This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Beirut: A distorted city, war-torn and familiar, flickered on my grandparents’ black-and-white television during my Eighties childhood in Athens. The reels of gunmen returning fire through ruined buildings, in a city resembling mine, engraved early memories. The reports referred to it with its ancient Greek name of Berytus, but my child’s imagination filed it away somewhere geographically distant, whilst wondering what growing up in an urban battlefield was like.

Ten years later, in the winter of 1996, I travelled to Beirut for the first time. As I walked through the raked rubble of its postwar streets, the dysfunctional “Berytus” of my childhood resurfaced. Now that I was physically there, real moments competed with recollected small-screen images: the long rows of extinguished architectural cadavers, a pretty girl in a brightly-coloured sports car speaking on a mobile phone as she descended the mountain into the city through a canyon of pockmarked apartment blocks, and rain-sodden international flags draped over the entrances of the tourist district’s few functioning hotels.

I wasn’t the only person discovering the city: a whole generation of young Beirutis were taking tentative walks in formerly off-limits areas, in the aftermath of a sedentary civil war where claustrophobia guaranteed survival. Just as geography bestowed cultural openness to this prominent port on Asia’s Mediterranean coastline, so did geopolitics close it down, fracture the city and reanimate each box into an actor in a Cold War proxy conflict.

“The Lebanese can never have a sustainable economic system unless it connects all the way across Syria to Iraq where the resources and production are,” said Jamal Ghosn, a journalist for the Beirut daily Al-Akhbar. “If you don’t have a land connection, however good the products, they become too expensive if air-shipped.”

In 1996, Beirut anticipated a return to past glories. An amnesty guaranteed the disbanding of most militias. Rafic Hariri, an ambitious businessman-prime minister, leveraged his construction company to reanimate the shattered downtown into a modern business/residential district. And émigré Lebanese moved back in droves. In a city where tragedy jostled with superficiality, the rebuilding of a frontline hotel called the Phoenicia symbolised Beirut’s return as profit-pumping pleasure capital.

Israel invaded two weeks after I left, in a war that inflicted $500 million worth of damage. Four years later, the Lebanese militant movement Hezbollah forced Israel to vacate a strip of the Lebanese South it had occupied since its 1982 invasion. In 2005, Hariri was assassinated, and in 2006 Israel invaded again, in another war that wrecked communities and infrastructure. In 2008, Hezbollah took over the city to demonstrate its control of the country, ushering in a decade of uneasy stability during which neighbouring Syria was destroyed by an Arab Spring-inspired uprising.

The Lebanese banking miracle was revealed to be a scam in 2019, locking away depositors’ funds and triggering the severest economic crisis of the industrial era. The lights went out over Beirut as the state budget shrank from $90 billion in 2019 to $700 million in 2022, and it could no longer afford to provide electricity. A year later, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history ripped through Beirut’s port, obliterating parts of the city. It was a symbolic end to a city whose raison d’être was its contact with the sea.

Until now, I had not visited Beirut since 2018 and expected to see it vastly diminished. I was surprised on my first walk across its downtown to encounter an illuminated city frequented by thousands of people, including what seemed to be a nouveau riche class, perhaps of crisis profiteers, alongside Lebanese expats returned for the summer, patronising multiple new bars and restaurants.

As Israel and Hezbollah traded rockets 55 miles to the south, wedding fireworks lit up the sky, and apple and cappuccino-scented nargile smoke mixed with car exhaust fumes. That same schizophrenic civil-war Beirut appeared unchanged, blithely ignoring its grim circumstances to spring back after every apparently conclusive setback.

Captive of history

Beirut’s geography and neighbours determine its fate, often with barely a few hours’ delay. Its compressed architectural layerings — Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, French Mandate, International and now luxury towers repurposed as investment instruments — express the global trends that shaped this once-somnolent Mediterranean town.

With late 18th century geopolitics, successive Russian and then Egyptian occupations embroiled Ottoman Beirut into the Eastern Question: how to stall Russian expansion into the Mediterranean through delaying Istanbul’s demise. After the Russians upset locals by obliging them to kiss a portrait of Catherine the Great as they passed through the city gates, an Egyptian army led by a challenger to the Sultan called Ibrahim Pasha conquered the city and held it for eight years. Ibrahim, whose father was busy constructing Alexandria as a business hub on the Mediterranean, was interested in urbanism.

