•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 how to play to the fantasies of his people.
• He was an excellent public speaker and could make even the most hopeless situation seem like it had potential.
• Arafat was able to unify the Palestinian people and give them a sense of purpose.
•Israel had little understanding of Lebanon before the 1982 invasion, with most knowledge coming from newspaper clippings and radio broadcasts.
• The Israelis did not understand that there were two Lebanons – one built on a merger between Maronites and Sunnis, and one built on a Zionist-Maronite view from the 1930s and 1940s.
•Israelis saw Christians as the “real Lebanese,” just as they saw themselves as the real owners of Palestine.
• Each Israeli soldier entering Lebanon was given a pamphlet entitled Lebanon, published by the Israeli army education corps. The entire 14-page pamphlet, a condensed history of Lebanon, contained only two passing references to the Shiites, Lebanon’s largest single religious community in the 1980s.
• The real source of Lebanon’s troubles was the fact that these two Lebanons—Christian and Muslim—frequently were at odds with each other, going back to the very foundation of their state, when they were literally thrown together.
• With an economy so dependent on the Arab-Muslim world, Lebanon was destined to be the last Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
•The “Palestine Problem” for Israelis is not one of two equally legitimate national communities—Jews and Palestinians—seeking a national home in Palestine, but rather the problem of marauding Arab bands killing Jews, engaging in terrorism, and refusing to accept the Jewish people’s right to the land of Israel.
• The PLO is responsible for much of the violence against Israelis and Begin believes that getting rid of them will solve the Palestine Problem.
• Sharon shares Begin’s fantasies about Jewish power and sees military strength as a way to solve complex political problems like those presented by Lebanon.
•The Israeli army invades Lebanon, causing PLO leader Arafat’s illusions to crumble.
• The Arab world is uninterested in the Palestinians’ plight, and the Lebanese Sunnis tire of hosting them.
• On July 3, 1982, at a meeting in Salam’s mansion, the Sunni leaders confront Arafat about leaving Beirut.
• Arafat agrees to consider their proposal and leaves for Iftar.
•Arafat and Hani al-Hassan returned and joined the Sunni notables and the Salam family around the dinner table.
• Everyone agreed that there should be no talk of politics during the meal.
• Arafat read from a document, written in his own scrawl under the letterhead of the PLO commander in chief, which stated that “The PLO does not wish to remain in Lebanon.”
• After another month of Israeli bombing and shelling of West Beirut, though, he would have no such illusions; neither, for that matter, would any other Palestinians.
•210 bodies were found by the International Committee of the Red Cross, but it is estimated that 800-1,000 people were killed in total
• The Israeli soldiers present didn’t see or hear anything because they had been dehumanizing Palestinians for so long that they lost track of the distinction between civilians and fighters.
•Sharon thought that by going to Beirut and destroying Arafat, he could impose permanent Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza.
• However, what Sharon didn’t realize is that Arafat was ready to star in the “theater” of Beirut for a long time. All Arafat really wanted was a little turf for himself and his people.
• By driving Arafat and his guerrillas out, Sharon re-created their dilemma of homelessness and made them wandering men again – with no option but to invest virtually all their energy in diplomacy (as opposed to armed struggle) with the aim of recovering precisely the turf where Sharon had planned to impose his rule: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
• In order to constrain King Hussein (and keep a land bridge open to Palestinians on the West Bank), Arafat reached an agreement with Jordan on a joint negotiating strategy on February 11, 1985 – even though this agreement was bitterly opposed by PLO hard-liners at the time.
• A year later, Hussein nullified the accord and threw PLO out of Jordan – putting Arafat back into orbit; yet even with all ground cut out from under him, he floated in midair held aloft by Palestinian aspirations for national self-determination.
•After the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, Israel was left to fend for itself in Lebanon.
• There are two ways to create a stable Lebanese government – by addressing the root causes of instability or treating its symptoms.
• Israel chose the latter option, installing Amin Gemayel as president.
• This decision led to more turmoil in Lebanon and ultimately an unenforceable peace treaty.
•The Israeli army made a movie in 1985 called Two Fingers from Sidon to prepare troops for serving in Lebanon.
• The movie was shown to soldiers anyway and became popular, eventually being released to the public.
• In one scene, a jaded veteran soldier explains the political situation in Lebanon to a fresh-eyed lieutenant.
•The U.S. Marines came to Lebanon as “peacekeepers” in 1982, but left in 1984 after two years.
• Tadeusz Borowski’s book about the Nazi concentration camps, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, describes how prisoners killed a Nazi SS guard after their camp was liberated by American GI’s.
• The prisoners dragged the German soldier inside their blockhouse, put him on a bunk, covered him with a blanket, and then sat on top of him—looking innocent and waiting for the American soldiers to show up.
