Tag: hamas

MEC-A-1-S-10

S C E N E (X) 

עפולה 

Afula Township, State of Israel, 2001-ce 

*** 

The first time you come here, as a Jew, a lifetime of anticipation, religious zeal, and propaganda make it like a pilgrimage. And you only go on the two-week tour; the wall, the handsome and pretty soldiers, the Tel Aviv vibe, the camels, the shouks, the black tea, the Dead Sea and Masada. But the second time, the cracks began to show up. You either decide, “Tikkun Olam”, we can fix any cracks, or you place the State of Israel on a little shelf, like a photo, and you root for it, or you have long boring circular conversations about the Palestinians. But in the State, itself, which necessitates the ghettoization and systematic oppression of Palestinians; the uncomfortable reality that is literally behind window or over a wall; in the occupation there are not just cracks in moral narrative; there is bleeding and there is dying. There is the full denial of rights and freedom for one people, for another to lay claim to the land.  

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV 

I am told it is very green up north in the shade of Mt. Tabor. I am told it’s important to learn Hebrew. The language of the colony, I mean, “our historic homeland”. I take a bus from the Techanama Gazit Central Bus Station to a town called Afula, which is as mediocre as it is relatively isolated. As it is also close to everything. The whole country takes eight hours to drive north to south. The kibbutz itself is still a good half an hour further north, so I stick my thumb in the air for several hours before a Bedouin trucker drops me at the gates of Kibbutz Ein Dor.  

My one-night standing had turned into a good long week of partying. With less than $200 of my money left, I decided to quit my evil ways and learn to speak the language of the world’s oldest tribe while doing a bit of the old ‘agrarian collective labor’.  

Kibbutz Ein Dor was established at its present location facing Mount Tabor in the eastern section of the Lower Galilee in May 1948. Its members came from groups of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair from Israel, Hungary, and the United States. Later groups from Chile and Uruguay and much smaller groups and individuals from over 30 different countries joined them. Today the kibbutz boasts about 430 members and candidates for membership, and a permanent population of close to 800 when children, parents of members, and Hebrew Ulpan students are considered. The kibbutz’s economy is built almost entirely upon its cable factory, Teldor, which manufactures telecommunication and electronic cables. The kibbutz still cultivates a wide range of field crops, has a dairy farm, and raises chickens. That’s almost verbatim off the kibbutz Web site. 

Ein Dor is situated where the Chesulloth Basin meets the eastern section of the Lower Galilee and the Jezreel Valley. There was a new electric entrance gate that was surrounded by a security fence made of barbed wire as old as the country itself. A guard was posted at the entrance. The young man had dark hair and a black uniform and was sitting with his feet up at the post with an Uzi submachine in his lap looking bored and disinterested. The guard was no older than seventeen. All of the buildings are white stucco with a solid earthy appearance and red corrugated tin roofs.  Massive olive trees and other shrubbery made the kibbutz exude abundance. Compared with the dry and dusty hills and the two small Arab villages with their scrawny sheep that flanked it, the kibbutz felt like a fortress of bounty. Flowers had been planted everywhere, and the grounds were immaculate. Green grass covered the lawns of all the kibbutz buildings. As I walked up the main street to the central building, I saw what looked like a huge auditorium that served as the central dining hall. A sign told me as much in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic. 

The Russians Roman and Anya his homegirl had told me that the real Israelis hate the weak, naïve American tourists. That I come from New York means a lot less here. A lot of fat, rich, lazy American Jews live in that city.  

“Above your head there flashes a great big dollar sign,” the Russian girl Anya I made fuck within Tel Aviv had said to me adding, “Your nice words will not so much to protect you here from us!” Was she Slavic joking I’d get kidnapped, or that everyone would want to fuck me, I wasn’t fully sure. In fact, she was also alluding as I’d discover that Israel is a place where all the Jews, or the majority, are poor. Sometimes Israelis call Israelis sabras after the cactus-like, thorny fruit with the sweet center when opened as if deep down these Israelites were warm and respectful to outsiders. That’s very wishful thinking, which doesn’t last long past the two-week tour.  

“I’m looking for a woman named Bruria who is the volunteer coordinator of the kibbutz.”  

Bruria’s closet-like office was in a small shed attached to the main Volunteer Office building. I can’t help but thinking she looks like a man in a dress. Her English isn’t very good, and I am informed that it will cost me a thousand, two hundred shekels and fifty agorot to enroll in the ulpan program. Everything they say about the poor, impoverished kibbutzniks must be truism because they want my agorot; the bullshit Jewish penny. Nobody chases those down the street. I feign agreement fully wondering where I am going to come up with that kind of money considering my net worth financially is perhaps no more than $180 at this time. She takes every penny and tells me I can pay the rest down the line. It’s hard times in the lower hills of Galilee.  I now don’t have a shekel to my name.   

The kibbutz does not make a great first impression. Built something like a cross between Jurassic Park and the Soviet Union, the adults seem embittered and cagey as Bruria brings me around. The facilities are pleasant until we arrive in the area where the volunteers live. Stucco and pebble faced buildings give way to trailer bungalows near a sign that reads ‘welcome to our ghetto.’ There are close to twenty white bungalow buildings on a steeply inclined hill that are each only one story tall. Each bungalow has a porch with some irregular lawn chairs and assorted stools. Each house has four volunteers in two sets of living quarters. There are two outdoor showers per building, which four volunteers share. These dwellings overlook a series of olive fields and in the distance, you can see the small Arab village of Deburiya. The Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer echoes across the valley five times a day she warns me. 

“It may sound like a scary cry of war, but it is how they pray. They are the good Arabs, long time our neighbors. We control now their water which makes them better neighbors.” 

Bruria unlocks my apartment and tells me to leave my stuff. I have just one large black rucksack. The room she calls ‘living quarters’ is a one-room affair with two dormitory steel cots and two adjacent closets. My roommate is rather neat. His t-shirts are all folded, his stuff tucked inside the large closet. There are no posters on the walls or art, just a small wooden table with an alarm clock that has a picture of Israeli girl in black and white with X O X O scribbled on it and a big red lipstick kiss. Guess that’s what he’s doing here. It’s all very laconic, that is to say the bare minimum of what one needs. But after squatting for three months in a dirty hovel in London this is all a marked improvement. Bruria tells me my roommate’s name is Danny and that he is from Los Angles  

Classes are in session. The classroom building is on top of the hill. It is built in the same white stucco style with a red shingled roof. Bruria interrupts the class and announces that I ‘will be the new student.’ There are about twenty other people in the class. All of them are easily twice my age by the look of it. I had been under the impression that there would be people my age forgetting that this was a program for new immigrants, not seventeen-year-old radicals in some fucked up self-imposed exile. Everybody smiles and then gets back to work.   