The deepening of Beirut’s port, along with the construction of a modern road to Damascus in 1863, allowed it to replace Tripoli as the Syrian hinterland’s main port. Wheat and other products amassed in Beirut alongside native silk, tobacco and cotton, for export to Egyptian and European ports.

The suqs of traditional Arab Beirut (built around a Mamluke nucleus) were demolished, first by the Ottoman and then by their post-First World War French successors, who modernised the city and anointed it the capital of a newly-created state dedicated to their Christian allies.

Unused to the idea of becoming the capital of a state, Beirut developed following independence from the French in 1943 as a republic of traders. It hosted Western missionaries, Arab intellectuals, tourists, spies, bankers, militiamen and refugees throughout the rest of the 20th century.

“Beirut stands out amongst the cities of its age not only for having helped to formulate the concept of Arab modernity, but also, and still more importantly, for having helped to make it a living thing,” wrote Samir Kassir, an assassinated Lebanese journalist in his book Beirut, “even if, in doing so, Beirut lured itself into a dead end.”

Yet, the antithesis of too-big-to-fail, tiny Lebanon became a convenient locale for regional powers to wage their proxy conflicts. The country’s transformation into a banking hub, through a 1956 banking secrecy law that attracted petrodollars and capital exiting Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine, set in motion a financialisation that devoured the city. Beirut has been caught in the Riviera-versus-Citadel dilemma ever since.

The Riviera

I visited the Corm Foundation, an archive housed inside a 35-metre-high tribute to the Empire State Building, built in 1928 in the palm groves of the Beirut plain as a paean to New York’s dynamism. Its owner was Charles Corm, an entrepreneurial Lebanese freshly returned from the United States, where he convinced Henry Ford to designate him his Middle East representative by promising to build the roads his country lacked.

Corm became the richest man in the pre-oil-boom Middle East by amassing $1 billion in wealth before quitting business aged 40 and dedicating himself to Phoenicianism, a movement aiming to bridge Lebanese sectarian differences through promoting a common, pre-Arab identity. He hosted literary salons and published La Revue Phénicienne.

“Forget the French or Ottomans, we have our own history starting with the Phoenicians,” said David Corm, Charles’s 86-year-old son. “My father tried to find the cement to bind a country of 18 recognised religious communities.”

I met David, an architect, in the garden of the foundation, where he still visits daily with his Bahai-Palestinian artist wife. “I had the great luck to live Beirut’s golden age between 1960 and 1975,” he said, walking through a collection of busts of Roman emperors with Phoenician origins, after reminiscing about childhood excursions on the tram to the downtown cinemas of Rue de Damas. “I went out every night, partying in the nightclubs on Rue de Phénicie.”

After marrying, they settled in a district called Verdun that was cosmopolitan enough for residents not to know each other’s religion. “Beirut was a melting pot of culture and business,” Corm said. “Brigitte Bardot would come with her lover, and it was the playground for the rich and famous.”

Petrodollars flowed into Lebanon, revving the Lebanese banking and tourism sectors. Urban planners jettisoned Forties schemes prioritising social housing, irrigation and agricultural usages in favour of tourist developments. The French Mandate leveraged political alliances with influential local families through allocating them prime beachfront property, “which is why huge parts of the Beirut seafront are owned by elite families such as the Trad and Chamoun, mostly Christian, allies of the French, even though they didn’t belong to the area,” said Abir Saksouk-Sasso, an urban planner and founder of Public Works Studio. The organisation focused on urbanism, shared space and marginalised communities’ right to the city.

“Beirut developed on the misery and disasters of other Arab countries,” says May Farhat, a historian of Islamic art and architecture at the Lebanese American University. “Israel taking over Haifa benefitted Beirut’s port, and then it benefitted even more when all the Palestinian elite came over here.”

One of these was Yousef Beidas, a Palestinian banker from Jerusalem. After fleeing the 1948 war following the unilateral announcement of the State of Israel to Beirut, he rose from lowly money-exchanger to become the founder of Intra Bank, a financial colossus which acquired Middle East Airlines, the Casino du Liban, the Beirut Port Authority and Baalbek Studios, the seat of Lebanon’s film industry.

