At the Green Village Outpost contact line our tabor is told to dig in. So, for a few days we helped sandbag and fortify what appears like the accommodations of long fled oil workers. Something green and modern looking in the bleak oil lands of Der Ez Zor province. Oasis in the Wastelands north of the Euphrates. The Turkish Army is coming.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips.” Late into the long trips home. I have no home; it was your home only. Only my ugly little flats around the Brooklyn Soviet. Rented in desperation, vulnerability, an admission of poverty. And I will never go back to that humiliating life. I will never see you again, or see Russia, or Cuba, or Mehanata or any other type of slavery life. Your lips and whispers are still lingering Goldy. It forever remains.
Now deployed about ten days ago to the Southern front near Omar Fields. Daesh is nearly finished they say. Assigned first to Tabor Shihad Lawrence, five quickly died by snipers and mines in the first night of the operation.
The twenty international volunteers are all drifting in different directions. They prefer we not all die at the same time. There are supposedly around 500 international fighters in Rojava, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, also Türkiye. But numbers and time to the Kurds mean absolutely nothing. So maybe there are 500, or maybe just 50. Who knows Heval, who knows!
“Daesh is nearly defeated.” The Islamic State once size of Great Britain at its maximal, poised to take Baghdad and Damascus is reduced to the wastelands of the deep desert and a strong of indefensible towns along the Euphrates River southeast. From the North the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the Western Coalition advance. We are part of that force. On the other side of the Euphrates the Russian Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Syrian Army advance. We all try and not shoot at each other, at least until ISIS is finished. Over the border in Iraq ISIS has been largely crushed; the Shi’a Popular Mobilization Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Pasdaran, and Western advisors and Special forces have all but driven ISIS from Iraq to the Syrian border.
The name I have been given is Heval Kawa Zivistan which means “Comrade Black Smith Winter.” I am a Paramedic in civilian life and therefore one of the highest medically trained foreigners in the brigade. Heval Shoresh from Brooklyn, I have known him since childhood. He has a child back in America. And I judge him for being here were it my right to judge. But this palace and this revolution is irresistible to us both. He is a gardener back home. Here he carries a heavy-duty long-range, high-power rifle called a Dastun which is about twice his size. Hard to aim.
There is Heval Sasson from Austria. He was an EMT who once travelled with his girlfriend all over Africa on a motorcycle. He is quiet, ideological, principled and socialist in disposition. With also is Scottish Heval Ciya a former British solider. Also, the mad man possible career criminal kicked out of the French foreign Legion called Heval Sivan, who although he claims he was also a British solider can’t hit a target with an AK to save his reputation. He hasn’t let up for many days talking about the Order of the Knights Templar, talking about the Knights of Malta; actually, engaged in an unending pressure of speech manic diatribe about the new crusades, that we are allegedly in. There’s also Heval Azad from Albania, something of a gypsy, a bespeckeld intellectual; an anarchist of course.
There is also a French Legionnaire of enormous size, almost a giant. He is called Heval Gabar and speaks only of the Legion, reveals nothing of his life. He isn’t very well liked by the other internationals. There is also a young kid who looks not more than 16 but is allegedly 18 his name is Max. One of the few held back in the Academy because of minor injury. He is dubbed “Heval Maslum”, but everyone just calls him Max. And that is how he introduces himself. He’s allegedly from Salem, Oregon. No matter what sems to happen he just repeats, “I don’t care.”
After the 5 Arab conscripts were blown apart the first night, they broke the internationals nto smaller groupings. Ciya and Sivan were sent to a YPG Cadro Tabor based on being British military they were sent to the front. Soresh, Maslum, Gabar were merged into an Arab unit and sent to the front. Sasson and I were attached to Kurdish Red Crescent outpost in the Naqta in Omar Fields. Gabar and Maslum dubbed “pizkereks” or problem makers were sent to guard a fox hole on the edge of some useless “liberated village”. No one knew where Heval Azad was sent, but Albanians are very tough crafty bunker people.
“He will turn up and be just fine!” Heval Sasson says, ever an Austrian optimist. “But he just as easily could have stepped on a mine and blown off a leg or been hit by sniper bullet.
