LITMIR.BIZ

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to have friends everywhere. He said, ‘I want to have friends everywhere and no enemies.’

      I asked him if he had any enemies.

      He shrugged. ‘How can you tell? You don’t know who your enemy is. Someone can come smiling, saying, “I am your friend,” and then, when you’re not looking, he hits you in the back.’

      I asked a stupid question: ‘Are the Israelis your enemy?’

      ‘They are everyone’s enemy.’

      Samir had good reason to regard the Israelis as enemies. In the war he had been a driver for foreign journalists, which meant he was often in danger of being killed by the Israelis or their allies. However, Samir’s interest in enemies went much wider. On our travels I discovered that he favoured the conspiracy theory of history. He was sure that Princess Diana had died as a result of a conspiracy by the Israelis and the royal family who, on discovering that the Diana-Dodi romance had resulted in her pregnancy, had had her killed. He was equally sure that Monica Lewinsky had been instructed by international Jewry to bring down President Clinton.

      Over lunch in a garden in Balbek I gave Samir the benefit of my extensive knowledge of the royal family, garnered over the years that journalists have been asking me to comment on the latest events in the royal soap opera. I am a firm believer in the ‘cock-up’ theory of history rather than the conspiracy theory. I know that people conspire together, but I also know that stupidity usually triumphs. I assured Samir that Diana’s death was an accident, a result of the belief which many drinkers hold – that they drive better when they are drunk. Samir was completely unconvinced. He knew for certain that it was a conspiracy between the royal family and the Israelis to bring down not merely Diana but Dodi and thus strike at Dodi’s father, Mohammed al Fayed. I could see from his expression that he thought I was very naïve.

      I should have remembered Robert Fisk and The Plot, and held my breath. Anyone who wants to try to understand why Lebanon, once a rich and flourishing country, is now in a state where a long, vicious war has ended but peace has not been made must read Robert Fisk’s Pity the Poor Nation. Of Lebanon after the war he wrote,

      The events of the 1975–6 civil war have become a fixation for the Lebanese. Even today, the bookshops of Hamra Street and Sassine Square contain shelves of expensive photographic records of the fighting, coffee table books with colour plates in which readers can study at their leisure and in detail the last moments of a young Muslim militiaman before the firing squad, the anguished eyes of a Palestinian mother pleading for her family before a hooded gunman, a Christian family lying massacred inside their home. It is a kind of catharsis for both the Lebanese and the Palestinians who have long understood the way in which these terrible events should be interpreted. Victories were the result of courage, of patriotism or revolutionary conviction. Defeats were always caused by the plot: The Plot, the mo’amera, the complot, undefinable and ubiquitous, a conspiracy of treachery in which a foreign hand – Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, American, French, Libyan, Iranian – was always involved. Edward Cody of the AP and I once came to the conclusion that in every interview we conducted in the Lebanon, a special chair should be set aside for The Plot – since The Plot invariably played a leading role in all discussions we ever had with politicians, diplomats or gunmen.³

      Jean Said Makdisi, in her glossary of terms used in times of crisis, linked The Plot to The Plan and explained that ‘The reader should not expect proponents of conspiracy theories to show alarm at their pervasiveness. Rather, a certain perverse comfort is taken from the assurance that someone, at least, knows what is going on and why.’⁴

      It is our human nature to create an explanation for everything that happens, even though such an explanation may be entirely speculative and, in many cases, quite far-fetched. We prefer an explanation which enhances our image of ourselves. The thought that someone somewhere is conspiring against us serves to boost our pride. It means that we are so important that other people have to take us into account. The explanation that the suffering of most people in Lebanon was brought about simply because they were in the way when different groups of men, who care nothing for their fellow human beings, were battling for supremacy, is too close to a truth which shows how helpless and insignificant we are in the whole scheme of things. For many people a conspiracy of enemies is preferable because it boosts their sense of personal identity. This is one of the reasons why enemies are necessary.

      Asking someone about their enemies is a very intrusive question, and the answers can be surprising. At an Amnesty International party I asked a fellow guest, a strong supporter of Amnesty, whether he had an enemy. He answered immediately, ‘My ex-wife.’ People can talk about their friendships without revealing much about themselves, but talking about their enemies goes straight to the painful complexities of relationships, as the participants of a workshop showed in their definitions of an enemy. They said,

      • ‘An enemy is someone who threatens my safety and leaves me feeling helpless.’

      • ‘An enemy is someone who despises you, doesn’t respect you, wishes you were dead.’

      • ‘Enemies are those who do not allow you to progress, to develop in your own way, but try to impose their own beliefs and opinions.’

      • ‘An enemy is somebody who doesn’t give me respect or trust or openness, who has different values from me and expects me to conform to theirs, who makes life uncomfortable for me by their actions and words.’

      • ‘I have loads of enemies. There’s family, people who have rigid lifestyles and who dictate to everyone. At work there’s the people who vie for power with me, and elsewhere, in politics.’

      • ‘Looking carefully into my life I am aware that I have had, and probably still have, enemies, although I have a fantasy that I haven’t. An enemy is someone who wishes bad things for me and who, it seems, no amount of love or understanding will influence otherwise.’

      • ‘I believe we need enemies to shift rage from family and community to outsiders or causes. Also it gives an illusion of superiority by condemning their beliefs.’

      • ‘An enemy is a traitor. One who betrayed me. One who had let me down. Rejected me. An unaccepting, narrow-minded person who had not been willing to listen and who sees the truth only from their own view point. Probably envies me and therefore wishes to destroy me.’

      • ‘As a child I had enemies – other children who bullied me at school and on the way home from school.’

      • ‘An enemy is someone who is totally without morals. A traitor. Someone who thinks only of self-gain and themselves. Someone who has let me down.’

      When I asked four-year-old Alice if she had any enemies she immediately identified the problem of how we can hate the people we love. She said, ‘Sometimes Miles is an enemy. With Christopher and Jake. Most of the time when they come to tea he doesn’t let me into his bedroom. He just wants to play with his friends.’

      I asked her how that made her feel. She said, ‘A bit upset. I cry, because sometimes I am trying to get though his door and he slams it shut and I fall down the steps.’

      Miles, as I discovered when he told me about his enemies, had encountered the Sex War, though he had not yet recognized it as such. He told me that most of his enemies were girls. There were those who, he said, are ‘always telling on you, and telling the teachers, “Miss, Miles did this, Miles did that.”’ Megan was the chief of his accusers, but she did much more. He said, ‘She makes me feel really bad. I say, “Look, Megan, I don’t want you playing with me because I can’t play with you all the time. I’ve got other friends.” And if I said, “I’m not your friend,” she’d go off crying. She’d go all red-faced and make me feel really bad. I just can’t leave her alone. And then when I approach her, she runs off.’

      Yet at other times Megan would distract him from his work by talking to him. I suggested to Miles that Megan really liked him and did things to annoy him just to get his attention. Miles dismissed this entirely, so I let the subject

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