Review of Barbara Newman's The Covenant

The Covenant: Love and Death in Beirut by Barbara Newman is a rather odd book. On the one hand it reads like a schoolgirl's ode to a lost boyfriend, and the author does seem like she take a lot of pains to tell us that she is objective, and not so much pain to actually be objective. That being said, there is a bunch of useful stuff in the book, as long as you take the whole thing with a grain of salt.

The book is about Bashir Gamayel, the leader of the Phalangist party during Lebanon's civil war. The author is in love with him, and ends up haveing an affair, and ends up having an affair with him. The author is a journalist and the book aims to tell the Phalangist side of the story of Lebanon's civil war. She claims that the story was never really told from their perspective. That is true. The Syrians/PLO/Muslims do seem to have the sympathies of all the reporters who wrote about it. That is fashionable. It is not clear why that was. Maybe they were fighting the good fight, the one against Israel, maybe the reported found Muslims sexier or more interesting to cover than Christians. . . who knows?

Here the tragic hero of the civil war is Gamayel, who is universally disliked in Lebanon right now, most likely because 1) he was pro-Israel and 2) because the Syrians, who controll everything in Lebanon tell everyone to dislike Gamayel. The author concludes that it was the Syrians who killed him, and it is most likely that they are right. The Syrians had the most to gain. An unstable Lebanon keeps the Syrians in power there.

The books is not a great read, and one does not get the feeling that the author was very intimately involved with the city life there in Beirut. She was not. She did not live there. She was in and out a couple of times to film stuff. She has no feel for the turf, and it shows.

She also repeats Gamayel's dismissal of the Christian atrocities that took place during the war. There is a good reason to not hold them morally culpable, namely because that is what was happening in the war by both sides, alot. But still to dismiss it, diminished the journalistic integrity of the whole narrative, as does her obvious love for Bashir.

At the end she has a good analysis of who she believes Bashir's killers to have been (and the organizers of Sabra and Shatilla too). It sounds very plausible, and one wished the whole book could be this carefully penned.

The book is important to read if you want to understand Lebanon and the civil war. It is very unorthodox and takes an unpopular stand, that is why it is important. There is a lot of truth there, but be careful what you believe.