Later that day I am introduced to the ghetto’s ‘North American Social Club.’ It is on the porch of a bungalow at the top of the ghetto on the hill. It has a third fridge on the porch. There is a Russian quarter, an Argentinean quarter with a Columbian among them here to garden not to learn, and the American section. The Russians only speak Russian; the Latin Americans don’t speak Russian or English well. And go figure, we don’t speak anything at all besides English including the Chilean girl and Canadian guy in my new ‘club.’ Everyone is learning Hebrew, but vodka is the lingua franca by the looks of it. 

My roommate introduces himself as Daniel Asher Callahan who is questionably Jewish. He is tall and lanky, has dark hair with freckles and knows how to freestyle rap. The Canadian John Yuma, whom everybody calls Johnny Bravo, is all things loud, drunk, and misogynistic. Also, questionably Jewish. Like Paul Bunyan and Izzy Vitz, he tells tall tales. According to his own booze-soaked account, he was formerly a freelance soldier, this gun for hire in the French Foreign Legion for eight years. He boasts combat on nearly every continent ‘with the browns or yellows’ and is visibly a degenerate drunk. Bobby Brown is the third American in the social club. He’s part bookworm and part smartass jock. He has glasses and flashcards. He goes for jogs to Duriyah. He’s liberal but still doesn’t trust Arabs. Both Danny and Yuma are not yet sure it was worth their coming here. The more they drank, the less they liked the Holy Land air and long summer months with no rain. Bobby Brown was a good little Zionist through and through. “What kind of fucking Jewish name is Robert Brown?” Yuma yells! 

It’s my first day at the Kibbutz and they’ve extended me a full membership. Club activities generally involve pounding back Gold Star or Maccabi beers, the national swag of Israel, and puffing carton upon carton of Noblisse from the commissary. It is as if they pay us weekly for booze and smoke. That’s all our little company store stipend gets us in the end. Yuma spotted me the beers.  

“You’re new so you get the shitty chair ‘til you steal yourself a better one,” Danny says to me.  

“Steal anything that’s not tied down,” he says is the way of things.  

Bobby becomes more social the more he drinks. John Yuma seems to get louder and more unhinged. Kind of hard to imagine any of them as being Jewish. 

School and work alternate every day except Saturday. Depending on your assignment you work about eight hours a day with a two-hour lunch. Most volunteers are in the mess hall cooking, food prepping and doing dishes for nearly 800 three times a day, although I’m told many families eat at home. Other options include Yards, which means constantly weeding and laying sprinkler line or Gardens, which helps to maintain the flowers and trees on the grounds. The ambitious and trusted either milk cows or work for TELDOR the chief kibbutz product, which is telecommunications wiring. Everyone tells me that I have to decide by tomorrow to work in the mess hall for obvious reasons like stealing food and air-conditioning, but I need to be outside using my hands.  

We are all sitting on the porch of the North American Social Club drinking Gold Star beers that Yuma bought in Afula except for Bobby Brown who is immersed in the course work. 

“So where are you going to slave,” asks John Yuma. 

“I was thinking about Yards and Gardens.” 

“That’s a lot of digging. You got to dig mini trenches for the sprinkler lines, which keep the place so green. You should get to work to keep your soft hands not dirty. And fill our fridge,” Yuma says.  

“You see, a kibbutz is about doing as little work as possible and getting drunk as often as you can. And givin’ it to every new girl that arrives.” 

“I only say it ‘cause you’re scrawny. Teldor and field work is man’s work,” says Yuma. 

“Where do all the curvy kibbutz girls work?  

“They don’t. Most of them are really underage. Like getting locked up underage. Pickings are very slim these days. There’s a fine Brazilian girl named Carla but she he has a kibbutznik boyfriend. She works in Yards and Gardens if you’re looking for good eye candy. Girl is stacked and curvy,” says Bobby looking up from his book. 

“I’m always looking for eye candy. I’m a horny seventeen-year-old.” 

Just down the hill at the bungalow below ours some Russians in our Ulpan Program start yelling at us from their window and waving with their arms for us to come down. 

“What do they want?” I ask. 

“They want us to get really trashed on vodka,” says Bobby Brown. 

“Come on,” says John, “It’s a kibbutz highlight that never gets old.” 

It was one we would have over and over again. Bobby and Danny sat it out. I had no idea why because I figured it was just for a shot. The Russians apparently really, really liked sharing their liquid oblivion. 

There were four Russians in the small room. All four of them were in their early thirties. Three were Slavs and the other one was a dark Georgian. They offered their names, but I only caught one distinctively, Alexi, who was the youngest. The Georgian had a crucifix around his neck, which he never took off. None of them spoke English and I wasn’t able to catch any of the names of the other three. The vodka was very cheap and highly flammable, one of them demonstrated by igniting a wall briefly. We slammed two shots in the first minute or two. Then we chased each shot with water. I was laid out by the time I reached eight. It burned my throat and made my head spin. I fell off the cot as I yelled profanity in drunken glee. Alexi showed us a picture of his sister or girlfriend. Who cared or knew. Yuma told him ‘I’d fucked her in the ass.’ They all started cheering and patting me on the back. And then a blackout, and a blur of sweat and yelling and more shots.  

The last thing I remember hearing was Yuma with his arm around a Russian yelling, “WE’RE GONNA FUCK YOUR MOTHERS IN THE ASS!” They had no idea what he was saying so that just cheered and we all did another shot. I had to be practically carried back to my room by John and Danny sometime after midnight. I stink of booze for a whle week. The Russians see to that. 

*** 

I settle on “Yards and Gardens” detail managed by a triumvirate two Latin laborers and the Kibbutz Yards and Garden foreman Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was half English/half Irish. He’d come here in the sixties, a little leftist and a little reckless. He had gotten an Israelite pregnant and never left. He’d acquired kibbutz membership, married the girl and had three kids. He was a good guy with numerous yarns, which all seemed to amount to a warning about getting out before I got one of their girls pregnant. The girls were all 12, I told him. He told me he was talking about the country not the kibbutz. The other two weren’t Jewish either. Adonai Gonzalez was Colombian and strapping. He’d been here a couple years. Said prospects were better here than in his own ‘piece of shit’ country. And there was the hot Brazilian, a tall, gorgeous brunette, the hot sweaty eye candy Yuma had mentioned.  

