•It was the prospect of dying a random, senseless death that made Beirut so frightening.
• Since the start of the Lebanese civil war, much of the fighting in Beirut has consisted of sniping or shelling from great distances; those doing the fighting often have no idea where their bullets or shells will land.
• When car bombs came into vogue in the late 1970s, life on the Beirut streets became even more terrifying.
• In August 1982, an eight-story building packed with several hundred Palestinian refugees was bombed by Israeli jets and collapsed, burying everyone inside alive.
• The evening Mohammed’s family perished in my apartment we ran over to the local police station to see if any survivors had been taken to local hospitals. There was a lone policeman on duty who said he had no list of either survivors or victims. Death had no echo in Beirut—nobody’s life seemed to leave any mark on city or reverberate its ear.
•George, who died a natural death a few years ago, understood the secret of coping with the violence of Beirut—that it required something more complicated than just hiding in a basement shelter.
• It required a thousand little changes in one’s daily habits and a thousand little mental games to avoid being overwhelmed by everything happening around you.
• Terry Prothro, who directed the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University of Beirut and was a longtime resident of the city, once suggested that what “we are experiencing in Lebanon is something that is unlike any stress problems psychiatrists or psychologists have had to deal with anywhere in the past.”
• The Lebanese invented their own prescriptions for coping, proving in the process that men and women can go on for years and years in what seem to be inhuman conditions by developing the right coping mechanisms.
• The most popular means of coping I saw in Beirut was simply learning to play mind games—games that eased one’s anxiety without actually removing any danger.
•People in Beirut always had to find some way to differentiate themselves from the victim and to insist that there was a logical explanation for why each person died, which, if noted, would save them from a similar fate.
• Richard Day studied the coping mechanisms of people in Beirut and found that those who survived the Israeli invasion of Beirut were those who learned how to block out what was going on around them.
• I learned to be quite good at this myself.
•Robin Wright, an American reporter working in Beirut on a book about radical Shiite groups, used to have to spend a great deal of time moving in and out of Shiite neighborhoods controlled by the radical Hizbullah.
• One day, she went up to a senior Hizbullah official and asked for a press pass. The official didn’t know from press passes, but he wanted to be accommodating, so he gave her a piece of poster with the Hizbullah emblem on it.
• David Zucchino and Tom Friedman were riding in a taxi up the Beirut-Damascus highway when they were stopped at a checkpoint by teenage boys with pistols who demanded to know their religion.
• The taxi driver saved them by telling the militiaman that they were journalists.
•In early July 1982, reporter Robert Fisk requests an interview with Yasir Arafat through Arafat’s personal spokesman, Mahmoud Labadi.
• Labadi is initially reluctant to grant the interview to Fisk because he is Jewish, but eventually relents.
• After theinterview goes well and is published on the front page of The New York Times, Labadi tells Bill Farrell (Fisk’s colleague) that he has asked for a complete assessment of all of Fisk’s reporting on the PLO from their office in New York.
• Upon receiving this telex, which describes his coverage as generally fair and balanced but notes that The New York Times’ “cousinly ways” sometimes make it less supportive of the PLO than they would like, Labadi calls for a meeting with Mohammed (Fisk’s assistant) and Fisks.
• During this meeting, after reading aloud what was said about his work in the telex, Fisks says “Sounds okay to me,” before adding that if rules have changed then he’ll go back to packing his bags at The Commodore hotel.
•Labadi reassures him that Jews are not being targeted specifically by saying “We just want you from him to report the truth.”
•Reporters found ways to negotiate the space needed to learn and write the truth, while at the same time protecting themselves.
• They ran pieces without a byline and sometimes quoted local militia radio stations on sensitive stories.
• The Western press coddled the PLO and never judged it with anywhere near the scrutiny that it judged Israeli, Phalangist, or American behavior.
•Hama is a Sunni Muslim city known for its conservatism and religious piety.
• The city has a history of hostility towards secular central governments in Damascus.
• This hostility boiled over in the late 1970s when the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Sunni guerilla fighters, began assassinating government officials and Syrian citizens.
• In response, the Assad regime declared martial law and began systematically rounding up suspected members of the Brotherhood.
• On June 26, 1980, an assassination attempt was made on President Assad’s life.
• In retaliation, Defense Companies loyal to Assad massacred 600-1,000 prisoners being held at Tadmur Prison – many of whom were innocent civilians with no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
•In February 1982, President Assad decided to end his Hama problem once and for all by implementing “Hama Rules.”
• Exact details of what happened during the massacre are incomplete, but it is pieced together from five sources.
• According to these sources, responsibility for taming Hama was given to Rifaat who first infiltrated 1,500 men into buildings in the city.
• At the same time, another 1,500 commandos erected a tent camp near a dam at the outskirts of Hama and dug out a landing pad for helicopters.
• Tuesday February 2nd at 1:00 am was set as the time for “clean-up” of Hama to commence.
