This city keeps you on your toes, as long as you hang on to them. When you walk across a one-way street, look both ways. No driver—on a motorcycle or in an SUV—hesitates to charge the wrong way up a road clearly signed for traffic to go in the opposite direction. When two cars meet head-on, the driver going the wrong way shouts abuse at the innocent one obeying the rules. Welcome to Beirut.
This insouciant behavior reflects the near-unanimous contempt for law—in a country whose politicians illegally enrich themselves—of a populace with an indomitable will to enjoy life despite decades of violence. Since 1975, wars have caused unfathomable destruction while somehow allowing much of the city to survive. The ruination continues today courtesy of Israeli warplanes, rockets, and drones that demolish apartment complexes, mosques, hospitals, schools, and hotels.
“Do you remember what Lebanon was like before Iran and Hezbollah turned it into a nightmare?” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Lebanese in a video message in June. “Remember the cafés? Remember the culture? Remember the calm? All that’s gone because Hezbollah and Iran want to drag us into war over and over and over again.” It’s easy to recall the cafés and the culture, though, because both are thriving. Even the so-called Hezbollah stronghold in Dahieh, in suburban southwest Beirut, comes alive between Israeli sorties, when residents rush to clear some of the wreckage and reopen cafés and shops.
The Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra has not interrupted its schedule of Mozart, Bizet, and Khachaturian in churches all over this coastal capital. Lebanese films—including, recently, Lana Daher’s Beirut elegy Do You Love Me—premiere regularly at the Metropolis, an art house cinema. Women and girls in bikinis still swim in the sea and pools of Walid Abou Nassar’s Sporting Club, on the west side, and at the beaches of Batroun and Byblos, to the north. This is just what Beirut’s citizens do, what they have always done, war or no war. They cannot defeat the Israeli military any more than they can overthrow their leaders, so they carry on as if neither existed.
Even the influx of about a million refugees from the country’s southern and eastern zones has not impeded the flourishing of dinner parties, live music, and café life. It is not defiance, as in Sarajevo in the early 1990s when Bosnians staged plays and concerts to prove to the Serbs that they could not destroy their culture. In Beirut, it is indifference…
Read the full article in the Alta Journal.
