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Beirut: time for another requiem?

Shail Mayaram

What is going to be the fallout of the most recent Israeli onslaught? A human tragedy. A colossal loss of a civilisational heritage.

THE DOCTRINE of collective culpability holds an entire people responsible for what a few have done. The Lebanese have been deemed guilty of Hizbollah's action of kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. The country is scarred once again by Israeli bombing. The world watches as an enormous tragedy is played out: an infinitesimal part of this is quantified as numbers dead and injured and as material destruction. The larger story is of massive displacement, livelihood crises, the fear and terror that people will live with for decades, the breakdown of an entire civilisational fabric already badly damaged after the civil war and Israeli occupation.

Lebanon's economy had just begun the process of recovery, of restoring Beirut to its pre-civil war status as a hub for global economy operations in Africa and the Middle East — a position Dubai had become heir to. What is the problem with the Israeli-U.S. reading? Foreign policy rarely considers that cities are repositories of civilisations built up over centuries or that its inhabitants might be the bearers of memories that draw upon cultural strata. State and intelligence departments rarely recognise complex identities that are represented by cities, countries, and civilisations. How easy it then becomes for armies to go in and pulverise peoples. Hence, the recent destruction of a range of cities — Kabul, Baghdad, Basra, and now Beirut, and Tyre.

I had visited Beirut in October 2004 as part of a project on Asian cities. Occasionally I visited the Corniche, the beautiful walkway alongside the Mediterranean. It is not just Europe that entertains the myth of the Mediterranean as borderlands, it is also the countries southwards. Lebanon's location as a meeting ground for Europe, Asia, and Africa lends it a rare cultural complexity. Byblos located on the coast is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and an ancient crossroads. There were strong relations between Egypt and Lebanon as early as the fourth millennium. Roman columns lead to an ancient temple of the goddess Baalat Gebal. Sidon is another ancient coastal city. To these places the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians came and took cedar for their ships and palaces. These city-states were eventually incorporated by Assyria and Phoenicia. The conquest of Tyre and other cities by Alexander began the Hellenisation of its culture. The Roman Empire brought urban planning, temples, forums, theatres, gymnasiums, hippodromes, and baths. By the early Byzantine period, and the advent of Christianity around AD 323, Berythus was one of the most prosperous trading ports of the eastern Mediterranean as also a centre of learning known for the first law school.

The conversion to Islam followed in the wake of the Arab conquest. Ummayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Seljugs ruled in turn. In Tripoli an Islamic ambience is apparent as it was first an Ottoman, then a Mamluk city. Steps from the street below the castle lead down to the souk, a dense visual experience. The followers of the Byzantine sage, St. Maron, deemed heretic and persecuted by the Eastern church at Byzantium came to live in this region in the eighth century and build their monasteries. The Maronite poet, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), draws upon both Christian and Muslim mystical traditions. In Doha, Beirut's Armenian neighbourhood, the writing on shops suddenly becomes Armenian rather than Arabic. The Armenians came over from the Ottoman Empire almost a century ago. The city is also home to many migrants including Kurdish and Syrian labourers, Sri Lankan domestic labour, and Russian and Ukrainian sex workers.

The new downtown Beirut. Spectacular. Multi-religious. There is obviously a state message coming through from the post-war reconstruction of Beirut. The vision of a new Lebanon rising from the ashes, of a country that is multi-denominational and not mono-religious. Churches that are Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Roman Catholic, a brand new mosque, and even a synagogue. The multi-religious statement is overstated, says Harvard-based architect, Hashim Sarkis. He himself has been arguing for retaining the traditional public space of the maidan, which has been overridden in the making of modern Beirut. This was where people from the hinterland camped, in a space of exchange for peasant, pastoralist, and city dweller.

A metaphor for Lebanese identity is provided by Mai Ghoussoub, artist and writer. For her being a Beiruti means the possibility of reading and writing both ways, right to left and left to right, in Arabic and in English. She speaks eloquently of this city on the Mediterranean where the winds of all cultures came in and you could breathe deep from them and of them. Of the city inscribed in time. But there are cities where you do not venture outwards and instead turn your back to worlds outside.

Cities also have their ugly undersides. Beirut harbours many kinds of identities, including those that are committed to ideologies of violence. Maronite Christian hyper-nationalism that had grown over the nineteenth century and their anxiety with respect to the erosion of their political dominance led to the formation of Phalange militias. In 1982 they carried out massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila where estimates range of 460-3000 Palestinian civilians killed. Robert Fisk points out in Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, an account of the violence of the 1980s, that the South Lebanon Army was the Israeli puppet Maronite militia in the zone of south Lebanon. The massacres took place at the Palestinian camps of west Beirut that was then under protection of Israel. Not insignificantly, he returns to Auschwitz to find clues for what happened in Beirut.

While the civil war is often portrayed as one between Christians and Muslims, by the end of the war Phalangists assaulted even Armenians and Greek Orthodox who allied with Christian Palestinians and Druze Muslims against Maronites. Hizbollah was born in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Palestinian refugees assert that in 1985 it even targeted them. Some 2,500 persons are estimated to have been killed in the battle of the camps.

What is the nature of the aftermath of violence? Clearly Beirutis are struggling to find ways of living together all over again. The debate on the rebuilding of the city in order to recapture its cosmopolitan heritage is one manifestation. William Dalrymple's travelogue, The Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, cites a Maronite priest who tells him how Walid Jumblatt, Druze leader of the Progressive Socialist Party and the leftist alliance, is trying to get Christians to return to Lebanon. "He wants to heal the wounds," says the priest.

What is going to be the fallout then of the most recent Israeli onslaught? A human tragedy. A colossal loss of a civilisational heritage. The Israeli action has only served to unite groups who were hitherto inimical. The assassination of Rafiq Hariri last year almost seemed to overwrite ethnic difference in the moment of mourning. Night after night Beirutis, Christian and Muslim, kept vigil at the tomb of the man who had for ten years pioneered the rebuilding of the city. The strong anti-Syrian national sentiment has now been reversed. Hizbollah and Hamas are also new allies. Iranian and Syrian support, as also that of Moqtada al-Sadr from Iraq for Hizbollah suggests emergent alliances between Shia and Sunni political forces.

Hizbollah's action was certainly illegitimate and immoral; its politics has time and again revealed the ideology of violence that imbues its cadres. Israel can hardly afford to pass any moral strictures on either Hamas or Hizbollah. For the last several months it has been involved in a siege of the Gaza that is aimed against the recently elected Hamas-dominated Palestinian government. The siege has meant enormous death and destruction for Palestinians. Further, one needs to ask: has not Israel detained Palestinian and other persons? The violence of the state is deemed legitimate (arrest, detention) while that of non state is referred to as illegitimate (abduction).

The international community needs to introspect on several questions as it debates the "war on terror." How are the images currently viewed on Arab media contributing to the making of future suicide bombers? Does sovereignty confer on states the right to take lives, destroy cities and civilisations? How is the issue of viable statehood for Israelis contrasted with the statelessness/unsustainable state of the Palestinians going to be resolved? Israel demands a zone demilitarised of Hizbollah. In the making of a secure future, the Lebanese need to be assured of a country demilitarised of not just Hizbollah and the Amal, but also of repeated Israeli incursions.

(The writer is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.)

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