Our work was largely the maintenance of the sprinkler system. Without it the hills would not be so green. The Israelis utilized a drip irrigation system. The pioneers in less than a hundred years had reclaimed swathes of swamp, desert and rock, but milk and honey hardly came. The kibbutznik dream of agrarian socialism was over. They had outlived their colonial purpose.  

But if there was some endless war going on, I hadn’t seen any of it yet. Not in Tel Aviv or Galilee anyway. I dug up sprinkler lines shirtless, never seeming to burn in the nonstop sun. I was getting a little less scrawny with the three meals a day. The kibbutz was always the same work, the same food and the same people every single day. I’d get shit hammered drunk with the Russians and the North American Social Club. I’d sit bored in the classroom pretending to learn Hebrew. I wondered sometimes if I was in too deep. I wondered if Zionism was really the end of the ideological road for me. It was too easy. I wondered when the hammer would fall, or the real test would come. I was living in a war zone wholly sheltered from the war. I wondered when I’d meet a Palestinian again.  

I wonder if little Kareem from the Wadi would light himself up in a bus that I was on or perhaps he had already. The kibbutz was a vacuum. Each weekend came and I hitchhiked down to Tel Aviv. To see Israel. To get fucked and hammered and blown by everything except Palestinians. My dreams were a dull silence. Mike Washington was truly dead it seemed. I had learned to sleep like normal people do, in quiet but without peace.   

Every so often some kibbutznik would tell me to put a shirt on lest I burn up, but I never seemed to. My blood wasn’t wholly infused with the European. Just my skin. My great, great grandmother’s rape had not been complete, as I didn’t burn. So, I ate cucumber, onion, and tomato salads, tried to pick up Hebrew and fought the good fight to keep the yards and gardens green.  

After work I’d sit on the porch with Danny and Johnny Yuma smoking cigarette after cigarette and downing frosty cold liter bottles of Coca Cola. We’d look out over the village of Deburiya and listen to their call to prayer go off around sundown. The ghostly Adhan echoed throughout the valley. We could sit in our walled little compound sipping Coke and getting hammered on cheap beer. We could pretend the Intifada was taking place in the cities and would not reach us. But like the village of Deburiya, we could cut off their water and lock them off their lands but ignoring them is impossible. “There are serious contradictions that Alleyah will raise,” Danny explains, “it’s not a very large country and there is nowhere for anyone to go. We have already pushed millions of them out of the country. We cannot ignore the Intifada; it is not going to stop.”  “Fuck these stupid sand niggers” says Yuma. 

0

MEC-A1-S7

S C E N E (VII)  

بيروت 

Beirut, Corniche, 2024ce 

***     

The historical, comical, and even anecdotal way you know “the Jew is back in Beirut” is his appearance at Monir’s on the most Western reach of the Corniche wrapping way into Ras Beirut. The very most western point of the Corniche is the literal turning point on “the people’s boardwalk” stretching dozens of kilometers where you begin to leave Western Sunni Beirut and enter southwest Shi’a Beirut. Tracksuits and mustaches. Shiite tricks and the of twelve Palestinian refugee camps.    

Did I hear you say, “a Jew is back in Beirut?! With any surprise in my voice?” explains Monir Senior, the owner of the Fruits of the Sea Restaurant. If he is back, well, great trouble is coming. 

“There are at least 40 Jews still in Beirut!” says a man who looks like could be in Hamas or could just be a regular Middle-aged Sunni. Hamas is Arabic for Zeal; and is the infamous Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that has just orchestrated the action of October 7th; in which 1,200 Israelis lost their lives in Jihad or Pogrom, or terrorism; depends on one’s sensibilities. The man has a bulge in his suit for a shooter to perch. He has a shabby suit. “Which is 40 too many if you ask me!” 

“There are not 40! Just 25, and all loyal Lebanese to the core.” 

“The Party of God just agreed to help pay for the great synagogue renovations!” exclaims someone in Hezbollah having their late lunch with a deluge of tea and cigarettes. 

“Paid for by Iran!” The Hamas man yells back. 

The Jew was made familiar with the Monir family having served with his son in the Mosul Offensive of 2017, and thus the Monir Shop was the one familiar lynchpin the Jew ever has, tying the world of alive and now, to the world of endless and ephemeral. The speculative world he uniquely and often peers into. He is of course “capable of becoming a blue-purple smoke” and then he’s gone! They say the Jew has great powers. That is what they always say for sure. Power to steal and to heal, with mere words.” 

They say “the Jew always appears in a green suit, in a pop and puff and mystical whiff of blue-purple smoke. Out of nowhere!” And so he has now; in the dead of winter. In the nights before Christmas. Which in Beirut means one minute it is sunny beach weather, and the next a torrential downpour flooding the roads putting cars under water. The Jew sits in the middle of the room amid everybody’s tables, so everyone can see his face. And a little light goes on. 

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV  

“Now looking back, the first thing I should have done was walk into Monir’s on the Corniche, ask the manager for the owner, and tell him I fought with his son Monir during the Isis wars.” 

His son Monir Jr. and I were part of a special international tabor attached to the Iraqi Special Forces units in the battle of Mosul. We used to patch up the varying combatants and civilians blown apart in the crossfire. Stabilize them until they can get extracted 10 or 20 km away toward a distant field hospital. Usually NGO, WHO, or Shiite Hashidashabi Popular Mobilization Forces field hospitals. Unless we found the bruises under the right arm, from firing a Kalashnikov, and we’d know they were Isis and they’d be snatched off the operating table to be tortured or summarily shot in the head and then dumped in the river.  Monir is Christian Lebanese; his family is Maronite. We used to spend our leave time in outer ring Erbil flirting with Iranian prostitutes but being too broke to pay for one. 

The salary for an internationalist volunteer in a tabor is $250 a month in faceless dinar, with unlimited Arnette or sometimes Gauloise cigarettes, three square Iraqi collective meals eating with your hands; and “a place at the table with Jesus” as Monir used to say.  

Now any friend of Monir the Jr. was a friend for the life of Monir the Senior, but I never even opened my mouth in Monir’s except to ask for a menu and order some seafood stew. And a Coke, but there is only Pepsi in Lebanon! Any idiot knows that. Why was the Jew making such culturally insensitive rookie mistakes? Maybe he is nervous? Maybe it’s just performance anxiety? 

