The Israeli army has been bombarding Beirut in recent days and entered Lebanon for the third time in history in a major invasion. The first time was in 1982, then again in 2016. While 42 years ago the Palestine Liberation Organization was its main target, the Israelis subsequently led and are conducting operations against Hezbollah.
Beirut used to be an extraordinary city until the mid-seventies. A metropolis where East and West, the Arab world and Europe met. A center of business and financial services, full of famous hotels, restaurants, cafes and luxury shops. A city where you could swim in the sea and near the beach you could see the snow-covered hills of the Šúf mountain range, where you could go skiing in the afternoon. The story of the Lebanese metropolis tells about the great rise of one city and then its long-lasting fall.
Between roughly 1945 and 1975, everything that was touched was successful in Beirut. Lebanon was one of the few free countries in the Middle East. Publishers published books and newspapers here that could not be published in other Arab countries. It attracted both businessmen and investors from the West and from the rich oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf. From Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait. It became a kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, everyone was also attracted by low taxes.
Hamra Street in Beirut was among the most expensive in the world, and the neighborhood around the Mediterranean Sea, known as Ras Beirut, became legendary for its restaurants, cafes and nightclubs. Casino du Liban opened its doors in 1957 and for a long time it was the largest casino far and wide in all parts of the world.
In 1966, the American magazine Life wrote about Beirut: “It is the Paris of the Orient and at the same time it has a bit of Las Vegas, the Riviera and the Swiss St. Moritz in it.” The Lebanese had a reputation as talented businessmen and many of them established themselves as businessmen in the world: in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, France or in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
In the opposite direction, it drew Arabs who had to flee their countries for political reasons to Beirut. And spies: during the Cold War it represented in the Eastern Mediterranean something like Berlin or Vienna in Europe. A center of international espionage, but also of collusion and secret service contacts. It was in Beirut that the most famous Soviet KGB agent and British traitor Kim Philby worked as a journalist in the 1960s.
At the time, the Goodies supermarket was restocking every day from planes landing from Paris. Hotels St. Georges, Normandy or Phenicia overflowed with opulence and luxury, the city was engulfed in a construction boom. Lebanon was an Arab country where alcohol was not restricted, which further increased its appeal in the eyes of tourists.
Beirut after the Israeli airstrike. | Photo: Reuters
At that time, airplanes of companies from dozens of countries of the world landed in Beirut, and cruise ships with tourists docked in the port every day. They came for the sights, entertainment, casino, golf, markets full of fresh fruits and vegetables and famous Lebanese cuisine. The five-kilometer-long promenade on the Mediterranean coast, known by the French name Corniche, was a paradise for morning joggers, cyclists or just people who liked to enjoy the sound of sea waves in the middle of a big city.
Postcards of the period depicted the central square of Martyrs with palm trees, the sea in the background and a peculiar architectural feat: the brutalist building of the Rivoli cinema, which looked a bit like a strange spaceship. Remembering the golden era of Lebanon.
Attacks on Israel and the birth of Hezbollah
Already in the first half of the seventies, however, political clouds were gathering over the country. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) moved here from Jordan, creating a state within a state and attacking Israel across the southern border, prompting Israeli retaliation. Confessional tensions were also growing in Lebanon’s religiously diverse society: Shia Muslims felt marginalized, economically disadvantaged and excluded from a share of political power held mainly by Christians and Sunni Muslims.
Yasser Arafat in a December 5, 2001 file photo | Photo: Reuters
The explosive and toxic mixture exploded on April 13, 1975. Christian militiamen and Yasser Arafat’s PLO gunmen clashed in downtown Beirut. The barricades divided the city into two parts – the western Muslim and the eastern Christian. The fighting spread quickly, the country engulfed in civil war. The Switzerland of the Middle East became a battlefield for the army and militias, and in the following year, 1976, Syria sent its soldiers. A country whose rulers never came to terms with the independence of Lebanon and considered it an artificially separated piece of Syria.
In 1979, after the overthrow of the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers came to power in Iran. They wanted to export their concept of the so-called Islamic revolution even beyond the borders. At least where the Shiite Muslims, who make up the majority of the population in Iran, lived. Khomeini and his people thus invited the Shiite Muslim community in Lebanon under their patronage. They armed and financed Shiite fighters: thus, in the early 1980s, Hezbollah was born.