• The operation began with some 500 soldiers from Rifaat’s Defense Companies surrounding Barudi neighborhood on western bank of Orontes River where most religious Hamawis lived in narrow alleyways and arch-covered roads.
As they entered Barudi district Syrian officers carried lists with names and addresses of suspected hideouts and arms caches of Muslim rebels when they were met with machine-gun fire from rooftops punctuated by shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” God is greater [than enemy].
•Thousands of additional government troops were rushed to Hama, and the 47th Armored Brigade was ordered to move from the outskirts into the city.
• The Muslim Brotherhood, with the help of many secular neighborhood youths who had been alienated from the regime as a result of previous crackdowns on Hama, actually seized the initiative, attacking Defense Brigades positions around town and setting up their own roadblocks made of boulders and garbage.
• From the mosque microphones they blared the same message over and over: “Rise up and drive
•On February 17, the Muslim Brotherhood’s commander, Sheik al-Kaylani, was killed by a mortar blast.
• The Syrian government broadcast a telegram of support addressed to President Assad from the Hama branch of the Baath Party on February 22.
• For the next several weeks, there was a settling of accounts between the Assad regime and Syria’s fourth-largest city; many more people perished as a result.
• Most of the casualties in Hama apparently were registered during this phase.
• Syrian army engineers set about systematically dynamiting any buildings which remained standing in “Brotherhood” neighborhoods, with whoever was inside. According to both Amnesty International and the Muslim Brotherhood, groups of prisoners suspected of anti-government sentiments were taken from detention camps, machine-gunned en masse, and then dumped into pre-dug pits that were covered with earth and left unmarked.
•The best way to understand the influence of tribalism on political behavior in the modern Middle East is by looking at the phenomenon in its purest original form among the nomadic Bedouin of the desert.
• Life in the desert, observed Clinton Bailey, an Israeli expert on the Bedouin of the Sinai and Negev deserts, was always dominated by two overriding facts: first, in the desert, water and grazing resources were so limited that “everyone had to become a wolf and be prepared to survive at any time on the leftovers of the rest’; second, ‘the tribes could not survive without a permanent enemy, which was the rival tribe.
•The reason one can still find such tribe-like conflicts at work in the Middle East today is that most peoples in this part of the world, including Israeli Jews, have not fully broken from their primordial identities.
• Their relatively new nation-states are still abstractions in many ways. This is because primordial, tribe-like loyalties governed men’s identities and political attitudes so deeply.
• The traditional authoritarian ruler in the Middle East assumed or inherited power based on the sword, to which his subjects were expected to submit obediently.
• On some occasions a major Arab tribe or group of soldiers would impose itself on the tribes and cities of another region—such as when the Umayyads came out of Arabia and imposed themselves on Levantine territory.
•In the modern Middle East, there are two types of authoritarian tradition – the Ottoman approach and the more brutal, un-Islamic Abul-Abbas variety.
• The more brutal form of authoritarianism is dangerous because insecure autocrats are using chemical weapons and modern armies without restraint.
• Hama was an example of what happens when a modern Middle Eastern autocrat uses twentieth-century weapons without restraint.
•Assad and Saddam Hussein have survived longer than any other modern autocrats in Syria or Iraq because they are both brutal and smart.
• They maintain overlapping intelligence agencies that spy on each other, the army, and the people.
• They use everything that the twentieth century has to offer in terms of surveillance technology.
• On July 22, 1979, Saddam Hussein convened an extraordinary meeting of the Iraqi Baath Party Regional Congress in order to hear al-Mashhadi’s confession—live.
• A videotape ofthe confessions was then distributed to Baath Party branches across Iraq, as well as to army units; a few bootleg copies even made their way to Kuwait and Beirut.
•In the wake of World War I, the British and French took out their imperial pens and carved up what remained of the Ottoman dynastic empire, and created an assortment of nation-states in the Middle East modeled along their own.
• These new states consisted of neat polygons—with right angles that were always in sharp contrast to the chaotic reality on the ground.
• What happened in the twentieth century when these new nation-states were created was that in each one a particular tribe-like group either seized power or was ensconced in power by the British and French—and then tried to dominate all other groups in the state.
•Arafat’s primary base of support during his Beirut days came from those Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
• They formed the ranks of his guerrilla army and filled the positions of his bureaucracy.
• Most of these Palestinian refugees hailed from towns and villages that fell within the boundaries of pre-1967 Israel—places such as Haifa or Jaffa or the Galilee.
• Arafat was a genius at playing the good cop-bad cop routine with Arab leaders.
• The paychecks weren’t big, and sometimes they came late, but they came, and when they did they didn’t bounce.
• By unifying the Palestinian people under one banner, by creating an institutional framework to sustain that unity, Arafat assembled a critical mass behind the Palestinian cause that simply made it impossible to ignore.
•Yasser Arafat was a skilled politician who knew h