Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (28 page)

Ghaddar lives in Beirut, but she grew up in the south and often visits family there. Like Slim, she’s convinced that her community will be more relaxed on the question of Israel in the future.

“They’re very flexible, she said. “The war with Israel ended in 2006. Everybody knows that. It’s not going to happen again, not if Israel doesn’t start it. Hezbollah cannot strike first again. They don’t have enough support. For the people, the war is over. They’re convinced Israel isn’t going to strike unless Hezbollah starts something.”

None of this means that peace and normal relations are around the next corner, but what about relative peace and quiet?

“There is a way,” said Eli Khoury, CEO of the M&C Saatchi advertising company in the Middle East and co-founder of the Lebanon Renaissance Foundation. “Hezbollah has already agreed in principle to return to a nonaggression treaty, the original armistice that has been in place for more than 60 years. [Druze leader] Walid Jumblatt campaigns for it. [Former Prime Minister] Fouad Siniora also campaigned for it.”

He’s referring to the armistice the Lebanese government and the new state of Israel signed at the end of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949. Lebanon was hardly even involved in that war and hasn’t actively waged war against Israel since. The Israelis have fought wars
in
Lebanon, but not against the Lebanese army or government. Their enemies were Palestinian- and Iranian-backed terrorist organizations. In the middle of the 2006 war, Lebanese and Israeli military officers sat down over tea and worked out a plan to ensure that neither side accidentally shot at the other.

“Everyone is at least paying lip service to neutrality now,” Khoury said. “It used to be only the Christians who said they wanted neutrality. So today at least lip service is paid by every party, even the harshest, to neutrality, decentralization, border control, cleaning up agreements with Syria and a return to the armistice with Israel.”

The Christians have always wanted Lebanon to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Shias wanted it, too, until 1982. Back then it was only the Sunnis who wanted Lebanon to be involved. It was they who embraced Egyptian tyrant Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism and invited the PLO into the country.

Since then, however, the Sunnis in Lebanon have quietly moved on from the conflict with Israel, just as Sunni Arabs have moved on pretty much everywhere else. For them, the war ended with the PLO’s last stand in 1982. As for the rest of the region, not a single Sunni Arab government has actively participated in a full-blown war against Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Lebanon’s Sunnis, in moving on, are hardly unique. Indeed, they have even more reason to move on than do Sunnis in places like Tunisia and Morocco because Tunisia and Morocco don’t get torn to pieces when the rocket launchers are fired up. Contrary to popular belief in some quarters, most Lebanese people do not enjoy getting blown up and shot at.

“The most recent study we commissioned,” Khoury said, “and it was thorough—we surveyed 4,000 people—showed that 95 percent of the Sunnis don’t care about Salafism or the Arab-Israeli conflict anymore. They’re interested in other things. You have to remember that Saad Hariri’s party is by far the most popular movement among the Sunnis.”

Only Hezbollah keeps the fight alive, and historically speaking, the default position of their constituents has been radically different from what it is now. Hezbollah’s sponsors in Syria and Iran are still standing, and it might take a generation for attitudes to change even after guns, money and ideology stop coming in from Tehran and Damascus. But it should be clear by now there’s nothing eternal about the attitudes and behavior of Israel’s northern neighbor. And if it’s still too soon for optimism, it is not too soon to say a faint hope flickers on the horizon.

Chapter Twelve

Can Beirut Be Paris Again?

Beirut, 2013

Before the city became the poster child for urban disaster areas in the mid-1970s, Beirut was widely known as the Paris of the Middle East. With its French Mandate architecture, its world-class cuisine, its fashionable and liberated women, its bevy of churches in the Christian half of the city, its thousand-year-old ties to France and with French as a second language, it fit the part.

Then civil war broke out in 1975 and a gravitational black hole seemed to appear beneath the city, sucking in interventionist powers from the Middle East and even the more remote parts of the world. The Palestine Liberation Organization, the Israelis, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Soviets, the French and the Americans descended on Lebanon when its orgy of violence—the worst in the region since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—tore city and country to pieces. More than 100,000 people were killed at a time when the population was less than 4 million. Beirut still hasn’t fully recovered.

