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“Raise Your Head, We are Making an Honorable Film”: Heiny Srour on the Restored Leila and the Wolves and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived
Leila and the Wolves Refusing a single dominant system of values in Lebanon as the secular daughter of a working class Lebanese Jewish father and an Egyptian aristocrat mother provided filmmaker Heiny Srour with what she has called a “wide-angle view of the world,” from which she has felt fit to critique, without embellishment, failures of the Arab left. Though ultimately disappointed by the revolutionary Middle East organizations of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who could lapse into anti-semitism or sexism, she’s noted the exceptions of the Lebanese Communists (who were, however, too weak to enact a substantial difference for women) and the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). For Srour, the idea that the oppression of women would magically dissolve with the end of class society was ahistorical: Excluding any minority from the equation of liberation would not just be incorrect but doom the movement to failure.
So, it felt like encountering the future when a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) told her, “Women are not only oppressed by imperialism and class society, but also by their fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles…” In 1969, she interviewed this Front rep as a film critic for AfricAsia, a Paris publication that documented Third World liberation struggles. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization embedded equality for women into their political line and actualized it through an extensive program of social reforms effective in their liberated zone in Dhofar, a province of the Sultanate of Oman. To continue extracting the nation’s rich oil reserves unperturbed, Britain kept the Omani masses under stark feudalism by way of overseas military bases and their puppet sultan, Qaboos bin Said Al Said. The PFLOAG rose to liberate the Omani people from the conditions imposed on them by this western invader.
Enlivened by the discovery of an existing secular, democratic and feminist socialism, Srour walked her crew and film equipment through 800km of desert and bombardment by the British Royal Air Force to see for herself and document the rare, radical way of life in Dhofar. The result was The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974)—the only documentary about the PFLOAG, their armed struggle, and their advanced democracy, which included, as the film’s opening captions inform us, “affirmative action for women 30 years before the West.” It was the first film directed by an Arab woman to premiere at Cannes but was banned in Lebanon for 45 years and still remains censored in many Arab countries.
It took her another six years to begin her second film, Leila and the Wolves (1984), filmed at times literally in the crossfire of the Lebanese Civil War. Lead actors Rafik Ali Ahmad and Nabila Zeitouni play multiple men and women with different roles throughout the revolutionary histories of Palestine and Lebanon, a narrative device emphasizing men’s abuses regardless of their political or social position and womens’ sometimes thankless sacrifices for the cause. Ultimately, it signals Srour’s further disillusionment with the Arab left. “But,” she said in a 2020 interview, “I remain faithful to the cause of justice in spite of immense political disappointments…Thus, I am in favor of justice, but I remain lucid, without idealizing the oppressed. Opening our eyes wide to their faults is the best way of helping them.”
There is much to learn from her extra-critical support.
Below, Srour and I talk about the impacts of circulating The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived since 1974, the dangers of shooting Leila and the Wolves during the Lebanese civil war, and collaborations with left-wing male DPs who were in practice chauvinistic.
New restorations of Leila and the Wolves and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived play at New York’s BAM from today, March 14, until March 20, with Srour in attendance on the 14th and the 16th, courtesy of its North American distributor Several Futures.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about putting together the web of support you had for The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, ranging from the Ministry of Culture of South Yemen and German Television to British leftist groups Cinema Action and Berwick Street Collective, to networks of the Arab left including the DFLP Art Committee?
Srour: Tahar Cheriaa really made the difference between the film being completed or not, because paying for the [archival footage] and completing the film in the lab is a very costly operation. It’s thanks to Cheriaa that I could finish the film. He is the founder of the Carthage Film Festival, which was a great innovation, really — the [first African film festival] and the best showcase of the films of the Third World. And this was over 50 years ago. He was a great cinema lover, a great film critic, and a great strategist in bringing to life films from the Third World.