You can tell the coming weather of winter by the appearance of the Jew. Is he being rushed by something? Why does he order a Coke, there’s no Coke in Lebanon. Does he make a war fellow embrace Monir Jr, working in the Kitchen? Is he in the Kitchen in this reality? Is Monir still studying in Australia? Does he sit with a stranger inviting him for a smoke? Does he sit on the right with Hamas or the left with Hezbollah? Is he going to get kidnapped and cut into lots of little pieces? 

HAMAS MEN  

“Gotta get a good look at his face to tell the coming weather.” 

So, when the Jew sits down, they turn on a little light. Not too bright. Because the Jew comes to Beirut every single year and he may have evolved. How much blue smoke? What kind of shoes? What makes this new green suit? Is he dressed like a PKK again? What’s PKK again? The Kurdish resistance of Qandil; the Kurdistan Workers Party that trained him. Well, it looks like it was rushed and sloppy training if you ask the Party of God. 

This year, in 2024; at least most agree to that. The Jew doesn’t make small talk or reunion with Monir Senior. Shockingly, he seems to ignore everything. Who is or isn’t even at the restaurant? The Jew doesn’t seem to care about establishing the human connection. He seems rushed, and they all agree. In the Middle East only a foreigner is ever rushed. 

“The Jew of Beirut is out of season.” No one even knew he was coming this, Winter. No one even suspected it. He asks for a cigarette from a patron who obliges him. A neutral. He doesn’t make eye contact with the Hamas men, or the Hezbollah men. “My son is an electrical engineer in Massachusetts,” says the man he bummed the original smoke from, “We love you Americans.” “You being here makes me feel safer!” 

The Jew nods. He is a little American. So, they can love him a little. I suppose in some round about logic if shit were about to hit the fan, if the invasion was immanent an American wouldn’t be out for lunch on the Corniche. 

ADONAEV  

What I do now is very important, but mostly only to me. No one is really watching me as closely as me. They’re all watching me order a so-called Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t even exist. Watching me ignore the manager and owner, no entitlements. No attachments. No OUTS, and also no INS. I have never been here before. But maybe I have. Retrace your steps. Don’t let her down again. Don’t let your Vice President Yaelle D’Arrigo down, or your little secretary Karessa Abe who you are claiming you love so much. Or at least use it as an acid test for your own alleged morality. 

“They teach you in suicide intervention prevention training that offering an imbibing a glass of cold water is grounding; it’s a break in the tension.” 

No one brings him any water. In the New York Grad “cultural context”, that’s a sign you’re not welcome here. Not out of disrespect, but because it might influence his very next move. Might change the weather. No one moves any time faster than in pure Middle Eastern time; slower than slow as hell at all times like you live in a desert. Although nothing at all about Lebanon is like a desert. Until something explodes? Or does graciousness take over?  

The patron families don’t stare; they ignore him completely. But the Hamas men stare. How does he know they are Hamas men? The vibe is the vibe is the vibe. Hamas men have better suits than the men at the Hezbollah table. And why are these factions both at Monir’s? Because Israelis are about to invade Lebanon; it’s going to start World War Three. This will happen any minute, any hour now, or at least by the end of the week. 

YELIZAVETA ALEKSANDROVNA KOTLYAROVA   

(Inside his head) 

“Show them you’re not afraid to live or to die for me!”  

ADONAEV  

What I do now is particularly important. They are all watching me order a Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t exist. They only have Pepsi in Lebanon. An American tourist, out of season. It is near wartime. Hamas means Resistance shortened to Zeal and Hezbollah means Party of God. 

HAMAS MEN  

“The Americans pay for the Zionist war so he should die, in my humble opinion,” says one. 

“But maybe he could make a good hostage?” another one suggests. 

“Most of the ones under Gaza are already dead!” 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“This is a funny scenario, almost a little obscene. We were here to talk to Hamas. What’s this Jew doing here, who does he work for. What interests are served by him being here. B for Bravery, but also a highly incorrect approach to doing any real negotiating.” 

“They think they own the whole world,” one says.  

“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-MR.-AMERICAN?” one asks him in loud English. And so, he takes one. Nods a thank you/Shokran, and he does a heart-tap-to-salute. The heart tap salute he learned from the Kurds, both hands to the heart, and a left-handed salute showing modesty, and gratitude together. 

HAMAS MEN  

“You used to be able to tell the weather by the running of the Jew, but it’s very very sunny right now.”  

“Like summer in December!”  

“Lure him out to the back somehow?”  

“Hit him in the head?” 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“This is not funny.”  

“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-AMERICAN?” one asks him again in English. He takes another one. He then offers them his business card in gold and brown leaf. It says GCC which stands for ‘General Coordinating Committee’. Coordinating what, and for whom? 

“Who trained this person?” 

“No one trained him.” 

“Why is he really here then? Why at this time?” 

“To negotiate off channels?” 

“No, he’s nobody. Nobody is protecting him he’s here wide out in the open.”  

“Leave it all alone.” 

The Jew of Beirut didn’t appear in blue purple smoke, poof! He did not have on such bad shoes, but they were bad for walking twenty kilometers on the Corniche from Christian Achrafieh out here. “Clarkes he prefers.” Chafing his heels. His suit is like a green PKK officer if they had officers, which they do not, just comrade friends. Just a hundred thousand friends in the hills with Kalashnikovs. 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“I think you should take your leave Mr. American Tourist. No one stocks Coke-A-Cola here.” 

HAMAS MEN  

“They’re cock blocking us, again. Thise fucking Shiite motherfuckers.” 

The Hezbollah men nod, and the Jew gets up and leaves the place. Not having done more than smoke 3 cigarettes and washed his hands. No one in Hezbollah has any interest in a dead American right now. No one in Hezbollah has an interest in a dead American ever. The Jew leaves his card with the two tables of so-called terrorists. “Maybe it’s all confabulation and he’s not leaving a card with anyone besides some middle-aged Lebanese tough guys in a famous seafood cafe that real terrorists wouldn’t be in anyways.” “Pure confabulation, real rooky type moves.”  

YELIZAVETA  

“This isn’t a movie. You’re gonna get your fucking Jew fingernails pulled, or your eyes put out,” Yelizaveta tells him. Then, the Jew takes leave but turns hard right and keeps walking, down the Corniche southbound, walking and walking toward the Shi’a control zone. 

Retrace your steps. Walk to the end of the Boardwalk where the Ferris wheels are. When you see them, it should start to look familiar. Like when we were at the AUB in the 70’s. You will find me in the Shatila Refugee camp. I will stop time for you. 

