Approaching Beirut by night, the jet flew in low over the dark sea after banking eastward from Cyprus. Over the wing I watch as the glittering form of the city emerges out of the night. High-rise buildings rise up above the sea cliffs.
Though it is after midnight, lights still shine from the stacks of hotel room windows along the water. It is a welcome sight for Beirut, battered and blighted by decades of civil war, foreign occupation, instability and terrorism. This summer has brought more tourists than any year since the breakout of war in ‘75. But as the plane grows closer I see the others. Between the bright skyscrapers, others stand dark, like towers of negative space. In the glow from the Intercontinental Phoenicia, it is even possible to see the pockmarked façade of the old Holiday Inn, scarred from RPG and mortar fire.
I had come to Lebanon for the hell of it. In this country, where one notices a constant and sizable disconnect between reason and reality, this seems appropriate. I made the case to my skeptical parents over lunch at a Mexican restaurant. They heard me say “Beirut” and I caught my mother’s face blanch. Before they could be carried off into a nightmarish reverie of car bombs, Conkrite and kidnappings, I began to sell the idea: “Did you know: the New York Times named Beirut as the number one travel destination of the summer?” I brought out a folder of printouts from newspaper articles with titles like “Lebanon Gets Its Groove Back,” carefully excised of the inconvenient paragraphs that invariably closed each piece with the qualifications about Lebanon’s capricious stability and the constant threat of a steep descent into strife and instability.
Most people I spoke to about Beirut held two concomitant but incongruous pictures. One was of the city’s so-called “Golden Age,” (the very sounds of this phrase when spoken seem to settle with an elegant patina to the sounds of clinking glasses and Miles Davis). This Golden Age lasted for thirty years, from the end of the French Mandate following the Second World War until the outbreak of Civil War in 1975. Following the founding of Israel in 1948, Beirut took over Haifa’s position as the main exit point of Middle Eastern goods destined for the West. At the same time, Lebanon’s combination of Mediterranean beaches, exoticism, and Francophile high society attracted hundreds of thousands of Westerns every year, who flocked to see a discrete and romanticized image of the Orient.
The second is of the apocalyptic war-torn battleground that saw the two hundred and forty American servicemen killed in the 1983, the hundred western hostages taken in the 1980’s, the hijackings, the near total annihilation of downtown Beirut and fierce sectarian violence that crowded the news for two decades with tales of seemingly inescapable perennial misery.
There is an obvious - and disconcerting – disconnect between these two images. For those of my parents’ generation, the word Beirut is still evocative of the jet setting, au courant world it was when they coming of age. In the city known widely as “the Paris of the Middle East” one could laze amid ostentatious western comfort (secure in the fact that the place was run by Christians) while peering into the backdrop of a genuinely eastern culture, stocked fully with souks, Roman ruins, and bearded old Arabs playing backgammon and puffing away on narghiles under the palm trees along the Corniche.
This type of half-way immersion worked the other way as well, as the elites and Royals of the newly petrol-rich Gulf states flocked to Lebanon, drawn by its liberality and hedonism. For both East and West, Lebanon’s magnetism lay in the duality of its identity, as the point of intersection between two cultural spheres, where one could enjoy the sites and privileges of an alien world without abandoning the comforts of home. This is the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton may have once rubbed shoulders with a young Osama bin Laden at the legendary Saint Georges yacht club pool.
I stayed in the Hamra apartment of an English journalist friend named Alice, sleeping in the bed of her roommate Abby: out of the country covering the next day’s presidential election in Iran. After a few days in Beirut, I decided to venture south with my friend Tim, who was spending the summer in Beirut, working for an English-language online news organization called Now Lebanon. We made a reservation at the Orange House, a turtle refuge run by two Lebanese lesbians near the Israeli border (or if you believe the maps: Palestine). We were told that foreigners had to obtain a permit from the Army in Saida in order to travel south of the Litani River.
In Saida, Hariri is everywhere. The father, and the son. Rafik was born here, into a middle class Sunni family, and became the richest man in Lebanon, buying and building construction conglomerates. He was prime minister from 01 to 05, till the Syrians expunged him in a car bomb attack outside the Saint Georges. You can still see him if you pay a visit to the enormous tent erected in the shadow of his even more enormous mosque in the reconstructed downtown. His large flag-draped coffin sits splayed atop a flight of marble steps under a gallery of posters in which a smiling Rafik appears pasted repeatedly in doctored photographs, addressing parliament from half a dozen different lecterns spread throughout the room. The son – Saad - seems poised to become the next Prime Minister, though word on the street has it that he’d rather be sitting at home playing his Xbox.
