07/31/06 Back In Beirut: Author's Life In Lebanon Brings Conflict Into Focus

The pharmacies already are closed, author Cathy Sultan says, because they are out of medicine. Electrical power works sporadically.

Food pantries are nearly out of supplies. Fuel is being rationed for cooking. Bombs target cell phone and TV towers, to destroy connections to the outside world.

This is life in Lebanon today, and the average people who are affected by war here are not faceless. They include Sultan's 95-year-old mother-in-law, who with a helper lives in a fifth-floor Beirut apartment.

Sultan and husband Michel -- a native of Lebanon, former UW Hospital staffer and retired gastroenterologist -- live in Eau Claire but try to have daily communication with relatives and friends in Lebanon.

"I have no idea when I'll next see them," she says.

About 750,000 people becoming homeless in two weeks in this nation of 3.8 million residents is "an incredible humanitarian disaster," Sultan says, and she laments the ease with which the average U.S. citizen will detach from it all. She does not take it personally. This happens whenever war tears apart the world.

"We live very complacent lives in the U.S.," Sultan says, during a telephone interview. "I think we pay scant attention to what happens in the rest of the world, unless we are personally affected."

It is a human trait, not American, she says.

"Prior to the war in Beirut, I failed to pay attention to events around me, even though they were staring me in the face." Then her world "began to crumble."

Sultan's 2003 book, "Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue With Both Sides" (Scarletta Press, $15.95), has recently been reissued with substantially new and updated material.

"Peace between Israelis and Palestinians does not require them to agree on the events which comprise their respective histories," she writes. "Instead, it necessitates a mutual acknowledgment of the injustices each has suffered."

This work comes on the heels of "A Beirut Heart: One Woman's War" (Scarletta Press, $15.95), which is a first-person account of what she and her family -- including her children Naim and Nayla, who were then toddlers -- experienced while living between warring factions in Beirut for eight years.

The Washington, D.C., native "had traveled very little, knew very little about the world in general and even less about the Middle East" before moving there in 1969, after Michel finished his medical training in Madison. The drastic geographical change, in part, was a way to rebel against her parents.

If she had not married a Lebanese man, would she be as interested in the causes and effects of international conflict? Probably not, Sultan admits, because "we ultimately are affected by events that touch us personally. Cindy Sheehan may never have come forward, opposing the war in Iraq, if her son had not been killed."

The "forgotten Christians of the Middle East" was to be her next book project, because "most Americans don't know that there are Arab Christians. President Bush, in my opinion, has done a good job of labeling all Arabs as Muslim terrorists."

But now Sultan may shift plans because of recent events in Lebanon.

"I now feel compelled to write more on that subject, either nonfiction or fiction," she says, in an e-mail. "I've been in south Lebanon a dozen times. I've interviewed the villagers (there) who endured the 22-year Israeli occupation. Their stories are amazing," as are those of Hezbollah, whose stories she's also heard and documented.

Sultan is on the executive board of the National Peace Foundation, which since 1984 has worked to educate people about conflict resolution, sometimes through people-to-people exchanges. She is heartened when readers tell her they better understand Middle East conflict because of her work, yet gets discouraged because of world events.

"I can hardly fight back the tears when I see the images of the city I called home for 14 years, torn to shreds," Sultan says of Beirut.

She remains convinced that "we can hold our leaders responsible for what they do in our name" but "in order to do that, we must become informed on the issues."

Sultan will discuss "Israeli and Palestinian Voices" at 7 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, 4093 N. Oakland Ave., Milwaukee.

\ E-mail: mbergin@madison.com