So spectacular was Beidas’s rise, that an intimidated Lebanese elite schemed to bring him down. In 1966, Intra Bank collapsed. Beidas lost everything. It was the first of many cracks in the image of the Lebanese success story, but his influence lived on: the massive silos he built as part of his plan to turn the port into a hub for grain shielded the city during the 2020 blast, saving thousands more from death and injury.

“Even before the civil war you have a city in crisis that is relatively wealthy but surrounded by poor neighbourhoods,” said historian Charles Hayek. “The influx of the Shia contributes towards transforming Beirut from a city into three large villages — Sunni, Christian and Shia — that don’t have anything in common in terms of public space; this is what kills Beirut as a centre of freedom, knowledge-production and some form of democracy.”

The multistorey hotels and office towers that proliferated with the rise of banking and tourism soon surpassed Charles Corm’s mini-skyscraper. A heart attack in 1963, around the time of cosmopolitan Beirut’s apogee, spared him from having to see his city tumble into civil war. His building was commandeered by a Christian militia, and shelling obliterated the palm grove.

“The civil war was mostly fought by people of rural extraction,” said Hayek, “and their fighting was a symbolic refusal of the city as a space of liberty and freedom from feudalism and religion.”

The Citadel

As war swept before it everything Corm had sought to create, his two sons, David and Hiram, dug holes in the garden to hide their father’s art and sculpture collection, then departed the country. The sound of mortars taking off and landing around the city signalled that the good times were gone.

A year later, a series of battles between multiple militias had pulverised the city into militarised districts. One day, a militiaman called Ahmed Mattar found himself stuck at a Christian-controlled checkpoint. A leftist from a Shiite family of immigrants to Beirut, Mattar had taken a bullet to the right leg the previous day as his group fell back from several positions around the frontline district of al-Nabaa, a slum in East Beirut adjoining Christian districts. Stopped at the checkpoint by a hostile militiaman, Mattar realised with a sinking heart that his nom de guerre was amongst those being looked for by the Armenian militia.

Mattar’s life-story until then had traced the arrival to Beirut of large rural populations emigrating from the South after the creation of the State of Israel. His livestock breeder father moved to the capital after Israel’s creation cut access to the markets of Acre and Haifa. Mattar was born in 1954 in Tel el-Zaatar, a district of Beirut known for its Palestinian refugee camp.

Palestinian schoolteachers instilled in him a love of leftism and their national cause. In the early Seventies, the family moved to Biyaqout, an industrial district built upon olive groves that developed into one of Beirut’s densest slums. In the first years of the civil war, Christian militias from neighbouring districts targeted it for religious cleansing.

“The local Phalangist leader who blew up our house happened to be our neighbour,” Mattar recalled, as we sat one humid evening in the garden of a cultural centre in the Shia stronghold of al-Dahieh. “We actually used to have such good relations that they would park their cars on our land.”

Mattar’s family moved to Muslim-majority West Beirut, part of a long-standing process of religious separation that scarred the formerly cosmopolitan city, and dedicated himself to Fatah, the Palestinian leftist militant group that became the pretext for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He manned a succession of positions around the same districts where he grew up, where the accretion of Muslim rural immigrants around Christian districts traced the main civil war frontlines.

Waiting to be arrested, Mattar thought his civil war was over. Instead, the Armenian commanding officer knew him from logistical resupply meetings and arranged a false ID, waving him past the checkpoint and into Christian-held East Beirut. It was a frying-pan-into-fire moment, but Mattar managed to work his way back to safe ground without being discovered.

War-hardened Mattar managed to negotiate these axes and preserve himself, but for David Corm they nearly cost him his life. During a lull in fighting in 1983, he made a failed attempt to return to Beirut to salvage his father’s literary archive from the militia occupying the family building. Landing on a boat from Cyprus, he drove straight to the family tower, forgetting that the city had been parcelled into districts. Sniper rounds tearing holes in his car made him beat a hasty retreat.

His brother Hiram was more successful. Arriving at the tower, he closed his eyes to the pages of valuable books the militiamen used as lavatory paper, bribed them, and carried to safe storage several truckloads of archives and possessions. Today, a single fossilised palm-tree trunk remains to mark where the grove was.