*** 

So, he walks the Corniche until he comes to a place where it looks like the people are sealed inside. There he can see heavy duty checkpoints with armed guards and barbed wire and soviet looking block housing. But Yelizaveta or no Yelizaveta, he can’t just blag his way inside, and this was his first day back in Beirut. You can’t get into a Palestinian Refugee camp kind of state of mind on your very first day back in Beirut. It’s pushy, even for a Jew from New York. The Jew of Beirut is only pushy when it comes to life-or-death situations. And those are right around the corner to be sure. 

*** 

Kaveh Ashuri is burly, Assyrian, Iranian, Persian, American. He goes into town before Yosef Bashir because he wants to see an old, intractable flame. He wants to enjoy the city for a couple days before they get to work, even if he has to stop time. So, he stops time. More on that process later. 

The sun dips below the horizon, painting the sky in hues of fiery orange and soft lilac, signaling the awakening of Beirut’s vibrant nightlife. In the heart of the city, where the ancient metropolis melded seamlessly with modernity, lay a labyrinth of narrow streets and bustling boulevards that came alive after dark. It was a city where time seemed to blur, and the past whispered through the cracks of its ancient walls, intertwining with the pulsating energy of the present. 

Open mic night for stringed instruments. 

Amidst the maze of alleys and cobblestone paths, nestled a quaint café; its walls adorned with eclectic graffiti and flickering lanterns casting a warm glow. The scent of freshly brewed coffee mingled with the sweet aroma of shisha smoke, creating an intoxicating ambiance that drew in locals and wanderers alike. At a corner table, bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, sat Anya Layla Noori, her dark curls cascading over her shoulders as she sipped on a cup of rich Arabic coffee. Her eyes, the color of warm honey, sparkled with a mixture of excitement and anticipation as she awaited her rendezvous with destiny. Across the room, amidst a lively group of patrons, stood Kaveh Ashuri, posing as a musician with fingers that danced effortlessly across the strings of his oud. His soulful melodies filled the air, weaving a tapestry of enchantment that transported the listeners to distant lands and forgotten dreams. 

As the night wore on, Beirut revealed its true essence, a melting pot of cultures and traditions, where East met West and ancient metropolises embraced the modern world. Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and expatriates from every corner of the globe mingled effortlessly, their laughter and chatter blending into a symphony of harmony. Amid this vibrant tapestry, Layla’s eyes met Kaveh’s across the crowded room, and in that fleeting moment, time stood still. It was as if the universe conspired to bring them together, two souls destined to collide amidst the chaos of Beirut’s nocturnal embrace. 

With a shy smile, Kaveh made his way towards Layla, his heart pounding with anticipation. In her presence, he felt a sense of belonging, as if he had finally found the missing piece of his soul amidst the cacophony of the city. Their conversation flows effortlessly, as they exchange stories of their lives, their dreams, and their deepest desires. In each other’s presence, they found solace and understanding, a connection that transcended language and culture. 

As the night drew to a close, Kaveh took Layla’s hand in his own, his eyes searching hers for a flicker of doubt. But in the depths of her gaze, he found only certainty; a silent promise of a future yet to unfold. Together, they ventured out into the streets of Beirut, their footsteps echoing against the ancient walls as they embraced the magic of the night. In this city of contradictions and complexities, they found love, a beacon of light amidst the darkness, illuminating their path towards an uncertain yet exhilarating future. “Are you still Pasdaran,” she asks him? “Well, I guess so,” he says, “but realistically now we are all falling in line with the Party of God and Workers.” “So, Bashir and Sebastian are finally in Beirut,” she asks. “Yes, it has all been given the green light,” Kaveh replies. 

0

MEC-A1-S-3

S C E N E (III)  

 ירושלים القدس 

“YERUSHALAIIM” “JERUSALEM,” “AL QUDS,”  

STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001ce 

***  

MAYA SORIEYA EMMA SOLOMON ROSE 

“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.” 

There is also a great deal of inevitability all your friends will get rounded up, tortured, and killed. Some will give each other up under torture, betray themselves and the cause. 

I went on another scouting trip to Be’er Sheva at the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.  

None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in, or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes an odd black pictograph you had never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking and they put you on to our righteous and almost self-obvious revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein making rounds with his old friend Hadas.  

Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.  

The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugavnik storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon. 

But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the Manasseh Command. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.   

We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements. 

We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi art students at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters up in Galilee we called the Asher Command. 

There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot.  In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.  

“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.” 

There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.   

“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.  

This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites. 

Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City.  Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows and called it the KDAA, some made up word surely of Zach’s creation. 

You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”.  And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped to think which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long. 

On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend Canadian Dave. We take our time to eat. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the holiest of holies. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag. 

“Fuck,” he mutters. 

“What is it?” 

“I’m all out of art.”  

Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a  

PEGUAH!  And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sells Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s the smoke, there are the screams of the injured, the incoming sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews. PEGUAH! 

The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihadimmediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:  

“I won’t be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence.  

Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. She showed me that summer was not just to go underground and become invisible to our enemies, she taught me how to breathe underwater and time. 

0

LFME-S.2

SCENE (II) — NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2025 CE

The Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis explodes into brutality with military precision. Within minutes, women and children are herded out, diplomats and officials seized, bound, and laced with explosives that glint like festive nightmares. Resistance is crushed quickly—screams fading into muffled sobs, then silence.

Heavily armed attackers with glitching, unnatural masks storm the venue mid-show, transforming a cultural landmark into a slaughterhouse. A diplomat’s skull cracks under a pistol’s handle. Any protest earns a shattered jaw, a broken nose, or worse. Whispers of pleas echo between the sobs and gunfire.

Outside, the NYPD scrambles to contain the chaos. Inside, the hostages—over 800 of them—are stripped of status, speech, and dignity. Those who try to speak are gagged and beaten. A woman—calm, deadly—issues ultimatums: withdraw law enforcement, or executions begin. They demand Israel open its borders and cease fire in Gaza, or bodies will start dropping every half hour.

The world watches, horrified and helpless, as the terrorists release videos of their demands. Inside, horror grows hour by hour. A man is executed off-camera. Another shot while trying to flee. The air thickens with blood and dread.

Negotiations stretch into days. But diplomacy fails. The NYPD makes a desperate gamble, flooding the theatre with odorless gas. Chaos erupts—shots, screams, and then a series of deafening explosions. Fire consumes the building. Over 800 lives vanish in smoke and rubble—hostages, attackers, innocents.

