First, a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project which finds that Hezbollah has the support of 35% of the Lebanese population, lower by a long-shot than its level of support in Jordan (51%) or among Palestinians (61%). (In Israel, the number is 21%.) More interesting to me, in a way, is the internal sectarian breakdown in Lebanon, where Pew found that Hezbollah’s support is negligible among Christians (18%), rock bottom among Sunni Muslims (2%), and a stunning 97% among Shias.

Second, earlier this week, Patrick Barry at Democracy Arsenal noticed some radically changed language about Hezbollah in the American annual “threat assessment,” put out by the Director of National Intelligence. The 2010 report reads, in the relevant passage:

We judge that, unlike al-Qa’ida, Hizballah, which has not directly attacked US interests overseas over the past 13 years, is not now actively plotting to strike the Homeland. However, we cannot rule out that the group would attack if it perceives that the US is threatening its core interests.

Previous years’ reports have described Hezbollah as “a formidable terrorist adversary” (2009) with “hostility toward the US” (2007) and “the desire to use cyber means to target the United States” (2008).

David Kenner, at Foreign Policy, dismisses an attempt to make too much of this change by noting:

It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah hasn’t changed appreciably since 2007; the only thing that has shifted is the U.S. assessment of the party. And it’s a little strange to point out that Hezbollah won’t change its plans unless the United States is “threatening its core interests.” That is undoubtedly true, but of course the U.S. government is a threat to Hezbollah’s interests.

The point — that Hezbollah hasn’t changed appreciably since 2007 — is in some ways hard to dispute. If Hezbollah is willing to strike in order to protect its “core interests,” then it might seem that all that has changed is the threat posed to those core interests by the United States. But I do think that there is an important distinction between “core interests” and mere “interests,” as Kenner rather carelessly elides it — Hezbollah’s “interests” include long term military plans regarding the State of Israel, and the Palestinian conflict, but also short-term policy goals, and a specific legislative agenda; “core interests” are, primarily, the weapons.

This is important because while a conflict still lingers between the US and Hezbollah over the weapons and militarization — and that looks about the same now as it did in 2007 — the intervening three years have seen a continued shift of Hezbollah’s leading priorities towards its legislative agenda. Don’t forget the election of 2009, in which Hezbollah gained 10 MPs, 2 Cabinet Ministers, and a large chunk of the popular vote. Obviously this is not to dismiss the dangers of another war between Israel and Hezbollah, but here you could argue that Hezbollah has altered it priorities significantly enough to merit this new threat assessment language.

Here’s the start, but jump over to The National to read the whole thing (it ain’t short). Much credit to Jonathan Shainin, the brilliant editor of the Review section, for making this article what it is.

Follow the Money

When Salah Ezzedine’s alleged pyramid scheme collapsed, it left thousands of Lebanese Shia with empty bank accounts – and presented Hizbollah with a crisis of authenticity.

In retrospect, there were plenty of signs that Salah Ezzedine’s investment operation did not entirely make sense. The promised rates of return – 40 per cent, 60 per cent, 80 per cent – would later get the most attention, but surely the paperwork ought to have set off alarm bells as well. By nearly all accounts, the sole record that Ezzedine provided to his many clients in Lebanon’s mainly Shia south was a cheque for exactly the amount they had invested with him. No quarterly statements, no balance sheets with pie charts and annuities and APRs. So long as they enjoyed collecting regular payments on their investment, all Ezzedine’s clients had to do was keep that cheque safely tucked away in their wallets. If they ever wanted out, they could take it down to the bank, and the money was theirs.

Of course, that was assuming there even was paperwork. Ezzedine, who was arrested in August for allegedly defrauding thousands of individuals, was so trusted in South Lebanon that, especially towards the end, few of his customers bothered to ask for anything like a receipt, or, for that matter, where the money was being invested.

