the immensity of his surroundings. There was only water and though to some the sight would have seemed a desolate one, to Hakim it was spectacular. He scanned the horizon for land or for a ship, but for the moment he was content to see a horizon of only sky and sea. There was joy in his heart but sadness as well for the land he had left and knew he would never see again. He remembered climbing the branches of olive trees as a child to pick the fruit and drop them on the blanket laid out bellow. He thought of his friends and decided he would write to them as soon as he could, to tell them he was okay and to tell them he would send money when he found steady work. Or perhaps he would call, and he smiled at the thought of what Mahmoud would say upon hearing of Hakim’s journey.

Hakim shut the motor off to let it cool and to check the oil. He connected the other gas container to it then got on his back on the floor of the boat to smoke and to look at the clouds. The water gently rocked the dinghy as Hakim tried to imagine the profusion of possibilities and he wondered what nation’s soil his feet would touch next. He laughed at the thought of a cruise ship spotting him and rescuing him. He would be the talk of all the tourists on board who would beg him to dine with them and whom he would entertain with stories of war.

If he was handed over to the authorities he would claim refugee status, telling them he had fled persecution from Hamas for being a loyal Fatah member. Yes, foreigners would eat that up, he thought. Obviously he would not mention being at the Hamas police graduation ceremony when the first bombs had hit.

Waves lapped against the hull of the small boat as a warm breeze swept over from the open sea, whose surface was only a darker, more agitated projection of the clear azure above, and in which the sun was reflected like the shiny, white scales on a giant fish. Hakim imagined a large creature gliding smoothly through the water beneath his boat.

Hakim regretted not having brought music. He would have liked to hear the sound of Marcel Khalife playing his oud, playing in a bombed-out concert hall in Beirut, the notes exceeding place and time. Floating alone in a throbbing mass, home indeed felt far away. He sat up and looked ahead, squinting eyes on a dark face, hair blown back. Miles away on that godforsaken sliver of land there would be people searching and calling his name. He wondered if his name could be carried on the wind, if the sound of it might swirl by his ears even if the sea rendered it inaudible. He tried to listen for his name in the wild whistling breeze. Everything moved and pulsed like the beast beneath him.

Then Hakim became aware that it was the first time in his life he did not see buildings and concrete. He did not hear the honking of cars, the loud voices of vegetable hawkers or any radios blaring. He did not smell burning charcoal, diesel fumes, tobacco smoke or roasting meats. There was only the sun, sky and sea, and Hakim thought how remarkable it was to be free

He wondered who would be the first to discover his letter. He hoped it would be Mahmoud and not one of the women, because the women were always emotional and prone to fainting. He imagined Nayla reading his letter, falling back and smashing her head on a corner or the floor. They would blame him for her injuries or worse, her death.

He decided maybe he would write a book about his odyssey, then he would be invited on radio and TV shows and he would talk about Palestine, his homeland. He would tell the world how she suffered and how her rocky soil and streets were stained with too much blood. Maybe the Israelis would send Mossad agents to shut him up but he would escape by jumping out of a window on to a moving truck, and some tourist would happen to be filming at that moment on the street, and he would be on the news, and the Israelis would feel ashamed for having failed their mission to kill him and on account of his successful escape from that open-air prison despite their vessels and radars and drones. Yes, he concluded, he would be famous and he would humiliate them.

The clouds above him were drifting quickly and Hakim wondered whether the boat was being carried by the currents. I wonder what country the currents would take me to. He rather hoped it wouldn’t be North Africa, since being a Palestinian refugee in North Africa likely meant being poor. The Egyptians were traitors in any case as they kept the border with Gaza closed. They were likely to march him through the Sinai and throw him back into Gaza. He hoped the currents moved north towards Europe where he could make money, meet a nice girl, walk the boulevards and sit at cafés while working on his book. The Stone Thrower and the Sea, he decided to call it. Yes, Europe was most certainly preferable to the crowded and feverish streets of Cairo.

