Word: beirutization
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...pains. Jimmy Carter's successful effort to broker a peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978 did nothing for his political fortunes. In 1983, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, 241 members of the U.S. armed forces died after the bombing of a military barracks in Beirut--killed by a suspected Hizballah faction. And Bill Clinton left office bitterly disappointed that all his intelligence and charm were insufficient to bring about a comprehensive settlement between Israel and the Palestinians...
...Jewish majority, one with an Arab one--would share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That was the basis of the talks between Israel and the Palestinians in the last year of the Clinton Administration; it was acknowledged by the meeting of Arab states in Beirut in 2002, when they committed themselves to "normal relations" with Israel if it withdrew to its pre-1967 borders; it was the basis of the road map adopted by the U.S. and other powers in 2003; and it was accepted, finally, by Israel's old warrior Ariel Sharon, although he ultimately...
...love Damascus, but I certainly do not love being here under these circumstances. I came here from Beirut a week ago, in the aging Volvo of a Syrian named Ali, a kind middle-aged Shi'ite who has driven my friends and me back and forth between the two cities many times. His knowledge of Lebanon's roads is matched only by his devotion to Hizballah. I would have trusted no other driver to bring me safely past the Israeli jets bombing our road. But fleeing Lebanon in a car decorated with the photograph of Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah...
...Reality returned sharply as we crossed the mountains at Majdal Tarchiche and heard the sounds of jets overhead. I had been hearing them for days in Beirut, and we both tensed, waiting to hear the boom of an explosion on the road. That did not come until we had descended past the town of Zahle and into the Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian border. We had stopped the car on a side road so that Ali could hand over his Lebanese mobile-phone chip to a friend heading into the country. The delay turned out to be a godsend...
...When I told them that I had just come from Beirut, one shook his head and said: the Israelis are crazy. I was stunned: no one in Syria seems to actually utter the word Israel. No one says Israeli. Israel features frequently in political conversations, but only via euphemisms or circumlocutions. Now, though, with Israeli tanks massing at the Lebanese border and Israeli warplanes continuing their strikes throughout the country, there is no way to avoid these words. I wonder what consequences, if any, this change will bring - whether Syrians' ability to name the enemy will make Israel...