I first visited Lebanon in 1978, three years after the civil war began and six years before Theodore El was born.
I mention this because, although our experiences of this fascinating country came at different times, the impressions and judgements expressed in his excellent new book, Lebanon Days, which covers the tumultuous period from 2018 to 2021, are very much in line with my own.
On my first visit to Australia, I was studying Arabic in Cairo at the request of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs (which didn’t have a “T” in its name then), which was seeking to increase its expertise on the Middle East following the huge increase in oil prices engineered by Gulf oil producers after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
My department approved this trip to broaden my knowledge of the Middle East and to allow me to practice my Arabic in different environments where this very difficult language is spoken. This was a three-week budget trip through Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, using “service” taxis (taxis with a few passengers) and staying in hotels that were hard to beat for a half-star rating.
The key was to be fully immersed in an environment where little to no English was spoken and all practical aspects of daily life had to be communicated in Arabic.
Beirut: A city divided
Before flying to Beirut, I looked up books about the area in the Cairo embassy library – books about Lebanon dating back to before the civil war – and was struck by the beauty of the city centre, particularly the depictions of large palm trees on both the east and west sides of Martyrs' Square (which features many times in Elle's books).
I caught a taxi at Beirut airport, just south of the city, and asked the driver in husha (formal Arabic) to take me to Martyrs' Square. He looked at me in surprise. I assumed it was because my Arabic was not the 'Ahmi (colloquial) dialect he was used to. But when I got to the square, I saw another reason: high-velocity bullets had knocked down every palm tree about a meter off the ground.
I stumbled across the “Green Line” that divides the east and west sides of Beirut, the main fighting zone of the war, and the taxi driver, clearly uneasy about being so close to the square, refused to take me, a Muslim, into the Christian east.
I later visited Beirut several times during the war, and then I worked in Beirut for three years in the late 1990s, at a time when it seemed as if the city was recovering after several years.
There's beauty in the heart of Beirut. Photo: Joe Cassis/Pexels via The Conversation
In the mid-1980s, while I was stationed in Damascus, Syria, I and other staff members would regularly travel to Beirut between fighting sessions to carry out various official duties, and when we were in west Beirut, we usually slept in the embassy building, which was closed at the time.
As a precaution, mattresses had been dragged out of bedrooms into interior hallways to minimise the risk of a shower of broken glass in the event of an explosion close to the building.
Another vivid memory from that time is being invited to lunch by a Lebanese businessman at one of Beirut's finest restaurants. The food was French and the décor was what you'd expect from a fine European restaurant. The only thing that marred an otherwise enjoyable dining experience was that the restaurant's windows were covered with sandbags.
The 2019 Revolution
The Taif Agreement of October 1989 is generally seen as the official end of the war, but Lebanon's first post-war president, Rene Mouawad, lasted only 18 days in office before being assassinated by unknown assailants on November 22 that year.
Rafik Hariri, who served as prime minister for six years in the 1990s, spent much of his personal fortune rebuilding Beirut after the war, during which he called on other businessmen to voluntarily pay 10 percent of their income to the state in tax to help fund the reconstruction effort.
I recall a business acquaintance calling this request a joke. No one would pay such a tax. When I asked him how he expected a country to fund schools, hospitals and roads without taxes, he replied that in Australia one could reasonably assume that one's tax money would be used for these purposes. In Lebanon, such payments would be deposited in a Swiss bank.
In “Lebanon Days,” Elle tells many such stories, drawing on her experiences accompanying Caitlin, the wife of an Australian diplomat posted to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
His tenure also saw economic devastation caused by the collapse of the value of the Lebanese pound, which the Central Bank of Lebanon kept artificially high at 1,507.5 to the US dollar from 1999 to 2019.
This distorted the economy by making imports unfairly cheap and exports expensive, hindering the development of export industries and allowing unsustainable deficits to accumulate.
The policy was premised on the central bank being able to acquire dollars cheaper than they could sell them in order to maintain the value of the pound. It was a con that was ultimately doomed to fail, and that failure came to fruition in October 2019. The result was a social breakdown, a revolution that lasted for months with violent protests.
People from Lebanon's 18 religious denominations were affected equally, and protesters of all faiths gathered in Martyrs' Square, shouting slogans and singing protest songs. One such slogan described Lebanon as “a land of sheep ruled by wolves and owned by pigs,” according to El.
Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 hit the country, including Elle and Caitlyn, but the revolution didn't stop, eventually culminating in another disaster: a horrific explosion in August 2020 at Beirut's port, caused by the careless storage of a huge amount of ammonium nitrate.
Ell won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize for his essay published in the Australian Book Review. In his essay, Ell paints a vivid picture of the explosion and its impact on the city's residents.
He goes into great detail about this in his book, and I was particularly struck by his comment that the reason ammonium nitrate hadn't been moved to a more secure storage location was because no one had thought of a way to profit from it.
El's book is real to anyone who has lived in Lebanon, vividly portraying the fun-loving Lebanese people and the nightclubs of east Beirut, where even at the height of the civil war, patrons drank and danced until dawn.
The flipside was Lebanese people's determination to keep up appearances as the economy collapsed: People who used to frequent fashionable shopping malls but could no longer afford more than the bare necessities continued to wander the mall corridors empty-handed, carrying designer shopping bags as a sign that they were not.
The war that never ended
Early in “Lebanon Days,” El makes the persuasive argument that the civil war is not over, it has simply faded from sight: “Lebanon's religious differences have refined alienation into a way of life,” he writes.
Particularly striking is his description of Genevieve, a Maronite Christian woman who “told me frankly that she had never met a Muslim, as if it were obvious that there was no other way.”
Genevieve “spoke about the Muslim population in her country, and in her part of the world at large, as if it were an unpleasant and harmful thing to be resisted, rather than a historical reality and an essential part of life.”
In the early 1990s, to make the Taif Agreement work, a national unity government was formed consisting of leaders of the various sects that had waged the war. The main resistance to this arrangement was Samir Jahjaa, leader of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia.
Geagea opposed continued Syrian influence over the country's governance. In 1994 he was arrested and imprisoned for crimes allegedly committed during the war. Other ministers could have been charged with similar crimes but no such charges were made against them.
I recall that in 1997 the US ambassador hosted a group of Lebanese politicians and several Western ambassadors at his residence to brief the US congressional delegation on the post-war arrangements.
One MP asked whether Lebanon had held a “truth and reconciliation commission” after the war, like South Africa did after apartheid. One attendee was Walid Jumblatt, the mercurial Druze leader who was then a minister.
He quickly replied: “No, in Lebanon they were much more sophisticated. They put all the war criminals in the cabinet, and the war criminals who refused to become ministers were put in prison.” Amid laughter, the US ambassador explained to the bewildered delegation that this was actually what had happened.
Conspiracy theories
Elle structures her story chronologically, beginning with a prologue explaining how Lebanon became the country it is today.
He describes a series of remarkable stelae (upright stone slabs used as markers in the ancient world) perched on a rock face just north of Beirut near the River Dag. Each stelae records an invader, from Ramses II of Egypt to the Romans, the Ottoman Empire, France under Napoleon III, and a contingent of the Australian Imperial Corps, the latter of which records a 1941 operation against Vichy French forces in Lebanon.
He is referring to conspiracy theories Lebanese peddle as a result of the constant threat of Israeli military action, which usually follows attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, a Shiite militia that is better armed than the Lebanese army and has no authority over the government. The thumping of Israeli planes breaking the sound barrier over Beirut causes an instinctive search for shelter.
Remarkable ancient stone monuments in Lebanon record past invaders. Photo: Doris Pemler/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Elle ends the book with a sad story of her and Caitlin's departure: they had made many Lebanese friends, but many of them also left. The only ones who were reasonably happy to stay were those with dual citizenship, who had a safe haven abroad if another disaster struck.
The book is well-written and includes a map showing the locations mentioned in the story, a useful historical timeline, an Arabic glossary, and a guide to further reading.
“Lebanon Days” is a meditation on a country that never fails to impress those who visit. El is a gifted writer, his prose unadorned, precise and graceful. He covers the drama of three years in Lebanon, shedding light on this fascinating country's past and pointing to a future that seems bleak for now, especially with the ever-present threat of war between Israel and Hezbollah. But what also emerges is the resilience of its people.
In this country of contradictions, survival has become an art form.
Ian Parmeter is a research fellow at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
