Word: beirutization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Fadi Dawish, 28, is behind the counter of his grocery store, counting change in almost total darkness. He gets only a few hours of electricity a day, just like the other crumbling shops and dwellings along Salameh Street in Beirut's Sabra refugee camp, where smelly piles of garbage sit uncollected and the water supply swims with disease. Even when the lights are on, Dawish has to strain as he adds up the day's receipts because of the deep shrapnel gash over his left eye from Israel's onslaught against Palestinians in Lebanon 19 years ago. Recently...
...days when the P.L.O. ran an unruly state-within-a-state have left many Lebanese with bitter memories. Over the last year, debates in parliament and editorials in Beirut dailies have echoed the rising sentiment that Lebanon will find it difficult to bury its past and build a democratic future as long as Palestinian refugees remain in the country. "We refuse any implantation," Information Minister Ghazi Aridi declared in December. "This is a basic Lebanese national issue on which we cannot make any compromise...
Doing his best to hide his concern--secrecy is his middle name--Arafat is terrified to the point of paranoia, some of his confidants say, about Sharon's coming to power. Here is the former general who tried to kill him with air strikes on his Beirut bunker, who was found by an official Israeli report 18 years ago to bear "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Maybe the coming of the old warrior is what recently led a clearly unnerved Arafat to grab a machine gun from a bodyguard and leap...
...some sovereignty over Jerusalem. But Arafat bargained for more and didn't get it, then gambled on the new intifadeh, demolishing Barak's re-election hopes. So Arafat must now face Sharon, who calls him a liar and refuses to shake his hand. The dread is, it could be Beirut all over again...
Perhaps, but the dreams are surely sweeter than the realities today. The guerrillas have called Arafat the Old Man since Beirut, but now he really is old. He will turn 72 in August, and some around him are whispering that he is too frail, distracted and out of touch. The tantalizing Israeli and American proposals are now off the table. Recriminations have begun, with Arafat's negotiators squabbling over who screwed up. Arafat's more ambitious men are preparing for the coming succession struggle...