‘Natives of the Country’

On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and the vice president of Lebanon’s Jewish Communal Council (Conseil communal israélite libanais), was abducted from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a shadowy militant Shiite network, associated with the milieu from which Hezbollah was then emerging, which called itself the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. During his captivity Hallak was held alongside the journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and the sociologist Michel Seurat, who were abducted together on May 22 after arriving on the same flight from Paris, in a kidnapping claimed by Islamic Jihad. Seurat, a researcher at the social-sciences institute CERMOC (Centre d’études et de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain) who had lived in Lebanon for about a decade, was returning to Beirut; Kauffmann had arrived as a correspondent for L’Événement du jeudi. In a 1988 essay for that magazine, Kauffmann remembered that Hallak, unlike the other prisoners, was sometimes allowed to move without a blindfold; the guards referred to him simply as the hakim—the doctor.According to Kauffmann’s later account, by December 1985 Seurat’s health began to dete...