ALFRED TARAZI / FEASTS Beirut: capital of the good life! The city swarms with luxurious hotels, nightclubs, cafes and restaurants in which big business, regional politics and whoring are conducted. All around the capital, surviving in a state of poverty and deprivation, refugee camps: Palestinians, who were expelled from their land in 1948, and Lebanese who had to flee southern Lebanon due to Israeli airstrikes. In stark contrast to the lavishness of the capital, the camps grew in a climate of repression and neglect- with no sanitation, no education, and no hope. What are the prospects of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees stationed in Lebanon since 1948? Trapped in a country that denied them any other right than being a refugee, and a motherland that has been usurped, they waited for the great Arab nations to free their land for them. And when the great Arab nations lost war after war and turned into crippled dictatorships, the refugees took arms and became the most nationalistic of all Arabs, patriots for a nation that still does not exist. Meanwhile the Lebanese were also developing their own sense of nationalism. But for that, they had to fight. They would have to see the blood of their various communities mix in the gutters of history to believe that they were all destined to live together. And so they fought. Then, having built up a strong appetite, they would feast. The war would be punctuated by summits and negotiation rounds during which- like old Priam dining with Achilles after the former had slain his son Hector- they too would put aside all their feuds and think of food. Postponing their mourning and lamentation, gathering strength for the fights to come, they would meet around negotiation tables by day, banquets by night, and speculate on the nature of the fights to come. Soon enough, they would be fighting again. In the switching balance of allegiances during the Civil War, one of the most sinister moves saw Amal, the party founded by Moussa Sader, one of the main Lebanese Muslim militias, turn its guns on the Palestinian camps. They had been allies in their fight against the reactionary Christians, but now in the wake of the heavy price the Lebanese Chiites had paid in the course of the Israeli invasion of 82, the leadership of the Amal party developed a new discourse. Having been expelled from Lebanon in 82, Arafat must be stopped from coming back, the camps must be curbed. Going further than Maronites had ever been, they circled the camps and fired at point blank with T54 tanks into the densely packed dwellings. After a five months siege, on the brink of famine, the refugees of Burj Al Barajneh asked their religious authority to issue a fatwa allowing them to consume human meat. The rumors of cannibalism in the camps circulated in the capital. Finally, after years of conflicts and frustration, the Lebanese had suddenly found the solution to their Palestinian problem: let them eat each other. Putting in practice the old maxim “you are what you eat”, the Lebanese finally allowed the Palestinians to be as Palestinian as they could ever be. Anyhow, eating Palestinian flesh is as close to Palestine as they would ever get. The one surviving Palestinian refugee left, under a special resolution voted unanimously at the United Nations would then be allowed to cross the border into Israel, and, if he does not blow himself up on a landmine, hand over the keys of the houses those refugees took with them in 1948, to their now righteous owners.