He was the minister of culture of Tunisia, and he issued a law forcing Tunisian cinemas to show once every three months a short film. Once every =three months a short is not asking too much! But in those days, Third World Cinema hardly existed and was not seen at all. All the western monopolies that were providing Tunisia with films went on strike. The French monopoly, the British Monopoly and the American Monopoly stopped giving films to the Tunisian cinemas and even accused him of an economic block at the head of the state—for one short every three months! He also demanded Tunisia have its own lab. But that, [Habib] Bourguiba [the first president of Tunisia] didn’t like, although he’s the hero of the independence. For Tunisia to have its own lab was frightening to French interests. During the war on Algeria, the Algerian Cinema Unit filmed the resistance, sent [the rushes] to the French lab, and they were burned there. So, it was important to have a local lab.
He was accused of all kinds of horrible things and got six months in jail. Today, we find it normal to have labs, to have films, and to go to festivals with high visibility and be seen. But 60 years ago, this was not the case. When Cheriaa was released from jail, he became the head of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation (ACCT). He gave me a very generous grant without which I would not have been able to finish the film. He put his job at risk, he had two young children to feed, and he was aware that it was over the ideological ceiling of the ACCT—of this governmental organization. So, we disguised the film as an anthropological film, which it is as well, but not only that.
Filmmaker: Since Rising Above: Women of Vietnam [Srour’s documentary about five women who played influential roles in the Vietcong and the Provisional Revolutionary Government during the Vietnam war] was supported by the United Nations and the World Bank, did you have to do any of that anthropological disguising to secure financing?
Srour: Rising Above: Women of Vietnam has been sabotaged literally by TEV [Television for the Environment, founded by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF)]. They work for the environment and supposedly for human rights, but they really clipped my wing and tried to distort the editing. I really fought very hard to prevent the editing from being distorted. They subcontracted the [editing of the film] and tried to sabotage its feminism. And they managed, to some extent. I learned a lesson. The contract was very bad. I trusted them because they were supposed to be virtuous. But I don’t think anyone should be trusted when you sign a contract because people can take advantage of your naivety. They didn’t stand at all for women’s TV or women’s rights. They trampled on my human rights. But I would rather speak about The Hour of Liberation and Leila and the Wolves.
Filmmaker: In early interviews, you’re talking about giving voice to “the main basis of the revolution,” the poor masses, about the enemy being cinema made by the “neutral for the use of the rich,” etc. (Cahiers du Cinéma, 253) How had you developed your political consciousness toward revolutionary cultural production prior to shooting The Hour of Liberation has Arrived?
Srour: When I went to Dhofar, I was not at all mature politically. I was a spoiled rotten armchair left winger in Beirut. I was far more conscious than even my friends, but I was an armchair, spoiled Beiruti girl with two housemaids at home. Looking back, I can’t believe that it’s the same person who walked 14 hours nonstop by night, eating just one bit of fries and a cup of tea as breakfast and another cup of tea for dinner. Sleeping on the floor freezing, because in the desert you roast during the day and freeze in the evening. The gap between the temperatures is enormous and it damaged the negative, actually. It’s very bad for the 16mm stock.
This is why the restoration saved the film because you wouldn’t believe how much the negative suffered. And, also, [from] the bombardment, it gathered a lot of dust. When we were shooting the most crucial scene, which is the bombardment of the British military bases protecting the capital of the Sultan, the sync camera stopped. Had we not had a second, primitive camera [a Bolex] and another cameraman from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen’s Minister of Culture, we wouldn’t have been able to finish the film because the French cameraman [Michel Humeau] was so disheartened when the sync camera stopped. He carried [its] 10 kilos across mountains and desert! He lost 10 kilos himself! During the 800 kms going back, he wanted to stop the shooting. I insisted we finish it with the primitive camera of the Ministry of Culture. Then the French cameraman went alone with a military escort to Yemen, he opened the camera, cleaned it, and we could shoot again in sync. In those days there was no sync sound in Arab cinema. The only sync sound you had in ‘71, was ministers and heads of state speaking on television. The television cameras are extremely heavy. In France, I’d been a student of Jean Rouch, the French anthropologist turned filmmaker. I was very much fed with the idea of cinéma vérité. We’ve never heard the [actual] voice of a 15-year-old shepard, the voice of a child, on television in those days, nor in cinema. Not in documentaries. You may have heard them in feature films but dubbed in a studio.