***
Then night came and Sasson and I were quartered in a farmhouse. The commander invited us over to the field command for tea. The mood was the war with Daesh was almost over and very soon we would all be fighting Turkey in the north and or Assads forces right over the river.
The Commander is named Heval Azadi. They basically cycle out the same 50 Kurdish code names for everyone seems like. The commander in very broken English invites us for black Tea in one of the many pillow rooms they like to build.
“Trump say, no more guns for YPG,” he tells us the SDF is the brand the YPG uses to appear more inclusive, a little less Apoist, a little more not the PKK, but the commanders almost always say YPG or PKK, there’s a lot of little acronyms for small armies out here. The YPG, or the People’s Defense Forces make up 80% of the SDF; the Syrian Democratic Forces. All the best commanders are Turkish Kurd PKK trained.
“Daesh done in Iraq. Two towns left,” Azadi tells us.
“24 little Gundes to take along the river,” he says. A Gunde is a village.
“In Moscow, the PKK make a deal with regime,” he says, regime meaning Assad and Syrian Army, “Iran, regime, Russian make deal on autonomy and oil rights.”
We are engaged in an operation to seize Syria’s oil fields, Sasson had explained. There were not many ISIS fighters left after Mosul and Raqqah fell. This is all now about who can take as many oil fields as possible to negotiate the final settlements. This seems to discourage Heval Sasson.
“Really all that is left now, “says Commander, “NUSRA Front and HDS in Idlib.”
“Al Qaeda’s Syrian brand,” Sasson tells me.
“The PKK make a deal in Moscow; we will end making terms with Assad. The HDS, the Nusra, the Deash all the Islamist proxies in Idlib, Bab and Jarabulus City they must be eliminated to close the gap.”
“Closing-the-Gap” we learned in the Academy was about pushing through the Islamists into Turkish Hatay Province to gain sea access for Rojava. The Gap also being closing the lines between Afrin and Kobane. Afrin Canton is hard to resupply and will be the first thing the Turks attack.
“As soon as Deash war is over Turkey will attack, you will fight with Turkey?” They all wanted to know that. Would we all stay and fight the second biggest army in Nato.
“Of course we will,” Kawa claims, but Sasson knows suicide is also problematic when they return to their homelands. In fact, it is well known that many of the prior volunteers, of which there were only maybe two thousand over the past ten years; they didn’t adjust well here or there. But this was an antidote. Some did multiple tours, others died in other foreign lands for lesser causes.
“When Daesh is done there will be no ceasefire. Turkey will attack immediately. 45% of call Syria now in Rojava. In SDF hands. Turkey will waste no time,” says Heval Baran from Germany. Baran had set out to join the PKK, but after 6 months on the mountain they sent him to the YPG. The Germans apparently are the best suited of the internationals to adjust to Kadro life, but Baran said simply; “I don;t really want to give up women.” The life of a Kadro is one without any material things, no attachments, not sex no marriage. Life of total dedication to the struggle.
We all speculated about “Fighting the Turks near Afrin” while in the Academy. It will be slaughtered. A cadro boasts that “We have peace deals with USA and with Russia maybe also China!” But the dependency on the U.S. airpower is real.
“The Regime will not ever accept Rojava in any form, it is just too weak to defeat it right now.”
“Russia will never abandon the regime,” someone says in Kurdish.
“It is like America and Israel; you have Syria and Russia. The Regime gives Russian Mediterranean Seaport access, the Regime is only alive because of Russia and Iran.”
“There are many factors. Russian is loyal, America is not. When Daesh is over there will be no more guns, no more air support.”
“How many Western volunteers do you think are still in Rojava,” Sasson asks the commander.
“40, maybe even much less,” the Commander says. “50,000 came to fight for Daesh, maybe over time 2,000 came to help the SDF. 1,500 leftists from Turkey and 500 from the West. Now, in country still, 50 maybe.” “The airports in Erbil and Slemani are still shut down because of the independence referendum. For now, you are here to stay. Who knows what will happen. PJAK is now fighting in Iran again. Maybe soon more fighting between Iraqi Army and Pesh Merga. And Turkey! They are coming trust me heval.”
Goldy wrote that she might have to marry her rich ugly patron. Polina wrote she is leaving me since I am “on the other side of the planet now” Chanie is “back with Charlie”, so probably I will never hear from her again. Anya Noori, my attaché, sent me some news from Baghdad. “They are arresting Western volunteers without good paperwork coming back from Rojava. Slemani and Erbil airports are down everyone must go out from Baghdad.” But I have good paperwork. I called my parents the other day. An Arab had sold me a Syrian SIM card. They seem proud that I am there. I hope I can hold it together and reach ‘the mountaintop.’ There, if I am open-minded, I will finally understand the truth; into its innermost parts.
Like in my dreams, the EMT Program of Kurdistan is just a means to an end. And after thought, the G.C.C. is barely useful or functional any more out here. My so-called partners Andrew, Forti, Jessica, Matthew Smith, Ovid all have defected and left me out here with no help. Can I count on David Smith, Kaveh, Jonah, or Dr. Wagner, probably not or only for a little.
Everything here is an assault on my senses! Daily, I must learn ideology, discipline, war, Arabic, Kurmanji, keep Sasson and I from stepping on mines, dying in airstrikes, getting enough water. Sasson has said he is willing to help me run the EMT program if only we can get authorization to do so. The Kurds do not believe in time, they do not believe in space, and they do not believe in relying on foreigners. They do seem to believe concurrently in American led coalition airpower.
The others we trained with, the twenty, are all dispersed to different positions. Ten to Afrin and ten to Der Ez Zore. They must choose their own adventures in Rojava. I do hope that Soresh stays alive for the sake of his 6-year-old child and young wife. Ciya and Sasson signed the G.C.C. paperwork, the cover contracts that they will claim later to the government of Austria and Scottland that when they did out here was purely medical. But it’s not so much will they stay 6 months to train in an EMT program it’s more will the war ever actually end to allow the time and space to justify one.
It’s impossible to know how far up the mountain any of us will really ever go. Heval Barron was there almost a year. The German heval said little good or bad about it, he barely said much.
So many ways to die out here. We or most of the 2,000, or 500, or 50 shared a noble goal. Defeat Daesh, defend the Revolution in Rojava. In the meantime, Sasson and I have been training Arab fighters in life saving skills. We try and stay sane. I am sure I will have to use this AK-47 before this is all over. The thought does not bother me, but I do not delight in the thought of any killing.
Today, a villager “gundi” handed me their sick infant and I listened to its lungs and heart, and helped prepare some Pedialyte mix. The child was sick but dehydrated and stable, the Arab comrades keep telling people an American doctor is in the camp. But even in Syria I am still just a a paramedic not a doctor at all.
So much responsibility is on my shoulders. They all have varying medical issues. Infected toes, rotting death, abdominal pains. I do what I can. The Party purchased me a huge rolling duffle bag of medications and medical supplies. So, we stay as busy as we can.
I daydream, and hope Goldy thinks about me more than sometimes, but probably only Chanie does when she is allowed to. Goldy sometimes WhatsApp’s me cute photos and sometimes Anya, the attaché flirts from Baghdad. I have been sending Chanie letters via the U.S. Special Forces were run into coming through the camps.
I realize that G-d or no G-d, Abdullah Ocalan is writing about a universal truth. This is the last stand. The last chance we will ever have or get again.
“Deash is all wiped out,” the Commander repeats, “BUT THE TURKISH ARMY IS COMING FOR SURE. To burn all we have built to the ground,” he sighs, “Serkaften, we will fight them too!”
We all probably have a lot more bleeding left to do no matter what happens.
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 begin to show.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
I am told it is very green up north in the shade of Mt. Tabor. I am told its 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 come-on-in-sin. 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 of 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 JezreelValley. 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 up 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 my 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 stunk of booze for a week. The Russians saw to that.
***
The girls on the kibbutz are all about 12 years old or younger. So, I settled 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 sixty’s leftist and 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 had been 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 to ignore them would be impossible.
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.”
TheHezbollah 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.
Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
HEVAL CHIYA19
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland.
As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah20, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh21were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate.
Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river.
“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim22commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish23 or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh24, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros25being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil26 probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”
Those three and letter affiliations, they do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.
How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
El Al flight 510 touches down at Lod International Airport on May 9, 2001, at exactly 15:04 Israeli time. Which is usually on time, but then makes you wait a long time. After someone is inevitably rude to you. The passengers on the plane start clapping as the wheels hit the tarmac. Many of the passengers are evidently very happy to be home, and happier still that the Palestinians didn’t manage to hijack or ‘explode’ the plane. Someone whispers that things had gotten much worse in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. There had been two bombings the week before. The second Palestinian Intifada has blown the top off the kettle.
“Welcome to Israel,” the flight attendant tells us. She gives the date, time, and weather in Hebrew and then repeats it in thickly accented English, and then once again in Arabic, which is the second national language. English lettering is below all the Hebrew/Arabic signs because America foots the bill around here.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We descend onto the tarmac from the hatchway in the back of the plane. I have an urge to bend down and kiss the ground, but I do not. It is not very dignified something tells me, a voice inside that once had a name. It is brutally hot. I am wearing my kosher, blue pinstripe suit. I am glad I left my Kashmir trench coat in Spain. I stop for a moment and cover my eyes, lowering my head.
“Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohanynu, Adonai EhHad.” This is the only prayer I can remember that would make any sense on this occasion. Also, the only prayer I remember at all.
The revolution had failed me completely. But I knew I had also failed it. I had been misguided. The staunch atheism that the Family School had instilled in me for a time seemed to have been shattered by my last three weeks in Golder’s Green. Rabbi Tatz had opened a door for me only to have it slammed in my face when Rabbi Gabi declared that I wasn’t’ a real Jew. As I stared out the open window of the cab I saw the green fields of my people’s land blooming, highways filled with compact cars, and new buildings being erected everywhere. I was home and ready. Babylon was behind me. There was no longer a need to struggle needlessly. Believing in things that can never possibly exist.
***
All of Tel Aviv is bouncing off the walls. The streets are filled with loud and pushy people. There are beautiful women with olive skin and manly guys with tight t-shirts and jeans. They are all drunk or on the way down that road. Everyone has a gun and a flag. It is Israeli Independence Day and Israel had just won the basketball championship against all of Europe. I have never seen so many beautiful girls in my life. Tel Aviv was wild and free like New York on a beach. They may have driven us into the sea with gas and bullets in Europe but now we struck back with basketball and, well really fucking attractive women. The basketball win is a little hard to believe, but it made me happy we were winning where eevr we could win. The racist in me asserted that Ethiopians had been put in charge of the team. Some girl told me they had just recruited a bunch of American Blacks. Even better.
I check into a hostel on Kikar Dizengoff or DizengoffSquare. An elevated platform supported a white sculpture fountain with interlocking-colored disks in the middle of the square. It was like a Union Square of the Middle East with more junkies and less skaters. The hostel smelled like radio deodorant-free Europe. I was in a coed dorm room with twelve bunk beds. My bunkmates were mostly South Africans. Afrikaans is the ugliest language I have ever heard. I changed out of my suit, showered, and decided to go exploring. I grabbed a street map from the front desk and wandered out into the bustling, raucous Ben Yehuda Street, which I hoped would lead to the beach.
There was a rally going on in the square for the union which controlled Egged Buses, one of the two major government-owned lines. Groups of teenagers were spending time together and drinking in public, which I am told is legal here. A group of Russian punks gave me some unbelievably cheap vodka and I slammed it back. I drew them a picture of a punk with a shotgun mashing. They gave me more vodka but did not speak a word of English. There was a large movie theatre on a corner of the square. What looks like a huge and shady motel occupied another corner under a huge red neon sign that says KDA. Hebrew is spoken everywhere or Russian. I am enthralled and overwhelmed. It is almost too much to take in. The signs and language keep reminding me the land is ours. The cute girls with stacks of party flyers remind me that it’s not just another Friday night; it’s the biggest party night of the year.
