Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
BEIRUT — Walking in downtown Beirut, with its gleaming apartment blocks, outdoor cafes and stylish restaurants, one would never know Lebanon is possibly a missile or two away from a war — one that would make the 2006 conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah seem minor by comparison.
Since Hamas launched its attacks on southern Israel two weeks ago, Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces have been trading fire across the border — and these incidents have been intensifying. Twelve thousand people have fled their homes in southern Lebanon and 25 have been killed, among them 16 Hezbollah fighters and five Israeli soldiers.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops on the country’s northern border, warning that Hezbollah would be making “the mistake of its life” if it decided to fight another war in support of its ally Hamas. “We will strike it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the significance for it and the state of Lebanon will be devastating,” he said.
Indeed, that has been the threat since 2006 — another war, and Israel will flatten Lebanon.
But in affluent downtown Beirut, life goes on, and the beating heart of chic Lebanese nightlife continues thumping.
Unaffected by the country’s disastrous economic crisis — among the worst the world has seen since the 19th century, according to the World Bank — the princelings of the uber wealthy still careen around in their high-end sports cars, revving their mighty engines to a pitch that sets off car alarms, screeching their tires with glee.
Meanwhile, the city center’s outdoor restaurants display the handiwork of the many cosmetic surgeons based in the area, right by Beirut’s Corniche waterfront lined with palm trees. And forget the catwalks of Milan or Paris, every night here isn’t so much a runway show as a runaway one.
The rich come here to parade their wealth and what it can buy — the clouds of war be damned. And in a single night they will likely spend at least two to three times — sometimes even more — than the monthly income of an average Lebanese family, which is around $122.
But one doesn’t have to wander far to understand that downtown Beirut camouflages the consequences of the country’s financial crisis, which became fully apparent in 2019. The situation was then worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 Beirut port explosion — triggered by a huge amount of ammonium nitrate stored at a Hezbollah-controlled warehouse — which killed over 200 people, left 7,000 injured and caused $15 billion worth of property damage.
Many of the city’s other central districts are still a pale shadow of what they were before 2019. Hamra, for example — once the intellectual center of Beirut until the Lebanese civil war drove many writers and artists to flee — had been attempting a comeback of sorts, with a revival of its artsy café culture. But now it looks even more rundown and is deserted at night, with Syrian refugee families packed into dilapidated cinder-block buildings.
Across the city, many of them are on the streets begging, sitting patiently on sidewalks or crowding around anyone they think may have money. More than half of the 1.5 million Syrians here are children — unschooled and with no life opportunities, they beg from people who have no money themselves. A few years ago, these kids would have flowers or knickknacks to sell — but those items are too expensive now.
Their mothers are young and can be prey for the sex trade. Anecdotally, many say Syrian prostitution is through the roof, with many women forced into it out of circumstance, out of survival — but others are trafficked.
In 2016, Lebanon was shocked by a forced trafficking scandal focused on Chez Maurice, a nondescript two-story house in Jounieh, just a short drive from Beirut. There, police discovered 75 Syrian women and girls who had been forced into sexual slavery, flogged, tortured and electrocuted as part of the largest human trafficking network ever uncovered in the country.
The scandal shouldn’t have surprised anyone though. When the refugee exodus from Syria started to peak in 2013, there were clear signs Syrian women were prey for traffickers and at risk of terrible exploitation. And, of course, none of the trafficking bosses have gone to jail.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese have grown to become increasingly impatient with the Syrian presence as they struggle to survive themselves. They argue that Syrians are only compounding their own woes, forcing wages down as they’re willing to work for little.
A pharmacist near the hotel I was staying in erupted when I distributed some cash to pleading hands outside his store. “You give them money. Why?” he fumed. “The U.N. gives them money, and they should go back to their own homes — Syria is safe now. We have our own problems,” he then muttered.
And for several weeks before Hamas’ attacks on Israel, there were a series of clashes between Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees in Beirut’s outer districts and the northern regions. The Lebanese demanded Syrians be expelled, and security forces stepped in to contain the violence.
Few have stood up for the Syrian refugees, but Walid Jumblatt’s mainly Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), which is mainly a Druze outfit, has been at the forefront. “Due to official negligence, populist stances and discrimination, the Syrian refugee crisis has turned into a dangerous reality,” their parliamentary bloc said in a statement. They called for an end to “all acts of incitement to avoid their repercussions on internal security,” as well as the “political exploitation of the situation” by some parties who proposed the “export of the refugees.”
However, these volatile tensions weren’t on Jumblatt’s mind when he sat down for an interview last week at his home in the Msaytbeh neighborhood of Beirut. When asked about the prospect of Lebanon being sucked into Israel’s war with Hamas, Jumblatt, a former militia leader and one of the country’s most iconic political veterans, struck a pessimistic note. “I don’t think we can escape,” he said.
The interview was held in an expansive ground-floor sitting room scattered with photographs and mementos from Jumblatt’s long political career, decorated with artwork including two paintings of him — one by a Lebanese artist when he was young and another by a Russian painter when he was middle-aged. Also prominently displayed in the room were black-and-white photographs of his parents. His father, Kamal Jumblatt, was assassinated by Syrian autocrat Hafez al-Assad in 1977.
Later, upon hearing I live in Italy, Jumblatt, a prolific reader, handed me a copy of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” — a book documenting the decline of a Sicilian aristocratic family during the Risorgimento, Italy’s tumultuous 19th century unification. Whether the choice of gift was subliminal — in keeping with his anxiety about the current times — remains unclear.