Word: beirutization
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...Beirut's beautiful people are crammed into B-018, a hot nightclub near the downtown waterfront. Muscle men in jeans and miniskirted femmes fatales are dancing hip to hip, tossing back glasses of Johnnie Walker. Everybody's relishing the moment, as the city boogies its way out of the ashes...
That's debatable, but plainly things are improving. Beirut was an unthinkable venue for a regional summit throughout Lebanon's 1975-90 Christian-Muslim civil war and, for 10 years after, as Israel battled the Lebanese militia Hizballah. With Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, the country was made whole again and Beirut relatively secure...
Thanks to a major government-driven effort, the capital's once gutted urban center has been turned into a new downtown that aspires to reclaim for Beirut its old title, "Paris of the Middle East." The streets are lined with new and restored office buildings, apartments, shops and cafes. There's a Virgin Megastore (selling DVDs like Legally Blonde alongside videotapes of Osama bin Laden speeches) and a Beirut branch of Paul, a famed Parisian boulangerie. Summer festivals in the mountains east of the city have featured attractions such as Sting and Elton John...
...rolled into Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah after the Israeli Cabinet agreed to an extended military operation and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had declared Arafat "an enemy." The onslaught, which drew heavy criticism from the U.N. Security Council, came a day after an Arab summit in Beirut, which Arafat was prevented from attending by Israel. The leaders of Egypt and Jordan were also absent. The summit endorsed a Saudi peace plan offering Israel normal relations in exchange for withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war and a resolution of the problem of Palestinian refugees in other...
...mediation effort had been in trouble even before the Netanya carnage. Arafat's empty chair at Wednesday's Arab League summit signaled the Bush administration's failure to persuade Sharon to let the Palestinian leader travel to Beirut to lend his support to a Saudi proposal to normalize relations with Israel once it withdraws to its 1967 borders. And Arafat has been in no hurry either to take new action to rein in militants or sign on to a cease-fire plan his aides see as weighted in favor of the Israelis...