No country inflicted more damage than Syria under the rule of the Assad family’s Arab Socialist Baath Party. The Syrian army was one of the most destructive belligerents when it invaded during the Lebanon war and sponsored one militia after another to keep the country off balance. After the war ended, the Syrians smothered Lebanon with a stultifying military occupation for 15 years until the Cedar Revolution forced a withdrawal in 2005. Even after Syria left, Damascus and its violent local proxies—Hezbollah, Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party—laid waste to Lebanon from the inside, first by provoking a disastrous war with Israel in 2006 and again by invading Beirut in 2008 and toppling the government.

Now with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad possibly on his way out, or at least too busy to export mayhem to his neighbors as he faces the likes of Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS, will Beirut have the chance to be Paris again?

*  *  *

The truth is that Beirut never really was Paris except in a bastardized sense. The city is what you’d get if you put Paris, Miami and Baghdad into a blender and pressed
puree
. Gleaming glass skyscrapers rise above French-style villas adjacent to bullet-pocked walls and mortar-shattered towers. Hip entrepreneurs set up high-end boutiques next to crumbling modern-day ruins. A downtown Ferrari showroom sits across the street from a parking lot that was recently a bombed-out field of rubble. Beirut’s fabulous cuisine never went away, nor did the city’s high-end shopping districts, cafés, nightclubs and bars, but English has eclipsed French as the second most spoken language, and none of the reconstruction or new construction looks even the slightest bit French.

Beirut is a city that devours its past. Postwar progress means that some of its most beautiful buildings and even entire streets are being demolished and replaced with high-rises. Some of the new towers, like those along the city’s new waterfront, are architecturally outstanding. Others are standard-issue generic blocks that function as little more than vertical placeholders: imagine a 20-story bank building in a place like Dayton, Ohio. Sure, they beat the junky 12-story apartment complexes built during the war-torn 1970s and 1980s, but they’re replacing some of the most charming urban vistas in the entire Middle East.

“Construction in Lebanon has reached an alarming stage where much of the architectural memory of a city like Beirut is being erased,” says Michael Young of Beirut’s
Daily Star
newspaper. “Where once we had a relatively charming Mediterranean city, what we now have increasingly is a city of impersonal high-rises, many of them of questionable architectural value. Everywhere there is concrete and almost no green space.”

“The tragic thing,” says a graduate of the American University of Beirut who can’t stand the mismanagement, “is that they are destroying ruins that are over 2,000 years old to build structures that could very likely be uninhabitable within a year because the political situation could dramatically worsen. They destroyed a Phoenician port. They are destroying Roman and Byzantine ruins. For what? The chic new buildings they are erecting could very easily look like the blown-up Holiday Inn in the near future.”

Beirut is a small city. With only a million residents, it’s less than half the size of metropolitan Portland, Oregon. A hundred years ago it was hardly bigger than a fishing village. Nevertheless, Beirut has a lot of history to devour, some of it lovely, much of it horrible.

The year 1975 was when it all went to hell, but before 1975, back when Beirut was still “Paris,” the Levantine hell was in Syria. Damascus was the unstable place in the region. Syria, in fact, was among the least stable countries on earth. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, military coups came as often as Christmas. Not until the Baath Party seized power in 1963 did Syria settle down, and only then because the Baathists erected a total-surveillance Soviet-style police state that terrorized the population into passivity.

Hafez al-Assad, father of the current ruler, Bashar al-Assad, took the helm in 1970, and he cleverly figured out that Syria’s inherent instability could be exported and that the easiest place to export it was Lebanon.

Lebanon’s religious groups have different cultures, different values and different regional and international sympathies. The Christians have historic ties to the West dating back to the Crusades. Lebanon’s Sunnis are backed by much of the Arab world, which, outside Iraq, is overwhelmingly Sunni. The Shias have Iran as their patron, one of only a handful of Shia-majority countries anywhere in the world. Since Lebanon is small, divided by nature and weak by design, it’s easy pickings for a totalitarian state looking for hapless prey to divide and conquer.