Hakim turned his attention to the AK-47 next to him and deliberated whether or not he should throw it overboard. He didn’t want to be found with it since he new foreigners were so obsessed with terrorists. Being a Palestinian would be bad enough let alone being a Palestinian with an AK-47. The Americans would probably demand to know where Osama bin Laden was hiding and he would have to try to explain to them that he was from Gaza where he lived under occupation and that he was an Arab and a Palestinian but not a terrorist.
On the other hand he feared there remained a chance an Israeli vessel might pick him up. Perhaps the soldiers had been distracted by the shooting Hakim had heard near the beach and had notified a patrol boat afterwards to hunt him down, in which case he wanted to be armed. He had promised himself that he would not go back, and would rather die in a hail of bullets if that were the case—with any luck taking at least a couple of them down with him.

Hakim sat up and prepared to restart the motor. The sun had risen from the east so Hakim knew he should travel in the opposite direction in order not to navigate inadvertently back to where he had started from. Feeling hungry and thirsty he took out a bottle of water and some bread from his backpack. When he was finished he lit a cigarette and sped off westwards.

During the following hours he felt the sun’s rays intensifying, and began worrying the motor might overheat. He stopped several times to splash water over it and to let it cool down. By noon Hakim was himself feeling the effects of the scorching orb above so he took a shirt from his bag, soaked it in the sea and wrapped it around his head. The sun’s glare upon the sea’s surface hurt his eyes. Slowly the sun began descending to the West and Hakim decided to bear North so as to avoid having the blinding light reflected directly into his face, and because he hoped to get closer to Cyprus, Turkey, Crete or Greece.

The sea’s vastness and emptiness came as somewhat of a surprise. He had always imagined the Mediterranean as being a center of travel and commerce as ships from Africa crossed paths with European vessels. Many times sitting on a beach in Gaza he had imagined all the people and ships travelling the same sea while he could scarcely get a few miles out without being pushed back. But now he was alone in the sea and could see no one.

By the time the sun set over the horizon the remaining gas had all been used up. The temperature dropped so Hakim put on his extra clothes to stay warm, and curled up on the bottom of the boat. He shut his eyes and slowly drifted away on a shifty sea.

Les points de vue exprimés dans ce blog sont ceux de leurs auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de CJPMO.

THE ONLY LIVING JEW IN KABUL - Zablon Simintov is likely the only living Jew in Afghanistan. A few years ago there were two. But they had a falling out and, by his own admission, Zablon Simintov was not at all sad to find Ishaq Levin, the Jew with whom he had shared Kabul's only synagogue, lifeless on the floor.

According to a 2005 article in the Washington Post by N. C. Aizenman, the animosity between the two men began when Simintov offered Levin some help to immigrate to Israel. This did not please the elderly Levin who apparently, on another occasion, denounced Simintov as a spy to the Taliban—who were already none too pleased about Kabul's stubborn Jewish population of two—when he found out Simintov wanted to send the dilapidated synagogue's handwritten Torah scroll to Israel for safekeeping.

There is certainly something of the miraculous in Simintov's survival through Taliban rule. A North American friend I told Simintov's story to was tempted to draw an analogy between Kabul's lone and vulnerable Jew surrounded by a sea of angry Arabs, to Israel's own endurance despite the enmity of its neighbours.

Of course there would be a couple issues with that analogy, not least of which would be the fact that Afghans aren't Arabs, nor do they even really live in the Middle East, but since when are we North Americans so discerning when it comes to that region? Indeed for that comparison to work Simintov would probably also need at least a few nuclear bombs in his arms cache under the synagogue, a hefty bank account, and a really generous and powerful friend. On top of that, he would have sent most of his neighbours fleeing from their homes and then forbade them to return. All things poor Simintov does not have and did not do.