When they did, the answers he is said to have offered were as varied as they were suspect: steel, diamonds, titanium, zirconium, gold mines and petrol in Iran, oil in Eastern Europe, oil in Africa, iron in the Gambia, shoes and leather in China, defective clothing (for resale as fabric), old ships (for resale as scrap metal), construction in the Gulf, poultry in Brazil….

Keep reading here.

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For more from the Review, follow: @theADreview

Debeli is new to Lebanon — he arrived here just six months ago — something that may be reflected in the general optimism he exudes about changing the situation for his countrymen here. The past few weeks, he said, had been entirely consumed with dealing with the aftermath of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 409, in which 24 Ethiopian nationals perished. The crash, of course, was a quite separate matter from the deep-seated problems facing domestic workers here, but it did have the effect of casting extra light on the problem, both from the media and from Lebanese officials. (Prime Minister Saad Hariri, for one, visited the Ethiopian Consulate last week to pay his respects.)

Regarding the broader issue of domestic worker abuse and rights, Debeli told me that the process was moving along. “We are doing our best, but this problem is a longstanding problem, we cannot fix it overnight, ” he said. He added, “All of the leadership of the government is in a positive mindset” about making the necessary changes.

Advocates for domestic worker rights here in Lebanon, who have fought this uphill battle for many years, are not so optimistic. In Beirut, perhaps no one has worked as tirelessly to advance the rights of foreign domestic workers than Nadim Houry, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Lebanon. As Houry and others have explained it, there are two fundamental issues at work. The first is psychological — changing the attitude of some Lebanese, particularly those of the older generations, toward their household employees. The other is far more mundane — and, perhaps, more important: the need to change Lebanon’s legal protections for workers. As it stands, Lebanon’s labor laws explicitly exclude domestic workers from their minimum pay and time off requirements, and efforts to create alternative protections — such as through extralegal contracts between worker and employer — have had mixed results, at best.

Houry is Lebanese, and so are many of the other advocates in Beirut who have worked on this issue. The effort sometimes gets a bad rap as being driven by outsiders and Westerners, but this does not appear to be a fair assessment. When I asked Houry, recently, to point me to some other particularly involved Lebanese, he mentioned Najla Chahda, who runs Caritas Lebanon’s Center for Migrants, and Roland Tawk, a local lawyer who has taken on many migrants-rights cases.

Meanwhile, Houry’s group is responsible for a powerful investigation into domestic worker suicides which found, in August 2008, that an average of more than one domestic worker was killing herself every week.

Houry also pointed me, needless to say, to a Facebook page: Support the Rights of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon. Check it out, when you get a chance.

Yesterday morning, I went with the photojournalist Matthew Cassel (Just Image) to the Ethiopian Full Gospel Church, in Sebtiyeh, just outside of Beirut, for Sunday services and the funeral of one of the congregants, Hany Gebre, who died in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 last Monday.

If you are looking to understand the plight of Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon, look no further than the fact that this service — six days after the incident — was the first time the Ethiopian community could reliably get time off from work to gather. About 150 women — and they were ALL women — were there, and many cried for the entire three hour service, which was conducted through song and spoken word, wholly in Amharic. Representatives from the Ethiopian Consulate stopped by to pay their respects and distribute their personal mobile numbers, which everyone in attendance dutifully wrote down. They, too, left in tears.

The ceremony itself was spectacular — haunting in its beauty and sorrow. I’ll try to say more about the experience later, but have a listen to a few minutes that I recorded, and jump over to JustImage.org for Matt’s beautiful photographs from the service.

(tabarek, gita; tabarek, yesus: “Bless you, God; Bless you, Jesus.”)

top photograph: Joshua Hersh // bottom photograph: Matthew Cassel, Polaris.

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Emotions have run hot in the aftermath of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, and this has resulted in some visceral exchanges between Ethiopians and Lebanese. If it wasn’t already evident, this episode has made clear that there is a great deal of anger on both sides, but especially on behalf of Ethiopians, who feel deeply mistreated and abused by the Lebanese. Rather than opine more on this, I thought I’d just pull a few of the more evocative comments I received from my earlier blog post (in which I challenged the easy assessment of all Lebanese as racist).

