Inside Beirut, Lebanon where the past is not even past

Beirut: If you want to live in the present, don’t come to Beirut. Even in the midst of a devastating war with no end in sight, it’s impossible to silence the ghosts of history whispering in your ear. Don’t succumb to ignorance, they warn; don’t try to convince yourself this moment is an aberration. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, the legendary chronicler of the American South. He could easily have been writing about Beirut, this charming yet seemingly cursed city of trauma piled upon trauma, conflict layered upon conflict where we have spent the past eight days on assignment.

“Due to the current situation, we cannot offer our usual service,” apologises the Middle East Airlines flight attendant as our plane departs for Beirut. It’s the first of many times we will hear this phrase – “the situation” – deployed as a usefully oblique way to discuss the war being fought between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Most international airlines have cancelled flights to Beirut since the fighting escalated last month, but the Lebanese national carrier pushes on, even as bombs drop from the sky just a few kilometres from the tarmac. On the drive from the airport to the city centre, we pass rows of giant billboards of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs last month. In death, as in life, he looms over the city.

The roads of central Beirut are clogged with cars, traffic moving at a crawl. Since a massive explosion at the Beirut port in 2020, the city has struggled to generate enough electricity to keep the traffic and street lights on. Then came the sudden influx of people fleeing the war elsewhere in the country. Israel has instructed 1.2 million people to evacuate their homes, a quarter of the nation’s population, and Beirut is groaning under the weight of the mass displacement.

It’s a different story in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold that has suffered the city’s most intense Israeli bombardments in recent weeks. Here the roads are all but empty, revealing a stark divide between those parts of the city being pummelled by the war and those where life goes on with subdued normality. That sense of security can be quickly shattered, though: during our visit, the Israeli military bombs an apartment building in central Beirut, killing 22 people and destroying several neighbouring buildings.

With garbage piling high on the roadside, we drive beside the Corniche, the esplanade that runs parallel to the Mediterranean Sea. Home to buzzing beach bars and glitzy restaurants, the tourist magnet now resembles an open-air refugee camp, with tents housing those displaced by the war lining the promenade. Education has been put on hold in Lebanon so schools and colleges can be used for emergency accommodation. But there is not enough space to meet demand, forcing thousands of people to sleep on the streets, in their cars and in vacant buildings.

Walking along the Corniche, we meet Kassem A’achour, who fled his home town of Shaqra in southern Lebanon 21 days ago. He is lying on a mattress under a palm tree, seeking respite from the blazing afternoon sun. A’achour carves stone for a living, but introduces himself as a poet and scholar – fitting for an urbane city that has long served as a hub of Arab literature. As we talk, he unbuttons the side of his tracksuit pants and points to the wound where shrapnel from an Israeli bomb sliced through his leg three weeks ago. He says he was lucky to survive the strike, which killed four elderly people chatting nearby.

A’achour’s wife and three children are staying at a nearby hotel, but he prefers to pass his time on the Corniche to show solidarity with his fellow displaced citizens from the south. Hanging across the palm trees is a large banner saying: “October 7: the day of the great crossing.” It carries the logo of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that killed an estimated 1200 people in shock attacks in Israel a little over a year ago. Hezbollah has been firing rockets into northern Israel over the past year in what it says is an act of solidarity with Hamas’ war with Israel in Gaza.

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There is desolation on the promenade, but defiance, too. “We have a strong cause to fight for,” A’achour says, as a nearby loudspeaker blasts speeches by Nasrallah. “At the end of the fighting, we will go back to our villages with dignity and power. The enemy will have to negotiate with us, not us with them … We are being tortured in this life because we are promised things so beautiful they are unimaginable.” We hear similar sentiments from other evacuees, who mostly hail from Hezbollah’s Shiite Muslim supporter base. In other parts of the country, the group is deeply unpopular.

Some of the palm trees that line the promenade are still pocked with bullet holes from the civil war that ravaged the city from 1975 to 1990. The legacy of that war is even more striking a few blocks away at the bullet-ridden husk of the Holiday Inn. The luxury hotel served as a crucial battleground for duelling Lebanese militias and has stood in ruins ever since. The wounds from past wars remain unhealed, even as bombs rain down on Beirut once again.

Witness to history

Ronnie Chatah is a political commentator who hosts a popular podcast about Lebanese politics and used to run historical walking tours of the city. He says there is one place, above all others, that is crucial to understanding Beirut’s history: Martyrs’ Square.

It was here that Arab nationalists were hanged in 1916 during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and where Lebanese protesters demanded independence from France during the Second World War. It is where Lebanese protesters gathered in 2005 to demand the end of Syrian occupation, and in 2019 to protest against endemic corruption.

Some of the most important figures in Lebanese history are also buried there. Among them is Chatah’s father, a former finance minister and diplomat who was murdered in a 2013 car bomb attack. Mohamad Chatah was a prominent critic of Hezbollah and, although the group has denied any involvement, his son believes the group was responsible for his father’s assassination.

There are no raucous protesters in Martyrs’ Square today, only displaced and increasingly desperate people. Some families have taken up residence inside the skeleton of a large Christmas tree that is decorated each December. “No one is feeding us. No one is looking after us,” says a displaced man pleading for a bottle of water.

