Brian Keenan: After the war in Lebanon they will have no alternative but to coexist

Dawn is cruel in Lebanon.
Rocket holes have gutted this place
Like a blunt blade
In the flesh of a fish.
In the suburbs
An unkempt forest of rushes sprout
Amid minefields
Fed on sewage
Watered by years
Of un-staunched pipes
The ghosts of night have no place
In this hallucinatory city
Here they are masters of the light
Made substantial in the sun.

Today,
L'Orient-Le Jour has a headline,
"Découverte Macabre"
A record of bodies discovered the previous day
Spills out,
Like the innards of a disembowelled animal.
One dawn, perhaps,
Such secrets may not be
The burdensome proof
Of this Lebanese earth.

I wrote that some 17 years ago after I had returned from my incarceration in Lebanon. It's a small fragment of a long narrative poem I was working on. In a very short time I had come to love the place and the people I lived and worked with before I disappeared for five years into the bowels of Beirut's hallucinatory nightmare. Until that moment I had kept a small notebook in which I recorded things that struck me about the place. Somewhere in the pages I had written a quote from William Blake: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." The ruined city and its people alternately surviving one day then suffocating under another salvo of rocket fire, followed by the defiant ranting of political and religious zealots, seemed to draw it out of me. It seemed an appropriate apocalyptic phrase for an apocalyptic city.

That was nearly 20 years ago, and I recently planned to go back. As you are reading this, I should have been packing my bags for a family holiday in Lebanon. Obviously, I am not now. No one in their right mind takes a holiday in Hades.

Only last year, a friend of mine called to say she was intending to holiday in Lebanon and asked my advice. Without hesitation, I encouraged her to go. "Lebanon is beautiful and the Lebanese are a delight. They are courteous in the extreme, and their hospitality is overwhelming. They love their country and are more than delighted to share this exuberance with strangers.

"You can go skiing in the mountains in the morning and sun yourself on the beach in the afternoon; and the food is to die for. If you can go to the mountains, sit a while under the magnificent cedar and just let the place soak into you. The vistas are sublime. Take a copy of Kahlil Gibran's Thoughts and Meditations, read it slowly under the great tree's shade and you will see beyond the horizon."

I rabbitted on, remembering only the beautiful flower that Lebanon was and completely forgetting the poison hidden in its petals. But then I had every reason to forget the bleak history of this part of the world. A bloody inheritance of betrayal, assassination and religious animosity. I had also forgotten the covert and heinous foreign meddling by America, and Iran, and the invasion and occupation by Syria and Israel. All of whom, it seems to me, cared little about Lebanon and its people. I had believed that these proxy wars fought on the killing fields of Lebanon had been eradicated like the canker in the rose.

I chose to believe in men such as Rafik Hariri who married individual vision with personal wealth and set about rebuilding the biblical cities of Lebanon, disinterring Beirut from the rubble of its past. Even when he was assassinated a year ago, but huge public protests led to the withdrawal of the Syrian army, I was convinced that the resurrection of Lebanon was assured. Beirut would rise from the ashes, garlanded with olive branches and flowers. This would be the reborn Beirut of gourmet restaurants, glitzy boutiques full of handsome young men and incredibly beautiful young women, shops and street-side cafes filled with people watching the world go by. Churches and mosques rebuilt side by side, and plazas and pedestrian walkways that opened up the city. There would be no more green lines that divided the city. No more areas you dared not walk at night.

If I had a dream of the promised land, it was one shared by thousands of ordinary Lebanese who wanted to share it with any who, like me, were willingly beguiled by it. "Call into the Mayflower Hotel and give them my regards," were my parting words to my friend.

Last summer, she made the trip to Lebanon. Her postcard to me confirmed that I had been right to insist that she went. She had also called at the Mayflower Hotel with my message. The owner was almost overcome, and told her he remembered "Mr Brian" with great affection and respect. She underlined these words. Some weeks after her card arrived, I received another written by the hotel owner himself. It was polite and graceful, the way the Lebanese are. Mounir respectfully invited me and my family to come and stay at his hotel. It would, he assured me, give him great pleasure and much delight. I knew the pleasure and delight would be all mine - I immediately scanned my diary to fix a date for this summer.

How could I have been so naive? I am old and experienced enough to know that dreams are fanciful things that disappear with the dawn, and in Lebanon, as I recall, dawn is a cruel time.

Among the many things my dreaming could not erase was the curse of cyclical violence, war and destruction that waits in the shadows to engulf this place with evermore bloody and disastrous consequences. In the past week, I have viewed the television coverage with sickening despair. I have listened to the empty rhetoric of politicians coming at me like an old echo. I have heard and seen it all before. It makes me cynical and angry, and I despise these feelings in myself. Sometimes, I feel myself choke up with tears. Above all, I feel robbed and betrayed.

And if I feel this from the comfort of my home in Dublin, how do my friends in Hamra and Raouché or in those tiny hill villages feel?

In Lebanon, curses are not like dreams. They do not emanate from some psychic other world. The demons in Lebanon are not mythical, they are real and they wear the guise of men. What did the students I taught do to deserve their future subjected to this manmade curse? What did the shoemaker at the end of the street I lived in do? What did my friend Mounir do? What did the old man who sat and peeled garlic all day in my favourite restaurant do? What did the 11 children who were blown to bits while swimming in a canal near Tyre do?