Let us put an end to this habit of finding a comparison for all the Middle East's quagmires, and, please, for the love of God, let us be done with Second World War clichés. Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish former Prime Minister of Israel and leader of the conservative Likud party, likens the current regime in Iran to the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, and Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Hitler—effectively, albeit unintentionally, trivializing the crimes of Nazi Germany. No Mr. Netanyahu, this is not 1938.

But a few months ago I was traveling in Iraq and something did make me think of Simintov. We were driving along Iraq's endless highways bordered by quasi-lunar landscapes of garbage and stones; the smoggy sky, so grey, so heavy, and hanging so low above our heads it felt it as though it would surely crush us. The sporadic signs indicating the way to Baghdad had started showing distances falling short of the more reassuring three-digit range. I kept looking over at my driver who spoke not one word of English, my eyes asking "are you sure this is the way?" and his grin seeming to say "don't worry, we're not going there," though it may have meant "ha! This foreigner is shitting himself!"

Thinking of Baghdad, or rather dreading Baghdad, reminded me of Simintov in Kabul. Somewhere in Baghdad, I knew, there remained a handful of Jews. Like Simintov, these Jews are all that remain of a once thriving community. In 1948 there were 5000 Jews in Afghanistan. Today there is one. Baghdad was once the cradle of Jewish culture in the Middle East. Today you could count the number of remaining Jews on the fingers of your hands. In both cases, Jews fled persecution and most ended up in Israel or the United States.

But as veteran Middle East correspondent David Hirst points out in his book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, the Jews of Baghdad were once a prosperous and educated community. They enjoyed equality with other citizens under the constitution, they had representation in parliament, worked in the civil service and the Minister of Finance was a Jew from 1920 to 1925.

Oriental Jews, as those from the Middle East are called, had historically not suffered as the Jews of Europe had in European Christendom. Modern Zionism, the political movement started by Theodore Herzl aiming to establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine, therefore had much less appeal.

The arrival of the British in Iraq after World War One and the subsequent Zionist drive to establish a state in Palestine, did not help the Iraqi Jews. The Jewish minority was seen as being in special favour with the foreign rulers, as they were perceived to be throughout the Arab world once it was carved up by the French and British. In 1941 there was a riot in which more than 130 Jews were killed. It was the first pogrom in Iraqi history. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 there were still 130,000 Jews in Iraq.

What happened in the early 1950s is a matter of debate. David Hirst maintains, as a couple descendants of Oriental Jews I met in Israel told me they also believe, that the Iraqi Jewry was tricked into fleeing Baghdad by Zionist agents in Iraq which spread fear in the community with a series of three bombings. The Iraqi authorities subsequently made arrests of suspects allegedly members of a clandestine Jewish organization called "The Movement". Arms caches were found in synagogues. There was a trial and two were sentenced to death.

Hirst's claim that the Jews of Baghdad were "ingathered" by Zionists to meet Israel's need for new immigrants is controversial and disputable. Whatever the sources of the violence, a thriving Jewish community was decimated. Oriental Jews arriving in Israel were put in transit camps where they were lectured by teams of Zionist educators, and many of the Oriental Jews never felt at home or even accepted as equals amongst the European settlers of Israel.

Middle Eastern history may well be filled with battles, conquests and persecutions. All history is remembered this way. Blood and gore mark the climaxes of our narratives. Times of calm and cooperation are forgotten like the lull in an action movie.

I've heard Jerusalemites say there will never be peace in these holy lands because there has never been peace there before. Gone from their narrative is the grace of Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, when, in 538 BCE, he allowed the Jews of Babylon to go to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. Forgotten is the fact that following the Roman-Persian wars it is the Arab conquest which, in 638, permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem. When Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader, defeated the Christian crusader armies that had killed most Jews and Muslims of Jerusalem, it was he too in 1187 who allowed the Jews to return. Jerusalem under the Ottoman rule of Suleiman the Magnificent enjoyed development and peace, including protection for its Jewish inhabitants.

