What next for Lebanon in a region on fire?
A scholar skewers the state of the country. And 15 short stories bring Beirut to life
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The Big Story:
With Iranian missiles targeting Israel and Israel bombing Lebanon even as it invades it, what’s next for this small country ravaged by five years of economic crisis, run by a weak caretaker government and hostage to broader Middle Eastern conflicts?
Hemmed in between Israel, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon’s situation is bleak. As one of this week’s books* points out: “The Lebanese have become used to bad news stories”.
Yes, but Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib has said his country faces a “crisis that threatens its very existence”1 and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the world “cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza”. At least one million Lebanese – a fifth of the population – are displaced.
More than 1,000 people in Lebanon were reportedly killed in the past week, notably Hassan Nasrallah, longtime leader of Lebanon’s powerful Shia group Hezbollah.
Some, not least Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump, are cheering on Israel. Kushner says it must “finish the job”2 of destroying enemies such as the Iran-backed Hezbollah and bringing about a new regional order in the Middle East.
Others, such as Gershon Baskin, respected columnist of The Times of Israel and Al Quds, say they are “very disturbed” by the deaths of so many hundreds of innocent people. Baskin posted on social media: “How can we as human beings and residents of this Middle East so readily celebrate death and destruction?”3
This Week, Those Books:
An insider-outsider takes a long hard look at Lebanon.
Short stories that bring Beirut startlingly to life, in the midst of death.
If you want another read on the Middle East, this specially unlocked post from the archives will be freely available for one week: Israel-Palestine: Tears and fears
The Backstory:
Lebanon may be facing the largest displacement crisis in its 81 years as an independent country.
The Lebanese, like the Irish and the Italians, have a large diaspora, with people migrating in their hundreds of thousands in a series of waves that began in the late 19th century.
The Lebanese state officially recognises 18 religious communities – four Muslim sects; 12 Christian churches or groups of churches; the Druze and the Jews. Parliamentary seats, ministerial appointments, and positions in the army and the civil service are all distributed accordingly.
Modern Lebanon, the site of some of the oldest human settlements in the world, was established as the state of Greater Lebanon by France in 1920. It proclaimed its independence in 1943.
This Week’s Books:
*Lebanon: A Country in Fragments
By: Andrew Arsan
Publisher: Hurst
Year: 2018
The author, a Cambridge University academic,4 is of Lebanese heritage and it’s apparent in the passion and exasperation with which he examines the state of that country. He starts out by noting Lebanon’s apparent “limited significance”. It’s not India, China, the US, Russia, South Africa or Brazil, he says, being neither territorially vast, nor demographically, economically or geopolitically important. And yet, that’s exactly the reason, he suggests, Lebanon does matter. Might it be seen as “a microcosm of the contemporary world, a petri dish in which we can observe the microbial strains of late modernity”?
Certainly this book underlines the inherent danger of building a country by legitimising sectarianism as a power-sharing mechanism. Returning to Lebanon in 2005 after 15 years abroad, Arsan finds both hope and despair. All too few Lebanese politicians “attempt to address voters outside of their own communities”, he writes. And what seems like “built-in checks-and-balances against the monopolisation of power by any one group or figure” ultimately enshrines religion as the basis of political representation.
Choice quote ( and it seems hideously in tune with this moment):
“…crisis is manifest not just in electricity cuts, in uncollected rubbish and traffic jams, but also in that fraction of a second when one wonders whether the blurt of a text message signals a missive from the Israeli Defence Forces or just another promotion for two-for-one loo paper from the local supermarket, or when one unthinkingly checks under one’s car for a booby-trap at the end of a night out. Is it any surprise, then, that many should think of insecurity and instability, too, as features of life in contemporary Lebanon?”
Beirut Noir
Edited by Iman Humaydan Younes; translated by Michelle Hartman
Publisher: Akashic Books
Year: 2015
Beirut is a fitting subject for a short story collection. It’s the capital of Lebanon, one of the largest cities in the country and in the Levant. And it’s one of the world’s oldest cities.
This anthology, about 21st century Beirut, has 14 stories by Lebanese writers, and one by a Beirut-born-and-bred Palestinian. The editor, a well-known Lebanese writer, has kept to Lebanon’s trilingual model and included stories originally written in Arabic, French and English. What remains a constant, however, is Lebanon’s devastating civil war, which began in 1974 and lasted until 1990. All the stories are framed in some way by the war: unexpected and enforced absences; flashbacks to happier times; the pain that won’t go away.
Choice quote:
“They say that in Beirut, you live like there’s no tomorrow. Every day is so intense. So extreme. Here, people work, argue, drive, dance, drink, and even make love as if it were their last day on earth. When you’re constantly courting death, you learn how to appreciate life. You learn how to improvise dinners over candlelight because the electricity has just been cut again. You grow gardenias and jasmine to cover up bullet holes on your buildings. You become naturally creative because absolutely nothing is certain and no day is ever like the previous one”.
– Maya Rose by Zena el Khalil
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https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/396899
https://x.com/gershonbaskin/status/1840346447469854915
https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/prof-andrew-arsan