Firstly, daCaptain provides links to the Ethiopian Facebook memorials: two of them.

D. Asad wrote:

Racism has always been an issue in Lebanon; in particular the abuse of its domestic workers. What would not be ethical reporting would be for this discrimination to be covered up yet again. Remember, it was not just Lebanese nationals on the plane. For non-Lebanese to not only have lost their loved ones, but to also be denied the same access to information and compassion that is being showed to the Lebanese victims makes the tragedy even worse.

All effected families and friends are watching the news and reading the papers for information on this tragedy; not just the Lebanese. If coverage, support, and compassion are not shown equally to all then racism is obvious, and it is the duty of any honest and ethical reporter to share this information.

Ras Mitat counters the notion that the treatment of Ethiopians in Lebanon has any parallel in Western countries:

Are you kidding?

Ethiopian Airlines was at one point flying out of Beirut with 2 bodies each week of young Ethiopian housemaids. Lebanese authorities do nothing. Walk to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut and you’ll see escaped housemaids looking for shelter, after years of physical and sexual abuse. Check women’s prison and see how many housemaids were picked up homeless after running away from abuse.

Dr. Nayla Moukarbel offers an academic perspective:

You are right, it is not merely a question of racism; things are indeed more complex (and grey)than commonly portrayed. The ‘dehumanization’ as you mention of these women renders them invisible (and this, paradoxically, despite their high visibility since they are for most women of colour). The domestic worker is limited to her ’serving position’, her personality, identity and even being are erased.

I talk about the complex dynamics involved in the Madame/housemaid relationship and the rules that govern it in my book: ‘Sri Lankan Housemaids in Lebanon: A Case of ‘Symbolic Violence’ and ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance’.

And the feeling of mistreatment runs deep — irredeemably, it would seem — for Ethiopian Girl:

I would not be surprised if the plane was rocketed, the Arab people have no mercy when it comes to human life they think every one has an Arab life (cheap human life).low life bastards hope they rot in hell R.I.P to the Ethiopian brother and sisters.

It’s clear this is not an issue that can be ignored, or go away easily. The sense of righteous outrage is powerful.

Evidently this store is not unique to Beirut, but it’s in supremely bad taste. (Sophie’s choice was decidedly not over what color of cardigan to purchase.) Not to mention that “Sophie’s Choice” the book, by William Styron, is banned in Lebanon.

The coverage of Ethiopian Air Flight 409, which crashed into the Mediterranean sea close to Beirut just minutes after takeoff, early Monday morning, has reached that inevitable point: the reaction to the reaction to the coverage, or, as I like to call it, the third stage of good grief.

The crash itself was an absolute tragedy, and a equal-opportunity one at that, in that it spared no one, not least the family members of the victims. Spend a few minutes perusing this Facebook page set up to memorialize the deceased, as I did last night, and you’ll soon find a few minutes have turned into an hour, and you are thoroughly despairing. The pictures are heart-wrenching: wedding photos, summertime snaps of boys grilling meats in happier times, the owner of a well-known local restaurant, a cheery twenty-year-old boy hoping to surprise his parents in Africa, somebody’s boss.

Conspicuously missing from the Facebook page are the Ethiopian victims — here we get on to the tricky stuff. Like the ongoing analysis of what happened to the plane itself, this dynamic, evident not just on Facebook, but in newspaper stories and even official reports, which listed Ethiopian passengers separately from Lebanese ones, has been the subject of a tide of speculation and sniping in the media, here and abroad. Most of it is fair: If it’s true that Ethiopian family members were prevented from identifying bodies at the government hospital, or shoved out of camera shots by TV crews, this is outrageous and shameful.