•The Marines found it easy to mingle with the Muslims and Palestinians in West Beirut.
• They passed out bubble gum to kids and spent their days making leisurely patrols.
• The American officials who dispatched the Marines to Beirut thought that the Lebanese problem was relatively easy to solve.
•The Reagan Administration made Lebanon an extension of American political culture in order to justify the American presence there.
• This military relationship would ultimately undermine the entire American mission in Lebanon.
• President Gemayel began to use the Marines as a club to beat his Muslim opponents instead of using them as a crutch to rebuild his country.
• Gemayel totally ignored feelers from Shiite Amai leader Nabih Berri, whose support could easily have been won by a Lebanese President ready to commit some resources to rebuilding the predominantly Shiite southern suburbs of West Beirut.
•Gemayel managed to alienate the Sunni Muslims of West Beirut, who were actually supporting his presidency.
• During the first year of his rule, some 1,000 Muslims and Palestinians disappeared in West Beirut; they were either swooped up by the army and imprisoned without trial or abducted by the Phalangists and suffered fates unknown.
• Many West Beirut Lebanese Muslims welcomed the Christian-led Lebanese army when it came in and replaced the PLO. But that crackdown never came, so West Beirut went into a slow burn and Muslims there began attacking the army.
• Gemayel responded by putting West Beirut under an 8:00 p.m. curfew while he turned a blind eye to activities going on in East Beiruit with his father’s Phalangist Party militia including illegal ports and private armies..
•The Israelis withdrew from the Shouf Mountains, leaving the Marines to pick up the pieces in Beirut.
• This created a vacuum which everyone rushed to fill. From one side came the Druse, led by their warlord Walid Jumblat. From the other came Phalangists and Gemayel’s Lebanese army.
• The specific event which turned Marines from neutral peacekeepers into just another Lebanese faction was a battle for an obscure village named Souk el-Gharb.
• Syrian- and Palestinian-backed Druse units launched an artillery and ground assault on Souk el-Gharb, which controlled the ridge line overlooking Beirut.
• An agitated General Tannous came up to General Stiner and informed him that a “massive” offensive was taking shape against his army at Souk el-Gharb and that he needed American help immediately.. Without seeking any independent confirmation of Tannous’s assessment, McFarlane ordered Geraghty to have navy ships under his authority fire in support ofthe Lebanese army..
•The spirit of Beirut is what was known as the Levantine spirit, which is an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities.
• The Levantine political idea inspired the Beirutis and ultimately the Lebanese to believe that they could build a modern Arab republic.
• The Levantine idea posits the notion that if men cannot break with their tribal pasts, they can at least learn to check them at the door of the cities in which they live.
• This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution as settlers from Western Europe brought commerce, manners, and ideas to Lebanon.
• Elite elements of native populations imitated Western mores and manners while blending them with indigenous Arabic culture, creating a cosmopolitan nation in downtown Beirut.
•Beirut was a city with no real natural resources, other than the cunning of its multilingual inhabitants and their ability to make money serving as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world.
• The first round of the Lebanese civil war that broke out in April 1975 and lasted until the end of 1978 wounded Beirut, but not mortally.
• The definitive dismemberment of both Beirut and Lebanon came in early 1984.
•On February 26, 1984, the day the Marines completed their pullout from Lebanon, they held a formal ceremony to turn their Beirut Airport complex of bunkers and gun positions back over to whatever was left of the Lebanese army.
• The problem was that the Lebanese army commanders could not get to the airport because they had been thrown out of West Beirut. So at 8:15 a.m., a Muslim Lebanese army captain who happened to be hanging around the airport and a few other stragglers were rounded up for attendance.
• To ensure that some official Lebanese would be on hand, Colonel Fahim Qortabawi was flown in from East Beirut by helicopter.
• Colonel Faulkner delivered brief remarks thanking the Lebanese before he and his men struck their colors (took down American flag). As they did so, Qortabawi reached up and grabbed Lebanon’s flag off its hangings before folding it in an unclear pattern and handed it to Faulkner saying “Please…you might as well take our flag too.”
• With downcast eyes, Qortabawi turned Van Huss asking if they were really leaving; Van Huss confirmed fallback positions had already been vacated with final embarkation underway.
•Many Lebanese never mourned the passing of the Beirut city center because they were too young to remember it or too poor to have ever experienced its cosmopolitan life.
• Christian and Muslim bourgeoisie members who did exploit the beautiful side of Beirut will never have that same opportunity again.
• Some true Beirutis kept the addresses of their offices in the ravaged city center on their stationery as symbols of solidarity with the past and hope for future.
• Nabil Tabbara, an architect and professor at American University, took a leave from his job in 1976 to try and sketch what remained of teh city center before it vanished due to civil war.
