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 visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” The “lost grace” of Maurilia approximates Beirut’s, which likewise “can be appreciated only…in the old postcards.” It is with nostalgic regret that from time to time I examine postcards in the decaying souvenir shops of Beirut’s once-fashionable Hamra district. They depict, in sepia and color-tint, Ottoman mansions, lush gardens, venerable covered souks, a seafront promenade, ancient mosques, churches and synagogues, Roman columns amid metropolitan chaos, and a magnificent central plaza originally named the Place des Canons. After World War I, it was renamed the Place des Martyrs to honor the nationalist partisans whom the Turkish military governor, General Ahmed Jamal Pasha, hanged there in 1916 for defying his crumbling empire.
Beirut suffered little physical damage in World War I, which ushered in French rule, and in World War II, which brought independence. The Lebanese themselves, with assistance from Palestinians, Syrians, and Israelis, delivered the devastation that left only postcards to remind them of what they had lost. From the beginning of the country’s civil war in 1975 to its ostensible end in 1990, the Place des Martyrs, which lay on the “green line” between the city’s mutually hostile eastern and western halves, was subjected to artillery exchanges that reduced the antebellum structures on both sides to rubble.
The postwar rehabilitation of the city, as of the country, was incomplete when contraband ammonium nitrate stored, criminally and negligently, at Beirut’s port detonated in August 2020 with a ferocity that demolished buildings within a one-mile radius and killed 218 people. The country also had yet to recover from the collapse the previous October of the Central Bank’s Ponzi scheme, in collusion with private banks, which wiped out depositors’ life savings. With the disappearance of $80 billion, Lebanon’s GDP dropped by half. The exchange rate of the US dollar soared from 1,500 to 90,000 Lebanese pounds—a 98 percent fall in the pound’s value. Once-wealthy citizens were reduced to penury. The former economy minister Nasser Saidi wrote in October 2024 that “almost half the population lives below the poverty line.”
The Lebanese struggled to restore their properties and their fortunes. Young entrepreneurs started businesses, providing services and producing goods Lebanon could no longer afford to import. Civil society charities offered help to the poorest, both Lebanese and the 1.5 million Syrian refugees displaced by the civil war that erupted next door in 2011. They achieved all this despite the prolonged looting of their collective wealth by one of the world’s most corrupt ruling classes.
Lebanon’s predicament was as untenable as it was unstable. Mass protests in October 2019, optimistically dubbed “the revolution,” were violently suppressed by supporters of Lebanon’s only fully armed militia, the Shiite Islamist Hezbollah. At the end of President Michel Aoun’s catastrophic six-year term in October 2022, rival, venal politicians failed to agree on a successor, leaving the country without desperately needed leadership. Starved of funds, the caretaker government of Prime Minister Najib Mikati barely functioned. The Foreign Ministry ran out of high-quality paper for passports. The minister of information paid out of his own pocket to replace his ministry’s many shattered windows. Flimsy photocopies sufficed as replacements for expired plastic drivers’ licenses. Roads went unrepaired. Public hospitals ran short of medicines and staff.
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Main image: The aftermath of the 2024 Bachoura strike. Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
