Our Southern Neighbors

This post has no moral. Lebanese biker in the Sinai Desert (Egypt)

For those not familiar with the political situation in Lebanon, we – as Lebanese – are not allowed to have contact with ‘the enemy’. The enemy are our southern neighbors; the Israelis. And as a result, we know very little of each other, other than the usual propaganda. They are all after our land and our water, and we’re four million potential suicide bombers.
It is inevitable, that outside our own borders, we frequently run into these Israelis. At airports and in foreign towns.
The first reaction is one of ‘Look, those are Israelis’, as if we have encountered some species from the wild; after all, we never get to see them in real life. Well, we do get to see them during invasions and wars and the likes, but that is so surreal, you cannot consider that ‘real’, or ‘normal life’.
But the second reaction is that they are so like us. They pretty much look the same, especially if they are Sefardis (jews who originate from the Middle East as opposed to jews coming from Eastern Europe). And then if you end up in conversation with them, they turn out to be very friendly people who quite often say that they are so sorry about what is going on in the south and that as far as they are concerned, they never wanted to invade and all that. You don’t know how true that is, maybe they just say it to make you feel better.
But all the Lebanese that I know that ended up in a conversation with an Israeli outside of Lebanon basically have the same reaction; “they are really nice people, just like us.”

I remember one time riding with a group of Harley Davidson bikers from Beirut to Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt). And as we drove through the Sinai desert, we ran into some other bikers at a gas station. As this was the first time they had seen fellow bikers since Beirut, all 11 Harley riders crowded around these two bikers.
“So where are you from?” they ask.

Now remember; most Harley riders in Lebanon are men of a rather advanced age. And thus the hair on the top of the skull is either thinning or gone. As Lebanese, it is of course a preposterous thought that they should wear helmets, and so by the time they had gotten to Jordan, they all had a severely sunburned skull. They decided to buy some headgear at a roadside stall, and the salesman happens to have the Palestinian kaffiyeh. So here we have 11 leather-clad men with heavy beards, black Raybans around their head and wrapped in Palestinian kaffiyehs, crowding around these two guys.

“So where are you from?”
“Around,” one of them answers. He wears a white T-shirt and jeans. He does not look overly happy.
“Around?” They look at his license plate. “Shit, you’re from Israel, man! Cool. You guys alone?”

“No, there are more of us coming. They are not far behind.”
The Lebanese are trying to get as conversation going, but the Israelis are very short, do not seem at all interested, and they take off at breakneck speed.
The ‘others’ never showed up.
“Geez,” says one of the Lebanese, “that wasn’t very friendly. I was just trying to have a conversation. I was just interested. No need to get so offensive.”
“Have you considered that they might have been scared shitless of us? We do not really look very peaceful, and we’re Lebanese.”
“Afraid of us? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.” They all though it was pretty funny. Here you have a couple of Lebanese middle-aged guys, sincerely interested in getting a conversation going with the ‘enemy’ about bikes and road conditions in the Sinai desert, and it turns out they scare them away.

So what was the message of this? None. But I was inspired into this long train of thought by a post from Leila, who runs into some Israelis at a parking lot in the US. It is near the end of her post. Interesting read.