Word: beirutization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...outset to 57.6%. Sharon's had risen from 48.9% to 56.6%. To be sure, a growing minority of Israelis have expressed reservations about the invasion. Last week 2,000 army reservists sent Begin a petition calling on him not to order an invasion of West Beirut. The Peace Now organization has attracted several thousand people to antiwar rallies. Yet the level of public dissent poses no political threat to Begin's increasingly well-entrenched Likud coalition...
...idea of a strong central government may prove to be a chimera: Lebanese society has always been a patchwork of different feudal, regional and religious communities whose rivalries have sparked internecine clashes for generations. The departure of the P.L.O. will not change that pattern. Moreover, many observers in Beirut fear that the election of Gemayel, whose Christian supporters constitute a minority of Lebanon's population, would bring about a renewal of the civil war between Christians and Muslims...
...Israel's greatest assets has traditionally been its image as a beleaguered nation in a sea of hostile enemies and its corresponding claim to moral superiority. But as their forces closed in relentlessly on the P.L.O. in West Beirut, and television screens around the world showed numbing images of death and destruction, the Israeli government and people feared that the international view of their country was swiftly changing. Israel was rightly concerned that having won the battle in Lebanon, it might still lose the political war in the living rooms of Europe...
...Associated Press and NBC News in the U.S. confirmed Israel's fears, revealing that 51% of those surveyed disapproved of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, compared with 25% who supported the move. More to the point, 59% felt that Israel had gone too far in its attacks on Beirut, while only 7% said the level of force was appropriate...
...civilian deaths reported by the P.L.O. and mistakenly, if not maliciously, charged the Israelis with committing acts of cruelty. A prime case in point was the photograph of a badly burned baby who United Press International said had been the victim of an accidental Israeli bomb drop in East Beirut. President Reagan cited the picture in his talks with Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir as an example of why Jerusalem had to stop the bombing of the city. In their defense the Israelis claim that no bomb had fallen in East Beirut and that the child, in truth, had been...