Dana’s Reviews > Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir > Status Update

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