Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” The “lost grace” of Maurilia approximates Beirut’s, which likewise “can be appreciated only…in the old postcards.” It is with nostalgic regret that from time to time I examine postcards in the decaying souvenir shops of Beirut’s once-fashionable Hamra district. They depict, in sepia and color-tint, Ottoman mansions, lush gardens, venerable covered souks, a seafront promenade, ancient mosques, churches and synagogues, Roman columns amid metropolitan chaos, and a magnificent central plaza originally named the Place des Canons. After World War I, it was renamed the Place des Martyrs to honor the nationalist partisans whom the Turkish military governor, General Ahmed Jamal Pasha, hanged there in 1916 for defying his crumbling empire.
Beirut suffered little physical damage in World War I, which ushered in French rule, and in World War II, which brought independence. The Lebanese themselves, with assistance from Palestinians, Syrians, and Israelis, delivered the devastation that left only postcards to remind them of what they had lost. From the beginning of the country’s civil war in 1975 to its ostensible end in 1990, the Place des Martyrs, which lay on the “green line” between the city’s mutually hostile eastern and western halves, was subjected to artillery exchanges that reduced the antebellum structures on both sides to rubble.
The postwar rehabilitation of the city, as of the country, was incomplete when contraband ammonium nitrate stored, criminally and negligently, at Beirut’s port detonated in August 2020 with a ferocity that demolished buildings within a one-mile radius and killed 218 people. The country also had yet to recover from the collapse the previous October of the Central Bank’s Ponzi scheme, in collusion with private banks, which wiped out depositors’ life savings. With the disappearance of $80 billion, Lebanon’s GDP dropped by half. The exchange rate of the US dollar soared from 1,500 to 90,000 Lebanese pounds—a 98 percent fall in the pound’s value. Once-wealthy citizens were reduced to penury. The former economy minister Nasser Saidi wrote in October 2024 that “almost half the population lives below the poverty line.”
The Lebanese struggled to restore their properties and their fortunes. Young entrepreneurs started businesses, providing services and producing goods Lebanon could no longer afford to import. Civil society charities offered help to the poorest, both Lebanese and the 1.5 million Syrian refugees displaced by the civil war that erupted next door in 2011. They achieved all this despite the prolonged looting of their collective wealth by one of the world’s most corrupt ruling classes.
Lebanon’s predicament was as untenable as it was unstable. Mass protests in October 2019, optimistically dubbed “the revolution,” were violently suppressed by supporters of Lebanon’s only fully armed militia, the Shiite Islamist Hezbollah. At the end of President Michel Aoun’s catastrophic six-year term in October 2022, rival, venal politicians failed to agree on a successor, leaving the country without desperately needed leadership. Starved of funds, the caretaker government of Prime Minister Najib Mikati barely functioned. The Foreign Ministry ran out of high-quality paper for passports. The minister of information paid out of his own pocket to replace his ministry’s many shattered windows. Flimsy photocopies sufficed as replacements for expired plastic drivers’ licenses. Roads went unrepaired. Public hospitals ran short of medicines and staff.
Today the state electricity monopoly, Électricité du Liban, provides power for barely an hour or two a day, and often not at all. Garbage collection is haphazard at best. No water flows between reservoirs and dwellings. Schools rely on teaching staff whose salaries cannot sustain their families—some months, teachers receive no pay at all, nor do judges, police officers, soldiers, and civil servants. It is not unusual to discover that your taxi driver is also a soldier, teacher, or engineer, moonlighting to survive.
Lebanon is an Escher-like mirage: stairways go nowhere, weight-bearing joists fail to meet, impossible combinations of arches and foundations defy gravity. Yet the building stands. People adapt. No water from the state provider? No problem. Residents pay trucks to pump water to tanks on their roofs. No electricity? Again, no problem. Solar panels flower on rooftops; generators hum on balconies. Never missing an opportunity to exploit misfortune, businessmen and politicians known as “generator mafias” charge exorbitant sums to entire neighborhoods for electricity from massive diesel-powered machines. The Lebanese, who joke about the most abject circumstances, say that navigating the myriad dials and cables needed to switch back and forth among solar, generator, and state sources has turned them all into electrical engineers.
A large if uncounted percentage of the populace stays afloat with money from families in the far-flung Lebanese diaspora. Without support from the estimated fourteen million Lebanese abroad, who outnumber residents almost three to one, many would starve. Those with no outside funding go hungry. They, along with refugees from Palestine and Syria, beg in the streets. Spotting another opportunity, Fagin-like criminal networks organize the beggars and garnish most of their takings.