The Riviera vision wilted. Refugees, expelled from their villages in the South, settled the resorts. Large sections of the Lebanese middle and upper classes got on ships and braved militia shelling to reach refuge in Cyprus.

Children grew up in the insularity of militia-held districts. “Our worlds were very small during the war,” reminisces Kevork Baboyan, an economist for the United Nations Development Program, of his childhood in an Armenian enclave in Ras Beirut, a once-cosmopolitan district of Hamra frequented by a highbrow leftist Arab demi-monde when Beirut was the publishing capital of the Arab World.

“My father used to cross back and forth across the Green Line every week to his shop so he was one of those Lebanese who, through their interactions on the individual level, kept Lebanon united, in contrast to the militias’ discourse demonising the others, selling protection, and calling for the formation of autonomous areas.”

Baboyan absorbed his mother’s anxiety over whether his father would come back every weekend. He remembers the night when a militiaman from the Shiite Amal party entered their house, looking to see if their balcony had a clear shot on an enemy position. Despite feeling terrified, Baboyan noticed that his father “never exhibited condescension towards these fighters from rural backgrounds like other Beirutis, and in return they always respected him”. When he and his mother fled to Paris towards the end of the war, his father stayed behind to protect their home from squatters.

A blanket amnesty settled the civil war. Mattar, the Shiite Fatah fighter, went to visit the militiaman and former neighbour who led his family’s dispossession. “He was scared when he saw me,” he recalls, “and excused his actions by telling me: ‘Welcome back, this war ground down everyone.’ We drank a coffee and moved on.”

“With the law to forgive everyone, the militiamen changed into suits and went back to stealing from the Treasury,” said Baboyan.

In the Nineties, Hariri, the wealthy businessman-turned-prime minister, reconstructed Beirut’s downtown into what the journalist Ghosn calls a “Mediterranean Singapore that can provide bankers, designers and marketeers to global capitalism”. But the resulting product — a luxury expanse of residential towers, malls and a few historical buildings tailing into a yacht marina and surrounded by intimidatingly wide highways — merely cemented the divisions established elsewhere in the city by the avenues of an abandoned modernity and historic traumas.

The district is not served by public transport, nor does it contain a single place selling manakish, the definitive Lebanese traditional fast food. But political instability contributed to the district failing to take off, and many professionals moved to Dubai, which took over Beirut’s mantle of regional banking and business.

“You build and then everything’s dissolved because every 15 to 20 years we have a war,” said David Corm. “Each community has links to outside sponsors, so how can you make that into a country?”

A visitorless park

Beirut appeared to be a city shaped and reshaped not only by post-imperial geopolitical events such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and Cold War proxy fights, but global economic trends, such as the financialisation of real estate. A boom in construction demolished heritage buildings and mercilessly built over archaeological ruins. Beirut’s undeveloped land went from 40 per cent of the capital in 1967 to just 10 per cent by 2000.

At the same time, the government sought increasing amounts of deposits to continue supporting the Lebanese lira’s 20-year peg to the US dollar. It achieved this by offering higher rates of return on deposits and Treasury bills. In order to encourage ever-higher foreign investment flows into the economy, developers bought out long-term homeowners and went on demolition sprees across Lebanon’s remaining heritage buildings, replacing them with luxury residences.

“A lot of Beirutis left the city, with Sunnis going to southern suburbs and Christians to the Christian towns in the mountains,” said the economist, Baboyan. “Unless you’re in an area that was historically mixed, the rest of Lebanon is now entirely geographically and sectarianly stratified.”

The only wooded and natural open park interrupting Beirut’s denseness is Horsh Beirut, the last remaining patch of Beirut’s uncut forest, as green as it is bafflingly vacant. Birdsong emanates from clusters of trees atop rolling hills separating the park from the encroaching urban sprawl.

A fire during the 1982 Israeli invasion resulted in much of the forest’s loss. The park closed for 30 years and reopened in 2015. But despite its noticeably lower temperatures, reduced humidity and less polluted air, it has failed to re-establish its appeal to Beirutis: on the weekday I visit, visitors are reduced to a few picnicking families, some couples and a handful of joggers.