The French cameraman innovated by feeding the camera with a solar battery that only NASA used in these days. It was the first time in the history of cinema that such a technique was used, because how are you going to fit a sync camera in an area where you cannot plug in the rechargeable batteries? There was no electricity. That was a big problem as well, because [of] the Royal Air Force. At one point it was the rainy season, and you had very thick clouds, and you couldn’t see the planes. When you hear the [Royal Air Force bomber], the guerilla tells you to take off your glasses because they are a mirror [reflecting the sun]. Well, the solar battery is over 1 meter big, and it attracted the bombardment. So, if I give my voice to the voiceless, the Royal Air Force will come and wipe me, my military escort of 40 people, and my team. You wouldn’t believe the logistical problems.
Filmmaker: Among so many things, it’s stunning to see and hear the children practice criticism and self criticism so transparently and maturely. You wish most adult organizers communicated like this.
Srour: I totally agree with you. When he saw the film 50 years ago, a great feminist lawyer in Lebanon told me, “These 8-year-old children practice democracy more maturely than the Lebanese who are 40 years old.”
Filmmaker: You’ve mentioned that The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived never received the type of underground distribution that a lot of revolutionary Third World Cinema did at that time. What have been the more rewarding exhibition experiences despite that?
Srour: I only heard about the most rewarding screening [which happened in the 70s or 80s] six years ago. In those days, North Yemen, armed by Saudi Arabia and the Americans, was trying to smash the socialist experience of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. I don’t know if it was that socialist, but they wanted at least to give water and electricity and equality to their people — less radical than Dhofar, but pretty radical compared to the rest of the Arab world. Yemen was one country, and it was artificially divided, so you have tribes whose relatives are on the other side of the frontier. The North Yemeni soldiers were fed with the propaganda of Saudi Arabia — that the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen were atheists who poach women and sleep with their mothers and daughters. This is a classical slander against anybody progressive. At one point, there was a truce between South Yemen and North Yemen. Soldiers were getting bored, and the minister of culture, the very one who gave me a camera and a cameraman who saved the shooting, Abdullah Al-Khamiri, sent a projector and the film with a soldier to the other side of the frontier, where they were dying of boredom.
They said, “Come! We’re not going to kill you, come watch the film with us.”
And after that, they refused to shoot at their brothers. Because yes, the girls of the revolution, their heads are not covered, you can see their legs up to their knees, but it is to fight imperialism. And you have to know, in the Arab world, everybody is against imperialism. The poor people know exactly that they are poor because their oil is robbed. Or because the superpowers are supporting the dictators or preventing and sabotaging social reforms. But the answer varies. The secular people say we should modernize the Arab world, industrialize, land reform, and have better laws. The Islamists say we should go back to the greatness of the Islamic Empire, which was the superpower of the time for three centuries, using algebra and astronomy when Europe was in the Middle Ages. The North Yemeni soldiers were in this logic. But when they saw the film, they changed their mind and refused to shoot at the soldiers. [The army’s] their only job opportunity. Besides being court marshalled, they would lose their job. I don’t know what happened to them, all I know is that they chose not to shoot at their brothers.
A few years before [Ruhollah] Khomeini seized power, the Iranians in London contacted me and made an Iranian dubbing of The Hour of Liberation. Out of great Persian chauvinism, the Shah of Iran sent his troops to smash the revolution [in Dhofar] because he had the same mentality and was fed the same propaganda. When he saw the film, he changed his mind and decided to withdraw his troops. But it was too late, because the revolution had been smashed into pieces and a genocide had been committed by British officers, who later recognized their crimes before the camera of Tom Leveritt, a British cadet of the British Army turned filmmaker. But it was too late. To have saved Iranian and Arab lives is important, because war is horrible, and when it’s poor against poor it’s even more heartbreaking.
