‘Are they going to give us a home in Texas?’

FATIMA Haider remembers the day her family rushed to help survivors of a bomb that destroyed the US embassy next to her childhood home in Beirut.

“Bring me the newspapers, I’ll show you pictures of my brother pulling Americans from under the rubble,” she said.

Now her home in southern Lebanon has been turned to rubble by the Israeli military and her husband has been killed in a war that she says the United States is encouraging Israel to wage war on Hezbollah.

“We didn’t use to be against the Americans, but now we are,” she said. “They are against us.”

Homeless, she has returned with her children to the family house in the seaside district of Ein el Mreiseh, which was beside the US embassy until that building was blown up by Shi’ite Muslim militants in 1983.

“We were against what happened here,” said Fatima, herself a Shi’ite.

A towering apartment block and a car park stand where the US embassy used to be.

“We used to cook Lebanese food for them, make them coffee. They’d happily eat with us; now they are happily eating our country,” Fatima said.

Hezbollah, a Shi’ite group backed by Iran, has long disseminated propaganda against the US, a major ally of Israel.

But Washington’s defence of Israel and refusal to call for an immediate halt to a war that has killed more than 1,000 Lebanese and driven 900,000 from their homes has outraged Fatima’s family.

“Evil; she’s evil,” Najar Hamam said of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who has become the personification of US policy for many Lebanese.

“She’s not welcome here,” added Hamam, whose house in Beirut’s southern suburbs was flattened by an air strike.

Some two dozen members of the extended family have fled homes in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs to the safety of the one-storey house, one of the last of its kind on Beirut’s seafront strip.

“Thank God for this house, otherwise we’d be sleeping in Sanayeh,” said Hamam. Sanayeh is a public garden in Beirut where hundreds of Lebanese have been living after losing their homes.

Cursing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, she wondered if US President George W Bush’s home state might put her up.

“Are they going to give us a home in Texas?” she asked.

“I just wish I had a plane so I could destroy Israel, Bush and his dog Olmert,” she said, recalling stories of entire families killed in air raids. “Do babies know how to fight?”

Washington has urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties, but the majority of people it has killed in Lebanon have not been Hezbollah fighters. The guerrilla group has killed 121 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The US has been on Israel’s side of a diplomatic dispute on how to end the war, supporting its position that it keep troops in southern Lebanon until the arrival of an international force to keep Hezbollah away from the border.

Washington calls Hezbollah a terrorist group and says it started the war by capturing two soldiers in a raid into Israel on July 12. Hezbollah says Washington has pushed Israel to escalate the conflict.

Many Lebanese who have lost family or their homes share the view and hold the US directly responsible for the destruction wreaked on Lebanon.

Hamam’s daughter Faten said: “They give Israel weapons, tanks.”

“They have a big country, so why don’t they give them some land there so we can live in peace.”