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Lebanon was already in a permanent crisis by October 8 of last year, when Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to its assault on Gaza after Hamas’s suicidal penetration of Israel the day before. The decision by the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict initiated a year of suspense during which tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political-economic plight.
Like Americans between September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, and Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, most Lebanese aspired to remain aloof from a war in which they believed they had no part. However, their destiny was in the hands of Nasrallah and Benjamin Netanyahu. After beginning the shelling of Israel’s north on October 8, Nasrallah waited nearly a month to declare his intentions. Like everyone else in Lebanon on November 3, I tuned in to his speech. Would he counsel caution or favor escalation? Would he opt for peace or war? Would he put Lebanon’s interests first or those of his sponsors in Iran?
Lebanon’s seemed to prevail when he declared that Hamas’s October 7 attack had been “one hundred percent Palestinian in terms of both decision and execution.” In other words, Hamas—despite its alliance with Hezbollah in Iran’s self-declared “axis of resistance”—had not told him of its intentions. That left Nasrallah free to sit on the sidelines. However outrageous Israel’s revenge in Gaza, no Arab state was doing anything to defend Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: no oil embargo, no break in diplomatic relations, no pressure on the United States to cease delivering the weapons Israel was using to devastate Gaza. How could tiny Lebanon, much weaker than the Arab states that recognized Israel, fight the combined power of the Israeli Defense Forces and the US? It couldn’t. Yet Iranian interests dominated the rest of Nasrallah’s sermon: he promised to bombard Israel until it agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, and no cease-fire loomed on the horizon.
Hezbollah, like the rest of Lebanon, hoped to avoid an Israeli invasion; but blood flowed as red as the “red lines” containing violence to narrow bands on either side of the “blue line” between the two countries. While residents of northern Israel and southern Lebanon either evacuated or dug in, nightclubs in Beirut—and, I assume, in Tel Aviv—flourished as usual. The year after Nasrallah’s speech saw a static drôle de guerre, a “phony war” like the first seven months on Europe’s western front in 1939–1940. That ended with a blitzkrieg in April and May 1940, when the Wehrmacht conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France. In Lebanon, the same outcome was not long in arriving.
I left Beirut at the end of November 2023. On my flight back on August 4 of this year, Middle East Airlines’ video ads portrayed our destination as a vacation resort: al fresco concerts, thriving restaurants, beaches heaving with women in minuscule bikinis, expensive dinner jackets for fashionable young blades, diamond necklaces, local wines, and caterers delivering a cornucopia of fresh foods to your door. When I landed, Lebanon seemed much the same as when I left. Although Israel had assassinated a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut a few days earlier, exposing deep cracks in Hezbollah’s security apparatus, the war was still limited to the south. North of the Litani River, the notional demarcation between southern and central Lebanon, people had grown so accustomed to the fighting that they no longer noticed it.
The Lebanese responded to their plight with ridicule. Near-daily overflights by Israeli warplanes, whose sonic booms frightened children and rattled windows, led some wags to create a website, jidarsot.com (jidar sot means “sonic boom” in Arabic), where users could post comments about them. “It’s routine,” one wrote. “I’d still give it an 8/10 because it startled me.” Another was less impressed: “My cat’s fart is louder.” Israel’s then defense minister, Yoav Gallant, threatened to “return Lebanon to the stone age,” and Netanyahu said it would become “another Gaza.” One of Lebanon’s editorial cartoonists responded by drawing five sets of eyes staring out of the darkness with the caption:
The bad news is we might have to move to bunkers with no water, electricity, or modern comforts. The good news is you won’t notice the difference.
On August 27, two days after Israel bombed more than forty sites in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah reacted by firing 320 rockets into northern Israel, Beirut’s French-language daily, L’Orient-Le Jour, topped its front page with the headline, “After the response, return to abnormal?”
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Saturday nights on Beirut’s seaside Corniche saw the usual influx of youngsters cruising in flashy or dilapidated cars, while my friends and I watched from the balcony of one of my favorite restaurants, Casablanca, in west Beirut. Alongside this abnormal normality were omens that were difficult to discount. On September 17, we heard small explosions all over the city—sounds replicated in other parts of Lebanon and in Syria. Israel had penetrated Hezbollah’s logistics network and booby-trapped the pagers its members were given as substitutes for easily tracked mobile phones. The next day, Hezbollah members’ walkie-talkies also detonated. At least thirty-two people died and nearly three thousand were injured, most of them losing hands or eyes. Among the wounded was the Iranian ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, evidence that Iran was a significant part of Hezbollah’s communications network. More assassinations followed in what turned out to be preparation for an Israeli invasion.
