No peace: A boy seeking refuge at Ramlet Al Baida beach in Beirut, after fleeing Israeli airstrikes on the city’s southern suburbs with his family. — Photos: ©2024 The New York Times Company
EVEN for the Lebanese, it can be hard to say where it all went wrong for their tiny, beautiful country.
Certainly it was long before early Tuesday morning, when Israeli troops marched into southern Lebanon. Long before last Friday, when Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the revered and reviled Hezbollah leader who had a chokehold on the country’s politics and security for years.
And long before last October, when Hezbollah and Israel began trading airstrikes and rocket fire across the border, bringing the war in the Gaza Strip to Lebanon’s green, fertile south.
Hezbollah, the Iran-funded militia that doubles as a major political party and social services organisation, does not run Lebanon in any official sense. But under Nasrallah, it sometimes seemed as if it was the only force that mattered: a state within a state with its own military, schools, hospitals and youth programmes.
Now his death has come as the latest thunderbolt to jolt Lebanon, a Mediterranean country of 5.4 million people already stuck in a dejected state of nonstop emergency.
Many say Lebanon’s current anguish began in 2019, when the economy imploded and took the country’s once-robust middle class with it. Mass anti-government protests that year did nothing to dislodge the country’s widely loathed political class.
Others might mention 2020, the year Covid-19 further crippled the economy, and the year an enormous explosion at Beirut’s port shattered entire neighbourhoods of the capital.
A good case could be made for going all the way back to the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, which birthed the movement that became Hezbollah, and from which the country never really recovered.
All these crises and more have left Lebanon in no shape to withstand a sharply escalating conflict with Israel, like a 10-car pileup caught in the path of a tornado.
That much became obvious over the last week, when at least 118,000 Lebanese fled Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon’s south, in its agricultural Bekaa Valley and in the Hezbollah-dominated Dahiya suburbs of Beirut.
A man walking through the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Hilaniyeh.Already crippled by years of economic decline, political paralysis and other crises, Lebanon has little but its own citizens’ grit to survive the Israeli attacks.
The official response was “chaos,” said Mark Daou, an independent member of parliament, as the TV in his office played news footage of the hourslong traffic jams on the roads from the south last week.
He was not surprised the government seemed stupefied. “They have no money and they have no control over what’s happening on the ground,” he said, noting that Lebanon’s nominal military has little actual power. “They’re hostage to whatever Hezbollah decides unilaterally.”
While the government designated hundreds of public buildings as shelters for the displaced, it provided no mattresses, bedding, food or other supplies.
Information about shelters spread haphazardly through word of mouth and on WhatsApp, with little official guidance. Shelters filled quickly, leaving hundreds to sleep in public squares, a seaside promenade, a beach and under bridges when they evacuated the Dahiya suburbs after the previous week’s huge airstrike on Hezbollah headquarters under the neighbourhood.
As the longtime head of a group the United States considers a terrorist organisation, but one that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon when the state could not, Nasrallah was a hero to some Lebanese and anathema to others. But his power was such that few can predict what the country will look like without him.
Mired in political paralysis, Lebanon has gone nearly two years without a president and has only a caretaker government.
The state provides barely any electricity, leaving everyone dependent on generators, if they can afford the fees. Many generators can power only one appliance at a time, so residents unplug refrigerators or forgo air-conditioning just to do laundry.
The financial crisis has left many people who could once afford overseas vacations, ski weekends in Lebanon’s mountains and sun-dazzled afternoons at its beach clubs nearly destitute, their savings trapped in banks that deny them access to their own money. Desperate, a few account holders have resorted to holding up bank branches to demand their own funds.
Thousands of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, as well as many young professionals, entrepreneurs, designers and artists, have left the country. Teachers routinely go unpaid; many of their students cannot afford textbooks.
“The country in many respects cannot withstand a long-term war,” said Sleiman Haroun, the president of a national association of Lebanese hospitals. Though the health care system had performed well so far, he said, he worried that there were not enough medical professionals left to cope with a sustained Israeli onslaught.
But, he added, “This is our fate. We have to face it.”
Hezbollah supporters pay tribute to the victims of an Israeli airstrike, in Dahiya, near Beirut.
Enraged at their leaders, the Lebanese long ago stopped expecting anything from them.
Into the void left by the state have stepped private donors, individual volunteers, citizen aid groups, entrepreneurs and social-services organisations affiliated with political parties.
In wealthier pockets of the country, their efforts, along with the chic cocktail bars, nightclubs, manicured beach clubs and sophisticated restaurants, mask Lebanon’s collapse so effectively that first-time visitors are frequently taken aback by its high-functioning facade.
Residents and business owners have installed solar panels on rooftops across Lebanon to compensate for the lack of government-supplied electricity. Private donors pay for street lighting in some Beirut neighbourhoods.
Over the last week, as shelters overflowed with displaced residents, a patchwork of volunteers and local aid groups rushed to fill the gap.
Just inside the gate of a private school in central Beirut last week sat Sarah Khalil, a board member who was helping to manage wave upon wave of donations – food, water, a refrigerator – arriving in the courtyard. The school’s board had opened its 50 classrooms to displaced families, and faculty, neighbours, students’ family members and other school affiliates were showing up with provisions.
“This is the only way,” she said. “We can’t rely on the government, but we surely can rely on those around us.”
At Dr Sobhy Salah Middle School in the Bir Hassan neighbourhood, the Education Ministry unlocked the doors for displaced families. But it was the scouting organisation affiliated with the Amal Movement that was running the shelter and gathering donated supplies.
Asked why the government had not provided more, Mohamed Jaber, a volunteer, let out a laugh.
“There’s no government to begin with,” he said. “The government will only wake up way after the war has ended.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
