Status Updates From Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir

The tears of Jerusalem have spilled over and flooded Beirut, and Jerusalem and Beirut are sister cities in agony. Jerusalem is the vertical line, Beirut the traverse: Together they form the cross that we carry today.

💔

Above all, how can I express my strange love for this mutilated city; how to explain, both to myself and to others, the lingering magic of the place that has kept me and so many others clinging to its wreckage, refusing to let go, refusing to abandon it?

This is already resonating with me. I knew it would.

The Prime Minister of Lebanon, Shafiq al Wazzan, appeared on television. He exploded: "What more do they want? We've done what they've asked. The PLO has agreed to all the terms. What do they want? There is only one thing left and that is for them to kill us all. Let them kill us all. We can do no more. Enough, enough." There was no pleading in his voice, no sadness, only a bottomless anger.

It is easy here in Beirut to look at every passing stranger and see the face of a potential murderer. Those throat-cutters, those who rose in the dark of the night, who put their pitiless hands around the necks of women and infants and cut them, who are they? Which ones?
Yet it is when I look at my own face in the mirror that I am most frightened. Is mine the face of one of the damned?

“But as the Israeli attacks increased in ferocity and brutality, and as it became less clear that the Israelis were only after the PLO and not Beirut itself, as more people died and more buildings collapsed, there was a steady diminishing of the criticism. People increasingly identified with the fighters holding off the Israelis.”

About the socio economic differences in the two Beiruts :
“Is this what it is all about? One wanted to ask those who have defended this vision of history. Is this the Christian heritage? The Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha-where are their traces to be found in this citadel to the bourgeois spirit? Is this what thousands of people have died for? Sparkling shopping arcades and expensive restaurants?”

Big lol at the translation of specific lebanese terms used during times of crisis