Describing the current atmosphere in Beirut, Chatah says: “There is a sense of constant fear – whether it is the buzzing of an Israeli drone overhead or literally watching the war unfold in the background in the southern suburbs. It is a time of uneasiness, and Beirut is not like itself.” A heaviness hangs in the air, smothering the city’s vitality.

The war has compounded the already dire economic crisis that has plagued Lebanon for the past five years. Food inflation reached a staggering 483 per cent and the Lebanese currency was devalued by 98 per cent over the past two years. This becomes apparent when we sit down for lunch and see menu prices containing strings of zeroes: a bowl of hummus, for example, costs 450,000 Lebanese pounds ($7.50).

At Rafik Hariri University Hospital, the biggest in the country, general manager Jihad Saadeh tells us it is battling to cope with a lack of funding and a surge of patients. “We are suffering,” he says. The number of nurses at his disposal has halved because of the displacement crisis, but the number of intensive care patients has doubled.

During our visits to schools being used as emergency shelters, we find several families crammed into single rooms. Charities are providing water tanks, electricity, food and medical supplies. “This should be the government’s job,” sighs Mohammed Hassanein, who is overseeing an effort led by Palestinian refugees to assist those displaced by the war.

The void left by the Lebanese state also creates an opening for Hezbollah, which operates as a social welfare organisation as well as a paramilitary force and political party and is a declared terrorist organisation. Aided by funding from Iran, the group is providing loans to the displaced and compensation payments to those whose property is damaged by Israeli strikes.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese presidency has been vacant for two years because key political factions have not been able to agree upon a candidate. As for the national military, it is essentially a bystander to the conflict, powerless to rein in either Hezbollah or Israel.

‘We will fight to the end’

The poet Nizar Qabbani was born in Syria but spent much of his life in Beirut, a city he adored. In his 1978 poem Beirut, the Mistress of the World, he lamented how the city had been repeatedly colonised, invaded and oppressed by jostling regional powers. “We confess now/That we gave you no justice, no mercy/That we misunderstood you and were not sorry/That we offered you a dagger in place of flowers,” he wrote. Three years later, he went into exile in Europe, heartbroken when his wife was killed in a suicide bombing at the Iraqi embassy in Beirut. Four decades on, Ronnie Chatah says Lebanon remains a “battlefield for foreign conflict” rather than an independent nation pursuing its own interests.

Creating breathing room for Lebanon to determine its destiny will not be easy, however. After visiting a nearby evacuation centre, we walk through the Shatila refugee camp, set up on the outskirts of Beirut in 1949 to provide a home for Palestinians driven out of their homes by the state of Israel. About 20,000 people are crammed into the one-square-kilometre camp, a Dickensian warren of dark, damp alleys where clusters of electricity cables hang overhead like a jungle canopy. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Palestinians died here in 1982 when Christian militias, backed by Israel, went on a killing spree.

On the outskirts of the camp, we talk to a group of friends playing cards at a cafe as Al Jazeera broadcasts a split screen of the conflicts playing out across the region. Three of the men, aged in their 60s, were born in Lebanon and have lived their entire lives here, but the country feels temporary to them. They identify as Palestinian and dream of returning to their families’ ancestral lands in what is now the state of Israel. “The land is for us, not the Jewish people,” Abdul Zakari says as the friends play another round of quatorze. “We will fight to the end. It’s either them or us.”

Twice displaced

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As our time in Beirut nears its end, staff at the hotel we are staying at, the Hilton Beirut Habtoor Grand, make a sudden announcement. The hotel is being emptied of guests the following day and closed until further notice. Asked why, they respond only: “The current situation.” For the journalists and aid workers staying at the hotel, the closure is a minor inconvenience. For the staff who have suddenly lost their income, it is a disaster. “Please pray for us,” one of the workers says.

Our final evening is spent at Ramlet al-Baida, a beach at the south end of the Corniche where dozens of Syrian families are camping in tents on the sand. An estimated 1.5 million Syrians fled the vicious civil war in their country to seek safety in Lebanon. Now they again find themselves in a war zone and displaced from their homes. Volunteers from a conservation charity established to protect sea turtles from being suffocated by plastic bags are providing food and medicine. The Lebanese state is nowhere to be seen.

Ferial, a mother of six, is preparing dinner as flies buzz around her family’s tent. She’s making Aleppo-style potatoes cooked with chilli, parsley, coriander and garlic. Her family fled their home in Beirut’s southern suburbs two weeks earlier when the area was pummelled by Israeli airstrikes.

Winter is approaching, which will make sleeping on the beach even more difficult. They plan to stay put even as temperatures drop. “We have no place to go, we have to stay here,” Ferial, 40, says. She and her daughters chat amiably to us, smiling and laughing despite their circumstances. The youngest member of the family, 10-year-old Israa, is sick with a fever and crying in pain. How, we ask, do they maintain such good spirits despite it all?

“We are experienced, we adapt,” Ferial says. “In Syria, [we] saw the worst, people being amputated. This is a better situation now.”

Resilient as they are, this family could do with a break. So could Beirut, a city that keeps receiving daggers instead of flowers and where the past is never really past. A city you can’t help but love, even as it breaks your heart. As the sun dips beneath the Mediterranean, the horizon glows orange and the ocean surface shimmers. Above us, an Israeli surveillance drone buzzes like a mosquito. “This is the best time of the day,” Ferial says, looking out at the sunset. “It’s beautiful.”

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