Those who knew Beirut’s great cultural bazaar before the war mourn for their mythic society
We who lived in Lebanon before the war harbour romantic memories of a place that did not exist. Our shares in that collective illusion have aged like bottles of wine drawn from the same cedar cask, resting in the dark, maturing, transforming impurities into perfection. Albert Hourani, the influential Anglo-Lebanese historian, said Beirut was the last of the great Levantine port cities. It was. When Beirut succumbed to indigenous madness, Israeli rapacity and the deadening hand of Syrian despotism, a tradition of racial and cultural cross-fertilisation dating from the Phoenician city-states came to an end. Beirut had outlasted its more celebrated rivals along the Mediterranean shore from Asia Minor to Egypt, but it could not survive in the new age of religious intolerance, tribal segregation and economic manipulation. With its 17-year war, its siege by Israel and its occupation by Syria, it has followed the other Levantine entrepots into drabness and decay. Only our memories remain, faulty as they are.
“It was a summer of special splendour,” James Cameron, one of the finest journalists Britain produced in this century, wrote in his book 1914. “For once even the English sky accorded with the cloudless humour of the nation and enhanced it, day followed day in golden composure; all over the kingdom things were going well.”
That was the summer the great war began, and the world would be divided into those who knew Europe before the carnage and those who grew up afterwards. So, too, Lebanon and the Middle East. Some remember the last months before the Lebanese war began in the spring of 1975, when the Americans were evacuating Saigon. Resident aliens and the Lebanese themselves misunderstood the events taking place in their capital. The rest of the world knows only the Lebanon of strife, religious division, vulgar architecture, ruination of the countryside, cemeteries and the Syrian and Israeli occupations.
Before the war . . . “Before the war,” Lebanese exiles in Paris, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires say when speaking of their country, as if invoking some dead spirit. “Before the war” has become an incantation, a magic formula that excludes those who were not there. “Before the war” is a dream. The years just before the battles began were a time of social upheaval in Lebanon and the rest of the world. Lebanon’s ruling class, as sensitive as their counterparts in America and Europe, detected threats from below and from outside. Beirut’s vast political underground was attracting exiles from most of the world, and they took their inspiration from the Viet Cong and Che Guevara. When students at Beirut’s universities went on strike in 1971, many of them sang the anthem of the American civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome”. Globalism, rather than today’s capitalist orthodoxy, was a form of solidarity among the oppressed. Most Lebanese lived under the feudal order of tribal chiefs, upon whom they depended for jobs, education and prestige. Many in Lebanon lived in refugee camps, where the only roofs on their hovels were made of corrugated tin. Little boys sold chewing gum and shined shoes, young girls sold their bodies. Workers went on strike, and many among the poor, as among the intellectuals, believed the slogans of the world left.
The Soviet Union attempted to manipulate their organisations, just as the United States opposed them. Lebanon, long the meeting point and battleground of the Middle East’s tribes, was also a theatre of the cold war. The cold war faded, and the deeper structure of the tribe remains. The leftist movements who invited the friendless African National Congress to send delegates to Beirut ultimately degenerated into tribal and sectarian militias. They ended by emulating the feudal power-brokers they despised. They, too, became part of the Americans’ “new world order” rather than champions making a new world.
“Before the war”, we breathed ideas as we did the tobacco smoke of Lebanon’s raucous coffee houses. Among the first words in my Arabic vocabulary, when I arrived fresh from my California university in 1972, were liberation, struggle and victory. Whatever your point of view, whichever language you read, there was a newspaper for you. More than 40 dailies in ten languages. They were for debate rather than vehicles to carry advertising. However, secret subsidies from the Arab dictatorships, oil companies, the CIA and KGB corrupted them. Political theatre, much of it naive, flourished and helped to inspire a generation of committed Lebanese and Palestinian film makers. Poets and painters explored new themes, and they radicalised a generation of Arabs, Kurds and Armenians. A few on the extreme left made contacts with their Israeli counterparts, opening a dialogue that was more dangerous – many were killed and imprisoned for it – and promising than the official dialogue that came 15 years later between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. “Before the war” there was hope.
The summer of 1974 in Lebanon was like James Cameron’s English summer of 1914. In my diary for Friday 28 June 1974, I wrote of a delicious al fresco lunch with Lebanese and Palestinian friends at the house of John Cooley, the respected Christian Science Monitor correspondent and author. That evening I went to dinner in another friend’s garden and on to a succession of bars in the red-light district along Phoenicia Street with two other journalists, Phil Caputo and Barry Came. We were always talking then, debating, thinking, wondering. My diary entry mentioned the quality of the wine and beauty of the women, but it ended, “The Yemeni foreign minister was assassinated on [rue] Hamra. There was an intra-Palestinian shoot-out at Shatila camp – possibly 20 dead. And an invasion of the south is still predicted.”
The assassination, the battle, the threatened invasion – all of these are censored from the romantic memory. Yet it was the reality, as were the mobilisations of the Austro-Hungarian, German and French armies in the delightful summer of 1914.
What went wrong? Lebanon was a man who, as long as he appeared healthy, ignored the cancer in his body and the poison in the air he breathed. The cancer within was the totality of tribal-sectarian loyalties, much stronger than fidelity to a construct called Lebanon that the French carved out of post-Ottoman Syria in the 1920s, and the corruption it bred. The poison air blew in from Israel, which treated Lebanon and its borders with absolute contempt, cordoning off sections for itself and bombarding villages and refugee camps. The poison blew across the borders from Syria, which never reconciled itself to Lebanon’s survival and its success in the words of commerce and culture. Lebanon’s liberty was a reproach to the Syrians, who knew only military tyranny, stasis and futility. The poison came north with the Palestinian commandos, who were driven out of Jordan and attempted to remake Lebanon for their own ends. Their understandable goal was to return to their homes in Palestine, but they never consulted the Lebanese themselves.
For 17 years the Lebanese slaughtered one another. Syrians, Israelis and Palestinians used their country as a free fire zone. Many of the best Lebanese fled into exile. Their faux nationhood disintegrated. Then, with as little warning as it began, the war ended, more or less. The Syrian occupation underpins the latest arrangement, a fragile peace at best with the Israelis and the Shiite Muslims at war in south Lebanon. Lebanon woke from the war to discover it had lost the basis of its prosperity: the Arab oil sheikhs no longer needed the Lebanese. After 1975 they dispensed with multi-lingual Lebanese middlemen and dealt directly with western banks and corporations. Worse, Lebanon was no longer necessary as the Arab world’s giant bazaar for flourishing communities of Christians, Muslims and Jews, of Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Armenians, of Europeans, North Africans and Levantines. These peoples do not need Beirut’s bazaar society, because they no longer talk to one another. The old world is dead, and the minorities that gave the entire Middle East its texture are fleeing. The Armenians of Aleppo are in Los Angeles, the Jews of Damascus went to Brooklyn, the Zoroastrians of Iran are migrating to Europe, the Christians of Palestine are settling in Australia, the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey are being forced into their mountain ghettos.
All the tribes used to meet and talk in Lebanon, the last great Levantine port for all races and religions. Now it is gone for them. Worst of all, they no longer know how to use it.
When I hear the accents of the old Beirut, as I did the other night at a Lebanese restaurant, Fakhreldine, over Green Park in London, I imagine what it must be like now to walk in the mountains, to swim in Lebanon’s bit of the Mediterranean and to talk again with people who want to change the world. It is ten years since I drove out of Beirut and through the Shouf hills of Mount Lebanon. It is no easier to find that old Lebanon than to visit the world before 1914. It is like seeking oneself in the hour before he tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
