In the long evenings in West Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the French Mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Shatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12-year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line? Now he was, in his mid-twenties (if he was still alive), a gunboy no more. A gunman, no doubt...

― Robert Fisk