Eventually I wound my way down to the beach. It’s an endless strip of mini skyscrapers, hotels highway and the boardwalk, called the tiyeled. Itis the land of see-and-be-seen, play-and-get-hustled, hoot, holler and dance. Little wooden pergolas and stone benches run miles in either direction. It’s on the coast of the Mediterranean, but it’s more like Vegas than Nice. Everything is all lit up in a hundred shades of red or blue and there is live music being performed on mini stages along the way, mostly salsa and house music. I stand below a huge white terraced structure called the Opera Tower and look down at the main strip from Hof Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Beach. Some came to the Holy Land for that broken down wall locked up in the mountains, but I like my pilgrimages to end by the beach with a cocktail. Cars fly by with Israeli flags flapping out the windows. The occupants are yelling on the top of their lungs blasting Arabic sounding music from their vehicles. Everybody keeps offering me shots. Every crew and their Russian girl friends have multiple bottles of vodka and hookah set up for the fireworks show about to light up the beach.
As I walked further down the boardwalk, halfway to drunk by now, I encountered every manner of hustler, hawker, pusher, and thief. Children selling flashy neon toys. Eastern European émigrés hustling the tourists at games of three-card Monty lured in by a cute Romanian girl that keeps winning and might just be the dealer’s lady. Tables set up selling trinkets, selling temporary tattoos, selling smokes, selling girls who sell the smokes and not a single street artist in sight. Or copper for that matter. I decided not to set up tonight. It’s the Shabbos on top of Independence Day and Victory over Europe. Rabbi Tatz said I would learn to carry out the mitzvahs gradually. But then Rabbi Gabbi said I wasn’t a Jew, so why I kept referencing those Jews of the Green was beyond me. The Israeli government counts you as a Jew if a single grandparent was Jewish. This is surely better odds than having a halachically-converted Jewish mother.
I hear a South African saying that it was good they let these not quite Jewish Ruskies in because with the uprising going on in, it was unwise to let the Palestinians cross the green line to work like dogs in all the jobs the Jews don’t want. Half the Russians I was drinking with had gold crucifixes come to think of it. Guess they had a Jewish grandparent before Communism made them Orthodox Christians or whatever-the-hell they are.
I’m happy to be reunited with my Noblisse cigarettes. I remembered hoping they came in menthol when I first found them in the ubiquitous cigarette machines. They aren’t that bad for smoke which cost six shekels. That’s just over $1.50. Thank G-d for no more TOP rollies. These are Israel’s general-purpose cigarettes. They are the cheapest cigarettes you can buy when you’re poor. They are also smoked by the kibbutzniks, because if you live on kibbutz, you’re inherently poor. The Russians don’t smoke them. They smoke something only a little better called L & M, which feels more like a cheap Marlboro Light.
With my sketchpad and accented-English flying, I befriend a Russian named Roman along with his car, his bottle of Russian Standard, and his three lady friends. I take off in this former Soviet stranger’s car, a Roman who “knows where the nature party is up country”. At a good party you can forget about everything. So, I ended up staying in Tel Aviv in the arms of a wild little Russian sweet thing named Anya for nearly a week before I ended up making moves north.
“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 ManassehCommand. 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 artstudents 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.
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.
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He, employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has a loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots, are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG12. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Easten-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in some handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his new Vice President and his voice of reason and constraint. Her role as acting President while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and Sicilian Puerto Rican EMT Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, and he trusts her. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making pour team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are gonna throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” says Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the eyes of G-d.
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He, employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has a loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots, are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG12. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Easten-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in some handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his new Vice President and his voice of reason and constraint. Her role as acting President while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and Sicilian Puerto Rican EMT Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, and he trusts her. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making pour team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are gonna throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” says Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the eyes of G-d.
If I ever see her again, this is what I would say;
“We are all very old peoples that never forget.”
We all laugh, we love, and we dance in circles with our comrades. We have many types of language and customs, and many of these customs have been subsumed, or evolved, or were maintained with the zeal and blood of the martyrs.
It is not in our interests to keep fighting even if we have no will to make peace. For we have no ability or actual willingness to destroy each other. So, we must find a way to live on our hugely different terms.
