In the autumn of 1972, arriving in Lebanon as a graduate student at the American University of Beirut, I discovered radical student politics. The mainly Palestinian-led student movements were only a few years behind Paris and New York, and strikes were common. When police raided sit-ins, students sang “We Shall Overcome.” Discussions went on all night. Caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and hashish stimulated self-criticism sessions and persuaded many a young woman to hasten the revolution in bed. One of the more urgent debates was whether the Palestinians should choose a secular, democratic state in all of Palestine-Israel or content themselves with a truncated Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It did not occur to anyone that the Palestinians’ pop-gun war on Israel’s northern border was unlikely to compel the Israeli government to offer either option. Still, the talking went on. And on.
A friend took me to his aunt’s house in one of the refugee camps for the Arabs expelled from Palestine in 1948. The young man in the photograph atop her television, beaming a kind of innocent hope, was her son. He had died the month before in the Black September kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. My friend and I used to go to a tailor’s shop near the synagogue in Wadi Abou Jamil, Beirut’s Jewish Quarter. The tailor gave us Turkish coffee and joked with my friend about Palestine. When my friend was 2 years old, in 1948, his mother had carried him on her back from their village in Galilee over the border into Lebanon. When they left, the Israelis bulldozed his village and hundreds of others–lest the refugees have anything to return to. The tailor, who was born in Lebanon, said he would never leave. The fact that he could move to Israel anytime, while my friend could not even visit, made him laugh. The two exchanged jocular ethnic abuse with an ease unknown to me in California, where race could be a touchy issue. Today, neither one lives in Lebanon.
Wadi Abou Jamil was a curving road of old, rickety apartment buildings with shops and cafes on the ground floor. The lovely synagogue in those days seemed as poorly attended as churches and mosques. At the eastern edge of what would later be Muslim West Beirut, the Jewish Quarter became vulnerable in the civil war that began in April 1975. No one wanted to destroy it. On the contrary, Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and the Christian Phalangists fought each other to defend it–Arafat to prove his movement was not anti-Semitic and the Phalange to ingratiate itself with Israel. The losers, as often elsewhere in the world, were the Jews. Their abandoned houses gave shelter after 1982 to Lebanese Shiite Muslims, who had been displaced by Israeli bombardment and occupation.
Very old men, red tarbooshes tottering on their wizened heads, looked on the young generation with skepticism. Coffeehouse politics, nightclubs and relaxed sexual mores offended their honor. It had been bad enough when their mothers renounced the veil fifty years earlier, but daughters unfastening their bras were too much. The old politicians’ collaboration with imperialism, their tawdry compromises and their betrayal of independence repelled the children. Youth’s insistence on change brought it all down–the tar- booshes as much as the coffeehouse debates, the revolutionary aspirations as well as the Levantine compromises and mixing of peoples. The war it produced let religion out of church and mosque, twisting a political battle into a struggle between Jesus and Mohammed that could not be contained within the borders of Lebanon. The freedom fighters on both sides destroyed the fabric of the downtown gathering places of all communities–the ancient souks, smoky restaurants, trading companies and cafes. People and ideas were segregated by a north-south Green Line, crossed only by bullets and artillery shells. Of course, the war among the Lebanese was also a series of wars by proxy between Israel and Syria, Israel and the Palestinians and Syria and the Palestinians.