Syria didn’t start the Lebanese war—it was sparked in Beirut by clashes between Palestinian and Christian militias—but it would have ended much sooner without Syrian interference, and it would have ended much better. The Taif Agreement at the conclusion of hostilities required the disarmament of every militia in Lebanon. Assad’s army oversaw their disarmament but left Hezbollah in place, partly because it was a useful proxy in Syria’s relentless war against Israel and also because it could be used in a pinch to checkmate Beirut if Damascus’ new vassal got a little too uppity.

Hezbollah was used for both purposes after the Syrian army’s withdrawal. The 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel—which Hezbollah started when it killed three Israeli soldiers along the border and kidnapped two others—cost more than a thousand Lebanese citizens their lives, created more than a million refugees (almost 25 percent of the country) and shattered infrastructure from the north to the south. Despite the fact that Hezbollah and its local allies lost the most recent election, they’re in charge of the government, thanks to their slow-motion takeover of the country that began with the invasion and brief occupation of West Beirut in 2008.

In the end, it hardly mattered that the Lebanese managed to evict the Syrians, since Assad can still partly rule from a distance by proxy. But Assad can’t rule Lebanon even by proxy if he’s thrown from his palace in Syria. And now that his state is collapsing—the government has already lost control over huge swaths of the country to relatively moderate rebels and to psychopathic jihadists—Syria’s inherent instability has nowhere to go but inward.

The gravitational black hole that shattered Beirut and made Lebanon into one of history’s epicenters has shifted 52 miles east to the Syrian capital. The Free Syrian Army battles alongside the al-Qaeda-linked terrorists of Jabhat al-Nusra to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The formerly al-Qaeda linked Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is at war with everyone in the country. The war isn’t only political; it is also sectarian. Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority is at war with the heterodox Alawite minority, to which the Assad family belongs, while the Christian minority keeps its collective head down and the Kurdish minority wants out altogether. Wealthy Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula are funneling money and guns to the opposition. The Israelis launched a number of air strikes against Syrian weapons depots to prevent their transfer to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The United States decided to assist the moderate factions and bomb the terrorist factions. The Russians and Iranians are backing Assad to the end, as is Hezbollah. Syria has become Lebanonized.

“Syria before Assad was a playground of foreign intervention,” says Martin Kramer at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Hafez al-Assad turned Syria into a regional player in its own right, occupying Lebanon, running his own Palestinian factions and enabling Hezbollah. But now Syria has reverted to what it was before: a jumble of clashing interest groups and resentful sects, pitted against one another, all seeking foreign backers who might tip the balance in their favor. In the long view, fragmented weakness may be Syria’s default condition, and the Syria of Assad père, an aberration.”

At the time of this writing, no one can say for sure if Assad will survive the revolutionary war waged against him, but most Lebanese people I know think he will fall and that Syria could fall with him.

“Bashar’s balloon has burst,” says Eli Khoury. “He’s lost control. Pandora’s box is open. The Kurds, the Christians, the Sunnis, the leftists, the conservatives, they’re all asking what they’re going to get.”

“I don’t see Syria as heading toward transition,” says Jean-Pierre Katrib, a Beirut-based university lecturer and human-rights activist. “I see Syria as heading toward disintegration.”

The truth is that Syria makes no more sense as a state than Iraq does, which is why it took a totalitarian regime to keep it from fracturing. Both Syria and Iraq, each wired together with minority-backed Baath Party governments, have in some ways more in common with the former Yugoslavia than with internally coherent Arabic-speaking nations like Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

“Syria and Iraq have so far only been governed by ruthless, centralized iron,” Khoury says. “It’s otherwise hard to make sense of these places. They’re too big. The Baath propaganda says Lebanon was taken away from Syria. Even some Lebanese people believe this. But historically there was never a state called Syria. The theory that the Sykes-Picot Agreement broke Arab countries into pieces shortly before the end of World War I is wrong. It also glued some countries together, such as Iraq and Syria. Maybe history is going to reverse Sykes-Picot.”