Survival in Beirut

"Let’s go to Tabbara’s book, Lina Tabbara, because she’s at the other end of the spectrum – what I call ‘the private voice of the eye-witness’. She’s the woman who consciously decided to stay in Beirut for the entirety of the conflict. Her book is called Survival in Beirut: a Diary of Civil War … It’s expansive in the opposite direction. It gives you the psychological texture of that trauma. And here’s the thing. Anyone in these war-torn cities – anyone with the wherewithal – gets out, if not before the really awful violence starts then very shortly thereafter. Tabbara and her husband were both highly educated professionals; thoughtful, middle class, cosmopolitan Beiruties who ordinarily would have been nowhere near that city by the time the Lebanese army gave up completely on trying to control the warlords that effectively took it over for the best part of fifteen years. But she and her husband stayed. So what you get is this very rare voice telling about daily life in the city during this business, and usually we’re missing these voices, because the kinds of people who would submit their voices to paper in language that people can understand aren’t around. You’d think there’d be lots of them but there are so few I think I can count the number of this kind of book, across all the cities we looked at, on the fingers of one hand. I guess you could say that the more or less Christian Lebanese paramilitaries were pushing back against the PLO. The PLO had set up shop in Beirut after it was kicked out of Jordan by the King of Jordan shortly after 1948. He didn’t want to have to lock horns with Israel despite his sympathies and kinship with the Palestinian cause. So the PLO came to Lebanon and Lebanon gave them a kind of luke-warm welcome as cousins in trouble and then things got a little bit out of hand. So what you had was a well-to-do, essentially aristocratic Christian faction in Lebanon saying ‘we’ve had enough with this PLO stuff. They’re bringing the wrath of Israel into our country. That’s not what we signed up for’. So it was this pan-Arab cause that had their complaint against Israel but no particular squabble with the Lebanese that ended up in a fight with the Lebanese that was much more vicious and bloody than their battle with the Israelis. The Israelis came into the conflict several times taking advantage of moments of weakness or distraction as these others duked it out. Anyhow, it’s terribly complicated."