Another achievement is very recent, a British officer who trained the Sultan armed forces contacted me through his connection in Beirut because his daughter was working in the humanitarian field there. Originally, I didn’t want to speak with him because I was scared. He had retired and wanted to understand the other side. All the human rights people, Omani, the Lebanese, were saying, “Why are you scared? He’s retired, he’s not going to eat you! Speak with him.” For me, when you enter the army of a superpower, even a small industrial power, you’re taking a job to kill. But I was tearful when I asked him, “Why did you join the army in the first place?” And he said it was because it was the only job opportunity in his area. He too is a victim of the system. He saw the film and congratulated me. He told me, “I’m sorry that the party did not achieve their aims, especially the women.”
It shows that, when people are not silenced, not brainwashed, and are given an opportunity to discover another part of the truth — because the truth is contradictory by definition — they can change their mind.
Another achievement is that my conservative and reactionary father… He was a very good man. He treated the poor free of charge when they had no money. He paid for their medicine. But he is a victim of his upbringing. [He felt] girls should be very good at school and then accept the men that parents choose for her. He was always calling me a rotten, spoiled brat, never happy with nothing. And indeed, I was just an armchair left winger in Beirut. I came back from Dhofar, and I showed off—“I worked 14 hours non stop! I slept on the floor! I ate once a day!” I showed off that I was not as rotten as he thought. But I was rotten. [laughs] He was furious and said, they made you do that? I’m killing myself providing you good food and you’re never happy—show me this film! And that was a problem, because a few days [prior], when the Vietnamese won, he was very upset. He wanted the Americans to win. You have to know that in Lebanon, in those days, women are eternal minors. You cannot leave the territory without the father signing that you can leave the territory. I wanted to go back to Paris, and I thought, if he’s going to see the film he will not allow me to leave Lebanon again. It’s the end of me! But he insisted, and he saw the film.
My father, during the first world war, was forced to conscript under the Ottoman empire. The Turks took all the weak of Lebanon for their war effort. His father went, came back blind, and his little brother died of hunger. My father, who was brilliant at school, had to work as a shoe polisher. So, he was very moved by these little children [in the film] seated on the floor who learned in one year what other children learn in seven, thanks to democracy. And he was very moved by this old man who walked 400 km in a roadless area to save his side, and by the time he arrives it’s too late.
He used to sell a medical device to the Lebanese army, and he saw that they were not fighting and not serving the people. They had cars and drivers and medals filling their breasts. He saw [in The Hour of Liberation] an army, barefooted, without grades nor salary, building the first road of the country, the first school of the country, the first water hole of the country, the first hospital… He was very impressed! I was thinking all the time while he was watching, I must make a white marriage [a platonic marriage for convenience] with someone in Lebanon, because he’s not going to let me leave the country after this film.
Every time I thought of somebody I wanted to marry, they ended up being Christian and [already] married. So, I was in despair during the screening. But when he made those comments, I was overcome with joy. The misinformation is racking disasters because good people end up fighting against their own interests. This is why I value Graham Carter [founder of distributor Several Futures] so much for having the courage to show my films and enlighten the American public, which is needed. All publics need these films.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about the challenges of shooting Leila and the Wolves in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, sometimes amidst recently bombarded areas? You’ve mentioned how you paid off snipers in order to film safely.
Srour: We nearly got shot many times. In a documentary, the war serves it. When you’re making a historical film, where you need costumes and props for every scene, war stands against the film.