But if, in reaction to the coverage, some are seeing the revelation of Lebanon’s “racist underbelly”, I’m not so sure. Regarding things like the Facebook page, I would caution that this has an obvious, practical explanation (if an insidious one): most of the Ethiopian families here are domestic workers (most of the victims, too, so far as we know). They don’t have a lot of free time or access to the internet to post pictures on Facebook. And for the rest, I think the problem is deeper than just overt racism. The nature of the relationship between the domestic workers and the Lebanese — a grossly unequal one — and the long history of social segregation (forced more often than not), has led to a cultural gap: If, after a tragedy, dissociated people are meant to come together under their commonalities, then this is nearly impossible in a country where the domestic worker and employee share next to nothing except, now and then, a taxi.

The bigger issue then (for another time, and another post), is the broader dehumanization of darker-skinned domestic workers, clearly a massive problem here in Lebanon, but perhaps no more than in the US, or UK, where the stories of abuse are just as perfidious as here. But simply racism? I suspect something more gray is at play.

***

This note of caution is needed even more so in the ongoing evaluation of what happened to the plane itself. So far, we know nothing. Without the black box, we have only the premature determination, by President Michel Sleiman, that there was no indication of terrorism (based on what?); the immaterial declaration, by the Minister of Transportation, that the plane made a “fast and strange turn” shortly before hitting the sea (some might call this crashing), culminating in a strange analysis, in the Times of London, calling the debate between “storms and sabotage” a ponder-worthy “mystery” (evidence of neither = evidence of both, right?). The black box is everything. Without it, there is nothing to debate.

Or is there? Today, OTV, a local channel, is reporting that a rocket may have been fired at the plane, and notes that several Hezbollah officials were supposed to be on board, but cancelled at the last minute. (Wait, does that mean Hezbollah was the target or the culprit?)

And then there are the important ramifications of the fact that the plane may have been used by Ryanair in past years — has anyone considered the IRA angle yet?

Patrick Galey, a local British journalist who I’ve picked on a bit lately for no particular reason (he actually led some solid coverage of the incident in the Daily Star), notes that Naharnet (the source of some of the Hezbollah speculation) should be attended to with “a shovelful of salt.” When a plane drops out of the sky and lands in the Mediterranean, I would say this applies to all the coverage. And you’d better do with an ocean-full.

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First of all, what they’re saying: Last week, Asharq Alawsat cited a “well-informed Lebanese source” (this often means a shwarma man, but who knows) as saying that Lebanese officials traveling abroad had been warned that Israel was “planning to soon attack Lebanon.” Specifically, it seems that the Prime Minister and the President had been cautioned separately in meetings with Turkey’s president, Recap Tayyip Erdogan, that Israel was on the warpath. (Never mind that Turkey and Israel were, at that moment, in the midst of a ludicrous diplomatic sideshow of their own, over whose seat was higher during a recent ambassadorial meeting.)

It all seemed to reach a boiling point over the weekend when the state media  here — the National News Agency –  reported an “intense Israeli build-up of forces” along the border, and claimed that some Israeli commandos had even crossed “300 meters” into Lebanon, for fifteen minutes. Israeli F-16s also flew into Lebanese airspace on Sunday, one even reportedly hanging around for seven hours. Nothing happened, of course, and some outlets (Asharq Alawsat, funnily enough) reported that Israeli had already informed Lebanon, via UNIFIL, that they were merely conducting exercises. (Pilates?)

UNIFIL, the UN’s peacekeeping force here, did increase its patrols over the weekend, but it has also been the main conduit for tamping down all this bluster.  I met with some officials from the group last night and got the sense that they think all this talk is so much hot air. The chatter, they say, is nothing out of the ordinary, and as for the ground incursion, I was told that “the media needs to learn the difference between the Blue Line” — the official, UN-draw, boundary between Lebanon and Israel — and “the technical fence” — an Israeli-constructed fence that is entirely within Israeli territory. Occasionally the two boundary-markers coincide, but more often than not there is a buffer space between them, which can be hundreds of meters wide (300, even). At one point, apparently, a Lebanese highway dips south of the Blue Line — into Israel, that is — but because it’s north of the fence, the Israelis ignore it.

