Beirut Quotes

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden.She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

I'm going to the bathroom, not to Beirut. What horrible fate do you think's waiting for me in there? Death by toilet swirly?

The local dealers were cutting their coke with crystal meth

As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion. 'Let's save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,' I said.

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.

Before I started killing people, I like to think I was a fairly normal kid.

The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.

I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.

Nothing is very constant in Beirut. Certainly not dreams. But despair isn’t constant either. Beirut is a city to be loved and hated a thousand times a day. Every day. It is exhausting, but it is also beautiful.

Magic is hard on our world. Pulling it in is really violent and damaging. The more we use it, the more we stretch out the membrane between this world and the one we draw it in from. And the other side…' She looked at Maldonado and he nodded. 'Well, it’s toxic.

I don’t want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don’t want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I’m not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries?

Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.

Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they make themselves known, from their scars. - Chris Marker

There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing….” Florence

I will follow anyone And ask everyone To stand together as one nation Against the killing of innocent citizens

In Beirut, death’s unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night’s Russian missiles, brighter than a baby’s smile.

It's as though you had lost an arm or leg but still instinctively reach out to feel your missing limb or try to walk again, placing your entire weight on something that no longer is there.

I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and Saida I am from the ground underneath my home I am from the trees, the cedar tree I come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim... Kassar and Kassem I come from happiness and culture From "Habibi" and "Hayete" I am from all religions I am from the room beneath the stars.

I feel like my life is made up of tiny puzzle parts that no longer fit together. Imagine working on a puzzle only to find that the final picture can never be complete because one of its pieces is missing. This is exactly what's happened to my life; it has become impossible to put it back together.

I wish I had lost an arm or a leg. It would have been much easier than losing a part of my heart, which lives on, but now beats to a different rhythm.

Our dead become the photographs and words we hang on the walls, but they also hang on the walls of our hearts, the windows of our lips, and the sobs in our voices.

and Israelis had elected Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, as their prime minister, and his brutal legacy was already being felt.

Day after day, the globalization of terrorism becomes more evident. This is the one of the biggest challenges we are facing. We must stand with the innocent people around the world who are suffering or have lost their loved ones as a result of terrorism.

I often remember that dusty, ruined flat in old Beirut. And I know that a little part of me will stay there forever, laying out those treasures on the windowsill and playing at cat’s cradle with my friend.

on page 149 of 476 on From Beirut to Jerusalem : " Kumohon pada setiap burung yang lewat untuk mengatakan kerinduan dan rasa cintaku kepadamu, untuk kemudian kembali membawa berita tentang orang-orang yang kucintai

Blind faith can justify anything.* If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.

But were they Israeli planes dropping leaflets from the sky, or “flights of birds striking us with stones of baked clay” as if we were Ethiopians threatening Mecca in the Qur’an?

بيروت مدينة مليئة بصخب الحياة. والموت.

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.

Money from taxpayers in Wichita and Denver and Phoenix gets routed through the Pentagon and CIA and then ends up here, or in Baghdad or Dubai, or Doha or Kabul or Beirut, in the hands of contractors, subcontractors, their local business partners, local sheikhs, local Mukhabarat officers, local oil smugglers, local drug dealers—money that funds construction and real estate speculation in a few choice luxury districts, buildings that go up thanks to the sweat of imported Filipino and Bangladeshi workers

Grief is shameless; it refuses to be ignored. If you let it have its way, it becomes fatal. If you try to remove it piece by piece, it only multiplies like a tumor. And if you try to fight it, it becomes like quicksand; you try to claw your way back to the surface, and for a second you feel the fresh air against your face, thinking you've survived, only to be pulled fiercely back down again, swallowed whole, nothing left.

wore the same well-tailored clothes, and married women of their own tribe. But all that time, Philby had one secret he never shared: he was covertly working for Moscow, taking everything he was told by Elliott and passing it on to his Soviet spymasters. Elliott has come to Beirut to extract a confession. He has wired up the apartment and set watchers on the doors and street. He wants to know how many have died through Philby’s betrayal of their friendship. He wants to know when he became a fool.