First of all, while we were shooting the scene of the Palestinian woman, we were in Tartous [in Syria] shooting the Palestinian woman protesting the occupation and asking for the release of political prisoners. I didn’t have professional actors. The women did not want to shoot. They did not want to speak or play. First, cinema had a very bad name in those times, because it was mostly melodrama. For a traditional woman to see women on screen kissing a man… You lose your honor when you play in a film. So, they didn’t want to play, and they were like wood. And I discovered why, the assistant production manager went to a factory and told them, “If you don’t come to play in the film—we need 100 or so of you—you’ll be fired from your jobs! You and your husband!” So, he terrorized them — typical of the Ba’athists. But I didn’t know that at the time.
I was asking the women, “Repeat after me, ‘Down with the occupation, release the political prisoners!’” And they didn’t want to speak. After two hours, I lost my temper. I told them, What is it, your Golan Heights are occupied by Israel and you have no patriotic feelings towards your Palestinian sisters? Aren’t you ashamed?” Finally, they started repeating and playing. And then suddenly they froze and looked in terror behind me. I turn my head, and I see my American cameraman packing the camera.
“How dare you pack the camera without the director’s order!” I screamed at him. The second Syrian assistant comes in [and says], “Heiny, please, they’re going to kill us all!” I turn my head, and I see a two-meter [tall] man with a machine gun. The Muslim Brotherhood heard us chanting [the protest slogan], and thought the journalists were here and came with their banners, “Release political prisoners!” The Syrian secret service [man] came with a machine gun and was going to shoot us, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian women. I screamed, “How dare you interrupt my shoot! This is the best film of all the Middle East! Haven’t you seen how mediocre these actors are? They don’t want to play, and it took me two hours to get them to speak! And what, you come and destroy my shooting! How dare you! Shame on you!” He was frozen, because nobody ever dared to speak to people like him like that. So, he didn’t kill us, thank goodness.
In the last scene of the film, we’re shooting in the destroyed souks of Beirut. We told the snipers, “Here is 2000 lira, leave us to shoot until five o’clock and don’t kill us.” I went beyond the time, and we started to hear the snipers, “You went beyond five o’clock!” “Okay, here is more money, please let us shoot some more.” But shooting in an area full of snipers was frightening, frankly. There was this famous story of a Lebanese sniper who killed, in the souks, his own brother. He wasn’t aware until later that he killed his own brother. There were all sorts of horrible stories during the civil war. People getting killed while they were sipping coffee on their balcony. Or women who got killed while they were hanging the clothes after washing. It’s a miracle that we didn’t get shot.
Filmmaker: There is a recurring use of pans in Leila and the Wolves, often revealing men in the frame behaving or appearing in stark contrast to what comes before, or as a way of transporting through time in the same shot without cutting.
Srour: Frankly, I film with my gut. I don’t ask myself why. Remember, I’ve never been to film school. I often do things which are against the grammar of cinema. I remember showing El Chacal de Nahueltoro by Miguel Littín, a Chilean filmmaker of Palestinian descent, at the London International Film School. It’s a small, 16mm film that is fresh like peach. It’s basically the story of a man who kills his wife and four children.
I showed it to my students, and the first thing I hear from a student is, “We learned that the shot should be like this or that.” The people who taught them are teachers who learned 30 years in the film industry with the greatest British directors. And I told them, “I don’t want to hear anything about that. In my class, I don’t want to hear any dogma. Just listen to your gut and film.”
Another [filmmaking rule] is that if you change from the angle of the camera 180 degrees or something, you shouldn’t cross this [director’s] line. For me, there is only one line between justice and injustice, oppressor and oppressed. I do not want to hear any rubbish or dogma. Just use your camera to serve justice. And if you don’t want to serve justice, OK, I’ll still give you a high mark if you reach artistic excellence.
Filmmaker: Because you had tensions with your DP and sound person on The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, did you approach choosing your collaborators on Leila and the Wolves differently? How did you go about choosing your two cinematographers?