It is currently virtually impossible for most Christian and Muslim Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza to visit Jerusalem. If these more benevolent moments of the city's history were recalled more frequently, would it perhaps be a courtesy the Israeli regime would be more inclined to extend to the Arabs of its occupied territories?

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, documents in his books that Israel was indeed ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population in 1948 but believes that had it been done completely—meaning that if all Palestinians had been pushed across the Jordan river—there would now be peace. He said in a televised debate on Democracy Now! with Saree Makdisi and Norman Finkelstein that Jews and Arabs could never coexist in the same state because they were simply too different. As Professor Makdisi pointed out, they have and they can.

If we look to history for analogies and clichés, why not also look to it for inspiration and hope? History affirms that Arabs (Christian and Muslim) and Jews can cohabit peacefully and prosperously. Let's try to replicate these moments of our history instead of constantly resurrecting the spectres of its darkest hours.

Les points de vue exprimés dans ce blog sont ceux de leurs auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de CJPMO.

VESTIGES OF WAR: HOW WE CHOOSE TO REMEMBER - As a child my grandmother took me to the coast of Normandy so I could learn about the Second World War and see for myself the landscape and bunkers fought over at the cost of so many lives. Across the world, war is memorialized. Victories are celebrated and defeats bitterly remembered, and often even the most humiliating of loses are distorted into triumphs with tales of heroism and resistance in the face of pure tyranny.

We erect monuments and recite poetry—In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row—in memory of wars waged and to souls lost. Often, in our efforts to pay tribute and to never forget, we sanitize the infamy of warfare into something aesthetically sterile but incredibly moving nonetheless. Those who have laid eyes upon the identical rows of white crosses which populate the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer cannot help but be stirred by their sheer number. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. is equally poignant in its austerity by the seemingly endless list of names.

In our concerted effort to remember we often also try to absolve ourselves of our wrongdoings. Those accused of committing massacres point at others who have equalled or outdid their own. Those whose crimes are too monumental for the national psyche to absorb without precipitating an identity crisis often choose not to recall at all and to move on. Thus no genocide was committed against the Armenians at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were no worse than others committed during Lebanon's protracted civil war.

In Damascus, I stop to take-in the monument depicting Saladin on horseback guarding the entrance to the Old City. The revered Muslim leader who fought the West's Crusader armies and recaptured Palestine is buried nearby in the Umayyad mosque.

Not far away, the October War Panorama, built with the help of North Korea, celebrates the 1973 war with Israel and focuses on Israel's methodical destruction of the town of Quneitra.

However, north of Damascus in the peaceful town of Hama, with the Orontes River flowing through its city center and riverbanks lined with trees and gardens, I can find no clue of the bloodletting which took place in 1982 when then President Hafez al-Assad sent in troops to suppress a rebellion against his iron-fisted rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. The three weeks of fighting that ensued left the city center razed and between 10,000 and 30,000 of Assad's fellow Syrians and coreligionists dead. No memorial here.

In the Middle East the dregs of war are everywhere and open to anyone's interpretation. In Hebron, there is a shrine to Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler and army reservist who entered the Ibrahimi mosque with his automatic weapon in 1994 and killed 29 Muslims during prayer, injuring over a hundred more. So fundamentalist Jewish colonists pay tribute to a man who is unequivocally considered a terrorist by the surrounding Arab population.

In Beirut, I climb what is left of the Holiday Inn tower. From its roof, I can survey the bombed out and derelict buildings jutting out awkwardly amongst the city's booming reconstruction efforts. These pock-marked skeletons are unsavoury reminders of civil war, invasions and occupation..

