ALFRED TARAZI / BIRTHS Today, we kill Arafat. We break the sound barrier and within a few minutes we’ll be flying over Beirut. Our information is precise: he will be attending a meeting in a building next to the Sanayeh gardens. We drop the bomb, the building vanishes, Arafat dies, and we win the war. It is known as a vacuum bomb: those near the ignition point will be obliterated. Those at the fringe will suffer many internal and invisible injuries: crushed inner organs, ruptured lungs and burst eardrums. All the people in and around the building will die, but this is the price to pay to kill Arafat. However he was not there. In his life long hide and seek game with death he skipped the meeting and was playing chess with foreign correspondents in another location. Starts the dance of the survivors: the wailing, the moaning and the muffled sounds one could hear coming from underneath the rubble. A pregnant woman found in the debris of a car nearby is rushed to a hospital. We are the summer of 82, the Israeli Defense Forces are pounding the Lebanese capital from land, sea and air with a wide array of explosive devices. The besieged city lacks all kind of resources: water, electricity, food… The pregnant woman is rushed into an operating room; her pulse is getting weaker and weaker. Outside, the city is reconfigured by a deadly rhythm of detonations. In another room another woman is giving birth. It was a long delivery, and she had been given an epidural. All across the hospital you could find patients and medical staff clinging to radios, listening to the chattering sounds emitted through air waves of hope and life, more pounding more explosions, more death…the news are hopeless…the city itself is going through the birth pangs of a malformed infant named Peace In Galilee…In the operating block, the woman who was rescued is now totally unconscious. If she dies, the child dies with her. She is dying. Her belly is sliced open, and a baby girl is saved from that mortal envelope. They would see later if the vacuum bomb caused her any harm, she could be blind, she could be deaf, she could be bleeding internally, but at this moment, the child lives, and it is miraculous. In the other room, the other woman is waiting for her birth pangs to begin, waiting for the pain to hit her, waiting to deliver to the world another survivor. But she is numbed by the painkillers, the fear, and the overwhelming sounds of explosions. In the exhilaration of the news of that baby saved from his dead mothers belly, the doctor and attendants leave the delivery room. The bombs keep on dropping, creating sound waves of death reverberating across the city shattering everything around their fiery blasts. The woman does not feel a thing. She cannot hear anything but these loud deflagrations. When the nurses get back into the room, horror strikes. The baby had slid from the uterus, left the cervix, extracted itself from the vagina and was laying stiff in between an absent woman’s legs. Unattended, it had chocked. In the suspended time of tragedy, lifeless women, and dead infants, Arafat stands on the balcony of another building watching Beirut burn ablaze: if this had been Jerusalem we would have stayed to the end, but Beirut is not ours to destroy…Beirut is not ours to destroy…