Book review: 'Resistance - My Life for Lebanon'

Book review: Resistance - My Life for Lebanon
Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada, 18 December 2003

The greatest struggle in Soha Béchara's life was not plotting to assassinate Antoine Lahad, the Lebanese chief of militia in Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon during the 1980s. Rather, her true test was somewhat parallel to that of her home country of Lebanon -- to survive living under the tyranny of the occupying Israelis. But in Béchara's case, her prison was a literal one.

Born to a family of secular Greek Orthodox Christians, she grew up during Lebanon's fratricidal fighting. Béchara doesn't describe it as religious fighting (Christian vs. Muslim), but as the left versus the right, and she skips over much of the details regarding the Christian minority's struggle to keep the majority of political power from the demographically stronger Muslims. What she does emphasize is that as bad as the fighting during Lebanon's civil wars was, it was nowhere near as horrible as what happened after Israel occupied Lebanon in 1978.

Bechara illustrates an idyllic childhood in the southern Lebanon village of Deir Mimas, only a few miles away from Khaim, the location of the prison whose inhospitality she would endure for ten years. Although the days leading up to her her birth date, June 15, 1967, were "day{s} of defeat for the Arab world," the reality of Israel didn't hit Deir Mimas until 1978. Villagers who worked in Israel "would rise at dawn, enduring meticulous searches and hours of humiliating delays at Israeli border stations, before reaching their workplace, where they would often be forced to labor at a punishing speed."

Béchara adds, "in the early '70s, my childhood years, no one in Deir Mimas would have imagined than less than a decade later invasion and then occupation were to be our fate."

--snip--

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2253.shtml

http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-80-8