I obtain permission from the Lebanese authorities to travel to the South of the country where the ruins of the Beaufort castle overlook the region from one of its highest ridges. Because of the castle's strategic location it has been fought over by invading army after invading army during the past 1000 years. It was used by Palestinian guerrillas in the 1970's, attacked by Israeli jets in 1982 and then occupied by Israel until its retreat in 2000. Despite pleas by the Lebanese government to preserve what was left of the site's historic integrity, Israel blew out parts of the castle as it withdrew. The Israelis may have understood that the vestiges of war left by one army can quickly become the memorials of its enemy.

It is then not untypical of the kind of irony found so readily in the Middle East that a memorial to one war should become a military target of another. Such is the case of the al-Khiam Detention Camp located not far from Beaufort. This prison was run by Israel's proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), during its occupation of Southern Lebanon. The SLA held prisoners there without charges, in appalling conditions, in an attempt to keep the surrounding—largely Shiite—villagers acquiescent. After Israel withdrew and the SLA guards fled, the villagers ran to the prison to free those still trapped inside.

Hezbollah turned the notorious camp into a museum displaying the occupation's brutality, and in tribute to the prisoners who did not make it out alive. But the museum was bombed and all but completely destroyed by Israel when it faced off with Hezbollah during the summer of 2006. The wreckage, with Hezbollah flags protruding out of the piles of stone and wire, now houses two mock missiles aimed, as one can guess, at the prison's destroyer.

In Syria, during the war of 1967, the town of Quneitra, situated in the Golan Heights, was captured by the Israeli army. They occupied the city for six years until it was briefly recaptured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Israelis repulsed the Syrians in a counteroffensive and held onto it until 1974 when a disengagement agreement was signed. However, before withdrawing, in what amounted to a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Israelis systematically stripped the town of any valuable goods or materials which were sold to Israeli contractors. Bulldozers and tractors subsequently went to work. Every building, shop, bank, restaurant and the town's hospital was destroyed.

Today Quneitra is a ghost town of rubble bordered on its western side by rolls of barbwire delimiting where one would be unwise to venture since the area is heavily landmined. There is a UN post and a few Syrian police officers scattered amongst the ruins. In the distance to the West are the rollicking green fields cultivated by Israeli colonists. A Syrian intelligence officer "accompanies" you while you visit and you must obtain permission from the Syrian authorities to do so. He is, of course, all too happy to point out the extent of the damage wrought by Israel's occupation.

How we are so alike! We cannot bear our dead to remain nameless or the pain of loved ones lost in vain. We cannot accept defeat so death, through a desperate metamorphic process, becomes righteous. We attempt to make of war a dignified affair. We swear vengeance in the face of injustice but justify injustice if done on to others by our own hands. And it is a charade we never tire of.

So we treasure our vestiges. For when the guns fall mute and the lark's song is heard once more we hasten to make meaning of our use of force for fear that we may look in the proverbial mirror and see we are, after all, not so dissimilar from Beirut's unsightly, concrete carcasses.

Les points de vue exprimés dans ce blog sont ceux de leurs auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de CJPMO.

STUCK IN IRAQ - Had I known, as I began to travel through eastern Iraq towards the Iranian border, that the very city my Kurdish acquaintance had told me, as we parted, to be careful in and to get out of quickly would be the one I would end up stuck in for the night, I would assuredly have suffered another night in boring Suleimaniya.

About three hours and two taxis later, I approached the Iraq/Iran border by foot. The signs warning to be prepared to stop at the checkpoint and that the use of lethal force was authorized definitely caught my attention. However, being by now no stranger to the Middle East's checkpoint formalities (act casual and confident you have the right to be there; with most soldiers, you can lessen their hostility and suspicion towards you by means of a smile and a loud "Salam aleikum!" or "Shalom!" if you're in Palestine) I didn't feel overly threatened.

At first glance it seemed deserted until I detected two men in fatigues with sunglasses and scarves covering their faces peering at me from the security of their bulletproof booth. Believing my reddish beard and blond hair gave me a little leeway, I waved and smiled. "Salam aleikum!" I called out merrily.

