That’s Beirut. Walk around downtown, near the water, through the government-brokered and heavily indebted redevelopment of Beirut Central District, or Solidere, trading faux Ottoman-era buildings for glass towers and the counting of yellow cranes before the Mediterranean. Real estate billboards and copy promise the height of modern luxury.

A little bit south in a cab maybe 20 or 30 minutes and you’re in Haret Hreik, the target of so much Israeli bombing last summer. But there is no clean-up, no cranes lifting rubble and setting fresh asphault like there is farther north, along the Corniche, or in the streets downtown, blocked by the military since opposition protests began downtown last winter.

You can buy Hezbollah t-shirts, flags and posters throughout the southern suburbs. Walking around there you don'’t think about State Dept definitions of terrorism, Israeli rationale for "enforcing" 1559, or even the photos of Nasrallah at kiosks in Cairo. Old Mercedes taxis that would drive on new asphault under Beirut’s downtown skyscrapers drive down muddy, unpaved roads alongside rubbble in Haret Hreik. Cab drivers point out to empty lots where a mid-rise used to stand, now only rubble under the flash of a large Israeli bomb last summer.

I saw Robert Fisk lecture at AUB while visiting, his speech on history as the best tool for political critique nearly identical to what he said in Cairo in March, and what he wrote in the introduction to his 1300 page Great War for Civilization. From his "Elegy for Beirut" last summer:

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God’s leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah’s top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that’s not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

More.