April 9 --- Over to Lebanon

I've begun to think about law and the Israeli occupation and how the two correlate. There has to be some form of legislation relevant in matters such as illegal occupation, though I suppose that the problem is probably not the existence of such legislation, but whether it can be enforced..

We crossed to Lebanon today.

Sitting at the border crossing (for about 3 hours!) there were groups of young boys trying to sell us gum and chocolate wafers etc. However, it was obvious that they weren't meant to be there because every so often the border guards would attempt to remove them. There was one guard in particular who kept going after the boys. He looked like a real rambo army guy - American style - with his military hair cut, black army boots, very masculine black sunglasses and his walk - what a walk! Slow, deadly and bloody determined! A scary look! He kept walking after the boys, I say walking but it was more like strutting, and he really looked like he meant business. I was actually quite worried for the boy's safety, but I noticed that when he managed to get a boy, he just held them by their shoulder and steered them away. The boys didn't appear frightened at all, more like this was an oft-repeated game!

The crossing took so long because of the Palestinian Team and the nature of the relationship between Israel and Lebanon. FTW had been given special permission to allow them to cross with us, but it still caused massive delays. I'm beginning to wonder how long it will take us to enter the Israeli crossing when it is already taking hours to enter countries not infamous for holding people at border crossings!

By the time we entered, we had already missed much of the program that had been prepared for us in Lebanon (including cycling into Beirut), so we just went straight to the official welcome speeches. It was in these speeches that the first conflict occurred within FTW. It seemed that one of the groups hosting us in Lebanon was actually a political party. That causes many problems but I don't think anyone expected it to have the results it did. Unbeknown to those of us who did not speak Arabic, in the speeches made to us at the welcome were thinly veiled accusations towards the Syrian government that they were the ones responsible for the assassination of the very popular Lebanese leader Hariri, which had occurred the year before. This party was adamant that Syria had backed the assassination. This didn't go down well with the Syrian participants of the cycle, who walked out during the speeches and returned directly to the hotel where we would be staying, refusing to take part any further in the Lebanese-planned activities.
I wish that I knew exactly what the speeches said..