Writing from the wreckage

Loss and grief are dressed up in impersonal statistics. But Palestinian author Jean Said Makdisi focuses on the grotesque and the suffering of ordinary lives during Israel's occupation of Beirut

Beirut Fragments: Bearing Witness to a War

by Jean Said Makdisi

Published by 

Profile Books/Hachette

272 pages ₹499

 

On December 19, 2025, in response to Lok Sabha member D Purandeswari’s question about Indians in United Nations peacekeeping operations, Union Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh had revealed that 898 Indian personnel were serving in Lebanon as part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) that was established in 1978.

 

The impending shutdown of UNIFIL’s operations on December 31, 2026, under pressure from Israel and the United States, has raised serious concerns about the security and peacekeeping infrastructure in Lebanon. With India being one of the leading troop-contributing countries, this hasty withdrawal of military and civilian personnel meant to support cessation of hostilities, deliver humanitarian aid, and ensure safe return of displaced persons, hits close to home.

 

UNIFIL was set up soon after Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978. Another invasion, much bigger in scale, took place in the summer of 1982, with Israel laying siege to West Beirut. These military campaigns were meant to attack the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that ran its operations out of Lebanon. Hezbollah, a militant Islamist group in Lebanon, backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, was also formed in 1982, to fight the Israeli army.

 

Palestinian writer and scholar Jean Said Makdisi’s book Beirut Fragments, which chronicles the impact of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) on everyday life, must be read in the context of this geopolitical history. It would be particularly useful for Indian readers who are trying hard to wrap their heads around how Lebanon got pulled into the Israel-Hamas War.

 

The book offers a tender and melancholic account of what it felt like to live through the 1982 Israeli invasion. It is powerful because of the author’s refusal to let loss and grief be dressed up in impersonal statistics that do very little to expose the cruelties of the military industrial complex. Experts who pontificate on defence and strategy must read it to remember ordinary lives that are forgotten when analysis remains focused on nation states and armed groups.

 

The author writes, “My family came originally from Palestine, but I grew up in Egypt as an outsider. I was educated by Englishmen and Americans, absorbing their culture and values along with those handed down by my own Arab ancestors.” She is a Christian Arab who was born in Jerusalem in 1940, and also happens to be the sister of the late scholar Edward Said, who was an influential spokesperson for Palestinian self-determination in the diaspora.

 

Her writing makes one think about how silly and inadequate the nomenclature “Arab world” is when it comes to speaking about a population that is diverse in terms of religion, language and ideology. Those who have been stuck with the assumption that all Arabs are Muslims have a chance to correct and update their understanding of this region through this first-person narrative.

 

Beirut Fragments focuses on a time when “West Beirut was under the domination of the PLO and their supporters, while East Beirut was dominated by the Lebanese Forces who were at this point in direct collusion with the Israelis”. The author was guilty of taking refuge in a part of the country “dominated by those who were in collusion with the Israelis”. This emotional aspect, often missing from think tank reports and human rights dossiers, comes alive in her book.

 

Apart from documenting the killings and destruction of homes, the author records the disastrous effects on the mental health of those who managed to survive. She notes, for instance, the bouts of frenzied housecleaning that came from a “manic desire to clean up the whole world”.

 

She writes, “We slept when we could; we woke when we had to. The structure of time collapsed, and hours fell about us like stones off a broken building. Sundays, Mondays — all the days of the week were alike and lost their character, and all the dates of the month as well.” She read Jane Austen to find comfort and structure amidst chaos while her children played Monopoly and Scrabble or worked on geometry problems to create a semblance of normalcy in their lives.

 

After the Israeli soldiers left at the end of the civil war, her beloved Beirut looked completely different from what it used to be. The book, as expected, is filled with warmth and nostalgia, but does not look away from the detritus left behind. “The Israeli soldiers, wherever they had been, had defecated in choice places. On books, furniture, clothes and carpets; on bedroom floors; near toilet seats and in bathtubs; on school desks; and in shop windows, people found the rotting faeces.” This is a grotesque but apt visual metaphor for the shocking decay of the human soul.

 

The reviewer is a journalist