128 Between Private and Public
a village in the South, she became involved with the Communist move-
ment during the war and was eventually assigned the dangerous task of
assassinating the leader of the SLA,^28 General Antoine Lahad. In 1988, she
attempted to kill him disguised as an aerobics teacher, but failed and was
subsequently thrown into the notorious al-khiyam prison.
Her book provides a straight narrative of her involvement in the war
and how she was won over by the Communist cause, not for ideological but
for nationalistic reasons. The quiescence of her surroundings compelled
her to take action to liberate her (part of the) country from the Israeli pres-
ence. Although her book presents the memories of an involved party, its
focus is on popular resistance against Israel. For Beshara, the war did not
end in 1990. She spent most of the 1990s imprisoned in al-khiyam, where
she developed friendships with women from Hizbullah, their ideological
and religious differences notwithstanding. Her memoirs are a nationalist
tale with a triumphant culmination in her release in 1998 and her eleva-
tion to a true, national hero of the kind people stop to congratulate on the
street. Indeed, Beshara became the symbol of that period of national unity
triggered by the liberation of Southern Lebanon in May 2000:
For a time, with the liberation of the South, life even became
beautiful. It was a rare moment of unity for the Lebanese. For
fifteen years, with guns in hand, they had torn each other to
shreds, and after a peace that refused to deal with the damage
they had done to each other, they remained deeply divided,
too irresponsible to heal such painful wounds. The liberation
showed how our civil war had been, like any fratricidal con-
flict, a vain illusion—when compared with the strength of our
resistance against the Israeli occupation.^29The “reality” of the war, thus defined in the book, was the fight against
Israel. Compared to this reality, all fighting between Lebanese can be
explained away as sheer madness, an aberration of reality. Although
there are fleeting references in the text to collaborators and malicious
Falangists, they are never the main focus. As a result, the memory of the
war does not appear as a divisive issue. On the contrary, she recommends,
the war must be debated so people can understand “what it is to grow up
under occupation, to live at the mercy of checkpoints and curfews.”^30 The