Lebanon on the brink: The fragile resilience of a nation caught between war and survival
Young street vendors selling balloons walk past sculpted figures representing people staring at the devastation on a sidewalk overlooking the port of Beirut on August 4, 2024. Picture: Ibrahim Amro/ AFP
The cock crows a little after 6am in East Beirut, slowly stirring the people of Gemmayzeh from their beds.
One might think it unusual that a bird could wake so many in a city synonymous with noise. Unusual, however, doesn’t come close to covering the kaleidoscope of chaos that permeates this city.
A cock crowing in the morning, as French shutters open on small balconies to let the morning light in, is the most rudimentary thing that will happen on any given day.
In that context, the dawn chorus is a welcome constant.
A reminder that, despite everything, the sun also rises. And rise it does, bringing with it early spring heat and an Israeli drone humming an insidious song in an otherwise brilliant blue sky.
The runners are the first to hit the cobblestones. Next, it is the butchers and the bakers.
Before long, the streets will be full of people just going about their days. In Gemmayzeh — just like in Hamra, Dahiya, and everywhere else — cars sit bumper to bumper, honking their horns as much out of habit as frustration.
Pedestrians weave in and out between road and path as scaffolding dominates the latter, but it’s not because of any reconstruction project following Lebanon’s latest war. No, the scaffolding — like the crowing cock— was there before, and will be there long after.
A metaphor for Beirut as the Great Unfinished Cathedral. A city perpetually on the brink of something profoundly beautiful, but forever one bad decision away from disaster.
Lebanon on the precipice. Beirut on the brink. A country reduced to ashes, but — ever resilient — it rises like the phoenix, mocking those intent on disabling and destroying a nation so rich in culture it bleeds not blood but wine and olive oil.
When it rises, it turns its bomb shelters into nightclubs and the craters of its homes into modern art installations. To reduce its people to the simple designation “Arab” is to insult and ignores their Phoenician lineage.
They are Levantine, Sunnis, Shia, Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Catholic, Evangelical, Agnostic, and French.
In Beirut, there is even a synagogue. If there is one true democracy in the Middle East, it was never, ever Israel — but Lebanon.
Nowhere else. Dysfunctional, sure, but if the measure of a democracy is the freedom it allows its people to assemble, associate, own personal property, practice religion and express free speech and be gay, then Lebanon is close.
It’s treatment of migrant workers and the Palestinian refugee population are far more problematic than an imagined desire for conflict. Like any democracy, it has many societal problems. However, I bet they are not what you think.
And that’s the problem: Lebanon is always close. So tantalisingly close. It’s just that— whether it’s through coercive control of nefarious external actors such as Iran, Saudi, and especially the US, aggression from a war-hungry neighbour in Israel, or its own proclivity for self-destruction — this is a country that could be so much more, but is struggling like an addict to cleanse itself of the drug that elicits seductive highs and devastating lows.
It’s often said that, if you get a name for waking up early, you can stay in bed until noon. Beirut, with its well-earned reputation for the dreaded resilience and reinvention has masked a fragility that is evident in every bullet hole, every crevasse, and every crack in the pavement.
Its youth-educated and tri-lingual are much too young to be this tired. And they are tired. Unless you have a second passport or a Swiss bank account, prospects are few. If it was hope that drove them to the streets for the now forgotten Thawra (Revolution) of October 2019, it is fatigue that keeps them home now.
“My parents always told me when I was younger that we didn’t know hardship like they did,” Gail — a 23-year-old master’s degree student at American University of Beirut (AUB) tells me.
“We were the first teenagers in Lebanon that didn’t know war or bombings or being hungry. Then the blast happened. Then the economy. Then the war. Now, it seems like we’ve already lived through more than they did.”
“It’s true,” her mother says, “I just want her to leave. She is so smart. She shouldn’t have to live like this. Studying in darkness. Afraid of every big noise. I want her to go, and I want to go with her.”
“I don’t want to go,” Gail says.
Like many Lebanese, Gail thinks and texts in Arabic, speaks and writes in French for university, and is conversing comfortably with me in English. When I knew her first, she was a happy, smiling teenager finishing her baccalauréat.
Since then, she has completed her degree in microbiology through a pandemic, survived the port blast that destroyed her home, and undergone much of her master’s degree under the shadow of a war with Israel.
She is still smiling, but even she admits it’s harder to be happy.
By an Irish standard, she comes from a middle-class Lebanese family. Both her parents lost their jobs in the last five years due to the severe economic depression. Her studies only continue to be possible because of financial support coming from extended family overseas and scholarships. This is a common story.
The Lebanese — like their Palestinian neighbours — are fanatical about education, with many families devoting the majority of their income to ensure their children attend school and university. With prospects ever-dwindling, young women such as Gail are wondering has it all been with it.
