Blogging From the Belly of Beirut

Wired News:

By Cyrus Farivar
02:00 AM Jul, 21, 2006

As we drove back down the hill we could clearly see new billows of smoke rising beyond our neighborhood, and a loud double blast shook the air just as we were turning into our driveway. A minute later, the power went out. The generator took over so we could get the groceries up in the elevator, to find my mom upstairs giggling madly because the blast had made her jump 3 feet in the air from the sofa. It’s just like the “good ol’ days” again, we slipped right back into war mode without missing a beat. I often wondered if I could handle a war now as well as I did as a kid. So far so good. — “Mana,” in her blog Manamania, captures the scene in Beirut, Lebanon

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Mana is in her mid-20s and lives with her parents in an apartment near the city center of Beirut. She’s been blogging about the Israel-Lebanon conflict since it began more than a week ago, and her posts, such as the one above, have turned her LiveJournal account into a gathering point for vibrant and surprisingly conciliatory discussions by both Lebanese and Israelis.

Reached by phone Wednesday, Mana said that the internet has been an incredible tool to help all Lebanese communicate with each other, but more importantly, it has allowed dialogue with people on the other side of the battlefield in the middle of the conflict. (Fearful of reprisals, she spoke to Wired News only on condition of anonymity.)

“We have opportunities of directly talking to the person on the other side and figuring out what they want,” she said. “I get a lot of questions like: ‘Why didn’t your government kick out Hezbollah? Why didn’t your army stop them?’ Now people get a chance to find out.