Word: beirutization
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...being fought with bombs or bullets. Instead, it is being waged amid the rubble and wreckage of Lebanon's streets, and the prize is the support and gratitude of the hundreds of thousands of citizens attempting to piece together their shattered lives. At Mehdi High School in Beirut, now a temporary administrative center for refugees who lost homes in the war with Israel, Abdel Hussein Hodroj asks a bearded young official behind a desk for help. The young man doesn't work for the Lebanese government or a humanitarian group or a United Nations agency. He's a member...
Hodroj, 72, describes how Israeli missiles turned his neighborhood in Beirut's southern suburbs into a Lebanese version of ground zero. The bearded man reaches into a lockbox and pulls out $12,000 in U.S. $100 bills. He presses the money into Hodroj's palm. It's meant to pay for a year's rent and furniture while Hizballah builds him a new home. Hodroj doesn't bother to count the inch-thick wad of cash, equal to more than twice the average Lebanese annual income. Score one for the militants. "We're with Hizballah all the way," Hodroj says...
...Lebanese leaders and ordinary citizens may well hold the group accountable for triggering Israel's wrath. For the time being, however, even Hizballah's critics are mainly silent, no doubt in deference to the prowess that Hizballah guerrillas have shown against Israel's more powerful armed forces. In Beirut's southern suburbs, where the group's bulldozers have cleared massive piles of rubble from the streets, Hizballah has planted bright red banners declaring MADE IN USA at the sites of destroyed buildings. At Mehdi High School, Hizballah officials move around, carrying walkie-talkies. As they perform their functions with...
Lebanon is struggling to get back to normal after the summer's war. Central Beirut, whose sidewalk cafes are usually packed with Arab tourists in August, is still a ghost town. But Lebanese families and gaggles of teenagers have reclaimed the promenade along the Mediterranean Sea, escaping the humidity and trading stories about the Hizballah-Israel conflict that recently left so much of their country in ruins...
...willing to throw money at Lebanon's problems, few seem inclined to make more serious commitments. The news that France--Lebanon's closest ally in the West--would increase its force by just 200 soldiers to help the Lebanese Army take control of the south provoked dismay in Beirut. "We thought they were going to send thousands," says a Lebanese military expert. "This means they don't think it's safe." With Israeli commandos raiding a Hizballah stronghold in the Bekaa Valley on Saturday and Israeli drones still flying over Beirut and Hizballah ready to reload, it's hard...