One time, the Israelis used a robotic arm to trim some shrubbery on the north side of the fence — still inside Israel — and it was reported as an incursion into Lebanon. Sigh.

The Daily Star’s Patrick Galey thinks UNIFIL has a tendency to downplay any potential signs of tension regardless of the truth — “shows they are working effectively” — which strikes me as not totally wrong but overly cynical. Some of this is purely a matter of fact: Israeli troops either crossed over, or they didn’t. But more to the point, UNIFIL has been pretty proactive in denouncing Israeli drone and F-16 flyovers in Lebanese airspace. UNIFIL seems suitably outraged by it, too, and I was told last night that one plane even buzzed Jounieh — a Christian town north of Beirut — with sonic booms on Sunday. Maybe it was lost?

So, as always, we end up where we started: who knows. And in truth, if there was going to be a sudden attack, the powers that be probably wouldn’t want us to know about it in the first place.

Speaking of things notoriously hard to predict, it’s finally snowing in the Cedars, which means skiing is just a few more good storms away. (The Mzaar webcam is dark and promising!) Snow in the mountains means rain in the city, though, and I have to believe the rain — and the concomitant flooding — is responsible for the atrocious traffic here today and yesterday. This afternoon was a easily a five horner — at any given moment, on any given block, at least five cars are simultaneously honking their horns in frustration.

In 2007, according to a private study, Washington, DC lost $2.8 billion (in productivity, gas charges, and lost business) due to excessive traffic. What do you think the numbers are like in Beirut?

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Photo by dlisbona

Good news is that last year’s business was, by all accounts, significantly better than the year before, a trend that goes back at least a decade.

One thing that had no place in the article, but I would love to learn more about, is the rumors I heard of a quite heated dispute over the naming rights of the resort. It’s long been known as Faraya, but it’s actually located closest to the village of Ouyoun El Simane, and the resort itself is in Mzaar. Faraya is a little ways down the road — it’s where many of the people who work at the mountain live year-round. Apparently the people of Mzaar got fed up with all the attention going to Faraya, so they demanded a name change. It’s now called Mzaar or sometimes, confusingly, Faraya-Mzaar. (Do I have this right, commenters?)

Kind of like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

***********

No snow brings Middle East ski resort downhill

MZAAR KFARDEBIANE // Seated around a table in the darkened Val d’Isère rental shop, at the foot of the Mzaar ski resort 50 kilometres north-east of Beirut, half-a-dozen employees smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and wait, futilely, for the snow to come.

Nearly a month into the ski season in Lebanon, at one of the most popular winter resorts in the Middle East, business has yet to begin. While Europe and North America have been pummelled with record snowfall and low temperatures in recent weeks, Lebanon has seen unusual highs and virtually none of the fluffy white stuff.

“It’s very bad,” said one employee, Rami Kai, 20, who studies business administration at Notre Dame University in nearby Zouk Mosbeh, when he is not working at Mzaar (formerly known as Faraya).

“There are other things to do here – we have ATVs, for example – but there are not a lot of people coming for that.”

Temperatures in the mountains have reached the upper teens this January – not record highs, necessarily, but far too warm for snow to accumulate. Beirut too has experienced a decidedly summery month, with temperatures reaching into the high twenties.

Mr Kai and his co-workers were dressed, optimistically, in their uniform of red ski outfits.

Meanwhile, outside the shop, it had begun to rain. Across the empty car park, a high-speed chairlift was at a standstill, its chairs suspended over the rocky, brown terrain of the resort’s lowest runs. Patches of snow could be spotted in the higher reaches of the mountain, remnants of a tantalising storm in late December that did not last.

Read the rest here.

If you’re praying for snow, keep an eye on @skileb, where Lebanon’s resort operators can be heard tweeting to the internet gods for absolution.

(And follow me @joshuahersh for more regular update on all things Lebanon and otherwise.)