و بيروت إذا أردت أن تقدم تعريفا مناسبا لهافلن تجد مهما أجهدت ذهنك شيئا تقوله سوى أنها .. بيروت

In einer solchen Hölle ist vielleicht die Flucht die einzig mögliche Heldentat. Die Flucht ins Leben, ja, ins Leben.

Arab' is the new four-letter word, didn't you know?

That's when it hit me; my sunglasses were buried in the grave where my Talal lay. Yes, my sunglasses were buried with him. But oh, how I wish my eyes had gone with him instead.

—Do you have any weapons on you? —I have a longing that's killing me.

Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world—but he didn’t know the global village would be Beirut.

Different people with different dreams, from Tehran to Jerusalem, from Paris to Beirut, looked to Khomeini and saw a man who could serve their agenda, not realizing they were serving his.

Monk worked on his remaining Intertect cases at his dining table while I tried to hone my detecting instincts by reading the Murder, She Wrote novel he bought in Mill Valley. I can't say that I learned much about investigative procedure but I discovered that you should stay far away from Cabot Cove. That tiny New England village is deadlier than Beirut, South Central Los Angeles, and the darkest back alley in Juarez combined. Even though every killer eventually gets caught by Jessica Fletcher, I still wouldn't feel safe there. I'm surprised the old biddy walks around town unarmed.

In the disaster of 1948 the refugees found shelter in neighboringcountries as a 'temporary'measure.They left their food cooking onstoves,thinking to return in a few hours.They scattered in tents andcamps of zinc and tin'temporarily.'The commandos took arms andfought from Amman 'temporarily,'then from Beirut'temporarily,'then they moved to Tunis and Damascus'temporarily.'We drew up interim programs for liberation ‘temporarily' and they told us they had accepted the Oslo Agreements 'temporarily,'and so on, and soon. Each one said to himself and to others 'until things become clearer.

The Beirut beat was a demanding one. Middle Eastern politics were as complex and volatile in 1956 as they are today. But as Philby knew from his years as a correspondent in civil-war Spain, there is no better cover job for a spy than that of journalist, a profession that enables the asking of direct, unsubtle, and impertinent questions about the most sensitive subjects without arousing suspicion.

In my dreams, I entered a world where success was based on ethics and proper dealings, not bribes and scams. My vision of sucess including marrying Sophia, having joyful children, unassuming friends, and warmhearted neighbors. I aspired for an environment where I would be valued for my good character, not the strength of my aggression. I wanted to leave West Beirut, the four square miles of a lesser world.

Such car bombs—a weapon of choice for the Israeli forces besieging Beirut, and one of their most terrifying instruments of death and destruction—were described by one Mossad officer as “killing for killing’s sake.”25

To the people of Beirut, the post-apocalyptic world of The Umbrella Academy is now a reality. They now live in an obliterated world. From this day forward, they exist in a destroyed world. For them, the End Times just happened.

Als Schriftstellerin bin ich in gewissem Sinne Idealistin. Die Phantasie des Schriftstellers aber schöpft aus der Wirklichkeit. Sie gilt es, um jeden Preis in Erfahrung zu bringen, auch wenn dabei moralische Grenzen überschritten werden.

Starbucks itself is a product of diverse global cultures: “Starbuck’s customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans.”71

I should be in Beirut, I thought, working as a journalist, but another part of me was so wary of that old life of guns and misery. I did not want to see Tyre again, or Qana, or Baghdad. I wanted to do nothing more than move dirt from one place to another.

Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns." I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.

Beirut. What does that say to you? CAMPBELL: It says to me that they don’t know how to apply their religious ideas to contemporary life, and to human beings rather than just to their own community. It’s a terrible example of the failure of religion to meet the modern world.

When the Japanese invaded, informers said mother was an important member of the resistance. She was taken in, badly tortured and never confessed. Her life was spared because the Japanese interrogators could not believe a woman could have held such a key role. When her children were grown-up, mother would tell us, ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. The first time, you’re scared you’ll give away your friends. But there comes a point when you pass out. Once that happens, you cannot feel pain anymore. Once you have learnt that, you can beat your torturers.