When the dust settles, it’s carnage. Bodies charred and unrecognizable. The media calls it the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis, second only to 9/11 in death toll. The Arab world names it more fittingly: the Newyorkgrad Christmas Massacre.

Two of the attackers survived. Both now walk free, under the protection of foreign passports.

Nothing changed in Gaza. Nothing changed in Israel. Except the body count.

0

MEC-A1-S8

S C E N E (VIII)  

بيروت 

Beirut, Corniche, 2023ce 

***     

The historical, comical, and even anecdotal way you know “the Jew is back in Beirut” is his appearance at Monir’s on the most Western reach of the Corniche way into Ras Beirut. The very most western point of the Corniche is the literal turning point on the people’s boardwalk stretching dozens of kilometers where you begin to leave Western Sunni Beirut and enter southwest Shi’a Beirut. Tracksuits and mustaches. Shiite tricks and the of twelve Palestinian refugee camps.    

Did I hear you say, “a Jew is back in Beirut?! With any surprise in my voice?” explains Monir Senior, the owner of the Fruits of the Sea Restaurant. If he is back, well, great trouble is coming. 

“There are at least 40 Jews still in Beirut!” says a man who looks like could be in Hamas or could just be a regular Middle-aged Sunni. Hamas is Arabic for Zeal; and is the infamous Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that has just orchestrated the action of October 7th; in which 1,200 Israelis lost their lives in Jihad. The man has a bulge in his suit for a shooter to perch. He has a shabby suit. “Which is 40 too many if you ask me!” 

“There are not 40! Just 25, and all loyal Lebanese to the core.” 

“The Party of God just agreed to help pay for the great synagogue renovations!” exclaims someone in Hezbollah having their late lunch with a deluge of tea and cigarettes. 

“Paid for by Iran!” The Hamas man yells back. 

The Jew was made familiar with the Monir family having served with his son in the Mosul Offensive of 2017, and thus the Monir Shop was the one familiar lynchpin the Jew ever has, tying the world of alive and now, to the world of endless and ephemeral. The speculative world he uniquely and often peers into. He is of course “capable of becoming a blue-purple smoke and then he’s gone! They say the Jew has great powers. That is what they always say for sure. Power to steal and to heal, with mere words.” 

They say “the Jew always appears in a green suit, in a pop and puff and mystical whiff of blue-purple smoke. Out of nowhere!” And so has now in the dead of winter. Which in Beirut means one minute it is sunny beach weather, and the next a torrential down pour flooding the roads putting cars under water. The Jew sits in the middle of the room amid everybody’s tables, so everyone can see his face. And a little light goes on. 

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV  

“Now looking back, the first thing I should have done was walk into Monir’s on the Corniche, ask the manager for the owner, and tell him I fought with his son Monir during the Isis wars.” 

His son Monir Jr. and I were part of a special international tabor attached to the Iraqi Special Forces units in the battle of Mosul. We used to patch up the varying combatants and civilians blown apart in the crossfire. Stabilize them until they can get extracted 10 or 20 km away toward a distant field hospital. Usually NGO, WHO, or Shiite Hashidashabi Popular Mobilization Forces field hospitals. Unless we found the bruises under the right arm, from firing a Kalashnikov, and we’d know they were Isis and they’d be snatched off the operating table to be tortured, or summarily shot in the head and then dumped in the river.  Monir is Christian Lebanese; his family is Maronite. We used to spend our leave time in outer ring Erbil flirting with Iranian prostitutes but being too broke to pay for one. 

The salary for an internationalist volunteer in a tabor is $250 a month in faceless dinar, with unlimited Arnette or sometimes Gauloise cigarettes, three square Iraqi collective meals eating with your hands; and “a place at the table with Jesus” as Monir used to say.  

Now any friend of Monir the Jr. was a friend for the life of Monir the Senior, but I never even opened my mouth in Monir’s except to ask for a menu and order some seafood stew. And a Coke, but there is only Pepsi in Lebanon! Any idiot knows that. Why was the Jew making such culturally insensitive rookie mistakes? Maybe he is nervous? Maybe it’s just performance anxiety? 

You can tell the coming weather of winter by the appearance of the Jew. Is he being rushed by something? Why does he order a Coke, there’s no Coke in Lebanon. Does he make a war fellow embrace Monir Jr, working in the Kitchen? Is he in the Kitchen in this reality? Is Monir still studying in Australia? Does he sit with a stranger inviting him for a smoke? Does he sit on the right with Hamas or the left with Hezbollah? Is he going to get kidnapped and cut into lots of little pieces? 

HAMAS MEN  

“Gotta get a good look at his face to tell the coming weather.” 

So, when the Jew sits down, they turn on a little light. Not too bright. Because the Jew comes to Beirut every single year and he may have evolved. How much blue smoke? What kind of shoes? What makes this new green suit? Is he dressed like PKK again? What’s PKK again? The Kurdish resistance of Qandil; the Kurdistan Workers Party that trained him. Well, it looks like it was rushed and sloppy training if you ask the Party of God. 

This year, in 2024; at least most agree to that. The Jew doesn’t make small talk or reunion with Monir Senior. Shockingly he seems to ignore everything. Who is or isn’t even at the restaurant? The Jew doesn’t seem to care about establishing the human connection. He seems rushed, and they all agree. In the Middle East only a foreigner is ever rushed. 

“The Jew of Beirut is out of season.” No one even knew he was coming this, Winter. No one even suspected it. He asks for a cigarette from a patron who obliges him. A neutral. He doesn’t make eye contact with the Hamas men, or the Hezbollah men. “My son is an electrical engineer in Massachusetts,” says the man he bummed the original smoke from, “We love you Americans.” “You being here makes me feel safer!” 

The Jew nods. He is a little American. So, they can love him a little. I suppose in some round about logic if shit were about to hit the fan, if the invasion was immanent an American wouldn’t be out for lunch on the Corniche. 

ADONAEV  

What I do now is very important, but mostly only to me. No one is really watching me as closely as me. They’re all watching me order a so-called Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t even exist. Watching me ignore the manager and owner, no entitlements. No attachments. No OUTS, and also no INS. I have never been here before. But maybe I have. Retrace your steps. Don’t let her down again. Don’t let your Vice President Yaelle D’Arrigo down, or your little secretary Karessa Abe who you are claiming you love so much. Or at least using it as an acid test for your own alleged morality. 

“They teach you in suicide intervention prevention training that offering an imbibing a glass of cold water is grounding; it’s a break in the tension.” 