Militants of the Palestine Liberation Organization continued raiding the north of Israel, but events in London proved fatal for Lebanon. On June 3, 1982, Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain, Shlomo Argov, was leaving the Dorchester Hotel reception by car when three attackers fired pistols at the car. The diplomat was seriously injured and spent the next months in a coma, remaining in a wheelchair until the end of his life in 2003. The assassination was carried out by terrorists from the radical Palestinian organization Abu Nidal, but the Israeli government did not see a fundamental difference between them and the militants of Arafat’s PLO. “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal, they are all the same,” said Rafael Eitan, chief of the general staff of the Israeli army.
The center of Beirut, Lebanon. | Photo: Shutterstock
In three days, Israeli soldiers entered Lebanon and stopped as far as Beirut. They surrounded the western part and the government in Jerusalem set a goal: Arafat and his people must leave Lebanon. The Israelis subjected the metropolis to massive bombardment from the air, sea and land. August 12, known in Lebanon as Black Thursday, was the hardest. The Israeli army shelled West Beirut continuously for eleven hours.
In a hopeless situation, Arafat nodded to leave. In the following days, over eight thousand members of the PLO embarked at the port of Beirut and set sail. Arafat himself and his leadership to Tunis, where he lived for the next twelve years before the Israelis allowed him to enter the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as part of the peace accords.
But the end of the Palestine Liberation Organization did not mean the end of the war. It dragged on for the next eight long years. Lebanon came under the control of the Syrian regime of President Hafez Assad, the father of current leader Bashar Assad. Hezbollah emerged from the war as a strong movement armed by Iran, and the Israeli army remained in southern Lebanon until the late 2000s.
The golden era before 1975 never returned. The war took the lives of 150,000 Lebanese during the entire period up to 1990. Hundreds of thousands more fled. The position of Beirut as the financial and business center of the Middle East was gradually taken by other cities: Abu Dhabi, Dubai and later the Qatari capital Doha.
While the invasion of 1982 was aimed at the PLO, Hezbollah later assumed the position of the main enemy. The kidnapping and death of three Israeli soldiers in the border zone triggered a 34-day war in 2016.
This year’s operation is part of a new round of conflict, sparked by the attack of another terrorist movement, the Palestinian Hamas, on southern Israel last October 7.
Israel claims that the current ground operations in southern Lebanon and the strikes in Beirut are aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. He has been firing rockets and launching drones at northern Israel for more than a year. Iran supports this movement financially and militarily. When the author of this text was on the Israeli-Lebanese border last November, one of the Israeli officers claimed that it was actually the border with Iran.
Just nostalgia
A chaotic system riddled with corruption and cronyism led Lebanon to decline. Five years ago, many civil servants did not receive their salaries for months, banks did not pay deposits, electricity did not work due to unpaid bills to Turkish suppliers and a lack of fuel for generators. Garbage collection and disposal collapsed, the Lebanese pound lost value, as did public sector salaries.
“No civil servant can afford to buy a kilo of meat or chicken. Maybe only once a month. Our life has become primitive and we only buy basic things,” said Valíd Shaar, an employee of the Lebanese Ministry of Finance in 2022.
The explosion of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 became a symbol of deep problems. One of the strongest non-nuclear explosions killed 220 people and destroyed 300 thousand apartments and houses.
The bright years of Beirut are now only a nostalgic memory.
Video: Do we just destroy them? It’s not that simple, says Břetislav Tureček about the Israelis’ plans (October 9, 2024)
Spotlight Moment: Spotlight Moment: Do we just destroy them? It’s not that simple, Middle East expert Břetislav Tureček says about Israel’s plans. | Video: Team Spotlight
1 comment
Espionage is all so topsy turvy and confusing! If Kim Philby had never been caught there would never have been a postage stamp made after him or even a monument of him in Moscow and most of us would never have heard of him even though he was a cousin of Field Marshal Montgomery. If only he had read the epic spy novel Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series! It’s about Pemberton’s People in MI6 and is a must read for espionage cognoscenti. Have a look at a recent intriguing news article in TheBurlingtonFiles website dated 3 May 2024 about Colonel Pemberton’s People in MI6, John le Carré and Kim Philby. You may be gobsmacked.
See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php.