“During the war (in October and November ‘23), the bus from my mom’s home to AUB would take hours to just cross a few miles.
“The bombs were landing close to my home and, as I was working, all I could do was worry about my mom at home alone.
“I wanted to leave early but couldn’t. It was terrifying.”
Talking to Gail and her family, there is little talk of Israel, less of Hezbollah, and none of the $1bn embassy the US has built in the hills overlooking Beirut — another piece in their regional plan (which long preceded Trump) to keep Lebanon wounded but functional.
Not so functional that Gail and her college friends could ever hope to be part of the countries better future, but functional enough so that it remains a strategic buffer for American interests in its dear ally to the south: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.
Israel’s war in Lebanon lasted over two months. Its ground invasion of the south and aerial bombardment there, and of Beirut and Baalbek to the east, claimed over 4,000 lives, decimated infrastructure and homes, and wipe out entire towns and villages that had stood for centuries.
Many of the dead have yet to be recovered, their families denied the right to bury and grieve them.
They themselves are unable to return to homes that were destroyed and livelihoods shattered.
While neighbourhoods like Gemmayzeh, Achrafieh, and Hamra were spared the worst of the direct bombardment, Dahiya — a suburb that has a population of close to 1m people — was targeted relentlessly.
Visiting there now serves as a window into how so much of Lebanon now looks: Crippled, but functioning.
With good reason, the people of Dahiya are suspicious of outsiders — since it is outsiders that are responsible for destroying their lives in such a flagrant and unforgiving fashion. To go there, to stand on the rubble of their lives, and to point cameras and be horrified at the wreckage seems a morally dubious endeavour.
It is, of course, important in order to fully comprehend the evil that was indiscriminately visited upon an innocent population in a sovereign country, targeted — let’s face it — because they were Shia, but it also reeks of trauma porn, of engaging in a brand of misery tourism that feeds a need to bear witness, yes, but with the potential negative of “othering” the victim.
So, I went there with this in mind. To sit and eat batata hara and drink cold Almaza but 4km away felt too absurd a moral dichotomy.
Not far from the ringroad that takes you south towards the airport, the first crater appeared.
Followed by another, and another, and another. Each one the size of a football field, piled high with rubble and debris.
In some cases, the debris was as high as a two-storey building — smoke and dust still rising slowly skyward — he fate of a hundred lives buried underneath. There was no red-tape around these countless Ground Zeroes. No military controlling movement. Life continued around them.
Hairdressers, coffee shops, mosques, schools, and homes. What must these people feel when they open their shutters every morning, only for their view to be a sweaty, violent morass of ugly death and metal?
It’s been three months. No accountability — despite Israelis’ constant admissions of guilt. No recovery. No reparations. No return for those who we consider so unworthy of respect and dignity we’ve already forgotten they perished there.
In that context, keeping your head down while “bearing witness” is the least any of us could do. Later, speaking with friends at dinner, we wonder what else Israel fears from Lebanon?
Could they be so paranoid that Beirut is so superior a city than Tel Aviv, say (it is), that they’re prepared to cripple it once every 10 years or so? “I am fully convinced,” one learned friend told me, “that Israel was behind the port blast in 2020. I didn’t believe it at the time, nor for a long while after, but given everything that’s happened since I have no doubt.”
This surprised me, especially as I heard it more than once, and Lebanese people – self-important, opinionated, immaculately dressed — are anything but paranoid. Conversely, they usually blame themselves first. They seek comfort in the perpetual hope and the sun also rising.
From a distance, such conjecture may seem absurd. However, up close and on the ground, you can’t help feel “tragic coincidence” is a stretch for a city that has more bullet holes than street cats.
Evening time on the corniche is a spectacular vista. Migrants congregating, kids and families rollerblading, lovers holding hands — it is impossible to sit and watch them and be anything but seduced by the poetry of it all.
Phoenicians. Levantine. Sunnis. Shia. Greek Orthodox. Maronite. Catholic. Evangelical. Armenian. Agnostic. French. People.
But there is nothing poetic or romantic about the death they chose to forget — if only for an evening.
It lingers in the guise of a tiny, buzzing drone above their heads.
It’s a constant reminder that whatever peace and poetry they do enjoy, they do so on other people’s terms.
“You have your Lebanon,” Khalil Gibran wrote, “and I have mine.” He was speaking, I think, to the Western gaze through which outsiders can sometimes view his native land. If the poet were around today, I think his Lebanon and mine would be quite similar.
Maybe, as it’s people have often told me, this is the centre of civilisation after all. Lebanon, with its quiet complexities and cruel contradictions, reflects all of our humanity — for better and worse.
That is why it’s incumbent upon all of us to care about its fate.
