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.
This letter appears in Issue 37 of Alta Journal.
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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.
Despite homicidal drivers, the roar of Israeli drones, and overflowing garbage skips, I love walking through this dysfunctional city. The first time I explored it was in 1972, when grad student penury made wandering on foot more practical than taking taxis. Where the gutted hulk of the Saint Georges Hotel now stands on its eponymous bay, I recall the glamorous gathering place of the international press corps, oil barons, exiled dictators, and spies. I still regret the shyness that, in 1973 or ’74, prevented me from speaking to actor Candice Bergen as she waited outside for a taxi.
From there, I usually wander to downtown, which was reduced to dust in the 1970s and ’80s by fighting between Lebanon’s own militias. Postwar development has robbed it of what character survived. To me, though, it will always be a vibrant maelstrom of cavernous souks, Roman columns, majestic mosques and cathedrals, trading offices, and high-ceilinged Ottoman-era coffeehouses where I played cards and garnered political gossip.
On the mainly Christian east side, the antebellum dullness of tailors, artisans, and hardware stores in the Gemmayzeh district has given way to a mile of noisy bars, nightclubs, and restaurants. My favorite place for lunch there is what the British call a workingman’s caff, Le Chef. For almost 60 years, Charbel Bassil’s family has served the same Lebanese food everyone’s grandmother used to cook at home. You won’t get better lentil soup or shish barak—meat dumplings stewed in hot yogurt—anywhere. One wall sports a portrait of actor Russell Crowe, who generously provided some of the funds—regular customers donated the rest—to rehabilitate the restaurant after ammonium nitrate warehoused nearby detonated and devastated the entire neighborhood.
Back in the more or less Muslim west, where I live, once-fashionable Rue Hamra has become a slum. It lingers in my mind as a promenade of political cafés, bookshops, boutiques, and money changers. The café-bookshop Barzakh, above a café that used to be the Horseshoe, where 60 years ago leftists—not unlike those at UC Berkeley at the same time—gathered to plot or at least debate revolution, still hints at what this street was. Barzakh’s messy bookshelves, hot espresso, and crowded tables keep the old flame flickering. I miss the past, of course, but sonic booms from Israel’s fighter jets and the buzz of its drones thrust us back into the present. Yet, like Beirutis themselves, I endure this astounding, indestructible metropolis with many complaints and no regrets.•
Born in Los Angeles, Charles Glass left the city in 1972 and has since lived in Beirut, London, Ireland, Provence, and Tuscany. He served as ABC News’s chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and is the author of more than a dozen books, including Americans in Paris and Soldiers Don’t Go Mad.