The panorama of images evoking often overviewed and rarely questioned facts, selected for the documentary The Diary of a Sky, is extremely limited. We mostly see skies with condensation trails of aeroplanes and night shots. Most are highly saturated with noise. This seems the most adequate way to settle his subjects, which he expresses in a breathless speech, commenting on what is happening in the Lebanese skies. One precise piece of information follows the other. In fact, this documentary is the result of precise research documented by the digital library of the UN Security Council, to which permanent representatives of Lebanon have access.
Sky militarisation
Recently, Nyon’s Vision du Réel presented the work of Jordanian film director Lawrence Abu Hamdan, also an artist and winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2019, documents besides the already well-known Israeli violations of human rights and forms of terrorisation another much less known one: the permanent militarisation of the Lebanese air and sky by hundreds of automatic or manned air flights, producing the permanent feeling of threat and, at the same time, physical health attacking noise. Just to put it in one example: in June 2020, 440 territory violations by the Israel Air Force were counted by unmanned aerial vehicles, fighter jets, flares, helicopters, gliders, drones and balloons. The total flight time for territory violation is 1976 hours and 40 minutes, equal to more than 60 hours every day.
The sky, usually a place of relief for people under pressure, has become an occupied space, an ongoing threat to people’s minds and health. In the never-ending sound perturbation, the shattering windows caused by F-35 jets breaking the wall of sonic velocity are the most evident extreme.
In August 2020, the month of Beirut’s ammonium nitrate massacre, the data set of the UN-Library had been strangely missing for some time, only to show up later and by not accusing the direct impact of Israel’s air military, even if hundreds of testimonies declared to have heard plane sounds before the explosion. Indeed, the missing information could be useful for creating conspiracy theories and dividing the Lebanese population into ideological camps.
Macron’s France had the good idea to celebrate Lebanon with a 6 Alpha-Fight jet formation, never seen before in the country. The jets flew lower and slower than anyone was used to, without any announcement. Therefore, it produced a granted effect to shock the Lebanese population, alarmed by the error of a new unknown threat. These fighter jets have a 500 square kilometre noise expansion.
In June 2020, 440 territory violations by the Israel Air Force were counted by unmanned aerial vehicles, fighter jets, flares, helicopters, gliders, drones and balloons.
Testing
When in Germany after the end of World War II, the US army used the territory for test flights, but also to study the potential health effects, like increasing cortisol levels, heart rates and blood pressure; these tests were compared by Germany’s Minister of Defense with Mengele’s human body experimentations in concentration camps. The scientific lead, Dr. Hartmut Ising, had to stop his research on German territory but could follow up and proceed in Israel! He stated some long-term effects, such as thickening the walls of arteries, increasing calcium deposits in the heart, and consequently, strokes. After this evidence of life-threatening effects, the German parliament qualified the low-altitude flights as an aural epidemic and pronounced an interdiction on West Germany’s territories.
Further tests show that even a minor noise hanging in the atmosphere, stirring at the threshold of audibility, creates body reactions of constant dread. Ising observed that once subjects have been exposed to noise from low-flying jets, even reduced sounds, such as just a murmur in the distance, provoke the same physiological reactions as hearing them loudly.
Abu Hamdan resumes laconically: 22,111 Israeli jets and drones have entered Lebanon since 2007. Western countries have invested 400 Billion Dollars in F-35 Jet production. The selling price is 100 million dollars a plane. Nobody besides the US producers has the right to apply any modifications to the jets, except for Israel, also the first receiver of the F-35. The reason is easy to find out. Israel has the most real-world opportunity to test the machines for the benefit of all those buying military weapons.
By the way, Scientists estimate that around 100 Billion Dollars would be needed to reverse the entirety of the climate catastrophe.
The real world
Abu Hamdan also reminds us that the corrupt Lebanese government system produces a high number of electricity blackouts countrywide. To solve the problem, diesel generators were used temporarily at every corner. Each machine produces a 70-decibel noise, on the same frequency as the military jets.
Actually, the sky over Lebanon is much quieter. Israel’s air military is applied in its intensified bombing of Gaza, realising its maximum capabilities for sonic and material destruction.