How often have I held back my complaint: Why should the Lebanese homeland be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Egyptian loaf be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Syrian roof be incompatible with Palestine? Why should Palestine be incompatible with Palestine?

For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.

We grew up in places like Georgetown and Alexandria and Chevy Chase; we were flown in great thumping silver Pan American airplanes all the way to Rome, all the way to Greece, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Hamra, Cairo; we went to American Community Schools; we spent weekends swimming at the American Club.

The wrangling between Britain and the Free French throughout the war years had a further, far-reaching consequence when de Gaulle returned to power in 1958. As president of France it was he who infamously vetoed Harold Macmillan’s application to join the Common Market. In tracing exactly why de Gaulle said Non, it is, surprisingly, to the hot and noisy cities of Beirut and Damascus that we should look. The general’s experience of British machinations in both places profoundly shaped his reluctance to allow his wartime rivals to join his European club. It is a tale from which neither country emerges with much credit.

Chicago during this era also earned the label "Beirut on the Lake" because of the vituperative nature of the political battles and the unwillingness of the factions to compromise. At the time Beirut, Lebanon, was in the middle of a brutal Middle Eastern war involving various Arab factions and Israel, and it was being bombed to rubble.

When Israelis were indirectly involved in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, the story was front-page news for weeks. When Lebanese Shiites were directly involved in killing Palestinians in the very same camps from 1985 to 1988, it was almost always back-page news—if it was reported at all. This

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.

Nur das Leben bietet die Gewähr dafür, begangene Fehler wiedergutzumachen.

In der Gemeinsamkeit verliert den Tod an Schrecken. Wer allein stirbt, erlebt den Tod zweifach, einmal in seiner Einsamkeit und einmal im Tod selbst.

Glücklich, wer im Libanon eine Waffe und einen Grabplatz besitzt. Das Land gehört auf ewig dem, der bereit ist, dafür sein Leben zu geben.

Ihre Finger und Herzen am Abzug kneten sie den Geschmack von Sprengstoff in die Gegenwart, kneten sie Leid und Hass in die Geschichte.

Der Bürgerkrieg nagt an den zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen, bis nur noch ein Knochengerüst übrig ist.

I don't remember the last day of the war. But I remember the first time you could take a shower.

what if I discover that, for me, roaming is home?

Rule number one when cooking: never believe the recipe.

Do our dreams carry messages from the great beyond, sent by the people we have lost, or are they a reflection of our desperation and wishful thinking?

It does not matter to me: wherever you are grieving whether Paris, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bamako, Mexico or Beirut or New York City my heart, too, is bruised and dragging. There used to be such a thing as melodrama when feelings could be made up, but now there is bare pain and sorrow, a sense of endlessly missed opportunities to smile and embrace "The other.

When Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians declared jihad on Christians in 1975, we didn’t even know what that word meant. We had taken the Palestinians in, giving them refuge in our country, allowing them to study side by side with us in our schools and universities. We gave them jobs and shared our way of life with them. What started as political war spiraled very fast into a religious war between Muslims and Christians, with Lebanese Muslims joining the PLO fighting the Christians. We didn’t realize the depth of their hatred and resentment toward us as infidels. The more that Christians refused to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to allow the Palestinians to use Lebanon as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, the more the Palestinians looked at us as the enemy. Muslims started making statements such as “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday,” meaning first we fight the Jews, then we come for the Christians. Christian presence, influence, and democracy became an obstacle in the Palestinians' fight against Israel. Koranic verses such as sura 5:51—"Believers, take not Jews and Christians for your friends. They are but friends and protectors to each other"—became the driving force in recruiting Muslim youth. Many Christians barely knew the Bible, let alone the Koran and what it taught about us, the infidels. We should have seen the long-simmering tension between Muslims and Christians beginning to erupt, but we refused to believe that such hatred and such animosity existed. America also failed to recognize this hatred throughout all the attacks launched against it, beginning with the marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 all the way up to September 11, 2001. It was that horrible day that made Americans finally ask, What is jihad? And why do they hate us? I have a very simple answer for them: because you are “infidels.