By the way he reached for his weapon I could tell he hadn't been impressed by my western appearance. Perhaps having frequently been stopped on the street by people asking to have their pictures taken with me had gone a bit to my head. Right, I remembered, I'm not Leonardo Dicaprio, and I was overtaken by the urge to runaway from this clearly unhappy gunman.

I was ordered to stop, drop my bags, lift my shirt and spin around; a little dance I did most obediently. I tried to explain in as few words as possible that I was not a human bomb but simply a harmless backpacker who, God knows why, thought he'd cross Iraq instead of Turkey to get to Iran. I gently reached for the passport in my pocket with the barrel of his gun following closely my every movement.

He signaled for me to go stand behind the waist-high blast-wall, thereby emasculating the TNT presumably strapped to my legs. With much hesitation he approached me and patted me down. He looked at my passport, saw it was Canadian, grinned and said: "Canada… I have brother in Waterloo".

Since it had been established I was not a security threat and that authorized lethal force was not required here, the soldier informed me that the border was closed. Now being stranded on the Iraq/Iran border is exactly as much fun as it sounds. Dejectedly, I hitched a ride back to the near-by Iraqi city of Khanaqin, the words of my Kurdish acquaintance playing over in my head "Be careful there, you know, not just Kurds there so sometime little dangerous".

The hotel manager in Khanaqin wanted nothing to do with me so I walked up the street looking for another place to rest my head. I reached a roundabout and approached a police officer. I have no idea from what nooks or crannies they appeared from, but suddenly I was surrounded by at least fifteen officers all asking me a variant of the same few questions simultaneously.

Before I even had the time to object, I was being shuffled off into a pick-up truck and driven to the police headquarters. We spent considerable time knocking on the door of whomever it was who was supposed to be in charge, and everyone seemed quite unsure of what to do when the sounds of heavy snoring were discerned coming from behind the locked door. After a few minutes of arguing and banging on several other doors in the same hallway, a groggy and corpulent man appeared.

The interrogation was not totally unpleasant. The officers were friendly and seemed confused more than anything else by what on earth a twenty-four-year-old Canadian was doing in Khanaqin. The officer in charge wanted to know if I could arrange for him to find a Canadian wife so he could immigrate.

It was determined I would spend the night in a hotel, which, I tried to explain in vain, was what I had been intending to do all along. I enquired about whether or not it was really safe for me here since ethnically mixed cities in Iraq are generally unstable and I thought the Americans posted a few kilometers down the road probably didn't help my case either. "Oh yes!" they all exclaimed. "Very safe" they choired happily. Then, not thirty seconds later, the man in charge, suddenly very serious: "But don't leave hotel when night".

I was then accompanied back to the hotel by two officers. The manger seemed apprehensive to have me as his sole client. Though their conversation was incomprehensible to me, I couldn't help but get the impression his concern was either for my safety or that of his hotel's.

Reluctantly he accepted and demanded fifty dollars. Now when trying to negotiate the price of your room, at the only hotel, in the sketchy Iraqi city you are stranded in, the odds may be against you. But the officers present, suddenly panicked by the prospect of having to figure out what to do with this Canadian claiming to not have enough money for the hotel room and going on about how he will take his chances outside, argued in my favor and the price was eventually dropped to twenty-five.

My room was absolutely repugnant. There were five beds and my problem was not so much finding which one was not too soft, not too stiff, but just right, as it was figuring out which sheets were the least covered in other people's sweat and which bed contained the least foreign hairs. I scanned the floor to decide which square foot was the least grimy so I could set down my backpack.

As I walked the city streets it was clear I was the first Westerner out-of-uniform anyone had seen in a long time. A large building by the city centre was still pockmarked from the eight-year Iraq-Iran war during which trench warfare and poison gas were used. The city streets soon emptied as people went home to break fast, this being the month of Ramadan. I felt it wise to return to my hotel room, where power cuts helped add some theater to my predicament.

