The night the bombings began in her area, Cindy Daoud woke up to the sounds of a blast next to her home.
“When I opened the window I saw one of the buildings next to mine shake like a bowl of Jell-O,” she said. “Then I ran to my mother’s room and we turned the news on to find out that the airport had been bombed. My father was supposed to come in that day.”
Daoud, the vice-president of the Near Middle Eastern Civilizations Students Union, is one of a handful of U of T students to be caught in the crossfire and evacuated, in this summer’s war in Lebanon.
“I wanted people to feel what it was like being there. I wanted then to know what it was like for the citizens there,” Daoud said, speaking at Sidney Smith on Nov. 7, at a panel put on by the Near Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) Students Union. The discussion centred around the effect this crisis has had on the Lebanese people, and its political implications within and beyond Lebanon.
The panellists consisted of academics Dr. Jens Hanssen, a Professor in the NMC department, Dr. Atif Kubursi, a Professor at McMaster University, and Abir Chaaban, a Graduate Student at York University. It also included the stories of two U of T evacuees, Cindy Daoud and Nader Farhat, an NMC student and British evacuee.
The Lebanon war started on July 12 and ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire on Aug. 14. According to Amnesty International, more than 1,100 Lebanese were killed, 970,000 in a population of 4 million were displaced, 39 Israeli civilians and 117 Israeli Defence Force soldiers were killed.
The NMCSU wanted to spread awareness with this lecture, and most students seemed to appreciate the outreach it provided for the many students who don’t know enough about the events in Lebanon and much of the Middle East.
“The point wasn’t to finger blame, and I hope the audience didn’t feel that was the point,” said Farhat, who spoke about leaving as a British evacuee. “It was just to get the message across, and to say this is our narrative supported by fact and actual first-hand experience. And now it’s time for you to decide, it is not my place or the panellists’ place to make decisions for people.”
As for Daoud, despite an incredibly tedious evacuation that included sleeping on garbage bags, tables and chairs on the ship from Beirut to Cyprus before flying to Montreal and the final train ride home, she still has enough humour to muster a joke.
“These are jellyfish,” she says, showing a photograph she took from the ship out of Beirut, “We figured they were leaving because of the bombings too.”