I opted not to go to Beirut. I refused to admit it, but Damascus was the last place I wanted to go. It was as though as long as I didn't go back, I could pretend that you would be there waiting for me, having a coffee on my auntie's patio and bouncing her baby on your knee. Going back to Damascus meant facing your absence, dispelling the illusion. Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair if I don't acknowledge that I've never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend their some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.

I got to see with my own eyes the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuity alongside astounding folly, their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure. Of

Jeder Mensch trägt den Tod in sich. Warum schlafen wir dann nicht gleich von Geburt an in Särgen? Wozu die vielen Umwege, Ausflüchte und Täuschungsmanöver, mit denen wir versuchen, die Gebote der Natur zu überlisten?

Some of our bonding moments were times of great tragedy, but there were many happy memories as well. Though we each have since retreated to the different worlds from whence we came, the bond between us will never be broken.

Sprengladungen scheinen drogenähnliche Nebenwirkungen zu haben. Verborgene Energien, die im Innersten des Menschen schlummern, setzen sie frei, und den Alltagsverstand, die gewohnte Stimme der Vernunft, schalten sie kurzerhand aus.

It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light. A

لطالما وددتُ أن أشتري جميع البالونات وأطلق سراحها، غير أنّي كنتُ أجزم كلّ مرّة بأنّ مالك الحوراني، وهو لقبه، أمين عليها أكثر من الجميع. لا يسلّمها إلّا للأطفال، الذين يقدّرون معنى الأشياء قبل أن يحرّروها، فتصير كالمشرّدين، صاحبة حرّيّة مغمّسة بالكآبة.

As the Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf summed it up: “Though the average Lebanese derives much … social support and psychological reinforcement from … local and communal allegiances, these forces are the same elements that … prompt him on occasion to violate and betray his society’s normative standards. The Lebanese is being demoralized, in other words, by the very forces that are supposed to make him a more human and sociable being … The formation and deformation of Lebanon, so to speak, are rooted in the same forces.” I

Sie erscheinen mir so wehrlos, meine Bücher. Sie können das Feuer nicht erwidern. Andererseits stirbt das Geschoss, unmittelbar nachdem es abgefeuert worden ist. Das Buch hingegen wird in dem Moment erst geboren und wächst und vermehrt sich mit jedem, der es liest.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

Everyone lives in a proverbial music video for a few hours. Then they leave the blinged out universe of faux-independence and fleeting adulthood and return to their parents’ homes. Their parents’ homes replete with marble floors and gold chandeliers and expectations of virginal daughters.

One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn’t mean he isn’t buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal. The

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt...

The atmosphere in Washington was different. President Reagan remained popular, despite having committed crimes far worse than those that had brought Nixon down: financing terrorism in Nicaragua, trading weapons for hostages with Iran, and turning women and girls into mangled corpses on the streets of Beirut. Reagan’s collaborator Vice President George H. W. Bush looked likely to become the next president. Somehow—and Jasper could not figure out how this trick had been worked—people who challenged the president and caught him out cheating and lying were no longer heroes, as they had been in the seventies, but instead were considered disloyal and even anti-American.

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.

Seinerzeit wäre ich beinahe für eine der beiden Parteien, die jetzt um unser Haus kämpfen, in den Tod gegangen [...]. Ich war mal für kurze Zeit bei ihnen Mitglied, bis ich gemerkt habe, dass ich nicht zur Parteiarbeit tauge. Mit ihren Zielen bin ich war nach wie vor einverstanden, aber ich bin Schriftstellerin, und das verträgt sich nicht mit der Parteimitgliedschaft, denn dort wird erst gehandelt und dann diskutiert, und das steht in krassem Gegensatz zum obersten Prizip des Geistesmenschen: erst die Theorie und dann die Praxis mit so wenig Gewalt wie möglich. Künstler und Schriftsteller bilden eine unabhängige Partei. Entweder verschreiben sie sich ihrer Kunst oder einer politischen Richtung.