• Tabbara would go down tot he Phoenicia Hotel every morning, park his car, walk to Green Line, obtain passes from different militias fighting along line, then head off into battle zone with just his camera, pencils, and sketchpads to capture remnants fo youth.
• After three months fo work ,Tabbara put away all sketches ,photographs ,and street signs for safekeeping .In late 1976 ,the civil war died down briefly and many thought government would soon rebuild city cente almost as it was .It didn’t happen but for a brief period of time, Tabbara managed to capture the spirit of Beirut as it was before the civil war.
•In 1984, the Shiites of Lebanon were emboldened by the Islamic revolution in Iran and decided to take control of Beirut.
• The Lebanese knew that there would be no one from the outside to save them when the Marines evacuated Beirut.
• The lost generation of Lebanese youth had their adolescence destroyed by the civil war.
•All the myths are gone now, said Salam, but maybe that is the beginning of wisdom.
• We now know that the democracy we had was not a democracy at all but a sectarian balance of power.
• Liberty was not real liberty, but a kind of organized anarchy.
• Even with everything having fallen apart, a certain open society still exists in Beirut.
•In 1984, Yitzhak Rabin was at a dinner party hosted by Gita Sherover, a prominent Israeli philanthropist.
• Defense Minister Rabin received an urgent phone call from Ezer Weizman and left the room for several minutes.
• Upon returning, Gita asked him what the call was about. Rabin explained that Weizman had asked him to allow the Qawasmeh family to bring Fahd Qawasmeh’s body back to Hebron to be buried.
• Qawasmeh was assassinated in Amman on December 29, 1984 by Syrian agents. His family requested that he be buried in his hometown of Hebron.
• Rabin refused, saying “I don’t want any demonstrations.” This response caused stunned silence among the dinner guests.
•Abba Eban remarked that Israelis are more relaxed and self-confident when they are weak and vulnerable, compared to now when talk of destroying Israel by the PLO is ludicrous.
• Yehoshafat Harkabi’s book Arab Strategies & Israel’s Response is important because it points out that while Arabs have strategies, Israelis only have responses.
• You can feel the past lapping up against society in Israel, where Remembrance Day (Yom Hazikaron) commemorates those who fell in Israel’s wars. The phrase ‘the peace for peace’ means that the PLO will stop terrorism and Israel will stop occupation.
•In December 1988, Yasir Arafat finally publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist, after a month of deliberation by the Palestine National Council.
• This process was followed by a series of statements “clarifying” what the PNC resolutions “really” meant, which culminated in Geneva.
• On December 13th, 1988, Arafat addressed a special session of the UN General Assembly and choke out his recognition of “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security.”
• Secretary of State Shultz determined that Arafat’s declaration satisfied American conditions for dealing with the PLO and immediately ordered U.S. diplomats in Tunis to open dialogue with them.
•The media take perverse pleasure in labeling Israel South Africa, which tells Jews that they don’t have to be better than they are.
• NBC’s 1987 documentary on twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank was called “A Dream Is Dying” because it showed the end of the Jewish dream.
• The death of the Syrian dream is not liberating or devastating for the West because it doesn’t see any of its values emanating from Damascus.
•In 1988, an estimated 300,000-400,000 of the roughly 4.2 million Israelis had moved to the United States on a permanent or semi-permanent basis—with an estimated 100,000 in California alone.
• These figures must be compared with the fact that only about 50,000 of the 6 million American Jews have moved to Israel since the Jewish state was founded in 1948—some of them having moved back since—and only 25 percent of American Jews are estimated by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to have visited Israel even once in their lives.
• In recent years, 90 percent Soviet emigrants went to North America rather than Israel.
• It used to be a stigma for Israelis to immigrate to America but this is no longer true as attitudes have shifted..
• Bezek created a commercial which featured an elderly Israeli grandfather sitting in front of a shabby bare desk and dialing a number with his Los Angeles family which caused Sarah M. Schachter from Jerusalemto write The letter was followed by an editor’s note which read: “This public service announcement has been discontinued following complaints that it would encourage emigration.”
•As long as Israel was seen as a underdog story of David vs. Goliath, American Jews were supportive.
• However, after the Lebanon invasion and other controversies, some American Jews began to re-evaluate their support for Israel.
• This confusion was displayed in editorials in The New York Times and elsewhere.
• Local Jewish leaders described this transition as American Jews discovering Israel in the 1980s.
•America has the potential to be a great diplomat in the Middle East, but faces many constraints.
• Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger demonstrated that an American statesman can succeed in the Middle East if they are clear, sober, and fair.
• There is broad support from Americans in general and Jewish Americans in particular for an American statesman who is willing to play all the roles necessary.
• God commands Moses to liberate his people from bondage, meaning that there is always room for change and improvement (i.e., tomorrow can be different from yesterday).