No one brings him any water. In the New York Grad cultural context that’s a sign you’re not welcome here. Not out of disrespect, but because it might influence his very next move. Might change the weather. No one moves any time faster than in pure Middle Eastern time; slower than slow as hell at all times like you live in a desert. Until something explodes? Or does graciousness take over?  

The patron families don’t stare, they ignore him completely. But the Hamas men stare. How does he know they are Hamas men? The vibe is the vibe is the vibe. Hamas men have better suits than the men at the Hezbollah table. And why are these factions both at Monir’s? Because Israelis are about to invade Lebanon; it’s going to start World War Three. This will happen any minute, any hour now, or at least by the end of the week. 

YELIZAVETA ALEKSANDROVNA KOTLYAROVA   

(Inside his head) 

“Show them you’re not afraid to live or to die for me!”  

ADONAEV  

What I do now is particularly important. They are all watching me order a Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t exist. They only have Pepsi in Lebanon. An American tourist, out of season. It is near wartime. Hamas means Resistance shortened to Zeal and Hezbollah means Party of God. 

HAMAS MEN  

“The Americans pay for the Zionist war so he should die, in my humble opinion,” says one. 

“But maybe he could make a good hostage?” another one suggests. 

“Most of the ones under Gaza are already dead!” 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“This is a funny scenario, almost a little obscene. We were here to talk to Hamas. What’s this Jew doing here, who does he work for. What interests are served by him being here. B for Bravery, but also a highly incorrect approach to doing any real negotiating.” 

“They think they own the whole world,” one says.  

“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-MR.-AMERICAN?” one asks him in loud English. And so, he takes one. Nods a thank you/Shokran, and he does a heart-tap-to-salute. The heart tap salute he learned from the Kurds, both hands to the heart, and a left-handed salute showing modesty, and gratitude together. 

HAMAS MEN  

“You used to be able to tell the weather by the running of the Jew, but it’s very very sunny right now.”  

“Like summer in December!”  

“Lure him out to the back somehow?”  

“Hit him in the head?” 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“This is not funny.”  

“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-AMERICAN?” one asks him again in English. He takes another one. He then offers them his business card in gold and brown leaf. It says GCC which stands for ‘General Coordinating Committee’. Coordinating what, and for whom? 

“Who trained this person?” 

“No one trained him.” 

“Why is he really here then? Why at this time?” 

“To negotiate off channels?” 

“No, he’s nobody. Nobody is protecting him he’s here wide out in the open.”  

“Leave it all alone.” 

The Jew of Beirut didn’t appear in blue purple smoke, poof! He did not have on such bad shoes, but they were bad for walking twenty kilometers on the Corniche from Christian Achrafieh out here. “Clarkes he prefers.” Chafing his heels. His suit is like a green PKK officer if they had officers, which they do not, just comrade friends. Just a hundred thousand friends in the hills with Kalashnikovs. 

HEZBOLLAH MEN  

“I think you should take leave Mr. American. No one stocks Coke-A-Cola here.” 

HAMAS MEN  

“They’re cock blocking us, again. Fucking Shiites.” 

The Hezbollah men nod, and the Jew gets up and leaves the place. Not having done more than smoke 3 cigarettes and washed his hands. No one in Hezbollah has any interest in a dead American right now. No one in Hezbollah has an interest in a dead American ever. The Jew leaves his card with the two tables of so-called terrorists. Maybe it’s all confabulation and he’s not leaving a card with anyone besides some middle-aged Lebanese tough guys in a famous seafood cafe that real terrorists wouldn’t be in anyways. Pure confabulation, real rooky moves.  

YELIZAVETA  

“This isn’t a movie. You’re gonna get your fucking Jew fingernails pulled out,” Yelizaveta tells him. Then, the Jew takes leave but turns hard right and keeps walking, down the Corniche southbound, walking and walking toward the Shi’a control zone. 

Retrace your steps. Walk to the end of the Boardwalk where the Ferris wheels are. When you see them, it should start to look familiar. Like when we were at the AUB in the 70’s. You will find me in the Shatila Refugee camp. I will stop time for you. 

*** 

So, he walks the Corniche until he comes to a place where it looks like the people are sealed inside. There he can see heavy duty checkpoints with armed guards and barbed wire and soviet looking block housing. But Yelizaveta or no Yelizaveta he can’t just blag his way inside and this was his first day back in Beirut. You can’t get into a Palestinian Refugee camp kind of state of mind on your very first day back in Beirut. It’s pushy, even for a Jew from New York. The Jew of Beirut is only pushy when it comes to life-or-death situations. And those are right around the corner to be sure. 

*** 

Kaveh Ashuri is burly, Assyrian, Iranian, Persian, American. He gets into town before Yosef Bashir because he wants to see an old intractable flame. He wants to enjoy the city for a couple days before they get to work, even if he has to stop time.  

So, he stops time. 

The sun dips below the horizon, painting the sky in hues of fiery orange and soft lilac, signaling the awakening of Beirut’s vibrant nightlife. In the heart of the city, where the ancient metropolis melded seamlessly with modernity, lay a labyrinth of narrow streets and bustling boulevards that came alive after dark. It was a city where time seemed to blur, and the past whispered through the cracks of its ancient walls, intertwining with the pulsating energy of the present. 

Open mic night for stringed instruments. 

Amidst the maze of alleys and cobblestone paths, nestled a quaint café, its walls adorned with eclectic graffiti and flickering lanterns casting a warm glow. The scent of freshly brewed coffee mingled with the sweet aroma of shisha smoke, creating an intoxicating ambiance that drew in locals and wanderers alike. At a corner table, bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, sat Anya Layla Noori, her dark curls cascading over her shoulders as she sipped on a cup of rich Arabic coffee. Her eyes, the color of warm honey, sparkled with a mixture of excitement and anticipation as she awaited her rendezvous with destiny. Across the room, amidst a lively group of patrons, stood Kaveh Ashuri, posing as a musician with fingers that danced effortlessly across the strings of his oud. His soulful melodies filled the air, weaving a tapestry of enchantment that transported the listeners to distant lands and forgotten dreams. 

As the night wore on, Beirut revealed its true essence, a melting pot of cultures and traditions, where East met West and ancient metropolises embraced the modern world. Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and expatriates from every corner of the globe mingled effortlessly, their laughter and chatter blending into a symphony of harmony. In the midst of this vibrant tapestry, Layla’s eyes met Kaveh’s across the crowded room, and in that fleeting moment, time stood still. It was as if the universe conspired to bring them together, two souls destined to collide amidst the chaos of Beirut’s nocturnal embrace. 

