Hezbollah art show redux

As I sought information about the art show before I left with none, a few people told me to return the next day (Friday) at 3. Again, I arrived to find no one who spoke English well enough to explain things to me. So I just wandered the space wondering what to do.
The exhibition was laid out on the basketball court and some extra floor space. It was decorated like a military compound – fake rockets, soldiers, and a rocket-equipped truck meshed with the real camouflage nets, helmets, military backpacks, binoculars and boots.
The art was even more militant.
Most of the pieces were drawings in crayon, marker or pencil on regular sheets of paper. They lined all but one wall and were displayed on two 7-foot, A-shaped constructs on the basketball floor. There were some larger works. A few incorporated tissue paper. The wall behind where one of the baskets would have been featured 6’x3’ painted foam canvases with various things glued to them for a 3-D effect.
Several dioramas peppered the floor. I soon learned Hezbollah ran the school and commissioned children in its 14 to express their feelings about last summer’s war through art.
The first piece I really looked at showed two Israeli soldiers (recognizable by the Star of David on their helmets and shoulders) carrying a stretcher with a bloodied comrade missing half an arm. A fourth followed behind on crutches, blood pouring from his leg.
Images of death were everywhere. These kids (ranging in age from 6 to 13) clearly bought into the argument that Hezbollah won the war. Israeli gunboats burned or sank as soldiers floated in the water or lay bleeding on deck. Israeli soldiers ran in fear from Lebanese territory.
But the destruction wrought on Lebanon did not go unrecorded. Israeli warplanes dropped bombs with “USA” or “Amarica” written on the side. One thoughtful piece was a Star of David with a skull in the middle. The skull’s outstretched tongue was the American flag with a car colored like Lebanon’s flag headed from the tip into the skull’s mouth. Black and white photocopied pictures of Condeleezza Rice, George W. Bush, and four pro-American Lebanese politicians were pasted at the star’s six points.
The opposition despises Condi. Another, more clearly childish, crayon drawing had her stabbing a dove.
“She kills the peace,” a woman who speaks English and approached me as I roamed the space told me.
A few teachers and small children from a different school dropped by to see the art. One of the teachers started talking to me, offering to explain things. The children were enamored with me. They surrounded me, asking me all sorts of questions in English – amazed when I’d ask their names in Arabic, snickering when I’d mispronounce words.
(Kids learn English in school and often speak more than their parents.)
We (the teacher answering my questions and the flock of children staring at me) stopped by a diorama of a bombed-out city. Buildings of cardboard colored in crayon stood on streets of sand and small rocks. The metal frames of Matchbox cars littered the streets, and the buildings were crudely torn in half. It was a spot-on recreation of a rubble-strewn block pounded by war. A sign off to the left said, in English, “Made in USA.”
A colleague of the woman I was talking to, who didn’t speak English, started talking to the kids. “Assif,” I’m sorry, she said to me.
“Assif, assif,” I said back.
One little girl came up to me from the crowd of children.
“Are you with Israel, with America, or are you with us?”
Thanks for putting me on the spot, kid. Realistically, my own opinions aside, there was only one answer. I wonder if I’d said Israel and America whether this small mob of little girls would have come at me in a flurry of feet and tiny fists.