Wie viele Säcke Sand mag mein Leben umfassen? Langsam und stetig rieselt er durch eine kleine Öffnung zwischen zwei Kugeln. Wieviel ist verbraucht? Ist unten schon mehr Sand als oben? Und wenn ich jetzt tödlich getroffen werde, rutscht dann der restliche Sand auf einen Schub hinunter und alles ist vorbei? Wieviel Sand hat ein Mensch für sein Leben zur Verfügung? Man müsste gleich am Anfang darauf hingewiesen werden: Dies ist dein Anteil. Vergiss nicht, dass der Sand keine Sekunde lang aufhört zu rieseln. Ich weiß nicht, wie viele Säcke mein Leben ausmachen. Warum genügen sie nicht, um eine Barrikade zu errichten, die mich vor Überfällen, allem Ungewissen und der Vergänglichkeit des Lebens schützt?

in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, “We are the chosen group, and we have God.” Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell, and it never has opened up to the Catholic majority there. The Catholics and Protestants represent two totally different social systems, two different ideals. MOYERS: Each needs a new myth.

heroin pipeline whose outlet is Beirut. These eighteen men, all experts in conspiracy, in the highest ranges of secret communication and action and, above all, of silence, also shared one supreme virtue – every man had a solid cover. Every man possessed a valid passport with up-to-date visas for the principal countries in the world, and an entirely clean sheet with Interpol and with their respective national police forces. That factor alone, the factor of each man’s cleanliness after a lifetime in big crime, was his highest qualification for membership of SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. The founder and chairman of this private enterprise for private profit was Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Because of this knowledge, because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians. The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.

Rashid Bey Beydoun, a stylish Shia notable who wore his fez at a rakish angle and seemed free of the timidity of his people, set out to give himself and his sect a place in the city. He built a secondary school and a mosque for his people in West Beirut; he established a philanthropic association. The ambitious politician knew his city. He assembled a group of qabadayat, street toughs, who were ready to do his bidding. Such were the rules of the city: if Basta, the Sunni quarter, had its qabadayat, so would Rashid Beydoun and his people. He gave his men a grand name: talaya, the vanguard. They had more bark than bite, the boys of the talaya. But the timid men and women of the hinterland saw in Beydoun and his men and his school the beginning of their emancipation. It was in the school established by Rashid Bey Beydoun that Abbas was to enroll.

In spite of this firestorm, and even with Israel’s extensive aerial surveillance capabilities and its many hundreds of agents and spies planted in Lebanon16 (the war took place before the age of the reconnaissance drone), not one of the PLO’s several functioning underground command and control posts or its multiple communications centers, was ever hit. Nor was a single PLO leader killed in the attacks, although many civilians died when the Israeli air force missed its targets. This is surprising, given just how extensive were Israel’s efforts to liquidate them.17 Israel’s leaders were clearly unconcerned about killing civilians trying to do so: after an air attack in July 1981 destroyed a building in Beirut with heavy civilian casualties, Begin’s office had stated that “Israel was no longer refraining from attacking guerrilla targets in civilian areas.”18

The area occupied by the Christians in Syria and Palestine, called Outremer because of its location beyond the Mediterranean Sea, was a thin coastal strip extending from Armenia in the north to the borders of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt in the south. By 1109, the Christian territory was divided into four large states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, extending from Gaza to Beirut; the County of Tripoli, from Beirut to Margat; the Principality of Antioch, from Margat to Alexandria; and the County of Edessa, which stretched northeast all the way to present-day Urfa. These Latin states were governed by noble courts in much the same way as their counterparts in Europe. They were often rocked by dynastic disputes, which, together with the scarcity of available troops and the latent threat of Muslim attack, put the security of the Christian population in a constant state of uncertainty.