With a shy smile, Kaveh made his way towards Layla, his heart pounding with anticipation. In her presence, he felt a sense of belonging, as if he had finally found the missing piece of his soul amidst the cacophony of the city. Their conversation flows effortlessly, as they exchange stories of their lives, their dreams, and their deepest desires. In each other’s presence, they found solace and understanding, a connection that transcended language and culture. 

As the night drew to a close, Kaveh took Layla’s hand in his own, his eyes searching hers for a flicker of doubt. But in the depths of her gaze, he found only certainty, a silent promise of a future yet to unfold. Together, they ventured out into the streets of Beirut, their footsteps echoing against the ancient walls as they embraced the magic of the night. In this city of contradictions and complexities, they found love, a beacon of light amidst the darkness, illuminating their path towards an uncertain yet exhilarating future. 

0

MEC-A1-S3

S C E N E (III)  

 ירושלים القدس 

“YERUSHALAIIM” “JERUSALEM,” “AL QUDS,”  

STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001ce 

***  

MAYA SORIEYA EMMA SOLOMON ROSE 

“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.” 

I went on another day trip to Be’er Sheva in the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.  

None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in, or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes an odd black pictograph you had never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking and they put you on to our righteous revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein making rounds with his old friend Hadas.  

Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.  

The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugav storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon. 

But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the Manasseh Command. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.   

We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements. 

We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi art students at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters up in Galilee we called the Asher Command. 

There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot.  In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.  

“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.” 

There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.   

“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.  

This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites. 

Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City.  Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows and called it the KDAA, some made up word surely of Zach’s creation. 

You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”.  And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped to think which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long. 

On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend Canadian Dave. We took our time eating. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the holiest of holies. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag. 

“Fuck,” he mutters. 

“What is it?” 

“I’m all out of art.”  

Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a B O O M !  And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sell Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s the smoke, there’s the screams of the injured, the sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews. B O O M ! 

The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad immediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:  

“I ain’t gonna be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence. Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. 

She showed me that summer not just to go underground and become invisible to our enemies, she taught me how to breathe underwater and time. 

0

MEC-A1-S2

S C E N E (II)  

نيويوركغراد 

                             NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2025ce 

*** 

It all happens amazingly fast. As though a great deal of preparation and training has gone into it. Women and children are separated as quickly as possible and pushed outside. Soon, diplomats and various second tier world leaders are being zip tied, then wrapped in booby trapped explosives that look like Christmas lights. 

There were many screams and protestations at first, then only whimpering and begging to be released. Amidst the vibrant lights and bustling energy of the Millenium Theatre, a hostage crisis unfolded, shattering the illusion of entertainment, and plunging the venue into chaos. The assailants, masked with flickering faces, and heavily armed, stormed the premises during a sold-out performance, catching both audience members and staff completely off guard. Panic swept through the theater as screams pierced the air and confusion reigned. A diplomat is pistol whipped. A few warning shots go off. The hostages were tied together into bundles. Anyone that spoke was hit in the face. 

As the situation escalated, law enforcement swiftly mobilized, surrounding the theater and the NYPD is attempting to initiate negotiations with the perpetrators.  

A female terrorist with brown hair tied off in a bun; she passes demands out the barricaded entrance door. They are then released in a video. “WE ARE HOLDING OVER 800 INTERNATIONAL HOSTAGES. ALL ADULT MALE UN STAFF, POLITICIANS, ELITES AND VARIOUS CELEBRITIES.  In one hour, we will begin executing UN personnel beginning with European countries unless the NYPD withdraw completely in a five-block radius. There are explosives attached to the hostages and all over the building. ANY GAS, ANY RAID, WE WILL BLOW EVERYTHING UP.”  

Inside, tension hung thick, each passing moment fraught with uncertainty and fear. The hostages, trapped in a nightmare of uncertainty, clung to hope, their fates hanging in the balance. Some that tried to make speeches were beaten. Their mouths taped. 

Outside, a tense standoff ensued, with ERU teams poised for action and negotiators working tirelessly to secure the safe release of the hostages. Time seems to stretch endlessly as the world holds its breath, waiting for a resolution to the harrowing ordeal. So many powerful people taken hostage, so many celebrities. 

Amidst the chaos, stories emerged as individuals within the theater huddled together, offering comfort and support to one another in the face of danger. Families anxiously awaited news of their loved ones, their hearts heavy with dread yet buoyed by the glimmer of hope. “They’re communicating in Kurdish,” someone whispers. “What do they want,” someone else whispers. 

A second communique was put out on video, but a terrorist claiming to be “Emma”. Delivered in English with Hebrew and Arabic subtitles:  

WE WILL EXECUTE A HOSTAGE EVERY HALF HOUR UNLESS ISRAEL OPENS ITS NORTHERN BORDER TO THE REFUGEES, ENTERS A CEASFIRE IN GAZA, AND ALLOWS PALESTINIAN MIGRATION DOWN TO THE 32-degree LATITUDINAL LINE. ANY ATTEMPT TO RETAKE THE THEATRE WILL RESULT IN A DETONATION OF EXPLOSIVES THROUGHOUT. 

Eventually, after 72 hours of tense negotiations, the crisis reached its bloody conclusion. Through the combined efforts of law enforcement and skilled negotiators, the hostages were not freed, but their ordeal ended. The NYPD began filling the Theatre with odorless gas. 

At some point shots were exchanged. A raid began. Soon after a series of explosions which killed all the hostages and at least twenty of the terrorists. When the gas, dust, ash, and debris settled, the media circus began, but everyone was dead, or mostly dead. 

The standoff in Gaza and Northern Israel, Southern Lebanon Border was utterly unchanged, unaffected. 

“Though scars, both physical and emotional, will linger, the resilience of the human spirit prevailed, offering a beacon of hope in the aftermath of such a tragedy.” 

The Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis was after 9.11, the second largest terror attack on US soil. Who it killed was a veritable who is who of diplomatic personnel and lesser world leaders. It was claimed all the terrorists died, but that is not true at all. Two survived, and both are today Israelite passport holders. In the words of the Western Media, this bloody debacle was called the “Millenium Theatre Hostage Crisis,” but in the papers of the Arab street; “the Newyorkgrad Christmas Massacre.” Terror on U.S. soil over foreign policy decisions being made in the Middle East. 

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