For thousands of years our people gathered at the crossroads of the world. Or were born here in the shifting sands. We traded, we intermarried, we made alliances, we raided, we fled, we made wars and also, we conquered, pillaged, assimilated, massacred, made total fitna. But none of our peoples have killed in the numbers we now kill with weapons from outside our sphere. Many tribes, many peoples are we who remember our ways and our customs back thousands of years. With our stiff necks and incredible stubbornness to relinquish our sense of identities or beliefs. We all live with memories and tribulations going back several thousand years.
This is a treatise co-written by the People of the Book, but also those that came before these books, and those that never believed in a religion. It is pieced together and translated differently by the Zoroastrians, and the Judeans; by the Persians, by Arabs, and Phoenicians, by the Kurds; by the Palestinians living as citizens in exile or in camps as refugees. By Assyrians and Druze, by Shi’a, by Sunni, by Orthodox and Latin Christians. By Yemenites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Sunni and Shi’a Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Alawites, and Georgians as well
All who wish to see peace and if not peace, separation, and long-term ceasefire. If not peace, if not understanding; then trade and normality. All the people in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow;
“Enough! Ceasefire.
Build our confidence apart.
“Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our ancestral lands or in those lands we are welcomed; let us confederate and defeat forever the meddling of outside nations that speak of peace, trade in arms, and reduce us to barbarism!”
“These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful peace. An end to all outside invasions.
If we cannot pray in the same ways or speak the same languages, this is no impediment to declare HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags, let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River.
***
None of us are pro-peace. We are pro-survival. Pro-stability.Pro-living our lives with dignity.
We are invested in the possibility that the birth of the Confederation will stop the flow of blood throughout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on extraordinarily little tangible evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what occurred down the Nile was progress. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science all emanate from our peoples and our lands.
The Ziggurats of the Neolithic age tell a story.
Civilization began with the creation of castes and the centralization of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor; chaining early humanity to useful trades; and the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all-powerful oligarchs, and eventually a cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, later still over since, and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjugation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopotamia. This book is not about insurrection or economic development. It is not a rejection of ethnic identity or the work of atheists. What is clear:
The status quo is not sustainable. It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has experienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody chaos existed a long time before that. In perpetuity for as long as we have ever known. Every nation is vulnerable, every nation is complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes or the competing interpretations of Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division, not the cause of it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its oligarchy, cast off its foreign domination, cast off its ethnic particularism, and embrace peace on its own terms.
It is not true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman erupted via Palestine or can be cured from there.
Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karbala, Najaf, Mecca, Medina, and Tehran are all guarded by the now-flailing American empire. Not all original sins of the region began with Crusaders, Ottomans, Zionists, meddling foreigners, and with our oil.
The truth is that any so-called peace process is little more than a short-term buy-off. Allowing the hegemon powers more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out.
Egypt, Jordan, and briefly the PLO were paid off to make peace. Now the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and soon even possibly Saudi Arabia are paid to stand down because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base. Just as the Russians use Syria and Iran. Of course, the Iranians and Israelis have their interests, and of course, they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidies, they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such adventuristic foreign policy.
It is also a wild deception that the Islamic State (ISIS) has its origins in any normal version of Islam. That its goals were divinely inspired and that its recent defeat brought an end to this type of Wahabi Salafist insurgency. ISIS was an entity controlled by, supplied by, and supported by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services.
It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of foreign powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of theocracy. In short, the road to an actual long-lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews again, or religious zeal and fundamentalism!
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West; NATO, Russian Federation, and rising China.
We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.
The academia, the media, and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because:
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi)
(b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelites: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also know a great deal about persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics similar to the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
Thus, an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye will be managed one by one.
The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 100 years. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
***
“Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation will be founded by peoples of nations not states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation is based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governedby religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation is based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation will conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict will be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation will pursue non-alignment.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this unit’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistanand Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb & Middle East since 1920. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has arrived.”
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael1which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna2. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something so much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah3 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary4. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance.
Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian5) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives6. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians7. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. The Three Parties of Kurdistan must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is a narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nations. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.