Hope nevertheless persisted that the warfare would remain limited until a truce was negotiated in Gaza or Lebanon. One ambassador told me that the level of violence was “calibrated” to avoid escalation. A Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) general and a Western military adviser assured me that plans were underway to replace Hezbollah with LAF troops along a narrow border corridor and thus end the fighting. I suspect that neither of them checked with Nasrallah or Netanyahu.
Diplomats, mainly from France and the US, shuttled among Beirut, Jerusalem, and various Arab capitals, seeking a way out. Yet the US was not entirely disinterested. Lebanon’s Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, told me that the US negotiator Amos Hochstein, an Israeli army veteran, called him after Hezbollah bombed the Syrian Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The bombardment, allegedly a mistake, killed twelve children on a soccer field. Hochstein asked Jumblatt to condemn Hezbollah, which Jumblatt knew—and Hochstein should have known—would have sparked a Druze-Shiite war in advance of an Israeli invasion. He refused.
In late September, just after another of Nasrallah’s bellicose perorations, I had lunch with an old friend, Jamil Mrowe, in east Beirut’s sumptuous Mandaloun restaurant. His father, Kamel Mrowe, had founded and edited two of Lebanon’s more prestigious newspapers, the Arabic Al Hayat and the English Daily Star. Jamil inherited both publications, which have since closed down. Yet he remains an astute observer of Lebanese affairs and knows Hezbollah well.
“You could take the speech of today,” he said, “and hear the words of Nasser.” Jamil had reason to remember Gamal Abdel Nasser, who as Egypt’s leader from 1952 until his death in 1970 dominated the Arab world with his rhetoric. When Nasser gave a speech in 1966 saying that Egypt could defeat Israel, Jamil’s father wrote an editorial calling him either a liar or a traitor—a liar if he could not defeat Israel, a traitor if he could but didn’t. The editorial led to Kamel Mrowe’s assassination in May of that year by a fanatical Lebanese Sunni Nasserite. Nasrallah’s blustering about defeating Israel was reminiscent of Nasser’s equally hollow bombast. Both leaders, however, had devoted followers who would—and did—die for them.
Jamil, a Shiite of profound secularist leanings like the rest of his family, said many Hezbollah members were tiring of holy war: “As they have diehard adherents, they also have adherents who have families and properties and businesses.” A full-scale war would take all of that away. Hezbollah had changed since its founding in 1982, when its objective was to liberate Lebanon from Israeli occupation. “Hezbollah moved from good, sincere, hardworking, diligent people to petty bourgeoisie. That affects all political parties,” Jamil said. “Onward to fat bellies, then to fashionable thinning down.”
When Hezbollah’s followers became interested in money, they could be bought. Who but a Hezbollah member could have given Israel the locations of the leaders it planned to murder? Following the death of Fuad Shukr, his nephew was found dead with a bullet in his head—apparent retribution for betrayal. Hezbollah arrested other members whom it suspected of spying for Israel. The party, once famed for secrecy and probity, was weakening from within as Israel was diminishing it from without. Its dominance of the Lebanese polity was becoming another casualty of the war Nasrallah chose to launch against Israel.
The three largest communities in Lebanon—the Maronite Catholics, the Sunni Muslims, and the Shiite Muslims—have all had turns at subjugating the others. The Maronites had the upper hand under the French Mandate and in the first generation of independence. They controlled the most important offices of state: the presidency, command of the army and national police, and chairmanship of the Central Bank. The Sunnis rose next with the help of the armed factions of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from 1970 until Israel expelled Arafat in the summer of 1982. Next up was Hezbollah, a product of Israel’s 1982 invasion and of Iranian patronage. This year Israel is cutting Hezbollah down to size as it pursues Gallant’s promise to send the country into the stone age. Hezbollah, unlike the PLO, is Lebanese and cannot be expelled. Thus while the party is weakened, uncertainty over its place in Lebanon’s future prevails.
The year of living ambiguously concluded with the assassination of Nasrallah on September 27 and Israel’s ground invasion on October 1. The mass killing, destruction, and displacements that everyone feared have begun and are accelerating. Friends of mine have lost their houses and farms, and refugee families from the south camped on the sidewalks in front of my apartment. They filled schools, hotels, abandoned buildings, and beaches seeking safety, only for many of them to be bombed in their places of shelter far from the border. With destruction engulfing large swathes of the country north and south, in the future postcards may be the only reminders of Beirut as it was before 2024.
My closest friend in Beirut, scion of a Sunni family that has been prominent in Lebanese politics for generations, told me before I left, “The only thing we can be sure of is this: as bad as today is, it is better than tomorrow.”
—November 19, 2024