Srour: I didn’t choose the American cameraman, and there were tensions. He was against the Vietnam war, he had all the right lines, but in practice he was sexist. I didn’t choose him because there was no time to choose. I trusted the British production manager to choose one for me. For the money that BFI was giving, he couldn’t choose any better. So, I had to accept whatever I was given. On the verbal level, [Curtis Clark, of The Draughtsman’s Contract] was very left wing, like the French cameraman and soundman of Hour of Liberation. But in practice, the Yemeni cameraman [on Hour of Liberation], who had no pretense at all for any kind of politics, was much more feminist in his practice than the French, who were heroes, I repeat, but came from Paris furious with the French Women Liberation Movement. So [the French crewmen] came to Dhofar very anti-women liberation, and every time I tried to highlight the reality of the feminism of the front, they sabotaged the shot.
The American cameraman didn’t allow me to go near the camera to see what he was shooting. Like the French cameraman, I gave him instruction and he sabotaged it. When I finished the shooting [with the American cameraman before funding ran out], I interviewed the French cameraman [Charlet Recors, who went on to do aerial photography for films like Bourne Identity], he was Pied-Noir, the French of Algeria who made the policy of burned land, where they burn everything and don’t leave anything for the Algerians. These people are very anti-Arab. In the interview, when he told me that he was Pied-noir, he must have read in my eyes hostility. I was ashamed. He didn’t say anything, but silently he realized I was prejudiced. I was ashamed of my prejudice, because as a woman and as a Jew, I suffered a lot of prejudice. Although on the verbal level he had contempt for my feminist discourse, on the real level, the practical level, he was the most feminist cameraman I ever had. In the scene where you have a pan starting from the place where the wood is burning to heat the bathroom, and Leila who is now a fetus in a big bathtub, to the blue sitting room with all the empty armchairs, I really wanted to go from red to blue in one shot — from the womb of the mother to the coldness of the world which is pitiless against women. The American cameraman told me it’s impossible because the floor is bumpy, so you cannot do a tracking shot, and you cannot go from red to blue because you’ll burn the shot. The French cameraman was very daring and put little pieces of wood so the tracking shot was smooth and put a red filter over the windows of the blue sitting room and balanced the red with the blue, and the shot was not burned! The American cameraman, with all this left-wing discourse, unconsciously — or I don’t know if it was because he was scared to try — so often did the opposite of what I wanted. On a tight shoot, you don’t have time to see the rushes and repeat shots because it’s not what you wanted.
So, I learned the hard lesson, that the discourse is so different from the practice. The French cameraman was much older than me, more experienced than the American cameraman. And the fact that he lived in Algeria, how should I say—he knew how to handle Arab women. All the women on the crew confided in him, so he was the brother, the uncle, the father of all the women on the crew. He was to me like an older—he taught me so many things. Whereas the American cameraman didn’t want me to get near the camera.
Mind you, I have the same split between discourse and practice. At one point during the first shooting, there is this woman who comes from the mountain, the token woman taking up arms with men, and she throws her guns and says, “The revolution is finished!” In real life, at one of the parties, she sang a song [for] every person in the crew. And you know what she sang for me? “The Iron is sometimes tender but you never are.” I went in my room and cried and cried — I discovered that I was a real dictator on set! But what do you do? The Iranian filmmaker who made A Separation rehearsed with his actors for three months. I had 15 minutes with actors who are used to the horrible, vulgar melodramas of Syrian TV. If you don’t hold them with an iron-fist hand, they play vulgar melodrama and rubbish. It inhibited me years later not to make films. I don’t want to become a fascist, but what do you do when you have 20% of the money and the time needed? If you don’t hold your crew and cast with an iron hand then you end up with rubbish and vulgar melodrama.You don’t help women by making rubbish films. By the way, Syrian melodramas are very feminist, more radical than me on television! But they are so vulgar that you want to laugh when you see them. So, you serve feminism with artistic excellence. But what do you do when you have a fraction of the money? I don’t know, I haven’t solved this dilemma.
