Palestinian Identity: The Work of Tarek Al-Ghoussein

July 14, 2006: I am writing from a cafe in the Hamra district of West Beirut, Lebanon. The electricity has been cut off for a while now, and the city has been surviving on generators. The cafe is dark, hot, and humid. Espresso machines and blenders are silent. Conversations, rumors, frustration waft through the room. Occasionally the sound of Israeli warplanes overwhelms us. They drop leaflets. Yesterday, they advised inhabitants of the southern suburbs to flee because the night promised to be hot. Today, the leaflets warn that all remaining bridges and tunnels in will be bombed. November 18, 2005: I arrive in Beirut. Together with a couple of hundred art world itinerants booked into hotels at either end of the city's lively Hamra Street we came for the week-long, multi-disciplinary forum Home Works III. By day we folded invisibly into the cosmopolitan Hamra districts' cafes, shops, and eateries. Some of these are eloquent, on par with Paris, London, or New York. Others are particular to Beirut, like the fried potato vendor whose small take-out shop was a favorite of late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In the afternoon we flocked to the Masrah al-Madina where most of the program took place. The Masrah al-Madina is a large movie house whose entrance is distinguished by a massive, antiquated film projector cemented directly into the sidewalk. For those of us new to the city this monumental apparatus served as a channel marker of sorts, a point of reference that also testified to the resolute secularity of Lebanese public culture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] July 19, 2006: Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport as I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. I have the choice to sign up for the evacuation, but the European and North American governments have been so despicable, so racist that I don't want to subject myself to a discrimination of that sort ... For days I have been itching to leave because I want to pursue my professional commitments, meet deadlines and continue with my life ... And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel's genial strategy at implementing United Nations Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured, and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away. Home Works III was organized by Christine Tohme, founder of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, and by film curator Rasha Salti. Initially, it was to take place in the spring. But then came the assassination of Hariri on February 14, 2005. The program was postponed. The danger seemingly waited out. After all, tourists were still returning and in March there was the unprecedented public demonstration against Syria, the so-called Beirut Spring, in which a multitude of ethnic, religious, and political factions were unified by their opposition to Hariri's murder. Today his death reads less like a nasty bump in the road and more like the thud of things to come. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This is all bringing back echoes of 1982, the Israeli siege of Beirut. My living nightmare, well one of my living nightmares. It was summer then as well. The Israeli army marched through the south and besieged Beirut. For three months, the U.S. administration kept dispatching urges for the Israeli military to act with restraint. And the Israelis assured them they were acting appropriately. We had the PLO command in West then. I felt safe with the handsome fighters. …

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