Mereka punya sebuah mimpi. Dan aku berbagi mimpi itu dengan mereka: mimpi tentang sebuah dunia yang tampak jelas di tengah-tengah semburan gas air mata dan reruntuhan yang berasap di kamp-kamp pengungsi. Sebuah dunia tempat seorang bocah sebelas tahun tak perlu belajar cara menggunakan sepucuk kalashnikov atau mesin peluncur roket untuk membela keluarganya. Sebuah dunia yang damai, adil, dan aman, tempat aku tak perlu mengatakan kepada seorang anak, "Pergilah ke sekolah," hanya untuk mengetahui bahwa sekolahnya telah dibom, atau mengatakan kepada seorang gadis, "Bantulah ibumu menyiapkan makan malam," hanya untuk melihatnya kembali kepadaku dan mengatakan bahwa ibu dan keluarganya telah dibunuh. Sebuah dunia tempat kami tak perlu lagi takut terkubur hidup-hidup di dalam puing-puing. Sebuah dunia tempat aku tak perlu lagi memperbaiki bagian-bagian tubuh yang patah hanya untuk melihatnya dipatahkan lagi, atau memeluk tubuh remuk seorang bocah dengan tanganku dan bertanya, "Mengapa?" atau mendengar orang-orang bertanya, "Berapa lama lagi?" Sebuah dunia tanpa penjara, tanpa penyiksaan, tanpa rasa sakit, tanpa kelaparan, dan tanpa kartu-kartu identitas pengungsi, tempat aku dapat berteduh di rumahku sendiri dan mendengarkan nyanyian ibuku seraya menutup mata di penghujung hari. Tempat itu adalah mimpi kami, Jerusalem kami.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that hypersexualiztion will turn into complete desexualisation. The more men pump steroids into their system, the more women pump Botox into theirs, the less they look human at all. Blobs of post-human flesh floating around a phantom city, occasionally bumping into each other and feeling nothing. What was once skin, now a tepid silicone and steroid laden wasteland. The only hope for sex in Lebanon? The death of sex.

In a few weeks almost everyone’s gonna forget about the Beirut bombing, like we forgot about the ever-incoming nuke, like we forgot about the President campaigning on student loan forgiveness, like we forgot about the actor who said not enough Jews died in the Holocaust and that he hoped his wife got gang raped, like how each new President makes the other Presidents look kinder and gentler, like we forget about war crimes, like we forget about the secret police, like we forget about the homeless when we can’t see them, like we forget what it’s like to be poor to be hungry the minute we have food we have money, like we forgot about Three Mile Island, like we forgot that fall and spring used to be as long as winter and summer like we forgot we could do something about this, like we forget about anything we don’t turn into a holiday and remember only the signs and symbols of the horror, like we forget each time we remember that it’s not that we forget, it’s that there are just too many tragedies, every week, forever and ever, and to remember them all would kill you. Your heart would break and stop beating and you'd die. So we forget.

These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut. On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

The next day, September 16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter the campus to search for terrorists. Kerr rushed off to the university entrance, where, he later told us, he rejected the officers’ demands. “There are no terrorists on the AUB campus,” he said. “If you’re looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who’ve destroyed Beirut.” Thanks to Malcolm Kerr’s courage, we were temporarily safe in a faculty apartment at the AUB, but we soon heard that others were at that moment in mortal peril. On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.

When American astronaut Neil Armstrong, a devout Christian, visited Israel after his trip to the moon, he was taken on a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov. When they got to the Hulda Gate, which is at the top of the stairs leading to the Temple Mount, Armstrong asked Ben-Dov whether Jesus had stepped anywhere around there. “I told him, ‘Look, Jesus was a Jew,’” recalled Ben-Dov. “These are the steps that lead to the Temple, so he must have walked here many times.” Armstrong then asked if these were the original steps, and Ben-Dov confirmed that they were. “So Jesus stepped right here?” asked Armstrong again. “That’s right,” answered Ben-Dov. “I have to tell you,” Armstrong said to the Israeli archaeologist, “I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the moon.