When I came to finish the shooting with the French cameraman a year later, alone, without the British Film Institute, who was scared of all the military danger involved, I needed four or five times more time. Every time we crossed the Lebanese and the Syrian front, you had to wait a whole day. So I went through the diplomatic way, where you don’t wait, and every time my Lebanese colleague told me, “We don’t have a diplomatic [sign] on the car they’re going to kill us,” I said, “Raise your head, we are making an honorable film. Raise your head and we’re not going to get killed.” And I did it ten times! The good thing about male chauvinism in the Middle East is, when they think you’re brave, they don’t dare to talk to you, like cowards! So we did it ten times and didn’t get shot.
Filmmaker: For more than a year, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and bombardment of Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen have been livestreamed to us through peoples’ cell phone cameras. How do you think the way the world is witnessing Israel’s violence today changes the role and purpose of the medium and how we receive and can respond to that information?
Srour: Thank goodness for the alternative media, because if you look at the official media at TV stations, it’s disastrous. They are hiding the truth. In today’s world we can only hope to balance the lie, not to know the truth. I listen to the Israeli media, i24 News, which I receive only in French. I listen to Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English.
Al Jazeera Arabic is totally different from Al Jazeera English. During the first two weeks of the war, you had the bombing of Al Shifa Hospital. And on i24 news you would see the Israeli soldiers carrying the little babies, the premature babies from the machines that keep them alive. And on Al Jazeera Arabic you would see premature babies, their eyelids were so swollen you couldn’t see the eyes. You would see them fidgeting and dying, and they put them all on one machine to keep them alive.
So, you can only hope to balance the lies. And thank goodness there’s the alternative media today, to allow us to realize us there is a genocide going on in Gaza. Tsahal [the IDF] in Lebanon is completely violating the ceasefire in Rmaish, a Christian Maronite village on the border between Lebanon and Israel. I got that from Ici Beyrouth, the pro-Phalangist site. Phalangists are trained and armed by Israel, and they are violently anti-Hezbollah. You switch to Al Jazeera English, nothing of that. For Al Jazera Arabic, for a week, on and on and on they were showing these horrible scenes. The two of them are sponsored by the Emir of Qatar. But the Emir of Qatar, on Al Jazeera Arabic, needs the Muslim world to forget that he has the biggest American base on his territory. Al Jazeera English has an international audience, so he needs to make them forget that he’s been sponsoring Hamas.
It’s from Ici Beyrouth that I got the information [about] Rmaish — that Tsahal [bombarded a Christian hospital where my sister was working]. When I was a teenager, she told me a lot about this hospital, [where] Hezbollah cannot even dream to put their feet, much less hide arms. I don’t know if they were armed or trained by Israel, all I know is that during the invasion of Tsahal, all the valley men took up arms to prevent Hezbollah from entering the village. They didn’t want Hezbollah to use their space against Israel. What the Israeli army did was to burn ten thousand olive trees of this village, and for me it’s very symbolic.
Forcing peace at the point of the tanks and the planes is not the way forward. In the past, Jews were synonymous with loyalty. At the Jewish school, our Arabic teacher, a Muslim, told us the poem which all the Lebanese people learn at that age, called Ṣamūʾīl, the Arabic of Samuel. One of the great 7 Arab poets wrote this poem. He was a poet but also a prince. He left his arms in the custody of his Jewish friend Samuel…I’m sorry, I really want to cry every time, so let me drink some water. It’s a heartbreaking story.
The Jew was the byword of honesty, moral integrity, and loyalty. And today, because of what Israel is doing in Lebanon, Gaza, etc. the Jew is the villain, the heartless, the cruel. He’s the byword of cruelty. What do I answer these villages, who had ten thousand olive trees burned? What do I answer them, when Israel is committing crimes with planes and tanks carrying the star of David, in the name of a supposedly Jewish state?