The next morning a cheerful, elderly taxi driver took me towards the border. As we drove passed a smoldering heap of trash, he pointed at it and said: "This… Iraq". Then he broke out into a frightful fit of laughter.

At the border I was thoroughly searched and finally driven on a bus to where the Americans process those who come and go—for it is decidedly the Americans who have the final say on who or what enters and leaves Iraq. I was greeted by an American-Latino carrying an assault rifle. "Hey what's going on brother?" he said. He was wearing fatigues with the word “Contractor” written over the left side of his chest. Then a huge American female soldier came waddling out of the compound and asked me to follow her to the Bat Cave.

The Bat Cave (with its own logo and everything) is a biometrics system which scans irises, takes a headshot and records fingerprints. It allows evidence taken off of Improvised Explosive Devices, for example, to be passed through the system to see if anything matches someone's profile. "I've never done this to no one who can speak English before," she told me as she processed my information. Another friendly soldier told me about his visit to Niagara Falls.

Finally I walked to the border fence where Iraqi guards warned me about "those Iranians". On the Iranian side of the border, as the Iraqi guards who had taken a liking to me waved farewell through the gate, the Iranian officer bringing me to the immigration department said "Iraq" with a hiss and a dismissive wave of his right hand.

Les points de vue exprimés dans ce blog sont ceux de leurs auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de CJPMO.

AN IRAQI VACATION - Two days and two nights of interminable bus rides through barren, rocky planes and of too few hours of sleep caught on grimy terminal floors, left me a bit dazed, looking for a taxi in Iraq.

Northern Iraq is undoubtedly one of the few successes the American-led war can rightly claim. The Kurdish autonomous region is thriving relative to the rest of the ravaged country, and so far the only place I have traveled to in the past eight years where someone on the street has given me a thumbs-up and said "George Bush too good!"

But my taxi ride by the soaring flames of Kirkuk's oil wells and then through the dangerous city reveals a large population still living in abject poverty.

Seemingly endless expanses of garbage-strewn highways and quasi lunar landscapes punctuated by decrepit mud and stone huts lie in sharp contrast with the breathtaking, mountainous countryside where herds of sheep are shepherded by boisterous, dirty Kurdish children. The positively atrocious buildings and North Koreanesque monuments sprouting up haphazardly throughout the region's main cities can also serve as an adequate enough metaphor for a society at odds with itself; a place where modernization and the old-way play tug-of-war with modernization pulling too hard and too fast.

For despite oil revenues and aid, the cost of living remains almost unbearably high for many. The price of food has risen, power cutts happen daily, the price of gas is exorbitantly high since Iraq does not have the adequate infrastructure to refine all of its own oil, and everything is imported from outside the country. Indeed the apple I bit into this morning had somehow found its way into my hand from Chile.

The threat of violence is also never far but these are a people hardened by war and accustomed to pain and loss. Having survived the genocidal ambitions of the late Saddam Hussein and his attempts to Arabize the oil-rich Kurdish region, these are a people presently preoccupied with the material. The money being injected into Kurdistan and trickling down to the bottom-folk has already meant the arrival of the hardworking Ethiopians and Filipinos ready to work the menial jobs no longer deemed suitable for complacent Kurds.

But cash-fueled change is a difficult force to rein-in and while tourism in Iraq may not happen tomorrow it could happen provided the Kurds show some restraint and carefully rethink how their newfound fortunes will be used and developed.

The numerous military checkpoints and strong army presence will remain a necessary reality throughout Kurdistan for the time being, but it is worth noting that, despite Iraq's infamous suicide bombers and sectarian violence, in Suleimaniya, Northern Iraq, one can sip on tall bottles of Heineken after a day of sightseeing. It may not be many people's eco-adventure dream vacation, but for Iraq it's a start.

Les points de vue exprimés dans ce blog sont ceux de leurs auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de CJPMO.