Excerpts from Resistance: My Life for Lebanon

Written by Soha Bechara
Printed in 2003

"Inevitably, I would be arrested. But what would they do with me? Torture me? Execute me on the spot?"

Born in Lebanon on June 15, 1967, Soha Bechara remembered her childhood as happy and peaceful, filled with playtime with her cousins and village-wide festivals and celebrations. In her memoir, Resistance: My Life for Lebanon, Bechara described her village of Deir Mimas as "like paradise to me."

By the time Bechara was a teenager the situation had changed. From the early 1970s, Bechara had grown increasingly aware of the troubles that came to plague her country, as Palestinians living in camps along Lebanon's southern border fought with Jews in the neighboring country of Israel. (Palestinians—Arabs who claimed historic ties to land that now comprised the nation of Israel—had...