“We are going to use thin, durable, and yet fully understandable code.”
We are going to use metaphors inside allegories. We will fight on the low roads and high roads and from the mountains. We will not contradict myths or religious tenets; we will not offer up science as a new kind of positivist G-d. We are now at the crossroads. Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? “What could we accomplish if we knew you could not fail!” The world does not fit between a river and a sea.
Once upon a time, in a bustling city called Aley nestled between the mountains and the sea, there lived a storyteller named Nadia. She was known everywhere for her ability to weave tales that captivated the hearts and minds of all who listened. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars emerged in the night sky, people would gather around Nadia to hear her stories.
One evening, as Nadia sat beneath the ancient olive tree in the town square, a young girl approached her with a curious expression. “Tell me a story, please,” the girl pleaded, her eyes shining with anticipation. Nadia smiled warmly and beckoned the girl to sit beside her. “Of course, my Habibi. But first, let me tell you about the power of a single story. Before it is unleashed.”
With that, Nadia began to spin a tale unlike any other, a story of love and loss, of courage and redemption. As she spoke, the girl listened intently, hanging on to every word as if her very life depended on it. And when Nadia reached the end of the story, the girl sat in stunned silence, her heart deeply moved by the tale she had heard.
“That was just amazing,” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining with wonder. “I never knew that a story could have such power. Or that stories inside stories, inside stories even still exist!”
Nadia nodded, her own eyes twinkling with wisdom. “Indeed, my dear. A single story has the power to change hearts, to inspire minds, to bridge divides. It can lift us up in times of darkness and guide us along the path to enlightenment. But perhaps most importantly, a single story has the power to connect us to one another, to remind us of our shared humanity, and to unite us in our common journey through life.”
And so, as the stars shimmered overhead and the night air hummed with the magic of storytelling, Nadia and the young girl sat together beneath the olive tree, sharing tales of wonder and wisdom until the wee hours of the morning. And though they may have been just two voices in a world filled with billions, they knew in their hearts that the power of a single story could change the world.
***
Something about shards of manuscripts he had cobbled into something very grandiose sounding called “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation,” but that was not that subversive because talk of Confederalism was “very in now.” As the world was unraveling faster each day. In Lebanon, now that the economy did not exist and at least 5 of 18 ethnic confessions run their own ethnic cantons; namely the Maronites of Kataeb (Lebanese Forces), the Druze (Progressive Socialist Party), the Shi’a (under Hezbollah and a lesser way Amal), and the Sunni had their parties too. Hamas, Popular Front for the Future Movement, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Lion’s Den hid among the 12 camps of Palestinians, hiding in plain sight. No one wants anyone going out of the camps and attaching itself to the Sunni demographic. There has not been a census since 1932, but all suspect the Shi’a are getting bigger than the confessional allotment of the Taif Accords.
“We are all in need of something to believe,” an old song goes, “hope is a smoke.”
Now, the power of a single story told over a multi-course Lebanese meal in New Jersey convinced Souheil Tajer he was dealing with a genuine article. A person, Sebastian, who was obviously Lebanese in another life. And if not Lebanese in another life, someone who was an artistic soul. Writing something noble albeit something one might have to high on drugs to think was a viable plan.
But it was not a single story. It was two, or three, each of varying levels of non-authentication. It was two sentimental tales followed up by a powerful rhetorical device about the impossible. Or at least the possibility of impossible things breaking ground. Sneaking out of boats in the night. Turn the rifles into plow shears and art.
Sebastian confided in Souheil that growing up in kindergarten to 8th grade at the United Nations school his best boyhood to young adult friends were an Iranian named Gyve Safavi and a Maronite named Danny Czar. Thus, in comfort, he felt closer to the Shi’a and Maronites than he even did to his own people the Zionists, ehm, I mean Jews. Which were fully interchangeable words too many these days.
The second story was about 9 months that the Jew served as a medical volunteer, really a non-shooting fighter in Iraq and Syria during the Isis Wars. He had been at the fall of Mosul when they massacred the Isis forces, forced finally to surrender the second biggest City in Iraq after a Stalingrad-like siege. He had been there when Isis was mostly wiped out (before they regrouped thanks to the Saudis) in Hajin, Deir Ez Zor.
