In the long evenings … there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of the Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the French mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In those rusting front door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? The 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future?

Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation