The front cover of the 1982 American University of Beirut (AUB) yearbook features a black and white sketch of a campus building, foregrounded by a dozen colourful cut-and-pasted students. Some of them are sporting attire that is conspicuously from the 1980s; some are gathered around an orange juice vendor.
Open the yearbook to the first page, and the scene becomes decidedly less wholesome. An image of the main gate of AUB – emblazoned with the university’s motto in English and Arabic: “That they may have life and have it more abundantly” – is superimposed on a photograph of smoke rising from apartment buildings. The AUB Yearbook Committee explains in its introduction that, while they had intended to dedicate the book’s first 16 pages to the theme of the “reinstatement of student representation”, that plan had been derailed when, on June 4, Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon.
Lebanon was already seven years into its bloody civil war of 1975-90, but the Israeli invasion took it all to another level of savagery. The Israeli siege of “West Beirut” – the reductionist wartime label assigned to the so-called “Muslim” half of the Lebanese capital, where AUB is located – lasted from June to August of 1982, leaving residents without food, water, electricity, or fuel. The term “West Beirut”, the Yearbook Committee noted, had “become a by-word for the disastrous”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.