Noticeably, we no longer hear those hideous phrases "collateral damage" or "casualties of war". Everyone knows them for what they are: euphemisms for arbitrary but calculated murder. A leaflet dropped from a passing aircraft informing people to leave their homes or face the consequences redeems no one.

A week ago, I saw a photo of a man holding up a dead child he had just pulled from the blasted ruins of its home. It looked like a rag doll that had been pulled from a rubbish tip. In another context, the image could have been of a man holding up his daughter to receive a blessing. He could even have been handing the child to the care of a friend. But the face of the man holding up the infant confirms the worst. His features bear the emotional numbness of someone who has lived through this horror too many times; somewhere in his soul, he is as dead as the child he holds. His gesture simply asks us to bear witness, and perhaps, with what ever emotional life is left in him, he is also asking us to take this pain from him.

If a cataclysmic Pandora's box has been opened in Lebanon and that dire generational curse of death and destruction is passing over the land, why did we not see it coming? Maybe we did see it coming, but because we are used to it and expect such things from the Middle East, we are immune to it. Assuredly, the seeds were sown long before the poison erupted in the flower in the past few weeks.

A few months ago, the Irish Times carried a photo of a group of Palestinian youths fleeing through a crowd with the dead body of one of their friends, who had been shot for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. The faces of the two boys carrying their friend are imprinted with shock, confusion, desperation and the urgent need to get away. Two other boys at the edge of the crowd stretch out their arms to touch the boy's corpse. They are drawn to partake in his death. Their faces are like a mask, contorted in a pernicious grimace. It is as if some psychotic power is transferred, through the boy's martyrdom, and passes into them. It is a dreadful, revelatory moment. Tomorrow, they will throw more stones; in a few years, they will be firing guns. In a few more years, as the contagion of hate develops, they may put on the martyr's vest and walk into oblivion trailing the remains of more innocent dead behind them. The question I asked myself was where will this cauldron of hate and violence take these children?

I should have paid more attention to this question, but I was still seeing another Lebanon. One where I wanted to take my family and say: "See, this country is not the evil place that imprisoned me and these people don't want to hurt anyone." I wanted to stand in this land and not be afraid because of what had happened. I wanted my children to know that evil does not endure. I wanted them to love this country as I do, and as the Lebanese do. Above all, I wanted them to grow up secure in themselves and passionate about the big issues in life: justice, freedom, happiness, equality and the human right to independent judgment. I wanted them to know, and remember when they are old enough to reason, that their dad took them to Lebanon for this purpose. More importantly, I wanted them to have a great time and meet great people there.

In this star-crossed corner of the world, we should have known, we were certainly warned. Whether you believe in the curse of recurrent violence or not, you have to accept that such events are not things of chance. Even as I write, the Israeli military has declared a timescale for their incursion in Lebanon. Whatever they might say about "de-fanging" the snake of Hizbullah, they are intent on the physical and psychological destruction of their neighbours. Every day, I read reports or listen to the apologists of this crisis accuse each other; Meanwhile, innocents die on either side of their debate. No wonder the curse returns - such mindsets are stuck in a time warp, and nothing less than a purging of the intellect and imagination will ultimately dispel it. But how can that be done?

Drawing on his clinical experience, Dr Nathaniel Laor, a psychiatrist from Israel, illustrates how hate damages psychic structures. Two factors play a crucial role: first, hate gives, or can give, a form of pleasure; second, and more importantly, hate is addictive. And it is contagious; a potential epidemic. Perhaps that is the poison at the heart of the flower. Maybe the protagonists who are butchering the country need to go for a long session of counselling with Dr Laor.

About a dozen years ago, I was an invited speaker at an international conflict resolution conference held in Derry in Northern Ireland. Ehud Olmert was also a guest speaker. In his address, he said: "Political leaders can help change the psychological climate which affects the quality of relationships among people." And he concluded: "How are fears born? They are born because of differences in tradition and history; they are born because of differences in emotional, political and national circumstances. Because of such differences, people fear they cannot live together. If we are to overcome such fear, a credible and healthy political process must be carefully and painfully developed. A political process that does not aim to change the other or to overcome differences, but that allows each side to live peacefully in spite of their differences." I can only ask my fellow contributor, now prime minister of Israel: "What happened, Ehud? How does the havoc and slaughter of your neighbours tally with your inspiring sentiments?"

During my life, I have come to accept that there are very good reasons why Jews hate Muslims and vice versa. Often, they are eloquent in their arguments and can convincingly document reasons for their antipathy and suspicion. Yet wholesale genocide is no solution - and both sides know it. They have no alternative but to coexist.

Coexistence is the minimal, least demanding way for people to relate to one another without violence. It is not the same thing as love, or even as friendship. On the contrary, it is an expression of distance, an acknowledgment that boundaries will remain. It is informed by an attitude of live and let live; that is precisely the message that neither side in the war in Lebanon wants to hear or declare.

It is an ideal without illusions. Its object is not the seamless union of opposites but a practical relationship of mutual respect. It does not deny difference; it disarms it, robbing it of its power to wound or kill. In a pluralist society, ethnic and cultural differences are not abolished. They are legitimated, while society strives to guarantee that the law will be blind to them. It is not easy to achieve but when there is no alternative, it is worth trying.

For now, I've put off my visit to Lebanon. But I might return to that poem and rework it. But then, I think cynically, what's the point? Nothing changes in this corner of the earth.