Looking for the army base, we stumbled upon a massive barbed wire-enclosed block and parked down the street, approaching the prospective army base with passports in our slightly raised hands, signaling our harmlessness as if they were white handkerchiefs. We stepped toward the rifle-toting guards at the gate and Tim told them we were trying to find permits. One of the soldiers made a phone call, nodded knowingly, and gestured for us to follow. We entered the base - which seemed to be the only part of the city with any trees or shade - and walked up to a portable office trailer. He knocked, stepped inside, closed the door, came back out, led us to another trailer, knocked, stepped inside, closed the door, came back out, then to another trailer. He beckoned us to follow him into this one, where we sat on a couch while a man in a sweat-stained green uniform scrutinized our passports. He left for ten minutes, returned, had us follow him into a squat two-story administrative building, where we walked up a flight of stairs and through a series of snaking hallways before being signaled to wait outside as he entered an office, closing the door behind him.
Fifteen minutes later the door opened and we were waved inside. An overweight general sat in a plush leather chair, smoking a cigar, his boots crossed on the desk. His eyes darted to us as we entered before drifting back to an enormous flat screen television mounted on the wall next to the door, tuned to a cooking program. Good to see all that United Nations aid to the Lebanese Army is going to good use, I thought. Every few minutes he silenced a ringtone that reminded me of the theme from an old American cop show on the cell phone sitting atop a pile off papers on the desk.
He picked up our passports, examining our pictures. “Who is this?” he asked turning around one of the pictures. It was me, with a beard I had shaved off the month before. “Me,” I said. “No!” he declared with disbelief. Once I had reassured him that it was actually me, he asked why we wanted to go to the south. “To visit Habiba. She protects the turtles south of Sour,” answered Tim. The general’s face again turned to disbelief, “Why?!” He looked at my passport again, “There are turtles in LA, no? In California, yes?” “Actually, no.” I started, but he turned to Tim, “You are Jewish?” He shook his head. “A Christian?” he guessed. “Well…close enough.” Satisfied, the general scrawled something on a piece of paper, ripped off a piece and handed it to me. He dismissed us, “you can go.” The “pass” was a three-inch long scrap of paper with some scrawled Arabic numerals and a signature. I heard the dictum remarked more than once: “The French invented bureaucracy; we perfected it.”
Driving back from the bars in Gemmayzeh, we drive through the rebuilt downtown between the newly built and soon to be built skyscrapers of the resuscitated city. We get out at the Phoenicia and sidle across the street, around the block, past a sleeping guard, feet on desk in a well-lit lobby, and over a high, corrugated-steel wall, dropping ourselves quietly into a mess of concrete blocks and knotted wires. We run inside and begin our ascent up twenty-six stories to the top of the Holiday Inn. At each landing I pause and look around. Every floor is gutted; the walls that once stood between the rooms have been knocked down. Anything of any value was stolen decades ago. This was the backdrop for the famous War of the Hotels, in which Christian Phalangist and PLO militiamen occupied the high-rise hotels in the city center at the onset of the war in spring 1975. This was the overture to a war that would last fifteen years, kill two hundred thousand, and draw four different occupying armies into a country three-fourths the size of Connecticut.
From the roof we could see the lights of Beirut spread all around, creeping up the slopes of Mount Lebanon to the north and east, and reflected in the indigo sea. The rooftop opened up onto the top floor of the hotel, which looked as if it had once held a restaurant and bar with a similarly expansive view of the sprawling city. The place was eerily empty and quiet, perched high enough up in the sky not to pick up the sounds of the city below. A Japanese firm reportedly bought the property a several years ago, only to realize that the building was unsalvageable. If the peace that has prevailed since the Summer 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel continues for a few more years, the Holiday Inn will probably be brought down to make way for a new high-rise hotel or Emirati bank. We make our way down the five hundred spiraling steps to the ground, hop back over the fence out of this towering recollection of the war, into the streets of modern Beirut, hopeful for the future but too jaded to expect much from it. The now wakeful guard spots us dropping down the wall and starts to huff after us. We run down the street, and I flag down a taxi, making my escape from Beirut and heading to the airport to catch the four o’clock flight to Istanbul.
