Word: beirutization
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Aramex made its name in part by going where others feared to tread, getting mail across Beirut's green line during the Lebanese civil war and using donkeys to get parcels past Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank. Ghandour got his break when FedEx and later Airborne Express made Aramex their Middle East partner. The U.S. firms gave Aramex invaluable lessons in everything from quality control to technology. When DHL acquired Airborne and dropped Aramex, Ghandour learned another lesson: the turnaround. He got busy marshaling the regional players that Airborne had left in the cold into a new alliance...
...outbreak of hostilities with Hizballah and the ongoing operations in Gaza. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the current crisis is that a one-time member of Peace Now, a champion of social welfare issues and a negotiated two-state solution, is the man sending fighter jets over Beirut. Defense Minister Amir Peretz, once known mainly for championing issues like raising Isreel's minimum wage, is now, on two fronts, waging...
This war has turned Beirut inside out. The city's usually snarled traffic is almost gone and the blaring noise of car horns is absent. Conversely, parks that are rarely used are now full of people - those who have fled the bombings in the south, east, north, and, well, pretty much everywhere in Lebanon...
...Walking and driving around the streets, I noticed a peculiar trait of Beirut: it's not always possible to tell the difference between the old war damage and the new. Beirut is ramshackle and delightfully dilapidated in some parts - mostly the poor Shi'a parts, which are also the main target areas. Sometimes you realize that a balcony that appears freshly shorn off actually collapsed in the 1980s...
...Back in Hamra, the formerly fashionable part of town that was home to Beirut's famed shopping district in the 1960s, things were quite different. Traffic was subdued but it was still there. Shops were open and people were in the streets going about their business. The owner of a hardware store told me that people were stocking up on batteries. He thought the war had nothing to do with Hizballah or Israel's security. According to him, this was a war for the hearts and minds of tourists. Once Israel destroyed Lebanon's entire infrastructure, that would...