The Indigenous Israeli Berserk: Beirut 82 - Gaza 08

"The worst days were Sunday, 1 August, Wednesday, 4 August, and Thursday 12 August, and if I had to give prizes to the Israeli army, then the Ariel Sharon prize for Sheer Mindless Savagery would probably go to the whole of the Israeli High Command for 12 August. This was the last of the 3 major assaults on the city, and by then I had pretty well run out of new ways of describing what was going on. On 1 and 4 August, I had run through 'shock' and 'terror' and 'mindless brutality' and 'worst since World War II' and most other ways of describing what they were trying to do to us, so that by the time I got to Thursday I had to begin by saying, 'Watching the Israeli air force smashing Beirut to pieces yesterday was like having to stand and watch a man slowly beat a sick dog to death with an axe handle.' I remember looking at that line at the time and thinking I was laying it on a bit thick - real old Fleet Street horseshit of the 'I watched in horror today as bullets stitched a delicate tracery in the age-old palace of the emperor and an empire collapsed around me' school of British pop journalism. But looking back on it, it's not a bad simile, because Beirut was as defenceless against air attack as any sick animal is to attack by a sadist, and the Israelis were quite simply intent on brutalizing the place." p 24

"We used to sit around all night in the Commodore debating the question: are [the Israelis] doing it all on purpose, or are they just spraying it around and hoping for the best? The crew led by Tom Friedman of The New York Times, said it was mainly just 'shoot an arrow into the air, it falls to earth I know not where' stuff. They actually argued that a lot of that shelling and bombing was indiscriminate (a word you can use around the bar of the Commodore with impunity, but not one you can get into The New York Times). The Friedman theory roughly went like this: it had to be indiscriminate because that incoming shit hit everything: hospitals, that Temple of Truth the Commodore Hotel, the apartment blocks full of middle-class Lebanese, movie theatres, even the Magen Abraham Synagogue. It squashed middle-class Christians in their big apartments in Ramlet al-Baida; it blew the legs off Kurdish cigarette salesmen in Hamra; it burned the faces off teenage girls in Sabra camp and minced old men playing backgammon in their antique shops in Basta. The theory that the Israeli soldiers manning the Ring of Steel round west Beirut didn't care what they hit was one supported by probably 80% of the hacks; but the others said those guys knew exactly what they were doing, and if they blew the feet off some 70-year-old woman silly enough to be crossing an open road on the way to the bakery, it was because they wanted to drive the shoemakers out of business, and luck had nothing to do with it." p 70 (from God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983)