“Public space is very contested in Lebanon and there’s this whole narrative that the reason we don’t want to go to public spaces is because there are Syrian [refugees] there,” said Saksouk-Sasso, the urban planner, “and that public space in Beirut used to be for Beirutis and now there are all these people who came to the city from the South.”

The city’s only park is accessible through a single guarded entrance, surrounded by a tall spiked wall. On the other side is another of the large highways slicing through the city, and beyond that extends a Palestinian refugee camp and Beirut’s largest Muslim cemetery. A Sunni Muslim and Christian districts complete Horsh Beirut’s encirclement.

“There’s a class of people in Lebanon who have decided that the public is ruining public space,” said Saksouk. “They have this modern vision of a park they might see in France, where everyone’s behaving in a very civil way and no one’s smoking nargile.”

Horsh Beirut’s abandonment speaks to the lack of urgency in dealing with Beirut’s multiple ecological crises, as the Lebanese economy’s financialisation and turbo-charging of the banking and construction sectors were prioritised.

“Hariri bought the bankers with the high-interest state bonds,” said Ghosn, “and once he had the banking class, nobody in Lebanon could stop him from doing what he wanted.”

High interest rates attracted financial inflows, which drove the destruction of the city’s cultural heritage and accelerated the communities’ postwar alienation. When the banks finally crashed in 2019, the savings of Arabs from unstable locales like Yemen, Syria and Iraq, who thought they had found a safe haven, were locked away.

“All this real estate speculation was in order to keep attracting dollars to an economy that’s structurally in deficit and keep on financing it,” Baboyan said. “The Americans have an army to back their currency; we don’t.”

The 2020 port explosion was the final straw. With the banks, electricity and the economy closed off, the city went into a tailspin and the Lebanese began emigrating again. Architect Adib Dada refused to abandon his city. Employing “angry activism”, he sought to re-energise its aquatic vein, the Beirut River.

Throughout its history, Beirut shifted from benefiting from regional turmoil, to tipping into conflict

Today, only a miserable trickle of polluted, cement-bound water reaches the Mediterranean, after being bottled by private water companies at its 1,900m source, and mixed with waterfalls of raw sewage and untreated waste emanating from the towns, quarries and industrial zones along its length. Dada’s hope was that applying a rewilding technique of fast-growing afforestation called Miyawaki, using layers of native plants and trees to simulate the diversity of a natural forest, could reinject vitality into the river, filter away its toxins and nurture a rare public space of community gardens in his troubled city.

“Encasing it in concrete in 1968 ended the mixing of Christian and Muslim communities along its banks,” said Dada as he walked through the forest’s different stages, stretching from saplings planted a few months ago to two-metre-tall trees planted in 2019. “You start connecting the dots that you’re losing your land, way of life, practices and even your language, so it becomes important to reclaim these degraded lands and practices to not lose yourself.”

Throughout its history, Beirut shifted from benefiting from regional turmoil, to tipping into conflict in which regional and international powers battled each other from behind the safety of a proxy screen. The 21st century saw the battered Beirut model exported, as a number of cities began absorbing the kind of damage that Beirut had previously attracted. The American military interventions of the 2000s and consequences of the Arab Spring in the 2010s saw Baghdad, Benghazi, Damascus, Aleppo, Diyarbakir and Gaza begin to resemble the troubled city. “Beirut lost its regional and global connections, it’s not a city that is connected anymore,” said Hayek. “It doesn’t have a port, nor its creative, educated elites. I see it as a dying city, because cities do die when they lose their raison d’être.”

Others see a wilfulness in Beirut’s degradation. “The Lebanese formula of 18 sects managing to live together is a threat to our neighbours,” said Ziad Mikati, the adviser to the prime minister. “They decided that Lebanon is a threat to Syria’s closed socialist economy and to the extreme Zionist state of Israel.”

In their 80s now, the Corm brothers have signed an agreement with their neighbouring Université Saint-Joseph, allowing the Jesuit cultural institution to take over their family edifice in four decades and institute a campus named after their father. As a move, it owes as much to their descendants’ decision not to live in Lebanon as it does to their trust in the Lebanese state.

“Although my father thought that if they remembered their glorious past, it might help, I don’t know a people who ignore their history more than the Lebanese,” Corm said. “But maybe this is how they survive: instead of crying over the past, they seek the future, and that’s why they succeed wherever they go.”