So even though Souheil told him “This is, consequently, one of the worst times you could have ever picked to go.” He had gotten his plane tickets just before the Palestinian pogrom of October 7th which took several hundred hostages and butchered 1,200-something civilians, then resulted in Israel committing the ongoing quite possibly “war crimes” that have blown apart about 30,000 and counting people in Gaza. Shows no sign of slowing down.
The two stories resonated but so did the energy of the 39-year-old Sebastian Adonaev. Souhail read over the draft introduction to Rise of the Middle East Confederation, and it stated as a multiplicity of Middle Eastern voices, found it sane, and honest.
SOUHEIL TAJER
“What is your interest in my country?”
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We all have an imagined identity. My white skin, my Hebrew cult half beliefs, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the three wars with Rome; to me are not history. They are my peoples lived and living connection to the soul and being of the Levant. And in that light, the national borders, the wars of states are arbitrary and serve only divisive violence. They serve only oligarchy and outsiders.
SOUHEIL
Quite a Zionist idea.
SEBASTIAN
Confederalist, not Zionist. Nothing about the Jewish historical experience allows us a free license to trample the rights of other peoples. To me the national borders are all arbitrary drawn by Ottomans and Sykes Picot. To me, the Turks and then the Europeans handpicked little groups to lord over fake states, little more than plantations, and now we see that all unraveling.
SOUHEIL
It has been unraveling faster each day since October 7th.
The Palestinians are a source of great controversy and only Hezbollah panders to them out of spite for the Zionists they exchange rocket fire with, as well as a history of pandering to them. Everyone wishes the Palestinians would just go away and now there are 1.5-2 million Syrian refugees to contend with. Syrian beggar children are everywhere. That is 4 refugees for every 1 citizen. You can get Syrian beggar gypsies on like every corner of the Muslim Ras Beirut.
What is your relationship to the Palestinians?
SEBASTIAN
Those are my cousins. They make convincing poets and above average terrorists. That said, I have never had Palestinians try and kill me, where my own people have worked overtime. I have never met a Palestinian that I could not wage a struggle with.
SOUHEIL
I would like you to spend a week in the Chouf and share some of these ideas with my Druze friends. He has a similar thinking to you. Perhaps a great collective unconscious has begun to bring the people of the region to new, better, saner ideas. Your collaboration might yield some interesting conversations. Perhaps, in our lifetimes, before a line is crossed, we may act on some of them. The Chouf is magic. The Druze, well you know the Druze have seen many things, they claim to come back.
SEBASTIAN
I would love to. Sounds very peaceful.
SOUHEIL
You wear so many interesting hats. Student of law, paramedic practitioner, and human rights champion. But, as a writer you must tread carefully if you are seeking to make useful writing for those that live in the Middle East; the hard part is not becoming an “Arabist,” as in seeing us from your own world view. It is almost impossible for you to be an “Orientalist,” seeing the world from our view. As an internationalist, with some useful skills, you are welcome in my country now or anytime, but not now is an unbelievably troubled time.
SEBASTIAN
I am not going to try and convince anyone of any kind of thinking or of new zealous beliefs. I assume the role of a polite guest. Conversationally, I do have some ideas. A fusion of human rights and Middle Eastern shall we say destiny.
SOUHEIL
But be a tourist for now. Tourism is going to bring you unique and exciting experiences, but I will give you some numbers of some old friends I think could help you, or at least provide interesting conversations. Just in case you run out of things to do. Or are in the general market for interesting conversations.
Souheil Tajer gives the Jew the phone numbers of several prominent Maronites, Druze, and Orthodox to help him if he gets in trouble. Though he suspects the Jew has slightly more subversive intention than mere tourism, it did not seem dangerous yet to aid and abet his augmented tourism. He was on both an extremely specific mission planned a decade before and was going to try and convince a lot of people of something very radical: that the Middle East could be confederated. That the Middle East could end the dominance of foreigners and embrace democratic autonomy.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 