West Beirut Quotes

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures. Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance. “To be a Levantine,” wrote Hourani, “is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either.” In

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the

Well, then can you tell me something?” she continued. “Why is it that when the Germans were killing the Jews everyone screamed, but when we are being killed by Israelis, the world calls us killers?” The nurse’s question was clearly spoken out of a deep psychic wound, a grievance that she herself had been nursing for a long time. Who could blame her? As I stood there, one hand on the new mother’s bed railing and the other gripping my clipboard, I wanted to explain to her that the difference in treatment had nothing to do with the Israeli cause being somehow morally superior to that of the Palestinians and that it also had nothing to do with any conspiracy in the media. It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians simply are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose don’t, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathies of the West the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews, no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they suffer.

The starving children of Tel Zaatar who arrived in West Beirut will never be the same again. These were children who walked all the way from their camp and on the way found themselves walking alone. Children who saw their parents bayonetted to death in front of their eyes. Children who were shellshocked. Children who, before the siege, had been physically and mentally healthy and were now deaf-mute. Children who went into convulsions when they heard the word "water." Children who woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Children who lost every member of their families. Children who did not play, or run around, but sat staring, responding neither to questions nor the offer of food.

The siege of Beirut brought with it all the ancient terrors of sieges -- city gates broken, libraries burned down, fire dropped on defenders. A truly medieval event recalling these sieges of Jerusalem in 1099 and Acre in 1189. This siege also was a metaphor of confrontation between East and West and a fascinating symbol of the clash of self-definitions between settler-colonialism and native resistance. It was a mirage from the medieval age that bespoke, as sieges then often did, the most dreadful catastrophe that could befall people: the destruction of their city and their subsequent wanderings in search of shelter to house their passions and the outward expression of their culture. To Palestinians everywhere, the siege of Beirut became the most monumental event in their modern history -- even more monumental than the dismemberment of, and exodus from, Palestine in 1948. The Israelis tried everything during these siege. To starve the city. To bomb it to rubble. To terrorize its inhabitants with psychological warfare. To cut its water, medical, and food supplies.

Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!” A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars.

When I asked Marine Sergeant Jeffrey Roberts what he thought was happening in Lebanon, he explained, “To me it was a civil war, only it wasn’t just the North against the South. It was North against South, East against West, Northeast against Southwest, Southeast against Northwest, and we were in the middle of it all. There were just too many different sides. If we picked one, we had four others against us.” Marine

The daily television transmission of Israeli artillery bombarding Beirut, the columns of smoke, dust and fire rising in the air, and the close-up pictures of the destruction, including serious damage to a hospital, caused immense harm to Israel’s international image and much anguished discussion within Israel itself.”7 Arafat would regularly appear in front of the cameras with civilians injured during the attacks. The West, once solidly behind the Jewish state, began to shift toward the PLO. In Tel Aviv tens of thousands of Israelis protested the war, the first such protests in the Jewish state’s history.