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Beirut, Now and Then

On Wednesday​ , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the evening, the Health Ministry put the death toll at 182, already a day’s record for the round of fighting that began on 2 March, later raising the total to more than three hundred. Among the dead was a young man who worked in the Thai restaurant round the corner from my house. His family, like so many others, is in mourning. The last five weeks of Israel-Hizbullah warfare have produced more than five thousand Lebanese casualties.

When I walked home from dinner at the end of this worst day in this latest war, our western half of the city looked pretty much as it does in periods of peace: cafés filled with families having coffee or ice cream, shops open and brightly lit, boys kicking footballs on forecourts, bins overflowing with rubbish, babies in pushchairs rolled along broken pavements, music blaring from bars and men lugging plastic bags of groceries from Spinneys supermarket. It had been a long day of fear, not knowing where the Israeli jets would strike next.

I went home to sleep, but that wasn’t the way my days in troubled times here used to end. When war kicked off in Lebanon in 1975, the foreign press corps congregated on most evenings in the bar of the Hotel Saint Georges. Over the barman Ali Bitar’s martinis and other concoctions, we compared impressions of our daylight excursions to the fluctuating frontiers between Beirut’s mutually hostile neighbourhoods. Our dispatches filed by telex, we relaxed in leather armchairs, well out of mortar range, or so we imagined, and took counsel from the impeccable concierge, Mansour Breidy. We also garnered what gossip we could from politicians, bankers, arms dealers and oilmen. It was a rare correspondent who turned up in anything less than jacket and tie. We took consolation in the calming panorama of Saint George Bay and talked ourselves into somnolence in preparation for the morning’s savagery…

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NEW TO WATCH

In a series of interviews with leading historians on the History of Resistance, Charles Glass and his history students at the American University of Beirut probe deep into the heart of guerrilla warfare and resistance to foreign occupation.

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Watch more interviews, documentaries and films by Charles Glass here​