Beirut Gets a Reprieve—but for How Long?
The Nation | 16th December 2024
If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this. Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil war there, in 1975–76, we would give numbers to each successive ceasefire. Our tally ran out of steam after 100. Each time, something—a Christian boy dating a Muslim boy’s sister, a car theft, a drug deal gone wrong, flying a party flag in the wrong neighborhood—would kick-start a fresh wave of violence. One of Beirut’s early front lines was a street between Christian and Muslim neighborhoods. Western journalists—of whom I, as a young stringer for various publications and radio networks, was barely one—left the St. George Hotel bar long enough to observe exchanges of fire, pick up a few quotes, gather some color, and file in time for dinner. Then…
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Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously
The New York Review of Books
After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite…
The expendables
Times Literary Supplement
Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be “another Iranian student” approaching the…
In Lebanon, Israel Is Only Sowing the Seeds of More Bloodshed and Terror
The Nation
The history of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon are a series of lessons in futility and the arrogance of power. If only anyone were paying attention. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history is repression works only to…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.