Day 28

It's hard living a normal life on this side of the continent.

Suddenly, all conversation beyond world politics and media bias seems futile and only lasts a couple of minutes before it starts irritating the brain. I have become the epitome of anti-socialness, only partaking in group dynamics with the presence of my body. My mind remains somewhere in anxiety and dread.

How will I my city appear to me when I go back? Can I pretend none of this is happening? Am I still allow to dream of my return, of the children I want to raise there, of the apartment I furnish in my head, of my blue pebbled beaches, of my dusty mountain roads and turkish coffees in plastic espresso cups on the Corniche?

Is it shameful to say that I don't want to neither fundraise nor demonstrate anymore? With every chant, it makes it all sound so much more real...

I go to work in the mornings and spend 50% of my time doing work for a city whose government I resent, and the other 50% of the time reading up on the news. But it's the blogs, and most essentially them, that give me a more poignant and accurate report of the ongoing sordid events.

BBC will never tell me that my friends and family are receiving automated calls from Israel in which they equate Hezbollah to rats infesting our streets, and glorify their own Zionist state.

They do not tell me that the Israeli Minister of Justice (how ironic a name...) wonders why there still is electricity feeding Baalbeck.
And they do not tell me that Israel has a worse coverage of the war than the ranch-owners of Midwest America.

They do not tell me that the people of Israel chant "A good Arab is a dead Arab", which makes the military's half-hearted sorry excuses for civilian deaths in Lebanon a cover-up for their dream of annihilation and ethnic cleansing.
We are told and retold stories of the horror of the Holocaust and of the plight of Jews throughout history, through Spielberg movies, and endless documentaries, and here they are wishing upon others what they love to spread guilt about themselves. And I almost believed them when I was a spotty-faced teenager...

It's all maddeningly heartbreaking. A surreal nightmare I wake up to every morning with the on-switch of the computer. And that I am now starting to live in my slumber too. Slowly, the war has crept into my dreams and has placed me in the heart of it all. And I want nothing more than to wake up from the nightmare, and then wake again from the reality...

My father has told me that he has enrolled my sister in the Lycée of Saudi Arabia. They will not be going back home any soon. I could not stop bawling all day...